Both Cymbeline and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (AMND) are both set in a patriarchal environment where both genders grapple for control. Valerie Traub defines the distinction between gender sex and gender behavior as “Sex refers to the . . . biological distinctions between male and female bodies. Gender refers to those meanings derived from the division of male and female . . . the attributes considered appropriate to each: ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine.’” Patriarchy indirectly opposes this source of the meaning with male leaders moderating their control with their own male qualities. However, this thinking needed a stern control over the attribution of suitable behavior for each sex, signifying that gendered meanings “exist primarily as constructions of particular societies.”2 One display of this control contained in both plays is the orderly arrangement of female sexuality, a classification distinguished from the sexual characteristics of connecting explicitly to “erotic desires and activities.”3 Margreta de Grazia claimed “nothing threatens a patriarchal and hierarchic social formation more than a promiscuous womb,”4 and pivotally, both plays examine the supposed risk of unrestrained
1 Valerie Traub, “Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Margreta de Grazia and Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 129.
2 Ibid., 129.
3 Ibid., 129.
4 Margreta de Grazia, “The Scandal of Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 2
The Essay on Spirited People Gender Female Male
In 1952, few Americans were familiar with the concept of transsexualism. It was difficult to understand or acknowledge that "gender" was not synonymous with "sex;" that is, most people believed that the anatomy with which a child was born would indisputably influence his or her behavior, disposition, career choices, tastes and sexual preferences in one of two ways: male, or female. It was in that ...
ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland Publishing Inc, 1994, 1999), 106.
5 Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 176.
6 William Shakespeare, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), Act 1, Scene 1, 42, 97. [subsequent references to this work will be cited within the text as Dream, followed by act, scene and line number]
female desire. Also, the sexual relationships existing in the Sonnets appear to subvert stereotypical gender ideas founded in the initial poems. A view held in Cymbeline by both Posthumus and the king was that the appealing neutrality of the speaker’s master-mistress questions the idea that male and female qualities function as oppposites. Within each play, the existence of a foreign “otherness” can be seen as a another attempt to question the widely considered assumptions that societies are ruled by patriarchs. It is within the combination of these challenges to gender stereotypes , we can find recurring themes of procreation, forgiveness and androgyny throughout each unique text. This suggests Shakespeare’s deliberate intention to challenge and reconstruct the conventions of gender relations.
Within the opening scenes in both Cymbeline and MSND a patriarchal context is created by the setting of the authoritive courts of the ruling men and establishes the patriarchal stereotype of renaissance literature. In AMSND, Egeus’ superiority over Hermia is highlighted by his detailed knowledge of Lysander’s romantic gestures and with his continued belief that “she is mine.” He claims that by being supported by the ruling powers, he can claim that her refusal to obey him would result in death as is set in “the ancient privilege of Athens” ( )through his repeated insistence that “she is mine.” Legitimized by the state, he is able to assert that her disobedience must lead to swift execution by invoking “the ancient privilege of Athens” (Dream 1.1.41).
This is confirmed by Theseus but he also offers an alternative punishment where she must:
. . . be in shady cloister mew’d,
The Essay on “Midsummer Nights Dream” by Shakespeare
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” by William Shakespeare frequently explores the complex types of love. Love is timeless subject. It will forever be the theme of much popular entertainment and the source of conflict for many men and women. No one understands the theme of love greater than Shakespeare and therefore I will look at how conflict is developed through love in &# ...
To live a barren sister all your life
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
Thrice blessed they that master so their blood,
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage
(Dream 1.1.71–5)
Theseus indirectly goes against his own sexual drive with a pilgrimage that ascribes to the female “maiden” but the male superiority over the blood needed to satisfy the end, reflects the males power to uphold female chastity, which controls the right to reproduce. His claim that nuns are “thrice blessed” gives evidence of the importance of religious backing to defend his decision, which reflects the impact of religious principle on supporting a patriarchal society.
Regardless of the portrayal of the Athenian patriarchy in the beginning of the play, Shakespeare creates more tense situations where those values are challenged. While Hermia’s beauty is credited to her father , it does not occur to him that perhaps hiss sever strictness may be the cause of his “stubborn harshness”. And when Hermia asks if only “my father looked but with my eyes”, Theseus responds by rearranging her words “Rather your eyes must with his judgement look”. This exchange of points of view signifies the extent that Hermias will and desire is surpressed by patriarchal rule. Her desire is treated as insubordinate feminine emotion that must be controlled by masculine reason, which is summed up in the quote “fit your fancies to your fathers will”.
