Abstract
Interpretations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream often focus on sight and visuality. Yet music is equally pervasive in this play. Drawing on Renaissance philosophy about music, this paper argues that the diegetic music and musical metaphors employed both mask ideology as aesthetics and expose the dissonances underlying the apparently harmonious comic resolution. An analysis of the play’s music thus enables an understanding of the link between Oberon’s magic and Theseus’ patriarchal law; it is through the slipperiness and excess of music that the violence underlying the latter is disguised and revealed.
Riquet, Johannes