Abstract: | Shakespeare’s comedies have, throughout centuries, attracted criticism that ranged from slight contempt for their stylistic impurity to utter admiration for the complexity of their structures. This paper focusses on one of Shakespeare’s best loved early comedies, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in order to study the poetic nature of the play by taking into account some of the rhetorical elements that contribute to the construction of its particular atmosphere. Metamorphosis is explored in the movements of the words up and down scales of meaning operating through inversions, subversions, conversions and reversions that both bewilder and enchant the reader. |
