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A major new edition of Shakespeare´s much studied and performed comedy by leading scholar Sukanta Chaudhuri.

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The Arden Shakespeare is the established edition of Shakespeare´s work. Justly celebrated for its authoritative scholarship and invaluable commentary, Arden editions guide you to a richer understanding and appreciation of Shakespeare´s plays. This edition of A Midsummer Night´s Dream provides a clear and authoritative text, detailed notes and commentary on the same page as the text and a full introduction discussing the critical and historical background to the play. The editor brings fresh perspectives on global productions and adaptations of this most-loved of Shakespeare´s comedies.

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List of Illustrations
General editors´ Preface
Preface
INTRODUCTION
STAGE, SCREEN, ART
The play in its time: staging and casting
British productions: Restoration to nineteenth century
British productions: the twentieth century and after
Europe
Beyond Europe
Other media: cinema, music, art
SOURCES AND ANALOGUES: FAIRIES AND MORTALS
Fairies and fairy lore
Ovid: the classics and the fairies
Pyramus and Thisbe
Theseus and Hippolyta: Plutarch, Chaucer and Shakespeare

THEMES AND DESIGNS
Pastoral: the forest
Dreamers and Lovers
Patriarchy
Carnival, class, court
Theatre, art and illusion
The comedy of compromise
LANGUAGE AND VERSE
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT´S DREAMAppendix 1: Casting Chart
Appendix 2:Date and Occasion
Appendix 3: The Text
Abbreviations and References
Index

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Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His publications include Infirm Glory: Shakespeare and the renaissance Image of Man (Oxford, 1981), Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford, 1989) and The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge, 2010). He has edited the two-volume Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance (Manchester, 2016) besides other early modern texts and collections of essays. He was chief co-ordinator of Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore, and has translated widely from Bengali to English.

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