I never may believe These antique fables, nor 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.
These are the words of Duke Theseus near the end of Shakespeare’s luminous and enchanting play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Theseus’s speech invokes some of the play’s central issues, principally about the nature of love, which can seem at times like unreasonable madness, full of change and impermanence.As literature professor Dennis Quinn has pointed out that there’s a wonderful, playful irony in this speech: Theseus complains of antique fables and the nothingness of poetry, yet he is himself a character from myth who speaks these lines and in gorgeous verse! Through this irony, Shakespeare suggests that love is something more complicated than simply a form of “madness” that’s foreign to “cool reason.”
