A Midsummer Night's Dream

Texts:

• Annotated edition by Basia Siedlecki
  
• Midsummer Night's Dream @ the University of Virginia
• MOO edition
  

Quotations:

• "I woo'd thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries: / But I will wed thee in another key..." (Theseus, I.1)
  
• "Fair Hermia, question your desires..." (Theseus, I.1)
• "O teach me how you look..." (Helena, I.1)
  
• "The course of true love never did run smooth..." (Lysander, I.1)
• "Things base and vile, holding no quantity,
  Love can transpose to form and dignity." (Helena, I.1)
• "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
  And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." (Helena, I.1)
• "Who will not change a raven for a dove?" (Lysander, II.2)
• "What fools these mortals be!" (Puck, III.2)
• "Dark night, that from the eye his function takes, / The ear more quick of apprehension makes, / Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense, / It pays the hearing double recompense." (Hermia, III.2)
  
• "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's synaesthesia, IV.1)
• Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
  Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
  More than cool reason ever comprehends.
  The lunatic, the lover and the poet
  Are of imagination all compact:
  One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
  That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
  Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
  The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
  Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
  And as imagination bodies forth
  The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
  Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
  A local habitation and a name. (Theseus, V.1)
  
  
• 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, epilogue)

Contexts:

• SparkNotes study guide
• Shakespeare @ eNotes
• Cummings' study guide to MND
• VoS links to Shakespeare resources
• Shakespeare resources

• Jack Lynch's links (scroll down to Shakespeare)

• Shakespeare Study Guides at Bibliomania
  

• Shakespeare Study Guides by Cummings
  

• Everyday expressions taken from Shakespeare (collected by Cummings)
• Shakespeare quotations (by Cummings)
  
• Four phases of Shakespeare's life (by Cummings)
  
• Facts from Shakespeare's life (by Cummings)
• Folios and quartos (by Cummings)
• Shakespeare's manuscripts (by Cummings)
  
• The Globe theatre (by Cummings)
• Special effects in Elizabethan theatre (by Cummings)
• Medicine in Shakespeare (by Cummings)
  

Terms:
masque, masque (2), a play within a play, breaking the frame, mechanicals' (or: craftsmen's) play, apron stage (or T-stage)