From the hilarious mischief of the elf Puck to the rough humor of the self-centered Bottom and his fellow players, from the palace of Theseus in Athens to the magic wood where fairies play, Shakespeare's lyrical A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play of enchantment and an insightful portrait of the predicaments of love. This extensively annotated edition makes Midsummer completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century and provides a rich resource for students, teachers, and the general reader.

Burton Raffel's on-page annotations offer generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. In his introduction he explores the complexities of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom examines the play's extraordinary mélange of characters.