Athens, the Moon and You: Diana and the Female Appropriation of Marriage in A Midsummer Night's Dream
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.13136/sjtds.v8i1.375Abstract
In the multi-layered set of elements that constitutes the imagery of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Diana, the ancient goddess of hunting, occupies a special place. She is the model for the characters of both Titania and Hippolyta; the frequent recurrence of moon-related imagery can be interpreted as a reprisal of important elements of her iconographic tradition; the plot of the play is built around narrative patterns derived from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in which the goddess is deeply involved. This article investigates the relationship between these structural and dramatic elements and the way the play stages the gender relationships. It suggests that the references to Diana mark the stages of a progressive ‘appropriation’ of marriage by the female characters. On the one hand, quotations and references to the goddess allow characters such as Hermia, Titania and Hippolyta to express their resistance to a male world that would repress them; on the other hand, the rewriting of the myth of Actaeon in the Bottom episode presents and exposes a ‘revision’ of marriage values aimed at integrating women’s experience into the relationship.
Keywords: A Midsummer Night’s Dream; gender relationships; Diana; Greek Gods; Elizabethan ideology; marriage
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2022 Skenè. Journal of Theatre and Drama Studies
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Open Access Policy
This journal provides immediate open access to its content on the principle that making research freely available to the public supports a greater global exchange of knowledge.
This Journal is a CC-BY 4.0 publication (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This Licence allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this Journal, providing a link to the Licence and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author retains (i) the rights to reproduce, to distribute, to publicly perform, and to publicly display the Article in any medium for any purpose; (ii) the right to prepare derivative works from the Article; and (iii) the right to authorise others to make any use of the Article so long as the Author receives credit as Author and the Journal in which the Article has been published are cited as the source of first publication of the Article. For example, the Author may make and distribute copies in the course of teaching and research and may post the Article on personal or institutional Web sites and in other open-access digital repositories.
- The Author is free to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the Journal’s published version of the work, with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this Journal and explicitly underlining any change (full mention of Issue number, year, pages and DOI is required).
- The Author is permitted and encouraged to post their work online after the evaluation process has been successfully passed, as it can lead to productive exchanges as well as to a wider dissemination of the published work.
