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something mysterious and sexually romantic about it.
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New bent in heaven ,
    Ask your children why they think Hippolyta is comparing the moon to a bow that has just been bent. The answer is that Hippolyta is an Amazon. Amazons were the fierce women warriors of Greek mythology who fought with bows and arrows. Indeed, according to myth, every Amazon had one of her breasts removed so that it would not interfere physically as she drew back the bowstring.
shall behold the night
Of our solemnities .
    In other words, “The moon will look down from the heavens and bless our marriage.”
    Now try the whole speech. When there are slip-ups, just repeat the relevant section again and again. My children and I love the repetition. It has a calming effect on us. For our “Shakespeare time” together, there is nothing else in the world but us and the passage. It simplifies life for those two special hours on the weekend, and by the end of each session, we can—as Bottom might say—recite the lines at our fingertips.

Bonus Passage
    When the lovers reach their highest state of confusion, Oberon declares to Puck that it is time to straighten things out. He instructs Puck to use fog to create confusion, then use a magic antidote to sort out the couples. In a hilarious scene of mistaken identities, Puck does just what he’s told, and by the end of the scene, the four lovers are asleep on the ground. Puck’s final “blessing” on the couples is one that you and your children should memorize right now.
Jack shall have Jill;
Naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well .
    For me, this epigram stands for the endings of all the romantic comedies ever written. On the surface it means “they all lived happily ever after,” but the subtext is more complex and has a slightly darker cast. The man shall have his mare again . Not his woman, but his mare. Bottom became a donkey and then a fairy queen fell in love with him. There are things going on in our lives that are hard to fathom. They are beyond our reach. They live in our dreams.
Jack shall have Jill;
Naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well .
    It is especially interesting that Shakespeare has Puck comment on this moment from a distance, as though he is the creator of this “play” that the lovers are enacting in front of him. It’s as though he’s acknowledging that the lovers are operating in a fiction, just the way Jack and Jill are part of a nursery rhyme. Also, Puck is “breaking the fourth wall” of the stage: He is bringing the audience into his conspiracy and acknowledging that he’s in a play that we are watching. Again and again throughout Shakespeare’s plays, we’ll see Shakespeare use the image of a playwright creating a play-within-a-play, making theater versus “real life” a central metaphor of his vision of how we live our lives. At this moment, Puck is the playwright commenting on his “actors”:
Jack shall have Jill;
Naught shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well .
    There is a similar moment in Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro when the lovers are in jeopardy despite ruse after ruse to put things right. The crafty servant Figaro has confidence, however, that everything will turn out well, and he likens the situation to watching a comedy onstage, thereby distancing himself for a moment from his fellow actors. He sings:
The theater prescribes
It all ends with a smile.
I only hope that wedding bells
Might keep the peace awhile.
( The Marriage of Figaro ,
Act II, Scene 10, trans. McClatchy)
    I’d be willing to bet that the librettist of The Marriage of Figaro (Lorenzo da Ponti) was inspired by Puck’s similar blessing in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . As a writer of stage comedies, I find these lines iconic—they remind me of the whole history of stage comedy—and I have them pinned on the wall just above my