SOURCE: "Female Desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Shakespeare Yearbook, Vol. 2, Spring, 1991, pp. 115-29.

In the following excerpt, Taylor examines the relationship between gender and the operation of desire in A Midsummer Night's Dream, asserting that "inside men, desire tends to eradicate the person of the other; inside women, it does not."

Generally women begin to … yearn for a male … at fourteen years old, then they do offer themselves, and some plainly rage.

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

In Shakespeare Our Contemporary, published some twenty-five years ago, Jan Kott insists on the utter "interchangeability" of the four young lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander. "The lovers are exchangeable," he writes. "The entire action of this hot night, everything that has happened at this drunken party, is based on the complete exchangeability of love partners." More recently [in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in...