Screwball Comedies’ Midsummer Dream: Shakespeare, Cavell, and Magical Weakness

This article expands Cavell’s interpretation of The Philadelphia Story (1940) in relation to Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1596) and gendered democratic flourishing. My first section rehearses Geraldine Heng’s argument in Empire of Magic (2004) that the medieval romance genre channels Crusades trauma into imagined British nationhood, as embodied by Merlin. My second section finds a second wave of romantic overflow in Shakespeare’s play via the fairy king Oberon. My third section identifies Cary Grant's “C. K. Dexter Haven” as the film’s Merlin/Oberon. The Dionysian current of this Merlin-Oberlin-Grant flow I call “magical weakness,” a strategic male self-weakening for gendered democratic flourishing.