Sisters, Suitors, and Supremacy:
Elizabeth's Issues Personified in A Midsummer Night's Dream
by Jenny (Walicek) Clendenen
San Jose State University, 2005 | James O. Wood Shakespeare Award, 2006
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is thought to have been first performed at a wedding attended by Queen Elizabeth in 1596, but as Louis Montrose notes, whether or not she was actually there her “pervasive cultural presence was a condition of the play’s imaginative possibility” (69). This presence is particularly evident in the play’s virginal and lunar references, such as when Puck describes Cupid’s fiery shot “At a fair vestal, throned by the west” which is extinguished “in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,” after which the targeted “imperial vot’ress” passes on, in “maiden meditation” (2.1.155-65); Yates observes that the moonlight that pervades the play makes an implicit comparison between the professed Virgin Queen and the goddess of virginity, Diana (77).
Neither could anyone in Shakespeare’s time have failed to identify Elizabeth with the title character of Edmund Spenser’s epic Fairie Queene, and therefore with Titania. Besides the titular connection, the 63-year-old Elizabeth’s long repressed passions can be seen in Titania’s lament that “when [the moon] weeps, weeps every little flower, / Lamenting some enforced chastity” (3.1.194-5), and Elizabeth’s political longevity in Titania’s declaration that “I am a spirit of no common rate, / The summer still doth tend upon my state” (3.1.148-9). Furthermore, Titania is another name for Diana in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Kott 77), by which this play was heavily influenced (Orgel 251). The merger of these supernatural symbols of sexuality and virginity highlights the dichotomy between Elizabeth’s supposed chastity and reputed wantonness (Brown).
While scholars generally agree that Elizabeth’s iconism is represented in this play; I will argue that Shakespeare alludes to more than her sexuality. Specific character descriptions and the singularity of certain images within Midsummer Night’s Dream connote three major elements of Elizabeth’s life: her childhood conflicts with her sister Mary, the unsuitability of her suitors, and her desire to establish England as a global power.
The relationship between Helena and Hermia is one that complicates the confusion caused by Puck’s mistake. Whereas Lysander and Demetrius are unknown to each other except as compatriots of Greece and rivals for the same love, Hermia and Helena have enjoyed a close friendship since childhood, one that Helena equates with sisterhood. That Hermia seems to have collaborated with Demetrius to mock her is seen by Helena as a violation of “the sister’s vows, the hours that we have spent” (3.2.199) and “All schooldays’ friendship, childhood innocence” (3.2.202). In a speech brimming with political terms such as confederacy, conspired, counsel, and incorporate, she reminds her friend that they were “like two artificial gods / [who] with our needles created both one flower” (3.2.03-04). This is an apt description of the child princesses Elizabeth and Mary, born into the line of the Tudor Rose. Even the shape and color of the Tudor Rose are evoked by Helena’s comparison of their union to a “double cherry, seeming parted” (209) or “two lovely berries molded on one stem” (211). The royal connection is further established by her comments that they are like “coats in heraldry, / Due but to one, and crowned with one crest” (213-14), by her reference to their love as “ancient” (215) and by Demetrius’ reference to Helena as a princess (144).
In fact, the drugged Demetrius gushes about Helena in terms that also describe the well-known actual physical and attributed spiritual characteristics of Elizabeth: goddess, nymph, perfect, divine, white, snow[y], princess, pure white (3.2.137-44). The name Helena, in fact, is Greek for light, which in this context can signify both fair skin and illumination, including that of the moon goddess. Hermia elaborates on Helena’s beauty prior to their conflict, claiming that “Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, / The rest I’ll give to be to you translated” (1.1.190-92). Like Elizabeth, Helena is tall: at the climax of their spat, Hermia asserts that Helena “hath urged her height, / and with her personage, her tall personage, / Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him” (3.2.291-93). Then she snidely asks “are you grown so high in his esteem / Because I am so dwarfish and so low?” (3.2.294-95) Helena then asks the men to protect her, denying that “Because she is something lower than myself, […] I can match her” (3.2.303-04). Lysander also insults Hermia’s stature: “you dwarf! / You minimus, of hind’ring knotgrass made! You bead, you acorn!” (3.2.328-30) Mary Tudor was indeed small, short and dark – in Starkey’s words, “squat and mannish,” truly dwarfish beside her younger and far more attractive half-sister (figs 1 & 2).
