A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Oxford Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
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$17.95 AUD
- ISBN:
- 9780199535866
- Published:
- 1 May 2008
- Availability:
- 0
- Series:
- Oxford World's Classics
A Midsummer Night's Dream is perhaps the best-loved of Shakespeare's plays. 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. The fact that it is one of the very few of Shakespeare's plays not to draw on a narrative source suggests the degree to which it reflects his deepest imaginative concerns. In his introduction to this new edition, Peter Holland traces the material out of which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows, and the strange but enchanting amalgam he makes of them.
PREFACE
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
INTRODUCTION
Dreams
Dreams and Dreaming
Renaissance Dreams
Dramatic Dreams
Fairies
Robin
Theseus and Hippolyta
The Lovers
Bottom
'Pyramus and Thisbe'
Shapes
Date
The Text
EDITORIAL PROCEDURES
ABBREVIATIONS AND REFERENCES
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
APPENDIX: SHAKESPEARE'S REVISIONS OF ACT 5
INDEX
William Shakespeare
Peter Holland is Wilson University Lecturer in Drama at the Faculty of English, Cambridge University. He is also a drama reviewer for BBC radio and the TLS, a Syndic of Cambridge University Press, and a Governor of the Royal Shakespeare Company; he has published widely on theatre generally and Shakespeare in particular
`The commentary is admirably lucid and undogmatic on textual variants ... The introduction is of the kind that ponders and explores. Holland's method is to take each aspect or element of the play and consider it in the light of earlier traditions ... his critical position emerges unobtrusively but persuasively from the attested facts.' M.M. Mahoud, YES, 27, 1996