SOURCE: “A Midsummer Night's Dream as a Comic Version of the Theseus Myth,” in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays, edited by Dorothea Kehler, Garland Publishing, 1998, pp. 259-74.

[In the following essay, Freake interprets Shakespeare's recasting of the classical myth of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, particularly focusing on issues of gender dynamics and patriarchal power contained in the story.]

Myth criticism, by which I mean examinations of the relation between literary works and the myth on which they are based or to which they allude, has fallen on hard times. Poststructuralist criticism in general distrusts essentialist or trans-temporal modes of interpretation; and varieties of poststructuralism, such as new historicism, which emphasize the intricate connections between texts and their social contexts, shy away in embarrassment from the sort of literary criticism encouraged by Jung or Joseph Campbell.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, it could be argued, is of all Shakespeare's plays the most indebted to a mythic source. Yet, perhaps because it is a comedy—and therefore assumed to use myth decoratively rather than seriously—the play's mythical sources, while not ignored, have received less attention than they deserve. Although the specific episode of the Theseus story used by Shakespeare is a relatively minor one—Theseus' marriage to the queen of the Amazons—the parts of the play which make up its real action seem to become more infused with aspects of Theseus' adventures the longer one contemplates them. One notices the name Egeus (Aegeus) given to Hermia's father; the similarity of the lovers lost in the wood to the Athenian youths forced to enter the Minotaur's labyrinth; Bottom as a “monster” reminiscent of the minotaur; Bottom's craft of weaving, which recalls Ariadne's thread; Hermia's desertion which echoes Ariadne's abandonment on Naxos; Titania as Pasiphae, in love with “sweet bully Bottom” (4.2.19)¹; and, in Oberon, aspects of both Minos the king and judge and Daedalus the craftsman and magician, maker of labyrinths.

Reviewing some of the work that has been done on the Theseus story as it appears in Shakespeare's play, often in displaced form, I explore here the tension between an essentialist and a historicist view of myth. My hope is to suggest answers to three interrelated questions: Is it possible to reconcile these supposedly dichotomous attitudes to myth? Does A Midsummer Night's Dream contain or allude to a generative kernel discoverable in Greek versions of the Theseus story? Is it significant that this kernel, assuming we find it, is contained, half-hidden and half-revealed, in a comedy, which would therefore seem to be the best medium for preserving whatever mythic essence structures the Theseus cycle of stories?

The universalist attitude to myth always seems to assume, as Ted Hughes says in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, that a myth, as an element in a literary work, operates “as a controlling, patterned field of force, open internally to the ‘divine’, the ‘daemonic’, the ‘supernatural’ (of which the constituent myths were the original symbolic expression), but externally to the profane, physical form and individualities of the action, to the words of the actors, and the local habitation and burden of the plot.”² Hughes echoes Theseus' famous speech in this formulation, but he does not discuss A Midsummer Night's Dream in his five-hundred-page book, presumably because he does not think that the play is informed by the Great Goddess myth, although, as we shall see, such mythic residues can clearly be seen in it. Neither does he explain how, or why, the divine, daemonic or supernatural elements of myth mysteriously persist in much later literary creations. It could, I suppose, be said to reside in the narrative itself, which exists within a cultural tradition for reasons that are partly formal, partly psychological and partly accidental, but we know that thousands of ancient narratives have been lost or forgotten in spite of their “daemonic” connections.

Although he is often viewed as the most universalist of theorists, in defining myth Joseph Campbell actually allows room for historicist or ‘socially constructed’ factors that Hughes ignores. He claims that myths reflect

certain irreducible psychological problems inherent in the very biology of our species, which have remained constant, and have, consequently, so tended to control and structure the myths and rites in their service that, in spite of all the differences that have been recognized, analyzed, and stressed by sociologists and historians, there run through the myths of all mankind the common strains of a single symphony of the soul.³

This is as firm a statement of the universalist view as one could imagine. Yet in the same breath, Campbell notes that traditional functions of myth include “validating and maintaining some specific social order, authorizing its moral code as a construct beyond criticism or human emendation” and “shaping individuals to the aims and ideals of their various social groups,”⁴ formulations that concur with Roland Barthes' view in Mythologies.

What theorists like Barthes most dislike about traditional myth criticism is the claim that literature has inherited the universal qualities of myth. Deconstruction has undermined all foundational ideology and shown that claims to ongoing ‘presence,’ which are key to defenses of both myth and literature, are illusory and manipulative. As Reuben Arthur Brower has said, “Although we commonly speak of ‘the Oedipus myth’ or ‘the Hercules myth,’ and although anthropologists refer to mythical ‘archetypes’ or ‘structures,’ it can be said that there are no myths, only versions. To put it another way, there are only texts for interpretation. …”⁵ Yet there is something in the study of myth that deconstruction cannot completely dismiss. Even if myths exist only in “versions,” each version is a version of something; and even if we allow that the ‘something’ can never be captured or fixed, it cannot, either, be destroyed if the social will exists to keep it alive. Stories are clearly remembered and retold by societies over long periods of time. The difficult question is to explain why—without begging the question by appeals to their concern with “irreducible psychological problems” or to their ‘greatness’—certain stories are versioned over many centuries. Even if we can find the mythic kernel of the stories about Theseus, we still need to explain why the story remained so popular in European culture that it provided material not only for the Roman dramatists but for Shakespeare and Racine as well. Perhaps some sense of the primordial conflicts buried in the Theseus cycle and its antecedents will explain why Shakespeare creates his idiosyncratic version of the Theseus story as a play about marriage, intended to serve as part of a real marriage celebration.⁶

Do the episodes of the Theseus story, placed over each other like transparencies, reveal, “something of great constancy” (5.1.26)? Certainly the cycle reveals a conflict between the culture-founding, civilization-building elements of the story and more anarchic, destructive ones. In particular, it tells of Theseus' conflicts with women, suggesting, in Erich Neumann's words, that he is “the hero who conquers the symbol of matriarchal domination,” that is, the minotaur.⁷ Behind the Theseus myth, says Neumann, lies the conflict between the patriarchal and the matriarchal worlds and the gradual substitution of human sacrifices to animal ones in annual festivals of the renewal of kingly power.⁸

Most medieval and later retellings of the Theseus story seem far removed from such ancient rituals. Simon Tidworth, in a survey of the Theseus story in the Renaissance, remarks on “the universal popularity of the old stories and their universal accessibility. They were told not only for their own sakes but for the sake of practically any message that an author wished to impart.”⁹ The Theseus story was very well known in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It was accepted as an “antique fable,” but paintings of episodes from the story suggest that it was taken as having historical validity as well. After all, Theseus appeared in Plutarch along with firmly historical figures such as Mark Antony. Moreover, like history in general, the story was seen as a repository of moral exempla and as having continuing significance for Christian audiences. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, an Elizabethan audience would see, Shakespeare is involved in mythopoesis, the recreation of ancient stories, transposed and given a symbolic meaning yet treated with a sophisticated self-reflexiveness. Tidworth notes that Shakespeare took a classical story and used it as the medium for his own thoughts on human conduct in “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” but that he wrote no Theseus and Ariadne, apparently from lack of interest. “Theseus appears in his conventional role as Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream, but apart from that all we can gather are a few scraps of simile like ‘Thou mayst not wander in that labyrinth; / There Minotaurs and ugly treasons lurk’ from Henry VI Part I.”¹⁰

Others have perceived in A Midsummer Night's Dream a more extensive use of the Theseus story, but rarely have they seen the play as dealing with conflicts present in the Greek texts. In 1979, in an admirable article, “A Midsummer-Night's Dream: The Myth of Theseus and the Minotaur,” M. E. Lamb was the first to focus on the play's extensive use of the Theseus myth.¹¹ She notes that Theseus was read during the Renaissance not only as a reasonable man in control of his lower nature, but as an unkind lover and deserter of women. In spite of the fact that he and Hippolyta are happily wed at the end of the play, the audience would have known that the product of their union, Hippolytus, would eventually die because of his father's curse. This essay does not focus on the workings of “myth,” in either Campbell's or Barthes' sense; instead, the dark elements in the play are seen mostly as inevitable, in the sense that fear and death reside at the heart of the labyrinth of the world, even if the comic perspective can deny them for a time.¹²

