May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night
May Games and Metamorphoses on a Midsummer Night
This chapter examines Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. It argues that the whole night's action is presented as a release of shaping fantasy which brings clarification about the tricks of strong imagination. We watch a dream; but we are awake, thanks to pervasive humor about the tendency to take fantasy literally, whether in love, in superstition, or in Bottom's mechanical dramatics. As in Love's Labour's Lost, the folly of wit becomes the generalized comic subject in the course of an astonishing release of witty invention, so here in the course of a more inclusive release of imagination, the folly of fantasy becomes the general subject, echoed back and forth between the strains of the play's imitative counterpoint.
Keywords: Shakespeare, comedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, fantasy, imagination
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