A Midsummer Night's Dream
by William Shakespeare · first published 1600
28% recommend67% neutral6% critical
Why HN recommends it
Praised for being fun on stage and screen, with several readers saying it clicked when seen performed by good actors, and for its playful language that rewards close reading. Suits students and anyone new to Shakespeare.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
One night two young couples run into an enchanted forest in an attempt to escape their problems. But these four humans do not realize that the forest is filled with fairies and hobgoblins who love making mischief. When Oberon, the Fairy King, and his loyal hobgoblin servant, Puck, intervene in human affairs, the fate of these young couples is magically and hilariously transformed. Like a classic fairy tale, this retelling of William Shakespeare's most beloved comedy is perfect for older readers who will find much to treasure and for younger readers who will love hearing the story read aloud.
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We found a local group that does Shakespeare in the park every summer. When our son was about 12, we took him to a couple shows including A Midsummer Night's Dream which he had acted out in class that year. Seeing it on stage, with actors who know what they are doing, made Shakespeare "click" for him and really for me too. We've probably seen about 10 different…
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗…somebody mentioned that it's basically Hamlet and you can't unsee it once you realize which movie character is matched to which Shakespeare character. Over the years I've been to several adaptations of A Midsummer Night's Dream and it was a ton of fun every single time.
on “I like 'em thick OR: an apology to my English teachers” ↗One of my favorite high school teachers took the time to explain each and every dirty joke in A Midsummer Night's Dream; he was, consequently, one of the best English teachers I ever had. By the end of the year, the school fired him.
on “Teacher Suspended For Reading 'Ender's Game' To Middle School Students” ↗Shakespeare and Robert Burns were both blighted for me by being inflicted at high school. Ironically I found that I really like A Midsummer Night's Dream by watching a movie version with my son who was performing in it at school.
on “Ask HN: What is your comfort book?” ↗…stories a little ridiculous? Certainly. Is it also a fascinating glimpse into English as a language? Absolutely! Does everyone delight in language as much as I do? Of course not. I remember reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in 7th grade and the book we used having the play on the left page, and notes for the modern reader on the right page. I found that to be a great way of making the text accessible. Especially as a seventh…
on “Making Elizabethan plays understandable and fun to read” ↗I had the same experience reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in high school -- I could follow the story, but it was a slog to get through and I didn't understand what was supposed to be so great about it. Then I saw an actual performance of the play recently,…
on “I like 'em thick OR: an apology to my English teachers” ↗…memorize I don't mean by rote but by the kind of compulsive rereading and rethinking that only passion can motivate. Anyway, that was my epiphany. I decided to try Shakespeare next and bought a copy of Midsummer Night's Dream. That was a lot harder! The word to word, sentence to sentence writing of Shakespeare is so far beyond the likes of Marlowe, Milton or Melville in terms of subtlety and modulation. All of those guys are…
on “Teaching Ruby to High School Girls” ↗…story to it, so it encouraged me to figure out the language so I could follow the plot by myself. I was introduced to Shakespeare at age 12 and in that year we studied two plays, As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream and I was bored with both. The language wasn't difficult as our teacher explained everything well but I didn't find the stories interesting, they were a bit of a yawn really. As I said that changed with…
on “My ranking of every Shakespeare play” ↗I want something which knows my reading level and populates the margins of A Midsummer Night's Dream with explanations for everything in Shakespeare which is obscure to me. Likewise it should summarize popular science articles and look at the relevant research papers for the intuition that is being…
on “Mozilla Planning for Local AI Bot in Firefox” ↗…of different styles to demarcate different characters, moods, etc. As a very rough rule-of-thumb in Shakespeare, posh characters speak in iambic pentameters, commoners and clowns speak in prose. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, for example, the Athenians speak in iambic pentameters and the clowns speak in prose. When the clowns put on a play for the Athenians, the clowns and the Athenians swap speaking styles, so the Athenians…
on “What Does It Mean to "Write Like You Talk"?” ↗…As part of my English studies I have read the following ones - Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Measure for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Winter’s Tale. Average grades on them were between A+ to B's…
on “Shakespeare’s plays, sonnets, and poems” ↗…it's not meaningless. I've seen posts elsewhere that claim the etymology of blacklist, specifically, isn't based on this metaphor, but this metaphor exists throughout English. Consider this line from A Midsummer Night's Dream, "Not Hermia but Helena I love. Who will not change a raven for a dove?" where light > dark is so obvious that all you have to do is compare one girl to a dark bird and one to a light bird to make your…
on “On “White Fragility”” ↗…symbolic in a way that his other play conclusions were not. >his most widely regarded plays I guess I agree. Comedy doesn't get a lot of love at the Oscars either. I certainly appreciate plays like A Midsummer Night's Dream. But I have admit a lot of the gender-switching and mistaken identities in many of his comedies tend to blend together for me after a while.
on “A happy ending for King Lear? Trauma of plague caused Shakespeare to change it” ↗…consider to be the highest art. It's a beautiful, memorable game. Portal? That's as close to sublime as you get. It DOES have a story, and it has a good one. And no, it doesn't have themes, any more than A Midsummer Night's Dream does. Which is to say, you can see themes in it, because they're there in both of them, but the main thing about each one is that they're enjoyable without focusing on the themes. Shakespeare isn't great…
on “No Gods or Kings: Objectivism and Ayn Rand in BioShock” ↗While in high school, I think I only read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and The Taming of the Shrew.
on “Teacher Suspended For Reading 'Ender's Game' To Middle School Students” ↗