A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of "Henry Purcell"

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⭐ Core Definition: A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy play written by William Shakespeare in about 1595 or 1596. The play is set in Athens, and consists of several subplots that revolve around the marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta. One subplot involves a conflict among four Athenian lovers. Another follows a group of six amateur actors rehearsing the play which they are to perform before the wedding. Both groups find themselves in a forest inhabited by fairies who manipulate the humans and are engaged in their own domestic intrigue. A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most popular and widely performed plays.

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👉 A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Henry Purcell

Henry Purcell (/ˈpɜːrsəl/, rare: /pərˈsɛl/; c. 10 September 1659 – 21 November 1695) was an English composer and organist of the middle Baroque era. He composed more than 100 songs, a tragic opera Dido and Aeneas, and wrote incidental music to a version of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream called The Fairy Queen.

Purcell's musical style was uniquely English, although it incorporated Italian and French elements. Purcell is generally considered to be one of the greatest English composers.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Puck (magazine)

Puck was the first successful humor magazine in the United States of colorful cartoons, caricatures and political satire of the issues of the day. It was founded in 1876 as a German-language publication by Joseph Keppler, an Austrian immigrant cartoonist and Adolph Schwarzmann, a German businessman, co-founder and financial backer. Puck's first English-language edition was published in 1877, covering issues like New York City's Tammany Hall, presidential politics, and social issues of the late 19th century to the early 20th century.

"Puckish" means "childishly mischievous". This led Shakespeare's Puck character (from A Midsummer Night's Dream) to be recast as a charming near-naked boy and used as the title of the magazine. Puck was the first magazine to carry illustrated advertising and the first to successfully adopt full-color lithography printing for a weekly publication.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Patrick Stewart

Sir Patrick Stewart (born 13 July 1940) is an English actor. With a career spanning over seven decades of stage and screen, he has received various accolades, including two Olivier Awards and a Grammy Award, as well as nominations for a Tony Award, three Golden Globe Awards, four Emmy Awards, and three Screen Actors Guild Awards. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for services to drama in 2010.

In 1966, Stewart became a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He made his Broadway theatre debut in 1971 in a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. In 1979, he received the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance in Antony and Cleopatra in the West End. His first television role was in Coronation Street in 1967. His first major screen roles were in Fall of Eagles (1974), I, Claudius (1976) and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (1979). In 2008 he reprised his role as King Claudius in Hamlet and received his second Olivier Award and his first Tony Award nomination for respectively the West End and Broadway theatre productions.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Perigune

In Greek mythology, Perigune (Ancient Greek: Περιγούνη) was the daughter of Sinis. Her name is also spelled Perigouna or Perigone. She is passingly mentioned as Perigenia in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Hobgoblin

A hobgoblin is a household spirit, appearing in English folklore, once considered helpful, but which since the spread of Christianity has often been considered mischievous. Shakespeare identifies the character of Puck in his A Midsummer Night's Dream as a hobgoblin.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Titania (moon)

Titania (/tɪˈtɑːniə, -ˈt-/) is the largest moon of Uranus and the eighth-largest moon in the Solar System, with a diameter of 1,578 km (981 mi). Discovered by William Herschel in 1787, it is named after the queen of the fairies in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Its orbit lies inside Uranus's magnetosphere.

Titania consists of approximately equal amounts of ice and rock, and is probably differentiated into a rocky core and an icy mantle. A layer of liquid water may be present at the core–mantle boundary. Its surface, which is relatively dark and slightly red in color, appears to have been shaped by both impacts and endogenic processes. Although Titania is covered with numerous impact craters reaching up to 326 kilometres (203 mi) in diameter, it is less heavily cratered than Oberon, the outermost of Uranus's five large moons.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Oberon (poem)

Oberon is an epic poem by the German writer Christoph Martin Wieland. It was based on the epic romance Huon de Bordeaux, a French medieval tale, and influenced by Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Alexander Pope's version of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Merchant's Tale. It first appeared in 1780 and went through seven rewrites before its final form was published in 1796.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of The Fairy-Queen

The Fairy-Queen (1692; Purcell catalogue number Z.629) is a semi-opera by Henry Purcell; a "Restoration spectacular". The libretto is an anonymous adaptation of William Shakespeare's comedy A Midsummer Night's Dream. First performed in 1692, The Fairy-Queen was composed three years before Purcell's death at the age of 36. Following his death, the score was lost and only rediscovered early in the twentieth century.

Purcell did not set any of Shakespeare's text to music; instead he composed music for short masques in every act but the first. The play itself was also slightly modernised in keeping with seventeenth-century dramatic conventions, but in the main the spoken text is as Shakespeare wrote it. The masques are related to the play metaphorically, rather than literally. Many critics have stated that they bear no relationship to the play. Recent scholarship has shown that the opera, which ends with a masque featuring Hymen, the God of Marriage, was composed for the fifteenth wedding anniversary of William III and Mary II.

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A Midsummer Night's Dream in the context of Puck (A Midsummer Night's Dream)

Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is a character in William Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Based on the Puck of English mythology and the púca of Celtic mythology, Puck is a mischievous fairy, sprite, or jester. He is the first of the main fairy characters to appear, and he significantly influences events in the play. He delights in pranks such as replacing Nick Bottom's head with that of an ass.

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