A Midsummer Night's Dream
If the best way to learn a play is to actually act it out this is the only Shakespeare I have truly learned, despite excellent dramatic readings in AP English of numerous other plays.
In middle school I was in a bad production of A Midsummer Night's dream in the role of a rather awkward Lysander, awkward because I was a 13 year old boy asked to act devoutly in love with a 14 year old girl, doubly awkward because somewhere inside I knew I didn't even like girls. All in all my performance was lackluster.
As we read and rehearsed scenes I grew to love the way the lines sounded when we stopped reading them so stiffly - many of the words we didn't have the slightest idea of but occasionally we got it right. And even the most cynical of us involved, there were 20 of us total required to participate in the production, were moved.
One of the few who got it right was our Titania, a girl my age overly fond of horses. The director at last moment wanted to cut out Titania's monologue following "These are the forgeries of jealousy..." but we fought, a group of teens and preteens, fought to keep it intact. It was the heart of the whole play, the pairs of lovers, the bumbling townsfolk, were window dressing. Without that comparison of Oberon and Titania's love to the raging world the play was nothing.
I've had to read the play several more times in various classes in high school and college and have seen several movie versions, but I can never shake that rendition that we put on.
--addendum: My boyfriend had never read or seen the play before, so we took some time to read it to each other. As I've said, I've read it several times before, but it never truly struck me until now how fluid love is in this play and what Shakespeare wanted us to recognize and think about because of that. Ardent love in the wink of an eye is changed over to another and proclaimed with equal fervor. The previous object of affection, if thought of at all, is scorned. Both funny and sad. Brilliant.
