Because Shakespeare wrote his plays to be performed by his own acting company and probably did not prepare them for publication, stage directions in some of the first printed texts are sparse. In your texts, stage directions or indications of location which are printed within square brackets have been supplied by the editor, not the author. Some of these are unnecessary: when we need to know where we are or what's happening, Shakespeare's dialogue tends to tell us. Try to become aware of implicit directions in the dialogue; for instance, when Oberon greets Titania, "Ill-met by moonlight, proud Titania" Shakespeare's audience, sitting or standing in an open-air day-lit theater, knows that it's nighttime on stage.
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