The Moon and the Metamorphosis: Female Sexuality and Politics in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Abstract

The action, the imagery and the themes of A Midsummer Night's Dream all revolve around different kinds of change. Change can have the sense of changed affection and of exchange; but it can also have more lyrical connotations of transformation, of changes wrought by magical and mysterious outside forces. This is what Shakespeare extensively explores on other levels of the play, addressing the transmutative powers of dreams, of love, and of the imagination. Such ideas are often articulated in the play through the confusion of the senses. This theme of transformation is also articulated through another kind of allusion: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. This classical work was a kind of comic epic of change. It narrates transformative encounters, especially erotic encounters, between gods and mortals, and presents these events as mythological explanations of changeful phenomena in the natural world. In Ovid’s original Metamorphoses, the passage of time was often denoted by reference to the phases of the moon. This was highly appropriate since the moon itself was a symbol of change, in its passage through monthly cycles culminating in the transition from old moon to new, and in its association with the ebb and flow of the tides. Even more so than the Metamorphoses, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is presided over by this mutable heavenly body. We also see a reason why lunar imagery became increasingly popular for Elizabeth in the 1590s: as she grew older, its cyclical connotations could be used to suggest powers of infinite self-renewal, infinite youthfulness, and even goddess-like immortality. However, these celebrations of Elizabeth’s immunity to change and mortality were of course idealizations, and there is other evidence that as the 1590s progressed she was visibly in decline.