"Shaping Fantasies": Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture

SHAKESPEARE'S Duke Theseus formulates policy when he proclaims that "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact"; that "Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, / Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend / More than cool reason ever comprehends."' The social order of Theseus' Athens depends upon his authority to name the forms and his power to control the subjects of mental disorder. The ruler's task is to comprehend-to understand and to encompass-the energies and motives, the diverse, unstable, and potentially subversive apprehensions of the ruled. But the Duke-so self-assured and benignly condescending in his comprehension-might also have some cause for apprehension: he himself and the fictional society over which he rules have been shaped by the imagination of a poet. My intertextual study of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream and symbolic forms shaped by other Elizabethan lunatics, lovers, and poets construes the play as calling attention to itself, not only as an end but also as a source of cultural production.2 Thus, in writing of "shaping fantasies," I mean to suggest the dialectical character of cultural representations: the fantasies by which the text of A Midsummer Night's Dream has been shaped are also those to which it gives shape. I explore this dialectic within a specifically Elizabethan context of cultural production: the interplay between representations of gender and power in a stratified society in which authority is everywhere invested in men-everywhere, that is, except at the top. In the introduction to his recent edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Harold Brooks summarizes the consensus of modern criticism: "Love and marriage is the [play's] central theme: love aspiring to and consummated in marriage, or to a harmonious partnership within it" (p. cxxx). But, as Paul Olson suggested some years ago, the harmonious marital unions of A Midsummer Night's Dream are in harmony with doctrines of Tudor apologists for the patriarchal family: marital union implies a domestic hierarchy; marital harmony is predicated upon the wife's obedience to her husband.3 Brooks' romantic view and Olson's authoritarian one offer limited but complementary perspectives on the dramatic process by which A