From the ridiculous to the sublime: Ovidian and Neoplatonic registers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Carter, Sarah
Early Modern Literary Studies 12.1 (May, 2006)
Abstract
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595) is a play about love and the codification of desire. Intertextual influences are discernible from multitudinous systems of thought. Though these include the prominent philosophical consideration of love of the Renaissance Neoplatonists, the presence of Ovidian registers, widely considered to be ‘counter-Plato’, establishes a conflict of ideals within the text. This essay explores the relationship between divine, Platonic love and Ovidian bestial love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Titania and Bottom are focal points for both the Ovidian and Neoplatonic registers of the text as ‘love’ between the mortal and immortal is both common to Ovidian myth and central to the Neoplatonic communion with Divine Beauty as the zenith of humanity’s spiritual potentiality. The love, or lust, conjured upon Titania for Bottom, the mortal transformed into animal shape rather than the god, reduces the consideration to this: is Bottom communicating with the divine, or is the divine humiliated? The essay will consider the philosophical intention and early modern reinterpretation of inspirational material, as well as the reappearance of common mythological signifiers in the less ambiguous text of Thomas Heywood’s Love’s Mistress (1636). Such myths are responsive to the forms and pressures of the time of their reproduction and therefore A Midsummer Night’s Dream is potentially interesting in how the heterosexual love-relationship is represented, interrogated, and aligned with disparate constructs of the nature of love.
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