The vast audience laughed heartily at the befuddled language of Bottom, the weaver, and imagined themselves under the like spell of fantastic fairies.
The fifth and last act opens up with Theseus and his Amazonian Queen in the palace, prepared for the nuptial rites, and also the marriage of Lysander and Demetrius to their choice.
Theseus speaking of the strange conduct of lovers, delivers this great bit of philosophy:
"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 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!"
The play of Pyramus and Thisby is then introduced to the palace audience, when Bottom and his Athenian mechanics amuse Theseus and Hippolyta with their crude, rustic conception of love-making.
As the play proceeds Hippolyta remarks:
"This is the silliest stuff that I ever heard."
And Theseus says:
"The best in this kind are but shadows;
And the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them!"