While Athenian Law asserts masculine values, fairyland in many respects dispenses with patriarchal norms, and instead suggests that “Titania is an independent monarch with her own court . . . [that is] not subservient, to her husband’s.”8 In contrast to Theseus, Titania is swift to take control of her own marital sexuality, revealing to her fairies in the presence of Oberon that she has “forsworn his bed and company” (Dream 2.1.62).
Yet despite the fairy monarchs’ open relationship, it is Oberon alone who is accused of sexual conquest, with Titania noting pointedly his playing “pipes of corn . . . / To amorous Phillida” (Dream 2.1.67–8).
In contrast, Titania is not challenged for indulging her lusts, but is instead accused of enabling Theseus to indulge his own with Ariadne and Antiopa.
The Essay on Dreams On Of Mice And Men
"The Depression brought a massive influx of hopeful refugees to California from elsewhere in the United States, including 300,000 new agricultural workers--the people of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. These newcomers worked in the fields and stores for fifteen cents an hour while Hollywood made movies about their lot, Woody Guthrie sang songs about them, and union organizers tried hard to make ...
Peter Holland interprets the play’s moon imagery as representing Diana’s transformation from “the goddess of the ‘cold fruitless moon’ . . . into the goddess of married chastity,”9 a transformation enacted through the dissolution of the effects of Cupid’s flower by Dian’s bud, and in turn, mirroring Hermia and Helena’s passage toward chaste marriage and motherhood. However, Titania’s angered moon figuratively enacts Theseus’ earlier fear of an uncontrollable femininity, a reading emphasized in productions such as that by Peter Brook (1970) which cast the same actors in the roles of Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania to suggest “repressed emotional turbulence” in the Athenian relationship.10
9 Holland, “Introduction” to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 33.
10 Rixon, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” 38.
Some critics argue that the role of male lover
constitutes “a ‘feminized’ position insofar as it separates men from . . . military pursuits,”11 and indeed Helena sees their behavior as wanting masculinity, declaring that, “If you were men, as men you are in show, / You would not use a gentle lady so” (Dream 3.2.152–3).
In contrast, others hold that the effect of the drug exaggerates the “normal male practice . . . of inconstancy that is ironically displaced from its conventional place as an attribute of women.”12 This irony emphasizes a double standard in patriarchal ideology; while Theseus, in the opening scene, threatens Hermia for desiring the wrong man, he offers schooling to Demetrius for his broken vows to Helena. In turn, the drug appears to engender masculine traits in Titania, with her insistence that Bottom “shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no” (Dream 3.1.135) echoing Theseus’ earlier attempt to control Hermia’s transgression. Nevertheless, if an indirect result of the drug is to transform Helena’s gentle evocation of school-day companionship into the spiteful claim that Hermia “was a vixen when she went to school” (Dream 3.2.325), then her earlier claim that the friends are “with two seeming bodies but one heart” (Dream 3.2.213) reaffirms a female affinity present under normal circumstances. That such affinity is negotiated in different terms for the male characters is established early through Theseus’ instruction to Egeus and Demetrius that, “I have some private schooling for you both” (Dream 1.1.116), confirming that even under patriarchy there remains a masculine hierarchy.
The Essay on Dreams Man Lennie George Characters
Of Mice and Men, a novel written by John Steinbeck, clearly develops three themes: man s desire to create and seek dreams, man s desire for companionship, and man s responsibility to other members of society. First, a person s want to pursue their dreams is expressed through many of the characters. The primary example of this would be George and Lennie s attempting to earn a stake and purchase a ...
11 Traub, “Gender and Sexuality in Shakespeare,” 137.
12 Holland, “Introduction” to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 63.
Although both Dream and Cymbeline commence in the courts of ruling men to establish the patriarchal context of subsequent action, Cymbeline’s opening scene presents a more explicit illustration of female transgression. While Hermia is threatened with incarceration for desiring the wrong man, Innogen is already imprisoned for proceeding with a forbidden Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 7
marriage. Furthermore, while Hermia relies on Lysander to question Theseus’ reasoning, Innogen herself interrogates her father’s decree, arguing that, “It is your fault that I have loved Posthumus: / You bred him as my playfellow.”13 Cymbeline’s response is to assert alternative familial ties by lamenting that she “mightst have had the sole son of my queen!” (Cym. 1.1.139), and reveals a further issue that she “took’st a beggar; wouldst have made my throne / A seat for baseness” (Cym. 1.1.142–3).
