SOURCE: “The Changeling in A Dream,” in Studies in English Literature, Vol. 28, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 259-72.

[In the following essay, Slights contends that the changeling boy reflects the irresolution and indeterminancy of A Midsummer Night's Dream.]

Midway through the first scene of Act II in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Oberon, King of the Fairies, begs “a little changeling boy” of Titania. She responds, “The fairy land buys not the child of me” (II.i.120, 122), and from this exchange—or non-exchange—follows a highly determined though minimally textualized custody battle.¹ After a great deal has been done and said about the nature of love and marriage, and a quantity of flower juice has been squirted about, Oberon again “ask[s] of her her changeling child,” and “straight” Titania gives it to him (IV.i.59-60), not because the snaky scales of feminine insubordination have fallen from her eyes, but because Oberon has caused her to become infatuated with a very funny-looking local weaver who is also not her husband. The quarrel over the changeling boy is powerful but also peripheral, erratically described, and never properly resolved. These and similar anomalies in Shakespeare's treatment of the changeling boy make it difficult to see how the other characters, followed by a group of usually reliable critics, can say with such fierce (over-)determination just what the boy and the fairy discords focused on him are all about. Although the text never calls for this “character” to appear on stage, theatrical directors, taking matters creatively into their own hands, tend to beg the question by assigning the changeling's “part” to some small member of the company. In the case of such a shadowy figure as the changeling in A Dream, however, we need to proceed with some care in order to be sure that what we are interpreting is, in some sense, there.

There are just six direct references to the changeling boy in the text, three of which I have already quoted. In another, Puck, that perpetually amused vulgarizer of relationships, voices his view that the changeling is stolen goods that “jealous” Oberon wants to possess. He tells a unnamed fairy that Titania

                                                                                as her attendant hath
A lovely boy stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling.
And jealous Oberon would have the child
Knight of his train, to trace the forest wild;
But she, perforce, withholds the loved boy,
Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy.

(II.i.21-27)

From these lines we learn that the boy, who started life as an Indian prince, is “lovely,” “sweet,” and “loved” by Titania.² Oberon's competing and exclusive claim suggests that perhaps, as Puck implies, no one in fairyland has a rightful claim to him. Anyone who wants the changeling, for whatever purpose, may have to withhold him “perforce,” that is, forcibly. On the other hand, the line, “she, perforce, withholds the loved boy,” also opens the possibility that Titania herself is acting under some form of compulsion.

While Puck's account of the changeling boy raises the problems of compulsive behavior and custodial rights among thieves, Oberon's way of seeing the matter is that he has suffered an intolerable injury (II.i.147) at the hands of a “wanton” wife (II.i.63).³ To punish this act of sexual and social insubordination he employs the aphrodisiac juice of the flower called love-in-idleness, thereby creating a “hateful imperfection [in Titania's] eyes” (IV.i.63) that makes her lust after Bottom the ass. Eventually he chastens her and, we are to suppose, drives her back to his own conjugal bed with a second flower drug, “Dian's bud o'er Cupid's flower / [Having] such force and blessed power” (IV.i.73-74).

Titania's view of the changeling boy is altogether different from Puck's and Oberon's. To her, caring for the boy is an act of loyalty to a woman with whom she had shared the most intimate and delightful female companionship, until the fatal moment of the child's birth:

His mother was a vot'ress of my order,
And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side,
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking th' embarked traders on the flood;
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait,
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire)
Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again,
As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die,
And for her sake do I rear up her boy;
And for her sake I will not part with him.

(II.i.123-37)

The passage captures the pleasure the two women take in gently mocking the world of marine commerce with the richer joys of sorority and pregnancy.⁴ However perplexing we may find the phrase “a vot'ress of my order,”⁵ the lines describe a relationship of deep understanding and trust based on their feelings as women. The experience of perfect empathy is expressed in the metaphoring, unmetaphoring, and remetaphoring of the big-bellied sails. What is conceived and imitated here is the very idea of conception. The sails, impregnated by the inspiring breath of the wind, transform the trading vessels into women great with child, one of whom (Titania's votaress and the mother of the changeling boy) in turn humorously imitates a merchandise-laden vessel by gliding gracefully across the land “with pretty and with swimming gait.” One need only exchange the terms and, handy-dandy, which is the tenor, which the vehicle in this fully conceived metaphor? Ruth Nevo remarks wittily that “Oberon might mend his marriage more effectively by getting Titania with child than by trying to get Titania without child.”⁶ Though there is something vaguely absurd in the critic turning marriage counsellor to the Fairy King, Nevo has rightly seen that parenting emerges as central to Titania's consciousness. The Fairy Queen places herself in loco parentis when the Indian queen dies in childbirth. Now she must nurture and protect a child who, to her mind, is more adopted than kidnapped from the human realm. In Titania's eyes, the fact that he straddles the border between human and fairy in no way obviates his need for mothering.

