Midsummer Night's Dream

Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus at Jadavpur University, Kolkata. His publications include Infirm Glory: Shakespeare and the renaissance Image of Man (Oxford, 1981), Renaissance Pastoral and Its English Developments (Oxford, 1989) and The Metaphysics of Text (Cambridge, 2010). He has edited the two-volume Pastoral Poetry of the English Renaissance (Manchester, 2016) besides other early modern texts and collections of essays. He was chief co-ordinator of Bichitra, the online variorum of the works of Rabindranath Tagore, and has translated widely from Bengali to English.

• List of IllustrationsGeneral editors’ PrefacePrefaceINTRODUCTIONSTAGE, SCREEN, ARTThe play in its time: staging and castingBritish productions: Restoration to nineteenth centuryBritish productions: the twentieth century and afterEuropeBeyond EuropeOther media: cinema, music, artSOURCES AND ANALOGUES: FAIRIES AND MORTALSFairies and fairy lore Ovid: the classics and the fairiesPyramus and ThisbeTheseus and Hippolyta: Plutarch, Chaucer and ShakespeareTHEMES AND DESIGNSPastoral: the forestDreamers and LoversPatriarchyCarnival, class, courtTheatre, art and illusionThe comedy of compromiseLANGUAGE AND VERSE A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAMAppendix 1: Casting ChartAppendix 2:Date and OccasionAppendix 3: The TextAbbreviations and ReferencesIndex