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.
→ Listen 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
-
Romeo and Juliet
17 Feb, 2022 820 English and Old English literatures -
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
28 Dec, 2023 800 Literature, rhetoric and criticism -
The Tempest
14 Nov, 2013 820 English and Old English literatures -
Lear
28 Feb, 2008 820 English and Old English literatures -
Elizabethan Revenge
18 Jun, 2009 820 English and Old English literatures -
Shakespeare’s Work
11 May, 2000 820 English and Old English literatures -
Is Shakespeare History? The Plantagenets
11 Oct, 2018 820 English and Old English literatures -
Shakespeare and Literary Criticism
4 Mar, 1999 820 English and Old English literatures -
Thomas Middleton
20 Mar, 2025 820 English and Old English literatures -
Shakespeare’s Life
15 Mar, 2001 820 English and Old English literatures
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.