This reading of Athenian patriarchy pits a Calvinist political theology against the natural world outside Athens and the play’s enchanted fairies. This reading is possible because the play frames the problems of marriage and love as metonyms for the problems of free will, predestination, and grace in relationship to religious ritual. Following Peter Lake’s analysis of the trends within the Elizabethan church Hooker was responding to, particularly a Calvinist stress on predestination and a quietist approach to ritual practice (Lake 145-6), I begin by locating these trends in the interference of Duke Theseus and Egeus, sovereign and father, with the marriage plans of the young lovers Hermia and Lysander.

This universe, therefore, is anything but arbitrary. For Hooker the universe is structured according to a hierarchy of laws, including the laws of reason, nature, and scripture crucially, ritual practice is embedded in these general laws and is part of the ordinary functioning of the universe.

Rather than the tragedy Faustus locates in the paradoxical mixture of voluntarism and predestination, Midsummer is a comedy grounded in Hooker’s assumption of God’s rationality expressed as love and the enabling of creaturely virtue (Spinks 111-112). If Faustus dramatizes Calvinist cosmology, my first chapter treats A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a cosmology based on the theology of Richard Hooker.

El eterno legado by Elisabet Castany