A Midsummer Night's Cream - Shakespeare Month the Sixth (NSFW) 

The boy who played Puck at my high school was a cute Iranian boy I had a crush on. I've had a crush on Puck ever since by association.

"I demand better porn." We have it. It's called fan fiction.

am i the only one who thinks its funny that bottom's on top😂

Out of all the Shakespeare reviews in this first month, this is easily the most gloriously funny of them all.

I played Bottom in a production of Midsummer Night's Dream once. I gave good ass.

As an asexual who is prone to making dirty jokes (and a great interest in folklore), Midsummer Night's Dream is basically what I would be if I were a play

4:45-5:43 You read that poem so beautifully! I could feel the magic, and your love for the words shining through.

"Given their name to two of Ur-anus's moons." Then transfer into talking about this version. I see what you did there.

Men playing lesbians having sex? That's an… interesting idea.

Actually, the original play is totally open to the interpretation that Titania and Bottom do have sex. It doesn't say they do; it doesn't say they don't. In Michael Hoffman's 1999 movie, they do, and it totally works, and contradicts nothing in the text. But, if you argue that the original play is defined by how it was originally staged... I suppose it's safe to say that they didn't. But then, neither did R&J.

My favorite Shakespeare play of all time. Interesting adaptation.

7:55 Omg! Seriously?! Hermia made a specific point that she and Lysander shouldn't do it before the wedding, and Lysander actually respected her wishes in the play!

-YO, PUCK! -Yup? -YOU KNOW THAT FLOWER? -Yup. -GET IT! -'Kay. -*POETRY!!!*

Imagine what a Mel Brooks version of this play would be like.

"Weapons Grade Erection Killer." I'm using this all the time now.

Is pornography inherently un-intelectual, or is the genre simply infected by bad artistry? Is it really that you can't have character drama and tradgedy/comedy in a pornographic work, or that everyone is just too f*cking lazy to try? The genre is dominated by tropes and effects that that I can't stand, but I've seen more experimental pieces (mostly in comic form) tie in actual storytelling and *ehem* pleasure in a way that's actually extremely satisfying and doesn't leave as much of a guilty residue as this sort of muck.

MND is the first Shakespeare play I saw live, and I still think that is the best way to see it. There are a lot of opportunities to interact with the audience, and when the actors are really cooking, it's the funniest thing you've ever seen.

With Oberon and Titania having given their names to moons of the planet Uranus, keeping in mind that one of the play’s characters is called Bottom, we should have seen this coming.

I told myself this couldn't possibly be what I thought it was. It is.

I like that Buttwoman was a visited page on your imdb. ;)

With regards too "porn with plot"...you should look at The Devil In Miss Jones. Seriously, the first and last scenes wouldn't look out of place in an "actual" movie (The movie seriously starts out with the protagonist killing herself) and the soundtrack is literally the only porn soundtrack I would ever think of owning.

Fuck yeah Nina Hartley shoutout

I'm still waiting for "A Midsummer Night's Rave."

You know when I saw a Midsummer nights dream I was about 12 as well my school took a field trip to the Shakespeare tavern in downtown Atlanta and I have to say it was an awesome show, my first Shakespearean play and I'll never forget it.

The funny thing is that the thing about the flower (i am such a great linguist) could be taken as very sexual if viewed by some people, namely the people that are gonna be watching a porno. Why was it cut again?

This is probably my fanfic reader mind speaking, but instead of doing a porn version of the play do a missing scene or pwp.This is why I like fanfic.Even in the worst you twist and play with the orginial work not bastardise it.

