SOURCE: "A Midsummer Night's Dream Revisited," The Critical Survey, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1991, pp. 14-29.

In the following excerpt, Wells reviews trends in critical reception of A Midsummer Night's Dream in the 1970s and 1980s, reaffirming his doubts that the play was originally written for a wedding and examining the relationship between recent literary criticism of the play and its performance history.

The edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream which I edited for the New Penguin Shakespeare appeared in 1967. During that time it has been reprinted some twenty times and has sold well over 320,000 copies, which have certainly been used by many students and school children, and have formed the basis for a number of productions of the play, including the famous one by Peter Brook. It is, of course, like all other editions, gradually going out of date; and I hope it may be of interest to look at...