A Midsummer Night's Dream

From the Royal Shakespeare Company - a fresh new edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy. This book includes: * An introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream by award-winning scholar Jonathan Bate * The play - with clear explanatory notes on each page * A scene-by-scene analysis * An introduction to Shakespeare's career and the Elizabethan theatre * A rich exploration of approaches to staging the play The most enjoyable way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or participate in it.

This book presents a historical overview of A Midsummer Night's Dream in performance, recommends film versions, takes a detailed look at specific productions and includes interviews with three leading Directors - Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran and Tim Supple - so that we may get a sense of the extraordinary variety of interpretations that are possible - a variety that gives Shakespeare his unique capacity to be reinvented and made 'our contemporary' four centuries after his death. www.rscshakespeare.co.uk

Review:

'Jonathan Bate writes with as much elegance as insight about the making of theatre and the creation of the plays.' -Richard Eyre, The Sunday Telegraph 'Footnotes at the bottom of each page gloss unfamiliar vocabulary, paraphrase tricky meanings and uncover bawdy puns.

There is a universe to be found in these annotations: the Renaissance world of power and fate, sex and death, language and philosophy.' - Times Educational Supplement