such plays as The Taming of the Shrew and Richard III, was capable of a very different kind of dramatic speech, altogether tougher and leaner, but in A Midsummer Night’s Dream he gave full scope to what is, to borrow one of the adjectives he uses here, luscious poetry. Among Shakespeare’s plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of the very few for which scholars have never located a dominant literary source; its vision of moonlit, fairy-haunted woods evidently sprang from more idiosyncratic and personal imaginative roots.
