Midsummer Night's Dream - William Shakespeare Arts & Drama / Shakespeare, Shakespearean MP3 Audio Books

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BBC Radio Shakespeare: All's Well That Ends Well

William Shakespeare
Sian Phillips, Emma Fielding and Miriam Margolyes star in Shakespeare's comedy of men behaving badly and women doing it for themselves.$17.25

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BBC Radio Shakespeare: King Lear

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's bitter tragedy of loyalty, power and politics.

$17.25

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BBC Radio Shakespeare: Henry IV - Part One

William Shakespeare

Father and son Julian and Jamie Glover star as King Henry and Prince Hal in Shakespeare's stirring history.

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Macbeth

William Shakespeare
Macbeth is among the most powerful of Shakespeare's tragedies, a dark but fascinating glimpse into the soul of evil, set in medieval Scotland.$12.99

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Julius Caesar

William Shakespeare

Julius Caesar is one of Shakespeare's most popular and polished works.

$12.99

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Hamlet

William Shakespeare

The first in Shakespeare's great series of four tragedies.

$14.99

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Year in the Life of William Shakespeare 1599

James Shapiro
An intimate history of Shakespeare, following him through a single year that changed not only his fortunes but the course of literature for many generations to come...$19.99

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Midsummer Night's Dream

See Larger Image	Category :	Shakespeare, Shakespearean MP3 Audio Books

	Publisher :	Select Music & Video Distribution Ltd
	Author :	William Shakespeare
	Narrator :	Full Cast Production

	Length :	2 hours 20 minutes (Unabridged)

Download Price :		$12.25

Format :		Encoded Windows Media

© 2006 Select Music & Video Distribution Ltd

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A Midsummer Night's Dream must be one of the most enduringly popular of Shakespeare's plays, and it is not difficult to see why: the work blends several kinds of comedy with a powerful atmosphere of magic and mystery and a satisfying set of contrasts - between city and country, reason and imagination, love and infatuation.

The play dates from 1595-6, and therefore belongs to Shakespeare's early maturity as a dramatist. There is some disagreement about whether A Midsummer Night's Dream was specially written for an aristocratic wedding. No direct evidence for this speculation exists, although the festive and optimistic emphasis at the end - the fairies blessing the 'bride-bed' - would certainly be appropriate. One senses, too, a celebratory delight in the young writer's new-found richness of ideas and mastery of form, and it is interesting to see from what a wide range of sources Shakespeare drew in order to create what is nevertheless a highly original work.

The Sources
The anticipation and completion of Theseus' and Hippolyta's wedding, which frames the action, is taken from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale. Puck's origin, on the other hand, owes more to folklore than literature; the mechanicals' or 'clowns' (Bottom, Quince et al) are clearly caricatured Elizabethan working men, while the story of Pyramus and Thisbe came to Shakespeare through Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. No single source, however, can account for the miraculous transformation Shakespeare works upon these diverse materials.

Arts & Drama categories

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