Read A Midsummer Night’s Dream by email.
Two weeks, one wood, and a man playing a wall.
Theseus opens the play complaining that four days is a long time to wait for a wedding. This takes fourteen — a scene a morning through Athens and the wood: the lovers, the fairies, an amateur dramatic society, and a play about a wall.
Five or six minutes a day, and every installment opens with a line reminding you where you left off.
Two weeks from now, you will have read Shakespeare.
14 installments, one an email
- First published
- 1595
- Installments
- 14
- Each installment
- 5–6 min
How long it takes
- Words
- 17,317
- Reading time
- 1 hour 12 minutes
- At 5 minutes a day
- 2 weeks
- At 10 minutes a day
- 7 days
- At 20 minutes a day
- 4 days
At 240 words a minute, the average for adult silent reading. Use your own speed
Why read A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Nine scenes, and that is the whole play — the shortest run in the catalogue, and the one with the largest installments of any play here, a median of 1,454 words. What the length buys is that each morning is a complete movement: the Athenian court and its impossible law, the mechanicals casting their tragedy, Oberon and Titania quarrelling over a stolen boy, and the night in the wood after which both men wake up in love with Helena. Two weeks is about the right amount of time to spend on one night.
Verse arrives as verse and prose as prose, which matters more here than usual: Titania in pentameter and Bottom in flat Athenian prose look as different on the page as they sound on a stage. Speaker names are in small capitals, stage directions in italics. Four of the nine scenes are too long for one email — the night in the wood (Act III Scene 2, 3,823 words, the longest in the play) and the Pyramus and Thisbe performance in Act V among them — and every cut lands at an entrance or an exit, chosen so the longest part comes out as short as it can.
Installment 1 is the playbill — twenty-two persons of the play, the setting given as Athens and a wood near it — and then Theseus counting down the four days to his wedding. A fortnight later you are out of the wood and watching a duke sit politely through an extremely bad play. Of the plays in the catalogue, it is the one that asks least of a reader at seven in the morning.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does it take to read A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Just over an hour straight through (17,317 words). By email, it’s 14 daily installments of five to six minutes — a fortnight, or a week at a premium pace of two scenes a day.
Is this the complete, unabridged text?
Yes — all nine scenes in the carefully typeset Standard Ebooks edition, including the whole of Pyramus and Thisbe, Puck’s closing lines to the audience, and the dramatis personae. Nothing is trimmed or modernized.
How does a play work as email?
One scene per email, in play formatting: speaker names in small capitals, stage directions in italics, verse lines kept as verse. With only nine scenes the installments are long by this catalogue’s standards — a median of 1,454 words — and four of the nine arrive in more than one part. Acts II and III are entirely in the wood; Act IV walks back out of it.
Do the recaps spoil anything?
Each recap covers only the previous scene, and in this one it hardly matters: nobody dies, and Oberon announces his whole plan to Puck before carrying it out. The pleasure was never in the surprise — it is in watching the plan go wrong.
How does it arrive?
One installment per email, one email a day, at the hour you pick, with a one-line recap of the previous scene at the top. Free. Unsubscribe or pause anytime.
Standard Ebooks edition, public domain. Texts from Standard Ebooks and Project Gutenberg editions. Not affiliated with either.