A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Oxford Shakespeare: The Oxford Shakespearea Midsummer Night's Dream (Oxford World's Classics)

Shakespeare, William

ISBN 10: 0199535868 ISBN 13: 9780199535866

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2008

Synopsis

A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best loved of Shakepeare's plays. It brings together aristocrats, workers, and fairies in a wood outside Athens, and from there the enchantment begins.

Simple and engaging on the surface, it is none the less a highly original and sophisticated work, remarkable for both its literary and its theatrical mastery. It is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays which do not draw on narrative sources, which suggests that it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns to an unusual degree.

In his introduction Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, and to Shakespeare's construction of a world of night and shadows. Both here and in his commentary he explores the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.
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About this title

Product Description:

Midsummer Night's Dream: The Oxford Shakespeare

Review:

Traditionally seen as one of Shakespeare's more romantic and enchanting plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream has more recently been seen as a darker and more sinister play than generations of schoolchildren have ever imagined. The play has usually been seen as a comical tale with confused identities and the fickleness of youthful love, as the young lovers, Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena escape parental control and the "sharp Athenian law" of their elders by eloping into the forest outside the city. Unfortunately they stumble into civil war in fairyland, where King Oberon and Queen Titania fight over possession of a beautiful young Indian "changeling" boy. The appearance of the "rude mechanicals", a group of Athenian workers, including the weaver Nick Bottom, compounds the confusion. Chaos, confusion and "shaping fantasies" reign before the final settlement of the play, but underneath all the hilarity many critics have discerned more ambivalent attitudes towards coercive parental control, bestial sexuality and the destructive power of desire. These approaches in no way detract from the exquisite lyricism of many sections of the play, but make it a more complex and effective comedy than has often been appreciated. --Jerry Brotton

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0199535868
• ISBN 13: 9780199535866
• Binding: Pocket Book
• Number of pages: 288
• Editor: Holland Peter