A Midsummer Night's Dream (Signet Classic Shakespeare) - Softcover

William Shakespeare

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0451526961 ISBN 13: 9780451526960

Publisher: Signet Classics, 1999

Synopsis

An exciting new edition of the complete works of Shakespeare with these features: Illustrated with photographs from New York Shakespeare Festival productions, vivid readable readable introductions for each play by noted scholar David Bevington, a lively personal foreword by Joseph Papp, an insightful essay on the play in performance, modern spelling and pronunciation, up-to-date annotated bibliographies, and convenient listing of key passages.

About this title

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

Review

Praise for "William Shakespeare: Complete Works: " A feast of literary and historical information. "-The Wall Street Journal""

Praise for William Shakespeare: Complete Works: "A feast of literary and historical information." -The Wall Street Journal

Edition details

• Publisher: Signet Classics
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0451526961
• ISBN 13: 9780451526960
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 240