Much Ado About Nihilo: The poet’s roll in the hay becomes the poet’s role in the haze.

Shakespeare’s reflective observations in A Midsummer Night’s Dream on those who practice the art and craft of poetry is oft-quoted, but – as with much of Shakespeare – deserves to be quoted again:

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. [V. i. 12-17]

The initial imagery – an "eye, in a fine frenzy rolling" – evokes insanity and stupor. The twitching of the eye from earth to heaven and back again buttresses a notion of catatonia, but with just a hint that something more may be involved. Why "from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven"? The prepositional phrases evince a kind of intermediary link between the gods and mortals, as if Mercury – both the messenger of the gods, and the god of thievery – was at work, stealing a bit of heaven and bestowing it upon the spirit-starved denizens of earth. But from there, the lines give way to a kind of excrescence – "forms of things unknown" are "bodie[d] forth" in a way that is reminiscent of a birth. The product – like a babe – is clothed and christened, i.e., given a "local habitation and a name." (We note, too, the coupling of the poet’s "eye" [Elizabethan slang for "vagina"] with the poet’s phallic "pen" results in the conception of the "forms of things," and does nothing to dispel this birthing imagery.)

And at first glance – given the referenced embassy between heaven and earth – the lines appear to bear witness to the metaphorical magic of poetry: a demiurgic creation – the work of a kind of intellectual demigod, conjured from a mix of celestial and terrestrial matter. Anyone but Shakespeare would have reveled in the complete and powerfully apt description of the poet and his art that this first impression imparts. But Shakespeare refused to relegate the lines (or the import and importance of poetry) to such a hybrid realm.

He knew the exposed vulnerability of the Demiurge – a subordinate deity whose creative force derives from, and influences, the material (corruptible) world. Macbeth obliquely invokes the concept early in the "floating dagger" scene in Macbeth when he inquires:

...art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain? [II. i. 27-29]

A "false creation" – a product of an imperfect "god" (Man’s venal ambition) – leads inexorably to self-inflicted torture and death.

Prospero in The Tempest dabbles in a kind of enervating, demiurgic, "rough magic" [V. i. 50] that can even open graves and wake their "sleepers" [V. i. 48-49]. It is a kind of power that impels him in the end, with sad bravado, to resort to resigned renunciation (before, one suspects, his powers in the end overpower him):

...I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book. [V. i. 54-57]

In contrast, Shakespeare has Theseus in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream describe the poet’s ability to give "to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name." This is well-beyond the power of the Demiurge. Indeed, it evokes the power of an omnipotent deity to create from nothing. It is the biblical God who created the world out of nothing, in contravention of Aristotle’s declaration "Ex nihilo nihil fit," (i.e., "nothing comes from nothing"). This apothegm, figuring so prominently in Shakespeare’s King Lear, is at the heart of Shakespeare’s description of the poet’s role. Lear’s Cordelia – a name that means "heart" – embraced the essence of nothingness to expose the corruptibility (in all its senses) of the material world. (Indeed, her spiritual protege, the Fool, like an "airy nothing," simply vanishes midway into the play.) Both Cordelia and the Fool represent love without redemption, a facet to which even Christian Love cannot ascribe, and leads the play (and the audience) to the brink of nihilism. The vast difference between King Lear and Macbeth does not restrain Shakespeare from leading us to the same eschatological terminus, as Macbeth declares with shattering resignation that Life:

...is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. [V. v26-28].

Apart from its philosophical import, the word "nothing" was a loaded term to the Elizabethans. The word was brimming with sexual significance (e.g., Hamlet obscenely tells Ophelia that "nothing" ["no-thing"] lies "between maid’s legs" [III, ii. 119-121]). The numerical symbol for zero played into the word as well, with "nothing" signifying "an-0-thing" ["n-o-thing"]. Moreover, after the Globe theater opened, Shakespeare referred to his playhouse as "this wooden O" (for Globe) in the Prologue of King Henry V and begged his audience to pretend that the stage was a vast kingdom by referring to a "crooked figure" and to "ciphers," (terms that meant "zero(s)" to the Elizabethans):

O pardon, since a crooked figure may
Attest in little place a million,
And let us, ciphers to this great account,
On your imaginary forces work. [Prologue. Chorus. 15-18]

So, when the world’s greatest Poet speaks of the role of a poet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – with Puck reminding us in the Epilogue that the play was not real, but only "a dream" – we might just be able to translate the description of poetry into a prismatic declaration: O, it’s really nothing after all.