Queering the Shakespeare Film

Front matter

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE

Gender Trouble, Gay Spectatorship and Male Homoeroticism

Anthony Guy Patricia

Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction: The presence of the queer in the Shakespeare film xvii

II

Though grounded in Shakespeare’s original playtext, the opening scenes of Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer are inflected with a certain kind of queerness, particularly as far as the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta are concerned. This queerness manifests first of all in the style of Hippolyta’s costuming and more especially in the disdainful way the former queen of the Amazons acts toward Theseus. Explication of this assertion begins with noting that as the film proper starts to unfold, the trumpets roar, announcing the return of Theseus (Ian Hunter) to Athens with the conquered Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale). The couple walks separately but side-by-side as the throng of Athenian citizens that surrounds them cheers in order to make their joy known to one and all. Hippolyta wears a silver dress with a matching stylized head covering, both of which gleam as the light catches their respective surfaces. At the same time these garments manage to conceal almost the whole of Hippolyta’s body, effectively robbing her of the individuality of her gender. It is almost as if she has been unsexed. And that unsexing, contra the fondest wishes of Lady Macbeth, has left Hippolyta powerless. Indeed, she does little more in these moments than stare at the ground with her lips pursed in what comes across as the most severe manner possible. Her defensive posture is only heightened since she keeps her chest covered with her right arm, making it seem like she expects to be assaulted at any moment. But by far the most striking feature of Hippolyta’s appearance is the ornamental black snake she wears draped around her arms, shoulders and bosom (see Figure 1). The snake resonates not unlike Hester Prynne’s ‘A’ in Hawthorne’s celebrated 1850 Romance The Scarlet Letter. Given the rather unsubtle Christian allusion, it brands Hippolyta as a transgressive creature — a serpent, specifically — that has been defanged and compelled to occupy the proper chaste, obedient and silent! position all women are ‘supposed’ to inhabit in Western patriarchal society whether they will or no.

Meanwhile, C. W. Griffin explains that, in four representative twentieth-century film adaptations of Midsummer,” ‘it is often Hippolyta’s costume that serves as a potent signifier of her relationship to Theseus, suggesting degrees of compliance with his wishes in concordant versions and degrees of resistance in discordant ones’.'? The Hippolyta of Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer is an example of the latter. According to Griffin, this discordance in costume is complemented by Hippolyta’s

FIGURE 1 A downcast Hippolyta (Verree Teasdale) with a black snake wrapped around her bosom, shoulders and arms. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, dir. Max Reinhardt and William Dieterle, 1935.

‘looking disgusted with the whole operation’ that has brought her to Athens under Theseus’s control.'* The observation is an accurate one. Hippolyta is, for instance, unable to bring herself to look at Theseus when he insists with a condescending laugh that chills rather than humours that he ‘woo’d’ her with his ‘sword’ and by doing her ‘injuries’, and then goes on to proclaim that he will ‘wed’ her ‘in another key, / With pomp, with triumph and revelling’ (1.1.16-19).!° According to A. B. Taylor, these words and lines would have met with the approval of an Elizabethan audience imbued with patriarchal values: rebellious and disruptive womanhood, in the person of a warrior queen who had tried to overthrow one of the oldest civilisations, has been forced to submit to the ‘natural’ order and is in the process of being returned to the civilised fold through marriage. '°

Still, only moments later, Hippolyta merely smirks as Theseus is crowned with laurels in recognition of his success in conquering the Amazons and the crowd sings an anthem of praise to the duke’s greatness. The specificity of this acrimonious gesture on Hippolyta’s part makes it plain that she has little if any respect or admiration for Theseus, much less love for him. In feminist critical terms, the film thus participates, albeit ex post facto, in the long-standing interpretive tradition whereby, in the words of Tom Clayton, ‘Hippolyta has been aggrandized, Theseus demonized’.’’ As all of the evidence suggests, this approach to the interpretation of these characters is not unmerited, despite Clayton’s scepticism of its validity.

