Midsummer Night's Dream

Shakespeare’s most spirited play, adapted for new audiences by Jeffrey Whitty.

Tony Award–winning and Oscar-nominated storyteller Jeffrey Whitty offers his adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, mindfully adapted into modern language. Matching the Bard line for line, rhyme for rhyme, Whitty illuminates Shakespeare’s meaning for modern audiences while maintaining the play’s storytelling architecture, emotional texture, and freewheeling humor. Designed to supplement, not supplant, the original, Whitty’s Midsummer cuts through the centuries to bring audiences a fresh, moment-by-moment take, designed to flow as effortlessly for modern audiences as Shakespeare’s beloved classic played to the Elizabethans.
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This translation was written as part of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s Play On! project, which commissioned new translations of thirty-nine Shakespeare plays. These translations present the work of "The Bard" in language accessible to modern audiences while never losing the beauty of Shakespeare’s verse. These volumes make these works available for the first time in print—a new First Folio for a new era.

Jeffrey Whitty is a screenwriter, playwright, poet, and performer. In 2018 he received Best Adapted Screenplay honors for Can You Ever Forgive Me? from the Writers Guild of America, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Satellite Press Association, and others, as well as Academy Award and BAFTA nominations.