A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Tomorrow is the Summer Solstice, the official start of summer. Something about this time of year always makes me think about the Shakespearean play A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. It is one of my favorite books, filled with Fairy’s, magic, and romance! Whenever I read it, I envision all the characters as though they have stepped out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Mermaids, Sprites, Amazonians, Fairy Lords and Ladies frolicking in an enchanted wood all while leading a bunch of quarreling lovers through a moonlit chase to find their true love! Yes, a little magic is needed to cure the love-sick hearts, but in the end each couple is reunited to their hearts content, with only the memory of a fading dream to explain their night.

“Once I sat upon a promontory,
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin’s back,
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
That the rude sea grew civil at her song;
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,
To hear the sea-maid’s music.”

– Oberon, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Come, now a roundel and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence;
Some to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds,
Some war with rere-mice for their leathern wings,
To make my small elves coats, and some keep back
The clamorous owl that nightly hoots and wonders
At our quaint spirits. Sing me now asleep;
Then to your offices and let me rest.”

-Titania, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“But all the story of the night told over,
And their minds transfigur’d so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images,
And grows to something of great constancy,
But howsoever strange, and admirable.”

– Hippolyta, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“The eye of man hath not heard,
the ear of man hath not seen,
man’s hand is not able to taste,
his tongue to conceive,
nor his heart to report,
what my dream was.”

-Bottom, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.”

-Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream