[In the following essay, Green explores the homoerotic aspects of A Midsummer Night's Dream by examining Bottom's explication of his “dream,” Oberon's attraction to the changeling boy, and the relationship between Helena and Hermia. The critic contends, however, that the play ultimately upholds conservative cultural ideologies.]

“HOW HAPPY SOME O'ER OTHER SOME CAN BE!”¹

Pleasure and power do not cancel or turn back against one another; they seek out, overlap, and reinforce one another. They are linked together by complex mechanisms and devices of excitation and incitement.²

Of all the illusions produced by performance, for me the most immediate is the illusion that performance can accommodate all of my desires at once. This is the lure of performance and, of course, its failure. And yet, like Bottom, I still go for whatever I can get.³

In 1985 Liviu Ciulei, artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, mounted a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. His version of the play was, as the program notes attest, greatly informed by modern commentary on the play, including that of such notable feminist critics as Shirley Nelson Garner.⁴ This essay has its genesis in a particular aspect and effect of that production. In interludes between several scenes, accompanied by music and covered by enormous, beautiful gauze runners on a set solely of black, white, and red, some of the principal actors would join in a variety of pantomime sexual encounters—straight, gay, lesbian, bisexual, single-partner, multiple-partner, etc. As the play proceeded, these comparatively random unions rose with the confusions of the lovers and gradually sorted themselves out as the “true lovers” found each other. What I experienced at this production was a metatheatrical illustration of the well-known way in which this and other Shakespearean comedies represent disruptions of social order—ones that at times for twentieth-century viewers and readers seem liberating—only to accommodate that order, usually by reasserting some slightly modified version of it at the end.

For me Ciulei's Dream exposed how “it is our cultures that imagine that when heterosexual relations occur beside homosexual relations, the straight relation must win out—as if a biological destiny were asserting itself.”⁵ The Guthrie production suggested simultaneously the erotic possibilities (officially) proscribed by the societies of Shakespearean Athens, Elizabethan England, and Reaganite America that the text temporarily brings into play and the naturalized reassertion of those proscriptions. In so doing, Ciulei exposed one likely aspect of Dream's ideological effect in our time, if not in early modern England: the play is designed to foreclose all erotic unions that do not lead to socially sanctioned (i.e., marital) procreation; in a time that had witnessed simultaneously radical feminism and the reassertion of “family values,” gay rights and the cruel effects of mass paranoia about HIV and AIDS, Ciulei's production had exposed how a bit of high humanist culture like A Midsummer Night's Dream, despite its seeming tolerance and expansiveness, contributes to the ideological work of contemporary conservatism. If finally the text curbs the willful exercise of paternal power by Egeus, it still ends with the erasure of Amazons, the paternal sanctioning by Theseus of desired unions to ensure or enhance procreation, and the curbing too of Puckish pleasures in “those things … / That befall prepost'rously” (3.2.120-21).⁶

What is suppressed or lost in the text's ideological shaping of delight in such comic resolutions is the subject of this essay. Drawing on the work of Valerie Traub, I have assumed what she demonstrates: that “once the hierarchy between homoerotic and heterosexual is dissolved within the critical enterprise, homoerotic significations are everywhere—both in their expansive, inclusive modes, and in their anxious and repressed forms.”⁷ This essay does not (seek to) re-write A Midsummer Night's Dream as a gay play but rather explores some of its “homoerotic significations”—what I see as moments of “queer”⁸ disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy.

“GENTLES, PERCHANCE YOU WONDER AT THIS SHOW” (5.1.127)

To assume that gender predicates eroticism is to ignore the contradictions that have historically existed between these two inextricably related yet independent systems. While they are always connected, there is no simple fit between them. Gender 1 sexuality.⁹

It is not, necessarily, that Shakespeare was a sexual radical; rather, the ordinary currency of his theater and society is sexy for us. Shakespeare may work with distinct force for gay men and lesbians, simply because he didn't think he had to sort out sexuality in modern terms.¹⁰

Since Frye and Barber,¹¹ it's no secret that comedies like A Midsummer Night's Dream represent temporary holiday or topsy-turvy worlds through which the discontents of civilization are mediated or negotiated, if not resolved quite so neatly as the conventional marital endings suggest. Indeed a good deal of poststructuralist criticism, especially of the new historicist and feminist varieties, has debated the ideological import of Shakespearean comedies for the construction of gender, particularly in Anglo-American culture. Feminist criticism has been particularly instrumental in exposing the hidden sexist assumptions of structuralist analyses and classical psychoanalytic interpretations. It was not so much that various feminist critical approaches denied the carnival world or topsiturviness of Shakespearean comedy but rather that they revealed the oppressive constructions of gender re-established in the endings and/or exposed the limitations, slippages, and anxieties of the carnival itself in respect to gender differences. The latter were particularly striking, given the all-male mode of early modern English theatrical production, in the case of cross-dressed heroines like Portia, Rosalind, and Viola.¹²

Though this thumbnail sketch doesn't do justice to the variety and insight of either structuralist or poststructuralist approaches to Shakespearean comedy, it does convey in miniature the character of some major shifts that have occurred in the study of Shakespeare over the last thirty to forty years. But as poststructuralist notions of ideology have generally implied, we cannot think, analyze, or write our way out of the world in which we live and work and into a utopia; there are always “blind spots.”¹³ In this essay, undoubtedly with its own blind spots that others will unmask, I want to help build onto and into recent poststructuralist—primarily new historicist, cultural materialist, and feminist—critiques of Shakespeare a greater awareness of heterosexism and homophobia, not to reject those poststructuralist approaches but to help open them to the further possibilities for institutional and cultural analysis and change presented by recent queer theories.¹⁴ Just as feminist theorists, among others like postcolonial, class, and race theorists, politicize and thereby transform the methods and insights of poststructuralism in general and new historicism in particular, so I believe queer theorists can engage feminist, new historicist, and other theorists in a re-thinking at least of the terms and probably of the aims of their political commitments.¹⁵ thus Judith Butler, for instance, believes it now necessary “to muddle the lines between queer theory and feminism”: “The relation between sexual practice and gender is surely not a structurally determined one, but the destabilizing of the heterosexual presumption of that very structuralism still requires a way to think the two in a dynamic relation to one another.”¹⁶ My efforts here are necessarily tentative and introductory and do not pretend to be comprehensive, but focusing on A Midsummer Night's Dream—in which “the course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.134)—allows us to re-examine a prime site of cultural production of gender and sexuality through the new lenses of queer theory.¹⁷

“… PAST THE WIT OF MAN TO SAY WHAT DREAM IT WAS” (4.1.205-06)

Male homoeroticism can be manipulated to reinforce and justify misogyny, or it can offer itself up as the means to deconstruct the binary structures upon which subordination of women depends.¹⁸

Bottom's journey in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the queer one; through him we can see the trajectory of queer performance.¹⁹

Bottom's famous description of his dream constitutes a striking example of the comic way A Midsummer Night's Dream employs—or rather alludes to—the unthinkable that is sodomy, which Foucault calls “that utterly confused category.”²⁰ To the extent we have it, “Bottom's Dream” (4.1.200-19) recalls but cannot identify the dreamer as the butt (literally, zoologically, anatomically) of, an elaborate dramatic paranomasia. Bottom lacks even the simplest words for any of the potential meanings of his experience—his physical and erotic transformation—though we can fill in his lacunae in a variety of ways: he thought he was “an ass” and/or “consort of the fairy queen”; he thought he had “long ears and an ass's head” and/or “a beautiful woman.” But exactly what kind of ass Bottom is and even that he is one (not least of all for attempting “to expound this dream”) eludes him (4.1.207). What has almost eluded us is the text's allusion to sodomy. And here we may be treading shaky linguistic ground. The OED distinguishes between arse (the rectum) and ass (the beast of burden associated with stupidity) as they were used and pronounced at this time and suggests further that bottom did not refer denotatively to a person's “bum” until the eighteenth century despite the long-standing but problematic conjecture that bum, a well-worn word by the Renaissance though of uncertain origin, is itself a contraction of bottom. One still might argue that “bottom” figuratively suggests the arse and that the association between this Bottom and an ass is enough to encourage this multi-layered visual and aural pun.²¹

Yet beyond such scatological references and imagery, which are today virtually irrepressible, the well-known synesthetic confusions with which Bottom declares the inexpressibility of his “most rare vision” bespeak the unspeakable even as they obscure it: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was” (4.1.204-205, 211-214). Jonathan Goldberg points out that “among the categorical confusions of the confused category ‘sodomy’ is categorical confusion itself—… a denial of those socially constructed hierarchies that are taken to be natural, that social ordering that is thought to participate in and to replicate the order of being.”²² Certainly, Bottom the Weaver upsets the analogous social and natural orders in his liaison with the fairy queen, which is perhaps even more problematic once it becomes his “dream,” with the hint of transgressive desire and aspiration this speech implies. Rude mechanical that he is, Bottom unwittingly exposes the sodomitical desire and act that, as we shall see, Oberon misrecognizes in relation to the changeling boy and, by extension, the anxiety that Theseus both manifests and suppresses when faced with any desire not subject to his sanction.²³

Bottom would offer his dream of an “ass” (in what sense?) to the Duke in the “latter end” of the play-within-the-play or “Peradventure, to make it [the woman's death? the play being put on for his own preferment? the ‘ballet of this dream’ itself? etc.] the more gracious, at her [presumably Thisby's] death” (4.1.214-19). It is no accident that the entire entertainment Bottom and his friends offer represents the final stage of Theseus's winning and wooing the Amazon queen, thereby making her his own.²⁴ Moreover, it is at this moment that the representation of marriage, an institutional “deployment of alliance” that helps secure “homosocial” relations among men through an exchange of women,²⁵ meets the image of theater in a travesty of the cross-dressed productions of Shakespeare's day. As with the much-remarked silence of Hermia and Helena in the latter part of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the all-male production of the rude mechanicals and the social exchange it effects—a mirror, however parodic, of the Shakespearean theatrical enterprise itself—mark a larger elision of women's voices—and hence their power—through (and at the moment of) marriage as well as in the theater. Theseus's male subjects offer a tragedy of Babylonian lovers, in which a woman figures but does not act, in order to promote their own interests; the wedding of the Duke both masks and permits a social and economic transaction between different classes of men. Bottom's option—to sing the “ballet of this dream” at Thisby's death—thus suggests or creates a problematic link between (in this case, displaced) homoeroticism and misogyny, in which unspoken, even misrecognized sodomitical relations foster, solidify, and/or enhance the homosocial priorities of early modern England.²⁶

But who is to say that the social context of the rude mechanicals' performance before the court serves so exclusively established interests among men, albeit of different classes? The Pyramus and Thisby story Bottom and his friends enact is written against the rigid system of alliance that Egeus wanted upheld at the start of Shakespeare's play; like the corrective potion, this theatrical travesty exorcises the specter of impending tragedy for the lovers that the opening scene hinted at. Yet the play-within-the-play does so without neatly corroborating an ideology of romantic love that has never succeeded—we know from our own historical moment—in dislodging patriarchal interests served by the system of alliance, any more than the weddings in A Midsummer Night's Dream threaten the order and hierarchy of the society the play depicts.²⁷ Romantic love, which can be seen as an early step in the “deployment of sexuality” that Foucault describes,²⁸ has its part too in leading the Babylonian lovers to the grave. And thus—at least from our historical vantage point—Bottom and his friends have “critiqued” the ostensibly companionate marriages that Theseus and A Midsummer Night's Dream itself commend to us. But the burlesque elements of the “love” between Flute's Thisby and Bottom's Pyramus, the metatheatricality of a performance in which even the Wall and the Moon are in drag, and the possible difference between our delight in this “poor” performance and the grudging and/or mocking noblesse oblige of the on-stage courtiers—“Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man” (5.1.290)—hint at desires that exceed recuperation to dominant interests. Like Quince, Flute, et al., we are glad to have our “bully Bottom” back (5.2.19): such “working-class” solidarity bespeaks feelings and motivations beyond the ken of Theseus—“If we imagine no worse of them than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (5.1.215-16)—that enter the play via the social back door of Bottom and his friends. Something treasonous, or at least “transgressive,” is released by Bottom's theatrical production, not to mention his encounter with Titania, that apparently for Shakespeare evokes the natural and social confusion associated in early modern England with sodomy even as the text suppresses its recognition as such.²⁹

“THIS HATEFUL IMPERFECTION OF HER EYES” (4.1.63)

Marriage is the social institution whose regulatory functions ramify everywhere. Sodomy, as Bray suggests, fully negates the world, law, nature. Hence the unlikelihood that those sexual acts called sodomy, when performed, would be recognized as sodomy, especially if, in other social contexts, they could be called something else, or nothing at all.³⁰

Sinistrari observes that although moralists who treat of “this filthy vice” declare that “real Sodomy is committed between [women],” yet he has seen no one offer a credible explanation “as to how this takes place.”³¹

What is it that so frightens and/or disgusts Oberon as he surveys the love-making of Titania and her Bottom? The scene enacts a crucial méconnaissance, really a complex series of misrecognitions by Oberon: of his own sodomitical intentions toward the changeling boy, of his own misogynistic fears of female power and desires, of the residence of his honor in Titania and of his resentment of its disposition outside himself, of Titania's “lesbianism” as bestiality and hence as sodomy, of his own desires to be desired (by Titania) and to control desires, of his own sadistic voyeurism, etc. It exposes analogically the justification for Theseus's abduction of the Amazon: what women do when not subject(ed) to men is beyond the pale. Metatheatrically, it may represent (masculine) Elizabethan incomprehension in the face of the queen, who has the power to dispose of herself and to act on her own desires—Elizabeth as sodomite, her imagined transgressiveness, whether seeking a husband or furtively fulfilling carnal desires with men (or women) not her equals.³²

The full comic force of the scene derives precisely from the inexpressibility of the “undoings” of this moment where what is inconceivable finds its representation in what is proscribed: thus the scene may constitute from Oberon's voyeuristic position a reenactment of the unthinkable (lesbian) love of Titania for her votaress (mother of the disputed changeling boy), now displaced onto the manifest bestiality of Titania's embrace of an “ass,” whose name—Bottom—may well conjure the anatomical pun, which introduces the (other) “sodomy” that is never mentioned or recognized as such but implied in Oberon's obsession with the changeling boy.³³ In this case, what Foucault says of power's masking itself in order to succeed applies as forcefully to the self-delusion of the ruler as it does to the blinding of the ruled: “power is tolerable only on condition that it mask a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to its ability to hide its own mechanisms.”³⁴ Interestingly, the scene's allusion to sodomy marks multiple social frontiers. Among others, it indicates and—from and through Oberon's perspective—castigates, even negates, the possibilities of unrestrained female desires of any sort and their enactment (“Be as thou wast wont to be; / See as thou wast wont to see” [4.1.71-72]); ignores the supposedly impossible aspirations of subordinate classes and their realization, reducing them to “the fierce vexation of a dream” (4.1.69); and misconstrues and/or displaces erotic desires and practices of his own—“And now I have the boy” (4.1.62)—that he does not or cannot recognize as sodomy.

Not surprisingly, this is one of those moments of disorder in which Oberon hauls out another potion, a theatrical deus ex machina, to contain the explosive representations that derive originally from his own intervention in the affairs of those around him: “But first I will release the Fairy Queen” (4.1.70). We might recognize here the tension between the play's expansiveness and its containment: the very system of power relations that enables a Theseus or Oberon to intervene in and arrange the affairs of others leads to situations that belie their attempts to maintain order; the solution to those situations in turn lies with changes in the rulers themselves—a proposition at once seemingly radical in identifying the source of the problem (the rulers' having ruled poorly) and yet hopelessly contained within and supportive of the status quo.

And yet the genie cannot quite be squeezed back into the bottle. As Oberon's agent, Puck represents that slippage between power and its exercise that affords some space, however minimal, for interests, desires, pleasures, and practices other than those consonant with dominant ideology. Thus Oberon scolds Puck: “Of thy misprision must perforce ensue / Some true love turn'd, and not a false turn'd true” (3.2.90-91). Though the OED glosses this usage as “a misunderstanding” or “a mistake,” both the legalistic sense, having to do with “a misdemeanor or failure of duty on the part of a public official,” and the wholly separate substantive meaning of “scorn” or “contempt” are possible and likely operative here. Such Puckish “misprision” embodies what Dollimore calls the “paradoxical perverse,” in which “the most extreme threat to the true form of something comes not so much from its absolute opposite or its direct negation, but in the form of its perversion; somehow the perverse threat is inextricably rooted in the true and the authentic, while being, in spite of (or rather because of) that connection, also the utter contradiction of the true and authentic.”³⁵ Like Bottom, whose imagination is unfathomable and hence, if not threatening, still not ordered as Theseus would have it, Puck signals in the fairy world the possibility of disorder or, put another way, the un- or mis-recognized possibility of preposterous pleasures: “And those things do best please me / That befall prepost'rously” (3.2.120-21). If it is on such misrecognitions, on such blind spots, that the illusions of total order and control—of Oberon and, by extension, of Theseus—are constructed, it is nevertheless through the “perverse dynamic” of Puckish agency that these illusions are exposed.³⁶

Nor is the space in which Titania loved her votaress so easily policed; Oberon seems to have had no more influence on their relations than on Titania's choice of love-object under the spell of the potion. If, as Bray, Goldberg, and others contend, sodomy is a category that expands to signify and contain almost every sort of disruption of natural, social, and political order, then Oberon's exercise of power through Puck bears its hybrid fruit in this scene: Oberon may succeed in degrading Titania, but his voyeurism implicates him in the bestiality he witnesses; he may have revenged himself on Titania for loving her votaress so deeply, but he can do so only by having her re-enact the supposed transgression.³⁷ Moreover, Oberon may fail to recognize this scene as a displacement of his own sodomitical desires for the changeling boy, but the fact that Titania's desiring Bottom effects the exchange that Oberon desires suggests that the fairy king is getting the bottom he desires, the ass he wants: “And now I have the boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes” (4.1.62-63; see also 4.1.57-61). Though the scene represents the moment of the fairy king's decision to end the quarrel with Titania and thereby set nature aright, it confirms sodomy not only as the paradoxically perverse sign of pervasive disruption(s) in nature and thus society but also as an unrecognized constituent of natural and social order.³⁸

“SO WITH TWO SEEMING BODIES, BUT ONE HEART” (3.2.212)

Moreover, it was around and on the basis of the deployment of alliance that the deployment of sexuality was constructed.³⁹

Whatever other affective or social ties may be involved in a lesbian relationship—ties that may also exist in other relations between and among women, from friendship to rivalry, political sisterhood to class or racial antagonism, ambivalence to love, and so on—the term lesbian refers to a sexual relation, for better or worse, and however broadly one may wish to define sexual. I use this term in its psychoanalytic acceptation to include centrally—beyond any performed or fantasized sexual act, whatever it may be—the conscious presence of desire in one woman for another. It is that desire, rather than woman identification or even the sexual act itself (which can obviously occur between women for reasons unrelated to desire), that specifies lesbian sexuality.⁴⁰

There is of course one famous locus of “lesbian” interpretations of A Midsummer Night's Dream, the “double cherry” speech of Helena (3.2.192-219). The passage bespeaks the sort of emotional and physical closeness among women in early modern England and Europe that Lillian Faderman discusses. But the standard recuperation of what looks like a state of Donnean “ecstasy” between two girlfriends is afforded precisely by its location in the past. What we would call lesbianism or at least romantic friendship, which a poet like Katherine Phillips calls simply friendship,⁴¹ is attributed to a same-sex loyalty typical of youth or even childhood. The very fact that Helena and Hermia have come to the woods with the men they love and are fighting about and over those men has virtually determined the context in which this speech is understood—the passage from girlhood to womanhood.⁴² Whatever their current problems with their lovers and each other, most readers and critics, like Barber,⁴³ assume that Helena and Hermia are on the path to maturity—marriage and procreation in Renaissance terms or “compulsory heterosexuality” in ours.⁴⁴

And herein lies the problem with the text's location of lesbianism in the irretrievable realm of youth; female “confederacy”—to appropriate the term that Helena uses for the presumed alliance of Hermia with Lysander and Demetrius (3.2.192)—is always already to be dispensed with.⁴⁵ Though Faderman notes that intense female friendships like those of Phillips in the seventeenth century were greatly admired, they were only thus regarded so long as they did not, as certain cases of female cross-dressing did, involve the assumption of male prerogative and status and thus threaten, interfere with, subvert, or replace male homosocial interests in matters like licit procreation.⁴⁶ Indeed, the idea of two women living together and forming a household in the economic, social, and political senses, if not in the sexual as we understand it, seems to have been virtually unthinkable. It therefore comes as no surprise that the Amazons and the Athenian maidens of A Midsummer Night's Dream are obviously expected to marry and, in any event and less obviously, to die or at least to risk dying: the Amazons through war, the marriage-resisting Athenian maidens literally in execution or figuratively in “barren” chastity (1.1.72), and the married women figuratively in the procreative act (their husbands share this sign of mortality) and actually in childbirth. It is not surprising that prior to the Fairy King and Queen's nuptial blessing against “the blots of Nature's hand” in the “issue” of these “couples three” (5.1.405-10), Puck has already put us “In remembrance of a shroud” even as he presumably sweeps away the specter of death (5.1.378, 389-90). But in this coda, as the play approaches the juncture where theater dissolves into the lives of theater-goers, the care of fairies against the danger of death in childbirth seems indeed “No more yielding than a dream” (5.1.428).

