Session 38 Notes

  B. Bottom collapses the distinction between theatre and reality

“… I never may believe / These antique fables nor these fairy toys. / Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends. / The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact. / One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: / That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic, / Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. / The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven, / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.1.2-17)

“I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was – there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had – But man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballet of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of our play, before the duke. Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.” (IV.1.203-217)