In the Library
A Midsummer Night's Dream
William Shakespeare, 1600
- Form
- Form Play
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 9
- Length
- Length 17k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
The course of true love never did run smooth.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
The Tempest
William Shakespeare
The Tempest is Shakespeare's other play of spirits, spells and lovers steered by an unseen hand, with Ariel doing for Prospero what Puck does for Oberon.
£1.99
Metamorphoses
Ovid
Metamorphoses does the same thing, but supplies the raw material: the play's own lovers watch the doomed Pyramus and Thisbe, a story Shakespeare lifted straight from these pages.
£1.99
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland does the same thing, but sends a girl instead of four lovers tumbling into a night-logic world where the rules of waking life dissolve.
£1.99
About the book
Somewhere past the last house in Athens the trees close over the path, and everything the daylight promised comes undone. A flower's juice on a sleeping eyelid is enough to make the queen of the fairies adore the first thing she sees, and what she sees is a weaver wearing a donkey's head, whom she takes to her bower and crowns with roses. Shakespeare's joke is not on her. He is telling you the plain truth about desire: that it fixes on whatever it lands on, that four young people can swap their hearts around in a single night and never notice the switch, that reason has nothing to do with any of it. Oberon knows a bank where the wild thyme blows, and the play's language keeps opening out into that greenness, thick with moonlight and small terrors. Come morning the lovers are matched and Athens gets its wedding, but the wood is still standing where it was, and every one of us has been inside it.