SOURCE: Pearson, D'Orsay W. “Male Sovereignty, Harmony and Irony in A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Upstart Crow 7 (1987): 24-35.

[In the following essay, Pearson contends that in A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare questioned the notion that male supremacy and feminine obedience lead to matrimonial harmony.]

As is well known, the belief in the male's sovereignty in marriage and subsequently as head of his household had been hammered, figuratively, into the Elizabethan consciousness. The theory was divinely sanctioned. Children were governed by commandment; women in marrying were reminded, with the authority of St. Paul, that the husband was naturally fitted to be his “wyves heade, even as Christe is the heade of the church.”¹ The official “Sermon on the State of Matrimony” described woman as the “weaker vessel,” not because of lack of physical stamina but because she was “a weak creature, not endued with like strength and constancy of mind” as was her male counterpart, so that she was therefore “more prone to all weak affections and dispositions of mind. …”² She was to be guided by a male, first her father and then her husband, who was to regard her peccadillos with tolerance: “she must be spared and borne with” (p. 554).

Moreover, the homily stressed that feminine subjugation was a source of concord or harmony in marriage:

For this surely doth nourish concord very much when the wife is ready at hand at her husband's commandment, when she will apply herself to his will, when she endeavoureth herself to seek his contentation, and to do him pleasure, when she will eschew all things that might offend him. …

(p. 556)

The husband, in turn, could “nourish concord” by “considering these her frailties” and sparing her (pp. 554,55).

Despite this restating of a centuries-old traditional view, the author of “The Sermon on the State of Matrimony” was not so sanguine about masculine superiority and feminine inferiority as the passages just quoted might suggest. Marriage was a meritorious state for women, we read, because they “must specially feel the griefs and pains of matrimony, in that they relinquish the liberty of their own rule, in the pain of their travailing, in the bringing up of their children” (p. 557). This suggests that feminine obedience is not a natural condition but rather one of “estate.” Such unnatural obedience, the “Sermon” suggests, comes not from recognition of superior worth of the male but from an artificial concentration upon role. Whatever her husband's failings, the wife was charged,

this only must be looked upon, by what means thou mayest make thyself without blame. … And therefore bring not thy excuses to me … Go thou, therefore about such things as becometh thee only, and show thyself tractable to thy husband.

(pp. 558,59)

In short, dutifulness was to be achieved only by an act of self-immolation of will—an act not only psychologically unrealistic but one which also violated one of the stated purposes of marriage, to “live together lawfully in perpetual friendly fellowship” (p. 551).

The ironic dual vision of feminine obedience—that it is a natural condition because of difference of kind and that it is in fact a fiction imposed by the role, one which can be achieved only by concentrating on role—is present throughout the “Sermon.” Reader or auditor can accept the traditional view, presented with the weight of historical authority and sacred injunction, but only if the ramifications of admissions such as those above are not followed to their logical conclusions. In the “Sermon,” despite its insistence upon the tradition of masculine sovereignty, lie the seeds of a more “modern” view of feminine obedience and duty.

Like the “Sermon,” A Midsummer Night's Dream approaches the question of male sovereignty ironically, developing, at different levels of perspective, both conventional and unconventional statements about masculine sovereignty and harmony. The comedy has long been identified as a play about love and marriage, a play perhaps written for the “occasion” of a noble wedding.³ Nevertheless, the importance of Elizabethan theories of marriage and family to its characterization, its movement, and the ultimate statement it makes about feminine subjugation have not been adequately explored. A Midsummer Night's Dream is infinitely more than a play about the “lawlessness and laughableness” of love.⁴ It is more than an exploration, in terms of Platonic referents, of the dominance of the rational soul (Theseus) over the concupiscent soul (Hippolyta), as Paul Olson suggested when he recognized that the concept of male sovereignty in marriage, as it leads to harmony, is a central concern of the comedy.⁵ Shakespeare's play does more than examine the ideologies of male sovereignty in family and married life. It shows us instead the chaos which results when female subservience is foresworn and masculine sovereignty ignored. Yet to say only this would be to oversimplify. In terms of movement and plot resolution, A Midsummer Night's Dream seems to assert that harmony follows automatically upon the establishment of male dominance and wifely obedience. Working against this simplistic position, however, are individual male-female relationships which ironically show that concord is achieved by magic and “policie”; by fiat; by achievement of feminine will; by mutual recognition of the value of intent.

In the initial scenes of the play, Shakespeare rapidly introduces a multiplicity of disjunctive sovereignty-obedience relationships. There is Theseus, who “won” Hippolyta “doing [her] injuries” and “woo'd” her with his “sword.”⁶ Egeus enters to demand that his daughter be forced to wed Demetrius on pain of death, even though she favors Lysander. The lovelorn Helena has been spurned by Demetrius, who has abused his sovereign role in courtship (Helena claims of her sex, “We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo” [II.i.242].), while Bottom and his rustic fellows propose to act out the tragic results of disobedience to parental authority. The authority figures command, threaten, and decree, though their rhetoric fails to persuade those who by tradition should be dutiful.

Thrown into relief by the rebellion of conventionally obedient figures, the masculine soveriegnty of Act I shows itself as tyranny. By polarizing obedience to an either-or dichotomy, the playwright associates sovereignty not only with ego-centered inflexibility but also with a long list of negative terms: “death,” “injuries,” “disfigure,” “mew'd,” “barren,” “austerity,” “spotted,” “inconstant,” and, in the case of the rustics, “lamentable” and “cruel.” As a result of the insistence upon obedience, the initial world of A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of striking dis-ease. The apparent amity of Theseus and Hippolyta is no exception, for as they discuss their forthcoming marriage their attitudes toward it are strikingly different. Theseus sees the moon “lingering” his desires, “Like to a step-dame, or a dowager, / Long withering out a young man's revenue” (I. i. 4-6). Hippolyta appears to soothe, yet her reply suggests no similar wish to hasten the passage of time. Four days, she says, will “quickly steep themselves in night; / Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (I.i.7-8). When Egeus puts forth his demand that the Duke enforce the Athenian law which gives him life or death control over his daughter Hermia should she continue to refuse to marry Demetrius, his insistence on her conforming to his choice of two equally eligible suitors falls within the letter of the law but ignores a reciprocal view of his duty, to consider his daughter's preference if other circumstances are equal.⁷ Theseus' “love” for his captive bride—if such it is—has not bred in him charity toward others who love; the “mercy” he exhibits for Hermia when he offers her the chaste life of a nun illustrates early in the play the arbitrary, uncompassionate quality all male sovereignty exhibits, for it offers merely a different form, albeit a preferable one, of sterility.

Because of this substitution of tyrannical force for benevolent sovereignty (the “Sermon” warned the husband not to be too stiff, “so that he ought to wink at some things, and must gently expound all things, and to forbear” [p. 554]), the initial climate of Athens is unfavorable to courtship, to procreative marriage, to friendship and even to the most primitive attempts at art. Except for Hippolyta, who as martial conquest is a royal prisoner, the individual victims of a world where masculine sovereignty is abused determine on an exodus to Northrup Frye's green world, which holds out the promise of fulfilling their differing ambitions. Bottom and his crew think to perfect their inappropriate wedding play. Hermia and Lysander seek his aunt's domicile, where they will be wed. Demetrius aims to return Hermia to Athens and to marriage or death, while Helena tags after, convinced that Demetrius' indifferent presence is preferable to his absence.

It is at this point in the play's action that Shakespeare presents his final disjunction of masculine sovereignty and feminine obedience—Titania and Oberon. For the other males and females paired in the play, marriage is a future state. For Oberon and Titania, it is a present misery. Titania has pitted her will against that of her sovereign lord, refusing to give him the changeling son of her late devotee; she has, she says, forsworn Oberon's “bed and company” (II. i. 62). The disruption of the traditional husband-wife power structure, we learn, has consequences far beyond the division of the fairy kingdom into two courts. The whole world, of nature and of man, is in chaos. Not only have the seasons reversed themselves, the crops rotted, the animals become diseased. Titania tells her estranged husband:

The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
.....And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.

(II. i. 98-102; 115-117)

Clearly, the violation of the tradition of female obedience has affected not only the fairy world but also the world of nature and human society, which is bereft of not only recreation and dalliance (note the sexual innuendo in “the quaint mazes in the wanton green”) but also of spiritual communion as well.⁸ Most significantly, what is absent from the society is communion and harmony, suggested by the absence of game and song.

Retrospect, it has been said, is essential to an understanding of A Midsummer Night's Dream.⁹ Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than in II. i., as the actions of the fairy deities reflect backward to illuminate the “dis-ease” which afflicted Athenian society in Act I. As deities, Oberon and Titania seem clearly modelled on the anthropomorphic deities of antiquity. They are more powerful than the world they rule, yet they have human weaknesses.¹⁰ They are possessive. They favor specific mortals: Titania, Theseus; Oberon, Hippolyta. They cheat, wrangle, are strong-willed. They may be sexually promiscuous (see II. i. 70-80). They are not omniscient—note Oberon's ignorance of the presence of another Athenian youth in the forest. But most importantly, their disharmony is reflected in the disruption of harmony in nature and society. These are fertility deities gone wrong;¹¹ and one is reminded of the earth's growing parched and sterile as Ceres sought futilely for Persephone.¹²

But II. i. does more than inform past action. It also foreshadows the future. Titania had charged that the world's malaise grew out of husband and wife “debate” and “dissention”; Oberon offers a cure, one which epitomizes the play's movement toward denouement:

Do you amend it then; it lies in you.
Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
I do but beg a little changeling boy
To be my henchman.

(II. i. 118-21)

In Oberon's view, in Titania's obedience and subservience lies the cure for natural and social ills; when the proper power equation is renewed, there will be harmony in both the fairy kingdom and the world of men.

Significantly for Shakespeare's examination of male sovereignty and its relationship to harmony, the mere statement of a solution cannot resolve the difficulty. The estrangement between the fairy queen and her lord is perpetuated because Titania refuses to give Oberon the child. “The fairy land buys not the child of me” (II.i.122), she declares, giving as an excuse for her willfulness the devotion of her votaress:

And for her sake do I rear up her boy;
And for her sake I will not part with him.

(II. i. 136,37)

Oberon reveals his anthropomorphic affinities when he acts to achieve revenge for this slight to masculine sovereignty. He determines:

                              Thou shalt not from this grove
Till I torment thee for this injury.

(II. i. 146,47)

He plots. Once in possession of the potent juice of love-in-idleness, he will

… watch Titania as she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes;
The next thing then she waking looks upon
(Be it on lion, bear, or wolf or bull,
On meddling monkey or on busy ape),
She shall pursue it with the soul of love.

(II. i. 177-82)

His scheme, stripped of its lyricism, amounts to shaming Titania into obedience by casting her into a dotage latent with bestiality.¹³ Thus Oberon, like Theseus and Egeus, sees the exercise of power—here the power of malefic magic and “policie” rather than the power of arms or of the law—as the answer to feminine disobedience. His recourse to such extreme means argues the same ego-centered masculinity which was seen in Theseus, Egeus and Demetrius; Titania joins Hermia and Helena as figures whose individual desires are of little importance. Oberon, like his mortal counterparts in the play, acts upon the Machiavellian belief that the end justifies the means.¹⁴

Viewed from this perspective, the magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream is neither playful nor benign. Like all erotic magic, it is aimed at affecting the unnatural.¹⁵ With Puck as its agent, however, it becomes merely inept and bungling; as a result of its ineptitude, negative judgment of Oberon's perverse revenge is deflected. Nevertheless, the results of his plot eddy outward, affecting not just Titania, in much the way that the results of their quarrel spread beyond the fairy kingdom. None of the mortals who fled Athens appears immediately likely to find in the wood the solutions he sought. Puck, furnishing a “monster” for Oberon's plot, metamorphoses Bottom and deprives the rustics of their principal actor. Oberon's sympathy for the lovelorn Helena is frustrated when Puck anoints the wrong youth's eyes, and the love triangle which caused problems in Athens simply shifts its apex from Hermia to Helena. Helena discovers that “to be translated” into Hermia's “favor” (I. i. 191, 186) is not worth all the world except Demetrius. And while Puck can report to Oberon that “My mistress with a monster is in love” (III.ii.6) and “Titania wak'd and straightway lov'd an ass” (III. ii. 34), Titania and the audience see her doting directed at a “gentle mortal” (III. i. 137) who phlegmatically has a stronger appetite for hay than for sex.¹⁶

Oberon's plotting is successful in one respect; he does achieve marital dominance. Having confronted Titania in a compromising scene of his own devising, he reports to Puck:

When I had at my pleasure taunted her,
And she in mild terms begg'd my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child
Which straight she gave me. …

(IV. i. 57-60)

Having successfully degraded his wife into obedience, Oberon can afford, in the words of the “Sermon,” to “consider these her frailties” and “undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes” (IV. i. 62,63). Unethical cunning, not a natural superiority, has righted the traditional power ratio. Harmony, a quality hitherto absent from both human and supernatural realms, returns first to the fairy kingdom, then to earth, and finally to mortal society. Oberon commands:

Sound, music! Come, my queen, take hands with me,
And rock the grounds whereon these sleepers be.
Now thou and I are new in amity. …

(IV. i. 85-87)

The measured movement of dance, seen in the fairy round, is transmitted first to earth and then to the sleepers, whose own potential harmony has remained in suspension until the deities' seminal disharmony was resolved.

