A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Language and Writing

Description

Arden Student Skills: Language and Writing volumes offer a new type of study aid that combines lively critical insight with practical guidance on the writing skills you need to develop in order to engage fully with Shakespeare’s texts. The books’ core focus is on language: both understanding and enjoying Shakespeare’s complex dramatic language and expanding your own critical vocabulary as you respond to his plays. Each guide in the series will empower you to read and write about Shakespeare with increased confidence and enthusiasm. 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, and its critical reception; an account of the play’s movie adaptations 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. Cover page Halftitle page Series page Title page Copyright page CONTENTS SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE Introduction CHAPTER ONE A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s Time From stage to page: reading Shakespeare Shakespeare’s own language A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Shakespeare’s writing career Sources and borrowings as Shakespeare’s word- trove Making an Elizabethan play: metatheatre CHAPTER TWO A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Our Time The rise of professional literary criticism and Shakespeare in education CHAPTER THREE Unfolding the Play Through Language Narrative and plotting Speech acts Time and illusions The audience experience CHAPTER FOUR Hearing Shakespeare’s Language Shakespeare for the blind The music of poetry: rhythm, rhyme, blank verse, alliteration ‘Speaking pictures’: metaphor and imagery Responsive listening in dialogues CHAPTER FIVE Languages of Love The nuptial hour Young love Jealousy and adultery Love-hate Parodying love Monstrous love: beauty and the beast ‘And all things shall be peace’ CHAPTER SIX Language of Dreaming Dreams and visions Waking dreams Dreams and imagination Dream logic, dramatic logic and time CHAPTER SEVEN Languages of Nature ‘Purple Passages’ in the Green World ‘Purple passages’: redundant and surplus language? ‘Dilation’ CHAPTER EIGHT Language of Change Myth, Race and Gender Myth and change Changelings and racial difference Bottom as changeling: art and myth Actors and gender CHAPTER NINE From Page to Screen A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Cinematic Language Movie language: Shakespeare for the deaf Movies in history A Midsummer Night’s Dream on fi lm Offshoots and oddities CHAPTER TEN Writing Matters Read Reflect Explore Plan Revise, annotate, check, proofread, bibliography A few more tips Appendix Shakespeare’s Works in Approximate Chronological Order BIBLIOGRAPHY