This question can be situated within two theoretical
frameworks, feminism and ecocriticism. Ecocritics would be interested in the contrast of
nature with civilization in the play and would ask how the human constructedness of the
city would affect not only the land and ecosystem but the moral and social nature of the
people living and acting therein.
Feminist litersary
critics would look at the relationships between civilization and patriarchal power and
nature and feminine power. Theseus' Amazon queen was a ruler in her own land but is
subordinate in Athens. Do Titania and the two girls have power rooted in a forest whoich
is by its nature disruptive and chaotic, inherently resisting imposition of patriarchal
structures? Do Shakespeare's sources reflect an earlier matriarchal religious and social
order that is associated with the forest as an emblem of social structures existing
before the development of urban patriarchal cvilization?
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