This essay examines Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream as a vehicle for exploring Elizabethan ideals of love, marriage, and gender. Beginning with Theseus and Hippolyta's union and moving through the comic tribulations of the young lovers and the fairy world, the paper argues that the play consistently upholds the "old world" view that women belong either in the cloister or in the married state. Against this backdrop, the essay reads the play as an implicit critique of Queen Elizabeth I, whose celebrated independence and famous "Golden Speech" are contrasted with the play's vision of selfless love — a love that requires both imagination and will — which Elizabeth, by remaining unmarried, ostensibly never embraced.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedic drama that centers on marriage. It is traditionally held that Shakespeare penned the play for a friend's wedding; therefore, it should be no surprise to find that the theme of marriage runs through the entire work — from the young adults to the nobility, and even to the fairy world, where marital strife is encountered. Yet, having been penned in an age when the Queen of England herself never married, one may think that Midsummer serves as a kind of critique of Elizabeth. If the medieval view of women — both common and noble — was that they were suited for one of two states (either the cloister or marriage), it would appear that Elizabeth had certainly bucked that trend.
Yet Elizabethan England itself was on the cusp of bucking the medieval world: it had already abandoned the Church of the old order, and Elizabeth herself may be said to have held a modern view of life. Shakespeare's plays, too, blend the old world and the new — Hamlet is, after all, often considered a representation of the first modern man. Nonetheless, A Midsummer Night's Dream reinforces old world ideas of women and marriage, backing them up with a mysterious element called "love," which ultimately binds men and women to a higher realm — a fairy realm in Midsummer, but a spiritual realm in real life. This essay analyzes Midsummer and shows how it can be viewed as a negative critique of Elizabeth's unmarried state.
The play begins with Theseus awaiting the "nuptial hour" at which time he will wed Hippolyta — a woman he "woo'd" by his "sword" (1.1.16); that is to say, he essentially conquered her with his might, and she submitted. In this subtle passage, Shakespeare reinforces the idea of the medieval natural order — that the woman should submit to the man. An earlier reflection of the toppling of this order appears in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, wherein the Wife of Bath literally beats her husbands and tries to rule them. Here, by contrast, Theseus has won the love of his bride by dominating her, and she has submitted to be his wife — which is not to say that she has submitted to be his slave, though there is always a hint of subjection in the idea of "love."
Helena, for example, pursues Demetrius with all the devotion of one who has been chained to him. She has not been chained through any physical device, but by the heart: he made love to her, she accepted it, and now she follows him — abjectly, as she herself intimates, like a beaten dog — yet all out of love.
"Elizabeth's independence contrasted with play's ideals"
"Bottom's play reveals imagination's role in love"
When imagination is governed to see the good rather than all the bad, order is restored and love blossoms as it should. As Theseus states, it is better to use one's imagination as it is applied in the Golden Rule: love others as you love yourself — which necessitates an act not only of the will, but of the imagination, just as creating a work of art requires both. This never appears to have been the case with Elizabeth. If Midsummer may be viewed as a critique of her, the critique may be this: she never applied herself to the imagination of love with the virtue of selflessness. Instead, she applauded her own ability to be independent and rule alone — delivering not the Golden Rule, but the "Golden Speech."
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