The most admired of myth critics, Northrop Frye, noted, in 1983, that A Midsummer Night's Dream owes a great deal to Classical mythology, and, in typically suggestive fashion, he comments that Shakespeare's play retains signs of the struggle between matriarchal and patriarchal forms of social power which Neumann saw as an essential element of the Greek myth: “It might be possible to think that the fairy world represents a female principle in the play which is eventually subordinated to a male ascendancy associated with daylight. In the background is the unseen little boy who moves from female to male company as Oberon simultaneously asserts his authority over Titania; in the foreground is Theseus' marriage to a conquered Amazon.”¹³

Having had this insight, Frye immediately rejects it:

But this seems wrong, and out of key with the general tonality of the play. Theseus' marriage will at least end his unsavoury reputation as a treacherous lover, glanced at by Oberon, and the most explicit symbol of male domination, Egeus' claim to dispose of Hermia as he wishes, is precisely what is being eliminated by the total action. The fairy wood is a wood of Eros as well as of Venus and Diana, and both sexes are equally active principles in both worlds.¹⁴

Frye is right to see in the play yet another version of the ascendancy of male power over the “female principle,” yet all too cavalier in finding himself “wrong” and in assuming that “both sexes are equally active principles” in the world of dream and the world of political reality, if those are indeed the worlds to which he refers. His wording is in fact extremely ambiguous at this point. Are “both worlds” the world of Eros versus the world of Venus and Diana (a claim that makes little sense), or the worlds of night and day, the latter of which, at least, is not one in which both sexes are equally active “principles”? Frye's choice of such phrases as “a female principle” and “a male ascendancy associated with daylight” indicates a distaste for gender politics, which were flourishing when Frye wrote his essay. He notes a formidable tension in the play but re-represses it by an appeal to the play's genre; the “general tonality” fitting to a comedy is enough to make his potential reading unnecessary.

Louis Adrian Montrose's “‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture,” was published in 1983, the same year as Frye published the remarks just quoted. It does not overlook the gender politics that Frye recognizes but downplays. In discussing Elizabethan myth-making about Amazon societies supposedly being discovered in Africa and the New World, Montrose claims that Shakespeare's play reveals a similar “collective anxiety about the power of the female not only to dominate or reject the male but to create and destroy him. It is an ironic acknowledgment by an androcentric culture of the degree to which men are in fact dependent upon women: upon mothers and nurses, for their birth and nurture; upon mistresses and wives, for the validation of their manhood.”¹⁵ He has striking things to say about the central importance, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, of Titania's and Oberon's quarrel over a changeling boy. In a phrase reminiscent of Neumann's description of the Theseus tales, he refers to Theseus' victory over Hippolyta as “a defeat of the Amazonian matriarchate,”¹⁶ one of many myths, he says, which recount a cultural transition from matriarchy to patriarchy. He argues that the placement of this story “at the very threshold of A Midsummer Night's Dream” sanctions Oberon's attempt to take the boy from Titania and “to make a man of him”;¹⁷ notices the Oedipal implications of the struggle (Oberon and the boy are rivals for Titania, who has forsworn Oberon's “bed and company” [2.1.62-63] because of their quarrel);¹⁸ and notes perceptively that Titania's attachment to the changeling boy reflects her devotion to the memory of his mother, a devotion which Oberon destroys by forcing Titania to give the boy over to him. The play, Montrose concludes, “enacts a male disruption of an intimate bond between women: first by the boy, and then by the man.”¹⁹

This subtle essay directs our attention to an aspect of the Theseus story which may be a key to its continuing fascination: male fear of women's procreative power and attempts to deny that power by gaining control of children, and thereby women, through patriarchal marriage and the elaborate ideology of sexual roles that accompanies it. Its argument takes us a long way towards understanding the religious and social tension that is part of both the original Greek myth cycle and of Elizabethan concerns about female power and the politics of procreation.

