ABSTRACT
In the final act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Duke Theseus muses that “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” (5.1.14–17). Following a night of confusions in love and unexpected transformations, Theseus’s observation connects the embodying capacity of the imagination to the poet’s pen, capable of turning “things unknown” into visible shapes. In the meantime, Theseus’s preference for “cool reason” over the “seething brains” of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet is effectively trumped by Hippolyta’s more empathic response to “the story of the night told over” by the lovers, which she finds “strange and admirable” (5.1.23, 27). In some sense, the very act of adapting Shakespeare for twenty-first-century audiences across a range of genres can be appreciated for its aspiration to re-embody the “forms of things unknown” and give “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.”
