William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
At the palace of Theseus in Athens, Duke Theseus speaks with his betrothed, the Amazon queen Hippolyta, whom he will marry four days hence. According to the ancient Greek story, Hippolyta was the daughter of the war god, Ares, who gave her a magical belt which was supposed to protect her in battle. Theseus captured her, anyway, and she became the only Amazon ever to marry. “I woo’d thee with my sword,” Theseus tells her, “And won thy love doing thee injuries; / But I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling” (I.i.16-19). If love is akin to war, marriage provides the foundation of civil peace. Though a god, and a warrior-god at that, her father couldn’t or at least wouldn’t defend Hippolyta from the love-suit of the Athenian statesman. The god evidently knows that war’s purpose is the re-establishment of civil peace.
Civil peace also brings disputes under the law. Egeus arrives before the duke with his daughter, Hermia, and her two suitors, Lysander and Demetrius. Egeus, whose name means ‘shield,’ ‘protection,’ wants to shield his daughter from Lysander, whose name means ‘free man,’ ‘liberator.’ Hermia, whose name is the feminine form of Hermes, the messenger-god, has been giving her father a message he doesn’t want to hear, namely, that she loves Lysander and wants him to be the one who liberates her from fatherly edicts. Egeus prefers Demetrius, whose name means ‘devoted to Demeter,’ the goddess of agriculture and harvest, Demeter ‘Law-Giver,’ bringer of civilization. Egeus would rather marry his daughter to a man devoted to the household instead of a man devoted to the city, to citizenship. But in fact he depends upon the city to enforce his parental authority. Invoking “the ancient privilege of Athens” (I.i.41), whereby the city can require his daughter to marry the suitor the father chooses, upon pain of death “according to our law” (I.i.44), Egeus would overrule the love his daughter feels for Lysander. While there is a glance here at the ‘Old Law’ of the Bible as distinguished from the ‘New Law’ of love enunciated by Jesus as the sum and substance of the old, the primary distinction is the one between family and city, both liable to disruption by nature in the form of love. Egeus, the ‘old man’ of the law, and Demetrius, the young man of immature and flighty love, turn out to be allies in an attempt to subvert the natural love that is the right foundation of families that form the right foundation of cities.
“What say you, Hermia?” Duke Theseus asks (I.i.46). Your father “should be as a god” to you, being “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” (I.i.50-52). Hermia admits that Demetrius is a worthy gentleman, but Lysander is no less so; she wishes her father “look’d but with my eyes” (I.i.56). Theseus sides with her father: “Rather your eyes with his judgment must look” (I.i.57); as Athens’ ruler, he will enforce the law, finding her guilty of having neglected her father’s mature judgment as well as his patriarchal authority. At this, spirited Hermia wants to know the penalty for disobedience; Theseus cites the death penalty her father had mentioned, adding that the alternative is a life of virginity in service at the temple of Diana, the virgin goddess of the pale moon. Since “my soul consents not to give sovereignty” to either her father or her father’s choice of her husband, she chooses the temple over the household (I.i.82). Temporizing, the duke gives her four days to deliberate—to “examine well your blood,” your nature (I.i.68)—ending on the day of his own nuptials, when Diana’s new moon will appear.
Demetrius appeals to Hermia to relent and implores Lysander to yield “thy crazed title”—love—”to my certain right”—paternal authority, as recognized by the law of the city in which Lysander is a free man, a citizen (I.i.92). Lysander jibes, “You have her father’s love, Demetrius; / Let me have Hermia’s; do you marry him” (I.i.94). Egeus intervenes to grant that yes, Demetrius does have my love, “and what is mine my love shall render him”; since Hermia “is mine,” I lovingly give my daughter to him, not to you (I.i.96-97). Against this, Lysander charges that his rival previously had courted another lady, Helena, “and won her soul”; even now she “dotes in idolatry, / Upon this spotted and inconstant man” (I.i. 109-110). The nature of the man to whom you give your daughter is defective, whatever his social condition may be.
