SOURCE: “Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night's Dream,” in The Production of English Renaissance Culture, edited by David Lee Miller, Sharon O'Dair, and Harold Weber, Cornell University Press, 1994, pp. 123-150.

In the following essay, originally published in 1983, Boehrer claims that A Midsummer Night's Dream presents bestiality as associated with the maintenance of domestic order. The social arrangements in the play, Boehrer states, presume that human nature must be policed since it is threatened by the bestial, and/or female, “other.”

Although no one has paid much sustained attention to the fact, A Midsummer Night's Dream is patently about bestiality.¹ On the most immediate level, Titania's animal passion for the asinine Bottom climaxes the play's fairy subplot. In the process, this passion tests the bounds of Elizabethan theatrical decorum; Titania leads Bottom to a bed of flowers, embraces and kisses him, and woos him with some of the play's...