Throughout the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, one of the main themes is love. Shakespeare takes this theme and twists it around, showing how he perceives love based on how his characters react in the presence of it. One of the first things that Shakespeare says about love is that it’s messy. It’s imperfect. A popular quote from the play that supports this is said by Lysander in Act I, Scene i, “The course of love never did run smooth. ” By saying this, Lysander is stating that love, like life itself, is full of ups and downs, and not everything is always going to go as planned.
The whole story itself is basically a fight over who loves who, even without any outside magical interference. Lysander loves Hermia, and she loves him back, but Demetrius also loves her, and Helena loves Demetrius, but he doesn’t love her, nor does anyone else for that matter. To add to this already “messy” situation, Lysander and Demetrius both succumb to Oberon and Puck’s mischief and end up in love with Helena, leaving Hermia with nobody to love her. By creating all of this drama and playing with the different couples and their interactions with each other, Shakespeare shows his belief that love is messy.
Another thing that Shakespeare is saying about love is that it is true. Obviously, not all of the love that he writes about is true, but he is stating that true love does exist, and is important. To me, the only couple that really showed true love was Hermia and Lysander, due to the fact that all of the other couples that ended up together were influenced in some way by either the love potion, or some other type of outside pressure to be together.
They were together in t the beginning, but also in the end not because they had to, but because they wanted to. The ove between the two is shown in a quote from Egeus, Hermia’s father, “With cunning hast thou filched my daughter’s heart, turn’d her obedience, which is due to me, to stubborn harshness. ” It is easy to see the rage that he feels because he is unable to control his daughter anymore because the love that she feels for Lysander is true. One last thing Shakespeare is saying about love is that it is strong. Although it can be messy, if it is true, it will persevere through any obstacles thrown at it. An obstacle that just keeps coming back in this play is the love juice.
It causes major complications, but in the only case of true love, between Hermia and Lysander, the two were able to fight through any issues that may have arisen, and end up just as happy as they were before anything had even happened. In one particular soliloquy by Lysander, he utters, ” Or, if there were a sympathy in choice, War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it, Making it momentary as a sound, Swift as a shadow, short as any dream, Brief as the lightning in the collied night, That in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth, And ere a man hath power to say ‘Behold! The jaws of darkness to devour it up. So quick bright things to come to confusion. ”
He lists possible challenges that lovers might have to face, but then states that if it comes to an end, it was not real, insinuating that had the love been real, the two lovers would have been able to fight through all of the obstacles and stayed together. I say that love is intimidating. It’s scary. To me, it doesn’t seem as casual and easy to manipulate as it is to Shakespeare.
In this play, people declare their love readily, without any hesitation. To me, it doesn’t even seem like the people are truly in love, just intrigued by the pure thought of it. If it was really love, they would want to take everything a little bit slower; really get to know each other before making such big decisions, such as marrying each other. Love is a substantial part of people’s lives, not something that should be thrown around just because people feel like saying it.
People should want to say it, but it should create butterflies and make you feel nervous and afraid of how the other person might react. In this play, it doesn’t seem like anybody else really had this type of mentality, everyone was either all in, or all out, completely ready to give their heart away to someone that they barely knew, they didn’t treat love like the big deal that it is. To me, love is serious and intimidating, but in the best way possible.
