84 pages • 2 hours read
A Midsummer Night's Dream
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Themes
The Complexity of Love
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is not necessarily a love story, but the comedy unfolds through the complicated conflicts that arise from love. As Lysander suggests, true love “never did run smooth” (1.1.134). At the beginning of the play, love is a force of chaos. Hermia is willing to risk death to be with Lysander, Demetrius loves Hermia but also wants her punished, and Oberon and Titania are bickering with one another. The complex nature of these lovers’ quarrels is the foundation of the play, as the characters try to resolve their differences and achieve a simpler, more satisfying, and less acrimonious version of love. Along the way, the play mocks and satirizes the idea of simple, romantic love and shows the audience that reality—even a reality that involves fairies and magic—is far more complex.
The loving relationships the play portrays all involve some degree of conflict. Oberon and Titania bicker and play tricks on one another, Theseus marries Hippolyta after a war, and Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena are tangled in a knot of envy, romance, and bitterness. These conflicts stem partly from the fact that love itself is so volatile. The love potion exaggerates and accelerates the process of falling in and out of love, as well as the wild swings in perception this can generate. When Lysander’s feelings for Hermia transfer to Helena under the potion’s influence, he doesn’t simply ignore or abandon Hermia but rather spews vitriol at her: “Hang off, thou cat, thou burr; vile thing, let loose, / Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent” (3.2.261-62). This rapid shift from love to hatred is one the play has already previewed in Demetrius’s cruelty towards his former lover Helena; love is too intense an emotion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream suggests, to fade without conflict.
Further complicating matters is the inner turmoil love produces. As Helena observes, it’s possible to love someone against one’s better judgment: “Things base and vile, holding no quantity / Love can transpose to form and dignity” (1.1.232-33). Though Helena can rationally recognize Demetrius’s faults, her love for him overrides them, just as the love potion makes a donkey head seem beautiful to Titania. This psychological tension makes the already charged relationships in the play even more intense and unstable.
As a comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream features a happy ending. This happiness seems extremely fragile, however; Puck and Oberon have used the love potion to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena while correcting their earlier dosing of Lysander with a second potion that causes him to fall back in love with Hermia. Notably, the play’s language frames both of these as the men returning to their “true” love—Puck applies the potion to Lysander telling him to take “True delight in the sight / Of thy former lady’s eye” (3.3.40-41), and Demetrius describes Helena as his “natural taste” (4.1.171)—which seems to call into question the very idea that some loves are more authentic or lasting than others. This suggests that the weddings at the end of the play aren’t so much the logical conclusion of the characters’ romances as they are an attempt to contain the messy, confused, and shifting experience of love within the societal institution of marriage.
The Balance of Order and Chaos
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the ordered society of Athens contrasts with the chaotic, magical fairy world in the woods. The Greek city-state of Athens—significantly, the Greek city most associated with Classical philosophy, art, and government—functions as a symbol of society and civilization; it is a place that is governed by rules and laws. These laws may be cruel and harsh, as when Hermia faces possible execution for refusing to marry Demetrius, but they provide structure to the characters’ existence. Theseus embodies these rules. He organizes events and celebrations to occur at specific times, such as the arrival of a new moon, and he has the administrative skills of a nobleman, a ruler, and a military commander. Order and hierarchy inform both his identity and his method of ruling; he warns Hermia that she may be executed even as he sympathizes with her problem because he values the enforcement of rules and order more than the life of any single individual.
By contrast, magic and chaos rule the woods outside of Athens. The fairies that live in the woods do not believe in the Athenian model of social order. Puck is famous for his tricks and pranks, using magic to upend the normal rules for his own amusement, Lysander and Hermia enter the woods to escape the city’s rules, Titania refuses to obey Oberon’s authority, and a man has his head turned into that of a donkey. The woods represent the chaos of a disordered society. The rules—whether social, physical, or natural—no longer apply. In the woods, the strict order of Athenian society is taken apart for the amusement of the fairies, who value their own individual enjoyment over the preservation of society.
This is a liberating but also dangerous state of existence. With the help of the love potion, the previously suppressed tensions between Helena, Hermia, Demetrius, and Lysander boil over and nearly lead to physical violence. Their character arcs are therefore only complete when, after a night of chaos, the Athenians return to the city and its rules. The night of disorder has rearranged their social connections, and they are able to return to the city in an acceptable way. Hermia marries Lysander and Demetrius marries Helena, while Bottom’s head is returned to normal. The experience of chaos teaches the characters how to function better in the strict, ordered society to which they return. Meanwhile, the brush with Athenian society seems to have had the opposite effect on the fairies, lending a bit of order and hierarchy (e.g. Titania’s submission to her husband) to an otherwise chaotic world.
The Blurring of Dreams and Reality
In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, reality is never quite certain. Once the characters step beyond the ordered, ordinary city of Athens, they enter a chaotic world where they are never entirely sure what is real and what is a dream. Characters such as Hippolyta and Lysander make direct reference to dreams and dreaming, often when they are struggling to come to terms with the world around them. At many points in the play, characters lie down and sleep, waking up so changed that they may further question whether they are dreaming or experiencing reality. Demetrius wakes up and falls in love with Helena, as does Lysander. Titania wakes up and falls in love with Bottom. At the end of Act IV, the characters fall asleep and most of them return to their normal states. The act of sleeping and the possibility of dreaming force the characters to question their perception of reality.
The self-conscious theatricality of the play explores questions of reality from a different but related angle. Though not the only work of Shakespeare to contain a play within a play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream devotes an unusual amount of time and attention to the laborers’ production of Pyramus and Thisbe. Throughout their preparations and performance, the workers worry constantly that the audience might confuse the production with reality. This initially seems an absurd fear given how unconvincing their acting is. However, the characters, plot, and themes of the play do strongly mirror A Midsummer Night’s Dream’s, as does the laborers’ transformation of a potential tragedy into comedy. The production therefore blurs the lines between reality and unreality further, presenting a dreamlike echo of the real-world events the characters have dismissed as dreams. Puck’s closing monologue makes the relationship between dreams and theater explicit, giving the audience, like the Athenians, the opportunity to tell themselves they “have but slumbered here” (Epilogue, 3).
The Athenians do just this since it is the only way they can explain the events they have witnessed and taken part in. This creates a disconnect, in which the audience is aware of reality while the characters dismiss everything as a dream. This disconnect is an example of dramatic irony, in which the audience knows information that the characters do not. Unlike most examples of dramatic irony, however, this disconnect between dreams and reality shows the absurdity of the characters’ lives and the extent to which reality itself is unreal; their normal, orderly existence in Athens is as much a fantasy as anything they experienced in the woods. Perhaps just as significantly, it is only through their “dreams” that they can settle back into this existence. Although Theseus favors the security and simplicity of “reality” and dismisses dreams as suitable only for “[t]he lunatic, the lover, and the poet” (5.1.7), the play suggests that fantasy and fiction are central to waking life.
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