The main theme in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is love, and that’s also the main thing Shakespeare uses in all of his plays. He looks for how people fall in love with people that are attractive to them. You may think you truly love someone just to find out later in life that they’re not the one for you and not really attractive to you. Only after seeing the possible consequences of loving the wrong person in their “dreams” do the lovers finally end up with the person best made for them.
One of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays and it starts out with a very involved web of love issues. Demetrius, a young Athenian man who was first meant to marry Helena, falls in love with a woman named Hermia (who is also Helena’s best friend). In spite of his huge obsession with her, Hermia does not love Demetrius. She is in love with Lysander, another young man from Athens. However, Hermia’s father, Egeus, wishes for her to marry Demetrius. Although Demetrius rejects her, Helena continues to pursue him. Demetrius continues to ignore Helena’s advances and purse Hermia until Puck, a troublesome fairy, uses a love potion on him that makes him love Helena. Puck uses this same potion to make Lysander fall in love with Helena which upsets Hermia, who still wishes to marry Lysander. At the end of the play, Puck reverses the magic that confuses the lovers and everyone ends up with the right person.
The four Athenians wake up in the forest convinced that all the confusion that had occurred was a dream, and having consider their romantic options in their “dreams” finally decide to settle with the best person for them. Magic plays an important role in this play; it is the spark for most of the confusion and heartbreak that happens, but it also turns out to fix the opening love triangle.
Sandra Fischer argues that “when the lovers wake up after all of the confusion of the previous evening, they know exactly who they want to be with because they have explored all of the options of their imagination wishes.” (2) It was noted that on midsummer night people would dream of the person that they would marry. Puck’s struggle of the already complex love triangle allowed Lysander and Demetrius to “dream” of being in love with someone that they would not have expected, and for Helena and Hermia to “dream” of being loved and rejected properly by people that they would not have expected. Demetrius is a large part of the confusion among the lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream because he does not know what he wants for himself relationship wise. He was once in love with Helena, but becomes obsessed with her friend Hermia and believes that she is his true love. However, when magic forces him to become desperately in love with Helena, he realizes that deep down he’s always been in love with her after sleeping on it overnight and coming to his senses the next morning. Puck’s magic allows Demetrius to explore his imaginative want for Helena, allowing him to see past his obsession with Hermia (or his fantasy of what their relationship would be like) to finally choose the right person and clear the confusion between the four friends. In this example, Shakespeare uses magic to show that often desires are driven by curiosity rather than love, and that sometimes lack of desire is driven by unexplored feelings rather than a true lack of affection.
Shabnum Iftikhar states in his article “A Midsummer Night's Dream: Fiction or Truth?” that “one of the main outside situations that influences the lovers in the play is male dominance.” (113) Lysander and Hermia are only in the woods in the first place because of Hermia’s father’s call that she marries Demetrius, Hippolyta is married to Theseus because he defeated her in war, and Titania only ends up falling in love with Nick Bottom because her husband makes his helper Puck use the love potion on her as revenge for not allowing him to have his way. This play is a form of where the male is the head of the family with strict rules in concern to the way that women behave, so male dominance would be an important outside influence on the decisions that the lovers made. The play’s ending offers a flash of hope, however, that the difficulties caused by these strict rules could be beat in the end with the power of love. Lysander and Hermia defeat the obstacles of her father’s disapproval of their love in the end, and they are finally allowed to marry. Shakespeare’s use of conflict between their traditions (like males having more power than females) and the wants of the main characters serves to show that although society’s rules can seem difficult to go up against, sometimes it is necessary to not like them for the purpose of one’s own happiness.
Shakespeare uses the disorder of the forest to help to give a solution to the issues caused by the societal rules that restricted the four lovers. Eric Sterling argues that “Athens represents the order of a civilized society, while the forest symbolizes disorder and chaos.” (2) Even in their ordered society, the lovers are left lost and confused about their romantic lives. Demetrius goes back and forth between who he loves, and Lysander and Hermia does not know how they can be together due to laws that force women to marry the man that their father chooses. Sterling also mentions that throughout the lovers’ time in the forest, Shakespeare hinted at the possibility of disaster. Titania could have remained in love with Nick Bottom, and Hermia could have ended up with both men still in love with her at the end of the play. However, the complicated web of issues manages to work itself out because the chaotic and free environment of the forest allows it to. Shakespeare’s use of the lawlessness of the forest to solve the lovers’ issues serves to show that sometimes problems exist not because of the rules have been broken, but because those rules are too hard to apply to complex real-life situations.
