Midsummer Night's Dream

'I have had a most rare vision.' A Midsummer Night's Dream evokes images of fairies, dreams, changeling children, and actors being transformed into asses. But is the play as ethereal as these associations suggest? Varsha Panjwani argues that it a rare work of art that is both hilarious and profound, dream and nightmare, submissive and yet subversive. She demonstrates how this play uses dreams as a device to make us examine our reality and the power structures that we have constructed based on class, gender, sexuality, ability, race, nationality, religion, and age. This new edition maps the global appeal of this play and shows how it has inspired various artists around the world and urges readers to participate in the play's restless questioning and creative dreaming. The New Oxford Shakespeare offers authoritative editions of Shakespeare's works with introductory materials designed to encourage new interpretations of the plays and poems. Using the text from the landmark The New Oxford Shakespeare Complete Works: Modern Critical Edition, these volumes offer readers the latest thinking on the authentic texts (collated from all surviving original versions of Shakespeare's work) alongside innovative introductions from leading scholars. The texts are accompanied by a comprehensive set of critical apparatus to give readers the best resources to help understand and enjoy Shakespeare's work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Varsha Panjwani is the creator of the 'Women & Shakespeare' podcast and the author of Podcasts and Feminist Shakespeare Pedagogy (2022). Her teaching and research focus on the way in which Shakespeare is deployed in the service of diversity and how that, in turn, invigorates Shakespeare. She has published widely on these topics in journals including Shakespeare Survey, Shakespeare Studies, and Multicultural Shakespeare, and in edited collections such as Shakespeare, Race and Performance, Shakespeare and Indian Cinema, and The Arden Research Handbook to Shakespeare and Adaptation. She is also the co-editor of Re-contextualizing Indian Shakespeare Cinema in the West: Familiar Strangers (2023).