First to enjoy this return to order are the young lovers. Oberon's “benevolence” in extending the power of love-in-idleness to Demetrius and Lysander had resulted in brawling—between Hermia and Helena, between Demetrius and Lysander, and among the mispaired lovers. Now when they wake Lysander is cured of his infatuation with Helena by the juice of “Dian's bud” and loves where he first loved; Demetrius, still under the influence of love-in-idleness, dotes where he first wooed. Theseus, in an abrupt about-face, silences Egeus' intransigent insistence on controlling Hermia's future with the voice of rule; the father by fiat gains a daughter who does not contest his will.

Resolution has been delayed for an exemplary “divine” act of feminine obedience, so that “Jack shall have Jill; / Naught shall go ill, / The man shall have his mare again, and all shall go well” (III. ii. 461-63), In point of dramatic time, the traditional comic denouement comes after the one “married” couple in a marriage play achieves harmony because the wife obeys her husband.

Nevertheless, this structural affirmation of the relationship between obedience and harmony is not Shakespeare's total commentary on either harmony or its source. While structure may confirm the rightness of male sovereignty and its essential importance to harmony, individual relationships suggest that male sovereignty, like appreciation of the rustic's performance, is a matter of illusion and poetic faith. Ironically, it involves feminine will and willingness, not immolation of will. Hermia's speech in Act I had sounded this theme:

So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord,
Ere I will yield my virgin patent up
Unto his lordship, whose unwished yoke
My soul consents not to give sovereignty.

(i. 79-82)

Masculine dominance in the play comes not from that natural superiority which the “Sermon” dutifully recorded from tradition, but within the frame of male-female psychological tension which the “Sermon” recognized and for which it could only posit self-immolation of the feminine will. Titania, perhaps, foregoes her desire to retain the changeling, but her obedience is an act of self-defense, not the result of dwindling into a prescribed role as “wife.” Egeus gains his obedient daughter only when confronted by a higher authority than his own; ironically, he is obedient to masculine rule in a way none of the women is. Lysander and Demetrius have silent, and apparently obedient, wives, because their wives' souls so consent for the moment. And the tragic tale of the tyrannical sovereignty practiced by the parents of Pyramus and Thisbe is turned to comedy by the amateurish performance of the rustics.

Theseus' relationship with Hippolyta is more problematical and complex, for as the former Queen of the Amazons, those early “feminists,”¹⁷ Hippolyta's is a more ingrained and sustained clinging to individual rule; her characterization is one of Shakespeare's most subtle achievements. I have already noted the polarization of attitudes toward the couple's forthcoming marriage in Act I; critics before me have observed that their responses to the tales of the four young lovers embody differing aesthetics.¹⁸ This kind of disputatiousness on Hippolyta's part, an indirect rebellion against masculine sovereignty, is in fact one of her most sustained characteristics. Except in Act V, her appearances are limited to two brief scenes, the introductory frame scene and the hunting scene of IV. i. Here, as in the frame and in Act V, Hippolyta will not allow Theseus' assertions to go unchallenged. In the hunt scene, when Theseus praises his own hounds, she counters:

I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding, for besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

(112-18)

Hippolyta practices a frustratingly subtle, civil form of rebellion to masculine superiority, managing to contradict her betrothed's pronouncements even as she seems merely to comment. There is not, either here or in Act I, a verbal signal that she is disagreeing with Theseus. This she gives only after she is wed. After listening to Theseus' apostrophe to fantasy and imagination, she counters:

And all their minds transfigur'd so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy. …

(V. i. 24-26)

That our experience of the play tends to support her conclusion is here unimportant. What she is telling us is that as a wife she refuses to subdue her own judgment to that of the man she has married, signalling her disagreement through more witnesseth and the “But” (23) which introduces her speech. Her open refutation of her husband's grandiloquent theorizing could be viewed as a final push for independent rule; more probably it argues her own differing self-concepts as betrothed and as wife. In the first identity, her position was equivocal; a captive and a royal guest, formalized decorum dictated the degree of her civility. As wife, one of two who make one in flesh, she demonstrates that one flesh does not for her imply as well one mind—her husband's. Hermia and Helena, conditioned to pay lip service to masculine sovereignty by their society, become acquiescent once they have what they desire. Despite her marriage, Hippolyta withstands acceptance of Theseus' “rule,” if thus it can be interpreted, until almost the end of the play. He accepts the rustics' performance, for

          … what poor duty cannot do, noble respect
Takes it in might, not merit.

