About This Book

This book concentrates on the contexts from which the play emerges, those characteristics of life in Elizabethan England which are reflected in the values and views William Shakespeare brings to the text and which affect how a contemporary might have responded to it. The central context comprises the writer, the text, the audience and all the views, values and beliefs held by the writer and audience and encapsulated in the text. These values are the prime concern of this book. There is a secondary context that is also a focus. A play does not suddenly come into being without having a background. It does not exist in vacuo. It will have its own unique features, but has characteristics inherited from its author and generic traits derived from the writing of its time, particularly from the drama.

Other secondary contexts – the actors, the acting space, the social mix of any one audience – do not figure in this study except as occasional incidentals. There are tertiary contexts, such as the afterlife of the text (its printed form, how subsequent ages interpreted it, performed it, changed it – its performance history). There is also the critical backstory (the profile showing how critics of subsequent times bring their agendas and the values and prejudices of their period to analysis of the text). These are referenced incidentally where they seem useful and relevant, but are not a major concern. Any scholarly edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream will cover these areas in greater detail.

The book is for students preparing assignments and examinations for Shakespeare modules. The marking criteria at any level explicitly or implicitly require that students show a consistently well- developed and consistently detailed understanding of the significance and influence of contexts in which literary texts are written and understood. This means responding to the play in the ways Shakespeare's audience would have done. The following material will enable you to acquire a surer grasp of this cultural context – the social- political conditions from which the play emerged, the literary profile prevailing when it was written and its religious- moral dimension.