Twenty lines in to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when ‘merriments’, ‘mirth’ and ‘pomp’ have been ordered up to close off and reconcile with sportive ‘triumph’ the memory of the ‘injuries’ inflicted in the pre-history of the play by ‘triumph’ of a martial kind, Egeus comes crashing in upon Theseus’s pre-marital tête-à-tête, fuming, spluttering, ‘Full of vexation . . . with complaint / Against my child, my daughter Hermia’ (1.1.22–3). Stubborn Hermia has dug her heels in, is refusing to marry her father’s choice. She has eyes only for Lysander. Retaliating, the child-changed father demands ‘the ancient privilege of Athens’, to ‘dispose’ of what is ‘mine’ ‘either to this gentleman’ (Demetrius) ‘Or to her death, according to our law’ (41–4). ‘What say you, Hermia?’ asks Theseus (46). She answers: ‘I would my father look’d but with my eyes’ (56). But Theseus counters: ‘Rather your eyes must with his judgment look’ (57). That exchange, in a nutshell, formulates the impasse this most optically challenged (and challenging) Shakespeare play is going to explore, setting up a contest of looking strategies that the Dream is never to reconcile, only, finally, to finesse.