Themes and Motifs:

https://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/msnd/themes.html

Loves Difficulty

The course of true love never did run smooth, comments Lysander, articulating one of A
Midsummer Nights Dreams most important themesthat of the difficulty of love (I.i.134).
Though most of the conflict in the play stems from the troubles of romance, and though the
play involves a number of romantic elements, it is not truly a love story; it distances the
audience from the emotions of the characters in order to poke fun at the torments and
afflictions that those in love suffer. The tone of the play is so lighthearted that the audience
never doubts that things will end happily, and it is therefore free to enjoy the comedy without
being caught up in the tension of an uncertain outcome.

The theme of loves difficulty is often explored through the motif of love out of balancethat
is, romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a
relationship. The prime instance of this imbalance is the asymmetrical love among the four
young Athenians: Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius, and
Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helenaa simple numeric imbalance in which two men
love the same woman, leaving one woman with too many suitors and one with too few. The
play has strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is in many ways based on a
quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers tangle resolves itself into symmetrical
pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved. Somewhat similarly, in the
relationship between Titania and Oberon, an imbalance arises out of the fact that Oberons
coveting of Titanias Indian boy outweighs his love for her. Later, Titanias passion for the ass-
headed Bottom represents an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania is beautiful and
graceful, while Bottom is clumsy and grotesque.

Magic

The fairies magic, which brings about many of the most bizarre and hilarious situations in the
play, is another element central to the fantastic atmosphere of A Midsummer Nights Dream.
Shakespeare uses magic both to embody the almost supernatural power of love (symbolized
by the love potion) and to create a surreal world. Although the misuse of magic causes chaos,
as when Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to Lysanders eyelids, magic ultimately
resolves the plays tensions by restoring love to balance among the quartet of Athenian
youths. Additionally, the ease with which Puck uses magic to his own ends, as when he
reshapes Bottoms head into that of an ass and recreates the voices of Lysander and
Demetrius, stands in contrast to the laboriousness and gracelessness of the craftsmens
attempt to stage their play.

Dreams

As the title suggests, dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Nights Dream; they
are linked to the bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. Hippolytas first words in the play
evidence the prevalence of dreams (Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, / Four
nights will quickly dream away the time), and various characters mention dreams throughout
(I.i.78). The theme of dreaming recurs predominantly when characters attempt to explain
bizarre events in which these characters are involved: I have had a dream, past the wit of
man to say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about texpound this dream,
Bottom says, unable to fathom the magical happenings that have affected him as anything
but the result of slumber.
Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without
explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of
course; he seeks to recreate this environment in the play through the intervention of the
fairies in the magical forest. At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the
audience members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they
should remember it as nothing more than a dream. This sense of illusion and gauzy fragility is
crucial to the atmosphere of A Midsummer Nights Dream, as it helps render the play a
fantastical experience rather than a heavy drama.

Contrast

The idea of contrast is the basic building block of A Midsummer Nights Dream. The entire play
is constructed around groups of opposites and doubles. Nearly every characteristic presented
in the play has an opposite: Helena is tall, Hermia is short; Puck plays pranks, Bottom is the
victim of pranks; Titania is beautiful, Bottom is grotesque. Further, the three main groups of
characters (who are developed from sources as varied as Greek mythology, English folklore,
and classical literature) are designed to contrast powerfully with one another: the fairies are
graceful and magical, while the craftsmen are clumsy and earthy; the craftsmen are merry,
while the lovers are overly serious. Contrast serves as the defining visual characteristic of A
Midsummer Nights Dream, with the plays most indelible image being that of the beautiful,
delicate Titania weaving flowers into the hair of the ass-headed Bottom. It seems impossible
to imagine two figures less compatible with each other. The juxtaposition of extraordinary
differences is the most important characteristic of the plays surreal atmosphere and is thus
perhaps the plays central motif; there is no scene in which extraordinary contrast is not
present.

http://www.rsc.org.uk/explore/a-midsummer-nights-dream/teachers-resources/themes.aspx

Love and Marriage and the difficulty of making relationships work.

Some related scenes:
Act 1 Scene 1: Theseus describes his courtship of Hippolyta and the confusion of the
four lovers begins with Egeus' formal complaint about his daughter's involvement with
Lysander.
Act 2 Scene 1: Oberon and Titania quarrel over the Indian boy; Helena confronts
Demetrius in the wood.
Act 3 Scene 2: Lysander falls in love with Helena on awakening with the love juice in his
eyes: the lovers are in great confusion.
Act 4 Scene 1: Titania expresses her love for Bottom who has been transformed into a
donkey.
Act 5 Scene 1: Three weddings and a fairy blessing bring all to a happy conclusion.

