Anderson imagines a parallel world where Shakespeare is the "Great Historian" - every word the Bard wrote is true. I imagine Anderson had a lot of fun cataloging the anachronisms in the plays to come up with a slightly-technologically-advanced world during the English Civil War. The title indicates which of Shakespeare's plays are most influential on the plot, though, and it's great fun for the reader throughout. Of course, it is excessively romantic, as are most of Anderson's works.

One thing I especially enjoy is Anderson's use of unrhymed iambic pentameter dialogue throughout the book. ( )

The central conceit of this book is unusual - what if every word Shakespeare ever wrote was actually true?

That isn't just about the characters like the Fairies in 'Midsummer Night's Dream' or Lear (who of course, was not a historical personage) being real. It's also about the anomaly that the historical plays - going all the way back to Julius Caesar - are written from the viewpoint and with the knowledge of an Elizabethan gentleman. The concept of 'history' showing us a time when thought and things were different to the way they are in our present didn't come along for a couple of hundred years after Shakespeare's time; up until then, it was accepted wisdom that everything in the past had been the way things were in the present.

So in 'A Midsummer Tempest', Anderson takes us to the English Civil War, some 50 years after Shakespeare's time, but in a different world. England has harnessed steam power and there are other technological and social differences. But the war is fought not only on the political front, but also on a spiritual one as the conflict becomes one for the spirit of the land itself; a concept invoking some of the ideas that would emerge in Hobbes' 'Leviathan' , itself some years into the future.

Just for good measure, Anderson throws in some cross-dimensional visitors from other realms of Story, to show how real unreal worlds can sometimes seem. ( )