Before we get into the Midsummer Night's Dream scene workshops today, please take a few minutes to offer some feedback on the fourth-quarter writing assignments for this class--the Sonnet and Sonnet Explication. As you know, this is still a new, experimental approach to the poetry explication, and I am very interested in your feedback as both sonneteers and explicators.
Thank you!
The title of the Shakespeare play we've been enjoying in class identifies itself as a "dream," and indeed, characters throughout this play are repeatedly falling asleep and waking up on stage, and the main action takes place overnight in a magical, pastoral forest setting that is in many ways "dreamlike."
For your final Notebook prompt this year, take 5 minutes now to ponder all of the ways that you can see Shakespeare making use of this trope of dreams, dreamers, and dreaming in this play. How many "dreamers" are there in this play? Is a "dream" generally a good or bad thing in this play? What does dreaming entail, and does it represent an aspect of "reality," an alternate reality, an escape from reality, or some kind of nightmarish distortion of reality? In what ways is the play itself "like a dream"?
