Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été
1600
Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été
1600
Translated by François Guizot
A forest outside Athens, a moonless night, and love descends into beautiful chaos. Four young lovers flee the city's rigid laws only to find themselves prey to Puck's clumsy magic and a love potion that transforms affection into absurdity overnight. Meanwhile, the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania war over a changeling boy, their dispute sending ripples through the mortal world. Shakespeare constructs a world where the impossible feels inevitable, where a donkey-headed man becomes an object of devotion and the boundaries between dream and waking blur entirely. The play operates on multiple levels: a romantic comedy of errors, a meditation on the nature of desire itself (is love a choice or a spell?), and a playful meditation on theater itself, embodied in the bumbling amateur actors whose tragic Pyramus and Thisbe provides comic relief. It endures because it captures love's fundamental irrationality: the way desire transforms us into fools, the way a single night can remake everything we thought we knew about our own hearts.
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“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; And therefore is wing'd Cupid painted blind. Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste; Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste: And therefore is love said to be a child, Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.””
— William Shakespeare
“Though she be but little, she is fierce!””
— William Shakespeare
“The course of true love never did run smooth; But, either it was different in blood,O cross! too high to be enthrall’d to low. Or else misgraffed in respect of years, O spite! too old to be engag’d to young. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,O hell! to choose love by another’s eye.””
— William Shakespeare
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!””
— William Shakespeare
“And yet,to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays.””
— William Shakespeare
“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,Such shaping fantasies, that apprehendMore than cool reason ever comprehends.The lunatic, the lover and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poet's penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.””
— William Shakespeare
“My soul is in the sky.””
— William Shakespeare
“If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended,That you have but slumbered hereWhile these visions did appear.And this weak and idle theme,No more yielding but a dream,Gentles, do not reprehend:If you pardon, we will mend:And, as I am an honest Puck,If we have unearned luckNow to 'scape the serpent's tongue,We will make amends ere long;Else the Puck a liar call;So, good night unto you all.Give me your hands, if we be friends,And Robin shall restore amends.””
— William Shakespeare
“Are you sure That we are awake? It seems to me That yet we sleep, we dream””
— William Shakespeare
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<a href="https://lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63"><img src="https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg" alt="Read Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été by William Shakespeare free on Lex" width="160" height="40"></a>[](https://lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63)[url=https://lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63][img]https://lex-books.com/badges/read-on-lex.svg[/img][/url]Read Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été by William Shakespeare free on Lex: https://lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63Cite this book
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Shakespeare, William. Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été. Lex, lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63.Shakespeare, W. (1600). Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63Shakespeare, William. Le Songe D'une Nuit D'été. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/le-songe-d-une-nuit-d-t-647d3b10-7125-493a-aa7f-88427b74bf63.
