SOURCE: "Nightingales That Roar: The Language of A Midsummer Night's Dream," in Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by David G. Allen and Robert A. White, University of Delaware Press, 1990, pp. 137-49.

In the following excerpt, Halio examines how "verbal inconsistencies" in A Midsummer Night's Dream complicate and subvert the play's comic tone by providing continual reminders of the fragility of its harmonious resolution.

In an essay called "On the Value of Hamlet" [in Reinterpretations of Elizabethan Drama, 1969], Stephen Booth has shown how that play simultaneously frustrates and fulfills audience expectations and otherwise presents contradictions that belie or bedevil the attempts of many a reductionist critic to demonstrate a coherent thematic pattern in Shakespeare's masterpiece. Booth's commentary is particularly directed to the language and action of act 1 which, from the very outset, arouse in the audience a "sensation of...