(V. i. 91-92)

Not so for Hippolyta; the play is “the silliest stuff that ever I heard” (210); she is “a-weary of this moon” and wishes it would change (251). Only gradually is she caught up in the spirit of tolerance toward the play which the male spectators share, so that she exclaims, “Well shone, moon. Truly the moon shines with a good grace” (267-68), and “Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man” (290). Harmony here is achieved through game and play; she has been slowly won over to accept the amateurish effort with the same spirit that Theseus, then Lysander and Demetrius, accept it. The amity of Theseus and Hippolyta is the result of mutual tolerance of the disparity between act and intent.

The total harmony at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream has a tenuous quality; it rests for the most part on Machiavellian trickery, as in the case of Oberon and Titania, or on the gratification of female desire, as with Hermia and Helena. The effect may be sweet; but it is not lasting, though it allows for a universal harmony in the play world ultimately and provides excuse for the fairies' lustration of the brides' bed.

In the final analysis it is not male dominance and feminine obedience publicly acknowledged which provide for the harmony at the end of the comedy. The Theseus of Act V posits a more realistic basis for harmony than either sovereignty or obedience. It is probably not accidental that his acceptance of the rustic's dramatic offering recognizes the deficiency of duty and the importance of “noble respect” which takes cognizance of intent and not merit. Nor should it go unnoticed that Hippolyta, who initially contradicted the claim that the slow waning moon “lingered” and “withered” desire, now wishes the moon to change. What we see at the end of the comedy, in the relationship of Theseus and Hippolyta, is a harmony based on a mutual vision of duty: the recognition of the disparity between intent and performance, or more simply, an insight into the nature of reality. Both share a mutual attitude toward imperfection which accepts the chasm between the theoretical and the real. Act V is not incidental to the plot of A Midsummer Night's Dream;¹⁹ it is essential to establishing a viable resolution to the questions and actions introduced in Act I.

If Shakespeare's final commentary on the source of harmony in marriage differs from that of the ecclesiastics, it is not so widely disparate as it might at first appear. The “Sermon” itself reveals that its author was caught between the authoritative, traditional version of masculine superiority and sovereignty and a more empirical vision of human action and human motivation, a dilemma which for a churchman could have only one resolution, the ecclesiastically sanctioned one of feminine obedience, however unrealistically it might be achieved. Shakespeare too paid his dues to the traditional view in structuring A Midsummer Night's Dream, but he was not bound by that tradition. In individual instances, he shows that masculine sovereignty, or its illusion, results from trickery, from fiat, or from feminine will achieved. The playwright's final technique for achieving harmony, and structurally his ultimate one, owes little either to sovereignty or obedience and everything to tolerance and mutually reciprocal acceptance of imperfection and intent. This binds two into not just one flesh but into fellowship as well.

Notes

1. “The Fourme of the Solempnization of Matrimonye,” Queen Elizabeth's Prayer Book 1559 (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1911), p. 127.

2. Sermons or Homilies Appointed To Be Read in Churches in the Time of Queen Elizabeth of Famous Memory (London: C. and J. Rivington, 1825), p. 554.

3. See, for example, E. K. Chambers, Shakespeare: A Survey (London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1925), p. 79; John Russell Brown, Shakespeare and His Comedies (1957; rpt. London: Methuen, 1968), p. 90; Harriet Hawkins, “Fabulous Counterfeits: Dramatic Construction and Dramatic Perspective in The Spanish Tragedy, A Midsummer Night's Dream, and The Tempest,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1973), 51.

4. Chambers, p. 81.

5. “A Midsummer Night's Dream and the Meaning of Court Marriage,” ELH, 24 (1957), 101. Shirley Nelson Garner, “A Midsummer Night's Dream” ‘Jack Shall Have Jill; Naught Shall Go Ill’,” WS [Women’s Studies], 9 (1981), 47-63, takes a more negative view of the theme of sovereignty; she suggests that the play “affirms patriarchal order and hierarchy, insisting that the power of women must be circumscribed” (p. 47). For treatments which deal with “order” or Theseus as symbol of order, see Madeline Doran, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: A Metamorphosis,” Rice Institute Pamphlets, 46 (1960), 116; Blaze O. Bonazza, Shakespeare's Early Comedies: A Structural Analysis (London: Mouton, 1966), p. 122; David Young, Something of Great Constancy (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1966), p. 89.

