Littérature : Shakespeare & Co. S5 LL5CAN

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare is an invitation into a pastoral world where fairies interfere with the lives of mortals, for the worse or the better, in a comedy that blends laughter and cruelty. It will carry you into Elizabethan England and enable you to plunge into its culture and literary references, from the Middle Ages and Antiquity: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives…, Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Seneca’s plays and Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft. All these scholarly references are used by Shakespeare alongside English folklore to create a work of art that prompts amused spectators and readers to muse on the alchemy of love and jealousy, the poetics of night and day, the vagaries of fortune, the tension between order and chaos and the secrets of theatrical illusion. We shall also evoke the many adaptations that are now part of the history of the play.