This lively and informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips
you with the critical skills to analyse its language, structure and
themes and to expand and enrich your own response to the play. A
Midsummer Night's Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare's
diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal
iambics and rhyming couplets of courtiers and lovers, and 'warbling'
notes' and nursery rhythms of fairies, to stocky prose by the artisan
players including Bottom's comic malapropisms.
An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and
addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer
Night's Dream, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical
conventions at his disposal. It then moves to a detailed examination and
analysis of the play, focusing on its literary, technical and historical
intricacies; an account of the play's performance history and its
critical reception completes the volume. Each chapter offers a 'Writing
matters' section, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language
to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations