A Midsummer Night's Dream

Acouple things like, Puck totally hates Oberon. And Titania really does love Oberon. Apperently Puck was engaged to a fairy named Moth who is potenially evil. (she tried to kill sabrina) won't spoil anymore

A Midsummer Night's Dream - 1935 was released on:

UK: 9 October 1935 (London) (premiere)

USA: 9 October 1935 (New York City, New York)

USA: 30 October 1935

Austria: 5 November 1935

Finland: 17 November 1935

Denmark: 21 December 1935

Sweden: 20 January 1936

Portugal: 3 June 1938

West Germany: 1 October 1962 (TV premiere)

Hermia is in love with Lysander, but her best friend is Helena.

Hermia tells Helena that she plans to elope with Lysander, but Helena passes the message on to Demetrius.

Not a very good best friend, then.

No. As desperately as many people would like to believe it, there is no reason to believe that Shakespeare's personal life had any effect whatsoever on his plays. He wrote from imagination, not from experience. His life did have some effect on his sonnets, but not in the sense of recounting events which happened to him. The sonnets are more general musings, which is why they are still relevant.

There are three weddings in William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The play surrounds the festival that Theseus, the Duke of Athens, plans to celebrate his marriage to Hippolyta. His daughter, Hermia, marries her love, Lysander at the end of the place, while her former suitor, Demetrius, marries his new love, Helena.

These are lines spoken by Demetrius in Act 3, Scene 2 of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" by William Shakespeare. Demetrius utters this line while expressing his impatience with how slowly the night is passing.

The fairies are magic and the people are not. The fairies can make themselves tiny, or invisible, and can change people's heads into donkeys' heads.

peter quince

It came from the juice of a flower called "love-in-idleness" that had turned from white to purple when Cupid hit it by accident with his arrow.

From Act II, Scene 1:

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,

Flying between the cold moon and the earth,

Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took

At a fair vestal throned by the west,

And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,

As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft

Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon,

And the imperial votaress passed on,

In maiden meditation, fancy-free.

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,

Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,

And maidens call it love-in-idleness.

Fetch me that flower; the herb I shew'd thee once:

The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid

Will make or man or woman madly dote

Upon the next live creature that it sees.

Fetch me this herb; and be thou here again

Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

The "fair vestal throned by the west" is an allusion to the Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I.

Love-in-idleness has been identified with the heartsease (also called wild pansy) and with Love-in-a-Mist.

She is a pretty powerful character, able to stand up quite effectively to Oberon. In her long speech in 2,1 she talks about the environmental disasters caused by the argument between herself and Oberon, and says "We are their parents and original". Oberon replies, "Do you amend it then; it lies in you" which makes it look as if Oberon is heaping all the blame on her when she is prepared to share it. But whether or not she is prepared to share the blame, she is certainly just as selfish as Oberon when it comes to stopping the environmental disasters by giving up the Indian boy. It is not really fair to assess Titania's strengths and weaknesses on the basis of her actions when she is under the influence of the love-in-idleness flower, but once cured, she is herself again and she seems to have totally forgotten about the boy. Apparently that was an excuse to argue with Oberon which makes her pretty petty. She is also pretty rude about poor old Bottom. On the other hand, she shows a forgiving nature toward Oberon and they proceed to bless the wedding which is a good thing.

Yes! It's on video tape. William Hurt, and of all people Emmanuel Lewis both were in an NYC Summer in the Parks performance sometime in the 70s. I know because I watched a copy of the tape in college back in the 80s. When I was in college, the tape was at the University of Maryland McKeldin Hall Library.

It was a fine performance and believe it or not, from time to time, I search for it, too! I would really like to see it again.

Pyramus and Thisbe

Hermia told her. "Take comfort. He [Demetrius] no more shall see my face. Lysander and myself shall fly this place."

Lysander tells her as well. "Helen, to you our minds we will unfold."

Lysander says it to Hermia in Act 1 Scene 1.

Many people think they are so alike you cannot tell them apart, but there is a difference. Without the assistance of the love flower, Lysander is a true lover, and a very considerate one. He does not take advantage of Hermia when they are alone in the woods. He is prepared to sacrifice his life in Athens to exile himself with Hermia. Demetrius is more changeable. He has dumped Helena so as to have a chance with Hermia, even though he knows Hermia does not love him. He is quite happy to go along with Egeus's plan to force Hermia into marrying him. He threatens to rape Helena when they are alone in the woods, and only desists when she says that it won't be rape because she will be consenting.

During the Pyramus and Thisbe play, poor Starveling gets heckled right out of his text by guess who? Demetrius, aided and abetted by Theseus. All Starveling had to say was "horned moon" and away Demetrius went with the dirty joke. Lysander does not take part in the heckling and encourages Starveling, saying "Proceed, moon". Lysander is much kinder; Demetrius is rather mean.

Indeed it appears that Shakespeare, in drawing the characters of Demetrius and Helena, was portraying an abusive relationship. Helena is a person of low self-esteem ("I am as ugly as a bear") who feels that she deserves, unworthy as she is, to be mistreated by her lover ("I am your spaniel.") Demetrius is unfortunately one of those weak and cruel men who is happy to oblige.

On a sign at the Entrance of Chunky Cheese

He wants to advert her attention from the child so he can take it while she's obsessing over whatever she sees when she wakes.

Oberon decides to help Helena because he sees her heartbroken over Demetrius, who is in love with Hermia. Oberon wants to help restore harmony and balance in their relationships so that they can all be happy. Additionally, Oberon wants to correct the chaos caused by Puck's mistake with the love potion.

Helena and Hermia share equal prominence in the play. Hermia has more actual seperate lines, 48, than Helena does, 36, but Helena's lines are much longer. Many of Hermia's lines are one or two lines of blank verse, making a total of 165 lines of blank verse altogether. Helena has some long speeches, so she in fact has 239 lines of blank verse, a lot more memorizing than Hermia, but then, some people find it easier to memorize a set speech than dialogue.

The planet Uranus is the seventh one from the Sun in our solar system. There are a total of 27 known moons of Uranus. The fifth moon is known as Miranda which was the spirit that was seen in The Tempest.

Skottowe's essay, included in his book of essays on Shakespeare published in 1824, basically claims that A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a play, not a story, and is not meant to entertain, but rather that it is a kind of essay or poetical description of the nature of fairies. "An air of peculiar lightness distinguishes the poet's treatment of this extremely fanciful subject from his subsequent and bolder flights into the regions of the spiritual world. He rejected from the drama on which he engrafted it every thing calculated to distract from its playfulness . . ." A more bizarre claim it is hard to imagine: that William Shakespeare, whose job it was to write scripts for a company of actors of which he was one, which would bring in the crowds and thus make the actors prosperous, should empty the framework of his play of everything of interest except a poetic essay on the folklore of Northern Europe. As strange as such a claim may be, it does reflect the views of a number of nineteenth century critics, who, while heaping adulation on Shakespeare, refused to acknowledge him as a dramatist at all, and considered the plays to be uncomely repositories of scattered jewels of elegant and charming poetry. Thomas Hardy said "I do not think that Shakespeare appertains particularly to the theatrical world nowadays, if he ever did. . . . that his expression of himself was cast in the form of words for actors and not in the form of books to be read was an accident of his social circumstances that he himself despised." In other words, Shakespeare was no working actor and dramatist, but rather a romantic literary dilettante, a nineteenth century man born by accident in the sixteenth. That this fantasy should still gain attention now is frustrating and ridiculous, but is clearly the fact, since otherwise you would be filing Skottowe under "Strange Literary Conceits of the Remote Past" rather than taking him seriously in any way.

a demon