[In the following essay, Hunt alleges that A Midsummer Night's Dream functions as a cryptic allegory that criticizes Elizabeth I and the problem of securing a successor to her throne.]

Every so often commentators on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream quote Bottom's judgment on his own “most rare vision” of the Fairy Queen—“Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream” (4.1.203-4)—with tongue-in-cheek reference to their own interpretive efforts.¹ Given the frequency with which Bottom's words have been invoked for this purpose, one can be excused for believing that the utterance has lost most of its value as a beforehand deflector of criticism against the commentator's argument. Yet if ever a commentator on A Dream risked appearing an ass to his or her reader, it would be the interpreter presumptuous enough to offer a reading of a topical political allegory in the comedy. That, however, is precisely what I intend to do in this essay. I have in my title termed the political allegory I shall unfold not only “a” political allegory in A Midsummer Night's Dream (thus admitting that another one might appear as or more viable), but also that it is a “speculative” allegory. I realize nevertheless that, unless an author has supplied a statement of allegorical intention akin to Edmund Spenser's letter to Sir Walter Ralegh concerning The Faerie Queene, all unfolded literary allegories, political or otherwise, are speculative. Still, my use of the word in my title and from time to time in my argument may in some readers' minds make me appear less an ass in my expounding of Shakespeare's Dream.

David Bevington in the late 1960s identified the largest obstacle to explicating a political allegory critical of Queen Elizabeth in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Citing Edith Rickert's “lock-picking type” of allegorical reading of the play (a 1920s interpretation about which I shall have something to say later), Bevington rejects it with a simple, shrewd observation: “Shakespeare's supposed concealment of the allegory [of Titania/Elizabeth] grossly in love with [Bottom/James VI of Scotland] will not serve, for if Elizabeth with her mastery of decipherment could not read the message it would fail of its purpose. The record seems clear that the play did not offend.”² Setting aside for the moment the question of the plausibility of Rickert's equation of Bottom and the Scottish king, I want to question the assumptions underlying Bevington's judgment. He assumes that if a discernible allegory critical of Elizabeth exists in Shakespeare's comedy, it would have offended her; and if it offended her, a written record of the offense taken would have necessarily survived.

While Bevington's first assumption is certainly plausible, his second is debatable. It is likely that Elizabeth did not prosecute every author of a literary allusion to her rule that she suspected or knew was critical of it. If the allusion was notably oblique or cryptic, political prudence may have occasionally dictated her silence. The queen may have realized that crying out against every suspected critical allusion or allegory, when its author could defend himself by interpreting it according to a set of literal, harmless meanings, put her at risk of appearing to her subjects overly touchy, insecure in her monarchy. No record exists of her censure of Spenser for critically depicting in The Faerie Queene her treatment of Ralegh in the allegory of Belphoebe and Timias's relationship.

More importantly, Shakespeare possibly may have encrypted an allegory in A Midsummer Night's Dream not designed for Elizabeth's instruction, but for the amusing reinforcement of the political opinions of one or more earls and their coterie with influence over the playwright. Granted the danger entailed by such a hypothetical enterprise, Shakespeare might have been inclined to make the allegory especially dark, meant chiefly to be decoded and appreciated by a disaffected nobleman—who may have partly or wholly suggested it—and his “in-the-know” friends. Such an assumption is every bit as plausible as the belief that, if Shakespeare incorporated an allegory in A Midsummer Night's Dream, it was intended primarily for Queen Elizabeth's eyes and ears.

Critics have judged A Midsummer Night's Dream the most Lylyesque of Shakespeare's comedies.³ Veiled political allegories inform the comedies of John Lyly, so much so that this immediate predecessor of Shakespeare was identified in the 1580s with this dramatic phenomenon.⁴ By this logic, Shakespeare very likely incorporated a political allegory in A Midsummer Night's Dream. By making Titania the Fairy Queen, Shakespeare begs the recollection of Queen Elizabeth in auditors' minds, especially so because performances of the comedy likely preceded and closely followed the anticipated appearance in January 1596 of the second installment of Edmund Spenser's great poem in praise of Elizabeth, The Faerie Queene.⁵ The possibility that an encrypted allegory involving Elizabeth lurks in A Midsummer Night's Dream increases severalfold with the realization that the appearance of Shakespeare's play roughly coincides with a surge of contemporary interest in the great allegorical poem of the playwright's lifetime.⁶

In what follows, I argue that certain features of Spenser's The Faerie Queene—in addition to those of his Prosopopoia—have a greater relevance for the method and substance of A Midsummer Night's Dream than has been generally recognized, and that this awareness facilitates the reading of a Shakespearean allegory involving Queen Elizabeth, the duke of Anjou, and King James VI of Scotland. The likelihood that Shakespeare encoded a political allegory in his comedy concerning relationships between these persons derives strength from a speculated 1594-95 relationship between Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton, and demonstrable bonds between Southampton and the earl of Essex and between Essex and King James. The fact that Shakespeare in 1594-95 dedicated his two narrative poems—Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece—to Southampton, who may have been the Young Man of the Sonnets, presumes a relationship of some kind between the popular playwright and the play-going aristocrat. Martin Dzelzainis finds in the earl of Southampton's documented political opinions the source of the inferred politics of Shakespeare's The Rape of Lucrece and possibly his Julius Caesar. As regards Shakespeare's political thought, “the crucial question which needs to be addressed,” according to Dzelzainis, “is the extent to which … [Shakespeare's] earlier work exhibits traits which can be aligned with the political and intellectual agenda of the Essex circle.”⁷ Elizabeth had forbad all public discussion of the succession question. But through a likely allegory embedded in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Essex and Southampton presumably broach the question and provide an answer.⁸

Critics and editors of A Midsummer Night's Dream usually agree that an allegory involving Queen Elizabeth most certainly materializes during Oberon's account of how the pansy gained its magical property. Considering the major allegorical readings of this richly symbolic passage early in the play lays the groundwork for my subsequent, more important explication of a political allegory involving the succession question. It does so mainly by suggesting in each case the reconstructed interests of the earl of Essex in the consequences of Elizabeth's fierce chastity and the problem of who would succeed her. “Thou rememb'rest,” the Fairy King tells Robin Goodfellow,

Since once I sat upon a promontory
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song
And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
To hear the sea-maid's music?

(2.1.149-54)

When Puck says “I remember,” Oberon continues:

That very time I saw, but thou couldst not,
Flying between the cold moon and the earth
Cupid, all armed. A certain aim he took
At a fair vestal thronèd by the west,
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts.
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,
And the imperial vot'ress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower—
Before, milk-white; now, purple with love's wound:
And maidens call it ‘love-in-idleness’.
Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once.
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.

(2.1.155-72)

Since the eighteenth century, editors of this passage have generally agreed that the “fair vestal thronèd by the west” alludes to Elizabeth, the Virgin Queen throned on an island on the western edge of Europe, the monarch who had made the moon the symbol for her personal and political chastity. Oberon's rich evocation of a mermaid, a dolphin, and song strengthens the probability of this allusion. James Boaden in 1832 first asserted that certain details of Oberon's speech configure imaginative elements of a summer 1575 allegorical pageant presented by the earl of Leicester to Queen Elizabeth at the estate she had given him—Kenilworth, fourteen miles from Stratford.⁹ According to separate accounts of the entertainment written by Robert Laneham and George Gascoigne, the queen, returning to the castle after late-afternoon deer-hunting, at a small lake came upon “Triton, Neptune's blaster,” seated “upon a swimming mermayd (that from top too tayl was an eyghteen foot long).”¹⁰ (Gascoigne, in The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth, 1575, however, asserts that “Tryton, in likenesse of a mermaide, came towards the Queene's Majestie as she passed over the bridge, returning from hunting.”)¹¹ Triton tells the queen that her mere appearance will be sufficient to make the captor of the Lady of the Lake release the maiden. After several allegorical speeches and the appearance of the Lady of the Lake herself, Elizabeth, according to Laneham, passing farther onto the bridge, encountered Arion “ryding alofte upon hiz old freend the dolphin.”¹² (Gascoigne, however, states that “Protheus appeared, sitting on a dolphyn's back.”)¹³ One concludes that the impressions made on eyewitnesses of this pageant did not exactly correspond. Nevertheless both Laneham and Gascoigne agree that the mythological personage seated upon a dolphin sang a lyrical song and that ravishing music issued from a consort hidden within the sea creature.