Love is a device used by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that can be viewed as an uncontrollable situation because of its short nature in the play. Shabnum Iftikhar argues that “while the main women in the play are consistent with who they love (Hermia loves Lysander and Helena loves Demetrius) the men’s love seems to be changeable, particularly for Demetrius.”115) Although everyone ends up with the right person at the end of the play, the continuous changing of who Demetrius and Lysander were in love with is a start of a lot of chaos for the lovers. It could be argued that Shakespeare is showing both genders’ love as changes in their character because of Titania’s short-lived obsession with Nick Bottom, it is clear that Shakespeare mainly focuses this picture on male love because of his image of Demetrius. Demetrius is undecided about who he loves even before the fairies’ magic is involved. He goes from a marriage to Helena to being madly obsessed with Hermia without warning, and even after the love potion that sent him back to Helena wears off, he decides that he is no longer in love with Hermia and goes back to Helena. The way that Shakespeare represents Demetrius’s love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream could possibly be expressive of the way that he recognizes male love in real life. Shakespeare characterizes male love as an uncontrollable situation in his play to show how unpredictable it can be in real life.
Although the main four characters in the play seem to be surprised by what is happening to them, their behavior is predictable. M. E. Comtois, however, argues in his book The Comedy of Lovers in A Midsummer Night’s Dream that “Shakespeare purposely makes the main characters predictable so that the focus is on the unpredictable characters of the fairies in the play “ (p. 16-17). Comtois observes that the lovers behave almost like puppets, acting out the usual figure of literary characters who are young, rebellious, and in love. Their predictability allows for more focus on the foolish behavior of the fairies, who complicate their lives randomly because of their own disagreements. The fairies act as more of a chaotic outside force than Egeus because unlike him, they do not have any support in what happens in the lives of the four-young people, they are only using them as tools to help them solve their problems. The fact that the fairies randomly decided to mess with their love lives, it shows that their love was only in the hands of fate. Shakespeare uses the imaginary existence of troublesome fairies in the play to represent the changeable and random character of fate in real life.
Shakespeare uses different elements in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to add unpredictability in a predictable category, and find out truths about life and the society of the time. Audiences know from the beginning that comedies are supposed to end at least somewhat happily, but his use of the fairies’ bad pranks and the disorder of the forest allowed him to add an element of mystery and allowed him to show how unpredictable fate can be in real life. His use of magic in the story also helped in his picture of the characters’ exploration of their own subconscious wants. Shakespeare reveals through their exploration and achievements of their wishes that love and desire are not a given thing, they have to be explored and experienced to make the right decision. Shakespeare also reveals through his characterization of Demetrius and Lysander that desire (specifically in males) can be changeable and change unpredictably. Finally, Shakespeare uses the problem between the wants of the main characters and the rules set in place by society to show that some rules are flawed and that they do not always apply to complex situations that happen in real life. Shakespeare’s use of these elements in his play allow for the play to serve as a reference of common sense and not only a reference of entertainment.
Work cited page
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” “Shakespeare’s character for students” edited by Catherine C. Dominic, Gale, 1997. Page 310-311
Comtois, M. E. "The Comedy of the Lovers in a Midsummer Night's Dream." Essays in Literature, vol. 12, no. 1, Spring85, pp. 15-25. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=hlh&AN=24379228&site=eds-live&custid=magn1307
Fischer, Sandra K. "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." Masterplots, Fourth Edition, November 2010, pp. 1-3. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=lfh&AN=103331MP422609560000490&site=eds-live&custid=magn1307 print
Iftikhar, Shabnum. "A Midsummer Night's Dream: Fiction or Truth?." Language in India, vol. 15, no. 11, Nov. 2015, pp. 110-117. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=ufh&AN=111185863&site=eds-live&custid=magn1307 reference
Sterling, Eric. "A Midsummer Night’s Dream." Masterplots II: Juvenile & Young Adult Literature Series, Supplement, March 1997, pp. 1-2. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=lfh&AN=103331JYS12279720000053&site=eds-live&custid=magn1307 print
“A Midsummer Night’s Dream” “A Student’s Guide to William Shakespeare” edited by Walt Mittelstaedt, Enslow Publishers, Inc., 2005, page 79-93