Destiny Hagenow
BVU Shakespeare
7/10/16
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In a thoughtful essay using at least two of the various lovers in the play, demonstrate how love is an irrational emotion.
Helena loves Demetrius but worries that she is not good enough and that her friend Hermia is his real love. In Act 1, she utters,“And as he errs, doting on Hermia’s eyes, So I, admiring of his qualities. Things base and vile, holding no quantity, Love can transpose to form and dignity. Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.” I think a lot of women, even today, can have feelings like this. Helena is struggling with her self -image because of a man. She’s so distressed that Demetrius is in love with Hermia that she forgets her own self worth. I think this really goes with this play’s theme of love as erratic, inexplicable, and exceptionally powerful. In those lines she is saying that love is not just appearance it’s the perception one has of their beloved when they’re in love. She loses herself and can’t look at Demetrius with a logical eye because she’s in love with him. If that doesn’t prove that love is an irrational emotion, I don’t know what will.
Hermia is upset because her father forbid her and Lysander from marrying, and, if she disobeys her father, Theseus will kill her. Lysander attempts to console Hermia by saying,“Ay me, for aught that I could ever read, Could ever hear by tale or history, The course of true love never did run smooth.” Basically, what he is saying is that there has been many people who have fallen in love throughout the ages, and there have always been difficulties that challenge each relationship. Hermia responds that their love should persevere and that this is just the price they pay for perfect love. Hermia and Lysander are risking their lives for this feeling of love they have for each other. That’s incredibly irrational. They have a happy ending, but at what cost? How long will their happy ending last until their choice to disobey catches up to them?
As is typical of Shakespeare, Athens is presented as lawful and orderly and the forest represents the ungoverned natural world. You can agree or disagree with that statement. I want you to choose some very carefully worded quotes from the play to defend or refute the first sentence.
Athens is all business and realistic. The citizens start having issues with their love lives and decide to go into the woods to sort out their ridiculous and irrational love triangle. Theseus orders Puck to find a love potion for Titania so Puck goes to the woods to retrieve it. Anything magical or unnatural in this story seems to take place in the woods. In fact, Puck comments about the dreaminess of the play in the Epilogue, “If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended: That you have but slumbered here, While these visions did appear; And this weak and idle theme, No more yielding but a dream, Gentles, do not reprehend. If you pardon, we will mend.” He’s basically telling the audience that, if they’re offended, they should think of the events in the play as a dream, like some of the characters. For example, Bottom wakes up believing all these events were merely a dream when he states, “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.” This makes it sound like the various comical events that transpired in the forest were merely a dream that the audience shared. After these unnatural events. these characters are all to return to the realism of Athens.
Shakespeare writes a funny “bad” tragedy within a well-written romantic comedy. What makes Pyramus and Thisbe” bad and Midsummer good? You should consider characterization, plot, and language in your essay.
Shakespeare makes fun of his own career within his play. He mocks himself by writing a tragic play within a play to heighten this play’s humor. “Pyramus and Thisbe” is over-the-top dramatic with suicides and wasted love, which reminds me a bit of ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and other Shakespearean plays. This “bad” tragedy is so over the top that it’s funny, while this “bad” tragedy continues to heighten and escalate this well-written comedy. The lovers in Midsummer are so eloquent and well-spoken, while the craftsman could not be worse actors and say the most foolish and silly lines. For example, Bottom declares that he will roar, “as gently as any sucking dove,” and Flute, a bearded man, plays Thisbe. Pyramus and Thisbe has completely nonsensical language that strips the performance of any seriousness or profound meaning. The craftsmen are mocking the love triangle between Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander with their telling of the story of Pyramus and Thisbe.
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