SOURCE: Plasse, Marie A. “The Human Body as Performance Medium in Shakespeare: Some Theoretical Suggestions from A Midsummer Night's Dream.” College Literature 19, no. 1 (February 1992): 28-47.

In the following essay, Plasse discusses the human body as a performance medium that conveys the various themes expressed in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

It seemed to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape. But dearly do we pay all our life afterwards for this juvenile pleasure, this sense of distinctness. When the novelty is past, we find to our cost that, instead of realizing an idea, we have only materialized and brought down a fine vision to the standard of flesh and blood. We have to let go a dream, in quest of an unattainable substance.

Lamb (23-24)

Like much of the anti-theatrical criticism of Shakespearean productions in the nineteenth century, these remarks by Charles Lamb offer, under...