SOURCE: "Expounding the Dream: Shaping Fantasies in A Midsummer Night's Dream,'" in Psychoanalytic Approaches to Literature and Film, edited by Maurice Charney and Joseph Reppen, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987, pp. 120-38.

In the following essay, Hinley contends that in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare uses the "accepted Mogie of the dream" as a means of examining the psychological basis of the lovers' sexual anxieties. Hinley concludes that in the end the lovers establish stable romantic relationships within the boundaries of patriarchal society.

The movement from sexual confusion and tentative bondings to sexual certainty and mutually desired and socially beneficial unions, particularly significant in Shakespearean "green world" comedies, is nowhere so clearly marked as in A Midsummer Night's Dream. There Shakespeare, moving from the structured Athenian world to the supernatural night world of the forest, is freed by the accepted illogic of the dream to explore the psychological...