The class-based condemnation of Posthumus combines with the sexual inflection of “baseness” to reveal Cymbeline’s concern with royal lineage. However, he negates Innogen’s ability to procreate by insisting that she “languish / A drop of blood a day; and . . . / Die of this folly” (Cym. 1.1.157–9).
While the blood drops may symbolize decreasing fertility, they also suggest the bloodline that Cymbeline is eager to maintain—emphasized through his earlier claim that Innogen is “poison to my blood” (Cym. 1.1.129).
By incarcerating his daughter, Cymbeline sabotages his own lineage, a concern implicit in Innogen’s plea: “Harm not yourself with your vexation” (Cym. 1.1.135).
In more general terms, the conflict illustrates figuratively how patriarchal control can be as constricting to men as to women.
13 William Shakespeare, “Cymbeline,” in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al., 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), Act 1, Scene 1, 145–6. [subsequent references to this work will be cited within the text as Cym., followed by act, scene and line number]
The consequent degree of control which Innogen retains over Cymbeline’s lineage is mirrored by the perception in the world of the play that she herself defines her husband’s character. During the opening dialogue, a courtier asserts that Posthumus’ virtue “[by] her election may be truly read” (Cym. 1.1.54).
The Term Paper on Men Are From Mars Women Are From Venus Gender Differences In Communication
Men are From Mars, Women are from venus, gender differences in communication "MEN ARE FROM MARS, WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS: GENDER DIFFERENCES IN COMMUNICATION" Men and women typically use different discourse strategies in communication, and, in general, women's linguistic behavior is disadvantageous compared to men's. This paper will attempt to demonstrate this fact, through the many stereotypes ...
The insight foreshadows that which Giacomo shrewdly exploits to undermine Posthumus’ masculinity, asserting to Philario and the Frenchman that by “marrying his king’s daughter . . . / [Posthumus] must be weighed rather by her value than his own” (Cym. 1.4.11–12).
Posthumus seems aware of this general Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 8
perception of his precarious masculinity, imploring Innogen on their separation:
O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause To be suspected of more tenderness Than doth become a man.
(Cym. 1.1.94–6)
Although the opening of Cymbeline establishes versions of female transgression, the various plot lines throughout the remainder of the play are primarily concerned with “the recuperation of male power over the female.”14 Posthumus’ wager on Innogen’s chastity stems partially from insecure masculinity, and during the increasingly fraught exchange with Giacomo, he insists, “She holds her virtue still, and I my mind” (Cym. 1.4.61).
The word “still” relates to her continuous virtue, but also to stability, and conveys Posthumus’ need for
14 Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London: Routledge, Chapman and Hall, 1992), 211. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 9
Innogen to possess a steady femininity against which he can safely measure his own masculine “mind.” However, because he doubts his own masculinity, he therefore doubts her virtue, and as a consequence, is more susceptible to the belief that she has been unfaithful than that her bracelet has been lost or stolen (Cym. 2.4.123–5).
The furious soliloquy which follows is seen by Janet Adelman to encapsulate the play’s “anxieties about male identity and female power to define the male,”15 and associates both themes with “the mother’s capacity to unmake the son’s identity through her sexual fault.”16 This “fault” is ultimately conceived as participation in procreation, and in a speech which echoes Cymbeline’s concerns about Innogen’s influence over his royal lineage, Posthumus wonders, “Is there no way for men to be, but women / Must be half-workers?” (Cym. 2.4.1–2).
The Essay on Lord Byron: Sonnet On Chillon (A Formalist Explication)
This poem dramatizes the conflict between liberty and tyranny, specifically in instances where tyrannical forces attempt to squelch liberty by imprisoning those who champion her virtues. The speaker presents a paradox in the beginning of the poem, Eternal Spirit of the chainless mind!/Brightest in dungeons, Liberty, thou art,–For there thy habitation is the heart,– (1,2,3). The speaker ...
