Overview

This lively and informative guide to Shakespeare's popular comedy equips you with the critical skills to analyse its language, structure and themes and to expand and enrich your own response to the play. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeare’s diverse uses of language to reveal character and themes, from formal iambics and rhyming couplets of courtiers and lovers, and ‘warbling’ notes’ and nursery rhythms of fairies, to stocky prose by the artisan players including Bottom’s comic malapropisms. An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as the generic, literary and theatrical conventions at his disposal. It then moves to a detailed examination and analysis of the play, focusing on its literary, technical and historical intricacies; an account of the play's performance history and its critical reception completes the volume. Each chapter offers a 'Writing matters' section, clearly linking the analysis of Shakespeare's language to your own writing strategies in coursework and examinations.

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9781350103870

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R. S. White is Australian Professorial Fellow, Winthrop Professor of English at The University of Western Australia, and Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions 1100-1800. Among his other books are Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (1996), Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (2008), Pacifism in English Poetry: Minstrels of Peace (2008) and John Keats: A Literary Life (2010). He is a past President of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association and a Fellow of the Australian Humanities Academy.

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