These passages are from Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1966), "Titania and the Ass's Head," pp. 213-36.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is the most erotic of Shakespeare's plays. In no other tragedy or comedy of his, except Troilus and Cressida, is the eroticism expressed so brutally. . . .

It is worth having a closer look at the "bestiary" evoked by Shakespeare in the Dream. As a result of the romantic tradition, unfortunately presented in the theater through Mendelssohn's music, the forest in the Dream still seems to be another version of Arcadia But in the actual fact, it is rather a forest inhabited by devils and lamias, in which witches and sorceresses can easily find everything required for their practices.

You spotted snakes with double tongue,
Thorny hedgehogs, be not seen;
Newts and blindworms, do no wrong,
Come not near our Fairy Queen. (II, 2)

Titania lies down to sleep on a meadow among wild thyme, ox-lips, musk-roses, violets, and eglantine, but the lullaby sung by the fairies in her train seems somewhat frightening. After the creatures just quoted they go on to mention long-legged poisonous spiders, black beetles, worms, and snails. The lullaby does not forecast pleasant dreams. The bestiary of the Dream is not a haphazard one. Dried skin of a viper, pulverized spiders, bats' gristles appear in every medieval or Renaissance prescription book as drugs to cure impotence and women's afflictions of one kind or another. All these are slimy, hairy, sticky creatures, unpleasant to touch and often arousing violent aversion. It is the sort of aversion that is described by psychoanalytic textbooks as a sexual neurosis. Snakes, snails, bats, and spiders also form a favorite bestiary of Freud's theory of dreams. Oberon orders Puck to make the lovers sleep that kind of sleep when he says:

lead them thus
Till o'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep
With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep. (III, 2) . . .

[His previouly rendered wishes for Titania, who will instantly fall in love with Bottom and his ass's head when she awakens, are equally ominous.]

The next thing then she, waking, looks upon
(Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey or on busy ape)
She shall pursue it with the soul of love. (II, 1)

Oberon openly announces that as a punishment Titania will sleep with a beast. Again the selection of these animals is most characteristic, particularly in the next series of Oberon's threats:

Be it ounce or cat or bear,
Pard, or boar with bristled hair. (11, 2)

All these animals represent abundant sexual potency, and some of them play an important part in sexual demonology. Bottom is eventually transformed into an ass. But in this nightmarish summer night, the ass does not symbolize stupidity. From antiquity up to the Renaissance the ass was credited with the strongest sexual potency and among all quadrupeds was supposed to have the longest and hardest phallus. . . .

Titania has closed her eyes: she is dreaming about pure animality.