My first thoughts were to offer a more traditional Epilogue, a series of conclusions drawn from the essays here, about art's visionary moment. But then I thought that it might be no less profitable (and responsible) to allow an artist, perhaps THE artist, to say something that would reflect on what the contrib-utors to this collection have said—each in her or his own way, of course. Say it better than I could. Something touching both on that visionary moment and the larger life, the larger implications it admits, something that thrills us at the first encounter but then lasts a lifetime. Besides, I hope the descriptions of the 20 essays, as well as the general commentary in the Introduction, can serve that more traditional purpose of conclusions. For the epilogue that someone would be—no surprise—Shakespeare.

Unlike other playwrights, unlike Ben Jonson or Bertolt Brecht or David Mamet or Tom Stoppard or, for that matter, T. S. Eliot, who inspired this collection, Shakespeare offers no free-standing commentary on his art, on the way a fiction, though a visionary moment, expands from the specific to the general, ensuring art's survival in the “larger whole of experience.” Even his most extensive example of the rehearsal process is reduced to the bumbling actors in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Rather, Shakespeare's “commentary,” such as it is, is embedded in the plays themselves, or extracted by scholars and critics. Embedded, but not free-standing. There is, however, one moment, I think, when he comes especially close to defining how his art functions, the aesthetics of his playwriting as it in turn radiates out to the audience.

In the final scene of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta disagree about the lovers’ story of their night in the forest. Perhaps the four were interrogated as a group, perhaps separately, but the fact is that all their stories agree. On a night marked by fights, sudden onsets of sleep, potions in the eyes, strange sounds and sights, they went into the forest mismatched—two guys chasing one girl, the second girl abandoned—and came out perfectly matched, Lysander with Hermia, Demetrius with Helena.