A Midsummer Night’s Dream: The State of Play

This volume offers new critical and performance approaches to Shakespeare’s most well-known comedy of desire, a play that speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most resilient plays. Although often dismissed as light comedy suitable for young readers, the play is now taken seriously, transformed through readings from queer, feminist, post-colonialist, race and ecocritical perspectives, as well as in its global performances and adaptations.

Suitable for a wide range of readers, this collection includes approaches to the play covering textual studies, literary analysis, performance studies, adaptation studies and pedagogy. While differing in methodology, the chapters all point to the inherent instability or openness of this play and its themes of shifting identity and boundary crossings, bridging nature and culture, the material and ‘airy nothing’, mortal and fairy. They make it amply clear that this play speaks to people around the world today, emphasising its wide global reception and adaptability in both theatre and film.

The variety of topics covered includes, among many others: the intersection of race, slavery and ecology in the play; queer adaptations of the play on stage and screen; an exploration of a Korean adaptation that takes on the patriarchal foundations of the play’s romantic arc; an analysis of student adaptations in India that engage with the question of what can and cannot be performed; and an account of teaching the play in Kuwait and China, where students’ responses reflected differing cultural contexts.

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