Margaret Fuller’s Reading Worlds

WorkWilliam Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream (c. 1595?96), Act II, Scene 1, line 175 (Puck's speech) Inferred

William Shakespeare (1564–1616) · c. 1595-96; First Folio, 1623

InferredFuller quotes directly from Shakespeare's *A Midsummer Night's Dream*, Act V, scene i, where Theseus describes the poet's imagination: "The poet's pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name." She weaves the phrase "give a local habitation and a name" verbatim into her own sentence without attribution, employing one of Shakespeare's most famous observations on poetic imagination. Hudspeth identified the source. This is a near-verbatim quotation from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1, line 175, where Puck states, "I'll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes." Fuller employs this quotation to discuss the dichotomy between intellectual breadth and emotional grounding, contrasting Ariel-like transcendence with personal attachments.

QuotedRead

Letters • Books • Manuscripts

Selected engagements, in chronological order.

Totals count documented engagements, once at the earliest witness. How we count →

Reprints, Memoirs passages, and repeat notes within a single manuscript are shown but never counted twice. Evidence for this work is selective, not exhaustive. Methodology →

When Fuller engaged with this work

No datable encounters with Shakespeare, William have been catalogued yet.

Undated

Pieces with no legible date. They are part of the record but cannot be placed on the lifeline.

n.d.—

Letter to Unknown

p145
quoted · read
“she rather dreads being with me, because I make her too conscious.”

Fuller, Margaret. The Letters of Margaret Fuller. Edited by Robert N. Hudspeth. Vol. VI. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Fuller quotes directly from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, scene i, where Theseus describes the poet's imagination: "The poet's pen / Turns them to shapes, and gives to aery nothing / A local habitation and a name." She weaves the phrase "give a local habitation and a name" verbatim into her own sentence without attribution, employing one of Shakespeare's most famous observations on poetic imagination. Hudspeth identified the source.

n.d.—

Moonlight

p4
quoted · readManuscript page
“he is more than any other of imagination all compact”

Fuller, Margaret. "Moonlight." Houghton Library, Harvard University.

Inferred The phrase 'of imagination all compact' is a verbatim borrowing from Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene 1, lines 7–8 (Theseus): 'The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.' Fuller applies the phrase to Raphael without naming Shakespeare, using it as a recognized literary touchstone for supreme imaginative endowment.

n.d.—

Life Without and Life Within (1860) ? first publication, Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860, 1860

“Fragmentary Thoughts from Margaret Fuller's Journal”
quoted · read
“from 'putting a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes,”

Fuller, Margaret. Life Without and Life Within; or, Reviews, Narratives, Essays, and Poems. Edited by Arthur B. Fuller. Boston: Brown, Taggard and Chase, 1860. · p351

Inferred This is a near-verbatim quotation from William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Scene 1, line 175, where Puck states, "I'll put a girdle round about the earth / In forty minutes." Fuller employs this quotation to discuss the dichotomy between intellectual breadth and emotional grounding, contrasting Ariel-like transcendence with personal attachments.