This Is Shakespeare

by Emma Smith

The fairy quarrel between Oberon and Titania over this child results in their violent estrangement. And their ‘dissension’ (2.1.116) has a catastrophic impact on the human ‘mazèd world’ (113): crop failure, extreme weather, climate change. Love here produces ‘a progeny of evils’ (115): those ‘monstrous’ births that were understood by the Elizabethans to register the sinfulness of the parents or their transgressive sexual union. Just as Victorian ideas about childlike fairies have shaped the play’s reception, so too has the often-repeated assertion that the play was written for performance at some aristocratic marriage. Since there is no evidence for this, and no specific wedding has ever been convincingly identified as the occasion for the play, the idea looks like one of those critical myths that are useful largely in telling us what we would like to believe. Making A Midsummer Night’s Dream all about marriage is an attempt to regularize its depiction of desire, and turn its energies towards a celebration of the socially conservative institution of marriage rather than the transgressive energies of sexual desire.