Theseus A Midsummer Night's Dream

The fluidity between slumber and consciousness is a primary theme of William Shakespeare’s play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Through the use of repetitive language, alliteration, mirroring, and enjambment, Shakespeare creates a rolling and audibly appealing monologue with a form that contradicts its statements. In Act V Scene i, Theseus is in disbelief towards the events of the play and compares the lovers’ wild accounts to those of madmen and poets, but his statements paradoxically depict fantasy’s power to charm, encapture, and whisk listeners away from reality. Thus, Shakespeare is able to use Theseus’s stubborn doubt to actually describe the malleability of dreamscapes to his audience. Although Theseus’s monologue begins with him stating that he will never believe the stories the lovers have told him, calling them “antique fables” and “fairy toys” (3), Shakespeare

He states that, “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” (14-17). Once again, the king is making fun of the very process that made him. This creates a sense of unease for those who pick up on the subtle mocking of Theseus, as the malleability of the ‘fourth wall’ between the play and the audience mirrors that of dreams and reality. In a similar vein, the mirroring in the line, “Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven” (13), seems to be claiming that dreams themselves exist between the two planes; additionally, perhaps poets mediate this in-between space, channeling some sort of otherworldly or godly energy in their work. Mirroring can also be found in the lines, “That if it would but apprehend some joy/It comprehends some bringer of that joy” (19-20), which also connects the lovers, poets, and madmen to a god in the