A Midsummer Night's Dream

The Imagination of Shakespeare

More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor the 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.
Once 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.

The play and film A Midsummer Night’s Dream illustrates many different themes running throughout the story. The prominent theme seems to be that if you do something for the sake of love, things will work out for the best in the end. Another theme was that imaginatio...