 Perhaps this will always be the simple certainty of our lives on earth.



It is deeply ingrained in audiences of comedy, up to and including the present day, to watch for a satisfying moment of ‘happily ever after’ in literature, theater, film, and fairy tales. Thus, one classic and expected element of a Shakespearean comedy is a marriage in the final act. A Midsummer Night’s Dream justly meets this expectation by serving up—near, though not at the final act—multiple marriages. On the way to their connubial terminus, however, the females of A Midsummer Night’s Dream are coerced and manipulated with threats of personal violence. This paper investigates Shakespeare’s use of male-on-female violence in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I will examine the ways violence against women is employed as a source of humor and a means of jovially bending women to the will of men, thereby bringing them—willingly or unwillingly—toward a supposed better end. Shakespeare sets up this underpinning of gender violence in his opening scene.
The first act begins with Theseus remarking on his upcoming wedding. He is filled with happy anticipation as would be expected of any willing bridegroom, and he bemoans the slow drag of time prior to the wedding. It is clear that Theseus is prepared for a celebration. One assumes that the wedding of such a nobleman would necessarily be cause for celebration, for “pomp.” It seems incongruous that Theseus should mention funerals in the same breath as his marriage. Why does he need to make such a pointed distinction between rousing “merriments” and the need to “turn melancholy forth”? If we back up and consider Hippolyta’s response to Theseus’s ardent opening salvo, we have an indication. 
Hippolyta expresses none of Theseus’s sense of revelry about the impending marriage. She does not in these lines indicate any feeling of joyous anticipation, referring to the wedding ceremony only as “our solemnities.” Whereas Theseus is anxious about how slowly time will drag until they wed, Hippolyta foresees the time flying by, to arrive too soon, one might suppose. She likens the moon—often a symbol of the female life force and power because of its connection to the menses—to a drawn bow, the weapon of choice associated with the legendary Amazon warriors.  Hippolyta, the Amazon queen, remains, it appears, in a state of resistance to Theseus’s domination; her only weapon against him now, however, is symbolic, an unreachable “silver bow.” She certainly has good reason to resist him. After dismissing Philostrate, Theseus is blunt.
The double-entendre in sword is clear in this passage, and Theseus seems to believe that he has created a mated passion in Hippolyta through rape. His certainty that the wedding will be a “triumph” indicates that he is wholly confident that overpowering Hippolyta is tantamount to taming her. Her compliance, while not strictly necessary to Theseus’s celebration, is fully expected by him.