Nevertheless, A Midsummer Night's Dream provides a catalog of ways in which women—really upper-class women in this play—not only comply with but also resist the mandate to marry that is designed to control their productive, particularly procreative activities (the only sex that matters), and to secure through this control the disposition of property. Thus, as is well known, Hermia's resistance to her father's will is ultimately an affair of state that calls forth the full weight of the dominant ideology: “Either to die the death, or to abjure / For ever the society of men” (1.1.65-66). But the credence Hermia gives a highly—almost ridiculously—conventionalized romantic love, “the course” of which, as Lysander states and she concurs, “never did run smooth” (1.1.134), and her naive belief that Lysander must be satisfied with adhering even in the forest to conventions of courtly honor (2.2.35-65) suggest that in throwing off one yoke she has in fact taken up another. For the conventions of romantic love between men and women are situated within other systems (familial, social, economic, political) that deploy, protect, and foster male privilege, including men's insistence on women's fulfilling male sexual desires if the situation permits; following this line, Lysander is prone to leave Hermia because she refuses to satisfy his sexual urges, while Helena can demand that Demetrius act on his male prerogative to “abuse” her.⁴⁷ Moreover, the play may suggest in Hermia's putting Lysander farther off and in her dream (pace Holland)⁴⁸ that her own (erotic) desires do not tend toward Lysander: is hers a coy demurral (whether maidenly or coquettish), a fear of (hetero-)sexual intercourse (of Lysander's desire, of her own, of the act itself, of its social proscription, of pregnancy as a possible consequence), or—less obvious then but more probable now⁴⁹—a sexual disinclination to what we would call the heterosexual imperative?

For gay, lesbian, bisexual, and other “queer” readers and spectators, as well as for feminists (these categories may, of course, overlap) and perhaps others, Hermia's reluctance to sleep with or even next to the man with whom she is eloping bespeaks a lack of trust (well-founded, in light of the supernatural intervention) as well as a lack of desire. We find out that Hermia felt no reluctance about (sexual?) intimacy with her friend Helena. Moreover, a “queer” performance might build on a key sign of the depth of that relationship: her spilling the beans to Helena about her elopement with Lysander could be seen as an attempt to get Helena to stop her. But is it a test of Helena's love (an “out” reading) or just reliance on intimate knowledge that Helena's abject desire to please Demetrius will likely thwart Hermia's own acquiescence in Lysander's plan (a more traditional view of the latency of the women's intimacy)? The point is not that the text encourages these views but that the gaps in characterological motivation the text leaves for completion need not be filled as dominant ideologies then or now would fill them—with, in varying degrees and somewhat different senses, Hermia's naive reliance on female friendship and solidarity in the face of (heterosexual) love.

Flying in the face of dominant ideological probabilities, we might see in Helena's masochistic pursuit of a man who does not love or want her (sexually or maritally) an attempt simultaneously to comply with pervasive social expectations for adult women (their procreative function in the dominant ideology) and to thwart her role in a homosocial system of marital exchange. For feminists in particular, Helena's “spaniel” masochism (2.2.203-10) has been problematic if not downright offensive. But one possible queer reading might suggest that, in a world devoid of the requisite fairy magic, Helena's apparently self-frustrating choice and strategy—a clear case of “Love's mind” lacking “of any judgment taste” (1.1.236)—is most likely to keep her, if not satisfied, at least free from the constraints of marriage as well as from the risk of death for openly resisting or, given the procreative aim of marriage, for submitting. Even Hermia's choice—against her father's will—may similarly be seen as negotiating divers unsavory social demands. Needless to say, these isolated “queer” moments result from reading consciously and conscientiously against the grain of the text; filling its gaps in ways that counter dominant and—in the case of Helena, perhaps some feminist—ideological expectations; intervening, as Sinfield would say, precisely at the points where the text is silent.⁵⁰

But there are also other scenes, where the text “speaks,” that in present circumstances may take on meanings originally unintended: the “catfight” between Helena and Hermia is notable among these. For one thing, as feminists, we might question why mutual betrayal and physical violence between women is, by convention, funny. Furthermore, I would suggest, the ostensible humor of the scene—one of the most physical up to this point in the play—is complicated by its homoerotic energy. After all, it was originally enacted by two presumably attractive boy-actors who probably disheveled or defaced their costumes and make-up—teasing audiences by foregrounding the tension between the theatrical illusion of female presence and the male bodies that produce the illusion. Though A Midsummer Night's Dream is not a transvestite comedy, it toys with the underpinnings of its theatrical illusion-making and attraction: that there is—for at least some members of some audiences—a homoerotic charge to a scene with two boys pretending to be women fighting seems likely, especially for those accustomed to the metatheatricality of drag.

Interestingly enough, however, this scene is one that the employment of female actors renders problematic in a variety of ways: Most obviously, the increased verisimilitude of the representation of women lends weight in our culture to the text's skepticism about the durability of female friendship as opposed to love (always assumed heterosexual). But less obviously the change in the mode of production converts the probable homoeroticism of the boy-cum-woman catfight, a representation with its own problematics of gender and sexuality, into a scene with some of the potentially pornographic effects of female mud-wrestling. Indeed, many modern productions of this scene not only presume the conventional comic view of violence between women but also rely on a sexual effect akin to the cinematic use of lesbian sex in pornography aimed at men. The implied shallowness of women's friendships, the suggestion that female bodies lack the power to do more than parody masculine combat (which, to be sure, is itself mocked later in the futility of the Lysander-Demetrius chase orchestrated by Puck), and the way in which the women depend on and/or are restrained by the men in the very moment of their confrontation—certainly such misogynistic effects constitute the conventional “joke” implicit in this scene, of which the women are the butt and the male spectators (and originally producers) are the sharers. But these effects cannot be separated from the physicality of the women in modern productions of the scene—of a Hermia being restrained by and a Helena cowering behind the men, of torn dresses that tease audiences with the revelation of the actors' female bodies, in some cases of out-and-out wrestling as part of the stage business.⁵¹ How and for whom such scenes are erotic as well as funny in the context of modern production has a good deal to do with how we evaluate their effects: a lesbian theatrical production might or might not play up potential erotic qualities of the scene for its audiences, but in any event the term “pornographic” as a pejorative would undoubtedly not apply to such a version in the way that it might to a Broadway performance aimed mainly at bringing in politically, as well as socially and sexually, moderate to conservative middle- and upper-class suburbanites, tourists, and conventioneers.

