Hermia

hippolyta i wooed thee with my sword and won thy love doing thee injuries but i will wed thee in another key with pomp with triumph and with revelling

enter aegeus hermia lysander

and demetrius full of vexation come i with complaint against my child my daughter hermia stand forth demetrius my noble lord this man hath my consent to marry her stand forth lysander and my gracious duke this man hath bewitched the bosom of my child thou Thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes and interchanged love-tokens with my child, thou hast by moonlight at her window sung with feigning voice verses of feigning love, and stolen the impression of her fantasy with bracelets of thy hair, rings, gauds, conceits, knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweetmeats, messengers of strong prevailment and unhardened youth.

with cunning hast thou filched my daughter's heart turned her obedience which is due to me to stubborn harshness and my gracious duke be it so she will not hear before your grace consent to marry with demetrius i beg the ancient privilege of athens as she is mine i may dispose of her which shall be either to this gentleman or to her death according to our law immediately provided in that case

what say you hermia be advised fair maid to you your father should be as a god one that composed your beauties yea and one to whom you are but as a form in wax by him imprinted and within his power to leave the figure or disfigure it Demetrius is a worthy gentleman.

So is Lysander.

In himself he is, but in this kind, wanting your father's voice, the other must beheld the worthier.

I know not by what power I am made bold, nor how it may concern my modesty.

Creech in this?

So in this, I am going to be Lysander, who's deeply, deeply in love with Hermia, but...

What has happened, just before the scene that Creech and I are about to do, is Puck, the magic fairy, has squirted some fairy juice in my eyes.

And now instead of being in love with Hermia, I'm in love with Creech's character, Helena.

Oh, okay.

But Helena

So if you've read Planet Narnia by Michael Ward, which I'm sure lots of people have, he sets out very well what the planets are and what their characteristics are.

So Hermia is Mercury, Helena is the Moon, Lysander is Venus, and Demetrius is the Sun.

So read the play again with those things in mind and see what is revealed to you.

So for example, there are two characters who should be in love with one another but aren't.

And when all the lovers in Midsummer Night's Dream left, I was Diane Weiss, who was a size seven at that time, understudy.

When she left, I was to take over her role of Hermia in Midsummer Night's Dream.

And I got called into Michael Langham's office.

He said, you know, love.

worth sticking them in your OneNote as well for revision purposes it's easy if you're

struggling to access it on your phone for example maybe load up if you type BGS English podcast into Google the first hit will give you the website where you can download the handout so do make sure you do that And the extract we're looking at comes straight after Lysander has been becoming all amorous, asking to sleep closer to Hermia.

Hermia's having none of it.

She's having none of it, and they both fall down to sleep.

So we've got to remember, when we look at this extract, that as Puck speaks, and indeed as Helena and Demetra's talk, asleep on stage are the two lovers perhaps just in front of the tiring house at the back of the stage so we need to think about the physical reality often people forget the staging and just like we said with the mop question where they forgot obram was on stage we need to remember they're asleep on stage

i think it's particularly important with this play that you always think about is there something else on stage that you know people who aren't talking is there somebody watching so that you're picking up on any moments of dramatic irony.

And in terms of tonal shifts, just after this is kind of that quite moving speech, the only reference to an actual dream in the whole play, which is Hermia's dream of the snake that kind of wakes her, the snake that eats her heart.

So although this is a moment that is, I think, quite funny, and we're going to focus a lot on its humour today, it's juxtaposed with some kind of darker undercurrents, particularly the depiction of women.

Uh, the two lovers, uh, Lysander and-

Oh, Hermia.

Yeah

...

Hermia.

You know, do something Hermia.

Yeah.

My favorite line in, in...

Here, the bard plays with the rigid class system of his own time, taking three distinct groups and turning their society upside down in a world where no mortal is in control.

The play opens with young Hermia raging at her father Aegeus and Theseus, the king of Athens, who have forbidden her to marry her lover Lysander.

Hermia has no interest in her father's choice for her of Demetrius, but her best friend Helena definitely does.

Furious at their elders, Hermia and Lysander elope under cover of darkness, with Demetrius in hot pursuit.

This is further complicated by Helena's decision to follow them all into the woods in the hope of winning Demetrius' heart.

At this point, the woods are getting crowded as the lovers are sharing the space with a group of rude mechanicals, a troupe of workers drunkenly rehearsing a play led by the jovial Nick Bottom.