Connotations

A Journal for Critical Debate

A Journal for Critical Debate

  • Articles
    • Issues
    • Latest Additions
  • Debates
  • Conferences
  • Special Issues
  • Support Us
  • Members’ Area
  • About Us
    • Editors
    • Connotations Society for Critical Debate
    • Open Access Statement
    • Copyright and Re-Use
    • Submit an Article
    • Contact
    • Impressum
Home » What is the Dream in Midsummer Night’s Dream?

Search

What is the Dream in Midsummer Night’s Dream?


What is the Dream in Midsummer Night's Dream?

Original article

Robert Crosman. "What is the Dream in A Midsummer Night's Dream?." Connotations Vol. 7.1: 1-17.

Responses:

If you feel inspired to write a response, please send it to editors(at)connotations.de

Post navigation

  • ← Post-WWII Japanese-American Narrative: David Mura
  • The Opening of All’s Well That Ends Well →
Creative Commons License Connotations - A Journal for Critical Debate by the Connotations Society is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

· © 2023 Connotations · Powered by · Designed with the Customizr theme ·

This website uses cookies to improve your experience. We'll assume you're ok with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.Accept Read More
Privacy & Cookies Policy

Privacy Overview

This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. These cookies will be stored in your browser only with your consent. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience.
Necessary
Always Enabled
Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Non-necessary
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
SAVE & ACCEPT
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
modal close image
modal header

From “The Benefits of Cooking Together”
by The Chef & The Dish

Read by Sandra Wetzel

adventcal_01

“If cooking is in the very foundation of being human, then working together toward that shared enjoyment of eating is in the very foundation of what establishes human bond.”

modal header

From Taste: My Life Through Food
by Stanley Tucci

Read by Yves Herak

adventcal_02

 

“There is a dish, a very special dish, that is served in a home on Christmas Day. It is called Timpano…”

modal header

 

From Macbeth
by William Shakespeare

Read by Moana Toteff

adventcal_03

 

LADY MACBETH

Who dares receive it other,

As we shall make our griefs and clamor roar

Upon his death?

 

MACBETH

I am settled and bend up

Each corporal agent to this terrible feat.

Away, and mock the time with fairest show.

False face must hide what the false heart doth

know.

 

modal header

From “The Monkey’s Paw”
by W. W. Jacobs

Read by Curtis Runstedler

adventcal_04 

 

“It moved,” he cried, with a look of horror at the object as it lay on the floor. “As I wished, it twisted in my hand like a snake.”  

modal header

From Frankenstein
by Mary Shelley

Read by Sophie Franklin

adventcal_05

 

“It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open…”

 

modal header

“Frost at Midnight”
by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Read by Dan Poston

adventcal_06

 

The Frost performs its secret ministry,

Unhelped by any wind. The owlet’s cry 

Came loud—and hark, again! loud as before. 

The inmates of my cottage, all at rest, 

Have left me to that solitude, which suits 

Abstruser musings: save that at my side 

My cradled infant slumbers peacefully. 

‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs 

And vexes meditation with its strange 

And extreme silentness. Sea, hill, and wood, 

This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood, 

With all the numberless goings-on of life, 

Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame 

Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not; 

Only that film, which fluttered on the grate, 

 

Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing. 

Methinks, its motion in this hush of nature 

Gives it dim sympathies with me who live, 

Making it a companionable form, 

Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit 

By its own moods interprets, every where 

Echo or mirror seeking of itself, 

And makes a toy of Thought. 

 

But O! how oft,

How oft, at school, with most believing mind, 

Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars, 

To watch that fluttering stranger ! and as oft 

With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt 

Of my sweet birth-place, and the old church-tower, 

Whose bells, the poor man’s only music, rang 

From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day, 

So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me 

With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear 

Most like articulate sounds of things to come! 

So gazed I, till the soothing things, I dreamt, 

Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams! 

And so I brooded all the following morn, 

Awed by the stern preceptor’s face, mine eye 

Fixed with mock study on my swimming book: 

Save if the door half opened, and I snatched 

A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up, 

For still I hoped to see the stranger’s face, 

Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved, 

My play-mate when we both were clothed alike! 

 

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side, 

Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm, 

Fill up the intersperséd vacancies 

And momentary pauses of the thought! 

My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart 

With tender gladness, thus to look at thee, 

And think that thou shalt learn far other lore, 

And in far other scenes! For I was reared 

In the great city, pent ‘mid cloisters dim, 

And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars. 

