A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Why it’s on the list: Shakespeare’s comedy of four young Athenians, a company of amateur workmen and a quarrelling fairy king and queen, tangled together for one night in a wood by a misapplied love potion. The plot is farce a child can follow, the language is among the most purely pleasurable he wrote, and the play within the play teaches how theatre works while being funny about it.

Where I heard about it

• Founders Classical Academy — on the fifth-grade reading list at this classical school in Lewisville, Texas, the first Shakespeare in its sequence, posted by the Classic Learning Test (September 2026) as an example of what a classical curriculum assigns. Full eight-year sequence: Founders Classical Academy Reading List.

Connections

• Founders Classical Academy Reading List — the curriculum this came from; 56 unique titles across 5th through 12th grade.
• Classical Education — the movement whose canon this list is.
• William Shakespeare
• Literature