The duke halts the dispute. Conceding that before this he had been “over-full of self-affairs” to speak with Demetrius about this matter (I.i.113)—concerned more with the foreign war to win his bride, establish his family, than tending to his city—he summons Egeus and Demetrius for “some private schooling” (I.i.116). But whatever this private conference may entail, he doesn’t change his ruling. “For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself / To fit your fancies to your father’s will, / Or else the law of Athens yields you up” (I.i.117-19). It appears that he intends to reprimand father and intended son-in-law ‘in chambers,’ as a modern judge would say, without openly breaking the law of the city which, as judge, he must uphold. His bride-to-be is a foreign queen, whose father, being the god of war, evidently had no objection to the winning of his daughter in a display of military prowess. But Hermia is a child of peace, of civil society, and unless some equitable out-of-court settlement can be reached, not the law of love but the rule of law must govern her.
Or must it? Only if the lovers remain in the city. Hermia faces two unnatural choices: marriage to a man she does not love or a life of virgin austerity in service of a goddess. After the others depart, Lysander and Hermia remain to formulate a plot. Since “the course of true love never did run smooth,” as Lysander famously puts it (I.i.134)—nature faces conventional roadblocks laid down by men—and since it is “hell” “to choose love by another’s eyes,” as Hermia says (I.i.140), let us flee the city, Lysander proposes, go to the home of his “widow aunt” who has no natural children and so regards him as her own; there “may I marry thee; / And to that place the sharp Athenian law / Cannot pursue us” (I.i.156-163). Hermia agrees to the plan, which requires them to leave the city and plunge into the woods surrounding Athens, into the nature their love bespeaks, away from the city that denies nature. The free man, the citizen, faced with laws and rulers that are contra natura, has no choice but to retreat to the pre-political life of the bridegroom’s family, outside the city.
Helena arrives, looking for Demetrius. The two ladies are friends from childhood, and she understands that Hermia has in no way encouraged his suit except by being beautiful, by her nature (“would that fault were mine!”) (I.i.201). That fault will no longer be on display to Demetrius, Hermia explains, telling her of their impending self-exile and trusting that their lifelong friendship will ensure that Helena will respect the confidence. This proves a false expectation. When the lovers leave to their separate homes, Helena stays, telling herself and the audience that she will inform Demetrius of their plot. She explains that, like fickle Cupid himself, a mere child, a frivolous game-player, Demetrius first vowed “that he was only mine” and then ran off in pursuit of beautiful Hermia (I.i.243). Demetrius, she predicts, will pursue the lovers into the woods, but her pain at his departure out of her sight, she hopes, will be recompensed by his gratitude upon returning to the city with the deserving informant who will follow him, still hoping to convince him to repent of his unfaithful love. This seems a desperate plot because Helena cannot know what will happen in the woods, what will result from Demetrius’ pursuit. But it’s the only one she can devise, betraying her friendship to regain her beloved.
Still another plot must coincide with these: preparations for the duke’s nuptials. Some local tradesmen intend to perform a play to entertain the Court on the wedding day. A weaver, Nick Bottom, joins a carpenter, a joiner, a bellows-mender, a tinker, and a tailor to discuss a play with a self-contradictory title, “The most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” Ovid tells the story of Pyramus and Thisbe in the Metamorphoses. As scholars have noticed, those two lovers resemble Romeo and Juliet more than Lysander and Hermia, as the barrier to their marriage is the hatred of their two rival families; they do share with the Athenian couple a plan to elope, which ends tragically when Pyramus commits suicide after mistakenly thinking Thisbe has been killed by a lion. Ovid’s story is thus lamentable without being comic, but it’s sure to become so in the hands of these players. It transpires that Bottom’s theatrical ambitions know no bounds and want none, as he wants to play several parts—a changeling, a metamorphosis-man, indeed. Shakespeare will leave him, and his colleagues, to their own devices until the third Act of his own comedy, which as always is far from lamentable.
Other than beasts of prey, what else lives in the woods outside Athens? Fairies do. One of them, who “wander[s] every where” in the service of the Fairy Queen (II.i.6), derides Puck as the lout among the spirits, “that shrewd and knavish sprite” also known as Robin Goodfellow, a trickster-spirit who delights in petty annoyance of rustic households—curdling cream, chipping dishes (II.i.34-35). Puck serves not the queen of the fairies but their king, which makes him no good fellow at all to the queen’s attendant. Worse, the royal couple are estranged. Queen Titania has angered King Oberon by taking into her entourage “a lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king” (II.i.22), whom he covets for himself. This makes the queen’s attendant doubly dubious of the spirit who plays court jester to Oberon, and does his bidding.