Though Clayton goes on to claim that Theseus and Hippolyta’s is ‘on the showing, a civil(ized) relationship of “mutual love and good liking”’ because they are ‘social and personal — and military — equals of partly shared background: mythic nobility from different countries of the classical and post-classical mind [about to be] joined in late-Renaissance (or Early Modern) English-poetical matrimony’,'* things are no better between Theseus and Hippolyta not long thereafter when, at the ducal palace, he comes up behind her without alerting her to his presence. Now wearing a black dress with a high collar and a white snake framing her bosom, she is startled out of a reverie in which Griffin claims she is ‘recalling her Amazonian past’, presumably in all its glory and with its attendant freedoms for women, rather than dreaming of the future, such as it may be, that lies before her in Athens with Theseus.'? The duke is rather taken aback by Hippolyta’s frightened reaction to his unexpected appearance at her backside. But he covers his dismay by launching into his poetic complaint about the interminable passage of the time:

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace; four happy days bring in

Another moon: but O, methinks, how slow

This old moon wanes! She lingers my desires ... (1.1.1-4)

Viewers cannot fail to note that these lines have everything to do with only Theseus’s desires and not those of Hippolyta. It seems in fact that Theseus assumes his desires are exactly the same as hers. As such, Hippolyta responds in a way that, albeit subtly, makes it clear that she can wait for the fulfilment of his desires:

Four days will quickly steep themselves in night; Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow

New bent in heaven, shall behold the night

Of our solemnities. (1.1.6-11)

In addition, as Theseus speaks to Hippolyta, he can barely refrain from pressing his body against hers and from bestowing kisses on her person.

More than once during this curious exchange Hippolyta makes a show of trying to push Theseus away with her hand even as she also seems to welcome his attentions; this is, contra Clayton, another unmistakable sign of her general discomfort with her husband-to-be. And to confirm the point, though she invests the first three-and-ahalf lines of her answer to Theseus with more than a hint of excitement, when Hippolyta mentions how the moon ‘shall behold the night / Of our solemnities’ she turns her eyes away from Theseus, drops her chin to her chest, and once again stares at the ground in defeat. It is as if she is confronting, inwardly and one last time, the certain knowledge that she cannot escape the fate of becoming the wife, the possession, of the man who destroyed completely her previous, supposedly idyllic, way of life among the race of Amazon women.

Since it refers to what David Halperin describes as ‘whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’, another word for the discord Griffin explores in various cinematic versions of Midsummer like the one directed by Reinhardt and Dieterle under consideration here is queerness. In accord with the dictates of the regimes of the normal — with the normal understood, in this instance, as the heterocentric — Hippolyta should be far less equivocal about her forthcoming marriage to Theseus. Indeed, she ought to be downright ecstatic that Theseus saved her from an ‘abnormal’ life in a female-ruled society in which the need for men was at the utmost minimum; she ought to be grateful for her deliverance. As such Hippolyta’s actions and words in this early part of Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer are queer in the sense that they are ‘at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant’. She is resisting, insofar as she can, the straightjacket of what Adrienne Rich very aptly labelled ‘compulsory heterosexuality’.*! In this instance, compulsory heterosexuality takes the form of an enforced marriage — and all of its attendant responsibilities, such as house-running and childbearing — for Hippolyta to a man who violently abused her and her people (and then attempted to make a joke out of such misogynistic cruelties by using ‘woo’d’, ‘sword’ and ‘injuries’ as crude innuendos designed, presumably, to both seduce her and excuse his prior behaviour toward her), a man she does not seem to like, much less love, and a man she has not chosen to couple with of her own accord just because the proscriptions of an arbitrary normality demand that she do so. Given their individual and collective resistance to the dictates of compulsory heterosexuality it is not overstating the point to suggest that some queer audience members can possibly recognize at least something of a kindred spirit in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s conformity-resisting Hippolyta.