Furthermore, Posthumus’ rumination upon masculinity reveals an evasion of responsibility and self-recognition that is necessary to all manifestations of misogyny:
15 Ibid., 208.
16 Ibid., 211.
. . . there’s no motion That tends to vice in man, but I affirm It is the woman’s part: be it lying, note it, The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers . . .
All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows, Why, hers, in part or all; but rather, all
(Cym. 2.5.20–8)
While Posthumus presupposes an essentialism concerning fixed gender attributes, he also laments that such attributes are an unavoidable part of being male, given the regrettable necessity of female involvement in procreation. Overall, the play reveals the circular reasoning implicit in patriarchal ideology, namely the a priori assumption that negative attributes are essentially feminine, irrespective of the sex of the person exemplifying those character traits. The celebration of androgyny present in the Sonnets can be read as a response to this fallacy. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 10
Both Posthumus and Cymbeline fail in the course of the play to address the patriarchal fallacy of fixed gender attributes. It is fitting that Posthumus, who wishes to be rid of the feminine infection of his character, is for most of the play incapable of correctly interpreting his own wife’s character, whom Giacomo correctly esteems as “whiter than the sheets” (Cym. Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 11
2.2.16).
Similarly, while Innogen recognizes the Queen’s “[d]issembling courtesy” (Cym. 1.1.85), Cymbeline himself appears almost entirely trusting of his wife, learning only after her death that she abhorred his person (Cym. 5.6.40).
The king’s journey through the play is to “learn to distrust—and hence to separate himself from—his wife,”17 and while her death engenders the recuperation of his masculine control, it is also enacted figuratively through reunion with his sons. Janet Adelman argues that the two princes “are an experiment in male parthenogenesis, a portion of Cymbeline’s own masculinity split off and preserved from the taint of women.”18 Yet despite this “taint,” Cymbeline frames himself, not as a father, but as a mother, wondering “am I / A mother to the birth of three?” (Cym. 5.6.369–1).
Having received confirmation from Belarius that the princes are “blood of your begetting” (Cym. 5.6.332), Cymbeline regains from Innogen full control over his lineage, telling her she “hast lost by this a kingdom” (Cym. 5.6.373–4).
However, her unconscious anger is expressed through violent imagery in his innocent observation that:
17 Ibid., 208.
18 Ibid., 205.
. . . she, like harmless lightning, throws her eye
On him, her brother, me, her master, hitting
Each object with a joy.
(Cym. 5.6.395–7)
As with the opening scenes of Dream and Cymbeline, the opening sonnets (1–19) establish patriarchal orthodoxies which are disrupted in the later sonnets of the sequence. In one sense, “[what] ‘ought to be’ in the way of gender relations . . . is represented [here] as an ideal.”21 The speaker in these early sonnets encourages the youth to preserve his beauty through marriage and procreation, insisting “your sweet semblance to some other give,”22 and that through heterosexual marriage “sire and child and happy mother, / . . . one pleasing note do sing” (Son. 8.11–12).
Furthermore, the speaker’s assertion that the youth “art thy mother’s glass” (Son. 3.9) contrasts with Theseus’ patriarchal view that Egeus alone composed Hermia’s Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 13
beauties, and in turn, celebrates in physical form the “woman’s part” lamented by Posthumus. However, Sonnet 3 conveys subtle misogyny as the speaker criticizes the youth’s seeming reluctance to procreate:
Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.
For where is she so fair whose uneared womb
Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?
(Son. 3.4–6)
The implication that “woman” is synonymous with “mother” leaves women without children alienated from their biological sex, while implying a metonymic link between “woman” and “womb” suggests a view of women as simply a source of children, subject to the “tillage” of men. Furthermore, although dental alliteration in the phrase “Disdains the tillage” conveys the disgust of the hypothetical fair woman who rejects the youth, it also suggests the disdain of the speaker for such a woman, jarring with the soft consonants of lines 5 and 7. The phrase also contains an echo of “stain” and “pillage,” suggesting the threat of enforced intercourse and perhaps implying a moral imperative for women to become mothers. The implication that any woman would do for the young man’s task seals the speaker’s objectification of women.
