How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (8 page)

Speak, speak. Quite dumb?

Dead? Dead? A tomb

Must cover thy sweet eyes
.

These lily lips
,

This cherry nose
,

These yellow cowslip cheeks

Are gone, are gone!

Lovers, make moan;

His eyes were green as leeks
.

Have your children enact this speech aloud. You lie down and play dead and have one of them play poor grieving Thisbe, bemoaning the loss of her beloved Pyramus. It’s guaranteed to make them laugh.

Bottom’s story begins taking off about halfway through the play. In Act IV, Scene 1, we come upon Bottom and his friends rehearsing their play in a clearing in the woods. Amid mangled words and missed cues, Puck wanders onto the scene and transforms Bottom by putting an ass head on his shoulders. His fellow actors are frightened and run off, at which point, Titania—who is asleep nearby under the spell of Oberon’s magic flower—wakes up. As you’ll remember, the power of the magic
flower is that anyone who has been anointed by its juice will fall in love with the next live creature that he sees; and the first live creature that Titania sees on waking up is Bottom. So she falls instantly in love with this monster—half man, half donkey—and leads him away to her bed of flowers (
where the wild thyme blows
).

Two scenes later we see Titania and her fairies pampering Bottom with every donkey luxury imaginable. Here is what Titania says to Bottom when we come upon them among the flowers—and if you have a daughter, here’s her chance to play a fairy queen:

Come sit thee down upon this flowery bed
,

While I thy amiable cheeks do coy
[caress]

And stick muskroses in thy sleek smooth head
,

And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy
.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream
at the Rose Theatre, Kingston, with Judi Dench as Titania and Oliver Chris as Bottom
(photo credit 8.2)

As you can imagine, Bottom is lapping up all this attention.

BOTTOM

Where’s Peaseblossom?

PEASEBLOSSOM

Ready
.

BOTTOM

Scratch my head, Peaseblossom. Where’s Monsieur Cobweb?

COBWEB

Ready
.

BOTTOM

Monsieur Cobweb, good monsieur, get you your weapons in your hand and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee and … bring me the honey-bag.… I must to the barber’s, monsieur, for methinks I am marvels
[marvelous]
hairy about the face. And I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch
.

The end of the Mechanicals’ Plot is a happy one. Titania and Oberon are reunited, and as they dance together, Puck removes the ass head from Bottom’s shoulders. When Bottom awakes, whole again, he remembers the luscious experience with Titania as though it were a dream. He rubs his eyes and shakes himself and says with wonder:

I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream.… The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called “Bottom’s Dream” because it hath no bottom
.

Passage 4
Theseus and Hippolyta

THESEUS

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in

Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow

This old moon wanes!…

HIPPOLYTA

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;

Four nights will quickly dream away the time;

And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New bent in heaven, shall behold the night

Of our solemnities
.

(
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
,
Act I, Scene 1, lines 1ff.)

T
he fourth plot of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
is simplicity itself. At the beginning of the play, Duke Theseus, the ruler of Athens, is about to marry Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons, and at the end of the play he marries her. That’s all that really happens in their story, which functions as a sort of frame around the other three plots. However, Theseus has a civilizing effect on the whole play: He cautions Hermia
about the force of Athenian law, and he later overrules Hermia’s father and allows her to marry Lysander without punishment.

Also, when Philostrate, Theseus’s Master of the Revels, tries to dissuade his master from choosing the Mechanicals’ play for the wedding entertainment because it is so poorly written and performed, Theseus insists on having it, and he tells Philostrate why in one of my favorite couplets in the play:

For never anything can be amiss

When simpleness and duty tender it
.

Theseus has a compassionate heart, and we see it everywhere in the play.

The passage that you are about to teach your children consists of the two opening speeches of the play. Tell your children to imagine sitting in a darkened theater … the lights come up … and there onstage are two beautiful, exotic adults, the Duke of Athens and an Amazon Queen, discussing their wedding, which is only four days away.

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace
.

Nuptial
means “relating to a wedding.”
Apace
means “quickly.”

our nuptial hour

Draws on apace
.

Four happy days bring in

Another moon
.

In other words, “We’ll be married in just four happy days, at the time of the new moon.”

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace. Four happy days bring in

Another moon
.

And now comes the best part of the speech:

But, O, methinks how slow

This old moon wanes!

Theseus is so eager for his wedding day (and night) that time seems to be standing still.

Question:
Ask your children how they think Shakespeare is conveying the Duke’s sense of longing.

Answer
: Through the sounds of the words. He’s using a literary device called assonance, which means the repetition of internal vowel sounds in nearby words to create a specific effect. In this case he uses the repeated
o
to make it sound as if time is dragging along slowly. Have your children exaggerate the sounds.

But, Oooo, methinks hoooow slooooow

This oooold mooooon wanes!

Make it a contest to see which of you can exaggerate the sound more.

But, Ooooooooooooooooooooo, methinks hooooooooooooooooooow

sloooooooooooooooooow

This ooooooooooooooooooooooold

mooooooooooooooooooooooooooooon wanes!

Silly, yes. But I doubt that they’ll ever forget the line after this.

Hippolyta answers Theseus by saying:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;

Four nights will quickly dream away the time;

And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New bent in heaven, shall behold the night

Of our solemnities
.

In essence she is saying:

Don’t worry. The time will pass quickly. The days will become nights and during the nights we’ll dream, and before you know it the new moon will rise, and, like all new moons, it will have the curved shape of a bow, in this case a silver bow that has just been bent, ready for the first arrow. And incidentally, the new moon will look down and watch over us on our wedding night.

Hippolyta says it rather better than I just did:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;

Four nights will quickly dream away the time;

And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New bent in heaven, shall behold the night

Of our solemnities
.

Notice the use of the word
dream
. This will be a recurring image throughout the play.

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night;

Four nights will quickly
dream
away the time;

And then the
moon
,

The moon is the other central image of the play. The moon waxes and wanes—it grows large, then recedes. It glows in the night sky. There is something mysterious and sexually romantic about it.

And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New bent in heaven
,

Ask your children why they think Hippolyta is comparing the moon to a bow that has just been bent. The answer is that Hippolyta is an Amazon. Amazons were the fierce women warriors of Greek mythology who fought with bows and arrows. Indeed, according to myth, every Amazon had one of her breasts removed so that it would not interfere physically as she drew back the bowstring.

shall behold the night

Of our solemnities
.

In other words, “The moon will look down from the heavens and bless our marriage.”

Now try the whole speech. When there are slip-ups, just repeat the relevant section again and again. My children and I love the repetition. It has a calming effect on us. For our “Shakespeare time” together, there is nothing else in the world but us and the passage. It simplifies life for those two special hours on the weekend, and by the end of each session, we can—as Bottom might say—recite the lines at our fingertips.