I'm not ignoring you: I was just busy boiling homemade dog food. Sigh.

On the bright side, Mathilde is sitting up on her chest and barking every time she hears a gunshot. This is the opening week of deer season, so she is hearing many gunshots, a fortunate state of affairs for a convalescent dog who needs a hobby.

And now I am off to copyedit, and perhaps later I will write a brief disquisition about Shakespeare. Apparently that word is defined as "a long or elaborate essay or discussion on a particular subject," but I'll be writing a short one anyway, despite the dictionary's bossy assumptions.

Here's what I'll be writing about. It's from A Midsummer Night's Dream: a

ct 5, scene 1, lines 4–22. Theseus is speaking.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

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 aery nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush suppos’d a bear!