Yet Another One in My Head

The last week or so I wrestled into my brain yet another literary passage--another memorization. As I mentioned here a couple of weeks ago, when Joyce and I saw A Midsummer Night's Dream (for about the gazillionth time) a few weeks ago in Cleveland, I was struck by Theseus' speech near the end when he is talking about "the lunatic, the lover, and the poet" (5.1). It's a famous speech, and I decided, Hey, let's learn that one! (See text below.)

It took a bit. It's twenty-one lines, and, as you certainly would expect, the diction, at times, is a little ... unfamiliar. Odd to our twenty-first century ears are words written for an English audience in the 1590s.

But I did it, and I discovered, doing so, that I understood the speech a lot more than I used to. (At a production, the words sometimes flow over you, leaving loveliness behind--but not always a clear meaning.)

And I realized that the speech has an urgent, contemporary significance. Theseus is talking about facts and fiction. (News and fake news.) Several times here he disdains the false, argues for the true. (Of course, the great irony is that the actor playing Theseus is almost always the same person who, in earlier scenes, plays Oberon, the fairy king! And, of course, playwrights make a living by creating from air something solid.)

In the first few lines, Theseus talks about how "lovers and madmen have such seething brains"--full of fantasy--that they experience things that those endowed with "cool reason" recognize as "fantasy." 

He gives examples. Then in the final lines he returns to the notion. Those prone to fantasize "see"--or invent--things that aren't really there--or confuse one reality for another (a bush for a bear).

His bride-to-be (Hippolyta, the Amazon queen ... ancestor of Wonder Woman?) sees more subtlety and complexity in it--begs to differ a little--but the action swiftly moves on to the "Pyramus and Thisbe" production.

So ... these words are now in my head. Last night--awakening--I was going crazy because I could not remember the word supposed in the final line. I didn't want to turn on the light and look ... I wanted to go back to sleep.  A little square of moonlight, admitted by a crack in the shutter, lay beside me on the floor. I watched to see if Titania and her fairy attendants would arrive in it. And dance for me.

THESEUS (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 5:1)

More strange than true: 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 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.

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 supposed a bear!