A Midsummer Night's Dream: an opera by Benjamin Britten

This is the concert program of A Midsummer Night's Dream by Benjamin Britten, running from Saturday, November 23 to Tuesday November 26, 1996, with November 23, 25, and 26 at 8:00 p.m. and November 24 at 2 p.m., at the Boston university Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

A Midsummer Night's Dream, February 13, 2003

This is the concert program of the Boston University Opera Institute and Boston University Chamber Orchestra performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream with music by Benjamin Britten and libretto by Peter Pears and the composer, running Thursday, February 13 at 7:30 p.m., Friday and Saturday, February 14 and 15 at 8:00 p.m., and Sunday, February 16 at 2:00 p.m., at the Boston University Theatre, 264 Huntington Avenue. Digitization for Boston University Concert Programs was supported by the Boston University Humanities Library Endowed Fund

The Unpardonable Reader

Hawthorne’s prefaces to his romances, though largely ignored as a composite body of work, contain key insights into reading his fiction. Each preface is a sort of instruction manual directed toward the reader. He expects empathy from his readers and openness to his version of magical realism. A study of Hawthorne’s concept of the “Unpardonable Sin” as presented in “Ethan Brand” reveals that these reading instructions warn against a similar crime, that of a cold lack of empathy and tendency toward disbelief. On a much smaller scale, then, it becomes clear that a reader who does not follow Hawthorne’s instructions would be an unpardonable reader. Hawthorne provides examples of these unpardonable readers in three of his tales: “A Christmas Banquet,” “The Devil in the Manuscript,” and “Alice Doane’s Appeal.” Fortunately, in “Alice Doane’s Appeal,” Hawthorne offers an opportunity for redemption. Though unpardonable sinners may be beyond repentance and salvation, unpardonable readers are not

Behind the Stakes, Between the Lines, Beyond the Pun: A Critical Deconstruction of Humor in William Shakespeare\u27s A Midsummer Night\u27s Dream, and Other Popular Comedies

Humor is a powerful rhetorical device employed at all levels of human discourse—from casual banter to political debate. Still, despite humor’s global prevalence, its historical transgressiveness, and its distinct potential both to neutralize and critically engage highly fraught issues, humans do not often pause to ask how humor works. And what does its working tell us about our humanness? This thesis explores the operation of humor in literature and performance, using tools provided by structuralist, deconstructive, and postmodern critical arenas, to reveal how humor’s fundamental structures invite humans to entertain new perspectives and practice empathy. The study considers irony, the performance of stakes, wordplay, departure from form, timing, metatheatrics, and cross-dressing. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (ca. 1595) serves as a key text, but films and television series including Star Wars (20th Century Fox, 1977, 1983), Young Frankenstein (20th Century Fox, 1974), and Doctor Who (BBC,1963- ), are employed among other popular examples to demonstrate diverse types of humor