From the Royal Shakespeare Company – a fresh new edition of Shakespeare's most loved comedy
This Edition Includes :
- An illuminating introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream by award-winning scholar Jonathan Bate
- The play - with clear and authoritative explanatory notes on each page
- A helpful scene-by-scene analysis and key facts about the play
- An introduction to Shakespeare's career and the Elizabethan theatre
- A rich exploration of approaches to staging the play featuring photographs of key productions
The most enjoyable way to understand a Shakespeare play is to see it or participate in it. This unique edition 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.
Ideal for students, theatre-goers, actors and general readers, the RSC Shakespeare plays offer an accessible and contemporary approach to reading and rediscovering Shakespeare's works for the twenty-first century.
About the Author William Shakespeare (1564-1616) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon where his father was a prosperous glover. His early life is obscure, but he married Anne Hathaway in 1682 with whom he had two children. By 1592 he was establishing himself in London, and over the next twenty years he wrote thirty-seven plays-and contributed to many more-was a prolific poet, and was taken up by several influential patrons. His Sonnets were first printed in 1609 by George Eld for Thomas Thorpe. The identity of Mr. W.H. to whom the Sonnets are dedicated remains a mystery, as does the identity of the aristocratic youth in the Sonnets and the enigmatic Dark Lady.
About the Editors Jonathan Bate is Professor of Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature, University of Warwick, UK, and the editor of The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. He has held visiting posts at Harvard, Yale and UCLA and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a Fellow of the British Academy, an Honorary Fellow of St Catherine's College, Cambridge, and a Governor and Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. A prominent critic, award-winning biographer and broadcaster, he is the author of several books on Shakespeare, including The Genius of Shakespeare (Picador), which was praised by Sir Peter Hall, founder of the RSC, as 'the best modern book on Shakespeare.' In June 2006 he was awarded a CBE by HM The Queen 'for services to Higher Education'.
Eric Rasmussen is Professor of English at the University of Nevada, USA, and the Textual Editor of The RSC Shakespeare: The Complete Works. He is co-editor of the Norton Anthology of English Renaissance Drama and has edited volumes in both the Arden Shakespeare and Oxford World's Classics series. He is the General Textual Editor of the Internet Shakespeare Editions project - one of the most visited Shakespeare websites in the world. For over nine years he has written the annual review of editions and textual studies for the Shakespeare Survey.
Industry Reviews
Of late many classic titles - including the Bible - have been turned into manga, in a 21st-century version of the venerable Classics Illustrated comics. This take on the Bard boils his play down to approximately 20 words per page, drastically abridging the text, though keeping intact the original language and meter. A fully colored dramatis personae reduces the characters to sound bites and shines in comparison to the flat, gray-toned images that murkily tell the story itself. As drawn by Brown, the characters are decidedly more Western-looking in their styling than is typical to most manga, and the adaptor's choice of setting is an anachronistic mishmash of quasi-antique and modern, a choice that will leave sophisticated readers knowledgeable with the text slightly puzzled. The Tempest (ISBN: 978-0-8109-9476-8), drawn by Paul Duffield, follows an identical template. These attempts to convert Shakespeare into visual language fall flat, although the slick manga styling alone may attract some new readers to these works. (plot summary, author's biography) (Graphic fiction. 13 & up) (Kirkus Reviews)