Sometimes gentry of the neighborhood were invited to witness the sumptuous shows presented to Elizabeth on summer progress from one estate to another. Some romantically inclined Shakespeareans have imagined a prominent citizen of a town fourteen miles away and his eleven-year-old son watching the entertainment.¹⁴ Others posit a Stratford informant later telling the Shakespeares that he had “heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back / Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath / That the rude sea grew civil at her song.” Assuming Shakespeare's firsthand knowledge of the Kenilworth entertainment, a dubious proposition to say the least, is not necessary according to my later argument to justify his interest in evoking some of its details in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is enough for now to say that, since the entertainment involved the earl of Essex's stepfather, Leicester, and possibly his mother, the earl in the mid-1590s may have still been interested in certain aspects of it and that he, either directly, or through Southampton, may have directed Shakespeare's attention to published accounts of it.

Especially telling for adherents to the Kenilworth theory is the fact that Triton in Laneham's account of the pageantry charges “both Eolus with al his windez, the waters with hiz springs, hiz fysh and fooul … that they ne be so hardye in any fors to stur, but keep them calm and quiet while this Queen be prezent.”¹⁵ Likewise, Gascoigne has Triton “commanding … the waves to be calme.” “You waters wilde, suppresse your waves, and keepe you calme and plaine,” he orders.¹⁶ To this developing collation of details should be added a final ingredient from Leicester's pageantry: the spectacular fireworks that blazed on different July nights in the Warwickshire sky. Laneham describes “very straunge and sundry kindez of Fier-works, compeld by cunning to fly too and fro, and too mount very hye intoo the ayr upward, and also too burn unquenshabl in the water beneath.”¹⁷ On an earlier night, Jupiter displayed “hiz mayn poour; with blaz of burning darts, flying too and fro, leamz of starz coruscant, streamz and hail of firie sparkes, lightninges of wildfier a water and lond, flight & shoot of thunderbolz, all with such continuans, terror, and vehemencie, that the Heavins thundred, the waters soourged, the earth shooke.”¹⁸ These fireworks represent in this symbolic complex the “certain stars [that] shot madly from their spheres / To hear the sea-maid's music.” For some commentators, one of the “blaz of burning darts, flying too and fro,” depicts Cupid's “love-shaft,” “loosed … smartly from his bow.”

The likelihood of the Kenilworth allusion derives not from any one or two or even three of its elements corresponding to details of Oberon's rich evocation but from the unusual collation of mermaid-dolphin-sweet music-calmed water-and shooting stars in Shakespeare's poetry and Leicester's royal entertainment, arranged for the pleasure of the “fair vestal thronèd by the west,” the “imperial vot'ress,” secure from Cupid's dart, that Shakespeare immediately introduces into his scene.

Many commentators on A Midsummer Night's Dream have discounted all claims for the relevance of Leicester's Kenilworth entertainment for the play, chiefly because they cannot imagine that allusion to an ephemeral, twenty-year-old pageant would mean much to playgoers in 1595. Those persuaded by this argument but also convinced that Oberon's fantastic description draws upon the symbolic pageantry of a summer entertainment presented to the queen have opted for the earl of Hertford's fête at Elvetham in 1591, an event more likely to remain in some playgoers' memories in 1595. At Elvetham, Hertford's laborers dug a crescent-shaped pond enclosing to the north a promontory between the horns of the watery crescent. Hertford literally throned the “fair vestal” Elizabeth on the west side of the pond. Neaera, chief of the Nereids, onboard a ship in this entertainment approached Elizabeth, singing. In an article claiming the Elvetham pageantry as a source for details in Oberon's vision, Edith Rickert, citing a passage in Antony and Cleopatra, asserts that Shakespeare did not distinguish between Nereids and mermaids and that—in a highly questionable claim—the dramatist's phrase “dolphin's back” was a contemporary metaphor for a ship, which was sometimes synecdochically represented by its dolphin figurehead.¹⁹ Moreover, fireworks graced the final night of the queen's visit. These fell into the waters of the crescent moon, inspiring Shakespeare—so this argument goes—to write “But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft / Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon.”²⁰

Making a Nereid on a boat equivalent to a mermaid on a dolphin seems a bit more forced than the conjunction of mermaid-dolphin-sweet music-calmed water-shooting stars in the Kenilworth entertainment. And yet the Elvetham pageant explains some details of Oberon's speech—the promontory, the throne to the west, the fiery dart quenched in the moon—better than the Kenilworth entertainment does. Incongruities between each entertainment and the details of Oberon's remembrance have led a third (perhaps the largest) group of commentators to assert that Shakespeare simply conflated certain details of both pageants, or that he had no specific entertainment for Elizabeth in mind when he wrote Oberon's speech but drew generally upon his knowledge of the recurring ingredients of this royal subgenre.

Still, Oberon's speech has the feel of topical allegory and only aspects of the Kenilworth entertainment can explain apparently allegorical details of the latter half of Oberon's rhapsodic speech. Obviously the passage is designed to praise the Virgin Queen. When Oberon says—

But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon,
And the imperial vot'ress passèd on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free—

auditors immediately understand that Oberon (and through him Shakespeare) has complimented Elizabeth, whose strong chastity deflects suitors' amorous darts such that her mind is meditative, wise, untroubled by the romantic desire that they see making fools of the Athenian youths in the play. And yet this compliment is qualified—in fact, it disappears—when, upon reflection, the auditor (but more likely the reader) realizes that Cupid's “fiery shaft” (a phallic image) does penetrate the queen, for she was symbolically equivalent to the moon, whether full or crescent. Oberon does say that Cupid's shaft was quenched “in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon.” The method is typical of the play, in which Elizabeth is complimented at the same time that she is not complimented.

In 1843, N. J. Halpin further developed Boaden's claim for the relevancy of the Kenilworth entertainment for the play by asserting that, when Shakespeare had Cupid's deflected bolt fall upon “a little western flower,” purpling it with “love's wound,” he was directly involving Kenilworth's owner, the earl of Leicester, in his allegory.²¹ The earl had been one of the queen's most promising suitors; but, thwarted for years of his prize, he in the mid-1570s began an affair with and later in 1578 secretly married the mother of Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex—Lettice Knollys, countess of Essex. At the time of the Kenilworth entertainment, the countess lived in the western part of England. In this allegory, Elizabeth's lack of encouragement, her coldness, deflects the long-suffering Leicester's passion onto a “little western flower.” The countess, who could be considered “milk-white” in her long-standing reputation for purity, became stained (“purple with love's wound”). The widow of Walter, earl of Essex, would become the third and final wife of the earl of Leicester, but not before charges of adultery tainted her moral character. Later, the revelation of his secret marriage forever ruined Leicester's hopes of attaining the queen's most special favor. This allegorical reading indirectly criticizes the blind, categorical power of Elizabeth's chastity by suggesting the frustration and discord it could provoke.

At this point, I am not asking my reader to accept the Kenilworth allegorical reading of Oberon's speech but simply to contemplate it, hold it in suspension in his or her mind while we allegorically read Titania's, Oberon's, and Bottom's triangular relationship. For now, it is enough to note that, in the above-described reading, the earl of Essex's mother, Lettice Knollys, who an angry queen barred from her presence, gets her revenge (as does indirectly Essex's deceased stepfather, Leicester); for it is the essence of the “little western flower,” her juice, that makes the Fairy Queen act foolishly in a degrading erotic relationship with a bestial man. The obvious connection between the Kenilworth reading of Oberon's speech and a potential allegorical reading of Titania's relationship with Bottom involves a complex of Elizabeth, her chastity, and a suitor. Following this train of thought, let us then provisionally read allegorically the Fairy Queen's amour with Bottom, King Oberon's interest in it, and his insistence that the queen give him the Indian Boy to be a “henchman” (royal groom) in his retinue. Besides Leicester, the only other suitor with whom Elizabeth conducted a protracted affair of the heart was Francis, the French duke of Alençon (after 1578, duke of Anjou). In fact, the queen, by several accounts, appeared genuinely to love the homely little man she almost married in November 1581.

At the beginning of act 4, Titania's fairies pamper the ass-headed lover upon whom she dotes:

BOTTOM:
Scratch my head, Peaseblossom. Where's Monsieur Cobweb?
COBWEB:
Ready.
BOTTOM:
Monsieur Cobweb, good monsieur, get you your weapons in your hand and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle; and, good monsieur, bring me the honeybag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, monsieur; and, good monsieur, have a care the honeybag break not. I would be loath to have you overflowen with a honeybag, signior. [Exit Cobweb] Where's Monsieur Mustardseed?
MUSTARDSEED:
Ready.
BOTTOM:
Give me your neaf, Monsieur Mustardseed. Pray you, leave your courtesy, good monsieur.
MUSTARDSEED:
What's your will?
BOTTOM:
Nothing, good monsieur, but to help Cavaliery Peaseblossom to scratch. I must to the barber's, monsieur, for methinks I am marvellous hairy about the face; and I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me I must scratch.

(4.1.7-26, italics mine)

Eleven times Bottom addresses the fairies as “monsieur” in this brief dialogue; by excessive repetition, this word dominates these exchanges. In no way has Shakespeare characterized the fairies as French. Editors of the play have rarely offered an explanation for Bottom's form of address. The most notorious “monsieur” in England during the latter decades of the sixteenth century was Elizabeth's beloved, ardent suitor, the duke of Anjou; for “Monsieur” was one of the two names by which the queen regularly addressed her potential royal consort both in her reported conversation and in surviving letters written to him. In a 27 September 1579 proclamation against John Stubbs's pamphlet opposing her anticipated marriage, an angry Elizabeth asserted that his and others' “‘divinations’ … were nothing but ‘forged lies against a prince of royal blood, as Monsieur the French King's brother’” (my italics).²² “The title Monsieur,” in the words of Marion A. Taylor, “was the honorific bestowed upon the brother of a king of France when his brother became heir to the throne.”²³ In the summer of 1580, Elizabeth wrote to Sir Edward Stafford, “‘I am sure the [Dutch] States have accorded to the demands of Monsieur. … Oh, Stafford, I think not myself well used, and so tell Monsieur that I am made a stranger to myself. … Let it please Monsieur to suspend his answers unto [the common posts of London]. … I dare not assure Monsieur how this great matter will end until I be assured what way he will take with the Low Countries …’” (my italics).²⁴ The unpopularity of the projected marriage with a French Catholic prince made “Monsieur” a term of mockery with the Leicester-Sidney-Walsingham faction and among other English Protestants. In Shakespeare's play, the word “Monsieur” characterizes the Fairy Queen's oafish suitor more than it does the fairies he addresses.

Elizabeth was fond of giving nicknames to her trusted servants. The duke of Anjou quickly became her “Frog” and Jean de Simier—Anjou's Master of the Wardrobe who in Anjou's absence first courted the queen in England for him—her “Ape” or “Monkey.”²⁵ Elizabeth plied her Ape “with small gifts for Monsieur—handkerchiefs, gloves, or, more significant, miniatures of herself.”²⁶ Later, Anjou would send her from across the Channel fresh flowers and a miniature gold frog as a love token. The twenty-four-year-old Anjou “addressed her in devoted and passionate language, and she seemed to enjoy it, and showed every sign of falling in love with him.”²⁷ In August 1579, Anjou slipped over to England for a secret rendezvous with Elizabeth. “Simier had been assigned a pavilion in the gardens of Greenwich Palace, where the duke was to stay incognito. He arrived early one morning before anyone was awake and Simier put him to bed, writing Elizabeth a suggestive little note, wishing to God she was between the sheets with his master. At dusk she slipped out of the palace with only one lady and they supped with Simier and the duke.”²⁸ The occasion was a great success, causing Elizabeth to believe that the French prince was better-looking than she had been led to believe. But in the eyes of the majority of her courtiers and those subjects who eventually saw Anjou, he was a presumptuous, homely Catholic who threatened as potential royal consort to ruin England through disadvantageous alliances and foolish acts of policy. So hard was believing that the queen could find Anjou attractive that Leicester started a rumor that Simier had been giving Elizabeth love potions.

Shakespeare's staging of the Fairy Queen's infatuation with Bottom reprises the Elizabeth/Anjou affair from a Protestant viewpoint. An ocular love potion—the juice of the magical pansy—causes Titania foolishly to dote upon a lover unworthy of her, a suitor that only she can find handsome.²⁹ Like Elizabeth, doting Titania showers her beloved with little gifts. Like her, she coins an endearing love language for him, leading him into the recesses of her natural bower—a place analogous to the Greenwich garden pavilion where Elizabeth perhaps imagined herself “between the sheets.” In his defamatory pamphlet, John Stubbs had suggested that the likelihood that a dissolute life had given Anjou syphilis was reason enough to discourage thoughts of his marriage with Elizabeth.³⁰ Syphilis, the “French pox,” gets associated with Bottom when he tells Peter Quince that he can play Pyramus “in either your straw-colour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow,” and Quince replies, “Some of your French crowns have no hair at all, and then you will play bare faced” (1.2.83-88). While Bottom refers to the gold color of a French coin, Quince puns upon a head bald from syphilis, the “French” disease, and associates this symptom of advanced syphilis with Bottom barefaced.³¹

At this point, my reader might object that, if Shakespeare had wanted auditors to think of Anjou in connection with Bottom, he would have done well to have Puck transform the rude mechanical into an ape rather than an ass (Simier and Anjou were often conflated in disapproving English imaginations into a composite suitor). Shakespeare and Fletcher's The Two Noble Kinsmen reveals that repertory companies could introduce onto the stage the apelike Bavian of the morris dance, with his comic “long tool” and simian disguise. Oberon imagines that the first thing Titania will see, once Puck squeezes the magical juice into her eyes and she awakens, will be a “meddling monkey” or a “busy ape” (2.1.181). But the notorious example of Edmund Spenser's Prosopopoia: or Mother Hubberds Tale, composed in 1579 and published with his Complaints in 1591, argued against transforming Bottom into an ape. James Bednarz, Robert Reid, and Harold F. Brooks, among others, believe that one of the entertainments proposed in A Midsummer Night's Dream for Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding—“‘The thrice-three muses mourning for the death / Of learning, late deceased in beggary’” (5.1.52-53)—alludes not to the miserable death of dramatist and scholar Robert Greene but to the tone and substance of Spenser's argument in “The Teares of the Muses,” a poem included in the Complaints volume.³² This possibility suggests that Shakespeare most likely opened Spenser's Complaints while he was writing A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edwin Greenlaw in 1910 first read the allegorical beast fable of the latter part of Prosopopoia (ll.949-1384) as a veiled Protestant criticism of Elizabeth's potential marriage with the duke of Anjou.³³ In this Aesopian fable, an ape (Simier) and a fox (Lord Burghley) attempt to hoodwink a lion (Elizabeth), eventually stealing her skin. Wearing it, the ape along with the fox tyrannize over all estates until their mistakes of rule and the awakening lion drive them off. A late stanza of The Faerie Queene apparently alludes to a profound dislike that Elizabeth's minister Burghley had taken to Spenser.³⁴ It is quite likely that it sprang from his knowledge that Spenser had cast him as the fox in his poem. It is also quite likely that Burghley's influence with Elizabeth in this respect insured that Spenser would never win from her the material preferment that he thought his long epic in praise of her had earned him. Through Southampton and—behind him—Essex and a circle of Protestant noblemen, Shakespeare would likely have been aware of the disaster that Spenser had brought upon himself by not making his allegorical conceit sufficiently dark. Thus Bottom in my hypothetical reading becomes an ass and not an ape, with the advantage of making possible a dramatic pun on “ass”/“ace” and the connotation of sexual prowess lent by the analogue of the Apuleius story. In summary, the singularity and notoriety of Elizabeth's dotage on Anjou would have made some of Shakespeare's playgoers, admittedly a small audience,³⁵ think of that courtship when viewing the Fairy Queen's affair with “Monsieur” Bottom, especially since it replicated details of Elizabeth's and Anjou's amour.

Before leaving this symbolic dimension of A Midsummer Night's Dream, we should note a connection between the Elizabeth-Anjou affair and that involving Leicester, Elizabeth, and Lettice Knollys. According to Maria Perry, Leicester's spring 1578 marriage to Lettice Knollys was kept secret “until the autumn of 1579, when Simier told the Queen that Leicester was married to revenge himself on the earl for trying to wreck the negotiations for Elizabeth to marry [Anjou].”³⁶ In actuality, Simier “struck back by inducing two courtier allies of his, the crypto-Catholics, Henry Howard and Charles Arundel, to reveal to the Queen Leicester's marriage.”³⁷ Upon this discovery, Elizabeth's rage grew so great that she almost had Leicester imprisoned; she never afterward lost an opportunity to insult Lettice Knollys, and she never allowed Leicester to bring his wife to court. After Leicester died, “Elizabeth made Lettice pay back every penny he owed to the Crown. The countess sold jewelry to raise £ 50,000 and the Queen snatched back estates she had given him.”³⁸ Perry speculates that Elizabeth's realization that her former suitor Leicester apparently loved another woman so much that he was willing to risk the queen's certain rage by marrying her intensified her desire to marry Anjou as compensation for her hurt ego.³⁹

Titania's humiliating love affair constitutes Oberon's punishment of the Fairy Queen for her refusal to give him the Indian Boy. Allegorically, what could this punishment mean? Who do Oberon and the Indian Boy represent? In Book 2, canto 10 of Spenser's The Faerie Queene (published in 1590 and republished in 1596), Sir Guyon in Alma's Castle reads an old book titled Antiquitie of Faerie lond (2.10.70-76), a work celebrating the famous ancestors of Gloriana (Queen Elizabeth). There he finds that, after the “sundry gouernments” of “seuen hundred Princes” (2.10.74.3-4), Elficleos (King Henry VII) “did rayne,”

The wise Elficleos in great Maiestie,
Who mightily that scepter did sustayne,
And with rich spoiles and famous victorie,
Did high aduaunce the crowne of Faery:
He left two sonnes, of which faire Elferon
The eldest brother did vntimely dy;
Whose emptie place the mightie Oberon
Doubly supplide, in spousall, and dominion.
Great was his power and glorie ouer all,
Which him before, that sacred seate did fill,
That yet remaines his wide memoriall:
He dying left the fairest Tanaquill,
Him to succeede therein, by his last will:
Fairer and nobler liueth none this howre,
Ne like in grace, ne like in learned skill;
Therefore they Glorian call that glorious flowre,
Long mayst thou Glorian liue, in glory and great powre.

(2.10.75-76)⁴⁰

In this dark conceit, Elferon is Henry VIII's elder brother, Prince Arthur, whose premature death permitted Oberon (Henry VIII) to marry Arthur's widow, Catherine of Aragon. (Thus Henry VIII “Doubly supplide” his brother's place, “in spousall, and dominion”). Spenser stresses that King Oberon's last will and testament named Tanaquill, Elizabeth, his royal successor.⁴¹

King Henry VIII as the Fairy King Oberon also materializes in the dialogue of Thomas Dekker's The Whore of Babylon, published in 1607 and written and performed most likely the same year. Drawing upon Spenser's great poem for its conception of England as faeryland and English lords and ladies as elves and fairies, Dekker's ambitious play, which he considered a “Dramaticall Poem,” set forth in “Tropicall and shadowed collours”—in allegorical symbolism, in other words—amounts to virulent anti-Catholic satire based on events of the 1580s leading up to and including the formation of the Spanish Armada.⁴² Commentators on The Whore of Babylon have long recognized the influence on it of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Throughout the play, Elizabeth, the Fairy Queen, is called Titania, the name Shakespeare first associated with her twelve years earlier. Moreover, in these verses of the Empress of Babylon—“Fiue Summers haue scarce drawn their glimmering nights / Through the Moons siluer bowe” (1.1.47-48)—several commentators have heard the echo of these lines of Hippolyta's from Shakespeare's play: “Four nights will quickly dream away the time; / And then the moon, like to a silver bow” (1.1.8-9).⁴³ Like Spenser, Dekker allegorically traces Elizabeth's royal lineage. Florimell (the earl of Leicester) reports that Elfiline (Henry VII) “to immortal shades being gone,”

(Fames minion) great King Oberon,
Titaniaes royall father, liuely springs,
Whose Court was like a campe of none but Kings.
From this great conquering Monarchs glorious stemme,
Three (in direct line) wore his Diadem:
A King first, then a paire of Queens, of whom,
Shee that was held a downe-cast, by Fates doome,
Sits now aboue their hopes: her maiden hand,
Shall with a silken thred guide Fairie land.

(1.2.34-42)

Soon afterward, a king representing France tells Titania that his land is

Of breath so sweet, and of aspect so faire,
That to behold her, and to conquer her,
(In amorous combats,) great king Oberon,
Your awefull father, oft ha's thither come,
Like to a bridegroome, or a Reueller,
And gone agen in goodly triumphs home.

(1.2.108-13)

Obviously Dekker's source in this instance is The Faerie Queene 2.10.75-76. Nevertheless, the presence of elements of A Midsummer Night's Dream in The Whore of Babylon suggests that Dekker also may have understood that Oberon in Shakespeare's play figures Titania's royal father and capitalized upon an association known to contemporaries.

By depicting Titania and Oberon as married, Shakespeare allegorically suggests that Elizabeth is “married” to the Tudor line, or to her Tudor heritage. In 1595, she was long past childbearing and the use of a royal marriage to produce an heir. Titania and Oberon's marriage is barren because the aged Fairy Queen was barren. Her barrenness entailed the barrenness, the end, of the direct Tudor line fathered by King Henry VII. Much of Shakespeare's play has the quality and logic of a dream. Dreams usually distort and rearrange the relationships of both present and past reality. By a strange dream logic, Oberon's punishment of Titania by causing her to fall in love with an ass figuratively becomes Henry VIII's punishment of his daughter by making her, to the scorn of her subjects, futilely fall in love with the duke of Anjou. (The futility of the Titania/Bottom amour emphasizes the political futility of Elizabeth and Anjou's affair, insuring by allegorical logic that Oberon/Henry VIII is not really risking a Catholic succession). Oberon punishes Titania because she will not give him the Indian Boy. By in effect burying the Boy in a stereotypically feminized, “Elizabethan” world of bowers, Titania would render him unfit for the stereotypic masculine active world of the hunt and of the activities of King Oberon's train.

Homer Swander has established that Titania's bower (like Oberon's) exists offstage unseen, in mysterious faeryland—not to be confused with the onstage bank canopied with flowers where Titania sleeps.⁴⁴ Despite this distinction, editors, directors, actors, and playgoers generally conflate the two places mentally if not geographically. This would have been especially the case with Shakespeare's original audience, more familiar than modern audiences with the properties of Spenser's Bower of Bliss in The Faerie Queene, Book 2; for the poet's Bower resembles Titania's canopied bank.⁴⁵ Thus audiences imagine the bower as a locus of torpor, of sleep, of relative idleness reminiscent of other natural wombs of withdrawal in The Faerie Queene.

Oberon punishes Titania with the silly futility of the Anjou affair because she will not give him an heir to raise. The implication is that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a succession play, a drama partly about barren Elizabeth and the selection of her successor. Elizabeth had explicitly forbad on penalty of severe punishment—John Stubbs had had his hand cut off—any public discussion of the succession issue. Yet Shakespeare does so through an especially dark conceit. Who, then, is the Indian Boy? The answer is an astounding one, and yet it accords with the dream logic of Shakespeare's allegory and with the preference of the patron Shakespeare sought in 1593-95—the earl of Southampton, and through him with that of Southampton's intimate friend the earl of Essex and the Protestant circle of noblemen associated with them both.

James L. Calderwood asserts that “if Shakespeare had intended the boy … to have any importance in his own person, surely he would have put him onstage. By not doing so, he does to him theatrically what Oberon and Titania do to him rhetorically—transform him into a signifier in a system of communication.”⁴⁶ It is as a signifier in an allegorical system of communication between Shakespeare and a select audience, a communication involving the English succession, that the Indian Boy gains meaning. Throughout the 1580s and 1590s no one mentions a child the presumed age of the Indian Boy as a rightful successor. All the candidates are adult men and women. This fact suggests that the dreamlike distortion of this aspect of Shakespeare's political allegory is perhaps more extreme than elsewhere in the play.

The first thing to notice is Shakespeare's estrangement of the Indian Boy and his mother. The Indian Boy is a changeling, like Georgos, the Red Cross Knight, in Book I of The Faerie Queene. Shakespeare could have easily made the Boy an Athenian rather than an Indian changeling; after all, the fairy wood borders Theseus's Athens.⁴⁷ Editors and commentators invariably understand Titania's statement that the Boy's mother was “a vot'ress of my order” (2.1.123) to mean that she was a devotee of Titania, a member of an order devoted to worshipping the moon-queen. But Oberon refers to Titania's alter ego—“the fair vestal thronèd by the west”—as an “imperial vot'ress” (2.1.163). It makes little sense to think of the Boy's mother as a devotee of a queen when queens themselves are devotees of a goddess.⁴⁸ When Titania says that the Indian Boy's mother was a “vot'ress” of her order she implies that the woman was a devotee of her rank, of her order—in other words a queen, an “imperial vot'ress.” By conceiving of the Boy and his mother as Indian rather than Athenian, Shakespeare makes them royal aliens. Puck does say that the “lovely boy” was “stol'n from [a widowed] Indian king” (2.1.22). The potential claimant of Elizabeth's throne mentioned throughout the 1590s who was legally an alien was King James VI of Scotland, son of an alien monarch, Mary Queen of Scots.

In his last will and testament, made on 30 December 1546, Henry VIII had, in default of the issue of his son Edward VI and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth, settled the crown on the rightful heirs of Henry's late sister Mary, queen of France and afterward duchess of Suffolk. In the 1590s, that heir was Edward Lord Beauchamp, the eldest son of the eldest representative of Mary's marriage to Charles Brandon, duke of Suffolk—Lady Katherine Grey.⁴⁹ Early in her reign, Elizabeth had refused to allow the marriage of Katherine Grey to Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford. But Katherine secretly married Seymour anyway, and in the summer of 1561 became pregnant with the child who became Lord Beauchamp. Queen Elizabeth sent father and mother to the Tower, insisted that their marriage was invalid, and declared Edward Beauchamp illegitimate. Furthermore, it was determined that the signature privileging the Suffolk line was not signed by Henry himself but that someone had used his dry stamp instead. The questionable authenticity of the will thus compounded the problem of Lord Beauchamp's illegitimacy and his own marriage of disparagement, which had involved Lady Katherine Grey's son in many difficulties. Henry VIII had omitted any mention of the line of Scotland in his will. Given that omission, Elizabethans by the 1590s saw a crowd fill the field of succession. Among the potential claimants of the English throne were the earls of Derby and of Huntingdon; the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of King Philip II of Spain; Lady Arabella Stewart, descended from Margaret, daughter of King Henry VII; and eight other persons descended from King Edward III, among whom were several foreign princes.⁵⁰

The problematical status of Henry VIII's will, the indirection of claimants' title, the faintness, even illegality of the blood lines of some of them—these and other factors made a large number of Elizabeth's subjects regard King James VI of Scotland the heir to the English throne.⁵¹ James's mother, Mary Queen of Scots, was the granddaughter of Henry VIII's elder sister, Margaret; by hereditary descent, she was next in the line of succession.⁵² Her treasonous complicity in the Babington plot to overthrow Elizabeth and her execution did not alter genealogical fact. James VI's strongest advocates had always been the Protestant disciples of the earl of Leicester, Sir Philip Sidney, and their circle. In the 1590s they included Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, and his protégé, Henry Wriothesley, the earl of Southampton. At this point, readers might object that Titania's fervent devotion to the memory of the Indian votaress and to her child, the Indian Boy, hardly squares with Mary Queen of Scots' opposition to Elizabeth's rule, her execution, and Elizabeth's and James's sometimes testy relationship. I have suggested that at times the political allegory of A Midsummer Night's Dream appears distorted, in the manner that daytime events are by dreams. Elizabeth had always refused the request of counselors that she by legislation exclude Mary as her potential successor. Moreover, she had annually paid King James a pension of £ 3,000, a tribute that marked him as successor. (These monies were paid throughout the 1590s, after Queen Mary's execution in 1587). These and other facts likely reflect, at least in part, the positive bond that Elizabeth felt for her royal blood relative and her son and that she attempted to conceal. This bond, however weak or hidden, forms a basis for a psychological phenomenon familiar to Freudians: the conversion in dream of waking animosity to liking or love, a process driven by unacknowledged guilt. Elizabeth's decision to behead Catholic Mary was quite likely the most delayed and agonizing decision of her reign. The Indian votaress's death becomes the catalyst for Titania's profound caring for the Boy; if the real Fairy Queen felt some responsibility for that event, in dream the concern for the surviving son's welfare would be intensified. Banished Katherine Grey had been dead from natural causes for too many decades (since 1568, in fact) and Lord Beauchamp was too illegitimate for them to represent the Indian votaress and her son.

In Shakespeare's dark conceit, King Henry VIII as Oberon claims James VI as his surrogate son and heir as he did not (and, as regards sonship, could not) in his 1546 will and testament. Oberon's wish to “trace the forests wild” with the Boy a “Knight of his train” (2.1.25) replicates James's notorious addiction to the sport of hunting, which was well known in England while he was still king of Scotland.⁵³ Indirectly supporting my general allegorical reading are certain features of Robert Greene's dramatic romance The Scottish History of James the Fourth, a play dated 1588-92, with late 1590 the most likely time of composition and performance. Because the character Oberon, king of the fairies, appears as a kind of chorus in Greene's play, editors of A Midsummer Night's Dream sometimes cite Greene's work as a possible influence on Shakespeare. In the Induction of James IV, Oberon and a fairy Antic dance at night about a tomb, starting from it the spirit of a Scot named Bohan. Oberon and Bohan comment on the developing events of this historical romance from a vantage point outside the frame of the drama. At the conclusion of the play, they enter, and the Scottish spirit says, “And here we'll make ends. The mirk and sable night / Doth leave the peering morn to pry abroad” (Act 5, chorus 5, 1-2).⁵⁴ After Bohan requests that Oberon allow him to return to his grave, the Fairy King exclaims, “The rising sun doth call me hence away; / Thanks for thy jig, I may no longer stay” (Act 5, chorus 5, 11-12). These verses and this context set the precedent for Robin Goodfellow's warning to Oberon that their rectification of love's inequities “must be done with haste,”

For night's swift dragons cut the clouds full fast,
And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger,
At whose approach ghosts, wand'ring here and there,
Troop home to churchyards,

and the Fairy King's reply,

But we are spirits of another sort.
I with the morning's love have oft made sport,
And like a forester the groves may tread
Even till the eastern gate, all fiery red,
Opening on Neptune with fair blessèd beams
Turns into yellow gold his salt green streams.

(3.2.379-82, 388-93)

More to the point, however, is the degree to which Greene's James IV anticipates the allegorical significance of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

The historical James IV of Scotland married Margaret, elder sister of King Henry VIII, a union that established Mary Queen of Scots' and King James VI's claim to the English monarchy. Greene's play begins with James IV's and the king of England's protestation of mutual love and friendship based on James's recent marriage to the king of England's daughter, Dorothea. James immediately invests her with a crown, “that heralds may proclaim / Fair Dorothea peerless Queen of Scots!” (I.i.29-30). “Long live and prosper our fair Queen of Scots!” everyone on stage shouts as Dorothea is installed and crowned. Written and performed most likely within three or four years after the sentencing and execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Greene's play includes the repetition of a phrase, “Queen of Scots,” bound to startle auditors and evoke the image of a different, tragic Queen of Scots in their minds. And indeed for most of the play Queen Dorothea's role appears destined for martyrdom, for the play concerns James IV's ahistorical infatuation with Ida, his attempts to win her to his lust, and his consequent plot to have Dorothea murdered. Repentant, however, he begs the king of England's and Dorothea's forgiveness, which she grants him.

Accompanying this fictional romantic plot are several passages apparently critical of King James VI and the contemporary Scottish court.⁵⁵ Among them are purported allusions to James VI's alleged susceptibility to flattery and his troubles with his nobles after his return from his marriage trip to Denmark. “In the year 1520,” Bohan says in Greene's Induction, “was in Scotland a king, overruled with parasites, misled by lust, and many circumstances too long to trattle on now, much like our court of Scotland this day” (106-9). Yet despite this apparent criticism, Greene projects a model for English-Scottish relationships consistent with the allegorical import of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Bishop of St. Andrews tells James IV,

Thou art allied unto the English king
By marriage: a happy friend indeed
If usèd well; if not, a mighty foe.

(2.2.130-32)

Greene's play advocates a harmonious relationship between the English and Scottish monarchs, a conciliatory note after 1587-88 for the 1590s. In Act 5, scene 6, Greene's dialogue works to encourage the English monarch's acceptance of an erring Scottish king. A peacemaker, Queen Dorothea excuses James and tells her royal father,

My gracious father, govern your affects;
Give me that hand, that oft hath blessed this head,
And clasp thine arms, that have embracèd this,
About the shoulders of my wedded spouse.

(5.6.165-68)

Enthusiastically responding to his daughter's plea for incorporation, the king of England exclaims,

Thou provident kind mother of increase,
Thou must prevail, ah, Nature, thou must rule.
Hold, daughter, join my hand and his in one;
I will embrace him for to favour thee;
I call him friend and take him for my son.

(5.6.173-77)

“Ah, royal husband,” Dorothea tells James, “see what God hath wrought”:

Thy foe is now thy friend. Good men-at-arms,
Do you the like. These nations, if they join,
What monarch with his liegemen in this world
Dare but encounter you in open field?

(5.6.178-82)

Dorothea stresses a union that James VI would tirelessly advocate to Parliament once he became James I of England: the merger of Scotland and England into a single political entity. More important, by showing the English monarch forgiving and embracing a Scottish king named James, Greene in a play containing Oberon, king of the Fairies, sets a precedent for Shakespeare in a later play including Oberon as regards the import of his political allegory. Shakespeare's allegory implies that, regardless of his actual will and testament, King Henry VIII (if he could have) would have made James VI of Scotland his surrogate son and member of his train and thus would have informed Queen Elizabeth—Titania—of the person she ought to embrace as her successor.

The remainder of this essay involves speculation about why Shakespeare would have introduced this particular political allegory into A Midsummer Night's Dream. The following scenario depends upon Shakespeare's mid-1590s relationship with the earl of Southampton. Ascertaining the closeness of patron and poet's relationship has proved impossible. Nevertheless, a tradition “coming down from Sir William Davenant, who had known Shakespeare and was in a position to learn, tells us that Southampton gave his poet at one time a large sum to go through with a purchase he had a mind to. It is generally thought that it was this that gave Shakespeare his share in the company which was to become so famous”⁵⁶—the Lord Chamberlain's company, formed in 1594 with Shakespeare as principal dramatist. The second assumption upon which the scenario is based concerns Southampton's friendship with Robert Devereux, the earl of Essex, and his enlistment of Shakespeare to promote his own but especially Devereux's political agenda. The chorus's overt praise of the earl of Essex in Henry V reveals Shakespeare's positive attitude toward Essex as late as 1599.⁵⁷

Both Southampton and Essex as boys were wards of Lord Burghley. A nine-year-old ward of the Lord Treasurer at Cecil House, Southampton likely met Essex for the first time there, when the fifteen-year-old Essex returned to his guardian's home after completing his studies at Cambridge.⁵⁸ As they grew older, the young men grew together in their desire to emulate a Protestant model of homo universalis, Sir Philip Sidney. Sidney's widow had married Essex, and Southampton was to marry one of Essex's cousins. By 1593-94, Southampton was Essex's protégé, part of a circle of brash young aristocrats about the charismatic, impetuous earl, who was rapidly becoming Elizabeth's favorite. “To Southampton,” according to Charlotte Stopes, “Essex became the ideal knight, to whom he was willing to become esquire, or even page.”⁵⁹ Both Southampton and Essex were poets who assiduously cultivated poets and attended plays, in part because they believed that poetry joined with music and scholarship to complement Protestant militarism so as to form the successors of Sir Philip Sidney.⁶⁰ Southampton accompanied Essex in 1597 on the latter's naval campaign against the Spanish in the Azores, and he was later imprisoned for his part in the Essex Rebellion. Interestingly (for my argument), freeing Southampton and pardoning him was one of King James's first acts as the new English monarch.

In 1595 both Essex and Southampton fell out of favor with Queen Elizabeth. Early in this year, Essex's “open displays of bad temper and petulance were causing her Majesty a good deal of annoyance.”⁶¹ Furthermore, in 1595 a book appeared in England titled A Conference on the Next Succession to the Crown of England, which proved detrimental to the earl's relationship with the queen. “[I]t was prefaced with a fulsome dedication to Essex himself, as though the Earl in some fashion endorsed the contents. It speculated on the subject Elizabeth had forbidden all to meddle with—who should succeed on her death.”⁶² After surveying the claims of potential successors, the anonymous author, most likely the Jesuit Robert Parsons, suggested that on Elizabeth's death “no other man was likely ‘to have a greater part or sway in deciding of this great affair’—the succession—than Essex himself.”⁶³ To Elizabeth's irritation with Essex's dark moods was now added distrust. As Essex's standing with the queen sank, that of Southampton rose in 1595—but only momentarily so. Elizabeth zealously reserved to herself the decision concerning a maid of honor's marriage, and even her affair of the heart. In September 1595, the queen ceased favoring Southampton when she learned that he, without her permission, had become “too familiar” with one of her maids, Elizabeth Vernon, Essex's cousin.⁶⁴ Even though he later married Vernon, Southampton never regained the royal favor he lost.

Thus in 1595, a year favored for the composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, both Essex and Southampton had reason to be irritated with Elizabeth. Southampton was especially fond of Spenser's The Faerie Queene.⁶⁵ As has been noted, the writing and performance of A Midsummer Night's Dream plausibly falls within the 1595-96 period of London anticipation of the publication of the next three books of Spenser's poem. Essex and Southampton (or Southampton himself) possibly asked Shakespeare to include in a comedy an image of Queen Elizabeth in her popular persona, the Fairy Queen, but demeaningly so, in a veiled allegory stressing the humiliation of her affair with Monsieur, the duke of Anjou. This relationship would be presented in the larger context of the forbidden subject, the English succession—the very topic of the 1595 scandalous book that compounded Essex's difficulties with Queen Elizabeth.

James VI of Scotland clearly was the earl of Essex's choice as Elizabeth's successor. As early as 1589 Essex began a not-so-secret correspondence with James, in which he promised his service and fidelity, via letters written partly in cipher.⁶⁶ James in that year apparently concluded that he ought to favor Essex as inheriting the mantle—by way of Sir Philip Sidney and Essex's deceased stepfather, Leicester—of the militant English champion of Protestantism. James's negotiations of marriage to Anne of Denmark temporarily interrupted his correspondence with Essex. In October 1592, James wrote directly to Essex in order to persuade him to intervene with a recalcitrant Burghley on behalf of a Scotsman “who had been injured by English pirates and had not been allowed to execute his license to transport grain.”⁶⁷ In 1593-94, James had to argue strenuously to get his annual pension from Elizabeth. He regarded the Burghleys, Lord William and his son Robert, as his adversaries in this matter; his favoring of Essex increased proportionally to his dislike for the Burghleys.

In these years, Essex and King James could be said to have corresponded indirectly, through letters written between James's London agent, David Foulis, and Essex's close friend, Anthony Bacon, and the reports of these two men to the king and earl.⁶⁸ Helen Stafford notes that “Anthony Bacon, Essex's confidant, maintained a regular news service between London and Edinburgh, using agents Dr. Morrison, one Bruce, John Bothwell, laird of Holyroodhouse, and Dr. Harris, physician to the French King.”⁶⁹ Essex had consulted Elizabeth and had replied to James via Maitland that he would hold correspondence with no one without her consent.⁷⁰ But in this case, Essex certainly meant direct correspondence. Essex could encourage Southampton to urge Shakespeare to write a veiled dramatic allegory proclaiming James's right to the English throne. That text would constitute a witty “correspondence,” not so much between Essex and James as between Essex and more astute English playgoers. “In the spring of 1594, when the Bothwellian trouble was at its height, the King especially recommended his ambassadors, Easter Wemyss and Bruce, to Essex, commanding them to be guided by his advice in all their proceedings.”⁷¹

Thus ample evidence exists for Wallace MacCaffrey's claim that “from 1594 on [the earl of Essex] became the patron of James's causes at the English court.”⁷² As for the English succession, “the French ambassador gathered the impression that Essex favored James, although the Earl was very reticent about it. Certainly his actions bespoke it. At one time he wrote to James, ‘… such as I am, and all whatsoever I am (tho' perhaps a subject of small price) I consecrate vnto your regal throne. … Neither do I doubt, that the minds of all my country men … will jointly unite their hopes in your majesty's noble person, as the only center, wherein our rest and happiness consist.’”⁷³ Ironically, Essex's reticence in endorsing James for the English throne gets registered in the obscurity of Shakespeare's allegory of Titania, Oberon, and the Indian Boy. The playwright, after all, had his own safety to consider.

A venerable critical tradition conceives of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a comedy originally written for private performance during the festivities accompanying the marriage of an aristocratic couple and then performed later, probably in revised form, before a public audience.⁷⁴ Among the mid-1590s aristocratic marriages proposed for the play's first performance, that of William Stanley, earl of Derby, and Lady Elizabeth Vere, daughter of the earl of Oxford, granddaughter of Lord Burghley, and goddaughter and maid of honor to the queen, solemnized on 26 January 1595, has been advanced. Among its proponents is James Bednarz, who argues that Burghley's presence at its performance during wedding festivities explains certain satirical allusions to Spenser in the play: “It is likely that the lord treasurer's controlling presence behind the marriage acted as a catalyst for Shakespeare's parody of The Teares of the Muses, a work included in Spenser's Complaints volume, which repeatedly attacks Burghley for his barbaric indifference to culture and his unrestrained self-aggrandizement. Clever ridicule of Spenser would find a welcome audience at this gathering.”⁷⁵ And so by my argument, clever allusive ridicule of the queen and indirectly of Burghley would have found a welcome coterie audience at another, later performance. Shakespeare may have found himself obliged to incorporate topical allusions flattering the opinions of mutually antagonistic, influential persons or coteries more often than we currently realize or are prepared to admit. It is remotely possible that at the same or different stages of the composition of A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare found himself under pressure to reflect ingeniously in his play the prejudices of adversarial noblemen. That he perhaps did so testifies to the courtly rather than folkloric artistry of his Dream.

Notes

1. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, ed. Peter Holland, The Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon University Press, 1994). All quotations are taken from this edition.

2. David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 17.

3. Marco Mincoff, “Shakespeare and Lyly,” Shakespeare Survey 14 (1961): 15-24, esp. 20-22; G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962), 298-349, esp. 318; Leah Scragg, “Shakespeare, Lyly and Ovid: The Influence of Gallathea on A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Survey 30 (1977): 125-34; Patricia Parker, “‘Rude Mechanicals’: A Midsummer Night's Dream and Shakespearean Joinery,” Shakespeare from the Margins: Language, Culture, Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 83-115, esp. 102.

4. See, for example, David Bevington, “Lyly's Endymion and Midas: The Catholic Question in England,” Comparative Drama 32 (1998): 26-46, and books and articles referred to in the notes of this essay.

5. So Robert L. Reid argues in “The Fairy Queen: Gloriana or Titania?” The Upstart Crow: A Shakespeare Journal 13 (1993): 16-32, esp. 16-18. The seminal article for the relevance of various poems of Spenser's for the artistry of A Midsummer Night's Dream is James Bednarz's “Imitations of Spenser in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Renaissance Drama, n.s. 14 (1983): 79-102.

6. Paul A. Olson, in “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage,” ELH 24 (1957): 95-119, asserts that, “[l]ike Spenser, Shakespeare uses the shadow country [of the woods] to represent the ‘Other-world of allegory—that is, of Platonic Ideas, which constitute a higher reality of which earthly things are only imperfect copies’” (107-08). Olson is quoting Josephine Waters Bennett. In this vein, also see Jane K. Brown, “Discordia Concors: On the Order of A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Modern Language Quarterly 48 (1987): 20-41, esp. 20-21.

7. Martin Dzelzainis, “Shakespeare and Political Thought,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 100-16, esp. 107, 109.

8. Margot Heinemann, in “Rebel Lords, Popular Playwrights, and Political Culture: Notes on the Jacobean Patronage of the Earl of Southampton,” The Yearbook of English Studies 21 (1991): 63-86, remarks that “the very variety of anti-absolutist ideas and oppositional views of history within the Essex circle, openly discussed as they could never have been at Court, may indeed have contributed to Shakespeare's astonishingly multivocal drama” (64).

9. Boaden's claim has been further established and developed by N. J. Halpin, “Oberon's Vision” in The Midsummer-Night's Dream, Illustrated by a Comparison with Lylie's Endymion, (London: Shakespeare Society, 1843), 16-25, 90-95; George Brandes, William Shakespeare: A Critical Study, trans. William Archer, Mary Morison, and Diana White (1898; reprint, London: William Heinemann, 1905), 65-66; John Dover Wilson, Shakespeare's Happy Comedies (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 195; and Roger Warren, “Shakespeare and the Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth,” Notes and Queries, n.s., 18 (1971): 137-39.

10. Robert Laneham, A Letter: Whearin, part of the Entertainment, untoo the Queenz Maiesty, at Killingworth Castl, in Warwick Sheer … iz signified … The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols (1788-1805; reprint, London: Printed by N., 1823), 1:420-84, esp. 457.

11. Nichols 1:485-523, esp. 498.

12. Nichols, A Letter, 1:458.

13. Nichols, The Princely Pleasures, 1:500.

14. Halpin makes a case for the likelihood of the boy Shakespeare's presence at Kenilworth in 1575 (20-25, 43-46).

15. Nichols, A Letter, 1:457.

16. Nichols, The Princely Pleasures, 1:499.

17. Nichols, A Letter, 1:440.

18. Nichols, A Letter, 1:435.

19. Edith Rickert, “Political Propaganda and Satire in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Modern Philology 21 (1923-24): 53-87, 133-54, esp. 55-56.

20. Rickert, 56.

21. See William Shakespeare, “A Midsommer Night's Dream”: A New Variorum Edition of Shakespeare, ed. Horace Howard Furness (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1895), 75-91; and Maurice Hunt, “The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, and the School of Night: An Intertextual Nexus,” Essays in Literature 23 (1996): 3-20, esp. 13-14.

22. Maria Perry, The Word of a Prince: A Life of Elizabeth I from Contemporary Documents (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990), 238.

23. Marion A. Taylor, Bottom, Thou Art Translated: Political Allegory in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Related Literature (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1973), 40.

24. Perry, 247-49.

25. Wallace MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I (London: Edward Arnold, 1993), 199, 210.

26. MacCaffrey, 199.

27. Jasper Ridley, Elizabeth I: The Shrewdness of Virtue (New York: Viking Press, 1988), 208.

28. Perry, 237.

29. In this respect, my argument resembles that of Louis Adrian Montrose in his influential essay, “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” Representations 1.2 (1983): 61-94. Montrose asserts that A Midsummer Night's Dream is a male fantasy of control over Queen Elizabeth: “With Cupid's flower, Oberon can make the Fairy Queen ‘full of hateful fantasies’ (2.1.258); and with Dian's bud, he can win her back to his will” (81). For an allegorical reading of the “old moon” of the play as representing the “ominous repressive power” of Elizabeth, see Richard Wilson, “The Kindly Ones: The Death of the Author in Shakespearean Athens,” Literature and Censorship, ed. Nigel Smith (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1993), 1-24, esp. 13-16.

30. Ridley, 208; Perry, 238.

31. Two previous commentators have allegorically read Titania and Bottom's dotage as signifying Elizabeth and the Duke of Anjou's love affair: Alden Brooks, Will Shakespeare and the Dyer's Hand (New York: Scribner's, 1943), 95-98; and Taylor 31-50, 131-65. In Brooks's symbolic reading, Oberon figures Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester (95), who marries Lettice Knollys out of anger that Titania/Elizabeth will not hand over to him a changeling, a courtier with whom she had been flirting. Oberon/Leicester's humiliation of her through the pansy's spell backfires in Brooks's reading when the Fairy Queen falls in love with Leicester's rival, Anjou! Taylor anticipates my claim that Bottom's repeated utterance of the word “Monsieur” and his association with the French-crown disease evoke aspects of the duke of Anjou's character as the English understood it (136-39). Otherwise, she essentially adopts the details of Edith Rickert's reading except for Rickert's equation of Bottom with King James of Scotland.

32. Bednarz, 82; Reid, 26; Harold F. Brooks, “Introduction,” A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Methuen, 1979), xxi-cxliii, esp. xxxix. Critics finding an allusion to Spenser's poem rather than to Greene in the proposed nuptial entertainment usually claim that the phrase “thrice-three” is a parody of Spenser's sometimes labored archaic diction.

33. Edwin Greenlaw, “Spenser and the Earl of Leicester,” PMLA 25 (1910): 535-61. Rpt. in his Studies in Spenser's Historical Allegory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1932), 108-32. My citation of line numbers in Prosopopoia refers to the text in The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 327-79.

34. Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 1977), 6.12.41. I explore this issue involving Lord Burghley and speculate on its consequences for Spenser's career in “Hellish Work in The Faerie Queene,” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 41 (2001): 91-108.

35. Margot Heinemann nevertheless points out that the Essex/Southampton faction was as much a milieu as a circle, a larger milieu than is usually supposed, one that “included aristocrats who intensely resented their increased economic dependence on the Court and its ‘upstart’ favourites and the restriction of their military power, but also City Puritan ministers and ambitious army officers; rising diplomats, historians, and Oxford classical scholars; and a remarkable number of writers, playwrights, and poets, involved either as patrons or clients” (64).

36. Perry, 240.

37. MacCaffrey, 203. Also see Robert Lacey, Robert, Earl of Essex (New York: Atheneum, 1971), 17.

38. Perry, 243.

39. Perry, 240-42.

40. All quotations of The Faerie Queene are taken from the Hamilton edition.

41. Shakespeare was especially familiar with Book 2 of The Faerie Queene. I have demonstrated elsewhere that certain details of it constitute a subtext of As You Like It. (Maurice Hunt, “Wrestling for Temperance: As You Like It and The Faerie Queene, Book II,” Allegorica: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Literature 16 [1995]: 31-46). Furthermore, in canto 10 of Book 2, Shakespeare found not only the King Lear story vividly told (2.10.27-32), but also reference to King Cymbeline and his son Arvirage (Arviragus) and the fact that this monarch's reign coincided with the birth of Christ (2.10.50-52), a coincidence that the playwright exploits in Cymbeline.

42. All quotations of The Whore of Babylon are taken from the text appearing in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1955), 2:491-592.

43. See Rickert, 64.

44. Homer Swander, “Editors vs. A Text: The Scripted Geography of A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Studies in Philology 87 (1990): 83-108.

45. Swander, 96, n.14; Olson, 111.

46. James L. Calderwood, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: Anamorphism and Theseus' Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 (1991): 409-30, esp. 415.

47. This point is posed in the form of questions by Margo Hendricks, “‘Obscured by dreams’: Race, Empire, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47 (1996): 37-60, esp. 41. “But why does he have to be Indian? Why not describe the boy as merely a changeling child? Or, if critical tradition is correct that all the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream are taken from English folklore, why not identify the changeling as the English boy?”

48. Critics who have found the phrase “a vot'ress of my order” especially perplexing include Ernest Schanzer, “The Moon and the Fairies in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” University of Toronto Quarterly 24 (1955): 234-46, esp. 241-42; and William W. E. Slights, “The Changeling in A Dream,” Studies in English Literature: 1500-1900 28 (1988): 259-72, esp. 261. Attempting to interpret the phrase, Schanzer speculates: “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.”

49. Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England, During the Reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Bruce (Westminster: The Camden Society, 1861), viii-x.

50. Lacey, 127; Bruce, ix-xi.

51. “The line of Henry VIII was about to fail. They must go back to Henry VII. James of Scotland was Henry VII's eldest lineal representative, his true and obvious and nearest heir. Building upon that foundation, the judgment of the vast majority of the people … was clearly in his favour” (Bruce, xii).

52. Ridley, 131.

53. Coppélia Kahn, in “‘Magic of bounty’: Timon of Athens, Jacobean Patronage, and Maternal Power,” Shakespeare Quarterly 38 (1987): 34-57, esp. 56, associates Timon and James on the basis of their passion for hunting.

54. Robert Greene, The Scottish History of James the Fourth, ed. Norman Sanders (London: Methuen, 1970). All quotations of Greene's play are taken from Sanders' edition.

55. Sanders, xxvii, xxxiv-xxxv.

56. A. L. Rowse, Shakespeare's Southampton: Patron of Virginia (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), 85.

57. Henry V, 5.0.29-34.

58. G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), 27; Lacey, 110.

59. Charlotte C. Stopes, The Life of Henry, Third Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare's Patron (1922; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969), 35.

60. Lacey, 111.

61. Akrigg, 47.

62. Lacey, 127.

63. Lacey, 127.

64. Akrigg, 47-48; Rowse, 103-4.

65. Stopes, 42.

66. G. B. Harrison, The Life and Death of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex (New York: Henry Holt, 1937), 45.

67. Helen G. Stafford, James VI of Scotland and the Throne of England (New York: Appleton-Century, 1940), 73.

68. Stafford, 117-18.

69. Stafford, 203.

70. Stafford, 118.

71. Stafford, 118.

72. MacCaffrey, 439.

73. Stafford, 204.

74. David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy: The Art of A Midsummer Night's Dream (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966), 4-5.

75. Bednarz, 82.