Who does the seeing, who does the acting, who does the paying, and why—all these affect the erotics of this scene: feminism has led many of us to question the presumed universality of its humor and the effects of its comic conventions for the representation of gender and women in particular; additionally, queer theory suggests that this questioning can too easily subsume the erotic or sexual under the category of gender or ignore it altogether, even though the scene's erotic potentialities necessarily inform such gender analyses—all too often unconsciously. If queer theories rely on the inflated currency of the Bard in academic (and theatrical) circles, these theories—like the plurality of feminisms—also provide strategies for thwarting the uses to which dominant ideologies would put and constrain the text and for reclaiming the text for other ends, however limited in scope. Like Foucault's characterization of modern homosexual responses to the pathologizing discourse of psychoanalysis, queer literary theory and criticism constitutes a conscious and conscientious “‘reverse’ discourse,” though hardly a monolothic one: “homosexuality began to speak on its own behalf, to demand that its legitimacy or ‘naturality’ be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categories by which it was medically disqualified. There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it.”⁵² If some queer theory risks a facile recuperation of such a classic scene, indeed of so canonical a work as A Midsummer Night's Dream, it also enacts from within the discursive realms of theory/criticism and literature/theater the “re-visioning”—indeed multiple re-visionings—of the literary past that Adrienne Rich calls for.⁵³

“GOBLIN, LEAD THEM UP AND DOWN” (3.2.399)

I thus put into play the following hypothesis: like all forms of desire, homoerotic desire is implicit within all psyches; whether and how it is given cultural expression, whether and how it is manifested as anxiety, is a matter of culturally contingent signifying practices. What is culturally specific is not the fact or presence of desire towards persons of the same gender, but the meanings that are attached to its expression, and the attendant anxieties generated by its repression.⁵⁴

Sometimes I go to queer theatre and over-identify. I write myself into the plot. Or, I want to be Bottom. I want to play all the parts: “Let me play Thisby”; “Let me play the lion too.” I want to be in the representation, help produce or perform it, sometimes revise it.⁵⁵

Anne Barton ends her introduction to the Riverside edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream by invoking Hippolyta's words that the lovers' story, as well as their “minds transfigur'd so together,”

More witnesseth than fancy's images,
And grows to something of great constancy;
But howsoever, strange and admirable.

(5.1.24-27)

These words support Barton's view that “the play has created its own reality,” one “touching our own,” one beyond the “practicalities” of Theseus's common-sense view of the world.⁵⁶ As a critique of the former glorification of Theseus by critics like Hunter, Barton's reliance on Hippolyta's words as a corrective to her husband's beautiful but dismissive speech on the powers of the imagination provides a first move in dismantling the play's gender hierarchy, though she does not present it as such.⁵⁷ Hippolyta's words remind us that the tensions, the chill, of the opening scene have not disappeared entirely; marriage has transformed, perhaps even mitigated, the differences between Theseus and Hippolyta, but not eradicated them. A further problem, one might say contradiction, lies in the fact that Theseus seems better able than she to employ imagination in (mis)construing the good intentions of Bottom and his fellow-actors—albeit as a form of noblesse oblige that appropriates their play to his own ends as a “good” ruler. And these are just two among many “chinks” in the solidity of both the play's comic ending and the “world” it creates. If, as Barton recognizes, this is a play with more than one potential ending, what are the implications of Shakespeare's constructing “a fifth act which seems, in effect, to take place beyond the normal plot-defined boundaries of comedy”?⁵⁸ Is this generic anomaly related to the slippage in Hippolyta's words, between that constant “something”—a blank variously filled in various places and times—and its strangeness and marvelousness?⁵⁹ Why is there so much extraneous to the plot in “the latter end” of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

For me one answer lies in the centrality of two figures in act 5: Bottom and Puck. Though both characters are involved in the love and marriage plots, they have functioned in this regard primarily as pawns or agents in the desires of other characters. But in act 5 Bottom's exuberant imagination takes center-stage and cannot be contained by either the noblesse oblige of a Theseus or the mockery of other auditors; though aristocratic privilege is maintained in this scene through the interpretive practices of the elite, the “tedious brief scene” and the “very tragical mirth” of the play-within-the-play (5.1.56-57) nonetheless exceed the constraints of those practices on meaning. Furthermore, the rude mechanicals' reintroduction of tragedy and death into the final act of the play, however laughably executed, does ostensibly exorcise these elements from the play's happy marital resolution, but only at the cost of reminding us that the world is bigger than the play, that plays shape but a small part of experience through dramatic conventions and characters, and that comedy, like other genres, functions like a lens that sharpens the focus here on the social desirability and accommodation of marriage and procreation by filtering out other plots and perspectives. Quince's ill delivery of the Prologue—“All for your delight / We are not here” (5.1.114-15)—underscores the close connection between form and meaning: since “This fellow doth not stand upon points” (5.1.118), the prologue is garbled, unintentionally working against the aims of its speaker, even though both the onstage and the offstage audience can at times perceive his obscured but intended meaning. Quince's performance reveals just how slippery dramatic texts are.

The metatheater of Bottom and his friends—delivered by “many asses” (5.1.154)—reveals a textual “cranny” through which uncontainable meanings are whispered. It should remind us that if we see “sodomy,” “homoeroticism,” “lesbianism,” or “compulsory heterosexuality” in the “aery nothing” (5.1.16) of A Midsummer Night's Dream, whether, how, how much, and why the text bespeaks such concerns—intentionally or unintentionally, in its time or ours, to everyone or just to some—has much to do with the place(s) of this text in the culture of early modern England, with the intersections between this text and the multiple histories of our culture(s), and with our own various relations to the politics of the present moment. Too easily dismissed as merely scatalogical buffoonery, the sodomitical elements surrounding Bottom suggest that sodomy, as a key sign in Renaissance culture of chaos and disorder, could be employed to comic effect, could—or at least can—be deployed against the aesthetic rigidities of comic form and the political ideology of the prevailing order.

And Puck? His reappearance at the end, though it puts us “In remembrance of a shroud,” prepares “this hallowed house” for the entrance and procreative blessing of the fairy king and queen (5.1.378 and 388); hence it is not nearly so interestingly disruptive as his earlier appearances. But the fact that he and his words displace the fairy royals and theirs and the fact that his words bridge the space between actor and audience, calling attention to these theatrical “shadows” and “visions” (5.1.423 and 426), once again recall Puck's problematic function as the all too unreliable and often delightedly mischievous agent of Oberon. On numerous occasions, he exemplifies Dollimore's “paradoxical perverse,” the glitch in Oberon's exercise of power:⁶⁰ “And so far am I glad it so did sort, / As this their jangling I esteem a sport” (3.2.352-53). Puck's proximity to Oberon, as the (in)effective agent of the latter's will, underscores the limitations of power and its practices—the quirks, the “chinks,” through which its aims can be disrupted, if not countered.

Granted, Puck takes a sometimes voyeuristic, sometimes sadistic pleasure in the folly and pain of others. But unlike Oberon, who also desires the folly and shame/shaming of Titania, Puck's desires are ends in themselves, not displacements of other desires or means of asserting his own prerogatives. His engagement in the love plots—both that of the Athenian lovers and that of Oberon, Titania, the Indian boy, and Bottom—reminds us that one satisfies one's own desires almost inevitably at others' expense. Hardly a model of sensitivity to the feelings of others, Puck's obvious pleasure in mischief is a good deal more honest than Oberon's “pity” (4.1.47) for Titania after having savored her degradation and obtained from her the other object of his desires and designs.

Puck is the energy of desire itself, whatever its content; though at Oberon's service, his is an energy that cannot be fully contained within power's totalizing aims. If Bottom, who would play all the parts, is the model of Miller and Román's engagement with queer theater, Puck is my “queer” hero because his pleasures work against or at least inflect ideological constraints on desire, the very constraints he has been sent to enforce. Puck enjoys “what fools these mortals be” (3.2.115), his mistaken interventions simply adding to the vicissitudes of their fate as mortals in love and mirroring the volatility of human desire itself (3.2.92-93).

