SOURCE: “A Midsummer Night's Dream as a Comic Version of the Theseus Myth,” in A Midsummer Night's Dream: Critical Essays, edited by Dorothea Kehler, Garland Publishing, 1998, pp. 259-74.

In the following essay, Freake interprets Shakespeare's recasting of the classical myth of Theseus in A Midsummer Night's Dream, particularly focusing on issues of gender dynamics and patriarchal power contained in the story.

Myth criticism, by which I mean examinations of the relation between literary works and the myth on which they are based or to which they allude, has fallen on hard times. Poststructuralist criticism in general distrusts essentialist or trans-temporal modes of interpretation; and varieties of poststructuralism, such as new historicism, which emphasize the intricate connections between texts and their social contexts, shy away in embarrassment from the sort of literary criticism encouraged by Jung or Joseph Campbell.

A Midsummer Night's Dream, it could be argued, is of...