The Lively Corpse of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Pyramus voices an impossibility: the live experience of being dead: 'Now am I dead,/Now am I fled;/My soul is in the sky'). A few lines later, he is alive again to kill himself again ((Now die, die, die, die, die'). Shortly after, Bottom jettisons his (finally) dead character to bounce up at the suggestion that the Wall also is no longer alive to bury the dead ('the wall is down that parted their fathers. Will it please you to see the epilogue'), Theseus refuses courteously ('No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse'), referring to a standard mock-humility topos in epilogues. .