Theseus
Play
Summary
Theseus is the Duke of Athens, a figure of rational civic authority who frames the entire play with his impending marriage to Hippolyta. He opens the action by upholding the strict Athenian law that Hermia must obey her father or face death or the nunnery, and he closes it by overriding that same law benevolently to allow the lovers to pair as they have done. His famous speech on the imagination — lumping poets with lovers and lunatics — is one of the great skeptical statements about fiction's truth in all of Shakespeare.
Notable Quotations
"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact." *(V.i)*
"I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys." *(V.i)*
"More strange than true." *(V.i)*
Cross-references
- A Midsummer Night's Dream — the play
- Comedies — genre
- character_hermia — the young woman whose romantic autonomy he initially constrains
- character_oberon — the fairy king whose parallel authority governs the supernatural world