'A Midsummer Night's Dream' is perhaps Shakespeare's most popular comedy, & also a profound, archetypal play. In this new edition, the editor takes account of the number of important professional theatre productions & the large output of scholarly criticism on the plays which have appeared in recent years.

Shakespeare Survey is a yearbook of Shakespeare studies and production. Since 1948, the Survey has published the best international scholarship in English and many of its essays have become classics of Shakespeare criticism. Each volume is devoted to a theme, or play, or group of plays; each also contains a section of reviews of that year's textual and critical studies and of the year's major British performances. The theme for Volume 65 is 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. The complete set of Survey volumes is also available online at http://www.cambridge.org/online/shakespearesurvey. This fully searchable resource enables users to browse by author, essay and volume, search by play, theme and topic and save and bookmark their results.

"As the poetics is based on the texts (not derived by deduction or theoretical extension from some principle of poetics), so it is applied as a tool of analysis to the texts and used in conjunction with evaluation. The underlying assumption is that the task of poetics is instrumental, and that its usefulness has to be demonstrated and verified in practice. Hence, the division of the book into two parts. As Part I formulates a poetics on the basis of the texts, so Part II applies the poetics to the major texts - always within the dynamics of the multiple-plot and multi-layered perspective on a play. Part II focuses in detail on The Merry Wives of Windsor, The Merchant of Venice, and Twelfth Night, analyzing the agons and placing them in relation to the comedy of love and the perspective of folly."--Jacket.

For students of English and European literature, renaissance studies, comparative literature, drama and classics.