Product Description

The Arden Shakespeare is the established edition of Shakespeare's work. Justly celebrated for its authoritative scholarship and invaluable commentary, Arden guides you a richer understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare's plays.This edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream provides, a clear and authoritative text, detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text, a full introduction discussing the critical and historical background to the play and appendices presenting sources and relevant extracts.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #34891 in Books
• Published on: 1979-09-06
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

Customer Reviews

Terrific edition of a perfect play
There's nothing that you can write about "A Midsummer Night's Dream" that could hope to convey the glory, the comedy and the intelligence of the play.
What you can hope to convey in this kind of a review is that this edition is the only one worth buying for serious study, with an excellent introduction.

Arden Shakespeare
In some respects I think it'd be rather presumptuous of me to attempt to review Shakespeare. Someone so well known and influential wouldn't benefit from my opinions on their work, plus there are more scholarly and concise reviews out there. But I can comment on these Arden versions. Of all the Shakespeare I've read I've always found the Arden copies to be well laid out and to have excellent commentary and notes on the text. They really add to your understanding of Shakespeares outstanding plays and introduce you to the depth in his work. They have superb paper quality and are bound well, withstanding repeated readings and intensive study. For your collection of Shakespeare you can't do much better than Arden publications, some are quite hard to get hold of but it's worth the effort.

don't use as a script!
the notes are fairly good. none of the character names are written in full at the side (as a space saver, but it just annoys me). cannot be used easily as a script because of the notes. the notes seem to overpower the script. i think i would have been better off spending two pounds on another good qaulity copy of it, and then another couple of pounds on york notes. it's a shame, because i found that the edition of othello was much better, so i treated myself to midsummer too.