A Midsummer Night's Dream Movie Vs Play

For the final project I chose to do a children’s book adaptation of Shakespeare’s, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the perfect play to adapt into a children’s book because it compasses several entertaining child-like aspects such as, fairies and magic. The play contains the most adolescent fitting themes out of all the Shakespeare plays we have read so, naturally it was my first choice to modify into a children’s book.
When writing the children’s story, I tired to make it contrast slightly from the original play. I chose to make changes so the material could be easily understood by children. I changed the names of the characters to modern names that children can pronounce and remember easily. I also cut out some content

This allowed me to make observations I didn’t notice when reading the play for the first time. This project gave me the opportunity to get creative and modify the themes into a simpler format for the children’s book. One observation I noticed was, how the darkness at the beginning of the play quickly gives way to the festive tone that continues though the play. This reveals Shakespeare’s attitude towards love and its downfalls. Shakespeare mocks how unstable and irrational people can be when it comes to infatuation. After making this connection, I tried to include this subtly in the children’s

From the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this idea is emphasized. In the adaptation, the characters, Noah and Olivia, try to overcome a major obstacle by planning to run away and get married in the very beginning of the story. Love encounters even more obstacles as the story proceeds. The curious and good-natured fairies, Lily and Ella, fly around the woods causing unintentional chaos by sprinkling magic love juice in the wrong person’s eyes, causing them to fall in and out of love with the first person they see when they awake. In the end of the adaptation, similarly to the play, love triumphs all of the obstacles it encounters. A large portion of A Midsummer Night’s Dream takes place in the setting of the enchanted woods. In the woods, fairies fly around playfully in a world of magic, fascination, and mischief. This is the setting I chose for the children’s adaptation because it perfectly embodies the atmosphere that this children’s book should have: lively and