[Download] "Economies of Desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream." by Shakespeare Studies # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Economies of Desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
- Author : Shakespeare Studies
- Release Date : January 01, 2004
- Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 200 KB
Description
OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, scholars have grown increasingly interested in two seemingly-unrelated patterns of reference in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream (ca. 1596). On one hand, they have encountered a string of allusions to cross-species eroticism that, when taken collectively, may be read as a correlative to the play's language of patriarchal hegemony. On the other hand, they have discerned an undercurrent of sexual reference in the play that foregrounds various sorts of same-sex attachment. In the following pages, I aim to emphasize the structural complementarity of these two discursive patterns, to examine their common status as responses to the dominant figures of heteroerotic marital union in Shakespeare's comedy, and most particularly to investigate their relation to the exchange of love objects through which the play's various plots achieve their resolution. My general thesis is that the bestiality motif in A Midsummer Night's Dream parallels and inverts the play's various references to same-sex communities and attachments, and that both of these discursive patterns may be understood as a nervous projection of tendencies intrinsic to the play's understanding of gender difference and heteroerotic love. Of course, this argument takes for granted a.) that Shakespeare's comedy does refer to bestiality so frequently that these references may be regarded as a motif unto themselves and therefore considered worthy of collective study, and b.) that the play refers in similar fashion to relations that might be described as homosocial, homoaffective, or even homoerotic. Since I assume these things to be so, and since the remainder of my argument depends upon these assumptions, it is best to begin by reviewing the evidence in their favor. Since this evidence has already been advanced elsewhere, I will present it here in condensed form.