‘Moving grove’: Dionysian rites of passage in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth

Abstract

The major English medieval pagan folk customs, feasts, and rituals that survived in early modern England share the death-resurrection motif of the Greco-Roman agrarian rites and mystery religions associated mainly with the myths of Dionysus. This comparative study between two generically different plays, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Macbeth, purports to bring out, respectively, the degree of violence in a green comedy, and the effect of greenery in a tragedy of blood. It draws on René Girard's anthropological theory of sacrificial violence and scapegoating to examine the rites of passage in both plays through the archetype of the regenerative cycle of nature.