The A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare explores the love possibilities and impossibilities surrounding the marriage of Hippolyta, and Theseus. The play is interconnected through a series of love celebrations covering the whole land with Hermia disobeying the instructions of her father on whom she should marry. The story rolls down to Puck trusting the love-in-idleness flower in order to get her some love from Titania. Hermia and Lysander also escape to the forest with the hope of eloping (Shakespeare 260). The scenes of the play bring forth a mixture of love feelings that drive the reader to evaluate the essence of love in the society. Through the love adventures of the characters, love seems a seed that they all want to grow but a tough emotion to instill in the characters. This paper analyzes the difficulties and challenges that the characters in the play go through in their search for love and mutual understanding.
The play explores the dark side of love. Many of the characters chase after the love of their hearts thinking they will find things easy and that they will swiftly accept to their love. However, this is not always the case. The figurative representation of love by the characters is the first show of how hard love is to find among the characters. By applying the love potion to Titania’s eyes and forcing her to fall in love with a beast, the author shows how hard Puck found it to win Titania’s love. Hippolyta and Theseus are happily married at the end but the watch a play about the unfortunate lovers, a play that shows lack of good blood in the search for love and in the maintenance of a lasting love. This also shows that the author alludes to the toughness of love as a feeling.
Lysander’s comment is the articulation of the tough feeling that drives the minds of most of the characters in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” play. Lysander says that of course love never did run smooth (Shakespeare 261). The statement implies that the characters struggle to maintain their love after a series of challenges that make it sour. According to Lysander, it is not easy to determine when a person truly loves you and when you truly love someone, there is no assurance that he/ she will love you back. The romantic displays in the play do not show an element of true love but a conflict in the love episodes that ensemble in the play. The difficulties that the characters go through in search of love prove to Lysander that love is a tough test for the characters to get through just like his encounter with Hermia. This further makes the love stories of the characters hard.
There is imbalance in the love stories of the four characters, the Athenians. According to the author, the four Athenians are entangled in a cycle that numerically show imbalance in the love adventures of the characters. Hermia loves Lysander, while Lysander loves Hermia. Helena loves Demetrius, and Demetrius loves Hermia instead of Helena. This is a simple show of lack of love balance in the activities of the four characters (Howard 419). The balance in the love activities of the characters is missing showing that the love encounters of each of them is a tough story. In the triangle, two men love the same woman. This leaves the woman with many choices for the woman in terms of love for the men. At the same time, a woman loves a man who does not love her in return. The misfiring love and misplacement of love among the characters shows that love is hard feeling to make in the hearts of the characters.
The use of magic in the efforts to find love is another show that love is a hard feeling to find among the actors. Shakespeare shows that the use of magic uncovers the supernatural power of love. Puck goes to the forest and finds the love potion, thinking of how he could use it to know its effect on love. He mistakenly applies it to Lysander’s eyes and the efforts of this are to make the person to whom it is applied fall in love with a beast. The author notes that the magic causes more panic and unease in the love triangle. The Athenian quartet, two men, and two women, struggle to find balance in their love lives due to the magical effect of the love potion (Howard 417). The magical forces of the forest adventures also shows that love is a hard feeling to evoke among the characters in the pay.
Love is positioned as a feeling that mainly leads to dreams and thoughts in the fantasy world. From the onset of the title, dreams are imperative in the magical development of the story and the forest encounters of the love magic. Hippolyta notes that four days will pass quickly and still love may not be easily found in reference to the dreams for a new love (Buchanan 140). He says, “Four days will quickly steep themselves in night, / Four nights will quickly dream away the time” (Shakespeare 269). Hippolyta dreams of getting true love and adorable feelings of love but that does not come easy. The author shows the forest wishes of puck in form of dreams that love will come to them at some point in life. The fairies in the magical forest are all a dream for the Athenian quartet as they find themselves in an imbalanced love triangle. Shakespeare extends the dreamland part of love through puck to the readers. He says that if they find the play not interesting enough, they should consider it a dream and that although love was hard for them to find, they should dream of the reality of love coming to them at some point.
While the play is mainly ensured to represent a show of the dark side of love, there are points that show that love is easy to find although the mutual point of love may be hard to create. At the beginning of the play, Hippolyta and Theseus seek to love each other (Buchanan 135). Unlike the other characters in the play, Hippolyta and Theseus easily find love and they happily get married. Towards the end of the play, they seem to enjoy their life in love although they are cautious, as they know that true love is hard to find. The fact that Hermia loves Lysander and Lysander loves Hermia shows a coincidence of easy love between the two as they embrace their loves truly and honestly without opposition. Besides the scandal in Athenian love, their case is a little simpler because they have mutual love towards each other.
Through the dreams, love appears to be an easy encounter to get. Helena is in love with Demetrius and the dreams of a perfect love between the two shows that love is such an easy thing for the two to find (Bevington 29). However, their love is later hampered by love challenges and lack of balance in their love hence making the belief that love is hard to find to live on.In a way, as much as love may be hard to find at the initial stages, it finally finds the right mix and the right people get to love each other. Demetrius first loves Hermia but later, he loves Helena after noticing that she was the person to love.
The question of whether love is hard to find is evident in the play as most of the characters show. The love misery among the four Athenians is a clear show that love imbalance is a reason why true love is hard to find. Furthermore, Lysander says that love is never a smooth run. This further shows that true love is not easy to find.
Works Cited
Bevington, David. But We Are Spirits of Another Sort: The Dark Side of Love and Magic in A Midsummer Night's Dream". A Midsummer Night's Dream.Ed. Richard Dutton. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2006. 24–35.
Buchanan, Judith. Shakespeare on Film. Harlow: Pearson.ISBN 0-582-43716-4. 2005. Ch. 5, pp. 121–149
Howard, Jean E. Feminist Criticism.Shakespeare: An Oxford Guide. Eds. Stanley Wells and Lena Cowen Orlin, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 411–423.
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. The Riverside Shakespeare.Ed. G. Blakemore Evans and J.J.M. Tobin.Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1997.256–283.