Oberon and Titania enter and quarrel, jealous of each other’s lover, real or imagined. Titania accuses Oberon of having caused climate change; the seasons themselves are mixed up, as Midsummer’s Eve (the late-June night when fairy tricksters roam freely, tormenting honest human households) is coming in May, the month of lovers. She denies any love for the Indian boy, who is the orphan of a mortal friend of hers and now under her protection. In revenge, jealous and unbelieving Oberon plots with Puck to use an herbal potion which will cause Titania to fall in love with the first creature she sees, upon awakening from her next sleep. The fairies live outside the city, in all the woods of the world, but they delight in pranking households in city and countryside; they also exercise some control over the nature in which they reside, a control that depends not on magic so much as knowledge of nature and a consequent ability to rule the minds of humans and fairies alike.
When the fairies depart, the humans wander in. Demetrius searches for Hermia and Lysander but can’t shake Helena. “I love thee not, therefore pursue me not,” he tells her, rather in contradiction of his own conduct toward Hermia (II.i.188). “Where is Lysander and fair Hermia? / The one I’ll slay, the other slayeth me” (II.i.189-90). Helena is no less self-contradictory, in her own way, telling him her heart is “true as steel” (II.i.197) but then averring, “I am your spaniel,” and “the more you beat me, I will fawn on you” (II.i.203-04)—completing the mixture of images by comparing herself to a deer pursuing a tiger and a dove pursuing a griffin. Demetrius’ infidelity has caused this couple to be the one unnatural being in nature.
Oberon intends to fix that. He’s listened in on their quarrel and decides to treat Demetrius with the same nature-cure he has in mind for Titania. He tells Puck to apply the herbal potion to Demetrius’ eyes, even as he, Oberon, will apply it to hers. Since Puck has never seen Demetrius and Oberon doesn’t know that there are any other Athenians in the woods, Oberon commands him to dose the next sleeping man he sees who wears “Athenian garments” (II.i.264). Puck mistakenly treats sleeping Lysander, who awakens, sees Helena, falls in love with her, and now determines to kill Demetrius, who had betrayed and insulted his new beloved. Completing the delusion, he announces that “the will of man is by his reason sway’d; / And reason says you,” Helena, “are the worthier maid” (II.ii.115-16). When I was young, he continues, he was “ripe not to reason,” but now “reason becomes marshal to my will” (II.ii.119-20). Lysander’s bizarre change, and his even more bizarre explanation of it, make sense to Helena only as mockery, an unjust attempt to “flout my insufficiency” (II.ii.128). She runs off; when Hermia awakens, she cries out, “What a dream was here! / Lysander, look how I do quake with fear. / Methought a serpent eat my heart away, / And you sat smiling at his cruel prey” (II.ii.147-50). But Lysander has already left, chasing after Helena.
The would-be players have also entered the woods, perhaps in a prudent effort to spare civilization from their rehearsing. This enables Puck to transform Bottom’s head into an ass’s head (thus revealing Bottom’s true nature), and to ensure that he will be the one Titania first sees in the morning. When she declares her love for him, the ass nonetheless speaks truer of reason than Lysander had done: “Methinks, mistress you should have little reason for that. And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days” (III.i.131-132). “Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful,” Titania sighs—true enough (III.i. 135). Like a mortal woman, she would take the one she loves and transform him into what she wants, promising to “purge thy mortal grossness” and to turn him into a spirit (III.i.146).
Oberon has accomplished his mission, with Puck’s help, but Puck’s mistake now comes to his master’s attention: “Of thy misprision must perforce ensue / Some true love turned, and not a false turn’d true” (III.ii.90-91). Puck can only appeal to the underlying rule of fate. No fatalist, Oberon acts to right matters, quickly, ordering Puck to find Helena and bring her here, then to apply the potion—compacted of a flower of “purple die,” the royal color—to sleeping Demetrius (III.ii.102). Puck reconnoiters and returns, announcing the lady’s imminent arrival, pursued by Lysander. He proposes more fairy sport: “Shall we their fond pageant see? / Lord, what fools these mortals be!” (II.ii.114-15). Oberon evidently doesn’t mind toying with the mortal fools a bit, allowing the mad show to proceed. It will be a comedy of errors, with the fairies behaving like merry wives of Windsor.
