Shakespeare on screen, A midsummer night's dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to offer `fierce vexations' to film directors since all the ambiguities of this play in which `everything seems double' may constitute a challenge to performance. Yet this book will help to show that it is precisely the rich ambivalence of the text that allows for so many cinematic variations. If one film cannot render all the ambiguities of the text, the confrontation of multiple versions can no doubt successfully convey a multiplicity of interpretations that may merge in the spectators' minds and grow to `something of great constancy'. If those Shakespearean films have a life of their own, they also reveal the multifarious facets of a play whose hybrid, even monstrous, nature is bound to feed `translations' of all sorts. The purpose of this volume is precisely to explore how A Midsummer Night's Dream has been `translated' on screen.

This volume includes contributions by Kenneth S. Rothwell, Bernice W. Kliman, Richard Burt, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Michèle Willems, Olivier Stockman, Kevin De Ornellas, Sarah Hatchuel, Jay L. Halio, Mark Thornton Burnett, Pierre Berthomieu and José Ramón Díaz Fernández.