It should be noted, too, that Reinhardt and Dieterle’s representation of Hippolyta in their Midsummer is an interpellation that, if it exists at all, exists only in the subtext of Shakespeare’s play. Griffin points out that a ‘major problem attends any discordant performance of the Theseus—Hippolyta opening scene: because Shakespeare’s script doesn’t show us the process by which Hippolyta is changed, her transformation by the last act [of the play] into a willing bride seems unmotivated’. Griffin claims, however, that Reinhardt and Dieterle grapple with this problem ‘squarely — by presenting at least a portion of Hippolyta’s transformation, partly through reorganizing the script and partly through a costume change’. By the time Hippolyta and Theseus discuss their impending marriage in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer — something that happens in the very first lines of Shakespeare’s Midsummer — Griffin discerns this transformed Hippolyta in the queenly style of her dress and in the fact that ‘although she seems to take a good deal more pleasure in the thought of the approach of the new moon than she does in that of their (hers and Theseus’s) solemnities, she nevertheless does seem quietly resigned to her fate’.** In contrast, Shakespeare’s Hippolyta seems to have accepted her plight from the initial moments of his Midsummer. In fact, she seems to be just as eager as Theseus is for their wedding to take place. That being the case, her transformation into a willing bride, as Griffin characterizes it in relation to Reinhardt and Dieterle’s film, needs no motivation; she is that willing bride from the outset of Shakespeare’s play. There is no small amount of irony then in the fact that, though designed to provide viewers with the background deemed necessary for them to understand the dynamics at work in Theseus and Hippolyta’s relationship, the discordant interpretation of these characters that Reinhardt and Dieterle make central to the opening moments of their cinematic production of the play also brings to the foreground the queerness — as measured, at least in part, by the force of Hippolyta’s resistance to the imperatives of compulsory heterosexuality — inherent in such a representation. Arguably, that queerness would have remained more or less unintelligible had Reinhardt and Dieterle chosen not to employ such a specific expositional strategy in their adaptation of Midsummer.”

The repeated depictions of Hippolyta’s resistance to compulsory heterosexuality apparent in the first third of Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer come to seem even more queer in light of what occurs in the last third of the film, the part that corresponds with Shakespeare’s fifth act in which ‘The Most Lamentable Comedy and Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe’ is performed before the newly married duke and duchess and their court. Gone completely by this point in the movie is the angry, resisting woman warrior Hippolyta that had to be forced to walk through the streets of Athens led by the one that conquered her and her people. In her place is a relaxed and content Hippolyta who is ‘entirely at home in the Athenian court and wears a genuine smile while walking hand in hand with Theseus through the ducal palace to the places of honour where they will sit as their nuptials are celebrated with mirth and revelling. She now wears a bright, elaborate and heavily bejewelled gown devoid of any accessory resembling a serpent. After questioning Theseus about the strangeness of the tales Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius have related regarding their experiences in the forest outside Athens, Hippolyta listens intently to her husband’s speech about the similarities in the natures of lovers, madmen and poets (5.1.1-22). Though she responds with ‘But all the story of the night told over, / And all their minds transfigur’d so together, / Tells more to us [More witnesseth] than fancy’s images’ (5.1.23-5), suggesting that she is convinced there is actual substance to the young lovers’ stories, she also accepts Theseus’s explanation without argument, as would be expected of the dutiful and subservient wife of a powerful man. Furthermore, it should be noted that Hippolyta’s newfound equanimity toward her husband does not dissipate as the film concludes.

All of this accords with Shakespeare’s text. Nevertheless, audiences might well wonder what happened to the irate and defiant Hippolyta that was presented to them earlier in the film and mourn her loss. In New Historicist terms, any subversive qualities she once had have been contained and she has been rendered docile by the dominant patriarchal forces from which she is unable to escape. Yet the queer reading being performed here must register suspicion with the presumed happily-ever-after ending Reinhardt and Dieterle, following the original play, as it were, depict as the ultimate conclusion to Theseus and Hippolyta’s story in their Midsummer. Even in its cinematic form, that happily-ever-after is easily disrupted given that, in the words of Louis Adrian Montrose, the ‘play ends upon the threshold of another generational cycle, in which the procreation of new children will also produce new mothers and new fathers. Within this ending is a potential for renewing the forms of strife exhibited at the opening of the play.” Peter Holland makes a similar point when he writes that Midsummer ‘leaves entirely open the question of what the issue or outcome of this marriage of Athenian and Amazon will be, describing and blessing the future without directly stating what might or rather will happen (will because it is already accomplished, already fixed unalterably in the Theseus mythography)’.?* Holland adds that in ‘any version of the Theseus story Theseus does not stay with his Amazon bride ... and the next person on the Theseus list of seduced, raped and abandoned women seems usually to have been Phaedra’, whose lust for Hippolytus, Theseus and Hippolyta’s only child, will lead to death and destruction.” Marriage, in this case between a man and a woman, Theseus and Hippolyta, does not lead to the kind of stability and bliss many believe is the inevitable, ordained and final result of such unions. As Montrose and Holland both make clear by their references to classical Greek mythology, Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and Hippolyta, will engender all sorts of additional strife in his own life and in the lives of his father and mother.” Queer interpretation does not shy away from recognizing and accepting the fact that the notion of a relational happily-ever-after like that suggested by Shakespeare’s and Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummers is, at times, a simplistic, if not an outright dangerous, fiction.

