Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
Tyranny and Oppression of Patriarchal Society in the Romantic Comedy
All the romantic comedies begin in the anti-comic society which incorporates tyranny and unjust oppression of both class and gender. This is associated with the power given to the aristocracy in Elizabethan times.
The realistic hierarchical world is governed by laws forbidding certain actions, and often creates a sense of doom due to the violent threats issued at the beginning of these plays. These are all potentially tragic elements, defying our comic ideals. Nowhere is this cruel oppression more apparent than in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Violence, Censorship and Elizabethan Patriarchy
Hermia tries to avoid becoming a victim of Elizabethan patriarchy but is condemned for her resistance. She wants to be free to choose her own bridegroom and by doing so attempts to overrule the patriarchal right of a father to choose his daughter’s husband. The daughter’s feelings are ignored.
Theseus actually threatens Hermia. If she will not obey he father, Egeus, she must either die or:
Live like a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold, fruitless moon (I,1, l.172-3)
Egeus is willing to go a stage further and use physical violence on his daughter without considering the legal alternative which Theseus proffers. The only means of escape for Hermia, therefore, is her elopement, which is consistent with other Shakespearean comedies. In As You Like It, for instance, Celia and Rosalind flee the patriarchal home to be free.
The cruel patriarchal figure is present even in myth. Theseus captured Hippolyta and forced her to be his bride, according to legend, even though the wedding is portrayed favourably by Shakespeare here. An Elizabethan audience would have known the myth and seen the undercurrent of cruelty.
Theseus is also able to censor Hippolyta’s recognition of magical forces at the end of the play. Because his is the voice of law and reason, he has the power to dismiss utterly ideas other than his own.
Comedy or Cruel Revenge?
Even the female fairy folk cannot escape the injustice of a patriarchal system. Titania is criticised by Oberon for bringing into question Oberon’s right to take and control the boy whom Titania has in her service. She has a just reason for keeping the boy; she has adopted him from her serving lady who died in childbirth, but because Titania has revolted against her lord she has to be discredited and ridiculed, firstly by Puck, who says that:
She never had so sweet a changeling (II,1, l.123)
which suggests she has stolen the child, and then by her own husband, who gains cruel revenge by applying love juice to her eyes.
Injustice among the same social class is evident in A Midsummer Night’s Dream also. Lysander has the same social standing as Demetrius. Indeed, Lysander says to Egeus:
I am, my lord, as well deriv’d as he,
As well possess’d; my love is more than his (I,1, l.199-200)
However, Egeus sees Demetrius as the ideal husband for Hermia and no account of persuasion can alter this.
The character of Bottom is treated atrociously. Although Puck holds him in contempt due to his low social standing, Bottom’s friends compliment him. Quince thinks he has a good voice and Flute believes that Bottom has:
simply the best wit
Of any handicraft man in Athens (IV,2, l.110-11).
Flute is devastated when Bottom appears lost. We can therefore have sympathy with this gentle character when he is used in the revenge game. The ass’s head is really an extension of Bottom’s personality. It is unnerving to have a man degraded so whilst still remaining a comic figure and recalls man’s degeneration in King Lear. We also have to remember that this situation has been caused by the abuse of hierarchical power, reflecting its detrimental effect on the ordinary person.
Arbitrariness of Comedy and the Festive Resolution
Some critics believe that Shakespeare’s comedies have a festive resolution with the rediscovery of identity and social roles, and happy coupling through marriage. This theory can be challenged as the festive conclusion is often very unsatisfying. A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly shows signs of this.
The play of Pyramus and Thisbe which is performed has a tragic ending and mirrors the love of Hermia and Lysander which, from the beginning, has been threatened. The potential violence of Egeus towards his daughter is not actually altered at the end of the play. His real antagonistic feelings are merely overruled in order to bring about a happy conclusion.
Demetrius remains deluded in his love even at the end of the play. Whilst the other are released from their spells, he still has the love juice on his eyes. This seems an unjust way to bring two people together. The love juice symbolises arbitrariness and unreason and suggests that this is what love is, from one point of view.
It is evident, then, that A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s comedy is so closely bound in the hierarchy and Elizabethan patriarchal system that we, as a modern audience, can justify being both unnerved and alarmed by the cruelty from which the comedy stems.
For a Tudor audience, of course, this kind of patriarchal tyranny would be seen every day and the arbitrariness of love would be commonplace. But it does leave a modern audience with a bitter-sweet taste of what comedy can be.
Footnote
All quotations taken from: William Shakespeare, Shakespeare – Complete Works, OUP, 1986
Bibliography
William Shakespeare, Shakespeare – Complete Works, OUP, 1986
Linda Anderson, A Kind of Wild Justice, Associated University Presses Inc, 1987
SC Sen Gupta, Shakespearean Comedy, OUP, 1967
G Bevier, Shakespeare’s Antagonistic Comedy, Associated University Presses Inc, 1993
Bertrand Evans, Shakespeare’s Comedies, Oxford, 1960
CL Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy, Princeton University Press, 1959
Barbara Freedman, Staging the Gaze, Cornell University Press, 1991
Kristian Smidt, Unconformities in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies, Macmillan, 1986.
Shakespearean juxtaposition of beauty and cruelty
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