Order and disorder and the need for a balance between the rational and irrational, between
rules and magic, in the interests of love, harmony and creativity.
Some related scenes:
Act 1 Scene 1: Theseus describes Hermia's punishment if she disobeys her father,
prompting the lovers' escape to the woods.
Act 2 Scene 1: Titania describes the consequences for the natural world of her quarrel
with Oberon.
Act 3 Scene 1: Bottom's transformation disrupts the Mechanicals' rehearsal.
Act 3 Scene 2: Puck's mistakes bring the lovers to great confusion.
Act 4 Scene 1: Titania expresses her love for Bottom who has been transformed into a
donkey.
Act 5 Scene 1: Three weddings and a fairy blessing bring all to a happy conclusion.

Appearance and reality and how people and events are often not as they seem.
Some related scenes:
Act 3 Scene 1: Bottom's transformation disrupts the Mechanicals' rehearsal.
Act 3 Scene 2: Puck's mistakes bring the lovers to great confusion.
Act 4 Scene 1: Titania awakes from her fantasy and the lovers comment on how like a
dream recent events seem to them now.
Act 5 Scene 1: The play within the play highlights the theme of illusion and reality.
Creative imagination and its reliance on the unconscious, the magical, the mysterious.
Some related scenes:
Act 4 Scene 1: Titania awakes from her fantasy, the lovers comment on how like a
dream recent events seem to them now and Bottom tells of his vision.
Act 5 Scene 1: Theseus describes the poet's art, the play within the play provides its
comment on artistic enterprise and all ends in harmony with the fairies' blessing of the
sleeping house.

Motifs:

Nature representing the magical world of the forest in contrast to Theseus's court;
also as disrupted by the disharmony between the fairy king and queen.

'And through this distemperature we see/The seasons alter...' Act 2 Scene 1

'I know a bank where the wild thyme grows...' Act 2 Scene 1

'You spotted snakes with double tongue...' Act 2 Scene 2

'Out of this wood do not desire to go: / Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no. / I am
a spirit of no common rate...' Act 3 Scene 1

'I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round, / Through bog, through bush, through brake,
through briar: / Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound...' Act 3 Scene 1

The Moon reflecting change, disruption and unpredictability, romance, the magical
and mysterious, a journey.

'Four happy days bring in/Another moon' Act 1 Scene 1

'I'll met by moonlight, proud Titania' Act 2 Scene 1

'Therefore the moon, the governess of floods, / Pale in her anger, washes all the air...' Act 2
Scene 2

'We the globe can compass soon, / Swifter than the wandering moon' Act 4 Scene 1

'Now the hungry lion roars, / And the wolf behowls the moon' Act 5 Scene 1

Sleep and dreams which take us to mysterious places, are states of innocence and
vulnerability, cause confusion and the blurring of boundaries between fantasy and
reality.

'Ay me, for pity! what a dream was here!' Act 2 Scene 2

'Tell me how it came this night / That I sleeping here was found / With these mortals on the
ground' Act 4 Scene 1

'It seems to me / That yet we sleep, we dream' Act 4 Scene 1

'God's my life, stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a
dream...' Act 4 Scene 1
'Why, then, we are awake: let's follow him / And by the way let us recount our dreams' Act 4
Scene 1

'I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream,
because it hath no bottom' Act 4 Scene 1

Eyes as emblems of perception and perspective, as entryways to the heart,

windows on the soul

'I would my father look'd but with my eyes' Act 1 Scene 1

'Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind' Act 1 Scene 1

'Reason becomes the marshal to my will / And leads me to your eyes, where I o'erlook / Love's
stories written in love's richest book' Act 2 Scene 2

'And then I will her charmed eye release / From monster's view, and all things shall be peace'
Act 3 Scene 2

'Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When every thing seems double' Act 4 Scene 1

'The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling, / Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to
heaven...' Act5 Scene 1

Plays, rehearsals and roles/parts as symbols of magical transformation and of

experimentation and preparation; also as ironic comment on the insubstantiality of
A Midsummer Night's Dream and its themes.

'Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming' Act1 Scene 2

'You can play no part but Pyramus' Act 1 Scene 2

'We will meet; and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains; be
perfect: adieu' Act 1 Scene 2

'Thus have I, Wall, my part discharged so; / And, being done, thus Wall away doth go' Act 5
Scene 1

'If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended: / That you have but
slumbered here / While these visions did appear' Act 5 Scene 1

Magic as representing the unseen, the unpredictable, the irrational and

inexplicable.

'And this same progeny of evils comes/From our debate, from our dissension' Act 2 Scene 2

'That very time I saw, but thou couldst not, / Flying between the cold moon and the earth, /
Cupid all arm'd...' Act 2 Scene 1

'The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid / Will make or man or woman madly dote / Upon the
next live creature that it sees' Act 2 Scene 1

'I'll put a girdle round the earth/In forty minutes' Act 2 Scene 1

'But who comes here? I am invisible; / And I will overhear their conference' Act 2 Scene 1

'Churl, upon thy eyes I throw / All the power this charm doth owe' Act 2 Scene 2

' Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound...' Act 3 Scene 1

'Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated' Act 3 Scene 1

'Now, until the break of day, / Through this house each fairy stray. To be best bride-bed will
we, / Which by us shall blessed be' Act 5 Scene 1

http://www.cliffsnotes.com/literature/m/a-midsummer-nights-dream/critical-essays/major-
themes

Love

The dominant theme in A Midsummer Night's Dream is love, a subject to which Shakespeare
returns constantly in his comedies. Shakespeare explores how people tend to fall in love with
those who appear beautiful to them. People we think we love at one time in our lives can later
seem not only unattractive but even repellent. For a time, this attraction to beauty might
appear to be love at its most intense, but one of the ideas of the play is that real love is much
more than mere physical attraction.

At one level, the story of the four young Athenians asserts that although "The course of true
love never did run smooth," true love triumphs in the end, bringing happiness and harmony.
At another level, however, the audience is forced to consider what an apparently irrational
and whimsical thing love is, at least when experienced between youngsters.

Marriage

A Midsummer Night's Dream asserts marriage as the true fulfillment of romantic love. All the
damaged relationships have been sorted out at the end of Act IV, and Act V serves to
celebrate the whole idea of marriage in a spirit of festive happiness.

The triple wedding at the end of Act IV marks the formal resolution of the romantic problems
that have beset the two young couples from the beginning, when Egeus attempted to force
his daughter to marry the man he had chosen to be her husband.

The mature and stable love of Theseus and Hippolyta is contrasted with the relationship of
Oberon and Titania, whose squabbling has such a negative impact on the world around them.
Only when the marriage of the fairy King and Queen is put right can there be peace in their
kingdom and the world beyond it.

Appearance and Reality

Another of the play's main themes is one to which Shakespeare returns to again and again in
his work: the difference between appearance and reality. The idea that things are not
necessarily what they seem to be is at the heart of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in the
very title itself.

A dream is not real, even though it seems so at the time we experience it. Shakespeare
consciously creates the plays' dreamlike quality in a number of ways. Characters frequently
fall asleep and wake having dreamed ("Methought a serpent ate my heart away"); having had
magic worked upon them so that they are in a dreamlike state; or thinking that they have
dreamed ("I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was"). Much of the
play takes place at night, and there are references to moonlight, which changes the
appearance of what it illuminates.
The difference between appearances and reality is also explored through the play-within-a-
play, to particularly comic effect. The "rude mechanicals" completely fail to understand the
magic of the theatre, which depends upon the audience being allowed to believe (for a time,
at least) that what is being acted out in front of them is real.

When Snug the Joiner tells the stage audience that he is not really a lion and that they must
not be afraid of him, we (and they) laugh at this stupidity, but we also laugh at ourselves
for we know that he is not just a joiner pretending to be a lion, but an actor pretending to be a
joiner pretending to be a lion. Shakespeare seems to be saying, "We all know that this play
isn't real, but you're still sitting there and believing it." That is a kind of magic too.

Order and Disorder

A Midsummer Night's Dream also deals with the theme of order and disorder. The order of
Egeus' family is threatened because his daughter wishes to marry against his will; the social
order to the state demands that a father's will should be enforced. When the city dwellers find
themselves in the wood, away from their ordered and hierarchical society, order breaks down
and relationships are fragmented. But this is comedy, and relationships are more happily
rebuilt in the free atmosphere of the wood before the characters return to society.

Natural order the order of Nature is also broken and restored in A Midsummer Night's
Dream. The row between the Fairy King and Queen results in the order of the seasons being
disrupted:

The spring, the summer,

The chiding autumn, angry winter change

Their wonted liveries, and the mazd world

By their increase knows not which is which.

Only after Oberon and Titania's reconciliation can all this be put right. Without the restoration
of natural order, the happiness of the play's ending could not be complete.

The Moon

The dominant imagery in A Midsummer Night's Dream revolves around the moon and
moonlight. The word moon occurs three times in the play's first nine lines of the play, the last
of these three references in a most striking visual image: "the moon, like to a silver bow / New
bent in heaven." One reason for repeating such images is to create the atmosphere of night.

Shakespeare's plays were mostly performed by daylight, and he had to create the idea of
darkness or half-light in the imagination of his audience there where no lights to turn off or
to dim. In addition, these repeated moon references work upon the audience by creating a
dreamlike atmosphere. Familiar things look different by moonlight; they are seen quite literally
in a different light.

The moon itself is also a reminder of the passage of time, and that all things like its phases
must change. The more educated people in Shakespeare's audience would have also
understood the mythological significance of the moon. The moon-goddesses Luna and Diana
were associated with chastity on the one hand and fertility on the other; two qualities that are
united in faithful marriage, which the play celebrates.

Seeing
A Midsummer Night's Dream also contains many references to seeing, eyes, and eyesight.
These images serve a double purpose. The repetition reminds the audience of the difference
between how things look and what they are, (reinforcing the theme of appearance vs. reality),
and that love is blind and beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

http://www.litcharts.com/lit/a-midsummer-nights-dream/themes

Love

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about love. All of its actionfrom the escapades of
Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena in the forest, to the argument between Oberon and
Titania, to the play about two lovelorn youths that Bottom and his friends perform at Duke
Theseus's marriage to Hippolytaare motivated by love. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is
not a romance, in which the audience gets caught up in a passionate love affair between two
characters. It's a comedy, and because it's clear from the outset that it's a comedy and that
all will turn out happily, rather than try to overcome the audience with the exquisite and
overwhelming passion of love, A Midsummer Night's Dream invites the audience to laugh at
the way the passion of love can make people blind, foolish, inconstant, and desperate. At
various times, the power and passion of love threatens to destroy friendships, turn men
against men and women against women, and through the argument between Oberon and
Titania throws nature itself into turmoil.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, love is a force that characters cannot control, a point
amplified by workings of the love potion, which literally makes people slaves to love. And yet,
A Midsummer Night's Dream ends happily, with three marriages blessed by the reconciled
fairy King and Queen. So even as A Midsummer Night's Dream makes fun of love's effects on
both men and women and points out that when it comes to love there's nothing really new to
say, its happy ending reaffirms loves importance, beauty, and timeless relevance.

Plays Within Plays

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play containing other plays. The most obvious example is
the laborers' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, and their inept production serves three
important functions in the larger structure of the larger play. First, the laborer's mistakes and
misunderstandings introduce a strand of farce to the comedy of the larger play. Second, it
allows Shakespeare to comment on the nature of art and theater, primarily through the
laborer's own confused belief that the audience won't be able to distinguish between fiction
and reality. Third, the laborers' play parodies much of the rest of A Midsummer Night's Dream:
Pyramus and Thisbe are lovers who, facing opposition from their parents, elope, just as
Hermia and Lysander do. So even as the lovers and Theseus make fun of the laborers'
ridiculous performance, the audience, which is watching the lovers watch the laborers' play, is
aware that the lovers had been just as absurd.

A Midsummer Night's Dream also contains a second, subtler, play within a play. In this play
within a play, Oberon is playwright, and he seeks to "write" a comedy in which Helena gets
her love, Lysander and Hermia stay together, Titania learns a lesson in wifely obedience, and
all conflicts are resolved through marriage and reconciliation. And just as the laborers' play
turns a tragic drama into a comic farce, so does Oberon's when Puck accidentally puts the
love-potion on the eyes of the wrong Athenian man. And yet Oberon's play also serves a
counter purpose to the laborers' play. While the laborers' awful performance seems to suggest
the limit of the theater, Oberon's play, which rewrote the lives of the same mortals who mock
the laborers' play, suggests that theater really does have a magic that defies reality.

Dreams
After their surreal night of magic and mayhem in the forest, both the lovers and Bottom
describe what happened to them as a "dream." They use the word "dream" to describe their
experiences, because they wouldn't otherwise be able to understand the bizarre and irrational
things that they remember happening to them in the forest. By calling their experiences
dreams, Bottom and the lovers allow those experiences to exist as they are, without need for
explanation or understanding. As Bottom says: "I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream"(IV.i.200-201).
In a famous speech near the end of the play, Duke Theseus brushes off the lovers' tale of their
night in the forest, and goes so far as to condemn the imagination of all lovers, madmen, and
poets as full of illusion and untruths. But Theseus's argument overlooks that it is reason, as
set down in the law of Athens, that caused all the problems to begin with. And it was the
"dream" within the forest that solved those problems. Through this contrast, the play seems
to be suggesting that dreams and imagination are as useful as reason, and can sometimes
create truths that transcend reason's limits.

Men and Women

The relationship between men and women echoes across both the mortal and fairy worlds of
A Midsummer Night's Dream. More specifically, both the fairy and mortal plots in the play deal
with an attempt by male authority figures to control women. Though Theseus and Hippolyta
appear to share a healthy loving relationship, it is a love built upon a man asserting power
over a woman: Theseus won Hippolyta's love by defeating her in battle. Oberon creates the
love juice in an attempt to control his disobedient wife. Egeus seeks to control his daughter's
marriage. And while the play ends happily, with everyone either married or reconciled, the
love on display is of a very particular kind: it is a love in which women accept a role
subservient to their husbands. To a modern audience this likely seems rather offensive, but an
Elizabethan audience would have generally accepted that men are the head of the household
just as the king is the head of society.

Also, A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests that love can also take a terrible toll on same-sex
friendships. Even before the lovers get into the forest, Helena betrays her friend Hermia for
love. And once they do get into the forest, all the intense feelings nearly cause the men to
duel and brings the women almost to blows as well.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Midsummer_Night's_Dream#Themes_in_the_story

Love

David Bevington argues that the play represents the dark side of love. He writes that the
fairies make light of love by mistaking the lovers and by applying a love potion to Titania's
eyes, forcing her to fall in love with an ass.[7] In the forest, both couples are beset by
problems. Hermia and Lysander are both met by Puck, who provides some comic relief in the
play by confounding the four lovers in the forest. However, the play also alludes to serious
themes. At the end of the play, Hippolyta and Theseus, happily married, watch the play about
the unfortunate lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, and are able to enjoy and laugh at it.[8] Helena
and Demetrius are both oblivious to the dark side of their love, totally unaware of what may
have come of the events in the forest.

Loss of individual identity

Maurice Hunt, Chair of the English Department at Baylor University, writes of the blurring of
the identities of fantasy and reality in the play that make possible "that pleasing, narcotic
dreaminess associated with the fairies of the play".[11] By emphasising this theme even in
the setting of the play, Shakespeare prepares the reader's mind to accept the fantastic reality
of the fairy world and its happenings. This also seems to be the axis around which the plot
conflicts in the play occur. Hunt suggests that it is the breaking down of individual identities
that leads to the central conflict in the story.[11] It is the brawl between Oberon and Titania,
based on a lack of recognition for the other in the relationship, that drives the rest of the
drama in the story and makes it dangerous for any of the other lovers to come together due
to the disturbance of Nature caused by a fairy dispute.[11] Similarly, this failure to identify
and make distinction is what leads Puck to mistake one set of lovers for another in the forest
and place the juice of the flower on Lysander's eyes instead of Demetrius'.

Victor Kiernan, a Marxist scholar and historian, writes that it is for the greater sake of love that
this loss of identity takes place and that individual characters are made to suffer accordingly:
"It was the more extravagant cult of love that struck sensible people as irrational, and likely to
have dubious effects on its acolytes".[12] He believes that identities in the play are not so
much lost as they are blended together to create a type of haze through which distinction
becomes nearly impossible. It is driven by a desire for new and more practical ties between
characters as a means of coping with the strange world within the forest, even in relationships
as diverse and seemingly unrealistic as the brief love between Titania and Bottom the Ass: "It
was the tidal force of this social need that lent energy to relationships".[13]

