Green World is a literary concept defined by the critic Northrop Frye in his book, Anatomy of Criticism

(1957). Frye defines this term using Shakespeare's romantic comedies as the foundation. He says:

“The action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world,
goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal
world.”

“The green world charges the comedies with the symbolism of the victory of summer over winter”

“The green world has analogies, not only to the fertile world of ritual, but to the dream world that we
create out of our own desires. This dream world collides with the stumbling and blinded follies of the world
of experience, of Theseus' Athens with its idiotic marriage law..”

“Thus Shakespearean comedy illustrates, as clearly as any mythos we have, the archetypal function of
literature in visualizing the world of desire, not as an escape from "reality," but as the genuine form of the
world that human life tries to imitate.”

“Shakespeare’s type of romantic comedy follows a tradition...which has affinities with the medieval
traditions of the seasonal ritual play. We may call it the drama of the green world, its plot being assimilated
to the ritual theme of the triumph of life and love over the waste land... in all these comedies there is the
same rhythmic movement from normal world to green world and back again.”

 A Midsummer Night's Dream serves as an exploration of the green world through the fairies'
interference in the romantic entanglement of the Athenian lovers. The majority of the play's action takes
place in the woods outside of Theseus' Athens, with Shakespeare primarily using Athens to frame the
narrative in civilization. The woods of A Midsummer Night's Dream serves as an analogy to a dream-like
world created out of our desires that serves to contrast the "stumbling and blinded follies of the world of
experience.

The Myth of Deliverance:

“Eros triumphs over Nomos or law”

“But comedy is a mixture of the festive and the ironic, of a drive toward a renewed society along with a
strong emphasis on the arbitrary whims and absurdities that block its emergence”

In A Midsummer Night s Dream that we can see this 'green world' type of structure in Shakespearean
comedy most fully and suggestively. The action of this play is constructed around three main groupings of
its characters. The first group is at the Athenian court, with Theseus and Hippolyta at the centre, and four
lovers before them. As so often in comedy, an absurd or unreasonable law is being appealed to, in this case
by Hermia's father Egeus. The law of Athens says that a young woman must marry the man her father
chooses or face the alternatives of death or perpetual imprisonment in a convent. Egeus is far gone in
senility, and shows no distress at the possibility of his daughter's being executed if she does not marry the
man he chooses as a surrogate for himself. It is natural to want to rationalize this scene by saying that
Theseus probably has a better private strategy in mind, and will talk Egeus around to it offstage.

Once again, an unreasonable law, whatever we think of it, is not openly denounced but merely evaporates
from the action.
In the world where there could be such a law, reason and order are assumed to be in complete control of
emotion and impulse, and the most natural symbol of this is absolute parental authority, especially in
sexual matters, with any deviation from it leading to death or sterility.

The play is primarily for Theseus a reflection of the class structure of his own society. The sensitivity and
courtesy with which he responds to the play are genuine enough, and the actors are left with the
impression that they have done an excellent job of entertaining the court, as indeed they have.

The actors are sure that the ladies at least in their audience will not be able to distinguish fiction from fact,
and so accompany their lion with reassurances that he is not a real lion.  court ladies are unimaginably
delicate and fragile.

Every drama of Shakespeare contains a great variety of sub dramas, and the sub-drama of the four lovers
in the enchanted wood, however fanciful in detail, is a whole experience which is infinitely greater than the
sum of its parts.

Hippolyta disagrees with Theseus about the reality of the lovers' experience:

“all their minds transfigur'd so together”

 The word 'transfigur'd' indicates that the experience is neither real nor illusory, but has got clear of that
commonplace antithesis. The dramatist is not interested in the credible, but in the strange and admirable,
the illusion more real than reality, the reality that incorporates all the dreams of illusion.

Hippolyta's other comment is in response to Theseus' remark, quoted above, that all dramas are unreal,
andbad plays can be good plays if imagination amends them. She says:

'it must be your imagination then, and not theirs.'

In this play the daylight and the moonlight world do have some kind of equal and simultaneous validity:
the dream world enters into and informs waking experience, though, as Bottom discovers, it is very difficult
to reverse the process and reconstruct the dream. And so, as Puck says in the Epilogue, those in the
audience who don't like the play can pretend that they have dreamed it.

The wood is unmistakably a wood of Eros: Cupid's darts and magic potions are all about us, and people
behave very strangely under erotic influence. As Plato had said so many centuries previously, Eros can
never be clearly separated from madness, and madness, though a different thing from folly, often appears
as folly in the waking world.

In classical mythology, to which A Midsummer Night's Dream owes a great deal, the moon is female, and is
a part of what Robert Graves calls the Triple Will, being also the virgin huntress Diana (one of whose names
in Ovid is Titania) on earth and Hecate or Persephone in the lower world: Puck speaks of 'triple Hecate's
team.' It might be possible, then, to think that the fairy world represents a female principle in the play
which is eventually subordinated to a male ascendancy associated with daylight.

The traditional Christian explanation of reality and illusion is that God created a real and perfect world, and
that man fell out of it into his present world, which is subject to the illusions generated by sin and death.
The only progress toward reality that man is capable of is the progress from this world up toward the
original world that was intended to be his home.
This is a purgatorial ascent, the means being obedience to law, virtue, morality, and the sacraments of
religion.

The structure of Christian doctrine in Shakespeare's day envisaged a conception of 'nature' on two levels.
On the lower level was the 'fallen' world we are born in, to which animals and plants seem reasonably well
adjusted, but from which man is or ought to be alienated.

 Man is to turn away from this level of nature and seek in his institutions a kind of discipline that will help
to raise him to a higher and specifically human level of nature. It is 'natural' for man, though not for an
animal, to wear clothes, to live under social discipline, to feel moral obligations, to accept the necessity of
law.

Nature on this higher human level is much the same thing as art, the state of art being also the state of
human nature. Such a nature is primarily what is called natura naturata, nature as a structure or system,
and is founded on the horror of idolatry which inspired so much of early Christianity and of Judaism before
it. Idolatry means an absorption into a 'fallen' nature and an adoration of whatever is numinous in that
nature. Christian teaching says that while fallen nature reflects much of the glory and wisdom of the
original creation, it is not numinous: all the gods discovered in it are devils. The greatest of all these
potential idols, strictly speaking, is the Eros that is founded in our own sexual impulses, and is
consequently our central link with fallen nature.

Stephen Greenblatt in Representing the English Renaissance

Theseus appropriates the source of Hermia’s fragile power: her ability to deny access to her body. He
usurps the power of virginity by imposing upon Hermia his own power to deny the use of her body. If she
will not submit to its use by her father and by Demetrius, she must “abjure forever the society of men,”
and “live a barren sister all [her] life”. Her own words suggest that the female body is a supreme form fo
property and a locus for the contestation of authority. The self-possession of single blessedness is a form of
power against which are opposed the marriage doctrines of Shakespeare’s culture and the very form of his
comedy.

16th century French cosmographer and writer André Thevet once wrote: “that Patrimonie was not of a
meane of libertie but of thrladome”

Thrladome= the state of being a thrall; bondage; slavery; servitude.

The interaction of characters in the fictive societies of Shakespearean drama–like the interaction of
persons in the society of Shakespeare’s England –is structured by the complex interplay among culture-
specific categories, not only of age and gender but also of kinship and class.

Theseus represents paternity as a cultural act, an art: the father is a demiurge or homo faber, who
composes, in-forms, imprints himself upon, what is merely inchoate matter.