There was more to Mary, however, than her small frame suggested. As Helena fumes about Hermia, “O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd. / She was a vixen when she went to school, / And though she be but little, she is fierce” (3.2.324-25), so Mary Tudor was known to be both short and defiant; in adulthood, this “vixen” became the indisputably fierce “Bloody Mary.” Though the Tudor girls were, like Helena and Hermia, often close over the years, their relationship was marked by bouts of conflict that began upon Elizabeth’s birth, when Henry VIII reduced Mary’s title to “Lady Mary” and ordered her to be the baby’s lady-in-waiting (Ridley 16). Mary reluctantly did so but refused to acknowledge Elizabeth as princess despite her father’s orders, her governness’ threats, and the loss of her jewels and private dining privileges. It is possible, says David Starkey, that some of Elizabeth’s earliest memories were “of Mary, red-eyed and resentful, stamping her foot as she refused to curtsey to her baby half-sister” (19).
Resentment would be a natural reaction to the removal of one’s status -- and mother. Both Mary and Elizabeth lost their mothers as a result of their father’s fickleness, and this idea of motherless girls subject to inconstant, controlling men pervades Midsummer Night’s Dream. The two half-sisters would spend most of their lives in competition with each other, vying for paternal and popular approval, and yet they understood each other as only two motherless princesses could. A similar alternation of loyalty and competition can be seen in Hermia’s response to Helena’s accusations; the former remains calm and soothing until she realizes that Lysander truly does not love her. Then she turns visciously on Helena, calling her a “canker blossom” (3.2.282) -- in Mary’s world, a blighted Tudor rose.
The second issue that Shakespeare subtly addresses in Midsummer Night’s Dream is the unsuitability of Elizabeth’s favorite suitors and her concomitant failure to marry. This predicament is evident in the understandable reluctance of Hippolyta, the captured and coerced Amazonian queen, to welcome her wedding day. It is evident in the anger Titania feels toward Oberon about his patriarchal attempts, finally reduced to chicanery, to dominate her indomitable will. And it is evident in the distress Hermia feels over having a husband selected for her, when her heart has made its own choice.
Historians and scholars agree that if Elizabeth were ever to have chosen any man for love, it would have been her favorite courtier, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. But for Queen Elizabeth “The course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.134), and the man she loved was too far below her – and sometimes married. While she may have seen in Leicester the voice, shape and virtue that the drugged fairy queen saw in the transformed Bottom (3.1.132-34), as the latter admits, “Reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (137-38). When she comes to her senses, Titania’s woeful “Methought I was enamored of an ass” (4.1.76) mocks both the embarrassing gossip Leicester inspired and his job as Elizabeth’s Master of the Horse, which had Europeans scoffing that she might marry her “horse keeper” (Brimabcombe 109). Furthermore, the curious 15-line exchange between Hippolyta and Theseus about the hounds of Sparta (4.1.111-26) may well be a reference to Leicester’s previous title, Master of the Buckhounds (108). More overt or closely juxtaposed allusions might have cost Shakespeare severely, as the intimate relationship between the queen and the earl was a highly recognizable example of the dichotomy between Elizabeth’s professed virginity and her reputation.
Elizabeth’s flirtations with Leicester and other men were a product of her notorious vanity. According to Russ McDonald, “Oberon in his first speech berates his queen for her vanity, and their argument shortly reveals that hubris and its attendant faults are a root cause of their dispute and thus of its far-reaching consequences” (Orgel 254). To teach her a lesson, Oberon destines her to fall in love with the first thing her eye lands on, “Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, / On meddling monkey, or on busy ape” (2.1.180-81). Though this curse applies to the targeted men, too, neither Lysander nor Demetrius see anything but women when they are drugged; Titania, however, sees a two-legged beast. Elizabeth gave beast nicknames to many of the men in her life, but these in particular connote Leicester, whom she nicknamed her “lion,” whose emblem was a “bear” (fig. 3) whose wife the jealous queen referred to as a “she-wolf,” and whose coat of arms included a “bull.” That Oberon’s entire list of possibilities actually dissolve into the form of an ass clarifies Shakespeare’s opinion of Leicester, who, as the Lion, is mocked again in the rustics’ play. The earl is also strongly associated with the simian creatures Titania might have seen: Elizabeth referred to the charming French ambassador Simier -- whom the jealous Leicester tried to have assassinated -- as her “monkey,” and an “ape” is how Spenser satirized her advisor Lord Burghley (Renwick “Complaints” 77-113), who spent his entire career trying to keep Leicester at a distance.
