Poet and lunatic
Poet and lunatic

Summary/Abstract: In Shakespeare’s most emblematic comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Act V, Scene 1), Theseus declares that: The lunatic, the lover, and the poet Are of imagination all compact goes on to illustrate his thesis as far as the lunatic and the lover are concerned: Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend More than cool reason ever comprehends. 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. and finally finds that the poet fits in nicely, given the “tricks” that “strong imagination” has: The poet’s eye, in 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.

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