ABSTRACT
The ruling metaphor of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the marriage of the Reason and the Imagination. The rationalistic Theseus, Duke of Athens, insists that the imagination does nothing but delude ‘cool reason’. He derides the poet whose imagination ‘bodies forth the forms of things unknown’ and gives ‘to airy nothing a local habitation and a name’. For him the magical events of Midsummer’s Eve are ‘more strange than true’. Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, disagrees:
But all the story of the night told over, And all their minds transfigur’d so together, More witnesseth than fancy’s images, And grows to something of great constancy; But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
