William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream by Bruce Coville

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream by Bruce Coville

One of the most beloved radio show hosts of the 1940s and 1950s, Mary Margaret McBride (1899--1976) regularly attracted between six and eight million listeners to her daily one o'clock broadcast. During her twenty years on the air she interviewed tens of thousands of people, from President Harry Truman and Frank Lloyd Wright to Rachel Carson and Zora Neale Hurston. This is her story.

Five decades after their broadcast, her shows remain remarkably fresh and interesting. And yet McBride--the Oprah Winfrey of her day--has been practically forgotten, both in radio history and in the history of twentieth-century popular culture, primarily because she was a woman and because she was on daytime radio.

Susan Ware explains how Mary Margaret McBride was one of the first to exploit the cultural and political importance of talk radio, pioneering the magazine-style format that many talk shows still use. This radio biography recreates the world of daytime radio from the 1930s through the 1950s, confirming the enormous significance of radio to everyday life, especially for women.

In the first in-depth treatment of McBride, Ware starts with a description of how widely McBride was revered in the mid-1940s--the fifteenth anniversary party for her show in 1949 filled Yankee Stadium. Once the readers have gotten to know Mary Margaret (as everyone called her), Ware backtracks to tell the story of McBride's upbringing, her early career, and how she got her start in radio. The latter part of the book picks up McBride's story after World War I and through her death in 1976. An epilogue discusses the contemporary talk show phenomenon with a look back to Mary Margaret McBride's early influence on the format.

David Bevington is the Phyllis Fay Horton Distinguished Service Professor in the Humanities at the University of Chicago. A renowned text scholar, he has edited several Shakespeare editions including the Bantam Shakespeare in individual paperback volumes, The Complete Works of Shakespeare, (Longman, 2003), and Troilus and Cressida (Arden, 1998). He teaches courses in Shakespeare, Renaissance Drama, and Medieval Drama.

Barbara Gaines is the founder and Artistic Director of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. She has directed over 25 productions at Chicago Shakespeare, and she serves on the artistic directorate of
Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London as well as on Northwestern University's Board of Trustees.

Peter Holland is the McMeel Family Chair in Shakespeare Studies at the University of Notre Dame. One of the central figures in performance-oriented Shakespeare criticism, he has also edited many
Shakespeare plays, including A Midsummer Night's Dream for the Oxford Shakespeare series. He is also general editor of Shakespeare Survey and co-general editor (with Stanley Wells) of Oxford Shakespeare Topics.

Contributors:

Professor Douglas Lanier - Douglas Lanier is an Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. His publications include Shakescorp Noir in Shakespeare Quarterly 53.2 (Summer 2002) and Nostalgia and Theatricality in Shakespeare the Movie II (eds. Richard Burt and Lynda Boose, Routledge, 2003), and the book, Shakespeare and Modern Popular Culture (Oxford University Press, 2002).

Professor Jill Levenson - Jill L. Levenson is a Professor of English at Trinity College at the University of Toronto. She has written and edited numerous essays and books including Romeo and Juliet for the Manchester University Press's series Shakespeare in Performance (1987), Shakespeare and the Twentieth Century (with Jonathan Bate and Dieter Mehl), and the Oxford edition of Romeo and Juliet (2000). Currently she is writing a book on Shakespeare and modern drama for Shakespeare Topics, a series published by Oxford University Press.

Professor Lois Potter - Lois Potter is Ned B. Allen Professor of English at the University of Delaware. She has also taught in England, France, and Japan, attending and reviewing as many plays as possible. Her publications include the Arden edition of The Two Noble Kinsmen and Othello for the Manchester University Press's series Shakespeare in Performance.

Ms. Janet Suzman - Janet Suzman was trained at LAMDA and is an honorary associate artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Her work there has included The Wars of the Roses, As You Like It, The Taming of the Shrew, Much Ado About Nothing, Love's Labour's Lost, and The Merchant of Venice. She has been awarded numerous honorary degrees and was nominated for an Academy Award in 1971 for her performance in Nicholas and Alexandra. Her acclaimed 1990 direction of Othello in Johannesburg, South Africa is considered to be one of the most powerful productions of the play.

Mr. Andrew Wade - Andrew Wade was Head of Voice for the Royal Shakespeare Company, 1990 - 2003 and Voice Assistant Director from 1987-1990. During this time he worked on 170 productions and with more than 80 directors. Along with Cicely Berry, Andrew recorded Working Shakespeare, the DVD series on Voice and Shakespeare, and he was the verse consultant for the movie Shakespeare In Love. In 2000, he won a Bronze Award from the New York International Radio Festival for the series Lifespan, which he co-directed and devised. He works widely teaching, lecturing and coaching throughout the world.

Marie Macaisa is a lifelong fan of Shakespeare who has seen at least one theatrical production of nearly all his plays (she's waiting for Henry VIII). Her first career, lasting 20 years, was in high tech; she has a B.S. in Computer Science from MIT and a M.S. in Artificial Intelligence from the University of Pennsylvania. For the last two years, she has devoted herself to the Sourcebooks Shakespeare Experience.

Dominique Raccah is founder, president and publisher of Sourcebooks. Born in Paris, France, she has a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's in quantitative psychology from the University of Illinois. She also serves as series editor of Poetry Speaks and Poetry Speaks to Children.