Leicester was the favorite, but certainly not the only contender for Elizabeth’s affections; her court swarmed with jealous, presumptuous men competing for her favoritism. Though their elevated opinions of themselves are dramatized in the rustics’ foolishness, it is Lysander who voices the suitors’ challenge: “Now follow, if thou dar’st, to try whose right / Of thine or mine, is most in Helena.” (3.2.335-36). That right nearly went to the 25-year-old Duke of Anjou in 1579, when Elizabeth was 46, but she declined his offer of marriage at the behest of her Privy council, who objected to the idea of a foreign king -- especially a French Catholic (Brimacombe 114). Starkey describes the attraction and its results:
Elizabeth, who had a taste for the exotic, was hooked and determined to turn [Anjou] into a king. But her people hated him. John Stubbs attacked the match in a savage pamphlet; oblivious for once to her popularity, Elizabeth had his right hand struck off. Worse, from her point of view, was the reaction of the council. They debated the marriage all day, and then, irretrievably split, refused to tender any opinion at all. Elizabeth raged against them for their inconsistency […then] recollected herself. She sent [Anjou] back to France, loaded with gifts and fair words. (Starkey 316)
In Midsummer Night’s Dream the idea of an incoming foreign “boy ruler” is introduced in the person of the displaced Indian prince, over whom Titania and Oberon fight, and whom the queen is not allowed to keep. Puck mentions that Oberon is upset that Titania has crowned the foreign boy with flowers (2.1.27), but the fairy king is even more irritated when she does the same thing to the ass, the would-be king Leicester:
For, meeting her of late behind the wood,
Seeking sweet favors for this hateful fool,
I did upbraid her and fall out with her.
For she his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers;
And that same dew which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flowerets’ eyes
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.
When I had at my pleasure taunted her,
And she in mild terms had begged my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child;
Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent
To bear him to my bower in fairyland. (4.1.49-51)
Though both Elizabeth and Titania lose their exotic boys, Shakespeare seems less concerned with English xenophobia or Elizabeth’s single status than with the decline of her monarchial reputation as a result of her sexual devaluation. It may be in Demetrius’ finance-laden speech to the pursuing Helena that we best hear this commentary (emphasis mine):
You do impeach your modesty too much
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity (2.1.214-19)
Still, though subtly critical of her scandalous behavior, by identifying Elizabeth with Helena the playwright overtly pays homage to female faithfulness and makes the unfaithful (or rustic) men the object of derision. Like Leicester and Walter Ralegh, who married their wives secretly to avoid incurring the queen’s wrath, it is Lysander and Demetrius whose unfaithfulness is revealed and mocked.
The third issue that Shakespeare personifies in Midsummer Night’s Dream is that of Elizabeth’s desire to leave a global legacy. That Titania has stolen an Indian prince from his homeland, for ostensibly altruistic reasons, typifies Elizabeth’s attitude toward the exploration, Christianization, and exploitation of other lands. The desire to capture Spain’s monopoly of overseas trade is evident in Titania’s glowing description of the time she spent with her pregnant friend in India, which oddly employs such commercially relevant words as buys, order, spiced, traders, sails (sales), rich (twice), trifles, and merchandise (2.1.122-34). In 1587 Sir Francis Drake had set out to annoy the Spanish and Portugese and captured the St. Philip, whose papers provided so much information about the value of the Indian trade that the English were motivated to establish direct communication with India. In 1592 the Madre de Dios was captured by, among five other ships, Elizabeth’s own Garland, perhaps increasing the significance of the floral coronet with which Titania crowns the Indian prince. On board was discovered a fantastically rich cargo of jewels, ambergris, spices, ivory, ebony, frankincense, hides, porcelain, silk, gold cloth, quilts, carpets -- and hundreds of slaves. (“Madre”). Also found was a register, or “Matricola,” of the entire Portugese government and trade in the East Indies, which was the basis for promoting the London East India Company to Queen Elizabeth in 1599 (Birdwood).