Ill

Exactly what Oberon wants to do with the young boy Titania is keeping from him is a subject that has exercised critics of Shakespeare’s Midsummer for some time. Richard Rambuss describes the circumstances as follows: ‘What has really set Titania and Oberon at odds is the changeling boy. Titania holds on to the Indian prince, fetish-like, as a keepsake of his dead mother, pampering him in a precious, feminized world of flowers, sweets, and serenades, while Oberon wants to masculinize him’ instead.*! Beyond the issue of custody, though, this is a particularly queer matter where Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer is concerned, in large part because the directors opted to feature the child as a character that actually appears on-screen rather than leaving him as a figure that is only spoken about by Oberon, Titania and Puck, but never ‘seen’, as in the original playtext. This queerness reveals itself when eroticism and sexuality are factored in to the interpretative milieu that surrounds both the play and the film. As Shirley Nelson Garner points out, the playwright provides two related but distinct reasons that explain the fairy king’s and queen’s respective obsessions with the changeling boy. On Oberon’s side the reason is that Titania has stolen the boy from an Indian king and therefore does not deserve to keep him since she obtained him by nefarious means. On Titania’s side the reason is that she is rearing the boy because she feels an overwhelming responsibility to the deceased votaress of the fairy queen’s order, who was the boy’s mother and Titania’s bosom confidant. Clayton, trying to rehabilitate Oberon’s misogynistic reputation, claims that:

while Oberon begs Titania to give him the boy, she withholds him, not for his [the boy’s] sake but for the sake of his deceased mother, her late votary. The loyalty part of the sentiment is creditable but the rest and the effects are not: withholding the boy is made a willful refusal to yield responsibly and sympathetically to Oberon’s begging: it has no evident benefits for the boy, the boy’s deceased mother, herself [Titania], or Oberon, now or hereafter.”

More problematically however, Garner goes on to insist that both Oberon’s and Titania’s emotional investments in the changeling boy are charged with eroticism. Of the latter she writes, “Titania’s attachment to the boy is clearly erotic’; of the former she explains, ‘Oberon’s passionate determination to have the child for himself suggests that he is both attracted to and jealous of him’ in equally erotic terms.** Though informed by the best insights generated by psychoanalytic theory as applied to the study of literature, this is dangerous territory — this is queer territory — given the prevalence of modern and postmodern anxieties associated with children, adults and sexuality.

Garner’s repeated use of the term erotic in her essay is troublesome because it lacks definitional specificity. Drawing on its Greek etymology, the OED equates the erotic with the sexual as far as meaning is concerned.’ But if there is in fact any kind of a sexual component to Oberon’s and Titania’s respective ‘attractions’ to the Indian boy, Garner does not make that clear in the course of her analysis; her readers are left to fend for themselves on the interpretation of this point. In either case both erotic and sexual are words that can be further divided into subcategories. These include, among others, the physical and the non-physical, the genital and the non-genital, and the romantic and the platonic. It can be inferred of course that Garner means only for erotic to be understood in its non-physical, non-genital and wholly platonic sense. In that case what she seems to be attempting to describe in relation to Oberon, Titania and the changeling boy is the idea of desire sans either the erotic or the sexual. To be sure, conceding that the possibility exists that Oberon’s and Titania’s interests in the youth may cross the line between the appropriately parental and the disturbingly criminal forces an entirely discomfiting confrontation with one of the darkest sides of humanity — the abuse of children perpetrated by adults who are afflicted with a deformity in mind, character and spirit as devastating as it is repulsive.

