T. J. B. Spencer (1915–1978)

Tiny leather-bound edition, 1/4 the size of a small Kindle, bought at the Barbican (Rees, Cornwall). With pages this small, one reads closer. I've been paying attention to throw-away lines of Hermia, like "Phoebe doth behold/ Her silver visage in the watery glass, / Decking with liquid pearl the blades of grass..." but then Helena: "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind." I must have read this play a dozen times, and taught it even more; still, not for over a decade, during which I show more forgot the Mechanicals/ tradesmen casting where Bottom the weaver wants every part, promising not to scare the ladies with his lion's roar.

Taught this in another, paperback edition, ed. Bevington (Bantam). Shakespeare's comedies focus on father's and daughters--as indeed Shakespeare's own life, with two daughters left after the death of his son Hamnet (aged 11), twin of one girl. Comedies with fathers and daughters: Two Gentlemen, Love's Labours Lost, Merchant of Venice, As You Like it, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, and this play. Not to mention tragedies, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, and others. As for marriage laws (this precedes the Canons of 1604), the Globe Theatre across the Thames at Southbank was under different laws, under the Bishop of Winchester.
Some satire on acting here, with the Mechanicals (tradesmen, like Mechanics' Hall in Worcester, MA) versus professional, touring troups like the Earl of Hereford's men in the plague summer of '93.
Critic Coppelia Kahn notes how men run away from women in the canon, here Demetrius away from Helena (II.i.227). Shakespeare's own Stratford, West Midlands schooling may work in here, since his dialect dropped their h's. He keeps some archaic usage, like Old English object case of "eyes," "eyne," though we still keep the object and possessive case of "my," "mine."

Of several memorable speeches here, my favorite is Bottom's parody of First Corinthians: "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 report, what my dream was"(IV.i.209ff), though a close second is the Mechanicals' Prologue, where Quince mistakes commas for periods: "All for your delight/ We are not here. That you should here repent you / The actors are at hand" (V.i.113ff).

A couple years ago on my morning walks I aloudread it; and may I say, Shaksepeare is best aloud (as are all good authors). Meanwhile, our colleges have completely ignored aloudreading. Beneath their presumptuous notice, they have replaced simple speaking of literature with French pretentiousness, so that Obama's First Inaugural Yale prof poet could not say her own poem aloud. I read it in print, and in my estimate it was as good or better than Maya Angelou's for Clinton. (A JFK would have had a real poet like Gwendolyn Brooks....) But you'd never know it from the failure at reading aloud; I have heard a major playwright, reading at my own Amherst College, screw up a Frost chestnut so that it made no sense. Incredible.
I have found in my three decades of teaching that if freshmen and sophomores can aloudread--say, VS Naipaul's Miguel Street or Shakespeare's Measure for Measure--they write better. And they may well read when they leave college.
For myself, I aloudread all of Paradise Lost in one month (March) two years ago. I read half a book a day, some 400 lines, maybe 20-30 minutes. I actually figured out Miltonic "milage," aloudreading: 3 miles per book, 36 miles for all of PL. Shakespeare's MND I am taking slower--and laughing more.
I had forgotten that the herbal potion Oberon droplets onto lovers' eyelids comes from the flower "love-in-idleness," the Pansy. But the Mechanicals' play is unsurpassed as thespian parody, and I loved reading their rehearsal. show less

After Romeo and Juliet this is one of the best shakespeares ive read! The beautiful language creates a brilliant atmosphere for the tradgedy, leaving me upset when each person dies. Anyone who loves shakespeare as much as i do will love this but id also reccomend it as a first read if you havent read a shakespeare before.

If you've never read Shakespeare or if you're a little rusty, there's no shame in renting the movie first and watching it before you read the play. It will help you immensely in understanding what you read and appreciating Shakespeare's rich language. And remember -- footnotes are your friend!

Plodding through the Shakespeare plays! This one is so famous, lots of familiar lines and a well known plot, so I don't have anything additional to say about it really.