RSC Shakespeare / A Midsummer Night's Dream

Introduction to the Play.- Magical thinking.- Metamorphosis.- The Festive World.- 'The poet's eye ... the poet's pen'.- Introduction to the Text.- Key Facts.- A Midsummer Night's Dream.- Textual Notes.- Scene-by-Scene Analysis.- A Midsummer Night's Dream in Performance: The RSC and Beyond.- Four Centuries of the Dream: An Overview.- At the Royal Shakespeare Company.- The Director's Cut: Interviews with Michael Boyd, Gregory Doran, Tim Supple.- Shakespeare's Career in the Theatre.- Shakespeare's Works: A Chronology.- Further Reading and Viewing.- Acknowledgements and Picture Credits.

SIR 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.

'Jonathan Bate writes with as much elegance as insight about the making of theatre and the creation of the plays.'- Richard Eyre, <EM>The Sunday Telegraph</EM> '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.'  - <EM>Times Educational Supplement</EM>