As a direct result a royal charter, establishing commercial relations between England and the East, was granted by Elizabeth on December 31, 1600 -- the year Midsummer Night’s Dream was published. In fact, in 1596, the year this play is generally agreed to have been written, Leicester himself had commissioned a voyage to pursue the Indian and Chinese trade, but its three ships were never heard from again. The royal fairies’ battle over the Indian prince is an indication that eastern trade, made possible by Elizabeth and Armada-won naval dominance, was headline news in the last five years of the sixteenth century.
Certainly Renaissance audiences, so fond of conceits and hidden meanings, would not have missed Elizabeth’s superficial iconism in the play’s moon imagery, fairy queen nomenclature, and references to virginity. But would they have recognized more than this harmless nod-and-a-wink tribute to their queen? Hermia herself implies deeper levels of duplicity when she says “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double” (4.2.188-89), and, significantly, the remainder of the iambic line is completed by her own double, Helena: “So methinks.” Nonetheless, would the audience have heard the dark undertones in the exchanges between Helena and Hermia, and remembered Elizabeth’s own near-sister? Would they have noted the connections to her favorite but least popular suitors? Would they have seen the ironic links to exploitative enterprises in the theft of the Indian boy?
Perhaps, in the interest of preserving the playwright’s lucrative right hand, they were not meant to.
Works Cited
Birdwood, George. “The English in India before the East India Company.” Journal
of the Society of Arts. February 7, 1879. 216. Online at
<http://nistads.res.in/contents/yellowed/Englishb4eic.pdf> Accessed 4/20/04.
Brimacombe, Peter. All the Queen’s Men. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Brown, Julie. “Swift hart and “soft heart”: Elizabeth I and the Iconography of Lyly’s
Gallathea and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Selected Papers. Ed. Byron Nelson. Morgantown WVA: West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association, 1997.
Kott, Jan. “The Bottom Translation.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY, New Haven, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 73-85.
“Madre de Dios.” Ships of the World: A Historical Encyclopedia.. Houghton Mifflin.
Website. <http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/ships/html/
sh_057800_madrededios.htm > Accessed 4/22/05.
Montrose, Louis A. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of
Elizabethan Culture: Gender, power, Form.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 65-87.
Orgel, Stephen and Braunmuller, A.R., eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete
Works. NY: Penguin Putnam, 2002
Starkey, David. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. NY: HarperCollins, 2001.
Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
[See figures below this essay]
Fig. 1 - Queen Elizabeth
Fig. 2 - Queen Mary
Fig. 3 - Leicester Bear device
From the Warwickshire City Council website:
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, and great-great-great-great-grandson of Richard Beauchamp, is known to have used the combined device of the bear and ragged staff frequently. It can be seen in many places on the walls of the Leicester Hospital in Warwick, which he founded in 1571, and on a chimney piece in his castle of Kenilworth. Inventories of the furnishings of the castle mention cushions, bedcovers, and bookbindings decorated with the design, and his suit of armour (now in the Royal Armoury) is heavily decorated with ragged staffs. Source URL: http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/Web/corporate/pages.nsf/Links/2AA8F837EFE001B180256A38003531A9
From Bartleby.com:
Among the notable collectors who dressed their books in distinctive coverings were Thomas Wotton, who adopted the style and adapted the motto of Grolier, and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, whose most characteristic style was a plain binding having his well known badge, the bear and ragged staff, with his initials stamped on the side. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/214/1827.html
San Jose State University, 2005 | James O. Wood Shakespeare Award, 2006
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is thought to have been first performed at a wedding attended by Queen Elizabeth in 1596, but as Louis Montrose notes, whether or not she was actually there her “pervasive cultural presence was a condition of the play’s imaginative possibility” (69). This presence is particularly evident in the play’s virginal and lunar references, such as when Puck describes Cupid’s fiery shot “At a fair vestal, throned by the west” which is extinguished “in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon,” after which the targeted “imperial vot’ress” passes on, in “maiden meditation” (2.1.155-65); Yates observes that the moonlight that pervades the play makes an implicit comparison between the professed Virgin Queen and the goddess of virginity, Diana (77).
