A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay: The Perspective of Theseus

A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Perspective of Theseus

In his play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare clearly establishes the feelings of Theseus with respect to love and reason.

Theseus distrusts the nature of love and its effect on people as he states in the following passage:

I never may believe these antic fables or 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 a 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 (V, i, 3-22)!

Theseus expresses his doubt in the verisimilitude of the lover's recount of their night in the forest. He says that he has no faith in the ravings of lovers or poets, as they are as likely as madmen are to be divorced from reason. Coming, as it does, after the resolution of the lovers' dilemma, this monologue serves to dismiss most of the play a hallucinatory imaginings. Theseus is the voice of reason and authority, but he bows ...

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...rs” (V, I, 28-30! Instead of “Go and fresh days of love accompany your hearts!” (V, I, 28-30)

2. Your first paragraph seems to be your first point instead of your introduction. Your first sentence also appears to be your thesis statement. Your introduction should incorporate all of the points of your paper. You are introducing all of them. So, lengthen your introduction and then for your thesis statement you need to list all of the points that you discuss. In his play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare clearly establishes the feelings of Theseus with respect to love, reason.

3. When quoting lengthy passages from a Shakespearean play or a poem, you should keep the line formation. Begin a new line when the author of the passage begins a new line.