Nevertheless it is one thing to contemplate such disturbing ideas in the comparatively safe realm of textual criticism; it is quite another to do so when concrete visual representations of Oberon’s and Titania’s erotic desires for the changeling boy are available as in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer. The changeling boy (Sheila Brown)** first appears in the film as Puck (Mickey Rooney) regales the fairy in Titania’s service (Nina Theilade) with the story that the child was stolen by Titania from an Indian king and that Oberon wants the youngster for himself so that he can be a ‘[k]night of his [Oberon’s] train’ (2.1.1-42). Dressed in shiny silver clothing, the boy looks very much like a miniature turbaned raja. Bruce Babbington claims that the boy is ‘doubly contradictory; clearly masculine, yet highly feminised; and speechless, which makes him a literal infant, yet a perfectly coordinated child’ who ‘provides identification for both male (Oberon) and female (Titania) oedipal trajectories within his masculinity’.°” For the most part, the boy seems to be at home in the forest just outside Athens: he attempts to catch a firefly or two, he is entranced by a group of fairy musicians performing in the tree branches above, and he longs to fly like the fairy children who come to frolic with him in the wood. Clearly there is something very special about this changeling boy; he is at the centre of all the attention and the adoration. He is the object of everyone’s desire within and without the film.

When Titania (Anita Louise) finally appears, the fairy queen and the boy run into one another’s arms as if they have been parted for an interminable period of time. Babbington describes this portion of the scene in the following way: the changeling ‘is ecstatically reunited with the mother [Titania] in a sequence of breathtaking consummation, with the two running towards each other and the camera, so that the audience is alternately positioned with the points of view of mother and child’.3* The overdetermined effect here is a highly emotional one despite the obviously manipulative qualities that bring the effect to life. As the entire company proceeds to dance its way around the forest Titania takes every opportunity to shower light, feathery kisses on the face of her beloved little boy, the child of her devoted votaress. Before long the fairy queen and the changeling boy are led by the dancing company of her subjects to her bower where she and the child will rest. After placing a wreath of flowers on the boy’s head Titania kisses him again four times in a row, once on the nose, once on the cheek and twice on the lips. Then mother and child lie down to sleep in a state of perfect contentment right next to one another. While singing as requested, a few of the fairy queen’s subjects cover their monarch and her boy in a blanket woven of fresh flowers, leaves and vines. And for the briefest of moments at least, all seems right in the fairy world. But these interactions between a mother and a child, depicted on-screen as they are in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer, call particular attention to the fraught erotic component inherent in such relationships. It was Freud who claimed that ‘sexual love and what appears to be non-sexual love for parents are fed from the same sources; the latter, that is to say, merely corresponds to an infantile fixation of the libido’.*? In other words, a child’s erotic desire for a parent is merely another manifestation of the child’s innate desire for a parent’s care and nurturing that is part and parcel of the human developmental experience. Drawing on the work of Freud and Julia Kristeva, Aranye Fradenburg describes the dynamics in operation here as follows:

when we are young, we are in love with people a lot older than we are, and they with us, and we all ‘know’ it, if not consciously. We cannot become a human subject without taking in how our parents feel about us; the adult’s passionate love for the child is also in the child and in the adult she [or he] will become. This love is readily eroticized on both sides. It is not just ‘tenderness’ but ‘in-loveness’; it has a passional quality and is manifested through extraordinary bodily intimacy.”

From the initial embrace of Titania and the Indian boy, to the kisses they share, and to the fairy bed they slumber so closely together in, the eroticized ‘in-loveness’ Fradenburg details in her work is made plain in the images of the fairy queen and her charge that Reinhardt and Dieterle present in this section of their film. Individually and collectively these interactions between Titania and her votaress’s son make the passional quality of their relationship readily apparent. And it is a queer imperative to interpret them as such.

Though represented quite differently, Oberon’s (Victor Jory) erotic attachment to the changeling boy in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer is no less intense than Titania’s. Upon their initial confrontation under the moonlight in the forest a menacing Oberon reiterates to Titania that she alone has the power to bring their quarrel to an end. To this he adds: ‘I do but beg a little changeling boy / To be my henchman’ (2.1.120-1); then he makes a sudden grab for the boy that is unsuccessful because the child is so well protected by the queen and her coterie of fairies. Once Titania has explained to the fairy king why she will not give the boy up to him, Oberon inquires as to how long she intends to stay in the woods. In a rather sly, taunting, high-pitched voice, she answers:

Perchance till after Theseus’ wedding-day.

