ABSTRACT
A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages a poetic and epistemic mapping, or remapping, of knowledge according to the “accidental” law of eros, in the context of a dramatic narrative that not only problematises conventional conceptions of locality and their relationship to identity but also puts into question the empirical, predominantly rational, thought processes and models of identity that normally shape or inform our relationship to place. The comedy invites us to laugh at the folly of those who fall into the mental state which is romantic love; at the same time, however, it suggests that the lovers’ errors or phantasies, which are symptoms of their forgetting of a dominant civic – collectively legitimated – form of knowledge, are paradoxical signs of an alternative form of knowing. This other knowledge – marginalised, imperfect, but still significant – is identified in the accounts of the two Athenians, Demetrius and Bottom, who both, in different ways, remain enchanted with a fragmentary or dream-like form of memory, to which a heightened sense of physical location, or of dislocation in space, is seemingly of primary importance.
