Those who believe that the “real meaning” of Shakespeare’s Plays consist in the one instruction, “to thine own self be true”—a principle of behavior distinguishing Iago and Edmund not less, certainly, than Polonius—seem to believe also that the poet’s thought about the art he practised is completely revealed in a few lines spoken by Theseus toward the end of A Midsummer-Night’s Dream:
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.
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