Kseniia's blog

“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is a very interesting play to look at when we speak about the position of men and women in Elizabethan times. It is full of examples of the rules of the patriarchal society in which Shakespeare lived and worked.

Theseus and Hippolyta

The comedy starts with the wedding ceremony between Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, Amazonian queen. It is already unusual that the author presents strong female characters in his play, Hippolyta being the most extreme case as she is the Queen of the Amazons. It is different from what we have seen before in “The Comedy of Errors” and “The Taming of the Shrew”. Is Shakespeare going to change his vision of ideal patriarchal way of living?

The fact that Hippolyta stands up to Theseus when she disagrees with him in Act V is extremely significant. In Shakespeare’s time, the wife had to be the submissive, silent partner in a relationship. Hippolyta’s role in her relationship with Theseus is indeed striking. However, the following analysis of this vivid couple depends on the reader. On the one hands, we may think that Hippolyta attracts Theseus with her feminine charm which proves to be stronger than her forceful nature. Theseus seems to be totally in love with his bride and by marrying her he is saying “farewell to arms” and is surrendering to Hippolyta’s beauty and love. Thus, the former queen of the Amazons becomes a queen of new realm – Athens.

On the other hand, however, we may interpret everything the other way round. The opening scene of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” may look like Hippolyta’s subjugation as Theseus reminds his future wife: “Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries.” (A, 1.1.20-21. From now on I will use this on-line text as a reference for the quotations). Capturing her when he defeated the Amazons, Theseus abducted Hippolyta from her Amazon sisters to bring her to Athens and marry her. That is why it depends on the director of the play how to present this female character, whether as a willing bride or as a captive that has no other way out but to surrender.

Egeus as a father

Then we are presented with another problem: Egeus wants his daughter Hermia to marry his chosen man, Dimetrius, though she loves Lysander. To persuade her, Egeus invokes Athenian law, which offers her one of two alternatives: death or life as a nun.

But Egeus’s vision is not reasonable or even remotely justifiable. In insisting on Demetrius as a husband, Egeus insists on a young Athenian who is to all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Hermia’s choice, Lysander. Demetrius is from the same background as Lysander, as rich as Lysander, and as handsome. Egeus, therefore, has no logical reason for preferring Demetrius. Apart from the idea that Egeus had a special homosexual affection towards Demetrius, there is an interesting opinion about that irrationality, expressed by Shirley Nelson Garner (C). Egeus, knowing that Demetrius is likely to be an unfaithful husband to his daughter (because he has already proved himself to be unreliable by wooing Helena and then leaving her), intentionally chooses badly for his daughter, because he wishes to keep her for himself. By insisting that she marry a man whom she does not love and one who may be disloyal to her besides, Egeus assures that Hermia will always love her father and that she will never really leave him. Whatever Egeus’s reason may be, he uses his power as a father to make his daughter comply with his wish. As we have seen, for this purpose there was even a special law for disobedient daughters.

Though Theseus is less severe than Egeus, he is, from the outset, unsympathetic toward women. He utterly supports Egeus as patriarch, telling Hermia:

To you your father should be as a god,

One that composed your beauties; yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax

By him imprinted and within his power

To leave the figure or disfigure it. (1.1.55-59)

As a ruler, he will enforce the law, which gives Egeus control over Hermia’s sexuality and embodies patriarchal order.

Hermia and Helena as a possible threat to the patriarchal society

But what happens next? Hermia still does not want to obey, and she does not want to be neither nun nor cadaver, so she decides to run away with Lysander, to escape the society that does not give her any chance to build her life as she wants. She is joined by Helena, and together they might have achieved more results in protesting against the patriarchal bondage; however Shakespeare does not allow them to undermine the existent order of life, so the two women quarrel and finally separate. Once their friendship, and thus their power, is diminished, both of them are presumably “ready” for marriage.

This feminine “break-out” will end up in returning to the starting point. As this is a comedy, the girls will not be punished for their disobedience. Everything will turn out right and the initial disorder will end in harmony. The cost of it, however, is the restoration of the patriarchal hierarchy, so threatened at the beginning of the play. In the end, both Hermia and Helena marry their chosen men, in this way perpetuating the “circulus vituosus”: the process of marrying is how power over a woman changes hands from father to husband. Originally submissive daughters become submissive wives. Puck’s verse, in this respect, provides the paradigm:

Jack shall have Jill;

Nought shall go ill;

The man shall have his mare again,

And all shall be well.

