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Act 4, scene 1 of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream opens with the amorous dialogue between Titania and her newly beloved Nick Bottom. In a show of immoderate attention to one of the "hempen home-spuns,"1 Titania's affectionate imperatives add to the scene's dramatic irony: "Come, sit thee down upon this flow'ry bed / While I thy amiable cheeks do coy, / And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head, / And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy" (MND 4.1.1-4). Titania's pursuit of Bottom is so excessive that the love scene becomes sadly comical: not only has the queen of the fairy world been tricked into falling in love with one of the "rude mechanicals" (MND 3.2.9) but he is one whose head, as we know, has been changed into that of an ass. The farce continues as Titania proceeds to cloy the metamorphosed Bottom, yet the inordinate attention comes to no avail: Bottom, like so many confounded lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream, begins to fall asleep. Titania's doting, however, suggests more than mere comedy. The scene invites a comparison between Titania's exaggerated display of passion and that of another lustful female, told in the myth of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus in book 4 of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
In Ovid's story, Salmacis, a nymph unknown to Diana, falls in love with the handsome figure of Hermaphroditus, the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, who, amazed at the beauty of the pond where Salmacis bathes, decides to refresh his body in the crystal waters. When Salmacis sees Hermaphroditus's "naked beautie," such "strong pangs so ardently hir hilde, / That utterly she was astraught."2 Her longing grows until, unable to control herself, she dives into the pool and profusely caresses the surprised bather. When Hermaphroditus rejects the nymph's sexual advances, Salmacis asks the gods to unite them so that the "bodies of them twaine / Were mixt and joyned both in one" (SO 4.462-63).
A striking descriptive image occurs right before the pair's metamorphosis, and it prefigures the hermaphroditic coupling of their bodies. Salmacis throws her arms around Hermaphroditus like "Ivie runnes on trees about the utter rinde" (SO 4.453). The Latin text reads: "solent hederae longos intexere truncos