Roberts and Jacobs claim that “the stuff of comedy. . . . [is] fueled by misunderstanding, mistaken identity, misdirection, misinformed speech, errors in judgement, faults in intelligence, excessive or unreasonable behavior, and coincidences that stretch credulity” (1110). In Act 5, scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus tells us that

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 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! (Act 5, Scene 1, lines 4-23)

Repeatedly, the characters in the play talk about the world of dream. In the epilogue, Puck suggests that if the viewers are offended by the play, they should treat the play as “No more yielding but a dream.”

What role does imagination play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? How do emotion, imagination, and fantasy affect how the characters in the play perceive their world, and what effect do emotion, imagination, and fantasy have on how they treat each other?

Write an essay of approximately 500 words in which you provide evidence to respond to the following essay question. Your introduction should introduce the central idea of your thesis statement. Keep the introduction brief, no more than three or four sentences. The topic sentences of the body of your essay should be arguments in support of the thesis. The body paragraphs should explain how evidence drawn from the story supports the statements you are making (topic sentences) in support of the thesis. You will be graded on how clearly and thoroughly you respond to the thesis statement in language that is appropriate to a literary discussion and grammatically correct.

Primary Source

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Requirements