Validation for a reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream as an intersection of ancient and modern politics comes from C. Kerényi, who describes events in the myths about early Athens which resonate in the play, even though Shakespeare may not have known about all, or any, of the episodes. In his account of the early kings of Athens, the ancestors of Theseus, Kerényi records that the Athenians believed themselves to be descended not from a male primaeval being “but directly from the soft, reddish soil of Attica, which in the beginning brought forth human beings instead of wild beasts.”²⁰ Cecrops, who was regarded as the “heroic founder” of Athens, was half-serpent, half-human: “serpent as having sprung from the earth, yet also with a share in human form and therefore diphyes, ‘of twofold nature.’” One serpent appears in the play, in Hermia's dream, or nightmare: “Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best / To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!” (2.2.144-45). In a volume on the myth of the divine child, which he wrote with Kerényi, Jung remarks that the fear of dragons and serpents points to the danger that the consciousness will be overtaken by the unconscious; “snake-dreams,” he says, “usually occur … when the conscious mind is deviating from its instinctual basis.”²¹ It is hardly surprising that Hermia dreams of serpents when alone in the woods with her lover, since at that moment her consciousness is indeed threatened, by darkness, dream, and sexual desire. Her dream is not, of course, related to the story of Cecrops, but like Bottom's transformation into a half-animal creature, it does suggest that return to the womb of nature is a threat for the conscious and the social mind, a threat that Bottom can survive much more triumphantly than Hermia.

Half-animal mythical founders no doubt combine elements of chthonic origins (‘the people who live here sprang from this very earth’), totem memories, and psychological aspects that link the infant or child to the uncultured beast. Bottom's name may point to ways in which, in his dual form, he is at the ‘bottom’ of society, in the sense of being foundational: he recalls the beast consort who may fertilize the great mother goddess, but more obviously he is a baby, almost a divine child. Kerényi comments: “Being sprung from the earth and the nurseling of the maiden goddess, Pallas Athene, her father's daughter, and formed after her mind, the picture of the primitive Athenian was first present in Kekrops.”²² The Athenians thought of themselves as autochthonous, but they worshipped Athena who, although she became a patriarchal goddess, born without a mother, was doubtless at first a mother goddess. Like Artemis/Diana, one of whose names in Ovid is Titania,²³ Pallas Athena shunned male domination, even though she became firmly placed within the Olympian hierarchy dominated by Zeus. The transformed Bottom, in his man-animal double nature, resembles Cecrops as “picture of the primitive Athenian;” in relation to Titania he seems like an indulged baby, child rather than consort of a mother goddess. He stands (or lies) in for the changeling boy, who is in fact never seen in the play. Jung's comment that in myths of the divine child “Nature, the world of the instincts, takes the ‘child’ under its wing,”²⁴ is an apt commentary on Bottom's treatment by the fairies who bring him the good things of the wood. Jung's words about the power of the child archetype uncannily capture Bottom's experience as he struggles to remember the dream that he cannot express: “Consciousness hedged about by psychic powers, sustained or threatened or deluded by them, is the age-old experience of mankind. This experience has projected itself into the archetype of the child, which expresses man's wholeness. … The ‘eternal child’ in man is an indescribable experience, an incongruity, a handicap, and a divine prerogative.”²⁵ Bottom's metamorphosis is explicable, in part at least, as a vision of the child archetype.

But why would the child archetype, or, more modestly, concern with children, be part of a version of the Theseus story? Theseus, after all, is famous for cursing and destroying his son. The issue of lineage may suggest an answer. Cecrops “discovered, as it were, the double descent of human beings, that they come not only from a mother but also from a father. He founded the institution of marriage between one man and one woman, which was to be under the protection of the goddess Athene. That allegedly was his act of foundation, worthy of a primaeval father, who was not personally the ancestor of the Athenians, although they had him to thank for their patrilineal descent.”²⁶ The instituting of marriage no doubt marks, to some degree at least, the suppression of matriarchal customs and powers. The marriages in A Midsummer Night's Dream, although they are not determined by the tyrannical Egeus, nevertheless occur only with the approval of Theseus and the blessing of Oberon; moreover, “[t]hose who emphasized the point that Kekrops instituted marriage were obliged to add that men and women had mated promiscuously before his time.”²⁷ The tradition of another status for women than that in historical Athens, where they were excluded from public life, remained in the latest form of the story of how Pallas Athena took possession of the land:

In this version of that famous tale, the olive grew out of the earth for the first time while Kekrops reigned, and at the same time a spring appeared. The king is said to have inquired thereupon of the Delphic oracle and got the answer that the olive signified the goddess Athene, the water the god Poseidon, and the citizens were to decide after which the city was to be named. Now in those days the woman [sic] had still the franchise, and they out-voted the men by one; thus Athene was victorious and the city was named Athenai. Poseidon, as many tales teach us that he did, became angry and flooded the coasts. To pacify him, the women had to renounce their former right, and ever since then the children were not distinguished by the names of their mothers but by those of their fathers.²⁸

The quarrel of Oberon and Titania causes disruptions in nature reminiscent of the floods that Poseidon visited on Athens until he was placated by the women's sacrifice of their franchise. Titania gives in to Oberon, much as the women of Athens gave up their power, for the good of the community.