Puck is the very possibility of the perverse operating within yet against constraints, of pleasures beyond such constraints. If, as Ciulei's production implied, the text of A Midsummer Night's Dream attempts to exile all desires inconsistent with procreative marriage, Puck's reappearance at the end, especially as speaker of the epilogue, reinscribes the impossibility of such a program by reminding us of the play's potential for theatrical as well as ideological failure. Today we might add that how or whether these “shadows have offended” is closely tied to who is watching and what engages them (5.1.423); thus the text's enforcement of compulsory heterosexuality and procreation might commend the play to the ascendant moralists of the religious right in the U.S. today if the scene between Titania and Bottom did not theatrically signify sexual desires quite beyond fundamentalist cognizance. But such are the scenes of desire that Puck delights in and delights in making. In my view, Puck represents the possibility of queering this play, Shakespeare, the English renaissance canon, and the culture of the theaters and classrooms in which they are daily revived.

Notes

1. All references to Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 217-49. The quotation is from act 1, scene 1, line 226; hereafter such passages are cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990), 48.

3. Tim Miller and David Román, “‘Preaching to the Converted,’” Theatre Journal 47 (1995): 186.

4. See Thomas Clayton's polemical review of this production, “Shakespeare at the Guthrie: A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 229-36. Clayton praises Ciulei's Dream as “a major production by any measure and certainly one of the most systematically conceived,” but apparently regrets the vision of Shakespeare's play as “a dark comedy about patriarchal abuses of power in a reading Ciulei said was prescribed by the imperatives of our time” (230).

5. Alan Sinfield, Cultural Politics—Queer Reading (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 10.

6. See, for instance, Shirley Nelson Garner, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: ‘Jack Shall Have Jill; / Nought Shall Go Ill,’” Women's Studies 9 (1981): 47-63. Garner holds the view “that the renewal at the end of the play affirms patriarchal order and hierarchy, insisting that the power of women must be circumscribed, and that it recognizes the tenuousness of heterosexuality,” which needs, therefore, to be enforced (47). I am indebted to Garner's essay throughout, particularly for its feminist analysis of homoerotic elements in the play and of what Adrienne Rich, in “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence,” Signs 5 (1980): 631-60, calls “compulsory heterosexuality.” The sodomitical import of “preposterousness” is discussed later in this essay; see Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 180-81, on the meaning of “preposterous venus.”

7. Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992), 113.

8. The major pros and cons of this much-contested term are nicely outlined by Teresa de Lauretis in “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities: An Introduction,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2 (1991): iii-xviii. See also Sinfield, x-xi.

9. Traub, Desire, 95.

10. Sinfield, 19.

11. See Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism, (1957; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 169-71, and C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy (1959; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 3-15 and 119-62. For a problematizing counter-view of A Midsummer Night's Dream and “festive theory,” see Annabel Patterson, Shakespeare and the Popular Voice (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 52-70 and 170-73.

12. The question of the boy-player has been central to recent discussions of these issues: see, for example, Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage,” PMLA 102 (1987): 29-41; Jean Howard, “Crossdressing, the Theatre, and Gender Struggle in Early Modern England,” Shakespeare Quarterly 39 (1988): 418-40, who provides a good summary of the scholarship on the issue; and Valery Traub, Desire, 117-44 and 171-75, who provides what might be called a ‘queer’ intervention in the feminist discussion. For bibliographies of feminist criticism on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, see Dorothea Kehler's “A Selective Bibliography of Feminist and Feminist-Related Shakespeare Criticism, 1979-88” and Susan Baker and Lorena L. Stookey's “Renaissance Drama: A Bibliography for Feminists,” in In Another Country: Feminist Perspectives on Renaissance Drama, eds. Dorothea Kehler and Susan Baker (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1991), 261-301 and 302-24.

13. See, for instance, Jane Gallop, The Daughter's Seduction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 56-61, who deconstructs Irigaray's own “blind spot” in the French feminist's critique of Freud.

14. Though often lumped together, Sinfield identifies one of the key distinctions between new historicism and cultural materialism as the former's Althusserian “preoccupation with … the ‘entrapment model’ of ideology” (24). Most of the critics cited throughout this essay are themselves feminists, cultural materialists, and/or (new) historicists who have incorporated and/or developed queer theories or perspectives in their work; in addition to those cited elsewhere, I owe a general debt to the following authors and works: John Boswell, “Revolutions, Universals, and Sexual Categories,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, eds. Martin Bauml Duberman, Martha Vicinus, and George Chauncey, Jr. (New York: NAL/Penguin, 1989), 17-36 and 478-81; Judith C. Brown, “Lesbian Sexuality in Medieval and Early Modern Europe,” in Hidden from History, 67-75 and 495-500; James M. Saslow, “Homosexuality in the Renaissance: Behavior, Identity, and Artistic Expression,” in Hidden from History, 90-105 and 503-506; Stephen Orgel, “Nobody's Perfect: Or Why Did the English Stage Take Boys for Women?” Displacing Homophobia, eds. Ronald R. Butters, John M. Clum, and Michael Moon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989); Joseph Pequigney, Such Is My Love (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); Gayle Rubin, “Thinking Sex: Notes for a Radical Theory of the Politics of Sexuality,” in Pleasure and Danger: Exploring Female Sexuality, ed. Carole S. Vance (Boston: Routledge, 1984), 267-319; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Bonnie Zimmerman, “Perverse Reading: The Lesbian Appropriation of Literature,” in Sexual Practice/Textual Theory: Lesbian Cultural Criticism, eds. Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), 135-49.

15. The ongoing and salutary, if still somewhat limited, effects of the debates and critiques within feminism about race and class have, I believe, also enabled the intervention and incorporation of queer theories into institutionalized critical practice—for example, in Jonathan Dollimore's call for the interplay of theory and history (Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault [Oxford: Clarendon, 1991], 24-25) and in Diana Fuss's analysis of the debate over essentialism/anti-essentialism, especially within gay and lesbian studies themselves (Essentially Speaking [New York: Routledge, 1989], 97-112 and 127-29). In Shakespeare studies the intervention of queer theory was evident in a recent seminar on “Problematic Alliances: Feminism and Queer Theory in Early Modern Studies,” organized and conducted by Jean Howard and Nicholas Radel, at the 1995 meeting of The Shakespeare Association of America in Chicago.

16. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter (New York: Routledge, 1993), 239.

