The dichotomy between the mortal and supernatural world in A Midsummer Night’s Dream plays into William Shakespeare’s comedic tradition on a superficial level. What underlies for humour, love and fantastical dramatisation plays into a satire that exposes and mocks a deeply insidious political and social structure that insists on an dark, artificial and redundant conformity.
The delicate political structure, of both mortal and supernatural realms in the play, is subverted ironically by chaos built on the foundations of love.
-In the mortal realm, Hermia subverts the patriarchal order when she fights for her rights to true love against her father’s orders to marry Demetrius. The Athenian law, personified here in the play through Theseus, the Duke of Athens, states that a father “should be as a god” (31). The parallel drawn between Egeus with a divine bestows him with undisputable authority over Hermia’s person. By refusing to follow orders, Hermia fights against the patriarchal rule and inadvertently accepts the penalty “[e]ither to die the death or to abjure [society]” in that very moment (31). Her
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While she has internalised the social convention that man ought to do the wooing to the passive female, she does the exact opposite of what she says because of Demetrius’ “wrongs”. He has, prior to the play, proved to be disloyal towards her while she remains faithful and woos him to fix their relationship therefore subverting the gender roles. Like her other female counterparts in the play, Helena’s love becomes the stimulant for the chaos she creates. To Alexander Leggatt, the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are so “deeply embedded in the experience of love that they are unaware of convention”, rather than being unaware, they are conscientiously fighting the conventions on the grounds of love, for their love to achieve what they desire (Legatt