These stories about the beginnings of Athens record that with the discovery of the male role in procreation came marriage, monogamy, and the ‘voluntary’ surrender of women's rights to political power. The aspect of Shakespeare's play that most uncannily suggests the myth of Athen's founding is the choice of a cause for Titania's and Oberon's quarrel. Oberon wants control of a changeling boy who has been in Titania's care. It may be that Oberon is announcing the time when a boy-child should be initiated into the masculine world and that Titania is unjustifiably retarding the child's ‘natural’ development, but the text does not make that argument. Oberon simply says, “I do but beg a little changeling boy / To be my henchman” (2.1.120-21). The fact that he “begs” the child suggests that in spite of his later tricks, which quickly if illogically enforce Titania's compliance, he is dependent on Titania's willing gift of the child if he is to consider it his.²⁹

In response to Oberon's plea, Titania presents her own little ‘myth’ of the boy's birth:

His mother was a votress of my order;
And in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side;
And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
Marking th'embarked traders on the flood:
When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive
And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
Following (her womb then rich with my young squire),
Would imitate, and sail upon the land
To fetch me trifles, and return again
As from a voyage rich with merchandise.
But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
And for her sake I will not part with him.

(2.1.123-37)

Although this passage does not claim a virgin birth for the changeling boy, the simile of the “wanton wind” impregnating the sails of ships makes it appear that his mother had herself become pregnant without the help of a man. In light of Jung's remark that “like the womb of the mother, boundless water is an organic part of the image of the Primordial Child,”³⁰ it is striking that the changeling boy was born on the seashore. In far-off India Titania has received something close to worship (“votress of my order”) from her charming follower. Their friendship is similar to that of Hermia and Helena in their girlhoods, or even to that of the Amazons. As Montrose says, for Titania the changeling boy is a token of friendship among women, who are united in part by their self-evident primacy as progenitrixes; to give him up is to submit to male power. The ignorance of early Athenians about the role of the father in conception permitted promiscuous behavior like that which the four lovers in the play are in danger of embracing. Titania's insistence on children as links between women rather than between men, as they must be in any patrilineal system, and in particular her beautiful invocation of the self-sufficiency of women, which stops just short of accepting parthenogenesis, threaten both the natural and patriarchal orders, or rather, the natural order as interpreted by a patriarchal consciousness. Compared with the mother's role, the father's is a matter of faith, dependent on the mother's ‘word.’ In the beginning was the word, the word of submission not only to a male symbolic order but to fatherhood as the basis of social order. The name, and law, of the father depend on the submissive word (‘the child is yours’) of the mother. Titania is re-stating, here, one can imagine, the attitudes to birth and female solidarity of early Athenian women and of the Amazons, including perhaps Hippolyta herself, whose protests are unvoiced, unless, as I think is reasonable, we take Titania as her alter ego.

Interestingly, in turning to thoughts of revenge Oberon uses a word employed by Theseus when, at the beginning of the play, he described his wooing of Hippolyta, who has submitted because of “injuries” done to her (1.1.17). Oberon now promises to torment Titania “for this injury” (2.1.147). He will do so by using ‘love’ against her, as Theseus, in a sense, has done to Hippolyta, whose loss of independence is supposedly made up for by her marriage. Titania will be forced to love, against her reason and her will, and will be shamed by that love. Oberon inserts his own Ovid-like myth at this point, explaining to Puck that the juice of the flower called “love-in-idleness” (2.1.168) “will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the next live creature that it sees” (2.1.171-72). Ultimately Oberon uses the juice of “love-in-idleness” to effect two results connected to Kerényi's account of early Athens. After some confusion, he leads the young lovers to “marriage between one man and one woman,” thereby creating a social order in which the husband's power is secured by his legalized control over his wife. He also uses the juice to bring the rebellious Titania to heel. He does this by causing her to enact a version of the Pasiphae story: Bottom is both the bull that Pasiphae lusted after and the minotaur that resulted from her lust. Although Titania does not mate with Bottom, who as I have suggested is more divine child than sexual object, she will be shamed by her desire for him. No doubt the original story of the labyrinth reflects a view of the matriarchal, or more matriarchal, religion of Crete as seen by Greeks of the patriarchal period. For them, the Cretan palace and its acrobats vaulting over the backs and horns of bulls represented a forbidding image of the mother goddess with her beast consorts, not that Greek religion, at any stage, was without its powerful goddesses. But the power of the mother goddess, except for Ceres, perhaps, who was in any case associated with the mysteries rather than with more public forms of devotion, had been reduced, by subordination to male gods and by various specializations of her power, such as patronage of love or of virginity.

The important point, of course, is that such a submission is not just generous, or inevitable, but productive of women's real social enslavement. It is hardly surprising that woman's giving up of control over the child, on many levels except that of actual care, must be seen as freely given. Myths which concentrate on this point, and many do, usually present the female submission as a gracious and ‘natural’ occurrence. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, in spite of the chaos that their quarrel has threatened, the fairy king and queen ‘resolve the issue’ (and here the phrase can be taken almost literally) with a suspicious haste which foreshortens the conflict and allows a comic ending, at least from the viewpoint of the patriarchal order which is thus reaffirmed. In Oberon's song in the final scene, a blessing on the children to be born to the couples that have wed that day, he refers to “issue” twice: “And the issue there [in the bride-bed] create / Ever shall be fortunate” (5.1.391-92) and “And the blots of Nature's hand / Shall not in their issue stand …” (5.1.395-96). The parentless changeling boy has aroused primal and dangerous conflict between Oberon and Titania, figures who, although they seem to be childless themselves, readily suggest parental power. Their conflict resonates with doubts over the origin of children which, as Kerényi shows, are bound up with the institution of patriarchal marriage. The strangely static quality of A Midsummer Night's Dream—the play consists of the announcement of a marriage and the celebration of a marriage, but no representation of marriage itself—suggests that the interspersed plot lines, which involve escape into night, wood, and dream, are essential to the working out of a major block to the reconciliation of Theseus and his Amazon queen. The two plot lines which ‘handle’ this block are that of Oberon's and Titania's quarrel and that of the lover's night in the wood, which has been caused by Egeus' deadly willfulness, an extreme form of the position adopted by Oberon.

Although I would not claim that the story of Cecrops and early Athens is directly related to Shakespeare's play, I am impressed by the fact that it is in his great epithalamium that Shakespeare has chosen to recast the Theseus myth. In this recasting, he has included quarreling over the generation and control of children and, by extension, over the relative power of men and women. Oberon and Titania, in their struggle over the changeling boy and in Oberon's efforts to enforce Titania's obedience to his will, act out the sort of dream that might well trouble mortals' sleep. If the central part of the play is, among other things, a joint dream of Theseus and Hippolyta, then it is a dream that ‘resolves’ an underlying tension just as, according to Lévi-Strauss, and others, a myth resolves an intolerable social contradiction. Speaking of Levi-Strauss' view of myth, Ronald Schleifer has commented that “the function of mythic discourse is to create the illusory resolution of real cultural contradictions.”³¹ Shakespeare's play uses a version of the Pasiphae and minotaur story to create the “illusory resolution” of “real cultural contradictions.” One of the most repulsive aspects of the Theseus story is transformed into a charming fantasy in which Bottom returns to nature, has his (innocent) physical and emotional desires fulfilled, and is allowed, perhaps, to indulge an appreciation of the “female principle” that the waking man can admire only when it is firmly subordinated to male supremacy. This transformation of ‘repulsive’ into comic material does not, however, change the underlying meaning of the plot or of the social narratives that it supports.

In what sense, then, is A Midsummer Night's Dream a ‘mythic’ version of the Theseus story? Lamb has shown us that the story informs the play as a powerful and suggestive intertext; she has also noted some of the archetypal resonances of the labyrinth and of Bottom as minotaur. Frye has noted the play's reflection of struggles between male and female principles, and Montrose has argued its involvement in the contradictions and realities of Elizabethan society. I have suggested that the play brings forward a less obvious element in the Theseus cycle of stories, namely, its somewhat veiled treatment of the conflict between the matriarchal and patriarchal orders, which in turn is connected, as Kerényi suggests, to a primordial struggle over generation.

