'A Midsummer Night's Dream' Study Guide Now Available

The ASC Study Guide for A Midsummer Night's Dream is now available on our website. And, I promise you, this one's a lot of fun. Midsummer has so much potential for playing, and I think we've found some ways to really bring that to life in classrooms.

Here is a ten-page preview. The Study Guide contains the following activities:

• The Basics: Getting your students on their feet, working with iambic pentameter, paraphrasing, exploring rhetoric, and turning your classroom into an early modern stage. These sections include, for your benefit, the first 100 lines of text, already marked-up, to use as a model in the classroom.
  
• Line Assignments: A way to give your students ownership over a small section of text, which they will use in further language-based activities and staging explorations.
• Metrical Magic: Examines the performance clues provided by the shifts between normal iambic pentameter and the unusual trochaic tetrameter, the rhythm of spellcasting. The moments when a speaker transitions from one form to the other provide the basis for performance choices. Does the unusual meter call for music? A different physicality? How can actors emphasize the mysticism of what's going on in those moments?
  
• Staging Challenges: Titania's Bower explores the opportunities presented by the early modern stage. When Titania falls asleep on stage, where can she be placed? She can't be too much in the way of what's going on, but she also needs to be close enough for Oberon to ensorcel her and for Bottom to wake her. Students will experiment with different options and determine which they think is most effective.
  
• Perspectives: Courtship Rituals examines the social context of the romantic troubles in the play. How would Shakespeare's audience have perceived Egeus's ruthless inflexibility and Hermia's defiance? What implications of pre-contracted betrothals are in the play?
  
• Staging Challenges: Actors Playing Actors. The well-meant shenanigans of the Mechanicals can illuminate some potential clues about Shakespeare's own theatrical world. In this activity, your students will first explore the rehearsal process that Quince, Bottom, and the rest display, and then will prepare their own production of 'Pyramus and Thisbe'. We expect the result to be far more mirthful than tragical.
  
• Perspectives: Fairies explores the changing nature of the fae in literature, from its darker origins in English folklore to the benign transformation effected by the Victorians and Disney. Students will choose a source as inspiration for costume design in their vision of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
  
• Textual Variants: Examines a curious difference in speech prefixes between the Quarto and Folio versions of A Midsummer Night's Dream (which I discussed in my last post).
  
• Creative writing exercises based on the play, involving imitating Pyramus's questionable poetry or giving relationship advice to one of the lovers
  
• A guide to producing a 1-hour version of the play in your classroom

If you would like to purchase a downloadable copy of the study guide for A Midsummer Night's Dream, or any of our other available titles, please visit our website. Next up on the slate: Henry V.