About the Play:

William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream brings together a group of star-crossed lovers, an inept band of actors led by the pompous Bottom, and the king and queen of the fairies and their impish henchman Puck, who creates romantic and comic havoc for all. Shakespeare put some of his most dazzling dramatic poetry at the service of this teasing, glittering, hilarious and amazingly inventive play, whose seriousness is only fleetingly glimpsed beneath its dreamlike surface.

Read William Shakespeare's great comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream in all its brilliance and actually understand what it means. No Fear Shakespeare gives you Shakespeare's complete text of A Midsummer Night's Dream on the left-hand page, side-by-side with an easy-to-understand modern English on the right, with marginal notes and explanations and full descriptions of each character.

Shakespeare side-by-side in plain English. Each No Fear Shakespeare contains:
• The complete text of the original play
• A line-by-line translation that puts Shakespeare into the kind of English people actually speak today
• A complete list of characters with descriptions
• Plenty of helpful commentary

William Shakespeare's 1595 comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of his most often performed light plays.

About the Playwright:

Arguably the greatest English-language playwright, William Shakespeare was a seventeenth-century writer and dramatist, and is known as the Bard of Avon. Under the patronage of Queen Elizabeth I, he penned more than 30 plays, 154 sonnets, and numerous narrative poems and short verses. Equally accomplished in histories, tragedies, comedy, and romance, Shakespeare's most famous works include Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Taming of the Shrew, and As You Like It. Like many of his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare began his career on the stage, eventually rising to become part-owner of Lord Chamberlain's Men, a popular dramatic company of his day, and of the storied Globe Theatre in London. Extremely popular in his lifetime, Shakespeare's works continue to resonate more than three hundred years after his death. His plays are performed more often than any other playwright's, have been translated into every major language in the world, and are studied widely by scholars and students.