…certainly middle July is midsummer, and this means it is the perfect time, right to the day, to read (reread I’m sure) Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (this link is to the Arden Edition of the play, voluminous notes…).
We also have a number of film versions of the play. While our work here in Odyssey Online is to recommend books, we can take a slight break from that to recommend two versions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, notably the 1935 Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle version of the play which is a great “Classic Hollywood” movie featuring James Cagney and Olivia De Havilland, as well as the great “hipster-1960’s” (for want of a better way to put it) 1968 Peter Hall directed version, starring Derek Godfrey, Barbara Jefford, Nicholas Selby, Hugh Sullivan, David Warner, Diana Rigg, Michael Jayston, Helen Mirren, Judi Dench, Ian Holm. As Shakespeare himself says:
I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine…