Six years back I started reading Shakespeare again, as my children were being introduced to it in High school. Then four years ago my son who is now 18 found he had a love for the Bard and for his plays, much as I did at that age. We had been sticking to the
Oxford School Shakespeare editions as those were the versions they were reading in school, but my son decided to collect these
Pelican editions because they are all available as individual volumes. We loved that the Pelican has the complete works of Shakespeare in individual volumes, and we have been picking those up to read, he gets the physical and I grab the eBooks. I loved that there are eBooks for all volumes in this series, because of a
dual form of dyslexia. This year we picked up tickets for three Shakespeare plays at
The Stratford Festival, including this play, we did three of the Bards plays each of the last few years well.
The Pelican Classics were among my favourite editions of the plays when I was a youth myself. I often hunted used bookstores for the hard cover edition. I think the last time I read this would have been about 35-40 years ago. And even though I have not yet seen a production it came back fairly quickly. The description of this edition states:
“This edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is edited with an introduction by Russ McDonald and was recently repackaged with cover art by Manuja Waldia. Waldia received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for the Pelican Shakespeare series.
The legendary Pelican Shakespeare series features authoritative and meticulously researched texts paired with scholarship by renowned Shakespeareans. Each book includes an essay on the theatrical world of Shakespeare’s time, an introduction to the individual play, and a detailed note on the text used. Updated by general editors Stephen Orgel and A. R. Braunmuller, these easy-to-read editions incorporate over thirty years of Shakespeare scholarship undertaken since the original series, edited by Alfred Harbage, appeared between 1956 and 1967. With stunning new covers, definitive texts, and illuminating essays, the Pelican Shakespeare will remain a valued resource for students, teachers, and theater professionals for many years to come.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.”
Based on the commonly accepted chronological order of Shakespeare’s plays this usually ranked as one of the last written believed to have been written in 1610-1611. The sections in this volume prior to the text of the play are:
Publisher’s Note
The Theatrical World
The Texts of Shakespeare
Introduction
Note on the Text
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
The publishers note states:
“IT IS ALMOST half a century since the first volumes of the Pelican Shakespeare appeared under the general editorship of Alfred Harbage. The fact that a new edition, rather than simply a revision, has been undertaken reflects the profound changes textual and critical studies of Shakespeare have undergone in the past twenty years. For the new Pelican series, the texts of the plays and poems have been thoroughly revised in accordance with recent scholarship, and in some cases have been entirely reedited. New introductions and notes have been provided in all the volumes. But the new Shakespeare is also designed as a successor to the original series; the previous editions have been taken into account, and the advice of the previous editors has been solicited where it was feasible to do so.
Certain textual features of the new Pelican Shakespeare should be particularly noted. All lines are numbered that contain a word, phrase, or allusion explained in the glossarial notes. In addition, for convenience, every tenth line is also numbered, in italics when no annotation is indicated. The intrusive and often inaccurate place headings inserted by early editors are omitted (as is becoming standard practice), but for the convenience of those who miss them, an indication of locale now appears as the first item in the annotation of each scene.
In the interest of both elegance and utility, each speech prefix is set in a separate line when the speaker’s lines are in verse, except when those words form the second half of a verse line. Thus the verse form of the speech is kept visually intact. What is printed as verse and what is printed as prose has, in general, the authority of the original texts. Departures from the original texts in this regard have only the authority of editorial tradition and the judgment of the Pelican editors; and, in a few instances, are admittedly arbitrary..”
And the introduction begins with:
“THEATER COMPANIES that find themselves in financial trouble often announce a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a way to repair their sagging fortunes. It invariably sells tickets, and whether performed in a high-school Cafetorium or at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the play rarely fails to please the audience. Its predictable success owes something to the sure-fire last act, where the bad acting and excruciating verse of the play-within-the-play send people out of the theater in a jolly mood. A play in which inept amateurs perform a bad play is nearly indestructible, even when played by amateurs, and the ridiculous performance of “The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby” is merely the ultimate delight in a constantly rewarding two hours in the theater. Shakespeare gives us what we want when we go to a comedy: foolishness, the triumph of love and youth, magic, poetry, laughter. But he also provides something we may not know we want, effects and meanings that distinguish the greatest comedy: these include an ironic awareness that the joys attained are necessarily costly, anxiety about the evanescence of the theatrical fantasy, and recognition that the world to which we must return is not so pretty. It is this combination of mirth and depth that makes A Midsummer Night’s Dream one of Shakespeare’s most enduring and meaningful comedies.”
Later we are informed:
“Finally, almost twenty percent of the text of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is in prose, spoken mostly by the “mechanicals,” and even in this medium Shakespeare produces aural effects seldom heard in English comedy to this point. The craftsmen plan their festival play and conduct the rehearsal in workmanlike, everyday prose, much of it studded with malapropisms and other blunders. And yet the poet employs the same simple materials to create, in the soliloquy in which Bottom recalls his night in the forest, one of the most delicate moments in all of Shakespearean comedy, a parody of a religious epiphany that manages to evoke the emotional potency of the real thing.
