Ø What is literature for?
Ø Video
SparkNotes:
Ø A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM
William
Shakespeare
The most influential writer in all of
English literature, William
Shakespeare was born in 1564.Shakespeare attended grammar school, but
his formal education proceeded no further. In 1582 he married an older
woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her. Around 1590 he left
his family behind and traveled
to London to work as an
actor and playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and
Shakespeare eventually became the most popular playwright in England and
part-owner of the Globe Theater.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one
of his strangest and most delightful creations, and it marks a departure from
his earlier works and from others of the English Renaissance. The play demonstrates both the extent of
Shakespeare’s learning and the expansiveness of his imagination. The range
of references in the play is among its most extraordinary attributes: Shakespeare draws on sources as various as Greek mythology (Theseus, for instance, is
loosely based on the Greek hero of the same name, and the play is peppered with
references to Greek gods and goddesses); English country fairy lore
(the character of Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, was a popular
figure in sixteenth-century stories); and the theatrical practices of
Shakespeare’s London (the craftsmen’s play refers to and parodies
many conventions of English Renaissance theater, such as men playing the roles
of women). Further, many of the characters are drawn from diverse texts: Titania comes
from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Oberon may have been taken from the medieval romance Huan of Bordeaux, translated by Lord
Berners in the mid-1530s. Unlike the plots of many of Shakespeare’s plays,
however, the story in A
Midsummer Night’s Dream seems not to have been drawn from any particular source
but rather to be the original product of the playwright’s imagination.
Ø Vocabulary
l amend: to make changes to a
document, law, agreement etc, especially in order to improve it
l amendment: formal official change
Ø Thirteenth Amendment to the
United States Constitution
The Thirteenth Amendment (Amendment XIII) to the United States Constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime.
Though the amendment formally abolished slavery throughout the United States, factors such as Black Codes , white supremacist violence, and selective enforcement of statutes continued to subject some black Americans to involuntary labor, particularly in the South. In contrast to the other Reconstruction Amendments, the Thirteenth Amendment was rarely cited in later case law, but has been used to strike down peonage and some race-based discrimination as "badges and incidents of slavery"
l mort- dead
mortal:
human and not able to live forever
immortal:
living or existing forever
Ø Love not look with eyes with
mind
Helena:"Love
looks not with the eyes but with the mind."
A
Midsummer Night's Dream (I, i, 234)
Helena ponders the transforming power
of love, noting that Cupid is blind. The lovesick Helena has been abandoned by her beloved Demetrius,
because he loves the more attractive Hermia. Helena, while tall and fair, is not as
lovely as Hermia. Helena finds it unfair that Demetrius dotes on Hermia's
beauty, and she wishes appearances were contagious the way a sickness is so
that she might look just like Hermia and win back Demetrius. The connection of love to eyesight and vision are matters of vital
importance in this play about love and the confusion it sometimes brings.
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