It should have been Bottom that was the namesake of Uranus' moon

Given that it is loosely based on A Midsummer Night's Dream, I would be interested in Kyle's opinion of Strange Magic, although I happen to have a much, much higher opinion of that film than pretty much anyone else.

i come back to this and i did not expect to be got by a reference to the canterbury tales of all things

Actually it’s more likely that the four fairies who attend on Bottom were played, not by young boys, but by the same full-grown actors who play Snug, Snout, Flute and Starveling, and that the First Fairy who delivers the “Over Hill, over dale” speech is the same actor who plays Egeus. Most of Shakespeare’s plays were designed for a cast of eleven men, three boys, and three musicians who also occasionally had lines or played extras in crowd scenes. If you break down the cast for doublings you find Theseus/Oberon, Hippolyta/Titania, Philostrate/Puck, as well as those I indicated above. Fairies were not lithe young creatures; they were powerful shape shifters and agents of chaos, literal forces of nature. The first fairy is not some hot young girl flirting with Puck but a dignified gentleman genuinely annoyed with Puck. The text fully supports this. It was in the 19th century that the idea of fairies as sexualized young girls with wings was invented (e.g. Tinkerbell) which, unfortunately, is when Mendelssohn wrote his incidental music for the play, and with its high violins and children’s chorus it has cemented the idea of little teeny harmless fairies. I love that music but it has kind of ruined the play. As for porn, I could imagine a version of Troilus and Cressida that would involve a lot of writhing bodies, depicting the corruption and depravity of the way sex is used as currency in wartime, and seeing Antony and Cleopatra going at it would do no harm to that play and maybe even raise the emotional stakes. But not Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a rather chaste affair; sex may be on everyone’s mind in the play, but the whole point is that they’re NOT doing it, and it’s that unfulfilled desire that fuels the play’s energy. By the way, I went to high school with Nina Hartley (I knew her as Mitzi.) I can attest that she legitimately knows her Shakespeare and could probably play a decent Titania in a non-porn production. But I haven’t seen this film and don’t feel I need to after your thoughtful review. I played Bottom in a 7th grade English class production and have always loved this play. It’s the one Shakespeare comedy that is still laugh out loud funny after four centuries, and should be counted among his very greatest plays.

I've been ruined by life... Beautiful literature being red to me and "fiery shaft" has me gigglig

I am sorry to nitpick but Gargoyles was originally a week day afternoon show after school.

One funny thing in retrospect which I think Kyle was unaware of is that there *is* a genuinely good quasi-pornographic parody of this very play: The late great postmodernist fantasist Angela Carter's short story "Overture and Incidental Music for A Midsummer Night's Dream". It is mainly a comedy, and a rather sardonic one at that, but it has at least one wildly perverse scene in its brief duration. Worth a read if you're bored and by no means prudish. (I'd also love if he'd one day cover The Company of Wolves, an adaptation of several of her deconstructed fairy tales with Neil Jordan directing which I think is her only screenwriting credit, but I digress.)

There's a porn version of Curb your Enthusiasm ?Why the fuck would you make that ? I'm not a bloke so I'm not an expert on what they find attractive. But I know Larry David ain't it.Apart from that weird thought this review is glorious. My favourite part has to be the part where the text was read. Not exctly a commentary on the porn but a wordgasam all the same.

A Midsummer Night's Dream was the first Shakespeare experience I ever had as well. And I got to play Bottom a couple of times (I love love LOVE the play within a play at the end, as long as the cast is game and the director can rein them in from excess.) That said, I can't help but be curious about This Ain't Curb Your Enthusiasm XXX. I mean, how did they pull that one off? (Other than with great self-loathing.)

5:50 Seriously, why _not_ have beautiful recitations of some of the actual poetry of this play in between.... frick, DURING, the sexing? Most of the imagery is already sexual anyway, embrace and use that!

Why? Why this? With so many adaptations, you chose this!

Up and down is a song from the play. "Up and down I will lead them up and down I am feared in field and town Goblin lead them up and down

um, actually, Gargoyles was Disney Afternoon tyvm lol XD

"Why this one?" Because Titus Andronicus would be HORRIFYING!

"Bottom" didn't refer to the human hindquarters in Shakespeare's time. So says Garber's "Shakespeare After All."

You thought the first line was a dick joke? I always interpreted it more as him saying that he just wants to lye with Hippolyta now and not wait for the marriage. He's talking about how the moon (time and fertility) lingers and he is impatient in waiting for his...hoopla!

