How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare Read Online Free

first horrible creature that she sees. What a great way to revenge myself. Titania will fall in love with a monster!”
    One of the reasons we know exactly what Oberon is thinking is that he has told us about his scheme a few minutes earlier in the same scene. Read this speech aloud with your children.
    OBERON
    Having once this juice ,
I’ll watch Titania when she is asleep
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes .
The next thing then she, waking, looks upon
(Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull ,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape)
She shall pursue it with the soul of love .
And ere [before] I take this charm from off her sight
(As I can take it with another herb) ,
I’ll make her render up her page [the Indian boy] to me.
    Thus, there is no doubt whatsoever what Oberon is thinking. This is typical of Shakespeare. When you read him carefully, he is always as clear as a bell.
There sleeps Titania sometime of the night ,
    Sometime of the night means “sometimes during the night” or “for some part of the night.” So the sentence in a more modern rendering would be, “Sometimes at night Titania sleeps there.”
Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight .
    We are now told that Titania is lulled in these flowers with dances and delight . What does that mean? What an odd thing to say. My own guess is that it’s meant to suggest that Titania, while she’s asleep, is dreaming about delightful things like dancing. After all, the play is called A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and the theme of dreaming recurs throughout the play. Oberon is probably thinking that his revenge will be all the sweeter if Titania is dreaming about something happy—and what a clue this gives us to Oberon’s character: He’s not nice in any conventional sense. He may be romantic, clever, attractive, cunning, temperamental, and mystical—but he’s not nice.
And there the snake throws her enameled skin ,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in .
    Here Oberon is telling us something new about Titania and the rest of the fairies. Use this as a game with your children. Ask them “What do you think Oberon is telling us about the fairies in those two lines?”
And there the snake throws her enameled skin ,
Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in .
    The answer: He’s telling us that, physically, the fairies are tiny .
    We know how big a normal snake is: anywhere from, say, six inches to three feet long. And we know that snakes shed their skin every so often. We should also note that the word weeds in Shakespeare’s time meant garments in addition to unwanted plants.
    So: Oberon is saying that there, on the bank, snakes throw off their skins every now and then, and the skin of a snake is just the right size to wrap a fairy in. Therefore Titania (and the rest of the fairies, including Oberon) are smaller than snakes. And in another part of the play we’re told that fairies can hide in acorn cups. So while fairies vary in size in Shakespeare’s fairy world, they’re all very small. Titania may be a queen, but she’s probably about the size of your son’s finger.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
And make her full of hateful fantasies .
    This part of the speech reminds us that we’re in the middle of an exciting story. Oberon says that he is going to streak Titania’s eyes with magic fairy juice so that she has hateful dreams.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
    And make her full of what? Hateful fantasies! He wants revenge. And what is it that she’ll wake up and see? We don’t know yet. We’re on tenterhooks, which is exactly what Shakespeare intends. He is toying with us so that we can’t wait to see the next scene.
    Have your children say the passage aloud one more time for good measure. Then, after a few days’ rest, we’ll move on.
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows ,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows ,
Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine ,
With sweet muskroses, and with eglantine .

    My