Pyramus and Thisbe

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Excerpt from Pyramus and Thisbe: The Burlesque Scenes From Shakespeare's Mildsummer Night's Dream, Arranged in Two Acts, With Full Stage Directions and Suggestions Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream occupies a position absolutely unique in dramatic literature. It is altogether original and embodies one of the most beautiful conceptions that ever visited the mind of a poet. It is, as its name implies, a phantasmagory, a mask of shadows, full of marvels, surprises, splendor and grotesqueness. It is an intricate tangle of love stories, supported on the one side by the exquisite fancies of fairy life, on the other side by the broadest farce of the clowns and their unconscious burlesque of Pyramus and Thisbe. Shakespeare has created out of "airy nothing" the delicate gossamer of a fairy world and peopled it with the phantoms of his marvelous imagination. He has accomplished this feat, not by external effects, but by the wonderful imagery of his verse, he appeals to the mind's eye rather than to the eye of sense, and he depends upon the co-operation of the spectator for the success of his fairy scenes. In direct contrast to the poet's own method, he sets forth that of Bottom and the rude Athenian mechanicals, who propose to celebrate the Duke's nuptials with an interlude. They are determined to leave nothing to be supplied by the imagination. Wall must be plastered, Moonshine must carry lantern and bush of thorns, every detail must be carried out with absolute literalness. The result is a burlesque, worthy of Shakespeare's genius. It is a keen but kindly satire upon the expedients of the Elizabethan stage and its humor is none the less enjoyable because the authors of it are so entirely unconscious of their own absurdity. In separating the burlesque scenes from the fairy scenes, an effort has been made to do as little violence to the text of Shakespeare as possible. The first act, "The Rehearsal, " is made up of several short scenes. The connective passages have necessarily been altered and a few passages added to preserve the sense of the original. With the exception of the transposition of two short speeches in the second act, no further changes have been made. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.