Join Regina Buccola for ‘Saint Valentine is Past’: Fairy Verse, Fairy Drugs, and Issues of Consent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of Oakton College's Great Books Speaker Series. This virtual event takes place on March 30, 2023, from 12:30 p.m. - 1:45 p.m. 

Grouped with the comedies in the first collected works of Shakespeare’s plays (the First Folio, which turns 400 this year!), A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be taken as a light-hearted love-romp through the woods. However, early modern beliefs about fairies as well as the overlap between the verse structure that Shakespeare’s fairies use and that of the witches of Macbeth suggest other, more sinister interpretations of them and of their actions. Finally, a mortal character in the play – Demetrius – is left under the influence of fairy drugs at the play’s end, calling into question the extent to which he consents to the relationship in which he is left. This presentation examines how these threads offer deeper insight into A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Shakespeare’s work more broadly. 

Speaker Bio: Regina Buccola is a Professor of English and the Chair of the Humanities at Roosevelt University in Chicago where she also serves as Director of Literature and Languages and a core faculty in Women’s and Gender Studies. She has published several books on early modern British drama and culture, most recently Haunting History Onstage: Shakespeare in the USA and Canada for Cambridge Elements as well as being the editor of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Critical Guide. Her work has been published in a number of journals, including Shakespeare Bulletin, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, and Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation. She serves as the scholar in residence at Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

Register for the event here.