“The course of true love never did run smooth.”

It certainly did not in Shakespeare’s psychedelic fantasy about cross-dressing, polyamory, speaking truth to power and tik-tok – centuries before the internet. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is endlessly adapted and readapted. At its heart, it’s a play about the madness and thrill of attraction and love; about how strange it is when one human spots another human to spend their life with.

In this episode there are green fairies who fight and turn flowers into love-potions. Is falling in love always this random and inexplicable? But the really big question is: are the faeries Incredible Hulk Green, or Fungus the Bogeyman Green? Help us decide.

Will you side with Jonty that the “Rude Mechanicals” are hilarious and the young lovers are a tedious bore – or do you agree with Sophie that Bottom, Snug and Flute are unfunny and that Hermia and Helena are internet influencers before their time? A queen falls in love with a donkey, and the Duke of Athens compares lovers, poets and madmen.

Join the SLOB team in a moonlit Athenian wood for love and laughs, and a moment of nostalgia for Robert Sean Leonard as Puck in the 1980s hit film Dead Poets’ Society.

Visit the Secret Life of Books and join a conversation about the episode and the show: https://www.secretlifeofbooks.org/forum

Further Reading:

William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “The New Cambridge Shakespeare.” (2003).

Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World, (Norton, 2004).

Jonathan Bate, How the Classics Made Shakespeare, Princeton University Press, 2019.

Leonard Barkan, Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me, (Fordham UP, 2024)

Bart van Es, “Captive children: John Lyly, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and child impressment on the early modern stage,” Renaissance Studies, 33;2, 2019.