The girls' history book has brought us up to the Elizabethan Age, and had a chapter on Shakespeare. After reading its paraphrased story of Macbeth yesterday, we read A Midsummer Night's Dream from a book I had bought separately, Ten Tales of Shakespeare for Children by Charles and Mary Lamb. This book tells the plays in a story format, good for reading aloud and not having to explain who's talking, but it keeps some of the lines so that the flavor is there. I followed that up by getting my Pelican Complete Works of William Shakespeare and reading Puck's final speech in the original language ("If we shadows have offended / Think but this, and all is mended").
They loved it. R especially was taken with the old-style language. We even looked up some sonnets, M recalling that the one quoted in the Sense and Sensibility movie was #116 ("Love is not true love / Which alters when it alteration finds"). I'm going to try to track down the local company that does Shakespeare in the Park, and see what they have playing this summer.
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