A Midsummer Nights Dream: Language and Writing

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 Nights Dream is a perfect play for exploring Shakespeares 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 Bottoms comic malapropisms. An introduction considers when and how the play was written, and addresses the language with which Shakespeare created A Midsummer Nights 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.