Movie Vs. Text

A Midsummer Night's Dream. By William Shakespeare. Dir. Adrian Noble. A Royal Shakespeare Company Production. 1996. Netflix

It was the first time for me that I had either read or watched a movie about William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. Reading it was a lot different for me than watching it because I didn't puck up on a lot of the humor that was involved. I knew parts were supposed to be funny and some parts weren't, but I couldn't always separate them. It was tough for me to understand the words at times, and even when I thought I read it correctly and had a correct definition of what a certain word was saying I would have to read the notes on the bottom of the page just to feed my urge of having to read what the annotations were. I would then get lost about what I was reading. It took all my attention to keep up with what was going on when reading it. The movie I could follow, and didn't realize how much of a funny man Puck was. The Netflix version pretty much followed the play word for word, and it did a good job of using foil characters and showing how the townsmen were in contrast to what the others stood for. The movie reassured me that I read it correctly, but it also gave me more of an insight into what Shakespeare was trying to show us through all the characters and how they assisted one another in developing.