How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare Read Online Free PDF

devour it up .
So quick bright things come to confusion .
    Short as any dream . Shakespeare does not mince words. For the lovers in this play, love is a dream, a midsummer night’s dream, a dream that can change as quickly as lightning in the coal-black night.

CHAPTER 8
    Passage 3
Bottom’s Dream
I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.… The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom .
( A Midsummer Night’s Dream ,
Act IV, Scene 1, lines 214–26)
    O ur third passage from A Midsummer Night’s Dream is spoken by a tradesman, an ordinary man of Athens named Nick Bottom who has just awakened from a dream. In his dream, two strange things happened: He had the head of a donkey, and a beautiful fairy queen fell in love with him.
    In fact, these two things were not just a dream; they really did happen to Bottom, and we see them happen earlier in the play. We’ll discuss Bottom’s part in the plot in more detail in a moment, but here’s what you need to know right now: First, Puck comes across Bottom and his friends in the woods (they are there to rehearse a play); and then Puck, to be mischievous, puts a donkey’s head on Bottom’s shoulders. A few minutes later, Titania wakes up with the juice of the magic flower in her eyes (remember:Oberon put it there to get his revenge); and Titania falls in love with this monster who is a man from the neck down and a donkey from the neck up. So when Bottom wakes up later with the ass-head removed, he thinks he had a dream: a “most rare vision.”
    Quotation Pages
    At this point, for ease of reading, I’ll stop printing the Quotation Pages as part of the text. However, you and your children should have the proper Quotation Pages next to you as you memorize this and the other passages in this book, and you should download them from howtoteachyourchildrenshakespeare.com .

Bottom’s Dream
I have had a most rare vision .
    I am always struck by the beauty of the phrase a most rare vision . Repeat it to your children and tell them to think about the words. If your children like to act, this is an ideal passage to practice their skills. Remind them that Bottom is just waking up from a deep sleep and has just had a pleasant but confusing dream.
    You will also notice from the way the speech is printed at the beginning of the chapter that it is not poetry, but rather prose. We’ll talk about what that means in the next chapter.
I have had a dream
past the wit of man
to say what dream it was .
    In this sentence, I’m especially fond of the word wit. The wit of man . As used in this sentence, the word wit means not only “understanding” or “knowledge”; it also has the connotation of “cleverness.” The phrase the wit of man seems to me the perfect choice of words from the perspective of a tradesman who would like to appear wise.
I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was .
Man is but an ass
if he go about to expound [explain] this dream .
    Man is but an ass . Shakespeare constantly uses puns throughout his plays. In this case, ass means both (1) a donkey and (2) a foolish person. (In Shakespeare’s day, it did not apparently mean a part of the body. I have checked all the glossaries and spoken to several Shakespeare experts, and they all agree that “ass” did not mean what we today would call a backside. And yet the name Bottom implies otherwise and I’ll go to my grave believing that the word had three connotations in Shakespeare’s day.) Now comes the juiciest part of the passage.

    James Cagney and Anita Louise in the 1935 film directed by Max Reinhardt (photo credit 8.1)
The eye of man hath not heard