Play Reviews: Othello, the Merchant of Venice, Love's Labour's Lost, Romeo and Juliet, the Alchemist, Coriolanus, the Taming of the Shrew, Macbeth, a Midsummer Night's Dream, Macbeth, Much Ado about Nothing, Gallathea, the Tempest, Twelfth Night, King Lear, Othello, the Merchant of Venice, Titus Andronicus, Le Songe d'une nuit d'été [A Midsummer Night's Dream], La Tempête [The Tempest], Le Songe d'une nuit d‘été [A Midsummer Night's Dream], Richard III, Le roi Lear [King Lear], Mesure pour mesure [Measure for Measure]

2007 ◽  
Vol 72 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-85
Author(s):  
Eleanor Collins ◽  
Michael Jones ◽  
Poonperm Paitayawat ◽  
Laura Grace Godwin ◽  
Michael Jones ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
King Lear ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Richard Iii ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Titus Andronicus ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost

5. Shakespeare and comic form

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stanley Wells
Keyword(s):  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Twelfth Night ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
As You Like It ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Love's Labour's Lost

Nearly half of Shakespeare’s plays, extending throughout his career, are written in comic form though they play a wide range of variations on it. ‘Shakespeare and comic form’ describes the five earliest as the lightest in tone, but in the five that follow, Shakespeare introduces an antagonist who must be expelled before the play can end happily. The later comedies were written for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The plays considered are The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, The Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night.

Two Hamlets

Tempo ◽  
1969 ◽  
pp. 6-12
Author(s):  
Stephen Walsh
Keyword(s):  
Original Text ◽  
Merchant Of Venice ◽  
Musical Settings ◽  
Midsummer Night's Dream ◽  
Much Ado About Nothing ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Merchant Of Venice ◽  
The Tempest ◽  
A Midsummer Night's Dream

Although Shakespeare has in the past been freely plundered for musical settings of every kind—from song to opera—it still seems a fair generalisation to say that his best work does not lend itself to this kind of treatment. Perhaps the most successful of all Shakespeare operas in English is Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, which follows closely the text of one of the less substantial comedies. Of The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, no satisfactory opera has apparently been made (though Berlioz's Béatrice et Bénédict contains charming music), and for much the same reason—namely Shakespeare's unrivalled genius for linguistic imagery—the great tragedies have resisted direct musical setting, Boito's Otello and Piave's Macbeth being, of course, free derivatives, not translations. Only in our own century has it become normal to set Shakespeare's tragedies in the original text, translated or otherwise.

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