ABSTRACT
Moments of clear, incontrovertible vision are few, as each of us privately knows too well. What is worse is that the most rare visions are notoriously short-lived, their value, perversely, being inversely proportionate to their duration. This chapter introduces the way in which Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, The Old Wives Tale, the generically anomalous Doctor Faustus, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest, all rationalize the unrealism and improbabilities typical of romantic comedy as miracles wrought by specifically magic intervention. The magicians of romantic comedy, like the dramatists themselves, play endless variations on the theme of the disappearing moment, the continually vanishing scene; they pursue their obsession with illusion. Shakespeare recognizes in similar fashion the inherent instability in dramatic illusions of real time, space, and material presence. The enchanted shows of and within Shakespearean comedy disintegrate into nothingness, and the ruptures of time and space disprove our perceptions of substance and material truths, proving all to be illusions.
