Front cover image for A midsummer's night dream

A midsummer's night dream

This study traces the response to "A Midsummer Night's Dream" from Shakespeare's day to the present, including critics from Britain, Europe and America.
Print Book, English, 1999
Athlone Press, London, 1999
xxi, 461 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm.
9780485810035, 0485810034
40907683
1. Moral conventions and human sympathy, 1775 / Elizabeth Griffith
2. Artists' interpretations of dramatic effects, 1787 / Samuel Felton
3. Commentary on A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1790 / Edmond Malone
4. Bottom as coxcomb, 1792 / Charles Taylor
5. Response to Malone, 1793 / George Steevens
6. Illustrations of some passages, 1794 / Walter Whiter
7. His fertile and creative fancy, 1800 / Charles Dibdin
8. On metre, invention, and a unified whole, 1815 / August Wilhelm Von Schlegel
9. Unity of feeling and of imagery, and the fairies, 1817 / Nathan Drake
10. Bottom, Puck, and the incompatibility of poetry and the stage, 1817 / William Hazlitt
11. Malone's last words, 1821 / James Boswell and Edmond Malone
12. Mainly on the fairies, 1824 / Augustine Skottowe
13. The fairy world, the clowns, the poetry, 1828 / George Daniel
14. New actors on the mimic scene-the fairies, 1828 / Thomas Keightley
15. Marginalia and other notes, 1836 / Samuel Taylor Coleridge
16. Bottom the lucky man, 1837 / William Maginn
17. Critics refuted, 1838 / Thomas Campbell
18. Originality in structure, machinery, and language, 1839 / Henry Hallam
19. The Pictorial Edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1839 / Charles Knight
20. The poet's dream, 1840 / William Spalding
21. Anachronisms, Nick Bottom as Midas, and stage representation, 1841 / James Orchard Halliwell
22. Oberon's Vision allegorized, 1843 / Nicholas John Halpin
23. Fairy drama and human nature, 1843 / Bryan Waller Procter
24. Poet of the Fairies, 1844 / Leigh Hunt
25. A comment, with some explanatory notes, 1845 / Joseph Hunter
26. The theme of self-parody, 1846 / Hermann Ulrici
27. Introductory remarks, 1847 / Gulian Crommelin Verplanck
28. The sister arts, and the play's structural balance, 1848 / Henry James Sumner Maine
29. A festival of dainties, 1851 / Henry Norman Hudson
30. The Dream and Art, 1851, 1872, 1883, 1884 / John Ruskin
31. A most charming entertainment of the stage, 1853 / Henry Morley
32. Samuel Phelps's Bottom, 1853 / Douglas William Jerrold
33. Dramatic and poetic art, 1854 / Richard Grant White
34. Dialogue with a sceptic, 1854 / Edward Strachey
35. Critical remarks on the play, 1856 / William Watkiss Lloyd
36. Celtic elements, 1859 / Anonymous
37. Genre and inner purpose, 1863 / Georg Gottfried Gervinus
38. Intuitive power of characterization, 1863 / Charles Cowden Clarke
39. The play's limitations, 1864 / Thomas Kenny
40. The sacred mysteries in the play, 1865 / John Abraham Heraud
41. The secret meaning of the Interlude, 1865 / Ethan Allen Hitchcock
42. The perfection of imbecilic clowns, 1866 / Abner Otis Kellogg
43. Not critics, but lowly worshippers of the Beautiful, 1869 / Mary Preston
44. The theme is love, 1871 / Hippolyte Adolphe Taine
45. Bottom
an ass, but no fool, 1873 / Daniel Wilson
46. A Midsummer Night's Dream as masque, 1874 / Karl Elze
47. Self-reflexive structure: the Real, the Ideal, and the Representation, 1874 / Denton Jacques Snider
48. Shakespeare differentiated from Bacon, 1875 / George Wilkes
49. Theseus as the central figure, 1875 / Edward Dowden
50. A comedy of incident, 1875 / Adolphus William Ward
51. Consummation of Shakespeare's lyrical genius, 1876 / Algernon Charles Swinburne
52. Bottom, a self-made man, 1876 / John Weiss
53. The full glow of fancy and fun, 1877 / Frederick James Furnivall
54. The wood is the world, 1879 / Charles Ebenezer Moyse
55. Titania and Ovid, 1880 / Thomas Spencer Baynes
56. A Platonic reading, 1884 / William Francis C. Wigston
57. Interpreting the spoken verse, 1885 / Grace Latham
58. Observations on the lovers and the mechanicals, 1886 / Elizabeth Wormeley Latimer
59. Poet rather than dramatist, 1888 / Francis Albert Marshall
60. Source of the play's popularity, 1888 / George Edgar Montgomery
61. Classical and modern, 1890 / Julia Wedgwood
62. Reason and desire in Oberon and Titania, 1890 / Charles Downing
63. The development of morality and art, 1891 / Sidney Clopton Lanier
64. A true work of art, 1894 / Barrett Wendell
65. The duration of the action, 1895 / Horace Howard Furness
66. Life and art, 1895 / Katharine Lee Bates
67. Mr. Daly and the idea of titivation, 1895 / George Bernard Shaw
68. Remarks on the play and modern education, 1895 / Andrew Lang
69. Theseus, Bottom, and the Interlude, 1896 / Frederick Samuel Boas
70. The central idea, 1897 / Edmund Kerchever Chambers
71. The airy dream, 1898 / Georg Morris Cohen Brandes
72. Illusion, realism, and imagination, 1900 / Max Beerbohm
73. Dream visions, 1903 / Charlotte Endymion Porter and Helen Archibald Clarke
74. A comedy of situation and enchantment, 1903 / Richard Green Moulton
75. Shakespeare's working classes, 1903 / Ernest Howard Crosby
76. The atmosphere of the play, 1904 / Gilbert Keith Chesterton
77. Love, dreamland, and Helena, 1905 / Stopford Augustus Brooke
78. The theme of illusion, 1907 / George Edward Woodberry
79. The nature and sources of the play, 1908 / Frank Sidgwick
80. The most beautiful work of man, 1909 / Algernon Charles Swinburne
81. Shakespeare's conception of his art, 1911 / Ernest De Selincourt
82. Screeds of word-music, 1914 / Harley Granville Barker
83. Three types of fairies: Puck, Oberon and Titania, 1916 / Charlotte Carmichael Stopes
84. The dream's validity, 1917 / Bjornstjerne Bjornson
85. Comedy of love, 1920 / Benedetto Croce