Titania:I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again:Mine ear is much enamourd of thy note;So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;And thy fair virtues force perforce doth move meOn the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

In this passage, Titania is professing her love for the donkey-headed Bottom the weaver, and Bottom seems to be rejecting her. TItania loves Bottom, because the spell Puck laid on her made her fall in love with the first person she saw, in this case Bottom. As with Lysander, Titania tries to say she is using reason to love Bottom, and Bottom jokingly replies that reason and love dont go together. Although Bottom means it as a joke, and this is an overall comedic scene, Bottoms words do ring true in the context of the play, and real life as well. Many people rush into love without thinking about the consequences, such as Romeo and Juliet, from the play we read before this. This is a common theme in Shakespeare that occurs over and over. I think he is trying to make us see how emotion, especially love, makes us act irrationally. So although Titania is under the influence of the spell, she is right when she says Bottom is wise, because in this instance he is being wise and breaking his usual joking and clueless persona to show a wiser side that we havent seen in any of the Mechanicals.

Theseus:The lunatic, the lover and the poetAre of imagination all compact:One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,Sees Helens beauty in a brow of Egypt:The poets eye, in fine frenzy rolling,Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;And as imagination bodies forthThe forms of things unknown, the poets penTurns them to shapes and gives to airy nothingA local habitation and a name.If one wished to describe the judgment which informsA Midsummer Nights Dream, one might do so very simply: the play suggests that lovers, like lunatics, poets, and actors, have their own truth which is established as they see the beauty of their beloved, and that they are confident in this truth for, although it seems the silliest stuff to an outsider, to them it is quite reasonable; it also suggests that lovers, like actors, need, and sometimes ask for, our belief, and that this belief can only be given if we have the generosity and imagination to think no worse of them than they of themselves.Theseus:A tedious brief scene of young PyramusAnd his love Thisbe. Very tragical mirth.Merry and tragical? Tedious and brief?That is hot ice and wondrous strange snow.How shall we find the concord of this discord?

The lovers enter, andTheseusasks them what entertainment they'd like to see that night.Philostratebrings forward a list of the possibilities. Theseus is interested by a "tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe, very tragical mirth" ,and wants to know how a play can be so contradictory. Philostrate replies that the play is "tedious brief" because it's the shortest play he's every seen but still too long. It's "tragical mirth" because at the end of the play, when Pyramus kills himself, Philostrate cried, but only because he was laughing so hard.