Teaching A Midsummer Night's Dream with the Folger Guide

Join Jessica Zeiss, Folger Mentor Teacher, for a two-hour virtual session devoted to the Folger Guide to Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Working through the guide in practice, we will explore hands-on approaches to introducing the language, strategies for close reading and scene work, and a unit sequence that takes students from first encounter to culminating activity.

You will leave with ready-to-use lessons, a flexible framework for pacing A Midsummer Night’s Dream in your classroom, and a discount in the Folger Shop for the Folger Guide to Teaching A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

About A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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 of mechanicals ineptly stage the tragedy of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” 

You will leave with: 

• Activities for exploring the play’s multiple storylines through performance, including approaches to the mechanicals’ scenes that students consistently love 

• Strategies for using the play’s comic energy as a gateway to its more demanding language and themes 

• A unit sequence that moves from scene work to a culminating project on transformation, identity, or what it means to put on a show