It feels kind of mean to make fun of the actor's or for the team to dare to , "think its movies" like come on man these people clearly started as creatives and to want to bother with a shakespearean porn you must have some admiration for the artistic merit. Sad to make fun of them, I think they're doing the best they can?

you know, I'd love to direct a well written porn one day (says the non-director with no experience and no training (but like, image how good a well made porn could be! There's so much unttaped potential!))

Is that a copy of Kevin Murphy's 'A Year at the Movies' on your shelf? Great book, hard to find, and an amazing showcase of classic MN movie theaters

I played theses in my local production of the play

Funny you mention better porn, the RU-vid channel School of Life has a video on that very idea. Anyway, possibly my favorite erotic fiction of all time is a Literary Fanfiction called "Twilight's Treatment". One of the reasons I love it so much is while it does have its fair share of gratuitous sex scenes (which are not even remotely hard to find in any given fandom, so much so it'd be generous to call them a dime a dozen), unlike most other erotic fanfictions- each sexual interaction serves a narrative purpose; all of them advance the story and/or character arcs. It comes in 2 volumes, the first one being more about a young adult woman who's grown up fairly sexually repressed, but that has been a relative non-issue until now that an external stimuli is bringing all that to the surface in a way that's fairly socially unhealthy with her teenage... sidekick/Butler? Honorary little brother? Surrogate son? The exact nature of their relationship is never really made clear in the source material. Anyway, the title comes from her treatment of the external stimuli. The 2nd volume is more about the... let's call him the teenage surrogate little brother, AKA the external stimuli, the older sister now downgraded to a side plot. Anyway, he's always prided himself as a gentleman (for which all the women in his life really respected him), but now that he's going through puberty (he's not a human, he's like... a dragonic human)- he's kind of... losing his humanity; he desperately tries to hold onto it while it inevitably kind of slips through his fingers anyway and it's complicating his relationships with all the women in his life. And it is damn good. I normally hate reading really long stories, and yet I blew through 180,000+ words easily for this one. The story wouldn't work if it was just a parade of plotless sex scenes like most porn and erotic fanfiction is (or at least no more so than any other erotic fanfiction), that would take away the thing that sets it apart and makes it good; the author is acutely aware of that and even made a joke chapter for April Fool's day that legitimately was just plotless sex scenes blind to character chemistry. Porn is usually terrible because the sex scenes almost never have a point (and go on way too long, have sub-par sound-mixing, and somehow fails at doing the primary thing it sets out to do: be enticing). There's no ART to it, porn is to sensual sexuality as pounding your fists on a keyboard is to music.

I love all of these shakespeare videos and have watched them many times, but...it always makes me a little sad to watch this, see the cover for 'Lords and Ladies' and then hear 'sci-fi'. Discworld is many things, but hardly sci-fi. I know it's nitpicky, but it's just how it makes me feel.

Maybe the reason for linking despair with the KFC Bowl was Patton Oswalt's bit about them?

I do find it interesting that you refer to masturbation that it is a lonely and regretful act. I have concern that you ain't going into it with a great outlook...

Which movie clip has been shown when kyle says reworking the text?

You should really read Plötzlich Shakespeare, it's really funny!

They certainly got Helena's thirstiness though.

I really DO NOT get the point of reviewing a porno, ANY porno. Of course they're not going to put any thought into the writing or delivery, what were you expecting?

Its porn ...what exactly did you expect?

I kinda get the dick in "long withering" from the opening line, but the rest? Can anyone explain the joke, cause I really don't get it even after Kyle's explanation. I'll blame it on the fact that English is only my second language :-P...

Man, I want to see the Muppets do this.

I really don't get why would you give this attention by reviewing it.

2:35 7:03 May I ask HOW you know this stuff about her?

I am gonna be honest that 'joke' about how pointless the pretty wording is and looking at how long Kyle goes on doing reading it and how quick it was i nthe porno for the same effect. yeah i'm sorry i am siding with the porno that shit is just wasted time. it's just purple prose but was popular then so we make excuses not to call the spade a spade

Hang on you didn't see Shakespeare until you were 11?

So Brad was right

Shakespeare put adult jokes in his plays? This is the guy who wrote The Scottish Play not Family Guy!