A Midsummer Night's Dream: Third Series (The Arden Shakespeare Third Series)

The Arden Editions provide deep notes on word and phrase meanings, themes, historical background, sources, and more. It's been a huge help in my personal project to "crack the code" come to understand and enjoy Shakespeare.

Very detailed notes for any Shakespeare aficionado.

I’ve been reading and preforming Shakespeare for 6ish years and this is the BEST companion for someone looking to really understand the options you have for interpretation. Arden Shakes offers you a super comprehensive break down of allllll the wild interpretations people have had over the centuries, multiple punctuation options, and tells you exactly where someone gets called a whore. Invaluable performance suggestions for actors. Probably kinda lame for English students. If you’re new start with Folgers.

The 3rd Edition Arden’s are amazing!

Excellent edition.

Do NOT buy this version. The version I received was not the Folger’s edition as listed. The front cover picture and text were blurry. Part of it look badly photocopied. This version came from “FeedBooks” and was printed on December 5, 2025 according to the back cover. A blatant scam.

The Arden books are very highly regarded. This is my first one and it had me questioning why. Maybe I'm just not the right mind for the academic nature of the introduction but I found it difficult to follow. It often just seemed like rattling off productions throughout the centuries without much commentary. There is good information buried within it, and some productions are obviously important and should be noted, but the time investment is significant compared to what you get out of it. It's about forty pages of this when it could have been 1/10th of that. The same pattern repeats for the rest of the introduction most disappointingly in the "themes" section. I found the whole Introduction skippable for the most part. Then we get to the actual play. The annotations follow the same pattern as the Introduction. A lot feel superfluous and I found myself, when wanting illumination on a word or line, to not have it. Many don't seem important or relevant at all unless you're doing a VERY deep dive into the history of the play. This is a very academic treatment. If that's what you're after, especially with respect to the dramaturgical history of the play, then this is probably quite good. Another note is that the binding and pages are great and held up after a period of close reading. I don't think this is a good edition if you're new to the play, certainly not if you are new to or adolescent with Shakespeare, or if you're looking for commentary that does anything other than a very deep dive in Dream's dramaturgical history. I'll give it three stars because it does seem to nail that goal, I just only wish it was better communicated that that was the goal at all. I wanted commentary not history.

So far, in the last year and a half, I have read 15 of the Arden Shakespeare Collection and 'A Midsummer's Night's Dream' has the worst introduction of them all. The writer spends so much time with the history of the play's productions that the work itself suffers. In an introduction the work is the key, not its history. Analysis of plot, character development, metaphysics, key phrases, the characters' relationships to one another and to the text, motives, etc, are crucial, for me, before I read the play. I have nor seen that many of Shakespeare's plays, but I find reading them rewarding and exciting. But first, before I get started reading the text, I need a warm-up that smoothes me into the play. The writer of this intro, Chaudhuri, holds the key components of Dream at a distance, while going on and on about where it was produced, who produced it, the actors who played certain characters, its translation into movies, TV, opera, while staying completely away from the text. I want to know about the characters in the play and their interrelationships with one another, an analysis of crucial scenes and how they move the plot forward, how key phrases reveal the inner depths of the characters' motives; in short, a body of knowledge that helps me along as I read the play. Its production history should be in the last few pages of the introduction, not take up more than half of it. I have gone ahead with the reading of Dream without the aid of a good intro and it is moving along nicely but an in-depth intro would have been so helpful.