ABSTRACT
A Midsummer Night's Dream defies audience's auguries about its ending because the element of surprise pervades the play. The promised end recedes from our field of vision, as the surprise-principle of ending becomes immanent rather than imminent. This chapter undertakes to describe the surprises and twists in the play's progress and then to define the precise role of fairy magic in creating those upsets. Close reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests, however, that simple identification of the two does not do justice to Shakespeare's more complex achievement. The chapter examines the extent to which the fairy magicians are Shakespeare's agents of change, the medium through which he figures and disfigures temporal and spatial "reality." It discusses the magicians' influence on temporal and spatial progress with an attempt to locate the limits of their power, the points at which time and space begin to control them; their magic power has virtually dissolved by the ending.
