Folger Guide to Teaching a Midsummer Night's Dream

The authoritative guide to teaching Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Folger Guide to Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an invaluable resource for teachers, students, and Shakespeare fans alike.

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare stages the workings of love. Theseus and Hippolyta, about to marry, are figures from mythology. In the woods outside Theseus’s Athens, two young men and two young women sort themselves out into couples—but not before they form first one love triangle, and then another.

Also in the woods, the king and queen of fairyland, Oberon and Titania, battle over custody of an orphan boy; Oberon uses magic to make Titania fall in love with a weaver named Bottom, whose head is temporarily transformed into that of a donkey by a hobgoblin or “puck,” Robin Goodfellow. Finally, Bottom and his companions ineptly stage the tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe.”

The Folger Guide to Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream Includes:
-An explanation of the Folger methodology for teaching Shakespeare
-Scholarly essays from experts in the field
-A five-week breakdown of digestible lesson plans
-Resource links for a deeper dive into the world of Shakespeare

This guide is an essential part of any teacher’s toolkit.

Dr. Peggy O’Brien is a classroom teacher who founded the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Education Department in 1981. She set the Library’s mission for K–12 students and teachers then and began to put it in motion; among a range of other programs, she founded and directed the Library’s intensive Teaching Shakespeare Institute, was instigator and general editor of the popular Shakespeare Set Free series and expanded the Library’s education work across the country. In 1994, she took a short break from the Folger—twenty years—but returned to further expand the education work and to engage in the Folger’s transformation under the leadership of Library Director Michael Witmore. She is the instigator and general editor of The Folger Guides to Teaching Shakespeare series.