A MIDSUMMER NIGHT ' S DREAM (1908) William Shakespeare, ARTHUR RACKHAM 1st Edition
Item History & Price
A MIDSUMMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
BY WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY ARTHUR RACKHAM
WILLIAM HEINEMANN - DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. LONDON - NEW YORK 1908 Clean Interior no writing in bookFirst printing; 1908 at title page, no additional printings stated. Large 7 1/2" x 10" gift book design. Beige full-cloth boards, gilt embossed cover and spine design, titles, moderate shelf wear, (See Photos).... Colour frontispiece plate of Titiana Lying Asleep; fine tissue guard w/printed caption. Thick, deckled pages very good, clean; Bind good; hinges intact. Features forty tipped-in color plates on thick matte pages by the wondrous illustrator, Arthur Rackham. Each plate beautifully rich with subdued colors and featuring Rackham at his most magically best; fine tissue guards w/printed captions. Illustrations produced by the Hentschel Colour-Type Process. Additionally, includes full and partial page b&w imagery, headers, tailpieces, and decorative designs throughout. Rare near fine example of book craftsmanship. Printed by Ballantyne & Co. Limited at the Ballantyne Press, Tavistock Street, London. 134 pages of text; apprx. 250 including full-page illustrations and plates.
A Midsummer Night's Dreams is a comedy portraying the events surrounding the marriage of Theseus, the Duke of Athens, to Hippolyta, the former queen of the Amazons. These events include the adventures of four young Athenian lovers and a group of six amateur actors (the mechanicals) who are controlled and manipulated by the fairies who inhabit the forest in which most of the play is set. One of Shakespeare's most popular works for the stage and is widely performed across the world.
Written in the 1590's reportedly for a wedding party attended by Queen Elizabeth I, Shakespeare's play has all the charm of an afternoon frolic in the countryside. Fairies and magical potions add to the delight as love is turned upside down. Shakespeare moves us with the imagery and rhythms of his verse, and we revel in the sharpness of his insight into life, love, and the human condition. Memorable characters abound, playfulness and mischief control the plot, and the play-within-a-play remains one of the great scenes in English comedy.
One of Shakespeare's most romantic and enchanting plays. Recently though, A Midsummer Night's Dream is sometimes interpreted as a darker and more sinister tale than many have imagined. Usually seen as a comical story with bewildered beings in the throes of youthful love as the young lovers, Lysander, Hermia, Demetrius and Helena escape their elder's clutches and their "sharp Athenian law" by eloping into the forest outside the city. Unfortunately they stumble into a civil war in fairyland, where King Oberon and Queen Titania fight over possession of a beautiful young "changeling". The appearance of the "rude mechanicals", a group of Athenian workers, including the weaver Nick Bottom, compound the chaos. Escalating confusion and "shaping fantasies" reign before the denouement, but beneath the hilarity some surmise a rather ambivalent attitude toward the destructive power of desire and the ethereal realms. A more complex and effective comedy than has often been understood!
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