Neither could anyone in Shakespeare’s time have failed to identify Elizabeth with the title character of Edmund Spenser’s epic Fairie Queene, and therefore with Titania. Besides the titular connection, the 63-year-old Elizabeth’s long repressed passions can be seen in Titania’s lament that “when [the moon] weeps, weeps every little flower, / Lamenting some enforced chastity” (3.1.194-5), and Elizabeth’s political longevity in Titania’s declaration that “I am a spirit of no common rate, / The summer still doth tend upon my state” (3.1.148-9). Furthermore, Titania is another name for Diana in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Kott 77), by which this play was heavily influenced (Orgel 251). The merger of these supernatural symbols of sexuality and virginity highlights the dichotomy between Elizabeth’s supposed chastity and reputed wantonness (Brown).
While scholars generally agree that Elizabeth’s iconism is represented in this play; I will argue that Shakespeare alludes to more than her sexuality. Specific character descriptions and the singularity of certain images within Midsummer Night’s Dream connote three major elements of Elizabeth’s life: her childhood conflicts with her sister Mary, the unsuitability of her suitors, and her desire to establish England as a global power.
The relationship between Helena and Hermia is one that complicates the confusion caused by Puck’s mistake. Whereas Lysander and Demetrius are unknown to each other except as compatriots of Greece and rivals for the same love, Hermia and Helena have enjoyed a close friendship since childhood, one that Helena equates with sisterhood. That Hermia seems to have collaborated with Demetrius to mock her is seen by Helena as a violation of “the sister’s vows, the hours that we have spent” (3.2.199) and “All schooldays’ friendship, childhood innocence” (3.2.202). In a speech brimming with political terms such as confederacy, conspired, counsel, and incorporate, she reminds her friend that they were “like two artificial gods / [who] with our needles created both one flower” (3.2.03-04). This is an apt description of the child princesses Elizabeth and Mary, born into the line of the Tudor Rose. Even the shape and color of the Tudor Rose are evoked by Helena’s comparison of their union to a “double cherry, seeming parted” (209) or “two lovely berries molded on one stem” (211). The royal connection is further established by her comments that they are like “coats in heraldry, / Due but to one, and crowned with one crest” (213-14), by her reference to their love as “ancient” (215) and by Demetrius’ reference to Helena as a princess (144).
In fact, the drugged Demetrius gushes about Helena in terms that also describe the well-known actual physical and attributed spiritual characteristics of Elizabeth: goddess, nymph, perfect, divine, white, snow[y], princess, pure white (3.2.137-44). The name Helena, in fact, is Greek for light, which in this context can signify both fair skin and illumination, including that of the moon goddess. Hermia elaborates on Helena’s beauty prior to their conflict, claiming that “Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated, / The rest I’ll give to be to you translated” (1.1.190-92). Like Elizabeth, Helena is tall: at the climax of their spat, Hermia asserts that Helena “hath urged her height, / and with her personage, her tall personage, / Her height, forsooth, she hath prevailed with him” (3.2.291-93). Then she snidely asks “are you grown so high in his esteem / Because I am so dwarfish and so low?” (3.2.294-95) Helena then asks the men to protect her, denying that “Because she is something lower than myself, […] I can match her” (3.2.303-04). Lysander also insults Hermia’s stature: “you dwarf! / You minimus, of hind’ring knotgrass made! You bead, you acorn!” (3.2.328-30) Mary Tudor was indeed small, short and dark – in Starkey’s words, “squat and mannish,” truly dwarfish beside her younger and far more attractive half-sister (figs 1 & 2).