Understanding what happens on the psychic boundary between human and fairy kind is a prime interpretive challenge in A Dream. The changeling boy, who in my view exists rather precariously in this bordering state, has seemed to some critics to provide a clear case of a lesson learned in fairyland and transferred back into the human realm. The lesson is largely concerned with the hypothesized superiority of reason (identified as a male strength) over will (identified as a female weakness) in Renaissance psychology, the dominant position of husbands over their wives in Renaissance society, and the advisability of graduating boy-children from women's care to men's hunting parties.⁷ The difficulty with these claims is that they assume or assert a kind of particularity about the nature and function of the changeling boy that—as we have already seen from the conflicting views of Puck, Oberon, and Titania—Shakespeare's text does not provide. The changeling is an absent presence, existing only as a series of competing claims on his company. As such, he illustrates a principle of indeterminacy evident in many parts of the play.

The concept of indeterminacy has gained considerable currency over the past three decades, largely through the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida, and other semantic philosophers. One version of the concept grows out of Derrida's efforts to break down the simple model of one signifier and one thing signified by suggesting that signifiers may just go on indefinitely referring to other signifiers. Jonathan Culler is at pains to point out that this is not the same thing as arguing that any interpretation is as good as any other. He writes, “The combination of context-bound meaning and boundless context on the one hand makes possible proclamations of the indeterminacy of meaning—though the smug iconoclasm of such proclamations may be irritating—but on the other hand urges that we continue to interpret texts, classify speech acts, and attempt to elucidate the conditions of signification.”⁸ It is in this sense and spirit that I invoke the principle of indeterminacy. I do not propose to make common cause with those who, like Bottom, believe that “Man is but an ass, if he go about t'expound this dream” (IV.i.206-207). Expounding is a large part of the business of criticism as I practice it. What makes asses of us all, including the characters in A Dream, is announcing that we possess the sole, uncontestable truth, particularly about an area of experience as unstable as the one Shakespeare dramatizes in this play. As interpreters, we must always be prepared to deal with contending, contingent truths about matters as apparently simple as weather-reporting and as decidedly complex as love and marriage. While offering us a variety of insights into such topics as these, the play always slips free of formally restrictive readings. The changeling boy receives a wide range of responses from characters in the play and invites even more complex, unsettling responses from the audience.

Consider for a moment an apparently banal topic, the weather. Titania's account of the weather in a distinctly anglicized Athens and environs achieves mythic proportions but precious little fixity:

          never, since the middle summer's spring,
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain or by rushy brook,
Or in the beached margent of the sea,
To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Hath every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard.
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon (the governess of floods),
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound.
And thorough this distemperature, we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose,
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
And odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

(II.i.82-117)

This perplexing set-piece of visionary verse moves from logic to chaos, from a precise time-frame to a seasonal jumble, from a complaint about infertility to a complaint about a “progeny of evils,” from precise signs denoting natural objects, causes, and consequences to a “mazed world [that] knows not which is which.” This sounds a good deal like a working definition of indeterminacy. Titania's catalogue of inclemency—fog, flooding, failed crops, decimated flocks, polluted air, and unseasonable temperatures—carries an implicit self-accusation of being either merciless (literally without clemency) or irresponsible towards the people whose weather she is making. But Titania is no bubble-headed woodland deity heedlessly upending the seasons. The thrice-repeated logical connective, “therefore,” lends force to the carefully deployed argumentative structure aimed at forcing Oberon to accept joint responsibility for the weather, if not for the changeling child. For all that the fairies seem to be a source of disorder in the play, Titania here provides an orderly explanation of that very disorder. From the precisely defined “middle summer's spring” Titania plunges us into a wintry world incongruously crowned with “sweet summer buds,” despite her assertion midway through the speech that “mortals want their winter here.” Though phrases such as “wanton green” and “lap of the crimson rose” convey, as C. L. Barber points out, a strong “amorous suggestion” (p. 147), others such as “childing autumn,” “progeny of evils,” and “parents and original” create an equally strong maternal suggestion. As she arrives at her conclusion regarding the debate over the changeling child, she leaves us with an overwhelming sense that, for all her logical explanation, the progeny of evils remains a paradox, an indeterminate truth, and we a part of that “mazed world [that] knows not which is which.”

