SOURCE: Clayton, Tom. “‘So quick bright things come to confusion’: or, What Else was A Midsummer Night's Dream About?”¹ In Shakespeare: Text and Theater, edited by Lois Potter and Arthur F. Kinney, pp. 62-91. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Clayton highlights the brighter, more lighthearted aspects of A Midsummer Night's Dream, emphasizing the civilized and complementary features of the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta and downplaying the bestial connotation in the relationship between the transformed Bottom and Titania.

In the now ancient history of Shakespeare's birth-quatercentenary year of 1964, it would not have been easy to find in the year's publications a pair of perspectives less alike than those of R. W. Dent,

Rather than being a foe to good living, poetic imagination can be its comfort and its guide, far “more yielding” than most dreams. Whether A Midsummer Night's Dream has an unplumbed “bottom...