From the hilarious mischief of Puck to the rough humor of the self-centered Bottom and his fellow players, from the palace of Theseus in Athens to the magic wood where fairies play, Shakespeare's lyrical A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play of enchantment and an insightful portrait of the predicaments of love. Now the most extensively annotated edition of the play to date makes it completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century and a resource for students, teachers, and the general reader.<BR>Burton Raffel's on-page annotations offer help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phrases and lines. In his introduction, he explores the complexities of A Midsummer Night's Dream. And in a concluding essay, Harold Bloom examines the play's extraordinary melange of characters.