What Sorts of Transgression Can You Identify in A Midsummer Night

What sorts of transgression can you identify in A Midsummer Nights Dream?
What are
the consequences of transgression with respect to love and courtship, in particular, and order
in human existence, in general?
The signification of transgression is everything that is contrary to the truth of faith,

thus that injures or extinguishes it, consequently all injury and loss thereof whatsoever. Put
simply, it is breaking boundaries - or breaking rules of society.
Shakespearean comedies, more frequently than tragedies or histories, made special
use of the figure of the unruly woman for the fact that the context in which cross-dressing
transpired was jovial, if not simply trivial. As seen in the cases of female protagonists across
the three comedies, the women are not cross-dressing to forge permanent, new identities;
cross-dressing is a means of empowering the women to attain their ends. In this sense, there is
a significant social transgression, as the Elizabethan patriarchy relegated women as mentally
fragile creatures in need of constant male domination and control. Common traits of the
Elizabethan female include those of children: sexual innocence, general navet, and
helplessness were the preferred norm of the Shakespearean woman. However, this is not to
preclude the sexual or socially unruly women of Shakespearean literature; instead, it is to
identify what a typical Shakespearean audience in the Elizabethan Era expected to see as a
resolution to a play. An unruly woman was fully expected to be tamed or brought under
control. The progression of the uncontrollable woman, initially defiant and in direct
opposition of the patriarchy in which she existed, progresses through a plot in three distinct
phases: 1) the female is introduced as a stereotypical wild woman and threat, deemed to be
so per her sexual chastity, refusal to marry, or escape from male-dominated society; 2) the
female is challenged by or attracts the attention of a male counterpart, whose mission is to
sexually conquer or marry her; and 3) the female is subdued through marriage or conflict
resolution in which she succumbs to the will of the man. The convention of these three stages
is very much akin to the modern-day happy ending, which is why the significance of the
transgressions is called into question.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play about love. All of its actionfrom the
escapades of Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena in the forest, to the argument between
Oberon and Titania, to the play about two lovelorn youths that Bottom and his friends perform
at Duke Theseus's marriage to Hippolytaare motivated by love. But A Midsummer Night's
Dream is not a romance, in which the audience gets caught up in a passionate love affair
between two characters. It's a comedy, and because it's clear from the outset that it's a comedy
and that all will turn out happily, rather than try to overcome the audience with the exquisite
and overwhelming passion of love, A Midsummer Night's Dream invites the audience to laugh
at the way the passion of love can make people blind, foolish, inconstant, and desperate. At
various times, the power and passion of love threatens to destroy friendships, turn men against
men and women against women, and through the argument between Oberon and Titania
throws nature itself into turmoil.
In A Midsummer Night's Dream, love is a force that characters cannot control, a point
amplified by workings of the love potion, which literally makes people slaves to love. And
yet, A Midsummer Night's Dream ends happily, with three marriages blessed by the
reconciled fairy King and Queen. So even as A Midsummer Night's Dream makes fun of
love's effects on both men and women and points out that when it comes to love there's
nothing really new to say, its happy ending reaffirms loves importance, beauty, and timeless
relevance.
The relationship between men and women echoes across both the mortal and fairy
worlds of A Midsummer Night's Dream. More specifically, both the fairy and mortal plots in
the play deal with an attempt by male authority figures to control women. Though Theseus
and Hippolyta appear to share a healthy loving relationship, it is a love built upon a man
asserting power over a woman: Theseus won Hippolyta's love by defeating her in battle.
Oberon creates the love juice in an attempt to control his disobedient wife. Egeus seeks to
control his daughter's marriage. And while the play ends happily, with everyone either married
or reconciled, the love on display is of a very particular kind: it is a love in which women
accept a role subservient to their husbands. To a modern audience this likely seems rather
offensive, but an Elizabethan audience would have generally accepted that men are the head
of the household just as the king is the head of society.
Also,
A Midsummer Night's Dream suggests that love can also take a terrible toll on same-sex
friendships. Even before the lovers get into the forest, Helena betrays her friend Hermia for
love. And once they do get into the forest, all the intense feelings nearly cause the men to duel
and brings the women almost to blows as well.
The theme
of loves difficulty is often explored through the motif of love out of balancethat is,
romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the harmony of a
relationship. The prime instance of this imbalance is the asymmetrical love among the four
young Athenians: Hermia loves Lysander, Lysander loves Hermia, Helena loves Demetrius,
and Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helenaa simple numeric imbalance in which two
men love the same woman, leaving one woman with too many suitors and one with too few.
The play has strong potential for a traditional outcome, and the plot is in many ways based on
a quest for internal balance; that is, when the lovers tangle resolves itself into symmetrical
pairings, the traditional happy ending will have been achieved. Somewhat similarly, in the
relationship between Titania and Oberon, an imbalance arises out of the fact that Oberons
coveting of Titanias Indian boy outweighs his love for her. Later, Titanias passion for the
ass-headed Bottom represents an imbalance of appearance and nature: Titania is beautiful and
graceful, while Bottom is clumsy and grotesque.
As the title suggests,
dreams are an important theme in A Midsummer Nights Dream; they are linked to the
bizarre, magical mishaps in the forest. Hippolytas first words in the play evidence the
prevalence of dreams (Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, / Four nights will
quickly dream away the time), and various characters mention dreams throughout (I.i.78).
The theme of dreaming recurs predominantly when characters attempt to explain bizarre
events in which these characters are involved: I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say
what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about texpound this dream, Bottom says,
unable to fathom the magical happenings that have affected him as anything but the result of
slumber.
Shakespeare is also interested in the actual workings of dreams, in how events occur without
explanation, time loses its normal sense of flow, and the impossible occurs as a matter of
course; he seeks to recreate this environment in the play through the intervention of the fairies
in the magical forest. At the end of the play, Puck extends the idea of dreams to the audience
members themselves, saying that, if they have been offended by the play, they should
remember it as nothing more than a dream. This sense of illusion and gauzy fragility is crucial
to the atmosphere of A Midsummer Nights Dream, as it helps render the play a fantastical
experience rather than a heavy drama.
Sources:
"Free English Literature Essays." Transgressive Nature of Cross-Dressing in
Comedies, 10 February 2016. <http://www.essay.uk.com/free-essays/english-literature/crossdressing-in-comedies.php>.
"The LitCharts Study Guide to A Midsummer Night's Dream." LitCharts, 10 February
2016. <http://www.litcharts.com/lit/a-midsummer-nights-dream/themes>.
SparkNotes. SparkNotes, 10 February 2016,
<http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/msnd/themes.html>.
Miloiu Ana-Maria,
Group 1, English A

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What sorts of transgression can you identify in A Midsummer Nights Dream?

The signification of transgression is everything that is contrary to the truth of faith,

As the title suggests,

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