Mid summer night's dream

1. A Midsummer Night's Dream

2. DAY 1 - https://youtu.be/M1wMfOwlAZ8

3. A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Genre
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, comedy (romcom) in five acts by William
Shakespeare, written about 1595–96 and published in 1600 in a quarto edition from
the author’s manuscript, in which there are some minor inconsistencies. The earliest
texts of William Shakespeare's works were published during the 16th and 17th
centuries in quarto or folio format. Folios are large, tall volumes; quartos are smaller,
roughly half the size. The publications of the latter are usually abbreviated to Q1, Q2,
etc., where the letter stands for "quarto" and the number for the first, second, or third
edition published.
The version published in the First Folio of 1623 was taken from a second quarto
edition, with some reference to a promptbook. One of the “great” or “middle”
comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its multilayered examination of love
and its vagaries, has long been one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s plays.
Quarto refers to the format
(and implicitly, the size) of
a book that results from
printing four pages on
each side of a sheet of
paper, front and back,
and folding the sheet
twice, each time folding
against the long side.
Eight pages are thus
printed on one sheet of
paper.
Ancient Greek
comedy was divided
into three periods:
Old Comedy, Middle
Comedy, and New
Comedy.
First Folio, first published
edition (1623) of the collected
works of
William Shakespeare,
originally published as Mr.
William Shakespeares
Comedies, Histories &
Tragedies. It is the major
source for contemporary
texts of his plays.

4. Midsummer Madness
People in Northern Europe and Great Britain enjoy Midsummer and celebrate Midsummer
Day. It's an ancient day that many people still enjoy because summer in that cold part of the
world, calls for celebration! Celebrated in n mid-June, it seems nature has burst into life and like
the Sun never sets. In fact, in the north of Sweden, it doesn’t, and in the south, only for an hour
or two. Historically, this day marks the midpoint of the growing season, halfway between planting
and harvest.
The night before Midsummer Day is called Midsummer Eve (June 23) which is on or near the
shortest night of the year! Celebrations for Midsummer typically begin on Midsummer's Eve.
Dancing, feasting, bonfires, and general merrymaking are hallmarks of the night!
Astronomically speaking, summer begins on the solstice. In 2021, the ‘solstice’ arrived
Saturday, June 20. At this moment, the Sun reached its highest and northernmost points in the
sky and Earth’s North Pole tilts directly toward the Sun.
Midsummer Madness is a temporary lapse into foolishness, senseless behavior, folly, etc.,
especially during the summer. The play is centred around this “madness” features ample
wordplay, underscoring the nonsensical mischief of the plot.

5. SETTING
A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place partly in the city of Athens, and partly in
the forest that lies beyond the city’s walls. This split between city and forest is
thematically significant. The city of Athens is depicted as a place of civilization, law,
and order, while the forest is a place of wildness, anarchy, and chaos. As if to
underline the idea of Athens as a place of law and order, the play opens with Egeus
bringing a legal dispute before Theseus.
As duke of Athens, Theseus stands as the city’s chief legal authority. His primary
responsibility is to uphold the law, which he attempts to do when he rules that
Hermia must obey her father and marry Demetrius instead of Lysander. In contrast
to this display of Athenian rule of law, the forest appears decidedly unruly—which is
to say, ruled by fairy mischief. The forest is a place where social norms break down,
as exemplified in the increasing chaos and confusion that afflicts the Athenian lovers
as well as Titania and Nick Bottom.

6. GOOGLE TIME!
WHERE IS ATHENS?
WHAT ARE THE SPECIAL
FACTS ABOUT THIS
COUNTRY? (Food,
Culture, Literature etc)

7. MAGIC IN SHAKESPEARE’S TIMES
Have you ever wondered why Shakespeare used witchcraft and the supernatural in many of
his works?
Even in Shakespeare’s day people were extremely superstitious. During the Elizabethan era people
blamed unexplainable events such as the Bubonic Plague, unexplained deaths or unpleasant
illnesses - as the work of witches. Some of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays such as Macbeth,
Hamlet, The Tempest and Julius Caesar were very much influenced by witchcraft and the
supernatural.He often used ghosts, witches, floating daggers and prophetic apparitions throughout his
plays. In Macbeth he used characters such as the witches to bring dark magic and suspense. In
Shakespeare's day those accused of witchcraft, or being a witch, were generally old, poor and single
women, widows or 'wise women'.
In 1542 Parliament passed the Witchcraft Act which defined witchcraft as a crime punishable by
death. It was repealed five years later, but restored by a new Act in 1562.A further law was passed in
1604 during the reign of James I who took a keen interest in demonology and even published a book
on it. The 1562 and 1604 Acts transferred the trial of witches from the Church to the ordinary
courts.As well as the charge of ‘mischief following anger’, there were other ways witches were
identified at trial. One was the presence of ‘witch marks’, a mark supposed to have been put on a
woman’s body by the Devil.Water was another commonly used means of determining whether women
were witches: water was seen as inherently pure, so a suspected witch would be tied up and thrown
in a pond or lake.If the suspect sank, the water ‘accepted’ her and therefore she was not a witch, but
if she floated, the water ‘rejected’ her, and she was presumed a witch.

8. READING TIME!
READ THE COMIC STRIP
VERSION IN THE TEXTBOOK TO
ENJOY THIS MAD MAD STORY!

9. DAY 2 - The Plot and the
Themes

10. WRITING STYLE
Shakespeare wrote much of A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
and most of his plays, in a style called blank verse ( like free
verse, it has no fixed number of lines or rhythm)
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare uses different
writing styles to suit different characters. For example,
Bottom and his friends generally speak in prose, which gives
them a simple, rustic quality. For the speeches of Oberon
and Titania, Shakespeare uses a much more complex form
of poetry, implying the exquisite beauty and magic of the
fairy kingdom.

11. CHARACTERS

13. A SHORT SUMMARY OF THE PLOT
In the second half of the 1590s, Shakespeare brought to perfection the genre of romantic
comedy that he had helped to invent. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595–96), one of the
most successful of all his plays, displays the kind of multiple plotting he had practiced in The
Taming of the Shrew and other earlier comedies.
First performed around 1596, Shakespeare’s comic fantasy of four lovers who find themselves
bewitched by fairies is a sly reckoning with love, jealousy and marriage. For centuries it’s been
one of Shakespeare’s most beloved plays.
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta, about to marry, are figures from
mythology. In the woods outside Theseus’s Athens, two young men and two young women sort
themselves out into couples—but not before they form first one love triangle, and then
another.Also in the woods, the king and queen of fairyland, Oberon and Titania, battle over
custody of an orphan boy; Oberon uses magic to make Titania fall in love with a weaver named
Bottom, whose head is temporarily transformed into that of a donkey by a hobgoblin or “puck,”
Robin Goodfellow. Finally, Bottom and his companions ineptly stage the tragedy of “Pyramus
and Thisbe.”

14. As we follow the events of the opening scene, you should make a note of characters
in your books, like a cast list in a theatre programme.
Each time you encounter a new character, you should record:
•their name;
•their relationship to other characters;
•personality traits;
•any other key details.
Please Make a Note