But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze 

By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags 

Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds, 

Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores 

And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear 

The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible 

Of that eternal language, which thy God 

Utters, who from eternity doth teach 

Himself in all, and all things in himself. 

Great universal Teacher! he shall mould 

Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask. 

 

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee, 

Whether the summer clothe the general earth 

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing 

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch 

Of mossy apple-tree, while the night-thatch 

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall 

Heard only in the trances of the blast, 

Or if the secret ministry of frost 

Shall hang them up in silent icicles, 

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

modal header

From The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

Read by David Korn

adventcal_07

 

“I came home afterwards and wrapped myself in my blanket and rocked back and forth, ice in my very bones, and thought of all the sunny Christmases of my childhood—oranges, bikes and hula-hoops, green tinsel sparkling in the heat.”

modal header

“The Black Belt”
by Jean Guthrie-Smith

Read by Jonathan Sharp

adventcal_08

Gruff trams and trains criss-cross and intersect 

With glittering steel this leprous countryside; 

Pyramid slagheaps threaten, seamed and specked 

With smouldering pink: a lively trade is plied 

In coarse flamboyant clothes and gaudy sweets 

And all the brave romantic merchandise 

Folk make the most of, being poor and wise. 

In unimagineably squalid streets, 

Ranked rabbit-hutches, citizens do dwell, – 

Weird, gnome-like men, shrill women and their young, 

Most piteous young! Where Heaven is seared to Hell 

With steam and smoke from demon valve, or stung 

To crude geranium from the furnace flares, 

There’s life and love, much talking and much drinking 

In this black bunch of towns, and bitter thinking 

On why and wherefore of the world’s affairs. 

That ship be sped and tool or weapon forged 

And laughter quickened round a million fires, 

The miser pit-heads will be daily gorged 

With stunted peoples of these pock-marked shires. 

Like goblin print upon a yellow page 

Forested chimneys spell their rigmarole; 

The fungoid mine spreads canker in the soul 

To feed the sinews of an iron age! 

modal header

From Wuthering Heights
by Emily Brontë

Read by Vera Yakupova

adventcal_09

“Wuthering Heights is the name of Mr. Heathcliff’s dwelling. “Wuthering“ being a significant provincial adjective, descriptive of the atmospheric tumult to which its station is exposed in stormy weather. Pure, bracing ventilation they must have up there at all times, indeed: one may guess the power of the north wind, blowing over the edge, by the excessive slant of a few stunted firs at the end of the house; and by a range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving alms of the sun. Happily, the architect had foresight to build it strong: the narrow windows are deeply set in the wall, and the corners defended with large jutting stones[…]“

image source: https://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/true-story-house-hill-inspired-wuthering-heights-1799935

modal header

From Howl’s Moving Castle
by Diana Wynne Jones

Read by Yves Herak

adventcal_10

“She shivered and cranked her stiff old neck around, but there was only darkness behind her. “Let’s have a bit more light, shall we?” she said. Her cracked little voice seemed to make no more noise than the crackling of the fire[…]“

 

 

 

 

 

 

image source: https://dianawynnejones.fandom.com/wiki/Calcifer?file=Calcifer.png

modal header

Amoretti XXX
by Edmund Spenser

Read by Nora Schalker

adventcal_11

 

My Love is like to ice, and I to fire: 

How comes it then that this her cold so great 

Is not dissolved through my so hot desire, 

But harder grows the more I her entreat? 

Or how comes it that my exceeding heat 

Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold, 

But that I burn much more in boiling sweat, 

And feel my flames augmented manifold? 

What more miraculous thing may be told, 

That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice, 

And ice, which is congeal’d with senseless cold, 

Should kindle fire by wonderful device? 

Such is the power of love in gentle mind, 

That it can alter all the course of kind. 

modal header

“The Burning Babe”
by Robert Southwell

Read by Capucine Blanc

adventcal_12

As I in hoary winter’s night stood shivering in the snow, 

Surpris’d I was with sudden heat which made my heart to glow; 

And lifting up a fearful eye to view what fire was near, 

A pretty Babe all burning bright did in the air appear; 

Who, scorched with excessive heat, such floods of tears did shed 

As though his floods should quench his flames which with his tears were fed. 

“Alas!” quoth he, “but newly born, in fiery heats I fry, 

Yet none approach to warm their hearts or feel my fire but I! 