17. Whatever the shortcomings of my own eclectic application of queer theory, my conviction about its significance owes much to my former student, Linda Parriott, whose undergraduate essay on A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello first brought home to me the function and value of a lesbian criticism (“Understanding the Fury: Subtexts of Female Homoeroticism in A Midsummer Night's Dream and Othello” [unpublished honors thesis, Augsburg College, 1993]). The play's famous line, cited here, about the bumpy “course of true love” is itself a prime site for queer re-examination, to which Valerie Traub provides a key in her brief discussion of nature's “bias” in Twelfth Night (Desire, 137-38). Though her critique does not refer directly to Stephen Greenblatt's analysis of this term from bowls, which reveals nature as “an unbalancing act” or “swerving” (see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 68), Traub's contention that the desires of both Sebastian and his boy-sister “obliterate the distinction between homoerotic and heterosexual—at least until the institution of marriage comes into (the) play” (Desire, 138)—implicitly throws into question Greenblatt's use of “bias” to describe the twist toward heterosexual object-choice as “something off-center … implanted in nature … that deflects men and women from their ostensible desires and toward the pairings for which they are destined” (Greenblatt, 68). There is in other words a presumption that the (heterosexual) object to which the lover swerves is somehow more natural than the homoerotic course or “swerving” that has led there. To be sure, the impending marital ending of this comedy ostensibly sorts out sanctioned from unsanctioned desires, but it cannot quite dispose of the homoerotic trajectories that have led to it—Antonio remains on stage and Viola is still Cesario (see Douglas E. Green, “Shakespeare's Violation: ‘One Face, One Voice, One Habit, and Two Persons,’” in Reconsidering the Renaissance: Papers from the 1987 CEMERS Conference on the Renaissance, ed. Mario di Cesare [Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies/SUNY Press, 1992], 336-38, especially nn. 32 and 34).

18. Traub, Desire, 142-43.

19. Miller and Román, 186.

20. Foucault, 101.

21. In contrast to the OED, Eric Patridge suggests that arse and ass are interchangeable, that the former reflects the pronunciation of the latter (Shakespeare's Bawdy, 3rd ed. [New York: Routledge, 1968], 59). Also, Puck's reference to the “bum” of the “wisest aunt,” who has mistaken the hobgoblin for a “three-foot stool” and thus “down topples,” supports the connection between bum and bottom (2.1.51-54).

22. Goldberg, Sodometries, 122.

23. Goldberg, citing Jonathan Crewe, makes explicit the sexual implications of Oberon's desire for the boy (Sodometries, 275, n. 8). James L. Calderwood discusses the analogy between the Theseus-Hippolyta sub-plot as anamorphically re-created and played out in the Oberon-Titania plot (“A Midsummer Night's Dream: Anamorphism and Theseus's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42 [1991]: 409-30). See Elizabeth Pittenger, “‘To Serve the Queere’: Nicholas Udall, Master of Revels,” in Queering the Renaissance, ed. Jonathan Goldberg, Queering the Renaissance (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 162-89, on “misrecognition” in regard to the problem of historical and theoretical readings of the text as evidence of “real sexual identity” and/or “real sexual practice” (168).

24. See Simon Shepherd on the contrasting images of the “warrior woman,” who represents an ideal of active womanhood, and of the Elizabethan “Amazon,” who is seen as lustful, disobedient, brutal (Amazons and Warrior Women [New York: St. Martin's, 1981], 5-17). Though his focus here is on Spenser, Shepherd's analysis suggests some of the tensions surrounding Hippolyta and her relationship with Theseus.

25. On the “deployment of alliance,” see Foucault 106-11; on the term “homosocial,” see Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 1-5.

26. For the possible mechanisms behind such misrecognitions, see chapter 3 of Alan Bray's Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 2nd ed. (London: Gay Men's Press, 1982), 58-80. In his essay on “Homosexuality and the Signs of Male Friendship in Elizabethan England,” History Workshop 29 (1990): 1-19, Bray discusses the ways in which the signs of desirable male friendship could be (con)fused with “the profoundly disturbing image of the sodomite” and the fearful chaos the latter represented and evoked (11). Aspiring to power and/or wealth beyond one's status or class was one of several contexts in which such confusion or deliberate accusation was likely to arise; indeed changes in the relations between masters and servingmen, which had clearly come under the notion of friendship so long as servingmen were also gentlemen, were subject to more suspicion once the retainers were not themselves “gentle” (10-15). Bottom's “dreams,” in this light, constitute a rather burlesque version of suspect preferment. As Gregory W. Bredbeck points out in his discussion of Ulysses' construction of Patroclus in Troilus and Cressida: “sodomy and related areas of homoerotic meaning, then, do not just delineate the division between high and low—do not just make the stuff of satire; rather, they also demarcate the point at which high and low meet and may be traversed” (Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991], 47). On the problematic coincidence of homoeroticism and misogyny, especially in the sonnets, Traub emphasizes that exclusively homoerotic bonds could signal “anxiety about reproduction” (Desire, 138-43); in this light, Theseus's marriage to the Amazon queen represents a misogynistic normalization of her former autonomy. Likewise, Thisby's death suggests, among other possibilities, subtextual come-uppance for disobedience to parental will, under the guise of the tragic thwarting of true love. But it is in the “Bottom's Dream” soliloquy, as well as in the rude mechanicals' performance at the nuptial feast, that the homoerotic (Bottom's potentially sodomitical vision) and the misogynistic (the marriage of Hippolyta, which elicits a tragic play, the death of whose heroine is the occasion for a song about this dream-vision) coincide, in this case as the possible means of Bottom's elevation.

27. This section depends heavily on Foucault's formulation of “a multiplicity of points of resistance” within “power relationships”: “Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority to power. Should it be said that one is always ‘inside’ power, there is no ‘escaping’ it, there is no absolute outside where it is concerned, because one is subject to the law in any case? … This would be to misunderstand the strictly relational character of power relationships. Their existence depends on a multiplicity of points of resistance: these play the role of adversary, target, support, or handle in power relations. These points of resistance are present everywhere in the power network. … But this does not mean that they are only a reaction or rebound, forming with respect to the basic domination an underside that is in the end always passive, doomed to perpetual defeat” (Foucault, 95-96). See Sinfield on theoretical positions that counter the stultifying effects of the “entrapment-model of ideology and power,” deriving from Althusser and some readings of Foucault, and that posit a more dynamic relation between dissidence and containment (24-27).

28. Foucault, 106-13.

29. It is tempting to posit for Shakespeare—as for his characters Bottom and, even more, Oberon and Theseus—what Goldberg calls a “dehiscence” within early modern (male) subjects around the question of sodomy. Though Goldberg and others have criticized Alan Bray's anachronistic use of the term “homosexuality” (Goldberg, Sodometries, 70-71), Bray describes well this “cleavage” within the subject: “For when one looks at the circumstantial details of how homosexuality was conceived of and how it was expressed in concrete social forms, it becomes obvious how very easy it was in Renaissance England—far more so than today—for a cleavage of this kind to exist, between an individual's behaviour and his awareness of its significance” (Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 68). Dollimore describes “transgressive reinscription” as “the return of the repressed and/or the suppressed and/or the displaced via the proximate” (33).

30. Goldberg, Sodometries, 19.

31. Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), 35-36. See Valerie Traub, “The (In)significance of ‘Lesbian’ Desire in Early Modern England,” in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 150-69, for a counterargument to the usefulness of the category of sodomy for analysis of female same-sex relations, at least in England, where there were no women tried for sodomy (152). In the same article, Traub also illuminates the recuperation of “lesbian” desires and practices to the model of “heterosexual” intercourse, penetration of a woman by a man. This elision accounts for my sometimes placing the term “lesbian,” among others, within quotation marks or parentheses: given the discourses on female-female relations in early modern England, the term—like homosexual and heterosexual—cannot be used without somehow signaling the historical slippage in its application. In her essay “The Straight Mind,” Monique Wittig illuminates but does not resolve these problems in her analysis of the concept “woman,” which “has meaning only in heterosexual systems of thought and heterosexual economic systems” (The Straight Mind and Other Essays [Boston: Beacon, 1992], 32).

