Lovers and madmen have such seething brains

Bottom and his buddies.

I'm sure I'm not the only one who would love to see Benedict Cumberbatch's Titania and Hugh Laurie's Bottom. And I mean that in exactly the double entendre you're thinking of right now. Too bad my favorite actors aren't always followed around by cameras from the first day they are cast into high school plays. I'd also much rather see what Ben Whishaw would do with Puck than The Tempest's Ariel, but that's another post.

For now, consider Theseus, Duke of Athens, and his dilemma: a bunch of love-sick and drugged-up teenagers from his court get lost in the woods just when the faeries are in the throes of a civil war of the sexes. The kids wake from their stupor and with their fanciful recollection of their "dreams," simply confirm Theseus' worldview that faeries are bullshit. That's the speech I chose--a romantic diatribe about the idiocy of romance. He's such a hipster.


A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Sc. I
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!