Love is a central theme in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare describes four kinds of love in this play.
Forbidden love is demonstrated between Hermia and Lysander. Hermia chooses a life on the run with her lover so that she is not forced to marry a man she does not love. In this play and others, Shakespeare seems to suggest that forbidden love is one of the deepest forms of love, as his characters tend to choose extreme consequences in order to achieve it.
Unrealized love exists in Helena's infatuation with Demetrious. She is very taken with the young man, but he only has eyes for Hermia. Helena chases after him through the forest desperate for his attention—though this attention is only returned thanks to a love potion.
Jealous love is displayed between the faerie king and queen, Oberon and Titania. Oberon is jealous of the attention that his queen displays for her adopted changeling son. He demands that she pay attention to him alone. When she refuses, Oberon concocts a scheme to embarrass his wife. They eventually make amends, but it seems that this rivalry is a hallmark of their love.
There is also chaotic love. Cupid really is blind in this play, and his potion causes a number of mix-ups. When Titania falls in love with the donkey-headed Bottom, she probably does not truly love him. However, her infatuation can be seen as symbolic that love often seems to make little sense.
Overall, Shakespeare is trying to teach his audience that love can take many forms and that it has the great potential to lead to trouble. That he wrote Romeo and Juliet at the same time as A Midsummer Night's Dream might be indicative that he was interested in the misadventures of love at the time. As Lysander says in act 1, scene 1, "The course of true love never did run smooth."
Midsummer's Eve is a celebration of the shortest night of the year and is often commemorated by letting loose under the moon while the short night lasts. The moon, or luna, represents lunacy. Therefore, throughout this comic play, Shakespeare celebrates the craziness or lunacy of love, a fit theme for Midsummer's Eve. He is teaching us not to apply rational standards to love: love runs according to its own unpredictable illogic.
Shakespeare covers more than one facet of love's lunacy or illogic. Titania, queen of the fairies, falls in love with Bottom, a lower-class man whose head has been turned into an ass's head. She moons over him and decorates his head with flowers. Helena chases Demetrius into the woods although he spurns her, insisting she will put up with his abuse just to be near him. Demetrius persists in pursuing Hermia, although she has made it clear she loves Lysander. Then, when a love potion puts both Demetrius and Lysander in love with Helena, showing love's fickleness, the play gets truly crazy. As Puck says, though it could apply to the fairies as well:
Lord, what fools these mortals be
One of the famous lines in A Midsummer Night's Dream says, "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." This is, essentially, what Shakespeare is trying to say about love.
The juice that Puck and Oberon apply to the eyes of Demetrius, Lysander, and Titania causes them each to fall in love with the first thing that they see. We know that Demetrius and Lysander love Hermia, not Helena, just as we know that Titania would not love Bottom in her normal state. Shakespeare is telling us that love that looks with the eyes is not real love, and the only real love is between minds. When the juice is removed from Lysander and Titania's eyes, they immediately fall back in love with Hermia and Oberon because their eyes are no longer dictating their feelings.
No comments:
Post a Comment