SOURCE: McPeek, James A. S. “The Psyche Myth and A Midsummer Night's Dream.” Shakespeare Quarterly 23, no. 1 (winter 1972): 69-79.

In the following essay, McPeek explores Shakespeare's treatment of the Psyche myth in A Midsummer Night's Dream, contending that the play provides a mythic translation of the Psyche legend.

In the phantasmagoria of A Midsummer Night's Dream scholars have discerned and analyzed the elements of several antique fables and fairy toys, but they seem largely to have neglected the curious and extensive relationship of this dreamworld to the story of Psyche and its matrix in Lucius Apuleius' Golden Ass. Many will concede that though Shakespeare may have known other stories about ass-headed men,¹ Apuleius' account of his adventures affords the most likely source for Titania's infatuation with a monster, as well as for some other motifs, as Sister M. Generosa has shown.² But the relationship of the Dream to the...