The lively corpse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Sullivan, Ceri ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1698-7404 2021. The lively corpse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Notes and Queries 68 (1) , p95. 10.1093/notesj/gjab015

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Abstract

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Pyramus voices an impossibility: the live experience of being dead: ‘Now am I dead,/Now am I fled;/My soul is in the sky’). A few lines later, he is alive again to kill himself again (‘Now die, die, die, die, die’). Shortly after, Bottom jettisons his (finally) dead character to bounce up at the suggestion that the Wall also is no longer alive to bury the dead (‘the wall is down that parted their fathers. Will it please you to see the epilogue’), Theseus refuses courteously (‘No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse’), referring to a standard mock-humility topos in epilogues.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
ISSN:	0029-3970
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	24 July 2020
Date of Acceptance:	23 July 2020
Last Modified:	06 Nov 2023 16:33
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/133692

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