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ABSTRACT
This essay examines the unsuspected role of equity in A Midsummer Night's Dream. According to Plutarch, Theseus promised that Athens would "be a common wealth . . . [in] which he woulde only reserve to him selfe the charge of the warres, and the preservation of the lawes. . . ." As such, ancient Athens recalls early modern England, which also considered itself a nation ruled by laws, not men. Theseus, therefore, must follow "the ancient privilege of Athens." But following the law did not mean slavishly enforcing it, and in a move that echoes the sixteenth-centur y debates on the topic, Theseus uses his equity to soften the law as much as he can, thus coming up with the wrong result (enforced marriage)-but for the right reasons. At the play's end, Theseus famously overrules Egeus ("I will overbear your will "), but in doing so, Theseus replaces law with will, and by doing so comes perilously close to the definitive behavior of a tyrant. He thus comes to the right result, but for the wrong reasons. The article demonstrates that the problem of law and equity participates in a web of disturbing resonances that reinforce each other and further trouble the play's performance of comic closure.
The topic of law in A Midsummer Night's Dream might seem, on the face of it, almost absurdly beside the point. Most critics focus on the twin problems of love and gender relations, the role of the "rude mechanicals," or the relationship between this play and Elizabeth I. Similarly, discussions of Theseus concern his problematic erotic life rather than his role as Athens's ruler and his relationship to law.1 Conversely, the many scholars interested in Shakespeare and the law usually leave this play alone, preferring more obviously legalistic texts, such as The Merchant of Venice or Othello.2 Two recent critical guides to A Midsummer Night's Dream do not mention law at all.3 Yet there are very good reasons for examining A Midsummer Night's Dream as a "constitutional comedy" (10), to use Oliver Arnold's excellent phrase. While the total number of lines explicitly devoted to the question of law may be small, they are crucial to the meaning, direction, and action of Shakespeare's comedy, which as...