This new casebook on A Midsummer Night's Dream traces the response of critical theory to a play peculiarly informed by modern preoccupations: imagination, representation and power, sexual repression and subjective transformation, patriarchal society, class structures and the limits of language. The essays collected here - New Critical, Marxist, feminist, New Historicist, cultural materialist, post-structuralist, performance - orientated and deconstructive - show the range of modern responses to these issues in the text. The introduction and endnotes on individual items elucidate the main themes and methodologies, showing how each item contributes to a vigorous wider debate about the Shakespearean text in modern culture.