If you will patiently dance in our round,

And see our moonlight revels, go with us;

If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts. (2.1.139-42)

Oberon’s not unexpected response is: ‘Give me that boy, and I will go with thee’ (2.1.143), which causes Titania to flee with the child wrapped firmly in her arms so that Oberon cannot take him from her by force. But when Titania later abandons the changeling boy in favour of the ass-headed Bottom, Oberon rushes into the clearing where the child lies on the ground in tears, and utters a primal scream of triumph as he sweeps the boy into his embrace. With a deep-throated laugh he proclaims ‘This falls out better than I could devise’

(3.2.35); then he retreats, with the changeling finally in his sole possession as he wanted all along, back into the forest. Thus what Montrose describes as ‘Oberon’s attempt to take the boy from an infantilizing mother and to make a man of him’ proves successful and, not incidentally, simultaneously ensures the continuation of his vision of the patriarchy.

It should be noted however, that Montrose’s summation of the circumstances involving Oberon’s acquisition of the changeling and what it means — that Oberon will be able ‘to make a man of him’ now that the boy has been wrested away from Titania’s overwhelmingly feminine influence — is only unproblematic from a traditional patriarchal perspective. Clayton provides the reminder that it is not very common for critics to discuss the boy’s interest ... According to the social norms implicit in the relations between the principals, it must be about the time that the boy would be fairy barmitzvahed and join the men — or elder fairies — if he is ready to be a ‘henchman.’ So, in the patriarchal fairy culture, fis interests are best served by joining Oberon.“

And indeed, throughout much of Western history, male children were separated from women, particularly their mothers, as a matter of course once they had reached a certain age. This was done so that these youths could be schooled properly in the ways of masculinity as they grew from boys into the men who, among other important tasks, would govern, fight for and produce the foodstuffs and goods that would ensure the survival of their respective societies. The assumption behind this separation of boys from women was built on the ideology that women were incapable of raising true men; only men who had themselves been through the transition from boy to man could bring about such an important metamorphosis successfully. There can be no doubt too that the curriculum for boys on their way to becoming the men they needed to be encompassed formal and informal instruction in sex in its procreative and non-procreative forms. These conventional associations are not at all unexpected as far as Montrose’s ‘to make a man of him’ statement is concerned. But significant complications arise here anyway because of the unavoidable fact that Oberon is perhaps the queer figure of all queer figures in Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummer.

Christy Desmet notes that the changeling boy ‘comes equipped with a maternal lineage [by virtue of being the offspring of Titania’s votaress] as ward to the fairy queen that prevents him from being absorbed easily into another Ovidian plot, playing Ganymede to Oberon’s Jove’. The myth of Jove’s sudden, intense passion for the mortal youth Ganymede — a desire so strong it led Jove to transform Ganymede into the immortal cup-bearer of the gods — is well known. It is also a myth that gay men in particular have claimed as one of their own foundational identitarian stories. Hence Oberon’s queer desire for the Indian boy in Shakespeare’s and Reinhardt and Dieterle’s Midsummers is alluded to intertextually. But Oberon’s queerness also reveals itself through the character’s potential bisexuality. Following the tumultuous night-time events in the forest outside Athens the fairy king tells Puck as a new day begins: ‘But we are spirits of another sort / I with the Morning’s love have oft made sport’ (3.2.388-9). Most glosses on this passage note that the ‘Morning’s love’ is a reference to Aurora, the mythological goddess of the dawn that makes way for the sun to shine every morning, while ‘sport’ is a long-standing euphemism for sex. The logical assumption then is that Oberon and Aurora have enjoyed multiple erotic romps together and will quite likely continue to do so in the future. Interestingly, Stephen Greenblatt, editor of Midsummer for The Norton Shakespeare, adds in a parenthetical aside in the footnote to the lines cited here the following information: ‘or Cephalus, a brave hunter, Aurora’s lover’. Considering the fact that the ‘love’ in question is linked grammatically by possession to the ‘Morning’, Greenblatt’s gloss makes a great deal of interpretive sense. More to the point it suggests that