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A Midsummer Night's Dream was written in honor of the marriage between Countess Southampton and Sir Thomas Heneage, the Queen's advisor. It is thought the Countess married her knight for political protection when her son committed the dangerous faux pas of promising to marry powerful Lord Burghley's granddaughter and, four years later, obdurately refused the match. Young Southampton's peculiar reluctance to wed a comely, well-titled woman culminated in a well-documented scandal. Shakespeare, then the Southamptons' family poet, gamely transformed Heneage into politic, dignified Theseus, wizarded the headstrong countess into Hippolyta and set both above the antics of the lovers, the dissipations and quarrels of the fairies. But the graceful newlyweds only frame the play; within, tumble riotous scenes of deluded, mismatched lovers, of man turned ass. A Midsummer Night's Dream congratulates the royal couple on their mature equanimity but more directly addresses the evolution of such psychosexual stability, the resolution of oedipal conflict, and the consequent ability for proper gender identity and adult heterosexual intimacy. The lovers dream of maturity, and finally the audience is asked to share their “vision wondrous fair.”
The younger characters in the play are at first considered primarily in relation to their contrasexual parent: Hermia and Helena are “Egeus' and Nedar's daughters,” and the youthful mechanicals, especially Bottom, are frequently addressed as “Mothers' sons.” This anticipates three obvious oedipal situations. The play opens with Egeus's unreasonable demand that his daughter, Hermia, either marry a man she, with good reason, has sworn never to wed or by