Pride Month and Shakespeare's indirect questioning of biblical law in A Midsummer Night's Dream
It is LGBTQ+ Pride Month in the United States[1], a celebration observed at various times of the year by a number of other countries around the globe. If you were an Elizabethan playwright and poet named William Shakespeare, you may have questioned certain passages of the Bible used by religious authorities to condemn sex between men, and used to justify related punishments of execution.[2] Yet in Elizabethan England, one would not have been able to have a play approved for performance by the master of revels if it included a virtuous character who complained about unhelpful and outdated biblical laws. How might you have challenged such use of the Bible without getting in trouble with authorities? One could dramatize a conflict stemming from an outdated Roman or Athenian law that is analogous to an outdated biblical law, and in that way, by indirection, make the same point [3]. (I am not the first to notice this.) Early in the first scene of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Drea...