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The Dream\'s comedy of language attains its peak of extravagance in \"Pyramus.\" One favourite effect is continued from the play proper: the misassignment of sense-experience--Pyramus sees a voice, hopes to hear his Thisby\'s face, and bids his tongue lose its light. In the rehearsal-scene he is supposed to have gone \"but to see a noise that he heard,\" and the effect has been taken to its highest point in Bottom\'s garbling of St. Paul: \"The eye of man hath not heard....\" That parody would not have been possible in anything but comic prose; and prose, as is normal in Shakespeare, is the vehicle for the scenes of plebeian comedy. Bottom\'s adherence to it in fairyland, while Titania speaks verse, adds to the characterization and the comic effect, emphasizing how unshakeably he remains himself, and how out of touch, inhabiting still their disparate worlds, they are with each other.
-Harold F. Brooks, Introduction to Arden,
A Midsummer Night\'s Dream, 1979
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