32. I am indebted in general here to Goldberg's discussion of Puttenham (Sodometries, 29-61), especially the subsidiary analysis of the Sieve Portrait of Elizabeth (43-47). Goldberg builds on but also raises questions about new historicist views of the anxiety elicited by the queen's sexuality and power (see, for example, Louis Adrian Montrose, “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of Elizabethan Culture: Gender, Power, Form,” in Rewriting the Renaissance, eds. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986], 65-87 and 329-34, and “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 31-64). See Gregory W. Bredbeck's discussion of the monarch's “two bodies” and its implications for writing (about) Edward II (50-60), especially the implicit “recognition of a space between power and person that can be narrowed or widened depending on the circumstances” (53); this space has a good deal to do, I think, with the way that through Titania concerns about the English queen's political powers are shifted to the sexual appetites of the temporal woman. Equally significant is James L. Calderwood's discussion of the double meaning of Titania's lines about the moon's “lamenting some enforced chastity” (3.1.198-200), delivered as she prepares to have Bottom hauled off to her bower (Calderwood, 421-22); the phrase, at least in its secondary meaning as compulsory chastity, calls up both the nunnery to which Hermia would be sent and the ostensible condition of the Virgin Queen herself.

33. As Bray stresses, social and economic context and power determined how sodomitical relationships were both perceived and conducted: “What determined the shared and recurring features of homosexual relationships [in Renaissance England] was the prevailing distribution of power, economic power and social power, not the fact of homosexuality itself” (Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England, 56). Traub sees a “maternal” bond between Titania and her devotee through the boy (“[In]significance,” 158-59), but I would suggest that the embrace of Titania and Bottom-the-ass is a “male” metaphor for female-female relations, exchanges, and bonds. If so, was the substitution of this human ass for another woman somehow a less threatening displacement (for Shakespeare) or a sadistic, misogynistic one—a sign of confusion in the face of “lesbian” sexuality or one of anxiety? Still, I agree with Traub about Oberon's feelings of superfluousness in the face of relations that simply do not require him (“[In]significance,” 159). To the extent that one does see tensions between an image of Oberon and Titania as squabbling over an adoptive son and those of the boy as embodiment of intersecting sexual relations (Titania-[votaress], Titania-boy, Oberon-boy), one might speculate also on incest as a key site of the contradiction between the family as a “deployment of alliance” and as “a hotbed of constant sexual incitement” (Foucault, 108-109) and what that might do, if not to likely Renaissance views of the dispute over the boy, then at least to some of ours: it might suggest, among other things, incest as a sign of “perverse” desire that cannot otherwise be represented.

34. Foucault, 86.

35. Dollimore, 121.

36. According to Dollimore, “the perverse dynamic signifies the potential of those [perverse] paradoxes to destabilize, to provoke discoherence” (121).

37. Calderwood offers a good summary on the debate as to whether or not Titania or Bottom “did it” (419-25). He argues that the relationship is one of “degrading but unconsummated desire” (422). But I am assuming the text implies that, at least off-stage, something was done; at any rate, for twentieth-century interpreters, a non-sexual encounter between Bottom and Titania is almost as inconceivable as a sexual one was for the nineteenth century (see, for instance, Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary [New York: Norton, 1966], 223-34). What kind of sexual act seems to me the (im)pertinent question, since for the Renaissance audience that would determine the magnitude of erotic transgression and shame the scene implies. Given the complex intertwining of gender and sexual roles in our own culture(s), the same question would have some bearing on our own categorization of the scene—as erotic, transgressive, degrading, bestial, (displaced) heterosexual, displaced homosexual, etc. One other interesting point that comes up in Calderwood's summary is the association of asses with compliant wives (419, n. 24): does Bottom then represent the wife Oberon wants, the wife Titania should be, or the wife she wants?

38. See Dollimore on the construction of “nature” and the complex interrelations between “nature” and its perversion (108-13). On matters related to “bestiality” in this and subsequent sections, see Bruce Thomas Boehrer's “Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, eds. David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, and Harold Weber (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 123-50, an excellent article which appeared as I was completing this essay. A new historicist, Boehrer discusses the English Renaissance “rhetoric of bestiality” (132) and the manifestations of this discourse in Shakespeare's Dream. Though his focus is strictly on “bestial buggery” and its representation, Boehrer makes some of the same points I am making here about the proximity of order and perversion and even the ironic dependence of the former on the latter. Interestingly, much as I do here and in the last section of this essay, Boehrer sees Puck as central to the play's ideological contradictions surrounding the ‘perverse’ (145-47).

39. Foucault, 107.

40. Teresa de Lauretis, The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 284.

41. See Faderman, 65-73, on the emotional and physical bonds between women in early modern England, which includes her discussion of Phillips.

42. Traub rejects this infantilizing view of same-sex desires and friendships among women (“[In]significance,” 157-59).

43. Barber, 129-30.

44. Rich, passim.

45. Traub, “(In)significance,” 158.

46. Faderman, 67-72 and 47-54; Traub, “(In)significance,” 163-65.

47. The sense that romantic love and even companionate marriage are in practice far from perfect is probably clearer and stronger for us, especially in light of modern feminist critiques, than this relative novelty, more common in fiction than in practice, was to a Renaissance audience. But Mary Astell, writing at the end of the seventeenth century, laid out early on some of the problems and pitfalls of those who marry solely for love. See Mary Astell, Selections from Some Reflections upon Marriage, in Vol. 1, Norton Anthology of English Literature, ed. M. H. Abrams et al., 6th ed. (New York: Norton, 1993), 1971-75.

48. Norman N. Holland, “Hermia's Dream,” Representing Shakespeare, ed. Murray M. Schwartz and Coppélia Kahn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 1-20.

49. See Julia Creet, “Daughter of the Movement: The Psychodynamics of Lesbian S/M Fantasy,” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 3.2 (1991): 135-59, on lesbianism as the “unimaginable,” especially within classic psychoanalysis (137).

50. Sinfield, 36-38.

51. Of the several professional, academic, and amateur productions I have seen since the early 1970s, most have involved some form of “striptease” as part of the fight between Helena and Hermia. Fewer have involved the intimate violence of wrestling.

52. Foucault, 101.

53. See Traub, Desire, 107; she employs the term “re-visioning” as defined by Adrienne Rich, in “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” College English 34.1 (1972): 18-25.

54. Traub, Desire, 103.

55. Miller and Román, 186.

56. Anne Barton, introduction to A Midsummer Night's Dream, in The Riverside Shakespeare, 221 and 219.

57. See G. K. Hunter, “A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in Shakespeare: Modern Essays in Criticism, ed. Leonard F. Dean, rev. ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 90-102 (especially 99-102), for a traditional glorification of Theseus and of the relationship between him and Hippolyta. In contrast, Skiles Howard, “Hands, Feet, and Bottoms: Decentering the Cosmic Dance in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993): 325-42, argues that even the play's deployment of courtly and popular dance conventions does not, as was formerly assumed, “create a timeless image of community, an imaginary unity based either on the cosmic dance or the medieval round” (342), that the tension between high and low forms here destabilizes the play's gender hierarchy, among others.

58. Barton, 219-21.

59. See the OED on “admirable.”

60. Dollimore, 121.