Demetrius awakens at the noise, falls in love with Helena, who once again assumes that she’s being mocked by both, who have conspired against her. “If you were civil and knew courtesy, / You would not do me thus much injury…. You both are rivals, and love Hermia; / And now both rivals, to mock Helena.” (III.ii.147-48, 155-56) When Hermia catches up with them and Lysander rejects her for Helena, Helena simply assumes that even her former friend is in on “this confederacy” (III.ii.192), much to Hermia’s bewilderment. But it is precisely the impossibility of civility in this woods that renders Helena’s indignation vain. The moonlit woods are nature’s darker side. The woods are ruled by the fairies, who include trickster Puck, a trickster even when he faithfully follows the benevolent if imprecise commands of the Fairy King. Misdirected, the natural love potion brings out the worst nature of the human lovers. Helena’s timid and suspicious side, Demetrius’ fickleness, Lysander’s sharp temper, and Hermia’s equally sharp temper, coupled with insecurity (when Helena calls her a puppet, she takes it as a jibe at her shortness of stature, despite her acknowledged beauty): all these bring the two men to the edge of violence against each other, urged on by the women. Whether ginned up by herbal medicine or not, the passion of love itself matters less than who or what it’s aimed at. [1]
Unlike his court jester, Puck, Lord Oberon has a fundamentally just nature, and now moves to intervene, Theseus-like, lest the comedy turn tragic. [2] “This is thy negligence,” he tells Puck, unless you arranged this out of willful knavery (III.ii.345). Puck truthfully protests that he was only following a too-vague command, while admitting he’s enjoyed the results. Very well, then, what I can see clearly, Oberon replies, is the brewing fight, and you shall put a stop to it by calling forth a black fog, which “will lead these testy rivals so astray / As one come not within another’s way” (III.ii.358-59). You will then dose Lysander with the herb, the “virtuous property” of which will remove from his eyes “all error” and “make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight” for his real love, Hermia (III.ii.367-69). “When they next wake, all this derision / Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision; / And back to Athens shall the lovers wend / With league whose date till death shall never end” (III.ii.370-73). Their natural loves restored, the lovers will be fit to re-enter civil society and marry. As for already-married Lord Oberon, “I’ll to my queen, and beg her Indian boy; / And then I will her charmed eye release / From monster’s view, and all things shall be peace” (III.ii.375-77). Knowing better than to disobey his lord’s command, and now knowing the man who is its object, Puck applies the juice to the eyes of sleeping Lysander, incanting a precept of natural right, “the country proverb known”: “That every man should take his own, / In your waking shall be shown: / Jack shall have Jill; / Nought shall go ill” (III.ii.458-462). At his lord’s direction, the trickster does the right thing, bridling his preference for misrule.
As the ruler of the night, Oberon tempers his justice with mercy. Considering his Fairy Queen as she sleeps, he “begin[s] to pity” her “dotage” on the human ass (IV.i.44). Having already confronted her with her with the act of infidelity he had caused her to commit, having exacted from her the Indian boy with whom he suspected of having committed real infidelity, and with the boy now transported to his own “bower in fairy land,” he will release her from the delusive spell (IV.i.58). He chants: “Be as thou wast wont to be; / See as thou was wont to see. / Dian’s bud o’er Cupid’s flower / Hath such force and blessed power” (IV.i.68-71). Invoking the chastity of Diana, which to follow would have given Hermia an unnatural life, restores the married queen of Fairy Land to her rightful place at the side of its king. And it does so by restoring her natural sight, so that she will again recognize a human ass for a human ass. In symbolic terms, he restores her capacity for noesis, for intellectual insight and, with it, the right classification of natural beings. Upon awakening, Titania believes that the reality she experienced under the spell was only a vexatious dream, but Oberon immediately points to the sleeping Bottom. She wonders, questions—the beginning of wisdom, as a philosopher might say. Oberon, the one who can answer her question, has won the battle Theseus has already won over the Amazon queen, establishing his authority. He intends to “dance in Duke Theseus’ house triumphantly” tomorrow night, “and bless it with all prosperity,” as it will now see the weddings of “faithful lovers,” lovers brought together then divided by Cupid, corrected by reason not law, and now prepared for a lifetime of Diana-like chastity under the bond of marriage, the bond of lawful love, the love that’s right for civil society.
