Midsummer Themes

Explore these quotations from the introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream:

Midsummer is "a play about love . . . love is a dream, or perhaps a vision; that is absurd, irrational, a delusion . . . that is doomed to be momentary" (182).

The play explores "the power of infatuation to transform the image of the beloved in the lover's eye" (xiv).

On a page in your notebook, create a tree map to collect direct quotations and details from the play that illustrate the love topics of patience, infatuation, and game playing (manipulation). The tree map will come in handy on finals day for the essay portion of the finals.

Act 4 Midsummer Vocab

conjunction = combined; joined
"We will, fair queen, up to the mountain's top / And mark the musical confusion / Of hounds and echo in conjunction" (4.1.115).


enmity = hostility; hate
"I know you two are rival enemies / How comes this gentle concord in the world, / That hatred is so far from jealousy / To sleep by hate and fear no enmity?" (4.1.151).


expound = explain; develop
"Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream" (4.1.217).

Act 3 Midsummer Vocab

Complete synonym triplets as homework for the words below for Act 3. Remember that the synonym triplet strategy requires that you only write down two synonyms for each assigned word and draw a visual representation of the word.

casement (3.1.55)

knavery (3.1.114)

enamored (3.1.140)

carcass (3.2.66)

scorn (3.2.125)

derision (3.2.125)

confederacy (3.2.197)

contrived (3.2.201)

earnest (3.2.290)

vixen (3.2.341)

recreant (3.2.435)

Midsummer Act 2 Vocab

forsworn
Titania: (about Oberon) "I have forsworn his bed and company" (2.1.64).

progeny
dissension
Titania: "And this same progeny of evils comes / From our debate, from our dissension; / We are their parents and original" (2.1.118-120).

promontory
Oberon: "Since once I sat upon a promontory / And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back" (2.1.154-155).

entice
Demitrius: (to Helena) "Do I entice you?" (2.1.206).

Debates This Week

This Thursday, January 8 and Friday, January 9 our class will conduct the three debates that students have been researching.

Cheating, fossil fuel reduction, and drug testing in sports are the three topics that we will debate. I will pick a resolution from a hat, and those teams will begin debating.

Students who are not involved in a debate will be completing one of the judging forms.

Midsummer Act 1 Vocabulary

nuptial (wedding; marriage)
Theseus: "Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour / Draws on apace" (1.1.1-2).

abjure (renounce; give up)
Theseus: "Either to die the death, or to abjure / Forever the society of men" (1.1.67-68).

austerity (self-denial; simple living)
Theseus: "Or on Diana's altar to protest / For aye austerity and single life" (1.1.91-92).

visage (face; appearance)
Lysander: "Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass, / Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass" (1.1.215).

lamentable (mournful; full of grief)
Quince: "Marry, our play is The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe" (1.2.11-12)

Note: The story of Pyramus and Thisbe is similar to Romeo and Juliet.