A Midsummer Night's Dream
The member's edition. The leader's edition adds notes for whoever opens the discussion: the sources and where Shakespeare left them, what the fairies were to his first audience, the play's argument about imagination and where it is made, and a question to start a fight.
Read it
A Midsummer Night's Dream is in the public domain. The whole play is on this page, scene by scene, every harder word glossed where it stands; the same text sits in the Society's library, the Armarium, inside the Complete Works.
Start reading → Contents Read along in the Armarium: the words light up →Listen free
The LibriVox full-cast reading (2008): Mark F. Smith as Theseus, Deborah Irving as Titania, Karen Savage as Puck, Simon Taylor as Bottom, Rosalind Wills as Helena and Laurie Anne Walden as Hermia. Five tracks, one an act, about two hours. It plays here, keeps your place in every act, and works from the lock screen on an iPhone or Android phone.
Recorded for LibriVox and hosted by the Internet Archive; the reading is in the public domain. The files play from the Archive; on a phone, download an act on Wi-Fi.
Kindle + Audible
Whispersync links a Kindle book to its Audible narration: own both, and your phone keeps one place between them, so you can read at home and pick up by ear in the car where you stopped.
The Arkangel Shakespeare on AudibleFor the ear the Society's standing choice is the Arkangel Shakespeare's full-cast recording (David Harewood as Oberon, Amanda Root as Titania, Roy Hudd as Bottom; about two and a half hours), on Audible. For the page, the Folger edition. The two do not sync; read the Folger, listen to Arkangel, and let the page here keep your place.
A Midsummer Night's Dream was written about 1595, close to Romeo and Juliet and Richard II, and probably for a wedding, though nobody has proved whose. It is the first play Shakespeare made without a story to follow. Theseus and Hippolyta come from Plutarch and Chaucer's Knight's Tale; Pyramus and Thisbe from Ovid; the man turned into an ass from Apuleius; Oberon from a French romance and Robin Goodfellow from every English village; and the four lovers from nowhere, which is why they are so hard to tell apart. He set them all in one wood on one night and let the juice of a flower do the plotting.
The Society's way into it is the one Theseus refuses: to take the dream seriously. The play is about what imagination does, in lovers, in madmen, in poets, and in a weaver who tries to tell a dream and reaches for Saint Paul; and it ends by asking the audience to treat the whole thing as a dream they may have slept through. Read it as a comedy about love's causes, as a play about plays, and as the one Shakespeare in which the natural world's weather depends on a marriage; and read Bottom's dream speech twice.
A note on the text
The text is Project Gutenberg's Complete Works (ebook #100, the PG Shakespeare Team's text), as canon-corpus cuts it into speeches for the Armarium, where the play sits inside shakespeare as a-midsummer-nights-dream; nothing is cut. The Quarto of 1600 is a good text and the Folio of 1623 follows it with stage directions from the playhouse; the differences are small. Line numbers are counted as canon-corpus counts them.
Persons
Everyone in the book, alphabetically by surname, with the parts they are in.
The Great Ideas
Each of Adler's Great Ideas the book touches, with the parts where it does. Ideas marked in gold are from the Society's own Syntopicon Addendum and link to it.
Scripture
Every quotation and clear allusion, in canonical order, with the King James text.
Glossary
Every harder word, A to Z, glossed in the sense it has here. Each links to the place it is used. Rarity is measured by how seldom the word turns up in English at large; the commonest words are never glossed.
Lines Worth Keeping
Every line the Society marked, in order.
Potent Quotables
The book's most-quoted lines, as first-letter study cards: read the first letters and say the line, then check it against the full text.
The Armarium Shelf
Books in the Society's library that the companion sends you to, and which parts send you there.
Memory Work
The Potent Quotables, and every line worth keeping ( of them), as decks for the Mnemonicon.
Download the Potent Quotables or the whole deck, then in the Mnemonicon choose Import and pick the file. Importing both adds nothing twice.
To study the glossary's words with spaced repetition, open the Vocabularium.