A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play by William Shakespeare. The full text of A Midsummer Night's Dream is available at Project Gutenberg. The play is considered a comedy.

The play features three interlocking plots, all of which are connected by a celebration of the wedding of Duke Theseus of Athens and the Amazonian Hyppolita. Two young Athenian men, Lysander and Demetrius, are both in love with the same woman, Hermia; Hermia herself loves Lysander, but her friend, Helena, is in love with Demetrius. When the father of Hermia forbids her to marry Lysander, the four pursue each other into the woods around the city, losing themselves in the dark and in the maze of their romantic entaglements. As usual with Shakespeare, the comedy has a bitter-sweet note, when Hermia's two lovers both, temporarily, turn against her in favor of Helena.

Meanwhile, Oberon, king of the fairies, and his estranged wife, Titania, arrive in the same woods to attend the upcoming nuptials. Titania refuses to lend her Indian page-boy to Oberon for use as his 'henchman', and Oberon seeks to punish her for her disobedience.

At the same time, a band of 'mechanicals' (lower-class artisans) have arranged to perform a crude pageant on the theme of Pyramus and Thisbe to stage for the wedding festivities, and venture into the forest for their rehearsal. Most notable among them is Bottom the Weaver, one of Shakespeare's most admired comic creations.

Oberon recruits the mischievous Puck (called also Hobgoblin) to help him regain Titania's devotion, but his simultaneous attempt to help the young lovers goes wrong, resulting in confusion. Bottom finds his head transformed into that of an ass, and the fairy queen is made to fall in love with him.

It is not known exactly when the play was written or first performed, but it is assumed to be between 1594 and 1596. A Midsummer Night's Dream might have been written as inspired by or to be performed in connection to a royal wedding.

Table of contents

1 Movie adaptations 2 Other adaptations 3 External links

Movie adaptations

The Shakespeare play has inspired several movies. The following are the best known.

• 1935 - directed by Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, produced by Henry Blanke and adapted by Charles Kenyon and Mary C. McCall Jr. The cast included James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck, Olivia de Havilland as Hermia, Joe E. Brown as Francis Flute, Dick Powell as Lysander and Victor Jory as Oberon.
  • The film won two Academy Awards:
  • Best Cinematography - Hal Mohr
  • Best Film Editing - Ralph Dawson
  • It was nominated for:
  • Best Picture - Henry Blanke, producer
  • Best Assistant Director - Sherry Shourds
  • Notably, Hal Mohr was not nominated for his work on the movie; he won the Oscar thanks to a grass-roots write-in campaign. The next year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared that it would not accept write-in votes for the awards.
• 1999 - written and directed by Michael Hoffman. The cast included Kevin Kline as Bottom, Michelle Pfeiffer as Titania, Sophie Marceau as Hippolyta, and Calista Flockhart as Helena.

Other adaptations

An overture and incidental music for the play were composed by Felix Mendelssohn in 1826

The play was adapted into an opera, with music by Benjamin Britten and libretto by Britten and Peter Pears. The opera was first performed on June 1, 1960, at Aldeburgh.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was adapted for comics by Neil Gaiman for his series The Sandman. The adaptation won several awards, and is distinguished by being the only comic that will ever win a World Fantasy Award (see Dream Country)

External links

• A Midsommer Nights Dreame - HTML version of this title.
• Midsummer Night's Dream - plain vanilla text from Project Gutenberg