Discovering G.K. Chesterton

[Deirdre Towers]

Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a British writer whose criticism holds up over time. His depiction of "A Midsummer's Dream" reveals such a fresh perspective with an acute sense of how Shakespeare "catches the atmosphere of a dream. The personalities are well known to everyone who has dreamt of perpetually falling over precipices or perpetually missing trains. ... The author contrives to include every one of the main peculiarities of the exasperating dream. Here is

 

the pursuit of the man we cannot catch,

the flight from the man we cannot see,

here is the perpetual returning to the same place,

here is the crazy alteration in the very objects of our desire,

the substitution of one face for another face,

the putting of the wrong souls in the wrong bodies,

 

the fantastic disloyalties of the night, all this is as obvious as it important."

 

Chesterton continues "But yet by the spreading of an atmosphere as magic as the fog of Puck, Shakespeare contrives to make the whole matter mysteriously hilarious while it is palpably tragic, and mysteriously charitable, while it is in itself cynical. He contrives somehow to rob tragedy and treachery of their full sharpness, just as a toothache or a deadly danger from a tiger, or a precipice is robbed of its sharpness in a pleasant dream."

 

He writes of "the mysticism of happiness." ... " We cannot have a midsummer night's dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the black coffee of criticism."

 

Thank you GK!