Arthos, John. Shakespeare’s Use of Dream and Vision, 1977Google Scholar

Barber, C. L. Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, 1959 (Emphasising the play’s links with tradition summer festivities, Barber’s chapter on it also illustrates its formal design; an important essay)Google Scholar

Bate, Jonathan. Shakespeare and Ovid, 1993 (A fine account of the influence of Ovid and the importance of metamorphoses in the play)Google Scholar

Berry, Ralph. Shakespeare’s Comedies: Explorations in Form, 1972 (A rather sombre view of Shakespeare’s comedies as preparations for the tragedies that were to follow)Google Scholar

Briggs, Katharine M. The Anatomy of Puck, 1959 (On the background lore relating to the fairies)Google Scholar

Peter Brook’s Production of William Shakespeare’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1974 (Comments of the director and various actors who took part, together with the text of the play, as staged by Brook)Google Scholar

Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare and his Comedies, 1957 (One of the first books to treat the play seriously in terms of its thematic content, specifically in relation to love)Google Scholar

Calderwood, J. L. Shakespeare’s Metadrama, 1971 (Incorporates his essay on the play, published as ‘The illusion of drama’, Modern Language QuarterlyMLQ 26 (1965), 506–22Google Scholar

Carroll, William C. The Metamorphoses of Shakespearean Comedy, 1985 (On the meanings of transformations in the play, especially in relation to the monstrous, to defloration, and to marriage)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Cope, Jackson. The Theater and the Dream, 1973 (A long, wide-ranging work, suggestive in its exploration of ideas and images that bear upon the play)Google Scholar

Dent, R. W. ‘Imagination in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare QuarterlySQ 15 (1964), 115–29 (An interesting account of the play as ‘a delightful exposition of the follies produced by excessive imagination in love, and the pleasures produced by controlled imagination in art’, p. 128Google Scholar

Dent, R. W. Shakespeare’s Proverbial Language, 1981 (A revision and expansion of the listings in M. P. Tilley’s Dictionary, referred to in the Commentary; this is an essential guide for all interested in Shakespeare’s use of proverb lore)Google Scholar

Dutton, Richard, ed., A Midsummer Night’s Dream. New Casebooks, 1996 (A well-chosen selection of recent critical essays on the play, including some of the best New-Historicist or Marxist accounts)Google Scholar

Fender, Stephen. Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1968 (A good, level-headed, general introduction to the play)Google Scholar

Garber, Marjorie. Dream In Shakespeare, 1974Google Scholar

Girard, René. ‘Myth and ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in Textual Strategies, ed. Harari, Josué V. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979)Google Scholar

Griffiths, Trevor R., ed., Shakespeare in Production: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1996 (Provides a brief history of productions in England, together with a text and line-by-line account of its treatment on the stage)Google Scholar

Halio, Jay L., Shakespeare in Performance: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1994 (A selective study of some important productions, especially those by Peter Brook and Robert Lepage)Google Scholar

Hendricks, Margo, ‘“Obscured by dreams”: race, empire and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, Shakespeare QuarterlySQ 47, (1996), 37–60 (Uses the Indian boy to present a rather too strenuous colonialist perspective on the play)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Hunter, G. K. John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier, 1962 (An excellent study of Lyly’s plays, with an analysis of their influence on Shakespeare)Google Scholar

Kermode, Frank, ‘The mature comedies’, in Brown, J. R. and Harris, B. (eds.), Early Shakespeare, 1961, pp. 211–27Google Scholar

Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 1964 (His stress on the potentially cruel and bestial elements in the play greatly influenced some critics, and Peter Brook as director of the play)Google Scholar

Laroque, François, Shakespeare’s Festive World. Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, 1991 (This survey of court festivities, popular festivals and folk traditions provides a context for understanding these aspects of the play)Google Scholar

Latham, M. W. The Elizabethan Fairies, 1930Google Scholar

Leggatt, Alexander. Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love, 1974 (Contains a sturdy, well-balanced account of the play)Google Scholar

Loomba, Ania, ‘The great Indian vanishing trick: colonialism, property, and the family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Callaghan, Dympna, 2000, pp. 163–87 (On the bearing of the Indian boy, Amazons, race and gender on a post-colonialist reading of the play)Google Scholar

McFarland, Thomas. Shakespeare’s Pastoral Comedy, 1972 (In contrast to Kott, sees the play as the happiest of Shakespeare’s comedies)Google Scholar

Montrose, Louis Adrian, ‘A kingdom of shadows’ in The Theatrical City: Culture Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649, ed. Smith, David L., Strier, Richard and , David Bevington, 1995Google Scholar

Montrose, Louis Adrian, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre, 1996 (These essays develop further his influential New-Historicist reading of the play as relating to the cult of Queen Elizabeth, to royal power, and to court culture in “‘Shaping fantasies”: figurations of gender and power in Elizabethan culture’, 1983, included in the collection edited by Richard Dutton)Google Scholar

Patterson, Annabel. ‘Bottom’s up: festive theory’, in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford, 1989), 52–70 (Offering an alternative view to that of Louis Montrose in emphasising popular festive forms in relation to Bottom)Google Scholar

Richmond, Hugh. Shakespeare’s Sexual Comedy, 1971 (Influenced by Kott, Richmond finds sadomasochistic sexual passions released in the play)Google Scholar

Scragg, Leah. ‘Shakespeare, Lyly and Ovid: the influence of “Gallathea” on “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”’, Shakespeare SurveyS.Sur. 30 (1977), 125–34Google Scholar

Scragg, Leah. The Metamorphosis of Gallathea: A Study in Creative Adaptation, 1982 (Presses rather too strenuously her claims for the influence of Lyly on Shakespeare)Google Scholar

Sytan, J. L. The Shakespeare Revolution, 1977 (Provides the best account of the seminal production of the play by Harley Granville-Barker in 1914)Google Scholar

Thompson, Ann. Shakespeare and Chaucer, 1978Google Scholar

Turner, Robert K. Jr., ‘Printing methods and textual problems in A Midsummer Night’s Dream A Midsommer nights dreame, Imprinted at London for Thomas Fisher, 1600 (first quarto)Q1’, Studies in Bibliography 15 (1962), 33–55Google Scholar

Wickham, Glynne. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the setting and the text’ in Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage, 1969Google Scholar

Wiles, David. Shakespeare’s Almanac: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Marriage and the Elizabethan Calendar, 1993 (The fullest attempt to connect the composition of the play with an aristocratic wedding)Google Scholar

Williams, Gray Jay. Our Moonlight Revels: A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the Theatre, 1997 (An important and handsomely illustrated performance history of the play that brings out the way cultural shifts and pressures have affected stage interpretations)Google Scholar

Young, David P. Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1966 (An important book, extending Barber’s account of the play, notably in dealing with the integration of courtly and popular elements, and in exploring attitudes to dreams and the imagination in Shakespeare’s age)Google Scholar