故事发生在仲夏夜晚，莱散特、第米屈律斯同时爱上了黑美霞，而黑美霞喜欢莱散特，她的好友海冷娜喜欢第米屈律斯。黑美霞为反对包办婚姻，与情人私奔，海冷娜和第米屈律斯也赶来，四人来到森林里。林中，仙王与仙后反目，仙王为了报复，小精灵把魔汁点错了，由此引发了四个情人间的纷争……

《莎士比亚戏剧选(插图本)》内容简介：莎士比亚的戏剧，大部分都是根据旧剧本、编年史与小说故事创作的，在创作中注入了自己的先进理想，给旧的题材以丰富而深刻的内容，赋予它们新的生命，从内容到形式都进行了创新。莎士比亚是无与伦比的戏剧结构大师，他的剧本固然有悲、喜剧之分，但在创作实际中又打破了悲、喜剧的界限，不受严格的传统体裁划分的限制，从而展现出更丰富饱满的人性和人物的精神世界。他善于描写几条相互平行交错的线索，来促进生动复杂的情节发展。写作技巧上则表现出一种奇妙的戏剧紧迫感，逐渐加快的情节发展的节奏，往往有一种气呵成的神来之笔，令观众惊叹不已。

《终成眷属》讲述了出身微贱但机智、勇敢的姑娘海伦娜，用巧妙的手段，一步一步接近目标，最后俘获了意中人青年伯爵伯特兰的心，终于如愿以偿地和他结成眷属的故事。《终成眷属》在海伦娜逐步实现爱情梦想这条主线以外，也描绘了宫廷和贵族生活、战争等社会画卷，塑造了一些性格鲜明的人物形象，探讨了爱情、婚姻、荣誉等重大主题。情节紧张生动，语言诙谐风趣，引人入胜。

“One man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages.” In this illuminating, innovative biography, Jonathan Bate, one of today’s most accomplished Shakespearean scholars, has found a fascinating new way to tell the story of the great dramatist. Using the Bard’s own immortal list of a man’s seven ages in As You Like It , Bate deduces the crucial events of Shakespeare’s life and connects them to his world and work as never before. Here is the author as an infant, born into a world of plague and syphillis, diseases with which he became closely familiar; as a schoolboy, a position he portrayed in The Merry Wives of Windsor , in which a clever, cheeky lad named William learns Latin grammar; as a lover, married at eighteen to an older woman already pregnant, perhaps presaging Bassanio, who in The Merchant of Venice won a wife who could save him from financial ruin. Here, too, is Shakespeare as a soldier, writing Henry the Fifth’s St. Crispin’s Day speech, with a nod to his own monarch Elizabeth I’s passionate addresses; as a justice, revealing his possible legal training in his precise use of the law in plays from Hamlet to Macbeth ; and as a pantaloon, an early retiree because of, Bate postulates, either illness or a scandal. Finally, Shakespeare enters oblivion, with sonnets that suggest he actively sought immortality through his art and secretly helped shape his posthumous image more than anyone ever knew. Equal parts masterly detective story, brilliant literary analysis, and insightful world history, Soul of the Age is more than a superb new recounting of Shakespeare’s experiences; it is a bold and entertaining work of scholarship and speculation, one that shifts from past to present, reality to the imagination, to reveal how this unsurpassed artist came to be. From the Hardcover edition.

Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's four great tragedies, encompassing witchcraft, bloody murder, ghostly apparitions as well as high poetry, blended in such a way as to demonstrate the assured dramatic touch of Shakespeare's maturity. Macbeth's tragedy is that of a good, brave and honourable man turned into the personification of evil by the workings of unreasonable ambition. It was a lesson lost on King James I & VI, for whom the play was written.

Taking the classical view that the political shapes man's consciousness, Allan Bloom considers Shakespeare as a profoundly political Renaissance dramatist. He aims to recover Shakespeare's ideas and beliefs, and to make his work once again a recognized source for the serious study of moral and political problems. In essays looking at "Julius Caesar", "Othello", and "The Merchant of Venice" Bloom shows how Shakespeare presents a picture of man that does not assume privileged access for only literary criticism. With this claim, he argues that political philosophy offers a comprehensive framework within which the which the problems of the Shakespearean heroes can be viewed. In short, he argues that Shakespeare was an eminently political author.