Green plots, hawthorn brakes, and an ass’s nole: Imaginative translation in <i>A Midsummer Night's Dream</i>

This article contests the notion that in early modern performance, metatheatre operated to limit the claims made by stage illusion by examining a scene that foregrounds the notion of metatheatrical representation, the artisans’ forest rehearsal in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. I demonstrate that the metatheatrical effects of the scene are only fully triggered when the audience commit to an imaginative translation of the actual stage conditions into the illusions of the play's fictions, and I argue that the theatrical management given to Bottom's magical metamorphosis operates self-reflectively to remark this arrangement.