David Marshall, an aesthetics scholar and English Professor at the University of California
Santa Barbara, takes this theme to an even further conclusion,[citation needed] pointing out
that the loss of identity is especially played out in the description of the mechanicals and their
assumption of other identities. In describing the occupations of the acting troupe, he writes
"Two construct or put together, two mend and repair, one weaves and one sews. All join
together what is apart or mend what has been rent, broken, or sundered". In Marshall's
opinion, this loss of individual identity not only blurs specificities, it creates new identities
found in community, which Marshall points out may lead to some understanding of
Shakespeare's opinions on love and marriage. Further, the mechanicals understand this
theme as they take on their individual parts for a corporate performance of Pyramus and
Thisbe. Marshall remarks that "To be an actor is to double and divide oneself, to discover
oneself in two parts: both oneself and not oneself, both the part and not the part". He claims
that the mechanicals understand this and that each character, particularly among the lovers,
has a sense of laying down individual identity for the greater benefit of the group or pairing. It
seems that a desire to lose one's individuality and find identity in the love of another is what
quietly moves the events of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is the primary sense of motivation
and is even reflected in the scenery and mood of the story.

Ambiguous sexuality

In his essay "Preposterous Pleasures: Queer Theories and A Midsummer Night's Dream",
Douglas E. Green explores possible interpretations of alternative sexuality that he finds within
the text of the play, in juxtaposition to the proscribed social mores of the culture at the time
the play was written. He writes that his essay "does not (seek to) rewrite A Midsummer
Night's Dream as a gay play but rather explores some of its 'homoerotic significations' ...
moments of 'queer' disruption and eruption in this Shakespearean comedy".[14] Green states
that he does not consider Shakespeare to have been a "sexual radical", but that the play
represented a "topsy-turvy world" or "temporary holiday" that mediates or negotiates the
"discontents of civilisation", which while resolved neatly in the story's conclusion, do not
resolve so neatly in real life.[15] Green writes that the "sodomitical elements",
"homoeroticism", "lesbianism", and even "compulsory heterosexuality" in the story must be
considered in the context of the "culture of early modern England" as a commentary on the
"aesthetic rigidities of comic form and political ideologies of the prevailing order". Aspects of
ambiguous sexuality and gender conflict in the story are also addressed in essays by Shirley
Garner[16] and William W.E. Slights[17] albeit all the characters are played by males.
Feminism

Male dominance is one thematic element found in A Midsummer Night's Dream. In A

Midsummer Night's Dream, Lysander and Hermia escape into the woods for a night where
they do not fall under the laws of Theseus or Egeus. Upon their arrival in Athens, the couples
are married. Marriage is seen as the ultimate social achievement for women while men can go
on to do many other great things and gain societal recognition.[18] In his article "The Imperial
Votaress", Louis Montrose draws attention to male and female gender roles and norms present
in the comedy in connection with Elizabethan culture. In reference to the triple wedding, he
says, "The festive conclusion in A Midsummer Night's Dream depends upon the success of a
process by which the feminine pride and power manifested in Amazon warriors, possessive
mothers, unruly wives, and wilful daughters are brought under the control of lords and
husbands."[19] He says that the consummation of marriage is how power over a woman
changes hands from father to husband. A connection between flowers and sexuality is drawn.
The juice employed by Oberon can be seen as symbolising menstrual blood as well as the
sexual blood shed by virgins. While blood as a result of menstruation is representative of a
woman's power, blood as a result of a first sexual encounter represents man's power over
women.[20]

There are points in the play, however, when there is an absence of patriarchal control. In his
book Power on Display, Leonard Tennenhouse says the problem in A Midsummer Night's
Dream is the problem of "authority gone archaic".[21] The Athenian law requiring a daughter
to die if she does not do her father's will is outdated. Tennenhouse contrasts the patriarchal
rule of Theseus in Athens with that of Oberon in the carnivalistic Faerie world. The disorder in
the land of the fairies completely opposes the world of Athens. He states that during times of
carnival and festival, male power is broken down. For example, what happens to the four
lovers in the woods as well as Bottom's dream represents chaos that contrasts with Theseus'
political order. However, Theseus does not punish the lovers for their disobedience. According
to Tennenhouse, by forgiving the lovers, he has made a distinction between the law of the
patriarch (Egeus) and that of the monarch (Theseus), creating two different voices of
authority. This distinction can be compared to the time of Elizabeth I in which monarchs were
seen as having two bodies: the body natural and the body politic. Elizabeth's succession itself
represented both the voice of a patriarch as well as the voice of a monarch: (1) her father's
will which stated that the crown should pass to her and (2) the fact that she was the daughter
of a king.[22] The challenge to patriarchal rule in A Midsummer Night's Dream mirrors exactly
what was occurring in the age of Elizabeth I.