Tao Te Ching
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Although one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays and still frequently performed around the world, the first reviewer, Samuel Pepys, called it "the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life." It’s prestige grew with time however and a reviewer in the 1840s called it, “the most beautiful poetical drama ever written.” It was also described at this time as an expression of Plato’s view of life as a dream. Set in ancient Greece in a time when the law set the death penalty for a daughter disobeying her father, the play expresses the gender rolls of the time viewing marriage as a transfer of power over women from father to bridegroom and as the ultimate goal for girls. It also describes though, male authority being broken down by passion and the chaos of emotional influence.
Quotes from A Midsummer Night's Dream
“And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.”
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“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.”
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“Are you sure that we are awake? It seems to me that yet we sleep, we dream.”
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40. Returning
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“Choice... momentary as a sound, swift as a shadow, short as any dream; brief as the lightening in the collied night.”
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