At best, the misogyny of the early sonnets might be read as the speaker’s crude attempt to convey to the youth a homoerotic desire through ambivalence towards female sexuality. Sonnet 20 is often read as an expression of the speaker’s homosexuality, with the preceding sonnets forming a narrative in which “homosocial desire changes by degrees into homosexual desire.”23 However, in terms of the representation of gendered relations in the sequence, the poem also explores the slippery interplay between sex and gender:
23 Bruce R. Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 248.
A woman’s face with nature’s own hand painted
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman’s gentle heart, but not acquainted Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 14
With shifting change as is false women’s fashion
(Son. 20.1–4)
Enjambment between lines 3–4 enacts the “shifting change” the speaker considers an essential attribute of women, echoing the patriarchal fears of inconstancy expressed in Dream. Similarly, the fricative phrase “false women’s fashion” forcefully labels all women deceitful, echoing Posthumus’ essentialist fears. However, the speaker’s belief that the youth possesses a “woman’s face” and “gentle heart” relies upon the transference of supposedly fixed feminine qualities. His elusory androgyny is encapsulated in the speaker’s phrase “master mistress,” and in turn, is conveyed formally through feminine ending and slant rhyme (“a-doting” / “nothing” (Son. 20.10, 12)).
Yet despite the speaker’s attraction to the youth’s femininity, he insists that the youth retains masculine control over these traits, describing him as “A man in hue all ‘hues’ in his controlling” (Son. 20.7).
Overall, the sonnet suggests that the speaker is both attracted to and troubled by the youth’s androgyny, and perhaps in turn, suggests the difficulty for men in responding to the aforementioned circular reasoning at the heart of patriarchy.
While only one of many figurative strategies in the Sonnets, androgyny, in one sense, symbolizes the speaker’s conflict between the masculine and the feminine, a conflict which is mirrored by the range of rivalries described in the sequence. Throughout Sonnets 79–86, the speaker meditates upon a rival poet’s claim for the youth’s affections. However, he reverses the gendered expectation for a combative male rival by praising the poet in phallic, masculine terms, claiming, “I am a worthless boat, / He of tall building and of goodly pride” (Son. 80.11–12), while conceding his own feminine response to the youth: “I faint when I of you do write” (Son. 80.1).
Later, while reflecting on his “ripe thoughts,” he likens writing to procreation as he compares his own brain to “the womb wherein they grew?” (Son. 86.3–4).
A further rivalry is Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 15
addressed concerning the youth’s relationship with the speaker’s mistress. The opening quatrain of Sonnet 144 reveals:
Two loves I have, of comfort and despair,
Which like two spirits do suggest me still:
The better angel is a man right fair,
The worser spirit a woman coloured ill
(Son. 144.1–4)
Although the speaker asserts that the youth is the “better angel,” the syntax suggests balanced opposition. The simile in line 2 invites a figurative reading of the youth and the mistress as personifying the “spirits” of masculinity and femininity. However, the speaker’s fear that “my angel be turned fiend” (Son. 144.9) suggests gender fluidity, while gendered expectations are reversed by comparing “his purity with her foul pride” (Son. 144.8).
Overall, the rivalries described in the Sonnets between the speaker and the subjects of his poems perhaps mirror the relationship between masculine and feminine attributes within the speaker himself: “two spirits do suggest me.” Furthermore, while the speaker recognizes tension between these assorted attributes, his embrace of the feminine aspect of his own character is in marked contrast to both Posthumus’ explicit disgust after similar reflection and Cymbeline’s figurative recuperation of masculine control.
Many critics argue that her darkness should be understood figuratively as offering a criticism of Petrarchan love sonnets—poetry, which in the process of idealizing the invariably “fair” female subject, serves only to “dehumanize [them] and Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 16
constitute[s] an implicit rejection of the imperfect bodies of actual women.”24 In Sonnet 130, the speaker asserts that, “If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; / If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head” (Son. 130.3–4).
Equating “white” with “snow” underlines how all skin tones are “dun” in comparison, while comparing all hair to “wires” detaches the blackness of the mistress’ hair from racial signification. An alternative figurative reading interprets the mistress’ darkness as signifying moral degeneracy.25
While it is possible to read the darkness of the mistress in the Sonnets as entirely figurative, critics have argued that, in the world of Dream, “Athenian patriarchal structures . . . are established in implicit opposition to [the] spectre of female and racial otherness.”27 This opposition is established by the exchange between Theseus and Hippolyta which opens the play, in which the Amazonian queen responds to the Duke’s impatience with the waning moon with a speech that is often performed as an elegy for lost freedom:
27 Ania Loomba, “The Great Indian Vanishing Trick—Colonialism, Property, and the Family in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, ed. Dympna Callaghan (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2000), 173.
