Jacob Matham, 1571-1631, Moreelse “Acteon Changed to a Stag after Surprising Diana in Her Bath” from The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol. 4, Netherlandish Artists: Matham, Saenredam, Muller. Retrospective conversion of The Illustrated Bartsch (Abaris Books) by ARTstor Inc. and authorized contractors
Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt and the moon, is one of many classical references in A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream. These images are all illustrations from within 20 years of the play’s writing, around 1594-1596.
All are set in an uncivilized forest, with no structures and no technology more advanced than a pot. In many of them, to an untrained eye, Diana is undistinguishable from her nymphs—all appearing as young, beautiful women. Particularly in the first illustrations, the women are nude and seemingly sexualized.
Engraving by Isaac Briot, “Actaeon changed into a stag;” engraving 1619; Warburg Institute: Renaissance and Baroque Book Illustrations
Both are taken from the myth of Acteon. He’s recognizable by his spear and his antlers. Concisely, in those two symbols and the body language of the women he encounters, the myth is retold. The spear is a blatantly phallic object, and Acteon’s threat to the women—and especially to Diana—is the risk he poses to her sexual chastity. As punishment, as the antlers prefigure, she translates him, as Shakespeare would use the word in MSND, into a stag, which his own dogs eat.
The third and fourth images depict Diana’s discovery of the pregnancy of one of her maids, Callisto. Again, she translates the sexual transgressor. That fate is not foreshadowed in the two illustrations—in fact, in the third, it’s difficult to tell who’s who. The women are all essentially interchangeable, insignificant as individuals and absorbed into Diana’s identity.
Antonio Tempesta, “Diane Noticing Calisto’s Pregnancy.” The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol. 36, Antonio Tempesta: Italian Masters of the Sixteenth Century. Retrospective conversion of The Illustrated Bartsch (Abaris Books) by ARTstor Inc. and authorized contractors
So what does this all have to do with Shakespeare? I was hoping in these images to find what would have been in the minds of Shakespeare and his audience when he invoked Diana, both by name and in the figure of the watery moon.
Whether, if you yield not to your father’s choice,
You can endure the livery of a nun,
For aye to be in shady cloister mew’d,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon.
Thrice-blessed they that master so their blood,
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage;
But earthlier happy is the rose distill’d,
Than that which withering on the virgin thorn
Grows, lives and dies in single blessedness.
(I.1.70-78)
Upon that day either prepare to die
For disobedience to your father’s will,
Or else to wed Demetrius, as he would,
Or on Diana’s altar to protest
For aye austerity and single life.
(I.1.86-90)
-THESEUS to HERMIA
In the very first scene of the play, Theseus uses the myth of Diana and her women followers as a threat to Hermia. Should she refuse the will of her father and Demetrius, she will either die or be forced to live as “a barren sister,” “withering on the virgin thorn.” In the context of civilized patriarchal Athens, he views this as horrible outcome.
But when the story moves into the forest, her realm, Diana represents a powerful alternative—although not, possibly, a better one.
Jan Pietersz Saenredam, Jan Saenredam, [1565?]-1607, Paulus Moreelse, “Diana Discovering Callisto’s Pregnancy;” The Illustrated Bartsch. Vol. 4, Netherlandish Artists: Matham, Saenredam, Muller. Retrospective conversion of The Illustrated Bartsch (Abaris Books) by ARTstor Inc. and authorized contractors
And loosed his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft
Quench’d in the chaste beams of the watery moon,
And the imperial votaress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
(II.1.159-164) (Oberon)
Come, wait upon him; lead him to my bower.
The moon methinks looks with a watery eye;
And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,
Lamenting some enforced chastity.
Tie up my lover’s tongue, bring him silently.
(III.1.192-195) (Titania)
The moon can be readily interpreted as Diana. She has “chaste beams” and “maiden meditation.” But she is also an “imperial votaress”—powerful, and in the notion of empire, a female patriarch, controlling the sexuality of her subjects. In both these passages, the Faerie King and Queen do just that: Oberon, seeking to acquire the love-in-idleness flower he will use to prank his wife and meddle with the sexual desires of the Athenians; Titania, ordering her servants to physically tie and carry Bottom the half-Ass off to her bed. The chaste moon is only interested in quenching desire, but that is also the ultimate act of power.
Power over what? In civilized Athens, women are a token object exchanged to reinforce patriarchal bonds and structure. Judith Butler in Gender Trouble supports this reading of marriage (51-52), and the interaction of Egeus, Theseus and Demetrius in the first scene establishes that motivation almost explicitly.
The greatest challenge to this institution, then, is a woman’s sexual autonomy. In Hermia, we see the smallest-scale form of this, when she seeks to marry only the man she loves. In Hippolyta, we get a more radical vision: the Amazons, traditionally never marrying and using men only for procreation. In Titania, a similar assumption of sovereign power, and the ability to take on as many lovers as she desires. But Diana is the most extreme challenge. Diana and her followers would remove themselves entirely from this social economy, and in fact translate and destroy any threats to their utter independence. They exist in a strictly homosocial state, while events of the play would challenge any such bonds between women—like the friendship between Titania and the mother of the changeling boy undermined by Oberon; and the friendship between Hermia and Helena warped by the shifting affection of their suitors.
Is Diana’s necessarily a better system? It seems, in its own way, just as tyrannical to both its women and its men. Our reading is complicated by the fifth act of the play, when the moon returns in the play within the play, but is depicted incompletely and incorrectly by the rude mechanicals, and mocked by its audience.