> Skip to content
Play sample
  • Published: 28 March 2023
  • ISBN: 9789380741567
  • Imprint: Steerforth Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 88
  • RRP: $24.99

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Staged: the origins of YA’s greatest tropes




This graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare's famous comedy retains the original language while the charming illustrations make the text more accessible for readers being introduced to the great dramatist's works for the first time.  
 
A concise, highly enjoyable adaptation of the classic play; one of more than 85 titles Campfire has published since their introduction to North America in 2010.

This graphic novel adaptation of Shakespeare's famous comedy retains the original language while the charming illustrations make the text more accessible for readers being introduced to the great dramatist's works for the first time. 
 
A concise, highly enjoyable adaptation of the classic play; one of more than 85 titles Campfire has published since their introduction to North America in 2010.

At the dawn of Western civilization in ancient Athens, a young lady named Hermia has threatened to upset the order of things by announcing that she will marry the man she loves, rather than the man that her father has chosen for her. Theseus, Duke of Athens, asks, “How shall we find the concord of this discord?”
 
Join Shakespeare as he offers us a classically entertaining solution to this problem. Under pain of death, Hermia flees Athens and spends a mad Midsummer night along with her friends along with other city-dwellers in a nearby forest. Unbeknownst to the Athenians, the forest is inhabited by a legion of fairies and the mischievous hobgoblin Puck. The fairies’ misguided attempt to help out the humans with a magical herb leads to mayhem. As the buffoon Bottom says, the night in the forest becomes “a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was”.

  • Published: 28 March 2023
  • ISBN: 9789380741567
  • Imprint: Steerforth Press
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 88
  • RRP: $24.99

Other books in the series

On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, and was baptised on 26 April 1564. His father was a glove maker and wool merchant and his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a well-to-do local land owner. Shakespeare was probably educated in Stratford’s grammar school. In 1582 he married Anne Hathaway, and the couple had a daughter the following year and twins in 1585.

Shakespeare’s theatrical life seems to have commenced around 1590. We do know that he was part of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company, which was renamed the King’s Company in 1603 when James I succeeded to the throne. The Company acquired interests in two theatres in the Southwark area of London, near the banks of the Thames - the Globe and the Blackfriars.

Shakespeare’s poetry was published before his plays, with two poems appearing in 1593 and 1594, dedicated to his patron Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. Most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were probably written at this time as well.

Records of Shakespeare’s plays begin to appear in 1594, and he produced roughly two a year until around 1611. His earliest plays include Henry VI and Titus Andronicus. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Richard II all date from the mid to late 1590s. Some of his most famous tragedies were written in the early 1600s; these include Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth and Antony & Cleopatra. His late plays, often known as the Romances, date from 1608 onwards and include The Tempest.

Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616 and was buried in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. The first collected edition of his works was published in 1623 and is known as ‘the First Folio’.

Also by William Shakespeare

See all