Extending the indeterminacy of Titania's account of the grief caused by the struggle for custody of the changeling boy is the fact that no one else in the play seems to notice any bad weather. However much the Athenian lovers quarrel, not so much as a cloud emerges on their horizons. It is not an adequate response to this observation to say that Titania's lines apply only to the lofty idealities of fairyland and are not intended as a description of ordinary human reality when she has gone to such lengths to locate all that mud in the nine men's morris and to de-rhapsodize her speech with the sweat of redundantly “human mortals.” René Girard amusingly demystifies the play's meteorology: “Scholars assume that the weather must have been particularly bad in the year Shakespeare wrote the play; this, in turn, gives some clues to the dating of the play. It must be true, indeed, that Shakespeare needed some really inclement weather to write what he did.”⁹ Girard goes on to argue that what lies behind all this literalized weather forecasting is the deeper problem of “conceptual undifferentiation” (p. 203), concluding with tongue in cheek that in the play's happy ending, “Good weather is back, everything is in order once more” (p. 208). The effect of omitting from the mimetic dimension of the play any corroborating text about the weather is to call into question the notion of a single, authorized version of reality, even though that version emanates from a royal source. Here is no privileging of the text but a willingness to launch the text on to the uncertain seas of human emotion.

If something as ordinary as the weather becomes a source of conflicting evidence in the play, we may expect a still higher degree of uncertainty to be generated around the presentation of love and marriage. It would be reasonable to conclude after reading the play or seeing it performed that love is the major source of indeterminacy, not quarreling, as Titania contends. It is hard to get a straight answer from a lover to even the simplest question: How do you like Athens, Hermia?

Before the time I did Lysander see,
Seem'd Athens as a paradise to me;
O then, what graces in my love do dwell,
That he hath turn'd a heaven unto a hell!

(I.i.204-207)

Not only does the weather around Athens remain uncertain, the city itself evokes diametrically opposed responses in the same person, this time under the compulsion of love.

Some of this violent changeability can be credited to Shakespeare's Ovidian treatment of love. Love, especially youthful love, can never remain fixed for long in the Metaphorphoses. Similarly, Lysander's account of the course of true love broods with Romeo and Juliet-like awareness over the fate of a passion that is

                                                            momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth;
And ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.

(I.i.143-49)

That four of Shakespeare's bright young things quickly come to confusion in the night wood may be attributed to their youthful inexperience. Indeed, the skittishness of lovers becomes synonymous with childishness in the play. The two Athenian youths and their girlfriends are initially thought to be as much in need of parenting as the changeling boy. They are not fully formed persons but rather exude the still undetermined potential of childhood.

In the non-human world of A Midsummer Night's Dream, love's fickleness has not one but three childish faces. “Love [is] said to be a child” (I.i.238) in the iconographic tradition that transmitted the Cupid myth from classical times to the Renaissance, a tradition summarized in some detail by Helena (I.i.232-45). With delicate literalness, Shakespeare translates the erratic power of Cupid's arrows into the magic juice of Oberon's narrative of the fiery shaft that missed Diana's “imperial vot'ress,” who figures the chaste Eliza, striking instead the flower called love-in-idleness (II.i.148-74). Oberon places Cupid's powerful drug in the hands of another “waggish boy,” Puck, who, though himself no lover of mankind, is vastly amused by the emotional instability generated by his newly acquired ability to make people tumble in and out of love. The third is our old friend the changeling boy, who likewise represents no uniform or fixed approach to the meaning of love.¹⁰ In each case, these spirits pose a threat to established hierarchy and its protective institution of marriage.