6. I. i. 16-17. All quotations are from The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).

7. Henri Bullinger, The Christen State of Matrimonye, tr. Miles Coverdale (London: J. Gough, 1543). Chapter V is entitled, “To a right mariage / must children al so haue the consent of theyr parentes”; Chapter VI (Sigs. Biiii^v-Ci^v) stresses that “The parentes ought not to constrayne ther children to matrimonye / nether to mary them a fore theyr tyme”: “In this poynt ought not the parentes to take to much vpon the selues because of theyr auctorite/nether to abuse or to compell theyr childe eyther (because of filthy advauntage or lothsomnesse in taking payne) to let him go & have no respect vnto him. For an ungodly and unhappye thing is it in the cause of mariage to compell a yonge man agaynst his will / to take such one as he hath no hart vnto. For in mariage ought to be the consent of both partyes with the consent of theyr parentes” (Sig. Biiii^v).

8. Rose A. Zimbardo, “Regeneration and Reconciliation in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Studies, 6 (1973), 35-50, also sees the chaos in nature stemming from the discord between Titania and Oberon.

9. Peter G. Phialas, Shakespeare's Romantic Comedies: The Development of Their Form and Meaning (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1966), p. 25.

10. See G. M. A. Grube, “The Gods in Homer,” Phoenix, 5 (1951), 62-76. See also Anca Vlasopolos, “The Ritual of Midsummer: A Pattern for A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Renaissance Quarterly, 31 (1978), 21-29, for an excellent discussion of the ecclesiastical and primitive associations of the date in the play's title.

11. For a discussion of Titania's connection with Hecate (and thus Persephone), see my “‘Unkind’ Theseus: A Study of Renaissance Mythography,” ELR, 4 (1974), 295n. T. Walter Herbert, Oberon's Mazed World (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 40-44, discusses Titania's Dianic associations as well as paralleling the fairy court to the classical one on Olympus.

12. The story of Ceres and Persephone is not the only classical tale suggested by MND. The verbal battle between Oberon and Titania is strongly reminiscent of the quarrel of Hera and Zeus in The Iliad, XV. Young, p. 14, suggests that Bottom's metamorphosis parallels events associated with Circe, Midas and Apuleius; David Ormerod, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth,” Shakespeare Studies, 11 (1978), 39-52, suggests the wood as the “Cretan maze transported across the seas” and Bottom as a “metamorphosed Minotaur” (p. 52). An excellent study of the Theseus-Minotaur-Pasiphae myth in MND is M. E. Lamb's “A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur,” TSLL [Texas Studies in Literature and Language], 21 (1979), 479-491.

13. Ormerod, pp. 40-43, and Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary (New York: Norton, 1974), pp. 223-229, would not see the bestiality as “latent”; to both it is actual.

14. Richard Hooker, The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593), 2 vols. (London: Dent, 1907), esp. I, 167-185, for a contemporary discussion of will. Oberon's “end,” the return of Titania to her properly obedient role, may be good, but his “means,” the attempt to persuade her through degradation, is not. Actions were judged unethical both when good means were used to achieve a bad end and bad means were used for a good end.

15. See my “Witchcraft in The Winter's Tale: Paulina as ‘Alcahueta y vn Poquito Hechizera’,” Shakespeare Studies, 12 (1979), 195-214. See also David Bevington, “‘But we are spirits of another sort’: The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Proc. of the Southeastern Inst. of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer, 1975, Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 7, ed. Siegfried Wenzel (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1978), 80-92.

16. Lamb, p. 481, commenting that Bottom is “oblivious to her [Titania's] charms,” also sees his sex drive as limited.

17. Celeste Turner Wright, “The Amazons in Elizabethan Literature,” SP, [Studies in Philology] 37 (1940), sees them as “the foremost ancient examples of feminism” (p. 433) but goes on to claim that Hippolyta, at the end of the play, is “a tamed and contented bride; her husband has shrunk her back into the bounds prescribed for women by nature. …” (p. 437).

18. Howard Nemerov, “The Marriage of Theseus and Hippolyta,” Kenyon Review, 18 (1956), 633-41. See also Richard Henze, “A Midsummer Night's Dream: Analogous Image,” Shakespeare Studies, 7 (1974), 115-123.

19. Anne Barton, “Introduction” to A Midsummer Night's Dream, Riverside Shakespeare, suggests that Act V is “superflous” in terms of plot, and concerns itself “principally, and even somewhat selfconsciously, with the relationship between art and life, dreams and the waking world” (p. 219).