A Midsummer-Night Dream

A Midsummer-Night Dream (1963) by William Shakespeare
Oxford University Press — ISBN: none
Condition: Very Good
As sold by Crappy Old Books

Some books arrive with a certain amount of literary prestige. A Midsummer-Night Dream arrives wearing a garland, trailing moonlight, and smirking gently at the whole idea of human dignity. Shakespeare’s most enchanted comedy is one of those works that has managed, over several centuries, to remain both genuinely magical and cheerfully ridiculous: a play in which lovers become confused, fairies interfere with everything, amateur actors attempt theatre with catastrophic confidence, and an otherwise respectable citizen ends up with a donkey’s head. In short, civilisation at its finest.

This 1963 Oxford University Press edition has the added charm of having belonged to Benenden School, which somehow feels exactly right. One can imagine it resting on a shelf in a tidy school library, quietly waiting to educate generations of students in the finer points of verse, mischief, and romantic disarray. Yet in a wonderfully poignant twist, it appears never to have been issued to anyone, as there are no entries in the borrowing index. So this book has lived the rare and curious life of a school copy that seems to have escaped the usual fate of annotation, panic-revision, and being shoved into a satchel five minutes before double English.

That untouched borrowing index gives it a strange and lovely aura. Here is a book that was fully prepared to serve literature, discipline, and adolescent bewilderment, and yet seems to have been spared the full ordeal. It is a near-miss in educational history: a volume present for duty, but apparently never summoned. One likes to think it spent its school years watching other books stagger out to meet essays on Hamlet and returns filed under “urgent,” while it remained elegantly untroubled, preserving its Shakespearean dreams in peace.

As for the play itself, A Midsummer-Night Dream remains one of Shakespeare’s most charming acts of controlled chaos. Love is shown not as noble destiny but as a sort of comic fever, easily redirected by misunderstanding, vanity, and supernatural meddling. Authority figures issue commands, young people ignore them, fairies manipulate everyone for sport, and the boundary between the sensible world and the absurd one collapses completely. Which is to say: it remains an entirely accurate portrait of social life.

What makes the play so enduring is that beneath the moonlit nonsense lies an astonishing precision. Shakespeare knows exactly how to balance elegance and farce, poetry and foolishness. The lovers are exasperating, the fairies are capricious, Bottom is immortal, and the whole thing dances forward with the confidence of a writer who understood that the human heart is a glorious, unreliable machine. It is dreamy, yes, but never vague. Even its whimsy has structure.

This Oxford University Press edition also carries that unmistakable mid-century academic solidity. It comes from a world in which classics were printed properly, schools expected pupils to meet them with some seriousness, and publishers believed literature deserved sturdy, respectable form. There is something deeply pleasing about that. This is not a novelty Shakespeare or a decorative Shakespeare. It is a working Shakespeare, produced for reading, studying, and perhaps the occasional quietly despairing schoolmaster.

Its Very Good condition only adds to the appeal. Combined with the unmarked borrowing index, it suggests a book that has somehow passed through institutional life with its composure intact. It has the provenance of a school copy, but without the battle scars you might expect. That makes it all the more attractive now: a handsome survivor from a vanished world of card indexes, proper libraries, and educational ambition.

In short, this is a delightful copy of one of the strangest and most lovable plays in English literature. A 1963 Benenden School Shakespeare that seems never quite to have entered active service, it offers all the moonlit confusion, fairy sabotage, and comic grandeur of A Midsummer-Night Dream in a form both elegant and faintly ironic. A Very Good school copy that nobody borrowed, which is itself almost Shakespearean: prepared for drama, but left instead in a state of perfect theatrical suspense.

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