Probably composed in 1595 or 1596, A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's early comedies, which shares the nature and style with a group of plays written about 1594-7. Though the specific occasion is still speculated, most scholars believe that Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream for a marriage celebration.

After its appearance for more than two hundred years the play was was was seldom performed during the Restoration and the eighteenth century. Instead, since its first being it inspired many operatic adaptations. In 1692, the play was first reshaped into the opera, The Fairy Queen with music by Henry Purcell, the operatic adaptations were continually made dowon to the nineteenth century. Perhaps the most well-known is Mendelssohn's music composed in 1826 and 1843 in association to the play, which was used by lots of productions in the nineteenth and twentieth century. Except the operatic adaptions, A Midsummer Night's Dream also inspired lots of the painters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Influenced by the operatic adaptions, most painters such as Richard Dadd, Robert Huskisson, Daniel Maclise and Joseph Noel Paton, drawed their imaginations upon the inventive operatic spectacles, and dealt primarily with the supernatural aspects of the play which also reflects the nineteenth-century romantic taste

It is after the twentieth century that Shakespeare's uncut text were put on stage. Though the influence of the operatic adaptions continues in many twenty century productions, new literary theories and diverse aspects of interpreting of the play also influences the modern reception of the play and also the presentations on stage.

Work and Websites Consulted

Foakes, R. A. Introduction. A Midsummer Night's Dream. By William Shakespeare.

Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984. 12-24.

Shakespeare Illustrated:A Midsummer Night's Dream

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/classes/Shakespeare_Illustrated/MidsummerPaintings.html

All Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream Guide

http://www.allshakespeare.com/midsummer

Home