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Notes

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Inspired by Shakespeare's play 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', the sculpture is the fifth in a series for the Great Garden near New Place, the site of Shakespeare's former home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

Shakespeare's New Place

Stratford-upon-Avon

Title

A Midsummer Night's Dream

Date

c. 2005

Medium

bronze

Accession number

STRST : SBT 2005-9

Acquisition method

gift from the Newington-Cropsey Foundation

Work type

Statue

Signature/marks description

rear base: Greg Wyatt / © 1/3 2005

Inscription description

rear: HIPPOLYTA / 'Tis strange my Theseus, that these / lovers speak of. / THESEUS / More strange than true: I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. / Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, /Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends. / The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact: / One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,/That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic, / Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt: / The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven; / And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things / unknown, the poet's pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name./ Such tricks hath strong imagination, / That if it would but apprehend some joy, / It comprehends some bringer of that joy; / Or in the night, imagining some fear, / How easy is a bush supposed a bear! / HIPPOLYTA / But all the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigured so together/ More witnesseth than fancy's images. / A Midsummer Night’s Dream Act V Scene 1

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