THESEUS        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 a 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.         (5.1.7-17)

Theseus gets this little aria—this beautiful disquisition on the nature of love, art, and madness—both as a set-piece and, perhaps, to give just a bit more time for everyone else to get ready, especially if there’s been a costume change for the lovers. (And it underscores that he, too, has perhaps been transformed at least a bit from the warrior hero turned legalistic ruler of the opening scene. He has the soul of a poet!) The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact. They’re all the same, and they’re all creatures of imagination—and they’re all at least a bit mad, is also the implication. They SEE things. One sees more devils than vast hell can hold: that is the madman. He’s possessed, he sees terrible things, he’s paranoid, delusional. The lover, all as frantic—every bit as mad—sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. The racialised language is of its time, and now offensive, but Theseus’s larger point is a straightforward one: the lover thinks that the person that they love is the most beautiful person in the world, no contest. (One wonders if this collocation of devils and Helen of Troy is a glance at Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, with its devils and its simulacrum of Helen, whose face launched a thousand ships, enchanting Faustus, in the repertory of the Admiral’s Men at exactly this time? Mad Marlowe, dead in 1593.) And the poet, well, he’s even worse. His eye, in a fine frenzy rolling—poets, they’re MAD, divinely inspired, or worse—doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven—up and down, yes, but also encompassing the whole of creation, things seen and unseen. Poets SEE things. (Poets get more words than lovers or madmen, too.) And as imagination bodies forth the forms of things unknown—things are generated, brought into being, as if being born, by the imagination, things that have never been thought before, let alone seen—the poet’s pen turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing a local habitation and a name. The quill, that once-flying thing, captures life, gives life, makes life. Poets write worlds into being, give breath form, find (literally invent) the words, make impossible things real.