Reality In A Midsummer Night's Dream

4 Pages 937 Words

“More strange than true. I never may believe these antic 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 aery nothing a local habitation and a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination , that if it would but apprehend some joy, it comprehends some bringer of that joy; or in the night, imagining some fear, how easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!” Theseus (5.1.2-22)

In the concluding act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus refers to the madness of love through his discussion of the relationship between lovers, poets, and madmen. Love’s virtue is defined through a common image of sight, which tries to make a distinction between what is rational and what is not in love. Theseus is stressing the point that love is of the imagination; it makes a person see things that are not really there. The passage is extremely visual, allowing the reader to understand Theseus’ point clearly.
The lover, the poet, and the madman are paralleled through the common image of sight to suggest that truth is ultimately subjective, such that each person makes his own truth. The mentally ill hallucinate, lovers see ugly people as beautiful, and poets create an imaginary world to give life to ideas by "giving to aery nothing a local habitation and a name."
After hearing of the events in the woods shared between the young lovers, Theseus feels that the events are “more strange than true,” as they are more bizarre than...