Here, more than anywhere else, he is the mouthpiece of the poet's irony. Shakespeare is far from regarding love as an expression of human reason; throughout his works, indeed, it is only by way of exception that he makes reason the determining factor in human conduct. He early felt and divined how much wider is the domain of the unconscious than of the conscious life, and saw that our moods and passions have their root in the unconscious. The germs of a whole philosophy of life are latent in the wayward love-scenes of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
And it is now that Shakespeare, on the farther limit of early youth, and immediately after writing A Midsummer Night's Dream, for the second time takes the most potent of youthful emotions as his theme, and treats it no longer as a thing of fantasy, but as a matter of the deadliest moment, as a glowing, entrancing, and annihilating passion, the source of bliss and agony, of life and death. It is now that he writes his first independent tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, that unique, imperishable love-poem, which remains to this day one of the loftiest summits of the world's literature. As A Midsummer Night's Dream is the triumph of grace, so Romeo and Juliet is the apotheosis of pure passion.
[1] N. J. Halpin: Oberon's Vision in the Midsummer Night's Dream, illustrated by a Comparison with Lylie's Endymion, 1842.
[2] New Shakspere Society's Transactions, 1880-86, p. 67.
[3] The passage in The Maydes Metamorphosis runs as follows:—
"Mopso. I pray you, what might I call you?
1st Fairy. My name is Penny.
Mopso. I am sorry I cannot purse you.
Frisco. I pray you, sir, what might I call you?
2nd Fairy. My name is Cricket.
Frisco. I would I were a chimney for your sake."
[4] The passion for alliteration in his contemporaries is satirised in these lines of the prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe:—
"Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast."