"What should you do?" I asked.

"Yeah, you've got me downstage-left with Theseus, the court upstage, and here comes five new characters, with a complaint that Theseus has to solve—and I've got nothing else to say."

"We'll find the motivation to move you in those opening lines."

I had, of course, my own reading of that ten-line interchange between Theseus and Hippolyta, yet I knew enough to wait for my Theseus and Hippolyta, to see what they would come up with. Now, I must admit at the first read-through with the cast to having colored their approach to some degree by a series of questions I had raised. Hippolyta has been a queen, leader of a band of warrior women in Brazil, bonding with her sisters and not needing the company of men. Theseus brings her back to Athens as his Duchess, but the decision was his, not hers: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries" (1.1.16-17). How does she feel about this? For her, is going to Athens a step up—or down?

Hippolyta empathizes with the lovers, finding their story "strange" (as in "wondrous"). Theseus feels the need to correct her; his "strange" means "absurd" or "irrational." But after his harangue, she still finds the story "admirable," and while he dismisses the lovers' accounts of the night, all of which agree, despite the fantastic events of which they tell, she insists that the combined stories grow "to something of great constancy" (5.1.1-27). If she agrees with his sense of "strange," she quickly adds her own "admirable." The conversation—debate? would we want to hear more of it? could Theseus stand anymore?—is abruptly halted with the entry of the lovers. So, how harmonious is this couple? To what degree is Hippolyta arguing with, resisting Theseus and his view of what is real or rational? And, more important, if she is resisting, then why?

In act 4 she recalls hunting in the woods of Crete with Hercules and Cadmus, "with hounds of Sparta." Theseus has just proposed to go to the mountaintop and there listen to his own dogs barking in the valley below, their sound one of "musical confusion" (4.1.112-30). With the anticipated consummation on his mind—indeed, on his mind for four days now—Theseus sees the outing as a way to pass the time. But might it also be taken as self-congratulatory? He is proud of having picked his brace of dogs with care, their distinct barks forming a perfect chord on the scale, a chord to be amplified by the echoing hills. He may take Hippolyta's reference to Hercules and Cadmus as name-dropping, her pointed reference to Sparta—famous for its hounds—as competitive. Quick to assert that his hounds are also "bred out of the Spartan kind," he goes on to brag of how low to the ground they run, right on the scent, how they are powerfully built like Thessalian bulls, careful or dogged in pursuit ("slow"). He even expands on the quality of their barking: they are "matched in mouth like bells," and no cry "more tunable" has ever been heard "in Crete, in Sparta, or in Thessaly."

To make this passage something more than scene-painting, or references to hunting that will drive the editor into copious footnotes, to make the passage live onstage, actors will need to find the characters' objects here, their motivations. What are they after? Could it be that Theseus and Hippolyta have two very different objects? Perhaps she relishes her past, life before Theseus came to Brazil, that time when the dogs' barking seemed to link "the groves, / The skies, the fountains, every region near" (118-21) so that nature itself became "all one mutual cry," a moment when opposites were united: "So musical a discord, such sweet thunder."

In effect, here Hippolyta seems at one with the play itself, where dichotomy gives way to unity, where opposites dissolve. For a time the lowly Bottom becomes a fairy queen's lover; youthful, irrational lovers have a mystical experience denied more sober, rational adults like Theseus. And a potential Romeo and Juliet (Hermia = Juliet = Thisby; Lysander = Romeo = Pyramus; Old Egeus = Old Capulet) is at once saved by a comic ending in which three couples are married even as it dissolves into an unintentionally funny, poorly acted melodrama staged before the Duke. Theseus' object, again, may be that of asserting his status as a hunter, as a man, annoyed as he is when a woman he has conquered brings up her own days as a huntress. His dogs attest his status. How solid, therefore, is the union of Theseus and Hippolyta? To be sure, Hippolyta is on his turf; yet how cowed is she? As with the debate about the stories in the final scene, the conversation here is aborted when Theseus spies the sleeping Athenians.

How does Theseus view women? Hippolyta? Does he think she "owes" him something for the decision to marry, rather than execute her in Brazil? Does she have any reservations about being here, about giving up her former life?