SOURCE: Rhoads, Diana Akers. “A Midsummer Night's Dream: Shakespeare's Dramatic Solution to the Problems Poetry Poses for Politics.” In Shakespeare's Defense of Poetry: A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest, pp. 49-60. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, Inc., 1985.

In the following essay, Rhoads contends that in A Midsummer Night's Dream Shakespeare portrayed Theseus as both an ideal ruler and a ruler who lacks the ability to understand love in order to highlight the incompatibility of “desire and politics.”

There are basically two critical attitudes towards Theseus. One sees him as a representative of reason and of rational love as opposed to the madness and irrational love of the other Athenian lovers. His love becomes the norm or the social ideal.¹ Critics who espouse this attitude often refer to Theseus as the ideal ruler, and they give him the attitudes of the Theseus of Chaucer's Knight's Tale.² Like...