A Midsummer Night's Dream: Fully Dramatized Audio Edition

By: William Shakespeare

Narrated by: full cast

Folger Shakespeare Library, The World’s Leading Center for Shakespeare Studies

The Folger Shakespeare Library, home to the world's largest Shakespeare collection, brings A Midsummer Night's Dream to life with this new full-length, full-cast dramatic recording of its definitive Folger Edition.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare stages the workings of love in unexpected ways. In the woods outside Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves into couples - but not before they form first one love triangle, and then another. The king and queen of fairyland, Oberon and Titania, battle over custody of an orphan boy. Oberon uses magic to make Titania fall in love with a weaver named Bottom, in an effort to distract Titania from the custody battle. While all of this is going on, Bottom and his companions ineptly stage the tragedy of "Pyramus and Thisbe".

This new full-cast recording - based on the most respected edition of Shakespeare’s classic - expertly produced by the Folger Theatre, is perfect for students, teachers, and the everyday listener.

Public Domain (P)Simon & Schuster

Surprisingly Entertaining

I had to read for an assingment and did not expect to like it but actually really enjoyed it. The actors were really good and the reading brought to life and helped me pay attention

A Mid Summer Nights Dream

Was tremendous. The readers were great and very professional. A great play to listen to and see. Tks

Perfect for audio

Shakespeare was obviously written for the stage so audio-only is a tall order, especially on text which is already so difficult to parse. This performance does a great job!

wow! just wow!

to listen to, to read along, and understand was what made this happen. great audio!

Great for Reading along to the Folger edition!

I got this dramatization because I figured it would help me read this great play if I had some people performing it while I read along. While it definitely isn't a perfect representation of what it might sound like on a stage it gives a perfect sense of the characters and humor. Recommended!

Very good

Cast is excellent and the performance is true to the text. I use this version with my high school students as we study the play.

This is fun and funny.

This was one of the most enjoyable ways to spend a couple of hours I have come across. You do need a good command of older English, but if you can read the King James Bible, this won’t be that mysterious. When the peasant characters are talking, part of the humor is that they are seriously misusing almost every long word they use.

Pure poetry and intoxication of words

“In pure poetry and the intoxication of words, Shakespeare never rose higher than he rises in this play. But in spite of this fact, the supreme literary merit of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a merit of design. The amazing symmetry, the amazing artistic and moral beauty of that design, can be stated very briefly. The story opens in the sane and common world with the pleasant seriousness of very young lovers and very young friends. Then, as the figures advance into the tangled wood of young troubles and stolen happiness, a change and bewilderment begins to fall on them. They lose their way and their wits for they are in the heart of fairyland. Their words, their hungers, their very figures grow more and more dim and fantastic, like dreams within dreams, in the supernatural mist of Puck.

Then the dream-fumes begin to clear, and characters and spectators begin to awaken together to the noise of horns and dogs and the clean and bracing morning. Theseus, the incarnation of a happy and generous rationalism, expounds in hackneyed and superb lines the sane view of such psychic experiences, pointing out with a reverent and sympathetic skepticism that all these fairies and spells are themselves but the emanations, the unconscious masterpieces, of man himself.

The whole company falls back into a splendid human laughter. There is a rush for banqueting and private theatricals, and over all these things ripples one of those frivolous and inspired conversations in which every good saying seems to die in giving birth to another. If ever the son of a man in his wanderings was at home and drinking by the fireside, he is at home in the house of Theseus. All the dreams have been forgotten, as a melancholy dream remembered throughout the morning might be forgotten in the human certainty of any other triumphant evening party; and so the play seems naturally ended. It began on the earth and it ends on the earth. Thus to round off the whole midsummer night’s dream in an eclipse of daylight is an effect of genius.

But of this comedy, as I have said, the mark is that genius goes beyond itself; and one touch is added which makes the play colossal. Theseus and his train retire with a crashing finale, full of humor and wisdom and things set right, and silence falls on the house. Then there comes a faint sound of little feet, and for a moment, as it were, the elves look into the house, asking which is the reality. “Suppose we are the realities and they the shadows.” If that ending were acted properly any modern man would feel shaken to his marrow if he had to walk home from the theatre through a country lane. A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents the question of whether the life of waking, or the life of the vision, is the real life, the sine qua non of man.”

“Gravity easily oppresses and complicates problems whereas lightheartedness  simplifies the complex and applies a magical gentleness that Shakespeare compares to the play of the fairies at night that perform their favors in the silence of sleep with no one hearing or seeing them. The problem that daytime Athens with all its business and busyness cannot solve, the nighttime world of the forests with its mirth and revels resolves in the most mysterious and hidden of ways. The king of the fairies’ love juice (from the flower love-in-idleness) that quietly anoints the eyelids of the sleeping lovers in the forest proves more miraculous than all the threats and warnings issued by the authorities of Athens invoking the letter of the law and threatening confinement to a nunnery or death by execution if Hermia does not marry Demetrius to please her father.” — G.K. Chesterton

A good performance of a great play

A few of the characters were weak, but the overall performance was very good.
I have generally never loved the musical interludes in this play, and this, alas, was no exception.
The play is the lightest of the comedies, and quite enjoyable.

Memories from college

As an English major, I was instantly enamoured by Shakespeare. A lovely afternoon spent reading a great classic!