My faultless breast the furnace is, the fuel wounding thorns, 

Love is the fire, and sighs the smoke, the ashes shame and scorns; 

The fuel Justice layeth on, and Mercy blows the coals, 

The metal in this furnace wrought are men’s defiled souls, 

For which, as now on fire I am to work them to their good, 

So will I melt into a bath to wash them in my blood.” 

With this he vanish’d out of sight and swiftly shrunk away, 

And straight I called unto mind that it was Christmas day. 

 

 

modal header

“The Giver (for Berdis)”
by James Baldwin

Read by Ellen Dengel-Janic

adventcal_13

If the hope of giving

is to love the living,

the giver risks madness

in the act of giving.

 

Some such lesson I seemed to see

in the faces that surrounded me.

Needy and blind, unhopeful, unlifted,

what gift would give them the gift to be gifted?

          The giver is no less adrift

          than those who are clamouring for the gift.

If they cannot claim it, if it is not there,

if their empty fingers beat the empty air

and the giver goes down on his knees in prayer

knows that all of his giving has been for naught

and that nothing was ever what he thought

and turns in his guilty bed to stare

at the starving multitudes standing there

and rises from bed to curse at heaven,

he must yet understand that to whom much is given

much will be taken, and justly so:

I cannot tell how much I owe.

 

 

 

 

modal header

“Andrew“
by Jane Bowles

Read by Michael Reid

adventcal_14

 

Andrew had an urge to bolt from the clearing, but he seated himself stiffly on the end of the tree trunk. The boy was beautiful, with an Irish-American face and thick curly brown hair. His cheeks were blood red from the heat of the flames. Andrew looked at his face and fell in love with him. Then he could not look away.

A mess kit and a brown paper package lay on the ground. “My food is there in that brown bag,“ the boy said. “I’ll give you a little piece of meat so you can see how good it tastes when it’s cooked here, out in the air. Did you go in for bonfires when you were a kid?“

“No,“ said Andrew. “Too much wind,“ he added, some vaguememory stirring in his mind.

“There’s lots of wind,“ he agreed, and Andrew was unreasonably delighted that the boy considered his remark a sensible one. “Lots of wind, but that never need stop you.“ He looked up at Andrew with a bright smile. “Not if you like a fire and the outdoors. Where I worked they used to call me Outdoor Tommy. Nobody got sore.“

modal header

From Jane Eyre
by Charlotte Brontë

Read by Sophia Smolinski

adventcal_15

 

I stood on the rug and warmed my hands, which were rather cold with sitting at a distance from the drawing-room fire. I felt now as composed as ever I did in my life: there was nothing indeed in the gipsy’s appearance to trouble one’s calm.She shut her book and slowly looked up; her hat-brim partially shaded her face, yet I could see, as she raised it, that it was a strange one. It looked all brown and black: elf-locks bristled out from beneath a white band which passed under her chin, and came half over her cheeks, or rather jaws: her eye confronted me at once, with a bold and direct gaze.

modal header

From The Cricket on the Hearth
by Charles Dickens

Read by Rebecca Felchle

adventcal_16

 

“suddenly, the struggling fire illumined the whole chimney with a glow of light; and the Cricket on the Hearth began to Chirp!”

modal header

“The Snow-Storm”
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Read by Raphael Zähringer

adventcal_17

 

 
Announced by all the trumpets of the sky,
Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields,
Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air
Hides hills and woods, the river, and the heaven,
And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end.
The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet
Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit
Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed
In a tumultuous privacy of storm.
 
Come see the north wind’s masonry.
Out of an unseen quarry evermore
Furnished with tile, the fierce artificer
Curves his white bastions with projected roof
Round every windward stake, or tree, or door.
Speeding, the myriad-handed, his wild work
So fanciful, so savage, nought cares he
For number or proportion. Mockingly,
On coop or kennel he hangs Parian wreaths;
A swan-like form invests the hidden thorn;
Fills up the farmer’s lane from wall to wall,
Maugre the farmer’s sighs; and, at the gate,
A tapering turret overtops the work.
And when his hours are numbered, and the world
Is all his own, retiring, as he were not,
Leaves, when the sun appears, astonished Art
To mimic in slow structures, stone by stone,
Built in an age, the mad wind’s night-work,
The frolic architecture of the snow.
modal header

From The Housemaid: Her Duties, and how to Perform Them

in Victorian London, Etiquette and Advice Manuals

Read by Julia Schatz

adventcal_18

 

“The housemaid’s work is heavier in winter than in summer, and particularly in the town. She has all the additional work of the fires: not only the care of the grates, the lighting and keeping in of the fires, and the carrying of fuel, but, in a town, the dirt from a thousand fires in other people\’s houses. […]“

