Shakespeare's Festive Comedy by Barber Cesar Lombardi; Greenblatt Stephen;

Author:Barber, Cesar Lombardi; Greenblatt, Stephen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-02-25T05:00:00+00:00

To you your father should be as a god;

One that compos’d your beauties; yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax,

By him imprinted, and within his power

To leave the figure, or disfigure it.

(I.i.47–51)

The supposedly moral threat is incongruously communicated in lines that relish the joy of composing beauties and suggests a godlike, almost inhuman freedom to do as one pleases in such creation. The metaphor of sealing as procreation is picked up again when Theseus requires Hermia to decide “by the next new moon, / The sealing day betwixt my love and me” (I.i.84–85). The consummation in prospect with marriage is envisaged as a melting into a new form and a new meaning. Helena says to Hermia that she would give the world “to be to you translated” (I.i.191), and in another image describes meanings that melt from love’s transforming power:

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