A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Essay Example

Love Out of Balance: The Illusion of Control in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

AMidsummer Night’s Dream is a star-crossed romp in which contrasts abound, in which chaos and order exist side by side in parallel worlds where love is spectacularly out of balance.  Shakespeare’s farce unfolds in a twilight world in which fairies exist alongside Theseus’ Athens.  The supernatural and mythological inhabit disparate realities that govern perspective and motive, but confound intent.

An aimless force, all-powerful

Holding dominion over all is the chaotic, ungovernable power of love.  Mortals may seek to maintain order within their environment butsuch control is illusory:  love holds sway over them and the events that govern their lives.  Fairies, who embody the arbitrary, unthinking influence of love, affect nature and the affairs of man.  They represent the mysterious forceof love, a phenomenon of nature which can manifest itself in unexpected ways.

The fairies are inscrutable and mischievous interferers, exhibiting ambivalence towardthe happiness, or unhappiness, of mankind.  Their reckless cruelty is not so much representative of nature itself, but of love’s powerful current, which carries all before it.Put simply, they just “do what they do”:

“Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wanter everywhere,

Swifter than the moones sphere” (Shakespeare, 2.1.11-12)

Contrast, too, is a theme which reflects the unpredictability of love and its power over nature – and the supernatural.  Theseus’ love for Hippolyta stems from his admiration of her strength and vitality, nearly masculine qualities.  Swayed by love, Theseus is drawn away from the traditional, submissive female that best fits his orderly ideal,to the Amazon queen and daughter of Ares.  And of course, Titania’sinadvertent love for Bottom is the most hilariously incongruous example of love’s aimless and arbitrary purposelessness, almost slapstick in its use of humor.

The Indian boy interposes a hint of infidelity and illicit love into the complex relationship between Oberon and Titania:

“A lovely boy, stol’n from an Indian king;

She never had so sweet a changeling:

And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild:

But she, perforce, withholds the lovely boy,

Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy” (Shakespeare, 2.1.12)

Power of love

The meddling fairies’ carelessness with the love potion leads to some of the play’s most amusingly chaotic scenes.  Made of the juice from one of Cupid’s misfired arrows, the fairies wield it to devastating effect.  Titania’s love for Bottom and the star-crossed lovers are victims of the potion, which represents the unreasoning and irresistible power of love.  It is the only explanation for such unreasoning romantic behavior.

Oberon himself gives in to the power that the potion represents, believing he can use it  onTitania.  The comedy of errors extends to the king of the fairies; even he must fall prey to the allure of the love potion.  Of course, the first thing Titania sees upon opening her eyes is Bottom.  She falls immediately in love:

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind,
And therefore is winged cupid painted blind.
Nor hath Love’s mind of any judgement taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste(Shakespeare, 1.1.8)

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, supernatural forces representing love cause characters to doubt their sanity and feel a sense of madness.  Shakespeare utilizes a characteristically self-mocking tone to summarize the confusion in his comic tryst:

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet

Are of imagination all compact.

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;

That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt.

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven(Shakespeare,5.1.7-17)

At play’s end, Puck, the agent of pure mischief, reminds us that what we imagine we’ve learned has been nothing more than a dream.  Love, the great influencer, is so pervasive that we often don’t perceive its subtler impact on our lives.  Puck causes us to wonder, if only for a moment, if love itself may be an illusory force.

Works Cited

Shakespeare, W.  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.   Oxford: Clarendon Press (1889).