A Midsummer's Night Dream

Can it really be so long ago? Well, then. Seven years ago -- seven years! -- the Misses fell in love with Brian Hamman's rapping Puck in the Chicago Shakespeare Theater production of Short Shakespeare! A Midsummer Night's Dream. (Related entry here.) And yesterday, they returned to Dream. With no small sense of nostalgia, we revisited the same retelling we read all those years ago and then watched the 1999 film version featuring Kevin Kline as the sort of Bottom Shakespeare himself may have envisioned. (Read Roger Ebert's review here.) And today after math and music, we will read the play, choose parts to memorize, and do what we do: Read. Think. Learn.

Live. Dream.

Titania:
I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:
Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force perforce doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

Bottom:
Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason
for that: and yet, to say the truth, reason and
love keep little company together now-a-days; the
more the pity that some honest neighbours will not
make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.

Titania:
Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.

Bottom:
Not so, neither: but if I had wit enough to get out
of this wood, I have enough to serve mine own turn.