This volume offers new critical and performance approaches to Shakespeare’s most well-known comedy of desire, a play that speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most resilient plays. Although often dismissed as light comedy suitable for young readers, the play is now taken seriously, transformed through readings from queer, feminist, post-colonialist, race and ecocritical perspectives, as well as in its global performances and adaptations.
Suitable for a wide range of readers, this collection includes approaches to the play covering textual studies, literary analysis, performance studies, adaptation studies and pedagogy. While differing in methodology, the chapters all point to the inherent instability or openness of this play and its themes of shifting identity and boundary crossings, bridging nature and culture, the material and ‘airy nothing’, mortal and fairy. They make it amply clear that this play speaks to people around the world today, emphasising its wide global reception and adaptability in both theatre and film.
The variety of topics covered includes: the play’s textual instability; the treatment of cognition and perception; anxiety about the power of the maternal imagination; the intersection of race, slavery and ecology; the intertwining of plant and human bodies; the use of transformative spaces in stage and screen adaptations; Korean adaptations that imagined the possibility of political reparations; student adaptations in India that engaged with what can be and not be staged in performance; and teaching the play in Kuwait and China, where students’ responses reflected differing cultural contexts.
Notes on Contributors Series Preface Introduction and Recent Studies of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Rebecca Bushnell (University of Pennsylvania, USA) 1. ‘Because It Hath No Bottom’: Re-thinking A Midsummer Night’s Dream as an Unstable Theatrical Text, Kurt Daw (San Francisco State University, USA) 2. ‘The Eye of Man Hath not Heard’: The Limits of Cognition in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Jessica Chiba (The Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, UK) 3. Pregnant Errors in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Douglas Lanier (University of New Hampshire, USA) 4. Race, Enslavement, and Consent in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Urvashi Chakravarty (University of Toronto, Canada) 5. Plant Bodies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Jason Hogue (University of Texas at Arlington, USA) 6. Transformative Social Space in Heterotopic Adaptations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Alexa Alice Joubin (George Washington University, USA) 7. A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet in Korea: National Reconciliation in the Green World of the Madang, Yu Jin Ko (Wellesley College, USA) 8. ‘Rehearse Most Obscenely’: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in an Indian Classroom, Jonathan Gil Harris (Ashoka University, India) 9. Courses that Never Did Run Smooth: Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream in Kuwait and China, Katherine Hennessey (Wenzhou-Kean University, China) Bibliography Index
Rebecca Bushnell is the School of Arts and Sciences Board of Advisers Emerita Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, USA.
