O: OBERON

In school, a lucky few of us were taken to a then modern adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." Hitherto my experience of Shakespeare was rather bleak. My grandfather insisted it was magical. I found it boring and full of complicated English made worse by the love sonnets that everyone kept harping on and which, we, occasionally had to mug up at school. Tedious, to say the least.
I went for the play expecting to be bored out of my wits. So what a pleasant surprise it was to have black leotard clad actors stage a modern, lively, musical! I do not remember which troupe it was, or where they were from (Britain, most likely!) but that night I went home in love with Oberon and Puck having discovered a whole new world. And yes, my grandfather was partly right. A lot of Shakespeare is indeed magical!

“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,
That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.” 
― William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream