SOURCE: “A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Gentle Concord to the Oedipal Problem,” in American Imago, Vol. 40, No. 4, Winter, 1983, pp. 355-69.

[In the following essay, Hartman identifies oedipal conflict originating in the incestuous desires of Egeus as well as Titania, and maintains that the play optimistically presents the resolution of such conflict within the confines of the “dream.”]

A Midsummer Night's Dream was written in honor of the marriage between Countess Southampton and Sir Thomas Heneage, the Queen's advisor. It is thought the Countess married her knight for political protection when her son committed the dangerous faux pas of promising to marry powerful Lord Burghley's granddaughter and, four years later, obdurately refused the match. Young Southampton's peculiar reluctance to wed a comely, well-titled woman culminated in a well-documented scandal. Shakespeare, then the Southamptons' family poet, gamely transformed Heneage into politic, dignified Theseus, wizarded the headstrong countess into Hippolyta and set both above the antics of the lovers, the dissipations and quarrels of the fairies. But the graceful newlyweds only frame the play; within, tumble riotous scenes of deluded, mismatched lovers, of man turned ass. A Midsummer Night's Dream congratulates the royal couple on their mature equanimity but more directly addresses the evolution of such psychosexual stability, the resolution of oedipal conflict, and the consequent ability for proper gender identity and adult heterosexual intimacy. The lovers dream of maturity, and finally the audience is asked to share their “vision wondrous fair.”

The younger characters in the play are at first considered primarily in relation to their contrasexual parent: Hermia and Helena are “Egeus' and Nedar's daughters,” and the youthful mechanicals, especially Bottom, are frequently addressed as “Mothers' sons.” This anticipates three obvious oedipal situations. The play opens with Egeus's unreasonable demand that his daughter, Hermia, either marry a man she, with good reason, has sworn never to wed or by Athenian law to enter a convent and live her life “a barren sister” (I.i.72) or to die. Egeus further charges that Lysander has “stol'n” Hermia's heart from him by moonlight (I.i.30-32, IV.i.160) and has “defeated him” (IV.i.160). References to stolen love are uttered frequently throughout the play, but only by jealous lovers. Indeed, Hermia herself accuses Helena of being the “thief of love” who had “come by night and stol'n [her] love's heart” (III.ii.282-83). Lysander argues the irrationality of Egeus in not allowing Hermia to marry a faithful lover while insisting she marry “spotted and inconstant” Demetrius (I.i.110). Theseus confesses that he, too, had wondered at this and promises Egeus an enigmatic “private schooling” (I.i.116). The name “Egeus” recalls the legendary excessive love Theseus' father, Egeus, had for his son.

The fairy tale part of the play also opens with an obviously oedipal scene. “Jealous” Oberon has been displaced from his rightful position in his wife's “bed and company” by a young Indian changeling whom Titania crowns with flowers and makes all her joy (II.i.27-28). The only other reference to “jealous” Oberon unrelated to the changeling incident appears when Oberon accuses Titania of a love affair with Theseus. The lovers also speak often of their “jealous rivalries.”

The fairy tale closes with the curiously analogous oedipal scene in which Titania falls passionately in love with another “changeling,” the asinine Bottom. Bottom, too, is crowned with flowers; the fairy queen embraces him as female ivy “Enrings the barky fingers of the elm” (IV.i.46-48). But Titania “loves” and “dotes” on Bottom to no avail; the rude mechanical merely wishes food and sleep.

Oedipal content in A Midsummer Night's Dream is striking in that parents (Egeus and Titania) are guilty of incestuous desire while children, either actively or passively, resist seduction. Bottom who comes nearest in responding to a parental figure—and hence is asinine—exhibits evidence of castration anxiety. The three fairy servants to whom Bottom absurdly attaches himself in Titania's bower are named Cobweb, Peaseblossom, and Mustardseed. Cobweb was used in Elizabethan England to staunch blood. Bottom alludes to possible harm, saying, “If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you, good Master Cobweb” (III.i.180-83). The artisan then commends himself to Peaseblossom's father, “Peascod” (which is in part derived from Middle English slang for scrotum), and commiserates with Mr. Mustardseed because “many a gentleman of your house … hath [been] devoured … I promise your kindred hath made my eyes water. … I know your patience well …” (III.i.192-95). The fear of dismemberment, obeisance to a phallic father figure, and the excessively strong sympathy given impatient “devoured gentlemen” all hint at castration anxiety. Bottom avoids overt anxiety, however, by not responding sexually to the mother figure's seductive overtures. Bottom evades oedipal temptation simply by being Bottom, an egocentric character unable to discern linguistic and sexual distinctions, and possessing only the infantile concerns of eating and sleeping. He childishly confuses body parts and their proper roles, saying: “The eye of man hath heard” and “I see a voice,” and in general refuses things their appropriate function.¹ Bottom, the ass, is obviously anal. And since man's bottom is indistinguishable from woman's, Bottom is also androgenous. That Bottom further symbolizes a regression to anal psychosexuality is implicit in the power relationship between him and his “director,” Peter Quince. In Early Modern English, peter was, as it is today, slang for penis and quince, by virtue of its tarty fruit referent and pronunciation, was perhaps a variant of cunt. “Penis-cunt” is tyrant only in Athens; in the wood, Bottom becomes “bully Bottom” and directs penis-cunt (III.i.8). Temporary regression to anality is adaptive when confronted by overwhelming oedipal temptation. Prior to his exodus from the wood, Bottom had a strong urge to assume all roles: male lover, lady, tyrant, director. After successfully evading seduction by Titania, Bottom allows penis-cunt its reign and admirably portrays male lover.

The desirability of acquiring proper gender identity and contrasexual love partner is emphasized throughout the play. Demetrius and Lysander's initial reluctance to engage in heterosexual intimacy suggests insufficient identity with their adult male roles. Helena cites the youths' inconstancy as typical of “waggish boys” (I.i.240), and evidence that Love or Cupid is indeed a child (I.i.238). She sarcastically labels Demetrius and Lysander's infidelity “a manly enterprise” (III.ii.157). The youths themselves taunt each other with cries of “come thou child” (III.ii.409), and “I'll whip thee with a rod” (III.ii.410). Puck notes their “trying manhood” (III.ii.413). The attainment of proper gender identity is temporarily retarded by oedipal gratification. Rather than becoming knight and portraying male lover, Changeling and Bottom are effeminately wreathed with Titania's flowers. The changeling's chivalrous training and Bottom's laudable depiction of Pyramus outside Titania's bower are both presented as joyous occasions.²

The women in the play are likewise encouraged to participate in feminine pursuits and enjoy permanent heterosexual relationships. Hermia, Helena, and Hippolyta must dare to participate fully in life and risk the potential calamities of romantic involvement and possible death from child-bearing, or subsist in the phlegmatic sanctuary which chastity provides. The former situation assures the inestimable pleasure of self-perpetuation through one's offspring, a perpetuation which repression and continence cannot engender. Hermia must suffer a metaphorical death should she choose Diana's austere single life:

Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon …
But earthlier happy is the rose distilled,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness.

(I.i.73-78)

The pure flower withers on its own thorny virginity; the more worldly rose is used up, but its essence remains.

Helena's comic reversal of the Apollo and Daphne myth is also significant. As Demetrius flees from her sexual advances, Helena proclaims: “Run when you will, the story shall be changed: Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase” (II.i.330-31). The mythological Daphne also fled a too ardent admirer. She refused to yield her virginity to Apollo and, calling on Diana's aid, changed her form to a Laurel tree. The sun god, in recompense, bestowed eternal youth on the Laurel and assigned to it the connotation of “victor.” But Daphne's “victory,” her unremitting chastity, is not human. Indeed, hers will be a subhuman, vegetative existence. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Demetrius runs, not to preserve his virginity; he merely aspires after Hermia's. Nor does he elude his pursuer with rigid stasis; rather, he warns Helena: “If thou follow me … / I shall do thee mischief in the wood” (II.i.236-37). Dauntless Helena accepts the offer most readily: “Ay, in the temple, in the town, in the field, / You do me mischief” (II.i.238-39). Marriage and the fairy blessing follow.

Theseus complains of how slow “this old moon wanes! She lingers my desires, / Like to a stepdame, or a dowager / Long withering out a young man's revenue” (I.i.3-7). Hippolyta, pondering the implication of marriage to this captor who “wooed [her] with his sword” (I.i.16), responds:

Four nights will quickly dream away the time;
And then the moon, like to a silver bow
New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

(I.i.9-11)

Here, the Amazon alludes to “Apollusa,” the destructress, to the orgiastic Aphrodite Urania whose sacred king was sacrificed on Midsummer Night to ensure the fecundity of the Athenian populace and harvest. Hippolyta, whom Theseus violated, alludes wistfully to a goddess whose consort is ritually murdered and whose virginity is magically restored. The heavenly bow which the bride envisions is newly bent in the midsummer sky, but King Theseus is not killed; rather, the marriage is solemnized. Hippolyta has accepted the challenge of womanhood. Though she might not live “happily ever after” (even folks in fairy tales have their rows: witness Titania and Oberon), she will indeed live fully and participate in sexual experience. Recovery of her virginity is an impossible fiction, a myth, but its loss enables impregnation and the birth of an innocent. Shakespeare does not suggest repression of sexual impulse as a solution to the oedipal problem but encourages resolution via displacement of the sexual impulse onto an appropriate love object.

Despite the apparent desirability of attaining adult heterosexual intimacy, most characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream initially pursue only impossible love relationships. The general theme of rivalry in courtship here acquires oedipal import. Of the major characters, only mature Theseus and Hippolyta do not insist on inappropriate, tabooed love objects, and even they were once military rivals. Titania and Oberon desire Theseus and Hippolyta respectively, both of whom are patently unavailable. The artisan's playlet Pyramus and Thisbe is a version of Romeo and Juliet, a tragedy which epitomizes tabooed love. Most significant is the woodland lovers' fascination with inappropriate love objects. The Athenian lovers are propelled toward and repelled from each other with curious disregard for past alliance or personality and are indistinguishable from their same-sexed counterparts except for labeling. Helena is “translated” into Hermia (I.i.183-191) and Hermia cries to her erstwhile lover “Am I not Hermia? Are you not Lysander?” (III.ii.274). In his “Myth and Ritual in Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night's Dream,” René Girard³ explains this phenomenon in terms of mimetic rivalry. The lovers, motivated by a spontaneous mimetic impulse, arbitrarily confer upon an object the status of coveted object and become rivals for that object's possession. The rivals become doubles and lose their individual identities.

Although the characters here are seemingly interchangeable, a peculiar pattern emerges upon consideration of their comic and labile romancing. When both Demetrius and Lysander court Hermia, she chooses the forbidden one. Demetrius desires Helena only until she accepts him and desires Hermia only when she rejects him. Lysander prefers distant Helena to convenient Hermia. And Helena, when approached by two desiring lovers, denies them both. And note:

Hermia: The more I hate, the more he follows me.
Helena: The more I love, the more he hateth me.

(I.i.198-99)

This is not—as René Girard suggests—mere rhetoric. The woodland lovers love precisely whomever they cannot have. Their choice, though limited to identical personalities, is nonetheless emphatic. Their affection, though vehement, is truly revoked when returned. The only constant element in the configuration is not simply, as Girard states, “the convergence of more than one desire on a single object,” but the systematic self-defeating oedipal-type fascination with unobtainable partnership. It is this which invokes the mimetic crisis.

Disguised by the mythic excuse of the “love juice,” the forage into the wood (madness) allows the lovers active pursuit of their tabooed love objects in a way never permissible in Athens. This imaginative exercise teaches the futility of seeking such inappropriate mates. As young adults, the lovers must finally and forever abandon hopes of securing the unobtainable father or mother figure of their oedipal fantasies and accept as consolation the available, appropriate love. Demetrius points to this in respect to Hermia, his mother figure of the wood:

                                                                                My love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud,
Which in my childhood I did dote upon;
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia:
But, like a sickness, did I loathe this food;
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will for evermore be true to it.

(IV.i.168-79)

Since dote is another word used only in reference to sexual love—Helena “dotes” on Demetrius; Hermia, on Lysander; and Titania, on Bottom—it is probable that Demetrius is here referring to his earliest heterosexual love, his mother. In particular, note the adjective idle which is applied to the woman whom Demetrius adored in his figurative childhood. Bottom's mother figure, Titania, is also unresponsive: the honey and music he requests never appear. When he asks for a “bottle of hay,” he receives unwanted nuts. When Bottom protests that he would rather have peas and is unanswered, he simply falls asleep. Titania does, however, gratify her suitable mate: soon after Bottom's request for music goes unsatisfied, Oberon says: “Titania, music call,” and the fairy queen promptly replies: “Music, ho, music!” (IV.i.84-86). It is significant that Demetrius likens his “childish” attachment to Hermia to a sickness and welcomes his mature commitment to Helena as a healthy adjustment. Puck wisely sings:

And the country proverb known,
That every man should take his own,
In your waking shall be shown.
                    Jack shall have Jill;
                    Nought shall go ill;
The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be well.

(III.ii.459-64)

“Mare” is perhaps a pun on “mere.” At dream's end, every man will find in his mate consolation for the lost mother and, moreover, be delighted by a responsive love. Shakespeare depicts no anguish in this turning away from the lost object towards its substitute. Rather, a boyish “sickness” is replaced by manly “wellness.” Relinquishing the contrasexual parent figure signals an immediate end to the mimetic crisis and a harmony between same-sexed characters who were previously rivals. The lovers finally abandon their fantasy of being who they are not and wanting what they cannot get. Theseus wonders at the resolution of such a profound conflict between Demetrius and his competitor:

I know you two are rival enemies.
How comes this gentle concord in the world,
That hatred is so far from jealousy,
To sleep by hate, and fear no enmity?

(IV.i.145-48)

Demetrius can only answer:

                                                                      I wot not by what power—
But by some power it is. …

(IV.i.167-68)

Through allusion to relevant myth, and directly by plot, Shakespeare acknowledges the oedipal problem. The conflict is represented in a “dream,” and hence exhibits defensive structures appropriate to dream formation: the oedipal fantasy is expurgated of its most punishable sexual content, and culpability for the most conspicuous instances of incestuous desire is projected away from the child on to the parental figure. The most interesting example of this is the splitting of “changeling” Bottom and the Indian changeling. Both changelings are wreathed with flowers and kept from attaining proper gender identity in Titania's bower. The Indian changeling is given over to Oberon's care precisely when Bottom leaves the wood. Although Bottom seemingly displaces the absent changeling in Titania's cradle, Titania and Oberon dispute the changeling's possession rather than Bottom's. In Ovid's Metamorphoses—a work well known to Shakespeare—“Titania” is an epithet for Diana, daughter of the Titans. Hence, Titania and the doubly asinine Bottom are a disguised version of the Wild Ass Set (Dionysos plus the moon goddess, Diana). This is reinforced with Bottom's craving for honey, the staple of Dionysos, whose appellation “wine-god” is a superimposition on the older “meade-god.” Another epithet of Dionysos' is “the Indian,” and this associates him with the Indian changeling. This doubling of themes functions to disguise further the oedipal quality of the changelings' relationship with Titania. In one situation, the mother and father figure dispute the possession of a relatively innocent and absent child; in the other, mother and child are closeted together sexually and the father figure is mysteriously absent. Here, the oedipal act and consequence are split: the “child” is present and cast in a sexual role during the oedipal scene, but absent and asexual at a time when the jealous father is present and retribution might occur. It is also significant that the moon goddess annually destroyed her sacred king, Dionysos, with bees. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the goddess' “humblebees” fetch Dionysos honey. The well-known myth of the Wild Ass Set has here been deliberately inverted: the vengeful “virgin” Diana has been transmuted into the sycophantic, seductive Titania; Dionysos, the patron god of orgasmic release and orgiastic pleasure, has become inhibited and constrained. Shakespeare has turned the realm of fairyland topsy-turvey and rephrased it in terms more comforting to all involved in the oedipal triangle.

The movement into the wood provides a somnabulistic, transient regressed state wherein characters are allowed pursuit of tabooed love objects in as guilt-free an environment as possible: the love objects are neither explicitly parental nor filial, and the mythic context of the wood is inverted and splintered to reduce anxiety. But it is only oedipal intent to which the play concedes, not oedipal behavior. Comic scenes wherein lovers scramble for precisely the mate forbidden, and a regal and ethereal queen conceives a perverse passion for an ass, speak eloquently of the failure inherent in oedipal love. A Midsummer Night's Dream does not simply contain allusions to gratified, albeit censored, incest. It provides an occasion (midsummer madness) for characters and audience to imaginatively attempt to gratify, to act out, their oedipal strivings. Significantly, such attempts invariably fail. Mythic references in the play expound the wisdom of not participating in incest and dissuade from choosing even asexual competitive arenas common to the same-sexed parent.⁴ Of the two “parents” who encouraged oedipal attachments in the play, Egeus is promised a “private schooling” by the prototypical father figure, Theseus, and Titania is taught a more informal “lesson” by her indignant husband. Significantly, too, the seductive attempts of these wayward parents are thwarted: Hermia marries Lysander, and Bottom discards his flow'ry cradle for the role of male lover. Model parental figures in the play discourage oedipal attachment and encourage non-oedipal romantic involvement; they are stern and cunning warriors who permit no competition, oedipal or otherwise, but who provide nuptials for the assorted lovers.

Shakespeare's “dream,” far from simply containing disguised oedipal elements in which the audience shares guilty pleasure, explores various permutations of the oedipal predicament: seductive mother with jealous father and absent child; seductive mother with child and absent father; seductive father with resistant daughter; seductive mother with resistant son; and more broadly, pursuant male with prohibitive female, and pursuant female with prohibitive male. Nearly every variety of the oedipus-complex is acknowledged, but in all cases its occurrence is conditioned with elusiveness, anxiety, and dissatisfaction. In all cases, too, the adaptive response to the situation is quite clearly exemplified. But while Shakespeare claims the futility of oedipal pursuit, he offers the consolation of a more appropriate, but still contrasexual, love. Strong emphasis is placed on the constancy of such new relationships (the bonding of marriage), and it is this which compensates for the impermanence and lack of gratification associated with the oedipal situation. It is significant that the play closes not with the surrealistic and experimental eroticism of the night, but with the mature and solemn commitment of marriage on a fine midsummer day. Freud's conception of art as a “path from phantasy back again to reality” is metaphorized by this movement from fairyland back to Athens and the Apollonian ideal. Shakespeare surely depicts puerile impulse and illicit desire; but he closes with maturation and socially sanctioned partnership. As Slochower points out, “Repression does not explain art … The artist embodies and expresses not only the genetic-pathological ‘background’; he also employs the ‘forward-’ tendencies and intactness of the ego.”⁵

Both Freud and Sachs maintain that oedipal fantasy in literature must be presented with an insistence on unreality and playfulness: “To insist that something, otherwise forbidden, is done in play is an excuse nearly as valid as ‘it's only a dream.’”⁶A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play, a fantasy about a dream, and yet it closes with eerie realism:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended;
That you have slumb'red here,
While these visions did appear,
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream. …

(V.i.425-30)

Ostensibly, the audience is given license to deny any complicity between itself and the drama, to project culpability for the offending content onto the shadow actors, and to consider the play only as significant as a dream. But Elizabethans believed dreams to be prophetic, and shadows accurately reflect solid objects. Moreover, the dream in A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a dream at all. With Puck's assistance, the lovers simply convince themselves that their forbidden “play” was dreamed. When Puck likewise encourages the audience to believe that the play itself is dream-like, the critical reader must react with scepticism. Puck never denies the realism of the play; he egoistically provides a quasi-defense for those deeply troubled by its honest, but disturbing, content. The offer of denial is, like all of Shakespeare's comic epilogues, ironic. The play is among the most well-constructed of Shakespearean plots and its portrayal demands perhaps more kinetic energy than any other of his dramas. Shakespeare confronts not only the oedipal problem, but divines likely audience response to that problem as well, and thoughtfully provides some semblance of defense. However, the defense, like magic and dream in the play, is illusory. The conclusion of Freud and Sachs, that literature which contains oedipal fantasy requires impenetrable disguise, seems applicable only to literature containing oedipal wish-fulfillment without complementary oedipal resolution. As A Midsummer Night's Dream presents desire, disillusionment, and resolution, i.e., displays the growth from oedipal child to non-oedipal adult, it must provide a “playfully” disguised version of fantasy, a more realistic version of the adaptation to the fantastic wish, and finally maintain the integrity of both by some subtle statement of realism. The puckish epilogue introduces the theme of wish-fulfillment and fantasy (“Think but this, and all is mended …”), but closes with the ironic implication that such gratification is ineffective. Wishing for oedipal love is not equated with indulging in incest; hoping that the wish for such love is nonexistent in the play does not negate its presence. The epilogue is further undermined by reference to Puck's earlier statement regarding the lovers' moonlight escapade:

When next they wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision. …

(III.ii.370-71)

In both addresses, Puck refers to an awakening and to unproductive image. The hobgoblin admits to deceit in the former instance (“shall seem a dream …”) and so is suspect in the latter case. Certainly Hippolyta's great mind for sensible strategy is not taken in by the ruse:

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

(V.i.23-27)

The lovers' midsummer night was indeed wakeful and fruitful (educational). One might assume that the audience's midsummer experience—the play itself—is similarly participatory and informative. Kenneth Burke's assertion that “Freud's co-ordinates, in stressing the poem as a dream, understress the poem as a communicative structure and as a realistic gauging of human situations” is well-supported by Shakespeare's ironic treatment of dream and wish-fulfillment, and also by his acceptance of things both “strange and admirable.”⁷

At the play's end, Puck coaxes:

Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.

(V.i.439-40)

This joining of hands is not merely conciliatory or “mending” as Sachs would predict. Puck promises to restore the childhood ability to amend: to alter, not simply to patch. It is the difference between playful imagination and self-indulgent fantasy, or what is therapeutic and what is cathartic. The promise refers the reader to another mention of “amend” in the play: Theseus' “The best in this kind [players] are but shadows; and / the worse are no worse, if imagination amend them” (V.i.212-13). The play invites projection, personalization. To this end, it depicts various aspects of the oedipal problem which appeal to both a male and female audience. The invitation to participate in the drama imaginatively is issued by Puck, an androgenous character with an androgenous name (Robin), and actors are but “shadows” requiring the addition of color and detail. Sachs maintains that

Shakespeare's characters do not speak only from the situation that is given to them by the poet, but from their own ego, and with such masterly truth that every one of them is a complete and never recurring personality; and yet the words that are spoken by his heroes and his knaves, his queens and wenches, are even today on every tongue.⁸

It is not their own never recurring ego from which the shadow actors derive their vividness. Like us, Shakespeare's characters seek to imitate, to become what they can never be, to get what they can never have. They find themselves lacking, and exchange their fantastic desires for a solid reality.

In sum, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is refreshingly optimistic concerning man's ability to answer the discord between societal restrictions and instinctual impulse with a “dream”; to discover in his own imaginatively reconstructed childhood “a gentle concord”; and—to hell with noble aims—to be happy.

Notes

1. Bottom thanks the “sweet moon” for its “sunny beams,” roars “gently as a suckling dove,” and speaks in a “monstrous little voice,” of a “lamentable comedy.”

2. Note also, that the father figures, Theseus and Oberon, each has a young male servant (Philostrate and Puck respectively) who models proper filial behavior and makes them smile.

3. René Girard, Myth and Ritual. Ithaca, 1979.

4. Theseus is infamous for reinforcing his sovereignty by executing nearly all of his opponents, including many of his sons. A peculiar instance of this concerns Theseus' son, Hippolytus. Aphrodite, angered by Hippolytus' generous offering to chaste Diana, caused the youth's stepmother, Phaedra, to conceive an incestuous desire for him. Though Hippolytus properly repelled his mother's seductive attempts, Phaedra untruthfully told Theseus that the youth had seduced her. The jealous king pursued his son from Athens, and during the chase, Hippolytus is accidently killed. Indignant Diana had Asclepius revive her devotee's corpse, and soon father and—now immortal—son were reconciled. (Hippolytus' mother is listed among the women whom Theseus forsook for Titania. Hippolyta, as Theseus' wife, has no mythological basis and perhaps functions only to remind the Elizabethan audience of the homonym “Hippolytus.”) Here again, the parent is cast in the oedipal role and the child actively resists temptation. Hippolitus' reconciliation with his father and elevation by the patron goddess of chastity to heroic, even immortal, stature emphasizes the desirability of repelling oedipal overtures.

5. Harry Slochower, Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in the Literary Classics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970), p. 29.

6. Hanns Sachs, The Creative Unconscious (Cambridge: Sci-Art Publ., 1951), p. 214.

7. Kenneth Burke, “Freud—and the Analysis of Poetry,” in Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. H. M. Ruitenbeck (New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1964), p. 114.

8. Sachs, p. 244.