The journey for personal identity is under pervasive threat by an often overwhelming culture which enforces structure and conformity upon its maturing populations, and seeks to interrupt divergent and queer becomings. The job of the storyteller (the actor, the musician, the dreamer, etc.) then necessarily becomes to maintain and explore functioning removed from (or better, in spite of) the oppressive system. Why then direct attention towards a fantastical, antiquated story to explore real, current identities? Is a world like that of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream equipped to handle queer experiences, or should the burden of the exploration of such identities be better left to contemporary works of realism?

 

For scholars such as Pauline Greenhill and Emilie Anderson-Grégoire, fairytales don’t only have the capacity to “specify... a culture’s prototypical quest for identity,” but are able to do so more efficiently and explicitly than works of “high” literature or realism. For these scholars, fairytales act as particularly revealing forms through which cultures construct their narratives for socialization and accordingly present their “most central myths” of identity (70). It should become obvious, then, how age may add to the relevance of these tales. For Dream, antiquity becomes a meaningful attribute in its ability to explore identity, as it represents a capacity within the play to represent deeply rooted biases upon which oppressive, contemporary structures are built.

Because they examine the most central myths of identity within their culture, fairytales also “reveal more explicitly than other texts the conflicts, contradictions, and tensions on which those myths are founded” (Greenhill et al, 70). Dream functions as a fairytale in this way, revealing cultural expectations of normalcy (through both purposeful structuring and unintended bias) and (through both intentional and extracted means) revealing ways of building identity through alternative, queer means.

A queer exploration of identity within Dream must subsequently not shy away from the supernatural elements of the text itself. Queerness is not something to be discovered alongside the magical explorations of the text, but instead is to be extracted from the tensions within existing structures exposed by the story’s mystical elements; the capacity of the play to serve as a queer space lies within the dream-space: a space which enables the “many divergent decisions and conditions” which produce a queer (or, as Vin Nardizzi argues, trans) capacity (159). The play’s dream-magic enables Shakespeare to manipulate his characters in ways outside of his own expectations of reality, and that same break from reality allows recipients of the play to explore increasingly deviant aspects of identity. The extraordinary reality of Dream is therefore not simply capable of handling exploration of Queer identities, but is enabled to explore such identities in a uniquely compelling way through its fantastical elements.

The journey into the forest in Dream represents a shift into queer ways of forming and reconciling with identity. Alexa Alice Joubin describes the forest as a space in which certain “social impositions are lifted while others are imposed” (Joubin, 419). Characters of all backgrounds explore alternative ways of exercising their personal beings removed from their prescribed roles within the existing structure of Athens. Still, these characters are unquestionably themselves, acting in accordance with their personal central myths, and not lost to new, wholly un-restricted egos. Accordingly, the forest acts as a space for the play’s “concentric circles of social and fantastical spaces [to]... converge” (Joubin, 423); the characters are able to grapple against the bonds restraining their identities with the slack introduced by this looser, unstructured setting.

The forest acts as a space of pleasure and passion removed from patriarchal and heteronormative structures. This, in part, enables the relationship between Titania and Bottom as the two (and particularly Titania) are able to imagine “a range of pluralistic sexual practices and desires” as described by Tiffany Hoffman (59). Hoffman explores the couple’s intimate interactions within the forest to identify several sources of pleasure removed from conventional intercourse. These queer sources of pleasure include oral gratification through eating and exploration of the mouth as an erogenous zone (Hoffman, 63) and BDSM particularly with regards to female power and control through play with discipline, coddling, desire, and fear (Hoffman, 71). Titania’s experience within the forest as an exploration of female power and pleasure coincides with certain cultural expectations, especially those which connect mystical forces and female sexual empowerment (such as the Distaff Gospels) while also clearly operating outside of power structures which diminish non-conceptive forms of pleasure. In this way, the magical space of the forest enables a queer exploration of pleasure.

 

The forest similarly promotes non-sexual explorations of passion separated from oppressive systems. The play’s four lovers are thrown into passionate discourse, fueled by the exploratory magic of the forest and removed from the constraining pressures of their courtly system. Exploration of these passions in a space of looser social pressure allows the lovers to develop their relational identities in ways which were prohibited outside of the forest’s dream-space. Demetrius, for example, is enabled within the forest to discover love for Helena, who he “cannnot love” within his constrained system (2.1.207-8). Lysandra and Hermia similarly can’t sustain their love against “the sharp Athenian law” (1.1.163-6) until such time as they are able to develop it within the more accepting forest. The forest as a queer space allows for the development and strengthening of these forms of identity-based disobedience and rebellion, which (in turn) enable these queer forms of passion to re-enter and permeate an otherwise non-accepting system.

 

In addition to exploration of sexual and romantic identity, the forest serves as a space for the exploration of gender. Bottom’s animalistic transformation functions, in several ways, as a transgender process. Most notably, Titania uses his newly obtained aspects, such as his “fair large ears” as sensual areas in demanding to “kiss them” (4.1.4). Stryker, Currah, and Moore describe the process of “transing” wherein gender, sex, and other categorical distinctions are assembled “into contingent structures of association with other attributes of bodily being, [which] allows for their reassembly” (13). This concept is further pushed by Nardizzi to interact with non-human objects (in the case of Dream this would be Bottom’s donkey features), as they serve to recognise “proliferative modes of gender non-conformity, multiplicity, and temporality” (159). For Bottom, exploration of the forest as a queer space involves exploration of his gendered body in its ability to be re-assembled and accordingly re-associated. Bottom, like all of the above mentioned characters, emerges from his time in the forest to discover “he has been enlightened through a quasi-mystical experience.” However, he uniquely finds the stage as an “innovative way to transmit this secret knowledge” (Hoffman, 75).

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Similarly, the performing of Dream enables the exploration and dissemination of queer and divergent identities. Purposeful, queer-focused engagement with the play and its fantastical themes therefore coincides with the shift advocated for by Marina Warner “toward fantasy as a mode of understanding, as an ingredient in survival, as a lever against the worst aspects of the status quo and the direction it is taking” (415). A Midsummer Night’s Dream must be explored as a queer narrative specifically because of the threat imposed by dominant culture on differing identities. Adopting the magical dream of the play as a queer one allows it to be used as a means of building alternative identities; “magic paradoxically defines normality” (Greenhill, 56).