⚗️alchemist⚗️ on Nostr: ren and I just read A Midsummer Night's Dream. We thought it'd be nice to post our ...

ren (npub1vdd…tkfq) and I just read A Midsummer Night's Dream. We thought it'd be nice to post our notes here.

---

> Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;
> Four nights will quickly dream away the time;

A clever parallel to the title of the play, where 'midsummer' makes you think of day, and then there is 'night' and 'dream' in sequence.
The next line, "and then the moon, like to a silver bow," gives a nod to Hippolyta's warrior nature but also brings to mind Cupid's bow. The image is transformed later, when Lysander speaks of Phoebe's silver visage and Hermia speaks of Cupid's golden arrow.

I didn't know the word "gauds", but I figured that it's where "gaudy" comes from.

> I beg the ancient privilege of Athens:
> As she is mine, I may dispose of her,

Damn, Egeus must be Canadian because he's really into MAID - Mediterranean Athens-induced Disposal

I thought this part was beautiful:

> To live a barren sister all your life,
> Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
> Thrice-blessèd they that master so their blood
> To undergo such maiden pilgrimage,
> But earthlier happy is the rose distilled
> Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn,
> Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

The moon at odds with love, as it seems to be throughout Act I.

These lines highlight for me the loneliness and beautiful solitude which has always been a part of my experience of life. He is right, I think, to compare it to being a fruit unpicked, withing on the vine. Being alone feels timeless, as if you could hold on to your self and your memories forever, ignoring the passage of time which withers you and everything you have known.

> Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena,

Archaic usage of 'made love' is always hilarious

> Upon this spotted and inconstant man.

I am now picturing Demetrius as a dalmatian

> 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.

Do you think that every extraordinarily bright thing necessarily makes the world look darker around it?

Could it be that the darkness lends beauty and depth and contrast to the light which we are lucky enough to find?

A world of life without death, light without contrast, would be a setting for a horror story, generation upon generation piling up to excess in a humid greenhouse world, teeming with things past their time, all crammed into every corner. In contrast, the grief of loss and death seems characterized by *emptiness*, echoes, voids, strong winds in caverns. The tragic element in that last verse makes me think of your review of Blood Meridian, actually, and how evil is a necessary and inescapable part of life.

I chuckled at this little stab:

> By all the vows that ever men have broke
> (In number more than ever women spoke),

This pivot in Helena's speech is interesting to me:

> Sickness is catching. O, were favor so!
> Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go.
> My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye;

As I understand, she is saying that "sickness is contagious" and she wishes that Hermia's traits (which have stolen Demetrius from her) could be equally contagious, so that she could 'catch' them too. Interesting to compare beauty to sickness. But in Helena's eyes, Hermia's beauty is 'wrong', it is against (what she believes is) fate.

Also FUCK HELENA she's being SO DUMB. All she has to do is let her friend and her star-crossed lover escape, and she will literally have Demetrius all to herself. This kind of frustrating dramatic tension reminds me of Othello, where audience gets to see Iago scheming against him in private, while Othello is just hilariously oblivious.

> Quince the carpenter, and Snug the joiner, and
> Bottom the weaver, and Flute the bellows-mender, and
> Snout the tinker, and Starveling the tailor.

These names are amazing.

I once took a class with a classmate who was *exactly like Bottom*. He acted as if he were the teacher's right-hand-man and had to get a word in whenever the teacher said a sentence. He would raise his hand and then go off on digressions to prove he 'understood' the material, just like Bottom ranting about the color of his beard. And, like Bottom, this motherfucker had no idea what was going on in the class.