A Midsummer Night's Dream (Folger Shakespeare Library)
Category: Books,Literature & Fiction,Dramas & Plays
A Midsummer Night's Dream (Folger Shakespeare Library) Details
About the Author William Shakespeare was born in April 1564 in the town of Stratford-upon-Avon, on England’s Avon River. When he was eighteen, he married Anne Hathaway. The couple had three children—an older daughter Susanna and twins, Judith and Hamnet. Hamnet, Shakespeare’s only son, died in childhood. The bulk of Shakespeare’s working life was spent in the theater world of London, where he established himself professionally by the early 1590s. He enjoyed success not only as a playwright and poet, but also as an actor and shareholder in an acting company. Although some think that sometime between 1610 and 1613 Shakespeare retired from the theater and returned home to Stratford, where he died in 1616, others believe that he may have continued to work in London until close to his death.Barbara A. Mowat is Director of Research emerita at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Consulting Editor of Shakespeare Quarterly, and author of The Dramaturgy of Shakespeare’s Romances and of essays on Shakespeare’s plays and their editing.Paul Werstine is Professor of English at the Graduate School and at King’s University College at Western University. He is a general editor of the New Variorum Shakespeare and author of Early Modern Playhouse Manuscripts and the Editing of Shakespeare and of many papers and articles on the printing and editing of Shakespeare’s plays. Read more
Reviews
So far, in the last year and a half, I have read 15 of the Arden Shakespeare Collection and 'A Midsummer's Night's Dream' has the worst introduction of them all. The writer spends so much time with the history of the play's productions that the work itself suffers. In an introduction the work is the key, not its history. Analysis of plot, character development, metaphysics, key phrases, the characters' relationships to one another and to the text, motives, etc, are crucial, for me, before I read the play. I have nor seen that many of Shakespeare's plays, but I find reading them rewarding and exciting. But first, before I get started reading the text, I need a warm-up that smoothes me into the play. The writer of this intro, Chaudhuri, holds the key components of Dream at a distance, while going on and on about where it was produced, who produced it, the actors who played certain characters, its translation into movies, TV, opera, while staying completely away from the text. I want to know about the characters in the play and their interrelationships with one another, an analysis of crucial scenes and how they move the plot forward, how key phrases reveal the inner depths of the characters' motives; in short, a body of knowledge that helps me along as I read the play. Its production history should be in the last few pages of the introduction, not take up more than half of it. I have gone ahead with the reading of Dream without the aid of a good intro and it is moving along nicely but an in-depth intro would have been so helpful.