Four nights will quickly dream away the time; And then the moon, like to a silver bow New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night Of our solemnities.
(Dream 1.1.8–11)
Hippolyta’s figurative linking of the moon with her former position as reigning Amazonian archer establishes the significance of the moon as the symbolic spectre of unruly femininity, foreign in both an astronomical sense, and in the sense of an allusion to a world beyond the strictures of patriarchy. Theseus is swift to dismiss all hints of melancholy, insisting that this “pale companion is not for our pomp” (Dream 1.1.15), yet implicitly he refers here to the moon, whose “bow” he counters with his own evocation of violence, reminding Hippolyta that “I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries” (Dream 1.1.16–7).
Attempting to convince Helena of his sudden love, Lysander draws upon the symbolic opposition between white and black present in the Sonnets, asking “Who will not Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 18
change a raven for a dove?” (Dream 2.2.120).
However, his rhetoric is swiftly literalized into racial slurs, calling the now hated Hermia, “Ethiope” and “tawny Tartar” (Dream 3.2.258, 264).
It remains for Titania to reclaim foreign femininity in her description of her pregnant votaress, gossiping together “in the spiced Indian air by night” (Dream 2.1.124)—an intimacy in stark contrast to the racism and violence enacted by the Athenian men.
While both Dream and the Sonnets establish kinship between femininity and the foreign, Jodi Mikalachki argues that the opposite is the case for Cymbeline, where “[n[ationally inflected gender anxiety haunts the drama, emerging particularly in contests over Roman–British relations.”28 This anxiety is manifest in reports to Giacomo by the Frenchman, who tells how he and Posthumus each “fell in praise of our country mistresses” (Cym. 1.4.54).
The metonymic association between women and their country of origin is affirmed by Innogen, when during Giacomo’s tall tale of Posthumus’ deceit, she reflects, “My lord, I fear, / Has forgot Britain” (Cym. 1.6.112–3).
While it might be tempting to read this association as reflecting patriarchal fantasies of conquest and control, it is the Queen herself who delivers the celebrated and impassioned nationalistic speech to Lucius concerning Caesar’s failed invasion, mocking how his ships, “Like egg-shells moved upon their surges, cracked / As easily ‘gainst our rocks” (Cym. 3.1.28–29).
Nevertheless, Mikalachki underlines the patriarchal prerogative, observing that, “respectable nationalism depends in part on respectable womanhood,”29 and Cymbeline ultimately blames his wife’s duplicity for his rued cancellation of Britain’s tribute to Rome, claiming, “We were dissuaded by our wicked queen” (Cym. 5.6.462–3).
The opening scenes in both Dream and Cymbeline present patriarchal societies in which both male and female characters negotiate masculine control. The assumption that each sex conforms to its apposite gendered category is transformed under patriarchy into an explicit pressure to do so. While both Hermia and Innogen express monogamous desire, male authority responds to their perceived transgression with the threat of incarceration as an attempt to control female sexuality and remove their right to procreate. For Cymbeline and Posthumus, this impulse is an expression of their fear of contamination by femininity, and Cymbeline has been read to enact “the recuperation of male power over the female.”31 Although Dream concludes with the assimilation of three female characters into conventional marriage bonds, the imagery of the moon and foreign femininity “suggests that a subliminal discourse on female sexuality pervades Shakespeare’s text,”32 alluding to a realm beyond the bounds of Athenian patriarchy. While the misogyny present in the Sonnets remains firmly within such bounds, the representation of transgressive sexuality is used to explore the blending of masculine and feminine gender qualities into an alluring androgyny. This form of androgyny, while disabling to Posthumus, is present in Dream’s fairyland, and characterizes the effects of Oberon’s drug upon the young Athenian lovers. It is this very quality of the youth that the speaker of the Sonnets tries to persuade him to immortalize through Valley Humanities Review Spring 2011 20
procreation, a process he likens to his own immortalization of the youth in verse. Overall, the representation of gendered relations in each text suggests that destabilizing gender expectations could be liberating for the full range of human relationships.