There was more to Mary, however, than her small frame suggested. As Helena fumes about Hermia, “O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd. / She was a vixen when she went to school, / And though she be but little, she is fierce” (3.2.324-25), so Mary Tudor was known to be both short and defiant; in adulthood, this “vixen” became the indisputably fierce “Bloody Mary.” Though the Tudor girls were, like Helena and Hermia, often close over the years, their relationship was marked by bouts of conflict that began upon Elizabeth’s birth, when Henry VIII reduced Mary’s title to “Lady Mary” and ordered her to be the baby’s lady-in-waiting (Ridley 16). Mary reluctantly did so but refused to acknowledge Elizabeth as princess despite her father’s orders, her governness’ threats, and the loss of her jewels and private dining privileges. It is possible, says David Starkey, that some of Elizabeth’s earliest memories were “of Mary, red-eyed and resentful, stamping her foot as she refused to curtsey to her baby half-sister” (19).
Resentment would be a natural reaction to the removal of one’s status -- and mother. Both Mary and Elizabeth lost their mothers as a result of their father’s fickleness, and this idea of motherless girls subject to inconstant, controlling men pervades Midsummer Night’s Dream. The two half-sisters would spend most of their lives in competition with each other, vying for paternal and popular approval, and yet they understood each other as only two motherless princesses could. A similar alternation of loyalty and competition can be seen in Hermia’s response to Helena’s accusations; the former remains calm and soothing until she realizes that Lysander truly does not love her. Then she turns visciously on Helena, calling her a “canker blossom” (3.2.282) -- in Mary’s world, a blighted Tudor rose.
The second issue that Shakespeare subtly addresses in Midsummer Night’s Dream is the unsuitability of Elizabeth’s favorite suitors and her concomitant failure to marry. This predicament is evident in the understandable reluctance of Hippolyta, the captured and coerced Amazonian queen, to welcome her wedding day. It is evident in the anger Titania feels toward Oberon about his patriarchal attempts, finally reduced to chicanery, to dominate her indomitable will. And it is evident in the distress Hermia feels over having a husband selected for her, when her heart has made its own choice.
Historians and scholars agree that if Elizabeth were ever to have chosen any man for love, it would have been her favorite courtier, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. But for Queen Elizabeth “The course of true love never did run smooth” (1.1.134), and the man she loved was too far below her – and sometimes married. While she may have seen in Leicester the voice, shape and virtue that the drugged fairy queen saw in the transformed Bottom (3.1.132-34), as the latter admits, “Reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (137-38). When she comes to her senses, Titania’s woeful “Methought I was enamored of an ass” (4.1.76) mocks both the embarrassing gossip Leicester inspired and his job as Elizabeth’s Master of the Horse, which had Europeans scoffing that she might marry her “horse keeper” (Brimabcombe 109). Furthermore, the curious 15-line exchange between Hippolyta and Theseus about the hounds of Sparta (4.1.111-26) may well be a reference to Leicester’s previous title, Master of the Buckhounds (108). More overt or closely juxtaposed allusions might have cost Shakespeare severely, as the intimate relationship between the queen and the earl was a highly recognizable example of the dichotomy between Elizabeth’s professed virginity and her reputation.
Elizabeth’s flirtations with Leicester and other men were a product of her notorious vanity. According to Russ McDonald, “Oberon in his first speech berates his queen for her vanity, and their argument shortly reveals that hubris and its attendant faults are a root cause of their dispute and thus of its far-reaching consequences” (Orgel 254). To teach her a lesson, Oberon destines her to fall in love with the first thing her eye lands on, “Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, / On meddling monkey, or on busy ape” (2.1.180-81). Though this curse applies to the targeted men, too, neither Lysander nor Demetrius see anything but women when they are drugged; Titania, however, sees a two-legged beast. Elizabeth gave beast nicknames to many of the men in her life, but these in particular connote Leicester, whom she nicknamed her “lion,” whose emblem was a “bear” (fig. 3) whose wife the jealous queen referred to as a “she-wolf,” and whose coat of arms included a “bull.” That Oberon’s entire list of possibilities actually dissolve into the form of an ass clarifies Shakespeare’s opinion of Leicester, who, as the Lion, is mocked again in the rustics’ play. The earl is also strongly associated with the simian creatures Titania might have seen: Elizabeth referred to the charming French ambassador Simier -- whom the jealous Leicester tried to have assassinated -- as her “monkey,” and an “ape” is how Spenser satirized her advisor Lord Burghley (Renwick “Complaints” 77-113), who spent his entire career trying to keep Leicester at a distance.
