A Midsummer Night's Dream
In Our Time
BBC
4.6 • 9.9K Ratings
🗓️ 18 April 2019
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of Shakespeare's most popular works, written c1595 in the last years of Elizabeth I. It is a comedy of love and desire and their many complications as well as their simplicity, and a reflection on society's expectations and limits. It is also a quiet critique of Elizabeth and her vulnerability and on the politics of the time, and an exploration of the power of imagination.
With
Helen Hackett Professor of English Literature and Leverhulme Research Fellow at University College London
Tom Healy Professor of Renaissance Studies at the University of Sussex
and
Alison Findlay Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University and Chair of the British Shakespeare Association
Producer: Simon Tillotson
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. |
| 0:07.6 | There's a reading list to go with it on our website and you can get news about our |
| 0:11.0 | programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. |
| 0:14.9 | I hope you enjoyed the programs. |
| 0:17.4 | Hello, I'm Ed Summonized Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular plays, with some of his |
| 0:21.9 | most memorable characters, including Oberon, Titania, Puck, Peter Quinn's and Bottom. |
| 0:27.3 | The children at primary school can be a simple fairy story. |
| 0:30.4 | For anyone older, that depends on your experience of life and love and your imagination. |
| 0:35.8 | The main plot crosses between comedy and tragedy, as does the rude mechanicals perimus and |
| 0:40.1 | thizby, the play within the play. |
| 0:42.6 | And the story's resolution, with three weddings and reconciliation is joyful. |
| 0:47.0 | If you don't look too closely, I'd thought many characters have had to give up. |
| 0:51.2 | We'd meet a discuss amid Summonized Dream, our Tom Healey, professor of our National |
| 0:55.1 | Studies at the University of Sussex, Alison Findlay, professor of our National's drama, |
| 0:59.6 | at Lancaster University, and chair of the British Shakespeare Association, and Helen Hackett, |
| 1:04.3 | professor of English literature and Leaver Hume Research Fellow at University College, |
| 1:08.8 | London. |
| 1:09.8 | Helen Hackett, where does this place sit among Shakespeare's plays? |
| 1:14.1 | It's a play where I think we get a really exciting, exhilarating sense of him taking |
| 1:18.1 | a step forward in his career because it's a sort of transition between early and middle |
| 1:23.3 | Shakespeare. |
... |
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