A Midsummer Night’s Dream - William Shakespeare

·         Something dreamy/ vague in the topic itself

·         Midsummer is the time for fertility/May rituals

·         Time of magic – Summer solstices - May 21 

Approximate year of performance 1595 – might have been written a little earlier

·         After Romeo and Juliet and before The Merchant of Venice 

·         Some call it a comedy – one of the earliest examples of Magical realism

·         But feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial readers may think otherwise

·         Very hard to slot the play – whose side the dramatist is on is never clear – a good quality 

What is the socio-political significance of the year of its performance?

·         Elizabeth I 1533-1603 - the Virgin Queen – her unwillingness to bow down to patriarchy and Protestant concepts on the place of woman problematic

·         The queen was aging and without a heir – succession – conspiracies   

A lot of couples:

Socially accepted

·         Ruling couple – Hippolyta and Theseus

·         Aristocratic couples

o   Hermia and Lysander

o   Helena and Demetrius

·         Fairy couple – Titania and Oberon

·         Couple in the Mechanical’s drama  Pyramus and Thesebe

Antisocial/ asocial

·         Moon goddess and women

·         Hippolyta and the Amazons

·         Hermia and Helena

·         Titania and Her Indian Votaress – impregnated and dies in child birth – Does this scare Titania? Is it why she picks up a quarrel with her husband? 

·         Titania and the Changeling boy

·         Bottom and Titania 

Everybody gravitates towards the forest – a space outside civilization in which one can resolve problems imposed by civilization and return

Themes:

1.      Transformation – everything becomes something else sometimes several times – transitional time in history – plastic nature of the period

2.      Taming of matriarchy

·         Hippolyta is the Amazon queen captured by Theseus – still not fully ready to accept her role as being subservient to her husband – her first speech and the last speech

·         What is happening to Titania is for her benefit – she is warned to rein in her sexuality and respect her lord and master’s wishes – if not she would be humiliated in the same way

·         All female associations are dissolved in favour of male-female relationships

                                                              i.      Helena- Hermia

                                                            ii.      Titania- Indian Votaress

3.       Taming of female sexuality – brought under patriarchal rule supervised by Protestant ethics

·         Hippolyta – already defeated and made monogamous

·         Helena – father threatens to kill her

·         Hermia – Demetrius threatens to kill her

·         Titania – Oberon humiliates her by making her fall in love with an ass-headed man – her lust for Bottom is taken as a reference to the repressed sexuality of Elizabeth – it would result in something unnatural – it is not natural for a woman to be celibate – the woman’s role a wife/mother

4.      Female property rights

·         Hippolyta loses her kingdom (and her magical girdle, too)

·         Titania – the changeling boy

·         All women loses their sovereignty to the men in their lives

5.      Colonial project

·         The Changeling – metaphor for the seductive dark-skinned east – the Other

·         The orient is sexualized/ feminized – Edward Said, Homi Babha – something to be possessed by the masculine west 

Characters:

·         Puck – cupid/a mischievous country spirit – Ariel in The Tempest

                                                              i.      An agent of patriarchy (?)

                                                            ii.      What can you interpret form his ‘mistakes’ of his character? Is he fully assimilated to the modern order?

·         Bottom – a satyr – wild sexuality