 

 

 

 

modal header

From Good Omens
by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Read by Inken Armbrust

adventcal_19

 

“Cases of spontaneous human combustion are on record all over the world. One minute someone’s quite happily chugging along with their life; the next there’s a sad photograph of a pile of ashes and a lonely and mysteriously uncharred foot or hand. Cases of spontaneous vehicular combustion are less well documented.“

 
 
 
 
 
Illustration by crashingwave: https://www.deviantart.com/crashingwave/art/Good-Omens-Crowley-s-Bentley-26642395

 

 

 

modal header

From The Fiery Cross
by Diana Gabaldon

Read by Sandra Wetzel

adventcal_20

 

 

“He wasn’t sure what he had expected. Something like the spectacle of the great fire at the Gathering, perhaps. The preparation wa
s the same, involving large quantities of food and drink. A huge keg of beer and a smaller one of whisky stood on planks at the edge of the dooryard, and a huge roast pig on a spit of green hickory turned slowly over a bed of coals, sending whiffs of smoke and mouthwatering aromas through the cold evening air.“
 
 

 

 

 

 

modal header

From “A Christmas Dream, and How It Came to Be True”
by Louisa May Alcott

Read by Moana Toteff

adventcal_21

“I wish I was a beggar-girl.”

“Would you like to be hungry, cold, and ragged, to beg all day, and sleep on an ash-heap at night?” asked mamma, wondering what would come next. 

“Cinderella did, and had a nice time in the end.”

 
 
 

 

 

 

 

modal header

From Martin Chuzzlewit
by Charles Dickens

Read by Sara Rogalski

adventcal_22

 

“All the farmers being by this time jogging homewards, there was nobody in the sanded parlour of the tavern where he had left the horse; so he had his little table drawn out close before the fire, and fell to work upon a well-cooked steak and smoking hot potatoes, with a strong appreciation of their excellence, and a very keen sense of enjoyment.“

 
 
 

 

image source: https://www.charlesdickenspage.com/illustrations-martin-chuzzlewit.html

 

modal header

From The Book Thief
by Markus Zusak

Read by Elena-Mira Tara

adventcal_23

“There are some things here that didn’t burn!“It was one of the cleanup men. He was not facing the girl, but

rather, the people standing by the town hall.

“Well, burn them again!“ came the reply. “And watch them burn!“

 

image source: https://bookriot.com/nazi-book-burning/

 

modal header

From Great Expectations
by Charles Dickens

Read by Matthias Bauer

adventcal_24

“Though I was hungry, I dared not eat my slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew Mrs. Joe’s housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore I resolved to put my hunk of bread-and-butter down the leg of my trousers.”

 

 

modal header

Jacklight
by Louise Erdrich

Read by Uwe Küchler

adventcal_25

 

The same Chippewa word is used both for flirting and hunting game, while another Chippewa word connotes both using force in intercourse and also killing a bear with one’s hands.            

-R.W. Dunning (1959) Social and Economic Change Among the Northern Ojibwa

 

We have come to the edge of the woods,

out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,

out of knotted twigs, out of leaves creaked shut,

out of hiding.

 

At first the light wavered, glancing over us.

Then it clenched to a fist of light that pointed,

searched out, divided us.

Each took the beams like direct blows the heart answers.

Each of us moved forward alone.

 

We have come to the edge of the woods,

drawn out of ourselves by this night sun,

this battery of polarized acids,

that outshines the moon.

 

We smell them behind it

but they are faceless, invisible.

We smell the raw steel of their gun barrels,

mink oil on leather, their tongues of sour barley.

We smell their mothers buried chin-deep in wet dirt.

We smell their fathers with scoured knuckles,

teeth cracked from hot marrow.

We smell their sisters of crushed dogwood, bruised apples,

of fractured cups and concussions of burnt hooks.

 

We smell their breath steaming lightly behind the jacklight.

We smell the itch underneath the caked guts on their clothes.

We smell their minds like silver hammers

cocked back, held in readiness

for the first of us to step into the open.

 

We have come to the edge of the woods,

out of brown grass where we slept, unseen,

out of leaves creaked shut, out of our hiding.

We have come here too long.

 

It is their turn now,

their turn to follow us. Listen,

they put down their equipment.

It is useless in the tall brush.

And now they take the first steps, not knowing

how deep the woods are and lightless.

How deep the woods are.