| Reviews |
| - '...he writes absorbingly about fairy lore, the dance-like interchangeability of love-partners, the play's intense self-reflexiveness, and its teasingly simple yet maddeningly reverbative structure.' - English Studies Offprint from Volume 77 Number 1, January 1996
- '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
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| Description | A Midsummer Night's Dream
is perhaps the best-loved of Shakespeare's plays, and certainly the one that children are likely to encounter first; its mixture of aristocrats, workers, and fairies meeting in a wood outside Athens has a magic of its own. Simple and engaging on the surface, it is nonetheless 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, defining the play in both the literary and theatrical traditions to which it belongs, Peter Holland pays particular attention to dreams and dreamers, tracing the materials out of
which Shakespeare constructs his world of night and shadows in the strange but enchanting amalgam he makes of them. Both here and in the detailed commentary he draws freely upon the play's extensive performance history to illustrate the wide range of interpretations of which it is capable.
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Readership: Students and scholars of Shakespeare from A-level upwards; Shakespeare enthusiasts, actors, and theatregoers.
| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
William Shakespeare
Edited by Peter Holland, Judith E. Wilson University Lecturer in Drama, Faculty of English, Cambridge University
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