Oberon and Titania

There is another example of the marital relations, it is that one of Oberon and Titania. They are both supernatural characters, the King and the Queen of the Fairies. In the beginning they seem to have equal magical powers, but later Oberon’s power proves to be greater. They quarrel about the possession of an Indian boy that Titania loves so much, and this quarrel brings chaos to the natural world.

Oberon’s determination to have the child for himself suggests that he is jealous of him. He wants to have the exclusive love of his wife, Titania. His official reason, however, is that he wants the child to be his “henchman”, and it may seem reasonable since there was a practice of taking boys from the nursery to the father’s realm so that they can acquire the character and skills appropriate to manhood. But there is no suggestion that Oberon wants to groom the child for manhood. Besides, for this purpose he could have returned the boy to his father, with whom he, as a human child, might be most probably reared.

So, the child poses a threat to the King of Fairies who needs Titania all for himself. And since Oberon cannot persuade his wife to turn the boy over to him, he will use his power to humiliate and torment her until she does so. He uses the love potion not simply to divert her attention from the child, so that he can have him, but to punish her as well. When Puck tells him that Titania is “with a monster in loue” (3.2.1028), he is obviously pleased and thinks that the situation turned out better than he had expected.

Titania and Bottom

Though the scenes between Titania and Bottom are charming and hilarious, Titania is made ridiculous. Whereas her opening speech is remarkable for its lyric beauty, and her defense of keeping the Indian boy has quiet and dignified emotion power, now she is reduced to admiring Bottom’s truisms and his monstrous shape: “Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful” (3.1.965).

Besides, there is the following argument presented by Sarah Carter in her work about “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (D):

“Titania’s links to the classical multiple-formed goddesses can be widened. It was, and is, common for trans-culturally equated and inter-culturally related goddesses to be made composite, and for ancient mother goddesses such as Isis to be assimilated into various cultures. Frances A. Yates records that Astraea is a composite of or comparable to Ceres (Astraea holds a sheaf of corn), Venus, Fortune, Isis, Atargatis, the Syrian goddess worshipped under the name of Virgo Caelestis at Carthage, and is associated with Urania, and, like Isis, with the moon.[16] The ancient great goddess Isis, of whom Apuleius becomes a devotee in The Golden Ass, is further disseminated into Artemis, Aphrodite, Proserpine, Ceres, Juno, Bellona and Hecate through younger and foreign civilisations.[17] This amalgamation resulted in what Ted Hughes terms in his pervasive study the ‘Great Goddess’ or the ‘Goddess of Complete Being’.[18][19] the destruction of the Goddess’ beloved by his brother god, and the destruction of the Goddess herself by the same […] Hughes’ vast thesis is that three fundamental myths establish the belief systems and mythology of multitudinous cultures, mainly ancient European, Middle Eastern and Northern African. These myths are the existence of the Great Goddess (in most obvious and ancient form the Earth mother type goddesses of Rhea, Gaia, Tiamat and Isis)

[…] it is easy to read the conflict between Titania and Oberon as a relatively straightforward representation of the destruction of the Great Goddess, the misogynistic myth and anxiety underpinning ancient patriarchal belief systems. Hughes writes that Oberon’s revenge is ‘a grotesque fairyland nightmare’, in that he makes Titania ‘wholly a Queen of Hell … As a result she is revealed as the consort of the Lord of Hell – who is always the gross inferior brother, Set, who is the Boar, or alternatively (in Egyptian terms) the Ass.’[20] Significantly, Set had ass’ ears and the ass was his sacred animal. For this reason, asses were said to be hated by Isis, and sacrificed prolifically in honour of Horus, the avenging son of Osiris and Isis.[21] Thereby, Bottom’s ass head represents the animal that the moon goddess Isis describes in The Golden Ass as ‘the most hateful beast in the universe’.[22] One of the Great Goddess’ manifest forms was as Divine Love,[23] which leads us back to the Neoplatonic communion between the divine and the human of Titania and Bottom, and yet also the corresponding utter humiliation of a goddess figure in a union with a detested creature.” So, the union between Titania and Bottom (an ass) seems to be a double humiliation for the Queen of Fairies.

Oberon’s winning the boy from Titania is at the centre of the play, for his victory is the price of amity between them, which in turn restores the green world.

We see that on all the levels, even on the supernatural one, patriarchal system is present, and moreover, it proves to be more powerful and harmonious. The male dominance is always re-established, even if it was undermined in the beginning, and this brings perfect accord, love and happiness to everyone. This is how things should be in a normal Elizabethan society.