A Midsummer Night's Dream

1605 All's Well That Ends Well

1605 The Life of Timon of Athens, with Thomas Middleton

1605-06 The Tragedy of King Lear

1605-08 ? contribution to The Four Plays in One (lost, except for A Yorkshire Tragedy, mostly by Thomas Middleton)

1606 The Tragedy of Macbeth (surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)

1606-07 The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra

1608 The Tragedy of Coriolanus

1608 Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with George Wilkins

1610 The Tragedy of Cymbeline

1611 The Winter's Tale

1611 The Tempest

1612-13 Cardenio, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called Double Falsehood by Lewis Theobald)

1613 Henry VIII (All Is True), with John Fletcher

1613-14 The Two Noble Kinsmen, with John Fletcher

FURTHER READING AND VIEWING

CRITICAL APPROACHES

Barber, C. L., Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom (1959). Half a century after publication, still the best book on Shakespearean comedy.

Calderwood, James L., A Midsummer Night's Dream (1992). Good on "metadrama," theatrical self-awareness.

Frye, Northrop, A Natural Perspective: The Development of Shakespearean Comedy and Romance (1967). Luminous study of Shakespearean comedy that develops "The Argument of Comedy" (discussed in "Introduction," p. xi).

Kehler, Dorothea, ed., A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays (2001). Wide selection of approaches.

Kermode, Frank, "The Mature Comedies," in Early Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (1961), pp. 214-20. Characteristically sensitive reading by a great critic.

Kott, Jan, "Titania and the Ass's Head," in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964). Highly influential "dark" and sexual reading.

Laroque, Francois, Shakespeare's Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage (1991). Useful extension of Barber's work.

Levine, Laura, "Rape, Repetition, and the Politics of Closure in A Midsummer Night's Dream," in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, ed. Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (1996), pp. 210-28. An example of a feminist approach.

Montrose, Louis Adrian, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (1996), pp. 109-205. Influential "new historicist" reading.

Patterson, Annabel, "Bottom's Up: Festive Theory," in Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (1989), pp. 52-70. Politically engaged.

Young, David P., Something of Great Constancy: The Art of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (1966). Thoughtful and detailed.

THE PLAY IN PERFORMANCE

Brooke, Michael, "A Midsummer Night's Dream on Screen," www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/564758/index.html. Pithy overview. Registered schools, colleges, universities, and libraries have access to video clips, including the complete twelve minutes of the silent 1908 version.

Griffiths, Trevor R., ed., A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare in Production (1996). Much helpful detail.