Leicester was the favorite, but certainly not the only contender for Elizabeth’s affections; her court swarmed with jealous, presumptuous men competing for her favoritism. Though their elevated opinions of themselves are dramatized in the rustics’ foolishness, it is Lysander who voices the suitors’ challenge: “Now follow, if thou dar’st, to try whose right / Of thine or mine, is most in Helena.” (3.2.335-36). That right nearly went to the 25-year-old Duke of Anjou in 1579, when Elizabeth was 46, but she declined his offer of marriage at the behest of her Privy council, who objected to the idea of a foreign king -- especially a French Catholic (Brimacombe 114). Starkey describes the attraction and its results:
Elizabeth, who had a taste for the exotic, was hooked and determined to turn [Anjou] into a king. But her people hated him. John Stubbs attacked the match in a savage pamphlet; oblivious for once to her popularity, Elizabeth had his right hand struck off. Worse, from her point of view, was the reaction of the council. They debated the marriage all day, and then, irretrievably split, refused to tender any opinion at all. Elizabeth raged against them for their inconsistency […then] recollected herself. She sent [Anjou] back to France, loaded with gifts and fair words. (Starkey 316)
In Midsummer Night’s Dream the idea of an incoming foreign “boy ruler” is introduced in the person of the displaced Indian prince, over whom Titania and Oberon fight, and whom the queen is not allowed to keep. Puck mentions that Oberon is upset that Titania has crowned the foreign boy with flowers (2.1.27), but the fairy king is even more irritated when she does the same thing to the ass, the would-be king Leicester:
For, meeting her of late behind the wood,
Seeking sweet favors for this hateful fool,
I did upbraid her and fall out with her.
For she his hairy temples then had rounded
With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers;
And that same dew which sometime on the buds
Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,
Stood now within the pretty flowerets’ eyes
Like tears that did their own disgrace bewail.
When I had at my pleasure taunted her,
And she in mild terms had begged my patience,
I then did ask of her her changeling child;
Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent
To bear him to my bower in fairyland. (4.1.49-51)
Though both Elizabeth and Titania lose their exotic boys, Shakespeare seems less concerned with English xenophobia or Elizabeth’s single status than with the decline of her monarchial reputation as a result of her sexual devaluation. It may be in Demetrius’ finance-laden speech to the pursuing Helena that we best hear this commentary (emphasis mine):
You do impeach your modesty too much
To leave the city and commit yourself
Into the hands of one that loves you not,
To trust the opportunity of night
And the ill counsel of a desert place
With the rich worth of your virginity (2.1.214-19)
Still, though subtly critical of her scandalous behavior, by identifying Elizabeth with Helena the playwright overtly pays homage to female faithfulness and makes the unfaithful (or rustic) men the object of derision. Like Leicester and Walter Ralegh, who married their wives secretly to avoid incurring the queen’s wrath, it is Lysander and Demetrius whose unfaithfulness is revealed and mocked.
The third issue that Shakespeare personifies in Midsummer Night’s Dream is that of Elizabeth’s desire to leave a global legacy. That Titania has stolen an Indian prince from his homeland, for ostensibly altruistic reasons, typifies Elizabeth’s attitude toward the exploration, Christianization, and exploitation of other lands. The desire to capture Spain’s monopoly of overseas trade is evident in Titania’s glowing description of the time she spent with her pregnant friend in India, which oddly employs such commercially relevant words as buys, order, spiced, traders, sails (sales), rich (twice), trifles, and merchandise (2.1.122-34). In 1587 Sir Francis Drake had set out to annoy the Spanish and Portugese and captured the St. Philip, whose papers provided so much information about the value of the Indian trade that the English were motivated to establish direct communication with India. In 1592 the Madre de Dios was captured by, among five other ships, Elizabeth’s own Garland, perhaps increasing the significance of the floral coronet with which Titania crowns the Indian prince. On board was discovered a fantastically rich cargo of jewels, ambergris, spices, ivory, ebony, frankincense, hides, porcelain, silk, gold cloth, quilts, carpets -- and hundreds of slaves. (“Madre”). Also found was a register, or “Matricola,” of the entire Portugese government and trade in the East Indies, which was the basis for promoting the London East India Company to Queen Elizabeth in 1599 (Birdwood).
As a direct result a royal charter, establishing commercial relations between England and the East, was granted by Elizabeth on December 31, 1600 -- the year Midsummer Night’s Dream was published. In fact, in 1596, the year this play is generally agreed to have been written, Leicester himself had commissioned a voyage to pursue the Indian and Chinese trade, but its three ships were never heard from again. The royal fairies’ battle over the Indian prince is an indication that eastern trade, made possible by Elizabeth and Armada-won naval dominance, was headline news in the last five years of the sixteenth century.
Certainly Renaissance audiences, so fond of conceits and hidden meanings, would not have missed Elizabeth’s superficial iconism in the play’s moon imagery, fairy queen nomenclature, and references to virginity. But would they have recognized more than this harmless nod-and-a-wink tribute to their queen? Hermia herself implies deeper levels of duplicity when she says “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When everything seems double” (4.2.188-89), and, significantly, the remainder of the iambic line is completed by her own double, Helena: “So methinks.” Nonetheless, would the audience have heard the dark undertones in the exchanges between Helena and Hermia, and remembered Elizabeth’s own near-sister? Would they have noted the connections to her favorite but least popular suitors? Would they have seen the ironic links to exploitative enterprises in the theft of the Indian boy?
Perhaps, in the interest of preserving the playwright’s lucrative right hand, they were not meant to.
Works Cited
Birdwood, George. “The English in India before the East India Company.” Journal
of the Society of Arts. February 7, 1879. 216. Online at
<http://nistads.res.in/contents/yellowed/Englishb4eic.pdf> Accessed 4/20/04.
Brimacombe, Peter. All the Queen’s Men. NY: St. Martin’s Press, 2000.
Brown, Julie. “Swift hart and “soft heart”: Elizabeth I and the Iconography of Lyly’s
Gallathea and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Selected Papers. Ed. Byron Nelson. Morgantown WVA: West Virginia Shakespeare and Renaissance Association, 1997.
Kott, Jan. “The Bottom Translation.” Modern Critical Interpretations: William
Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Ed. Harold Bloom. NY, New Haven, and Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 1987. 73-85.
“Madre de Dios.” Ships of the World: A Historical Encyclopedia.. Houghton Mifflin.
Website. <http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/ships/html/
sh_057800_madrededios.htm > Accessed 4/22/05.
Montrose, Louis A. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Shaping Fantasies of
Elizabethan Culture: Gender, power, Form.” Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Ed. Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986. 65-87.
Orgel, Stephen and Braunmuller, A.R., eds. William Shakespeare: The Complete
Works. NY: Penguin Putnam, 2002
Starkey, David. Elizabeth: The Struggle for the Throne. NY: HarperCollins, 2001.
Yates, Frances A. Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London and
Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975.
[See figures below this essay]
Fig. 1 - Queen Elizabeth
Fig. 2 - Queen Mary
Fig. 3 - Leicester Bear device
From the Warwickshire City Council website:
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, and great-great-great-great-grandson of Richard Beauchamp, is known to have used the combined device of the bear and ragged staff frequently. It can be seen in many places on the walls of the Leicester Hospital in Warwick, which he founded in 1571, and on a chimney piece in his castle of Kenilworth. Inventories of the furnishings of the castle mention cushions, bedcovers, and bookbindings decorated with the design, and his suit of armour (now in the Royal Armoury) is heavily decorated with ragged staffs. Source URL: http://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/Web/corporate/pages.nsf/Links/2AA8F837EFE001B180256A38003531A9
From Bartleby.com:
Among the notable collectors who dressed their books in distinctive coverings were Thomas Wotton, who adopted the style and adapted the motto of Grolier, and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, whose most characteristic style was a plain binding having his well known badge, the bear and ragged staff, with his initials stamped on the side. Source URL: http://www.bartleby.com/214/1827.html