The poetic range – from lyrical to ludicrous – corresponds to and helps to produce the tonal diversity that makes the play so appealing. Most comedy moves toward an affirmative resolution, the happy ending that emphasizes reconciliation and the satisfaction of desire. Audiences rejoice emotionally in the marriage of young people with whom they have identified and sympathized. At the same time, however, most comedy diverts its audience with preposterous behavior, developing conflicts that imply separation, error, reversal, and frustration. Even as we anticipate a happy ending, we take pleasure in watching shenanigans, pretension, and the well-aimed custard pie. This tension amounts to a contest between the end and the middle: the resolution provokes laughter of satisfaction; the comic conflict, laughter of scorn. Looked at from another angle, this opposition may be regarded as a struggle between the claims of irony and romance. In The Defence of Poesy, written about 1580, Sir Philip Sidney applauded the representation of foolish behavior, asserting that comedy fulfilled the moral function of leading audiences to reject such action with dismissive laughter. Practicing playwrights, however, like their modern counterparts, knew that audiences liked to leave the theater feeling hopeful, comforted by the belief that obstacles could be surmounted and happiness achieved. Comic fiction almost always cultivates both kinds of response. Jane Austen, for example, rewards the reader of Pride and Prejudice with both the idiocy of Mr. Collins and Mrs. Bennet and the reciprocated affections of Elizabeth and Darcy.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream has proved hospitable to so many different styles of production because it makes available to the director and the audience an exceptionally broad range of potential response. The ending offers multiple satisfactions: three human marriages are celebrated in the final scene, the fairy king and queen are reconciled, Bottom and the mechanicals believe that their court performance is a triumph, and as the lovers go off to bed, the fairies enter the palace to bless the marriages. And yet the concord and the delight generated by the conclusion are counterbalanced not only by the embarrassing antics that the characters have displayed on the way to the final scene, but also by the playwright’s stimulation of doubt about whether joy at the happy ending is actually warranted. Shakespeare seems to challenge any easy and uncritical pleasure in the marriage of the four young people, the union of Theseus and Hippolyta, the reconciliation of the supernatural figures, and, most obviously, the achievement of the amateur thespians. What looks like a joyous romp turns out to have darker reaches. This disturbance beneath the surface becomes one of Shakespeare’s major themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the audience discovers that everything is more complicated than it first appears, a principle that applies most significantly to the theater itself..”
The introduction concludes with:
“Such doubts about the nature of the real are confirmed by the play’s multiple endings. As the mechanicals wrap up their play, Theseus condescendingly announces the arrival of “fairy time” and sends the lovers off to bed with a closing couplet, thus signaling the end of the play. But the grand exit of the cast is followed by the entrance of Puck, who recites rhymed verses that seem to constitute a benediction. Then: Enter King and Queen of Fairies, with all their train. Their song and dance represent the final blessing of the house, and as they all sweep off the stage, Puck advances to address the audience directly, thus demolishing the boundary between stage and gallery. His epilogue, “If we shadows have offended,” speaks directly to the ontological problem of what we have seen. Does “shadows” refer to fairies or to actors? Both meanings are current in the sixteenth century. Is the audience being addressed by “Puck” or by the performer who has just finished enacting Puck? We have consented, for the previous two hours, to accept the stage action as reality, shadow as substance. Can we be sure that the world we have agreed to think of as real is anything more than a platform constructed for heavenly mirth? Where does the stage end and the world begin?
For all the laughter and pleasure that A Midsummer Night’s Dream generates, it also questions the validity and permanence of its affirmations. The human imagination produces as many nightmares as beguiling visions: or, in the words of the great Spanish painter Goya, “the sleep of reason brings forth monsters.” As the fairies bless the offspring of the wedded couples, we may uneasily recall the Ovidian sequel to the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta: their son was the doomed Hippolytus, lusted after by his stepmother and ultimately regarded as a figure for the destructive power of passion. Even the delights of theatrical illusion are suspect. As Meredith Skura has argued, the affection and indulgence with which Shakespeare depicts Bottom will turn to self-loathing in the tragedies, where the player merely struts and frets his hour upon the stage, where imagination is self-annihilating, and where the world is so dark that illusion is always deceptive and usually fatal.* In the comedies, however, the harmonies and rewards of theatrical art are still available, and that is why, at this very moment, it is likely that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is now playing at a theater near you.”
This play comprises 5 acts and a total of 9 or 10 scenes, the play takes place over a roughly 4 days. It is interesting play. I enjoy reading it but have always had mixed emotions on productions of it. Some I have absolutely loved, and others I have not even finished. Because of my personal temperament I struggle with the disorder and confusion in the play, and more so when that became over done in productions. I do believe in the power of dreams and change. And much like Narnia I believe in a form of magic. In today’s world with AI and deep fakes this play almost become prophetic in the portrayal of the difference between appearance and reality. According to Goodreads there are over 5400 editions of this play. This Pelican edition is great for reading or study.
I am glad I picked this up to read with my son before going to see a performance. It is one of the stories that really surprises readers. It reminded me how much I loved these editions when I was young and we have started collecting the eBook versions now. If you are looking for a good copy of the play to read or study I can easily recommend this edition.