A widely accepted interpretation of the play's comic resolution is that the young people's unrealized potential for love is eventually given adult definition by traditional marriage celebrations in Act V.¹¹ The fullest and most persuasive account of this approach to determining the meaning of the play is Paul Olson's essay, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage.”¹² After tracing a social and iconological tradition of marriage from the garden of Eden to the court of Elizabeth, Olson concludes that “In the total conceptual scheme of the play, the king and queen of the woods dramatize the two poles of the scale of values which gave meaning to marriage. They are types of the forces of Reason and Passion which in a more complex and human manner move through Theseus and Hippolita respectively” (p. 111).

One problem with this kind of reading is that it is clear both from literary and non-literary sources of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that marriage performed a great many functions besides subjecting women's passions to the control of men's intellects.¹³ Some marriages were for gain, some for companionship, some for love, some for convenience. Some were equally shared, some enforced, some secret, and some nasty, mean, brutish, and short. Furthermore, given the favored male pastimes referred to in A Midsummer Night's Dream (war and the hunt), it is difficult to believe that Shakespeare was trying to depict Reason as an exclusive male preserve. Although Olson explains with admirable fullness and subtlety the significance of various literary representations of marriage, he overreads the text of Shakespeare's play. He refers, for example, to Titania's “erotic games with … the changeling” (p. 111), assignations we neither see nor hear about.

Far more prominent in the play than “the celestial love which preserves chaste marriages and keeps the cosmos in order” (Olson, p. 109), are the uncontrollable, carnivalesque impulses operating despite the best efforts of several patriarchs to rearrange or suppress the natural impulses of youth. As one recent critic points out, “the play represents several stories of resistance and discord, counter-models of the reconciliation and accommodation Theseus proposes.”¹⁴ Not only does the play confront us with the willful rebellion of a quartet of teenagers, but it sets in motion the maddest of low-life subplots, including Bottom's anarchic synesthesia (IV.i.204-19) and even in the fifth-act resolution the topsy-turvy indeterminacy of “very tragical mirth” (V.i.57) in the mechanicals' performance at court. The challenge for all the audiences, on-stage and off, is to hold in mind at once pairs of terms and concepts that point in opposite directions. It has become customary to discuss the reconciliation of opposites or concordia discors in A Midsummer Night's Dream in terms of a patriarchal triumph over female waywardness in the most obvious of institutional joining of opposites, holy matrimony.¹⁵ This is the great Elizabethan humanist settlement for the problem of conflicting stories and emotional states in the play: Titania is forced to see the folly of her infatuation with the changeling boy by being made to fall in love with a second and more monstrous changeling, one that even she can eventually perceive as inferior to her proper husband. Like Helena, Hermia, and Hippolyta, she is taught that the only true concord for the sexes requires her to acknowledge the central fact of benign (and, by analogy, divine) male superiority in a patrilineal-patrological culture. Titania, in fact, acknowledges nothing of the kind when she gives up the changeling boy. All she says is that she now loathes the sight of the transfigured Bottom (IV.i.79). It can be argued, then, that in its pursuit of comic conflicts Shakespeare's play does more to unsettle than to inscribe traditional assumptions of courtly culture concerning marriage.

Traditional readings of A Midsummer Night's Dream do, of course, allow that conflicts exist within the hierarchical social structure depicted in the play, but they maintain that discord exists only to be chastized, corrected, and subsumed by a higher order. For a number of reasons I believe, on the contrary, that the indeterminacy of Shakespeare's text permits the characters to perpetuate their amorous and festive madness with all the illogic of a dream through and even beyond its formal end. Though the young lovers awake in Act IV as if from a dream, their present waking reality is as unfixed as their labyrinthine sleepwalking:

Her.
Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When every thing seems double.
Hel.
So methinks;
And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own, and not mine own.

(IV.i.189-92)

Shakespeare poses as a problem for his fictional persons as well as his would-be understanders outside the play, the proposition that any attempt to make something firmly one's own, whether it be a changeling boy, an eligible bachelor, or a unique interpretation of a text, is to expose the vaguely ridiculous limitations of the human condition. No tyrannical assertion of authority by a father, a duke, a lover, or a critic can manage to avoid the problem.

In writing a comedy that takes place almost wholly beyond the reach of ordinary domestic locales, exploring the haunts of Endymion rather than Gammer Gurton, Shakespeare ignores the centrality of traditional male power and respectability, instead mapping the terrain that Robert Frost in his poem “West-Running Brook” calls “lady-land.” The male authority figures, Egeus and Theseus, cease to exert their powers of constraint after Act I. The genuine sources of human vitality and insight in Shakespeare are not to be found at the safe center of government or in the quiet domains of marriage but rather in the world of Falstaff and Hal at the Boars Head, Lear and his fool on the heath, Perdita in her garden, Prospero and Caliban on their uneasily shared island—places that harbor the mooncalves and changelings of the world. A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a celebration in the same genre as Jonson's court masques. It is not focused on the literal or even the symbolic seat of royal power but rather on the largely uncharted territory on the fringes or “margents” of society where the rules of power tend to break down, often with imaginatively liberating and extremely amusing results. Here, Hippolyta's view that “the story of the night … grows to something of great constancy” (V.i.23-27) can brush aside Theseus's condescending and authoritarian pronouncements, leaving intact the claims of the imagination.

The point about discords in this marginal world is that they remain stimulatingly discordant. The changeling boy, so insubstantial in the text and so variously perceived as a source of conflict, is a prime example of the indeterminacy that the play postulates as the essential condition of people who love and people who dream. Try as they may to remain wrapped “In maiden meditation, fancy-free” (II.i.164), like the Imperial Virgin protected by chaste moonbeams from Cupid's fiery shaft, ordinary mortals are seldom free in their fancying. Even the perceptions of the Queen of Fairy can be constrained by the siren call of the strange mortal, Bottom:

I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again.
Mine ear is much enamored of thy note;
So is mine eye enthralled to thy shape;
And thy fair virtue's force (perforce) doth move me
On the first view to say, to swear, I love thee.

(III.i.137-41)

Here are a woman and a piece of text about as determined as they can be. Bottom's perceived good looks, his “virtue,” are closely shadowed by the root sense of virtú, power or force. A force perforce forces Titania triply to swear to a love that will evaporate from her eye and her tongue in the space of a single act. The real forces celebrated in the play would seem to be not marital restraint, chastity, or even, perhaps, constancy, but natural sexual impulses and radically unstable sense-perceptions. As Michael Andrews argues, the dewy tears that materialize in the “pretty flouriets' eyes” (IV.i.55) when Oberon upbraids Titania for bedecking first the changeling boy and then Bottom with flowers, are as likely to be shed for love repressed than, as usually glossed, for chaste women ravished.¹⁶ Enforced chastity is no wellspring of joy in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Instead, the play gives full scope to desires that struck Puritan preachers and authors of courtly entertainments alike as anathema to Christian marriage and good government.

Still, matrimony has its hour when the moon is full, the rustics are fooling at the height of their bent, and the fairies are in gentle attendance. The troublesome changeling child, violator of the shifting but ever-present boundary between human and other worlds, has apparently been forgotten in the wake of the new amity between Titania and Oberon. This is not to say that the differences of perception regarding the changeling have been resolved, any more than the conflicting infatuations of the Athenian lovers or Hermia's dispute with her father have been “resolved.” They have merely been swept to one side like the dust that Puck is sent to sweep behind the door on the wedding night. There the unpleasantnesses and competing truths will coexist with the joys of marriage and those of the comic stage. No single or higher truth emerges from the play but rather a slightly bewildering and highly amusing collection of apparently willful reinterpretations of the experience of being in and out of love. Like the changeling boy, A Midsummer Night's Dream itself is a masterwork of what I have called indeterminacy and what Keats called “Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.”¹⁷

Notes

1. Quotations from A Midsummer Night's Dream are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, et al. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

2. “The changeling,” according to Minor White Latham, “seems to have been peculiar to the 16th-century fairies of England” (The Elizabethan Fairies: The Fairies of Folklore and the Fairies of Shakespeare [New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1930], rpt. New York: Octagon Books, 1972, p. 150). The still more peculiar feature of this particular changeling is that he is not the usual deformed child left behind by the fairies to create consternation among distraught human parents, but instead the handsome young prince vied for on the far side, the fairy side.

3. In his article, “Titania and the Changeling,” ES 22 (1940):66-70, Donald C. Miller argues with single-minded determination that several epithets attached to Titania's name, including “proud,” “rash,” and “jealous,” are synonymous with “wanton.” Largely on this basis, he concludes that “Titania has made the boy her lover” (p. 66). As will become clear, I view the relationship very differently.