This ‘revelation’ of a ‘mythic kernel’ need not lead us to agree with essentialist views of myth. Or at least, we must be clear about why a myth has an ‘essence.’ Enough stories have been significant for a time and then been forgotten to persuade us that the power of myth is dependent not on some sort of primordial ‘charge’ but on continuing social relevance. That is, it is not the story or myth itself that remains ‘timeless,’ but the social context, which in spite of great changes in particulars, can sustain a basic pattern over time. No pattern has been more sustained over time than that of male supremacy, so it is hardly surprising that uneasiness over passion and over female independence would link ancient Athens, Elizabethan England, and contemporary societies. Perhaps it makes sense to see the essentialist view of myth as a kind of metaphor pointing to particularly important ongoing concerns. Especially in the masterful hands of Jung, whose comments on the child archetype I have quoted, this metaphor can provide emotional and even logical satisfaction, as long as the historical and social contexts recorded if not explained by Kerényi are kept firmly in mind.

Although patriarchal power is explored and defended in many of Shakespeare's tragedies, its arbitrariness is nowhere more explicit than in A Midsummer Night's Dream. The play is a comic version of the Theseus story, not because it parodies the myth, nor because it transforms the minotaur into a beneficent image of the divine or archetypal child, although both of these arguments can reasonably be made. Rather, Shakespeare's playful yet haunted play of Duke Theseus is a comedy because the comic mode best allows its underlying social theme, that of women's submission to men in marriage, to pass like a dream—a dream founded on the starkest reality.

Notes

1. All quotations from the play are taken from Harold F. Brooks' Arden edition (London: Methuen, 1979).

2. Hughes, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being (London: Faber and Faber, 1992), 3.

3. Campbell, “Mythological Themes in Creative Literature and Art,” in Myths, Dreams and Religion, ed. Joseph Campbell (New York: Dutton, 1970), 141.

4. Campbell, 140.

5. Brower, Mirror on Mirror: Translation, Imitation, Parody (Cambridge: Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 17.

6. See the introduction to the Arden edition, liii.

7. Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954; rpt. 1970), 2.

8. Neumann, 78.

9. See Tidworth, “From the Renaissance to Romanticism” in The Quest for Theseus, A. G. Ward et al. (New York: Praeger, 1970), 195.

10. Tidworth, 215.

11. Lamb, Texas Studies in Literature and Language 21 (1979): 478-91.

12. For further discussion of the labyrinth, see David Ormerod's “A Midsummer Night's Dream: The Monster in the Labyrinth,” in Shakespeare Studies 11 (1978): 39-52. Ormerod's article uses the narrative of Theseus and the minotaur, and its allegorizations during the Renaissance, to explore the notion of “blind love” and the eventual reconciliation of opposites into “a new discordia concors” (39).

13. Frye, The Myth of Deliverance: Reflections on Shakespeare's Problem Comedies (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), 80-81.

14. Frye, 81.

15. Representations 1.2 (1983): 66.

16. Montrose, 71.

17. Ibid.

18. Allen Dunn follows suit in his “The Indian Boy's Dream Wherein Every Mother's Son Rehearses His Part: Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream,” Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 15-32, especially 24-26.

19. Montrose, 71.

20. C. Kerényi, The Heroes of the Greeks, (1959, rpt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 209; see his chapter entitled “Kekrops, Erechtheus and Theseus.” I have retained Kerényi's spellings in quotations from his text but have otherwise used standard spellings.

21. C. G. Jung and C. Kerényi, Essays on a Science of Mythology: The Myth of the Divine Child and the Mysteries of Eleusis, Bollingen Series (1949; rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 85.

22. Kerényi, 209.

23. See Frye, 80.

24. Jung and Kerényi, 87.

25. Ibid., 97-98.

26. Kerényi, 209.

27. Ibid., 210.

28. Ibid., 210-11.

29. For an interesting discussion of Elizabethan beliefs about paternity, see Montrose's article, especially 72-75.

30. Jung and Kerényi, 49.

31. Ronald Schleifer, “Structuralism,” The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Michael Groden and Martin Kreiswirth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 700.