Intro
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another Shakespeare comedy about confusing love objects and shaky gender norms. This one’s set in Greece and focuses on two pairs of Athenian lovers, a group of amateur actors, and some deviant fairies who live in the forest nearby. It’s the fairies who set about confusing everything and everyone by casting a spell on the young lovers and the actors.
Because the New Historicists are just so into Shakespeare, Louis Adrian Montrose wrote an essay on A Midsummer Night’s Dream called “'Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.” That’s right: even when there’s fairies involved, the resulting fantasies can still be used to understand important things about power relationships in this time in history.
The play opens with Hermia, one of the lovers, refusing her father Egeus’s order to marry Demetrius, the man he wants her to marry, because Hermia’s in love with another guy called Lysander. Egeus brings Hermia to Theseus, the Duke of Athens, and complains that his daughter’s disobeying him. The Duke tells Hermia off, because in old Athens it was okay for dads to be bossy and dukes to back them up. Here’s the scene:
Quote
Egeus: Full of vexation come I, with complaint
Against my child, my daughter Hermia.
Stand forth, Demetrius. My noble lord,
This man hath my consent to marry her.
Stand forth, Lysander: and my gracious duke,
This man hath bewitch'd the bosom of my child;
….
With cunning hast thou [Lysander] filch'd my daughter's heart,
Turn'd her obedience, which is due to me,
To stubborn harshness: and, my gracious duke,
Be it so she; here will not here before your grace
Consent to marry with Demetrius,
I beg the ancient privilege of Athens,
As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman [Demetrius]
Or to her death, according to our law
Immediately provided in that case.
Theseus: What say you Hermia? Be advised fair maid:
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.
Demetrius is a worthy gentleman.
Analysis
Both Egeus and Theseus in this scene treat Hermia like a piece of property. Egeus refers to her as “mine,” and he says he has the right to “dispose” of her as he pleases. How could a dad care more about his future son-in-law than about his real-live daughter, anyway?
And Theseus clearly hasn’t stumbled across anything resembling, you know, gender equality either. Louis Adrian Montrose comments on Theseus’ words in his essay “’Shaping Fantasies.’” Montrose asks, where’s the mom in this? Theseus is talking as if it’s only Hermia’s father who’s responsible not just for her actions, but basically for giving birth to her, too. Biology, anyone?
So Theseus’ words give all the power to the dad, none to the mother, and even more none to the daughter Hermia. Can we see patriarchy at play here? You betcha. Theseus’ words strip women (mothers and daughters) of any power whatsoever. Moms are made invisible, and daughters like Hermia are dad’s property.
Shakespeare’s play is all about giving men power over women—this happens with the fairy king bewitching the fairy queen later on, and is made very clear in the passage above. And why might Shakespeare have wanted to do that, especially since he’s so gender-bendy elsewhere? Montrose argues that it’s because the Brits had a woman for queen at that time. Yup, Queen Elizabeth I. First in a chain of many a powerful Liz.
But before there was NBC, there was the British Empire in the sixteenth century, and Liz I was quite the ball-buster. A virgin queen, the most powerful person in the whole country, more powerful than any man. So men, during Elizabeth’s time, had an identity crisis. They were men for god’s sake, how the heck was it possible that a woman ruled over them? This is the anxiety that’s expressed in Shakespeare’s play, according to Montrose. And the play deals with this anxiety by trying really really hard to make it seem as if men have all the power. When in fact we all know that women rule. Well, at least Queen Elizabeth did, and it’s up to history who follows in her footsteps.