3 - Textual Studies

Summary

The Arden Shakespeare has graced the year with the publication of two volumes, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, so happily paired that we are tempted to suppose that the General Editors, joined now by Brian Morris, planned it that way from the beginning. It is not so, of course, for Brian Gibbons, the successor to the late John Crow in the editorship of Romeo and Juliet, began his work ‘from scratch in 1973’; and Harold F. Brooks confesses in his preface that ‘ A Midsummer Night’s Dream has had a pre-eminent place’ in his affections since the afternoon in 1914 when he attended Granville-Barker’s golden production. It is not too much to say that Brooks’s edition, bearing yet the marks of that inspiration, began at that matinée.

The conjunction of the two volumes sharpens our perspective on the relationships between the two plays. The most interesting of these to this reviewer is the question of dating. Brooks assembles all possible material on the date of A Midsummer Night's Dream from literary, topical, occasional, and stylistic considerations (twenty-three pages) and concludes that it 'was composed in the winter of 1595-6, for the Carey wedding' on 19 February 1596 (p. lvii) and that it probably followed Romeo and Juliet (p. xliii).