The mood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is far from that of Titus Andronicus and, aside from the absence of beheading and cannibalism, is probably due to the egregious use of sexual puns (see examples below). Shakespeare uses the sexual connotation behind both flowers, as a vulvic symbol, and snakes, as a phallic symbol, to extrapolate an entire garden allegory, and lead his characters into its physical manifestation. Besides the blatant humor behind the imagery, are there other analyses, politically, piously, or otherwise, that the ‘snake in the garden’ allegory might arouse?

1.1.76 “But earthlier happy is the rose distilled / Than that which, withering on the virgin thorn, / Grows, lives, and dies in single blessedness”
1.1.129 “How chance the roses there do fade so fast?”
1.1.185 “When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. / Sickness is catching.”
1.1.214 “And in the wood, where often you and I / Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie”
2.1.99 “And the quaint mazes in the wanton green”
2.1.159 “And loosed his love shaft smartly from his bow, / As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts. / But I might see young Cupid’s fiery shaft / Quenched in the chaste beams of the wat’ry moon”
2.1.165 “Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell. / It fell upon a little western flower”
2.1.249 “I know a bank where the wild thyme blows, / Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, / Quite overcanopied with luscious woodbine, / With sweet musk roses, and with eglantine. / There sleeps Titania sometime of the night, / Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight; / And there the snake throws her enameled skin, / Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in. / And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes”
2.2.9 “You spotted snakes with double tongue”
2.2.69 “This flower’s force in stirring love.”
2.2.146 “To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!”

William