A Midsummer Night’s Dream

18 Apr, 2019 820 English and Old English literatures

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare’s most popular works, written c1595 in the last years of Elizabeth I. It is a comedy of love and desire and their many complications as well as their simplicity, and a reflection on society’s expectations and limits. It is also a quiet critique of Elizabeth and her vulnerability and on the politics of the time, and an exploration of the power of imagination.

→ Play on BBC Sounds website

Guests

  • Helen Hackett 3 episodes
    Professor of English Literature and Leverhulme Research Fellow at University College London
  • Tom Healy 6 episodes
    Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Sussex
  • Alison Findlay No other episodes
    Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association

Reading list

  • Shakespeare and Ovid
    Jonathan Bate (Oxford University Press, 1993) Google Books →
  • A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare
    Dympna Callaghan (ed.) (Blackwell, 2016) Google Books →
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream: Contemporary Critical Essays
    Richard Dutton (ed.) (Palgrave, 1996) Google Books →
  • A Companion to Shakespeare's Works: Vol. III: The Comedies
    Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.) (Blackwell, 2003) Google Books →
  • Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe
    Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.) (University of Chicago Press, 1986) Google Books →
  • Writers and Their Work: 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'
    Helen Hackett (British Council/Northcote House, 1997) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare and Elizabeth: The Meeting of Two Myths
    Helen Hackett (Oxford University Press, 2009) Google Books →
  • Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night
    Katharine Hodgkin, Michelle O'Callaghan, and S. J. Wiseman (eds.) (Routledge, 2008) Google Books →
  • The Bottom Translation: Marlowe and Shakespeare and the Cultural Tradition
    Jan Kott (trans. Daniela Miedzyrecka and Lillian Vallee) (Northwestern University Press, 1987) Google Books →
  • The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre
    Louis Montrose (University of Chicago Press, 1996) Google Books →
  • Shakespeare and the Popular Voice
    Annabel Patterson (Blackwell, 1989) Google Books →
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream
    William Shakespeare (ed. Sukanta Chaudhuri) (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2017) Google Books →
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream
    William Shakespeare (ed. Peter Holland) (Oxford University Press, 1994) Google Books →
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream
    William Shakespeare (ed. Stanley Wells) (Penguin, 2005) Google Books →
  • Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Theatre
    Gary Jay Williams (University of Iowa Press, 1997) Google Books →
  • Writing Metamorphosis in the English Renaissance 1500-1700
    Susan Wiseman (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Google Books →

Related episodes

Programme ID: m00046rp

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00046rp

Auto-category: 822.33 (Shakespeare’s comedies)

Hello (First sentence from this episode) Hello, A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, with some of his most memorable characters, including Oberon, Titania, Puck, Peter Quince and Bottom.