A Midsummer Night’s Dream | Between Fantasy and Reality

In the first excerpt, George A. Bonnard's principal thesis is that the worlds, fantastic and mundane, represented in the play, exist apart from each other, never meeting at any given point. In the second excerpt, Allardyce Nicoll asserts that the play clearly reflects the poet's serious preoccupation with dreams and reality. In the final excerpt, David Richman discusses Shakespeare's effective introduction of wonder into A Midsummer Night's Dream. Language, the critic explains, is instrumental in creating wonderment, and the characters from the supernatural world identify themselves by their peculiar rhetorical devices and speech mannerisms.

George A. Bonnard
[In his discussion of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Bonnard's principal thesis is that the worlds, fantastic and mundane, represented in the play, exist apart from each other, never meeting at any given point. The inhabitants of the fairy world, the critic explains, are indeed ethereal in the sense that they lack true feelings and intelligence. But the dream world, Bonnard argues, although beyond the mortals' comprehension, nevertheless strongly influences the entire realm of ordinary life. Although separated by a veritable social chasm, the Athenian...