A Midsummer Night’s Dream may be understood as a play primarily about patriarchal authority. The play foregrounds this topic as a source of conflict through the opening lines of Hippolyta and Theseus. While Theseus remarks on his excitement for his wedding day, “Four happy days bring in / Another moon. But, O, methinks how slow / This old moon wanes!” (1.1.2-4), Hippolyta invokes the moon as a symbol of chastity and female independence: “then the moon, like to a silver bow / New-bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities.” (For more information on the moon as a symbol, please refer to the section, The Natural World → The Moon.) Theseus specifically cites widows’ status as individuals with financial power in comparison to time’s deterring force to his aims: “[The moon] lingers my desires / Like to a stepdame or a dowager / Long withering out a young man’s revenue” (1.1.4-6). Theseus, then, exposits about how he achieved his engagement to Hippolyta, by conquering the queen of the Amazons in battle, a victory over a symbol of female independence and power, “Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword / And won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.17-18).
Following the introduction to Hippolyta and Theseus’s characters, the play introduces its central conflict: father Egeus’s will to control his daughter’s choice in marriage. Deferring to the authority of the duke of Athens, Egeus’s “beg[s] the ancient privilege of Athens” in deciding his daughter’s fate in marriage (1.1.42); Theseus effectively represents a patriarchal law as well. Invoking the idea of parthenogenesis, Theseus characterize Hermia’s birth as the creation of her father alone and his to use or destroy (“figure or disfigure”):
Be advised, fair maid.
To you, your father should be as a god,
One that composed your beauties, yea, and one
To whom you are but as a form in wax
By him imprinted, and within his power
To leave the figure or disfigure it. (1.1.47-52)
Theseus’s proclamation of the law sets the stakes for the story: “Either to die the death or to abjure / Forever the society of men” (1.1.67-68). One may see Egeus and Theseus in parallel roles, in seeing the house as a microcosm for the state, to see the relationship between the king or prince and their subjects as analogous to the relationship between the male head of the household and the children and his servants. Here, Egeus and Theseus look to each other to reinforce social norms and power structures. Notably, the two lovers’ way out of their precarious situation involves Lysander’s “a widow aunt, a dowager”; the window is maintained as a symbol of female independence and power (1.1.159).
In such a patriarchal society, Hermia fights with individualism, first willing her father to see from her point of view, “I would my father looked but with my eyes” (1.1.68), and then deciding to join Lysander in running away from “[her] father’s house…[to] the wood” (1.1.166-167). Meanwhile, Helena combats the patriarchal norms herself, deciding to pursue her beloved, Demetrius, in the absence of him wooing her.
To contrast with the strict patriarchal authority of Athens, when the action moves to the woods, the domain of the fairies, in Act II, Scene 1, the text introduces a state of equality between the king and queen of the fairies, Oberon and Titania. (Titania contrasts with the other women in the play, in how they communicate with the men in their lives, by speaking plainly and strongly with Oberon, while Hippolyta is conquered, Hermia stuck under her father’s rule, and Helena in unrequited love under the threat of insults.) Oberon, appearing to be driven by a sense of jealousy over the votaress, anoints Titania’s eyes with the juice of the “love-in-idlelness” flower, wishing danger upon her in a scene mirroring the use of a date-rape drug:
What thou seest when thou dost wake
Do it for thy true love take.
Love and languish for his sake.
Be it ounce, or cat, or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair,
In thy eye that shall appear
When thou wak’st, it is thy dear.
Wake when some vile thing is near (2.2.33-40).
What Titania wakes up upon, Bottom, ends up to not be a vile monster, but a kind of humiliation for her, a way for Oberon to embarrass her or shame her for actions catalyzed by him. Oberon moves to assert the primacy of not only him over his wife, but his relationship with his wife over hers with the votaress. Only having secured the changeling boy at the center of their quarrel, a symbol of power over Titania, and this humiliation does he begin to pity “her dotage” (4.1.48) and decide to “undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes” (4.1.63-64). Upon her waking, Titania exclaims in endearment, “My Oberon, what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamored of an ass,” [emphasis added] a change in her attitude toward her husband since the beginning of the play when they were in argument and feuding (4.1.77-78); Oberon has achieved dominance over Titania in her newfound duty to him.
Meanwhile, in Athens, it is not Egeus’s reassertion of his rights as father that Theseus defends once the lovers emerge from the woods, but Demetrius’s wish in his changing passions and choice in wife: “Egeus, I will overbear your will, / For in the temple by and by, with us, / These couples shall eternally be knit” (4.1.186-188). The text invites comparisons of Egeus’s, Theseus’s, and Oberon’s authority, and the extent to which each may function as a tyrant. The overall arch of the play may be interpreted as the reassertion of masculine authority.