SOURCE: Clary, Frank Nicholas. “‘Imagine No Worse of Them’: Hippolyta on the Ritual Threshold in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.” In Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance, edited by Douglas F. Rutledge, pp. 155-66. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Clary discusses the Pyramus and Thisbe interlude in A Midsummer Night's Dream in terms of the ritual of wedding-night revelry. The critic argues that although traditionally the principal function of this rite is to allay male fears of domestication, here it is also designed to initiate Hippolyta into Athenian society.

The Pyramus and Thisbe episode at the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream is the threshold moment in a pageant of events that began with an early morning observance of the rite of May and will continue for a fortnight in nuptial solemnity and nightly revels. Between after supper and bedtime on the wedding night...