A Midsummer Night’s Dream

“Each volume of The Annotated Shakespeare proves to be a splendid addition to the series.”—Tita French Baumlin, Southwest Missouri State University

From the hilarious mischief of the elf Puck to the rough humor of the self-centered Bottom and his fellow players, from the palace of Theseus in Athens to the magic wood where fairies play, Shakespeare’s lyrical  A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a play of enchantment and an insightful portrait of the predicaments of love. This extensively annotated edition makes Midsummer completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century and provides a rich resource for students, teachers, and the general reader. 

Burton Raffel’s on-page annotations offer generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. In his introduction he explores the complexities of A Midsummer Night’s Dream . And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom examines the play’s extraordinary mélange of characters.