4. I cannot agree with David Marshall's assertion that in this speech Titania “is perpetuating rather than rejecting terms that inscribe people in a system of economic relations.” The tenderness of her language has little in common with characters such as Shylock whose purpose actually is so to “inscribe” people. See David Marshall, “Exchanging Visions: Reading A Midsummer Night's Dream,” ELH 49 (1982):568. A more sensitive and persuasive reading of the lines is C. L. Barber's in Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 136-37. Louis Adrian Montrose reads the speech as an exclusively female version of carrying sons and argues that it “counterpoints” Theseus's account of how men, without the mediation of women, leave their imprint on their daughters (I.i.47-51). The upshot of this contest between male and female fantasies of parthenogenesis, according to Montrose, is repeated “male disruption of an intimate bond between women” (p. 71), a disruption that the play's comic form eventually sanctions and, in doing so, “neutralizes the forms of royal power [in particular, the potent myth of the Virgin Queen] to which it ostensibly pays homage” (p. 85). See “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1 (1983): 61-94.

5. Ernest Schanzer, with refreshing candor, admits his bafflement at the phrase: “The order of the fairy queen? With human votaresses? It does not make sense … the words ‘vot'ress of my order’ seem oddly chosen. Perhaps some topical allusion is the answer to the puzzle, with Titania at least in this episode standing for the Queen and the votaress perhaps for one of her ladies-in-waiting” (“The Moon and the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” UTQ 24 [1955]:241-42). More relevant to today's readers than surmised topicality is the sense of stability, as opposed to wantonness, conveyed by the word “order.”

6. Ruth Nevo, Comic Transformations in Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 104.

7. In addition to Ruth Nevo's book, which I have already cited, and Paul Olson's essay, which I will discuss later, the following works read the play as endorsing certain sexist assumptions of Shakespeare's society: Paul N. Siegel, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Wedding Guests,” SQ 4 (1953):139-44; James L. Calderwood, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Illusion of Drama,” MLQ 26 (1965):506-22; David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of “A Midsummer Night's Dream” (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966); Anca Vlasopolos, “The Ritual of Midsummer: A Pattern for A Midsummer Night's Dream,” RenQ 31 (1978):21-29; and Alan W. Bellringer, “The Act of Change in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” ES 64 (1983):201-17.

8. Jonathan Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1982), p. 133.

9. René Girard, “Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1979), p. 199.

10. For an interpretation that finds a fixed, indeed a theoretically predetermined, pattern of behavior in the way adults and children relate to one another, see Vicky Shahly Hartman, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Gentle Concord to the Oedipal Problem,” AI 40 (1983):356-69. Norman Holland's application of Freudian theory to the play (“Hermia's Dream,” in Representing Shakespeare: New Psychoanalytic Essays, ed. Murry M. Schwartz and Coppelia Kahn [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980], pp. 1-20) avoids some of the problems of overdetermining the text that Hartman's essay exhibits. Paul Stevens argues from a rich matrix of allusion that the psychological origin of childishness in the play is the fancy uninformed by reason. See his Imagination and the Presence of Shakespeare in “Paradise Lost” (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1985), pp. 15, 85-87, et passim.

11. The connection between this play about marriage and an actual aristocratic marriage of the mid-1590s has often been postulated, but the evidence for linking A Midsummer Night's Dream to one or another specific marriage is so far inconclusive.

12. Paul A. Olson, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage,” ELH 24 (1957):95-119.

13. The fourth chapter of Keith Wrightson's English Society, 1580-1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982) presents evidence of some highly companionable marriages drawn from a variety of shires and social classes.

14. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 172. On the basis of Harold Brooks's source work with Plutarch and Seneca in the Arden edition, Louis Montrose argues that “sedimented within the verbal texture of A Midsummer Night's Dream are traces of those forms of familial violence which the play would suppress” (“‘Shaping Fantasies,’” p. 75).

15. Hippolyta's lines concerning the hounds of Sparta suggest a possible analogue to this process:

                                                                                                                            Never did I hear
    Such gallant chiding; for besides the groves,
    The skies, the fountains, every region near
    Seem all one mutual cry. I never heard
    So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

    (IV.i.114-18)

16. See Michael Cameron Andrews, “Titania on ‘Enforced Chastity,’” N&Q 31 (1984):188.

17. John Keats: Selected Poems and Letters, ed. Douglas Bush (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959), p. 261.