Midsummer Night's Dream

Reprint of 1895 edition

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps Shakespeare's most popular play, particularly as a first introduction to Shakespeare for children--filled as it is with a marvelous mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies. For this edition, Peter Holland's introduction looks at dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows.

This vibrant new anthology brings readers closer than ever before possible to the plays of Shakespeare as they were first acted, inviting readers to rediscover the bard and to rediscover his plays as scripts to be performed--not as works to be immortalized. Illustrations. Woodcuts. Slipcase.

Explores William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream through the lens of sexuality. Coverage includes an examination of Shakespeare's life and influences; a look at key ideas related to sexuality in Midsummer.

Collection of essays by Shakespeare scholars that have been selected for students at the high school or undergraduate college level. Each entry includes an introduction; a plot synopsis; a character list; a discussion of the work's principal themes; information about the style and literary devices used; a conversation about the work's historical context; and a critical overview.

Provides in-depth commentary on characters, themes, and the historical and social context of 300 most-studied literary works, including novels, plays, poems, speeches, and short stories, both international and American.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most widely studied comedies. This guide offers students an introduction to its critical and performance history, including notable stage productions, TV, and film versions as well as opera and ballet. It includes a keynote chapter outlining major areas of current research on the play and four new critical essays. Finally, a guide to critical, web-based and production-related resources and an annotated bibliography provide a basis for further individual research.

Written from the premise that to know Shakespeare's world is to better understand his work, this book presents the playwright's life in its proper Elizabethan and Jacobean context. Readers should find the text comprehensive in its treatment of Shakespeare's home and family, his education, London and the theatre as it was in his day, and the political, social, cultural and literary influences exerted by Elizabeth I and James I.

Covering 400 years of Shakespeare scholarship, Schoenbaum's now classic William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life received high acclaim from critics and scholars.

The product of exhaustive research by an Oxford scholar, this masterly study (The New Yorker) combines historical fact with a practical discussion of Shakespeare's plays, poems, and sonnets, interwoven with relevant moments from his life and age to create an accessible chronicle and an engaging read.

A polemical attack on the ways recent Shakespeare biographers have disguised their lack of information. How can biographies of Shakespeare continue to appear when so little is known about him? And when what is known has been in the public domain for so long? In the past decade, the majority of these biographies have been published by distinguished Shakespeareans - shouldn't they know better? To solve this puzzle, David Ellis looks at the methods that Shakespeare's biographers have used to hide their lack of knowledge. At the same time, by exploring efforts to write a life of Shakespeare along traditional lines, it asks what kind of animal 'biography' really is and how it should bewritten.