A Midsummer Night's Dream

When we were preparing for our English literature O level all those years ago, the teacher announced in one lesson that we had been reading the wrong syllabus. I imagine there would be an outcry today, but back then no-one seemed to care in the slightest about all the time we had wasted.

Anyway, that was the lesson in which "A Midsummer Night's Dream" was yanked out of my life and replaced by "Julius Caesar".

In Our Time was about AMND this week so I listened with attention as we are going to see it in August. This morning I also took advantage of the Bank Holiday to watch the 1999 film. I could have done without the bicycles in that but at at least I won't be under-prepared when we attend the live performance at Merton Hall Park and will still be able to bore everyone to death as usual a la Reg Smeeton "drawing from my vast, though admittedly unresolved catalogue of general know-it-all, facts of interest etc."

LINKS AND FURTHER READING

Helen Hackett at University College London

Tom Healy at the University of Sussex

Alison Findlay at Lancaster University

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Wikipedia

READING LIST:

Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford University Press, 1993)

Dympna Callaghan (ed.),  A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Blackwell, 2016), especially ‘The Great Indian Vanishing Trick: Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ by Ania Loomba

Richard Dutton (ed.), A Midsummer Night's Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays (Palgrave, 1996)

Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: Vol. III: The Comedies (Blackwell, 2003), especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Helen Hackett

Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (University of Chicago Press, 1986), especially ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form’ by Louis Adrian Montrose

Helen Hackett, Writers and Their Work: ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ (British Council/Northcote House, 1997)

Helen Hackett, Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths(Oxford University Press, 2009)

Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O’Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night (Routledge, 2008), especially ‘Dream-Visions of Elizabeth I’ by Helen Hackett

Jan Kott (trans. Daniela Miedzyrecka and Lillian Vallee), The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Cultural Tradition(Northwestern University Press, 1987)

Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Blackwell, 1989)

William Shakespeare (ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Arden Shakespeare (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017)

William Shakespeare (ed. Peter Holland), A Midsummer Night’s Dream(Oxford University Press, 1994)

William Shakespeare (ed. Stanley Wells), A Midsummer Night’s Dream(Penguin, 2005)

Gary Jay Williams, Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre (University of Iowa Press, 1997)

Susan Wiseman, Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1500-1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)