SOURCE: "'Discordia Concors': On the Order of A Midsummer Night's Dream," in Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 1, March, 1987, pp. 20-41.

In the following essay, Brown explores the relationship between the themes of imagination and love in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and argues that the play is allegorical rather than mimetic in its emphasis on the importance of love as means of knowing a higher truth.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is concerned with marriage, relations between the sexes, creativity and imagination, fancy, and love. The themes of love and imagination are so pervasive in the play that their relation has seemed almost too obvious to merit analysis. Recent readings have tended to focus either on the theme of love and marriage (sometimes "sexual politics") or on the theme of imagination, but not on the link between the two.¹ This essay will explore the connection between love and mental activity...