The first two characters we meet in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus and Hippolyta, are themselves based on Greek myths. Theseus was, according to legend, the founder and first ruler of Athens. He had two fathers (myths don't need to follow the laws of biology): Aegeus (a mortal) and Poseidon (the god of the sea). This dual parentage gave him both mortal and divine characteristics. Hippolyta was the daughter of Ares, the god of war. She was the queen of the Amazons, a legendary race of female warriors. Depending on which version of the story you read, Theseus either kidnapped Hippolyta or captured her in battle (which, I admit, is not a huge distinction). Theseus makes direct reference to this within the first 20 lines: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword/And won thy love doing thee injuries."
Shakespeare has chosen to set his play inside a Greek myth. But he takes liberties with it by placing completely mortal characters of his own invention in the same space as legendary, quasi-divine mythological figures. He builds the story around his own characters and shoves Theseus and Hippolyta to the periphery; after the first scene, we don't see them again until Act IV. This is not an illogical thing to do. After all, Theseus couldn't have ruled Athens unless he had some people to rule over. Those people weren't mentioned a whole lot in the myths about Theseus, but they must have existed within the universe of the Athenian founding story. Shakespeare fills in the gap by inventing a few of them.
What Shakespeare does here with Greek mythology is actually quite similar to what other authors have done with Shakespeare's works. For example, Tom Stoppard's play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (which I haven't read, but which is mentioned in Thomas Foster's How to Read Literature Like a Professor) revolves around two minor characters from Hamlet. The play makes reference to Shakespeare's original work, just as Shakespeare makes reference to the myths about Theseus, but dares to imagine what the lives of the peripheral people were like. They weren't important enough to be characterized in depth in the original work, but they were people, so they must have had their own problems and conflicts. All that was needed to bring those problems and conflicts to life was an author's imagination--Shakespeare's in the case of Theseus, Stoppard's in the case of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
A few other things about mythological allusions in this play: First of all, they're everywhere! I count eight references to mythological figures in just the first scene of dialogue. Sometimes, they seem almost gratuitous, as when Lysander says, "Tomorrow night when Phoebe doth behold/Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass..." According to the notes, Phoebe is an uncommonly used name for the goddess of the moon. There's a reason that Shakespeare is Shakespeare and I'm not. Still, was it really necessary to make a somewhat obscure mythological allusion in order to say, "Tomorrow night when the moon comes out and reflects in the water..."
At first, I thought that all the references to gods mythological characters might contribute to the setting of the story, functioning as a kind of regional dialect. A Midsummer Night's Dream takes place in Athens, after all. But with my limited knowledge of Greek mythology and a little Googling, I realized that Shakespeare actually uses the Roman names for a lot of these gods. There are lots of mentions of Diana, the goddess of chastity and the moon; the Greeks, however, would have referred to her as Artemis. I don't know why Shakespeare mixed things up in this way, but it's kind of weird.
Shakespeare also plays with the original Greek myth by inserting a character from a different branch of stories. Oberon, the king of fairies, is a figure in medieval literature; he had nothing to do with the ancient Greeks until Shakespeare put him in this play.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is an excellent case study for intertextuality. Literature builds on itself over time. With a little creativity, old things can be twisted into entirely new things; old characters, stories, and meanings can be entirely reinvented. A story lasts far beyond its author's lifetime.
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