A Midsummer Night's Dream Home Page

This is the Home Page for A Midsummer Night's Dream. The page collects information about this work from across our site. Here you will find links to our edition; where available, you will also find links to graphic facsimiles of the books in which it was first published, a list of performances, relevant pages in the section on Shakespeare's Life and Times, and links to relevant sites on the Internet.

• Title Page
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream (Folio 1, 1623)
    
  • A Midsummer Night's Dream (Quarto 1, 1600)
    

List of book facsimiles containing the play A Midsummer Night's Dream

• First Folio (1623)
  Brandeis University copy from Brandeis University Library
• First Folio (1623)
  New South Wales copy from State Library of New South Wales
• Second Folio (1632)
  New South Wales copy from State Library of New South Wales
• Third Folio (1664)
  New South Wales copy from State Library of New South Wales
• Fourth Folio (1685)
  New South Wales copy from State Library of New South Wales
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, Quarto 1 (1600)
  Unknown copy from British Library, London
• A Midsummer Night's Dream, Quarto 2 (1600)
  Garrick copy from British Library, London

Pages from the "Life and Times" that discuss A Midsummer Night's Dream

• A Midsummer Night's Dream
  
• Fairies and Robin Goodfellow
  
• Theseus and Hippolyta
  
• The lovers: the course of true love?
  
• Hempen homespuns
  
• The play-within-the-play: tragical mirth
  

List of performances related to A Midsummer Night's Dream

• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1971, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, USA)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1966, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, USA)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1937, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1947, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1958, Rudolph Cartier, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1964, Joan Kemp-Welch, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1972, Peter Brook, GB)
• Mendelssohn's Dream (1979, R. Philip, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1981, David Wilson, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1981, Elijah Moshinsky, GB)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1982, Emile Ardolino, USA)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1982, Peter Hall, GB)
• Midzomernachtsdroom. [A Midsummer Night's Dream] (1984, Dieter Dorn, West Germany)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1986, Peter Martins, USA)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (2008, Shakespeare's Globe, UK)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1909, Charles Kent, USA)
• Le song d'une nuit d'été, d'après Shakespeare (1909, France)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (1913, Italy)
• Ein Sommernachtsstraum: En heiteres Fastnachtsspiel (1925, Hans Neumann, Germany)
• 125 more performances...

Summary list of artifacts related to the play A Midsummer Night's Dream

• illustration artifacts (2)

Relevant links to other sites on the web

• "This falles out better, then I could deuise": Play-Bound Playwrights and the Nature of Shakespearean Comedy
  Steele, Kenneth B. "'This falles out better, then I could deuise': Play-Bound Playwrights and the Nature of Shakespearean Comedy." University of Toronto (1990). Steele looks at the development of the figure in each of Shakespeare's plays who either frames the entire play as an explicit artifact, directs and produces a contained performance, stages a theatrical practical joke, or orchestrates the events of the entire playworld toward a comic denouement and how this figure culminates in A Midsummer Night's Dream's omnipotent dramaturge Oberon:
• "Swift hart" and "soft heart": Elizabeth I and the Iconography of Lyly's Gallathea and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
  Bowen, Julia A. "'Swift hart' and 'soft heart': Elizabeth I and the Iconography of Lyly's Gallathea and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream." West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association (SRASP) 20 (1997). Bowen examines how Lyly and Shakespeare took advantage of Elizabeth's established iconography to make the queen a presence in their dramas and to what effect:
• Shakespeare's Italian Dream: Cinquecento sources for A Midsummer Night's Dream
  Leslie, Robert W. "Shakespeare's Italian Dream: Cinquecento Sources for A Midsummer Night's Dream." SHAKSPER via Early Modern Literary Studies. Leslie argues that not only is the setting of A Midsummer Night's Dream largely Italian, but the plot is also influenced by Italian sources:
• "Vowing, Swearing, and Superpraising of Parts": Petrarch and Pyramus in the Woods of Athens
  Steele, Kenneth B. "'Vowing, Swearing, and Superpraising of Parts': Petrarch and Pyramus in the Woods of Athens." SHAKSPER via Early Modern Literary Studies. Steele looks at A Midsummer Night's Dream's play-within-a-play to examine the influence of the Petrarchan idiom and Romeo and Juliet: