A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to offer `fierce vexations' to film

directors since all the ambiguities of this play in which `everything seems

double' may constitute a challenge to performance. Yet this book will help to

show that it is precisely the rich ambivalence of the text that allows for so many

cinematic variations. If one film cannot render all the ambiguities of the text,

the confrontation of multiple versions can no doubt successfully convey a

multiplicity of interpretations that may merge in the spectators' minds and

grow to `something of great constancy'. If those Shakespearean films have a

life of their own, they also reveal the multifarious facets of a play whose

hybrid, even monstrous, nature is bound to feed `translations' of all sorts. The

purpose of this volume is precisely to explore how A Midsummer Night's

Dream has been `translated' on screen.

This volume includes contributions by Kenneth S. Rothwell, Bernice W.

Kliman, Richard Burt, Nathalie Vienne-Guerrin, Michèle Willems, Olivier

Stockman, Kevin De Ornellas, Sarah Hatchuel, Jay L. Halio, Mark Thornton

Burnett, Pierre Berthomieu and José Ramón Díaz Fernández.