Overlapping sovereignties in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

The studies on metamorphosis of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream are mostly dedicated to the explanation regarding the ideas of the space-crossing. Nevertheless, this study is going to show that the issue of transformation in this theatrical work is not associated so much with moving from a city of Athens to a particular space of the wood, but jumping into a mystery of the breakdown of law due to the sovereigns’ intervention in the operation of the law. By focusing on the moment of the play’s representation of the sovereigns, either in Athens or the wood, there appears the issue of the exceptional environment in which law cannot operate, which brings about the metamorphosed conditions happening once Shakespeare’s characters recognize their exposure to arbitrary sovereign power. It becomes clear that A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s issue of metamorphosis is interested absolutely in the conflict between the law and the sovereigns. This appears to me that one aspect of understanding the problem that are associated with the role of the law and of sovereignty is an Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s theoretical notions of sovereignty that will help solve the mysterious problem of the breakdown of law and authority that Shakespeare’s characters jump into through some interesting questions: : how do Agamben’s theories of sovereignty help understand the role of the sovereigns and the operation of sovereignties regarding the law in the particular spaces, and how do his notions of sovereignty help explain the issue of metamorphosis in the play? Through these questions, Agamben’s theories of sovereignty open the opportunity for us to see that A Midsummer Night’s Dream not only allows Shakespeare to show the different forms of sovereignty in the particular spaces of Athens (Chapter 2) and of the wood (Chapter 3), but also leads the way to discuss the issue of the overlap between the two different types of sovereignty through the existence of Bottom’s transformation into what Agamben calls the theriomorphous being (Chapter 4). By utilizing Agamben’s perspective, this dissertation will envision the way in which the Agambenian theory of sovereignty help explore how the two different kinds of sovereignty, human and fairy, operate differently, how these sovereignties deal with the different forms of law, in this case, man-made law in Athens and natural law in the fairy kingdom, and how this affects our understanding of the narrative of the play in relation to the metamorphosis associated with the relationship between humanity and animality when these two kinds of sovereignty are combined, which allows us to see a meaning of the inoperativity of sovereignty, that is, the order beyond what sovereignty is pointing to.