A Midsummer Night's Dream Read Online Free Page A

Shakespearean stage directions are often dependent upon editorial inference alone and are not set in stone. We also depart from editorial tradition in sometimes admitting uncertainty and thus printing permissive stage directions, such as an Aside? (often a line may be equally effective as an aside or as a direct address—it is for each production or reading to make its own decision) or a may exit or a piece of business placed between arrows to indicate that it may occur at various different moments within a scene.
    Line Numbers are editorial, for reference and to key the explanatory and textual notes.
    Explanatory Notes explain allusions and gloss obsolete and difficult words, confusing phraseology, occasional major textual cruces, and so on. Particular attention is given to non-standard usage, bawdy innuendo, and technical terms (e.g. legal and military language). Where more than one sense is given, commas indicate shades of related meaning, slashes alternative or double meanings.
    Textual Notes at the end of the play indicate major departures from the Folio. They take the following form: the reading of our text is given in bold and its source given after an equals sign, with “F2” indicating that it derives from the Second Folio of 1632 and “Ed” that it derives from the subsequent editorial tradition. The rejected Folio (“F”) reading is then given. Thus for Act 1 Scene 1 line 142: “ 142 eyes = Q. F = eie” means that the Folio compositor erroneously printed Quarto’s “eyes” as “eie,” and we have restored the Quarto reading.

KEY FACTS
    MAJOR PARTS: (
with percentage of lines/number of speeches/scenes on stage
) Bottom (12%/59/5), Theseus (11%/48/3), Helena (11%/36/5), Robin Goodfellow (10%/33/6), Oberon (10%/29/5), Lysander (8%/50/5), Hermia (8%/48/5), Titania (7%/23/5), Demetrius (6%/48/5), Quince (5%/40/4), Flute (3%/18/4), Egeus (3%/13/3), Hippolyta (2%/14/3).
    LINGUISTIC MEDIUM: 80% verse, 20% prose. Fairly high incidence of rhyme, including deliberately bad rhyme in “Pyramus and Thisbe.”
    DATE: Mentioned in Francis Meres’ 1598 list of Shakespeare’s plays. Reference in Act 1 Scene 2 to courtiers being afraid of a stage lion may allude to an incident in Scotland in August 1594. Strong stylistic resemblances to other “lyrical” plays of Shakespeare’s high Elizabethan period, such as
Richard II
and especially
Romeo and Juliet:
this group of plays is traditionally dated to 1595–96. It has often been speculated that the first performance was a private one at an aristocratic wedding celebration, but there is absolutely no evidence for this: in the Elizabethan period, masque-like entertainments rather than full-length plays were commissioned for festive occasions such as weddings.
    SOURCES: The main plot is apparently without a direct source, which is unusual for Shakespeare. The tale of Pyramus and Thisbe is derived principally from Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, book four. It also has strong structural resemblances to the Romeo and Juliet story, which Shakespeare dramatized around the same time. The play as a whole absorbs much of Shakespeare’s eclectic reading: numerous borrowings of Ovidian mythology, some use of Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch, influence from John Lyly’s comedies (especially
Endimion
for dreaming and
Gallathea
for the interplay of aristocrats and artisans), an element of Chaucer (
The Knight’s Tale
for lovers at the court of Theseus, perhaps
The Tale of Sir Thopas
for the dream of sleeping with an “elf-queen”), perhaps
The Golden Ass
of Apuleius (trans. William Adlington, 1566) for Bottom’s transformation.
    TEXT: Quarto 1600, “as it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honourable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants.” apparently typeset from Shakespeare’s manuscript or a close transcription of it. Reprinted 1619 (Second Quarto). Folio