As with every Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream has a surface level as well as deeper levels. Tonight we’ll take a look at the darkness that hides beneath the veneer of the fairies and lovers gallivanting around in the forest, as well as the stories behind Theseus and Hippolyta. Is Shakespeare trying to make us notice something?
Presented by Robin Williams, Ph.D. Robin has been working with Shakespeare for more than four decades and with Shakespeare readers for more than two decades, and has a special interest in digging beneath the surface of the plays.
Shakespeare Talks! are on the first Tuesday of every month, sponsored by the International Shakespeare Center Santa Fe. (There is no talk on the first Tuesday of July, which is July 4.)
$10 at the door; students are free
“Or if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany, as a sound;
Swift, as a shadow; short, as any dream;
Brief, as the lightning in the collied night
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold,’
The Jaws of Darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.”