Daybreak impends. The night-rule of the fairies evanesces; the day-rule of Theseus returns. Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus have pursued the lovers into the woods, and now discover them. The youths have some explaining to do, and Lysander honestly relates what he and Hermia intended to do—much to the outrage of Egeus, who demands capital punishment under the law. But Demetrius comes to his friend’s defense. Oberon’s royal potion has corrected his passion, restoring it to fidelity. By “some power” he does not know, “my love to Hermia, / Melted as the snow”: “All the faith, the virtue of my heart, / The object and the pleasure of mine eye, / Is only Helena. To her, my lord, / Was I betroth’d ere I saw Hermia. / But, like a sickness, did I loathe this food; / But, as in health, come to my natural taste.” (IV.i.162-171). Oberon’s herbal potion, his nature cure, acted as a poison when Puck dosed the wrong person with it, but acted as a restorative, an agent returning the young man to his true nature, when applied to the right person, according to the reason of the just monarch-physician.
This is enough for Theseus. “Egeus, I will overbear your will,” return to Athens, and bring the two couples, with himself and Hippolyta, to wed (IV.i.176). “Our purpos’d hunting,” an act of what had seemed a just war, “shall be set aside” (IV.i.180). On what grounds? Does Egeus not still have Athenian law on his side, the law that enforces fatherly authority over daughters?
Yes, but the duke had won his own beloved by overcoming the power of the Amazon queen’s father’s chastity belt. A wise and just ruler will enforce the laws of the city; but the initial sin, the one that deranged the civil order, was Demetrius’ betrayal of his vow of betrothal. Egeus is attempting to enforce a law that did not justly apply to the circumstance, inasmuch as a violation of the suitor’s legal oath invalidates the betrothal the father would impose. Theseus’ ruling parallels that of Oberon. Just as Oberon corrected Puck’s misapplication of the nature-cure, which works rightly only when given according to the circumstance, so Theseus applies his law-cure rightly by adjusting it to the circumstances at hand Bot natural and civil law require the reasoned, prudential rule of the statesman-judge who is there to see things for himself.
All are now awake, poor Bottom the last. “I have had a most rare vision,” he tells himself. “I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had, but man is but a patch’d fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had.” (IV.i.203-08). His friend and fellow-player Peter Quince will write “a ballad of this dream. It shall be call’d ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom” (IV.i.212-213). Wrong on all counts, Ass Bottom. The vision was no dream; the wit of man can explain it quite readily; the ‘dream’ has a bottom, and it is himself, his nature as a fool. He intends to sing the ballad over the dead body of Thisbe, at the end of his play at the wedding. In that one thing he’s right, in his own goofy way, inasmuch as the song is a fitting coda for a lamentable comedy. He returns to Athens and to his worried friends, back in his right place, in his right role.
The next day, at the palace, Theseus and Hippolyta discuss the lovers’ story. Theseus dismisses it. “I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys. / Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends” (V.i.3-7). Lunatics (‘luna’ means moon, the light of the woods), lovers, and poets “are of imagination compact,” making ‘somethings’ that are really ‘nothings’ out of nothing but their joys and fears (V.i.8). For her part, Hippolyta isn’t so sure that the lovers’ tale must be some midsummer night’s dream. She considers the unanimity of the testimony, the unlikelihood that “all their minds transfigur’d so together” (V.i.24). Reason, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, lends support to their story, however implausible its perceptual premises may be. Less dogmatically ‘rationalistic’ than Theseus, she attends to the preponderance of the evidence, and in terms of the play she is right. After all, has the play’s audience not witnessed the players? Have the onlookers not been transfigured together?
The governing irony, of course, is that this is Theseus deliberating with an Amazon queen—both figures in an antique fable, lately translated to a London stage by a poet. Theseus, the mythological Athenian statesman, here echoes Socrates’ critique of poetry in the Ion. But he is no Socrates. Acting together as the ruling couple of Athens, Hippolyta’s socially-oriented practical wisdom will supplement the practical wisdom of Theseus, which leans toward hasty generalization. Theseus draws his practical wisdom from observation of human types; Hippolyta draws her practical wisdom from attending to opinion. Both kinds are needed to rule well, and it is the playgoing audience that sees the whole truth, with Shakespeare.
