SOURCE: Nevo, Ruth. “Fancy's Images.” In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, edited by Harold Bloom, pp. 57-72. New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987.

In the following essay, originally published in 1980, Nevo contends that A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's original inventions—“a complex and witty exploration of the infirmities and frailties and deficiencies and possibilities of the imaginative faculty itself.”

“A Midsummer Night's Dream is best seen,” says G. K. Hunter, “as a lyric divertissement … Shakespeare has lavished his art on the separate excellencies of the different parts, but has not sought to show them growing out of one another in a process analogous to that of symphonic ‘development.’” I would claim, on the contrary, symphonic development of a particularly subtle kind; both itself an impressive achievement in the unifying of complexities, and a distinct conquest in the zig-zag progress towards Shakespeare's comic paradigm. This is...