Peter G. Piatt, Barnard College

2. Gent. Is not this strange?
  1.  Gent. Most rare.

At the beginning of act 5 of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta discuss the reports of the lovers from the previous act, and in doing so, they provide an enactment of the two models of wonder that I attributed . . . to Jonson and Daniel. An examination of their speeches will help take us toward an exploration of the Shakespearean marvelous.

Hippolyta begins the discussion by emphasizing the wonder of the stories: "'Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of."¹ Interested in downplaying the strangeness of the claims—and separating them from truth ("More strange than true" [2])—Theseus skeptically links lovers with madmen and poets as people who possess "seething brains" (4) and "shaping fantasies" (5), basing their interpretations of the world on imagination—"of imagination all compact" (8)—and apprehension (5), instead of on "cool reason" and comprehension...