‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ was written by William Shakespeare in 1595 and performed to celebrate a wedding in a noble family. It was seen at the time as a light comedy and nothing more, but audiences and those studying the play have since discovered that the play is more dramatically complex than first thought. Shakespeare explores many different themes in a midsummer Night’s Dream, one of the main ones being love. The portrayal of love in the play has been described in different forms; it can be described as a sickness or madness, in the way that it causes people to behave irrationally. It has also been thought that Shakespeare had wanted to mock love, and make it seem like a foolish game.
The play opens as a wedding is supposed to take place, which people see as a holy union between two people in love. However, that union is interrupted by a request from outside, as Egeus arrives to protest against his daughter Hermia, saying: “Come I, with complaint/against my child”, because she refuses to marry the man he chose. The fact that this symbol of love and devotion, a wedding, begins the play, but never actually takes place initiates the exemplification of the foolishness of love for the rest of the drama. Also the depiction of happy love is interrupted with imbalanced, even chaotic love until it is sorted out at the end of the play. Whether he intended to or not, Shakespeare appears to ridicule love, as he seems to epitomize how foolish it is throughout the play.
Titania and Oberon, the fairy queen and king, enter in Act 2 Scene 1, enraged with one another although they are supposedly in love. Oberon wants to have something evil happen to his queen, because of their argument, she refuses to give him what he wants, as seen in the same scene, when they say: “I do beg but a little changeling boy…The fairy land buys not the child of me”. This makes him or his love seem immature or crude. Their image in the play is of a fairy couple that currently hates each other.
Making Titania fall in love with a vile creature mocks the validity of love.
Seeing the spectacle of the four lovers, Demetrius, Helena, Hermia and Lysander quarrel in Act 3, Scene 2 is amusing to the fairy Puck. He states in the most famous line from the play, “What fools these mortals be!” implying that their foolishness arises from their love for each other. Puck sees that love makes the mortals act foolish, but Puck doesn’t see that the world of the fairies is by no means immune to the foolishness of love; he forgets that love and the arguments caused by it is doing the same, arguably worse, to his Fairy King and Queen.
It is when Titania falls in love with Bottom in Act 3, Scene 1: “On the first view to say I swear, I love thee”, that Shakespeare appears to be making pure mockery of love. A fairy queen falling deeply in love, not even with a human, but with an ass, an ugly and clumsy creature is a ridiculous notion. The image of a beautiful fairy doting on and seducing an ass is both daring and shocking, especially to a Shakespearean or Elizabethan audience, as all of the actors would have been men! I think this is taking the mockery of love to extremes to prove a point.
Love is also mocked in a play within a play. The commoners (and comic relief of this Shakespearean play) decide to put on the lamentable tragedy of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’. They torture this great love story to laughter, and inadvertently mock the ideal of love by assigning the parts randomly. It seems as if Shakespeare does the same, with the four young Athenian lovers. Before and after the love potion is used for the first time, one woman has too many suitors and the other too few, the parts of who loves whom are given randomly.
Love is again given a foolish name with the character Bottom. He is in love with himself, he loves to hear himself speak, wants to take every role in the play and he plans to have his ‘dream’ written up, “I will get/Peter Quince to write a ballad of this/dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream’”. Having Bottom dote upon himself is the illustration of a silly and comic character, mocking a different type of love.
It was the love potion that led the characters to such bizarre behaviour, which caused chaos in the character’s lives on stage. Throughout the story, the audience knows that all this strangeness is because of the love potion, or because of love. It seems slightly ridiculous that just a single drop of the love potion can cause major changes. Shakespeare used this idea or technique to show us that love is fickle and forever changing, and therefore agreeing with the statement, because in highlighting this point, the play did make fun of love. This technique is consistent, suggesting Shakespeare had intended to do this.
The love potion could have also been used to show how young love changes as quickly and easily as though they are being put under a love spell. For instance, Demetrius’ coldness towards Helena changes to infatuation, in Act 2, Scene 1, “I love thee not”, and then in Act 3, Scene 2, “O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!” The comical elements of the play emphasise this by making the characters change their feelings towards each other more often then necessary.
Shakespeare, instead of mocking love, could be trying to show what a powerful emotion it is. In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, love often drives people to do things that are out of character, like when Hermia went against her father Egeus by not marrying the man he had chosen. There are more examples of when Shakespeare demonstrates how love can take control, and take away people’s sense and rational thought; even Bottom sees this, as he says in Act 3, Scene 1, “reason and love/keep little company together nowadays”. When Lysander and Hermia run away to the forest, they didn’t stop to think about wild beasts, or what they’d do for food or shelter. Similarly, when Titania fell in love with Bottom, she never stopped to think that he was a man with the head of an ass. This shows to a greater extent the power of love: the fairies have some authority over nature i.e. they are very influential, and yet love can control the most powerful of them. On that point, it is worth noting that the massive disturbances in nature came from what was love, with Titania and Oberon in Act 2, Scene 1.
Shakespeare could also be illustrating the ways that love doesn’t always go to plan, or the way people might want it to. Oberon wanted the relationship problems of the Athenians to be sorted, so in Act 2 Scene 1, he asked Puck to “anoint [Demetrius’] eyes”. Shakespeare is demonstrating that people are idealistic about love and they think that they can make it all happy and even. Then when Shakespeare makes them fall in love with the ‘wrong’ person, Shakespeare is showing how, as said by Lysander in Act 1 Scene 1, “The course of true love never did run smooth”.
Shakespeare makes ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ a comedy by making fun of the powerful and complex emotion of love, which he does in many different ways. By making fun of love and lovers, Shakespeare gets his point across more easily and effectively- the fact that love is extremely powerful and causes people to do things out of character.
In conclusion I think that throughout the play Shakespeare tries to portray the strong emotions of love but in order to do this he uses the element of comedy, which at times makes it seem like he is only mocking love, so that the play is light and dreamlike but still has depth.
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