As Oberon answers Puck, so Theseus answers Hippolyta, by directing attention away from the dubious and towards what’s in front of their eyes—in this case, the righted lovers, “full of joy and mirth” (V.i.28), after the marriage ceremony. The wedding revelers have three hours until bedtime, and in reviewing the several entertainments proffered, Theseus chooses what’s described as “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisby; very tragical mirth” (V.i.56-57). Rationalist as he is, he expects diversion from such a self-contradictory show. When he learns that men who have “never labor’d in their minds till now” will be the players (V.i.73), this confirms his choice—not, however, because he wants to laugh at the men who work with their hands but because “never anything can be amiss / When simpleness and duty tender it” (V.i.83-84). He may not be a man of theoretical wisdom, but he has a statesman’s practical wisdom, earned by observing men. “The kinder we, to give them thanks for nothing. / Our sport shall be to take what they mistake; / And what poor duty they cannot do, noble respect / Takes it in might, not merit”—that is, the intention of the deed. (V.i.89-92) This magnanimity is the opposite of Helena’s and Hermia’s small-souled mindset, which makes mortal insults out of trifles. Sure enough, in the prologue to the play-within-the-play, Quince announces, “If we offend, it is with our good will” (V.i.108).
The workers’ play parodies the regime of the woods, with the players as fairies without power. Lamentably comic Pyramus and Thisbe duly dispatch themselves, completing the laughable tragedy wherein no fairies rule the night by (in the end) wisely exerting the powers of nature. With kind irony, Theseus excuses Bottom from speaking an epilogue (“for your play needs no excuse”) and thanks the players for their “notably discharged” effort (V.i.345, 350). He then bids the members of the wedding party to retire to their marriage beds—the end of comedy, even as graves are the end of tragedy. Without knowing it, the players have reminded the lovers of the bad turn their once-disordered love might have taken.
Theseus doesn’t have the last word, however. That is left to the rulers of the night, who re-emerge when the married couples retire. Oberon and Titania chant blessings on them—”ever true in loving be” (V.i.397), their families nature perfected. Puck speaks the epilogue/apologia Bottom did not need to offer, asking the audience’s pardon for any offense “we shadows” may have given (V.i.412), and reminding them of the greater pardon all Christians enjoy: our “unearned luck / Now to scape the serpent’s tongue,” the same serpent that had threatened Hermia in her true dream about Lysander’s infidelity (V.i.421-22) but more immediately the hissing disapproval of an audience at the end of a bad play. As human beings depend on God’s grace, so do the ruled depend upon the grace of their rulers, whether they are subjects of monarchs or players in front of play-goers who sit in judgment.
Although routinely regarded as a well-wrought farce, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is as politic a comedy as Shakespeare ever wrote. A charming play about charms, it also shows how the loves of young lovers can and should be directed away from impassioned fickleness of Demetrius while protected from the soul-deadening legalism of Egeus. That young love needs sound direction is easy to show, although not so easy to show to the young, who are the ones who need it, and sometimes difficult to show the old, who try. This can be done by Shakespeare, whose comedies are love-potions applied to sleeping eyes, which he opens and directs to love the right kinds of persons.
Notes
- C. L. Barber isn’t quite right in calling love, as understood in this play, an “impersonal force beyond the persons concerned” (Barber: Shakespeare’s Festive Comedies, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959, 130). The young are likely subject to it, but the mature (Theseus, Hippolyta, Oberon, Titania) can directly it rightly, even if one of them (Egeus) would misdirect it.
- C. L. Barber cites Shakespeare’s Puritan contemporary, Philip Stubbes, who regards Oberon as a Satan-figure [Ibid. 119]. As a Puritan, Stubbes inclines to regard all spirit-beings other than angels as devilish; in our own time, many Christians in the Puritan tradition similarly frown over the antics of A. J. Rowling’s Harry Potter, although C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien usually get a pass. Shakespeare’s woods, even in the moonlight, are still nature, not Hell. Oberon keeps Puck in check there.
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