The Concept of Love in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the first William Shakespeare’s comic masterpiece. He wrote the comedy in 1596. The play is about the love between four couples, they all represent different types of love: mature love, youthful love, and renewed love. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is classified as a romantic comedy, however, from my point of view, the play is strong enough to demonstrate that assessment as a dark romantic comedy using the powerful love appears with strong darkness and cruelty between the characters.
There are a lot of reasons why this play should be considered as a dark romantic comedy. To start with, the play begins with Thesus’s announcement about his wedding with Hippolyta. The first reason shows the cruelty in how Egeus complains about Hermia which is his daughter. Hermia loves Lysender and wants to marry him. However, Egeus wants her to love Demetrius instead of Lysender, just because he wants to. This is the first place that shows power versus love.
On the one side there is her family which not allows her to love the guy she likes and the other side is her love. This play has a lot of conflicts in the context and this is one of the main conflicts. No one cares or listens what Hermia thinks, she loves the man but is it really worth it? Thesus says Hermia has to obey her father or she will die or become a nun. Love wins in this tragic scene, Hermia and Lysender run away from Athens.
Helena goes to Hermia and Lysander and complains about how Demetrius loves Hermia and Helena tells Demetrius where they are going, so she can have a chance to talk to Demetrius. Helena has no doubts about stopping their love so she can be happy. She is being selfish about her friend and thinking about her love. Is not that makes the romanticism the dark one?
Oberon which is the king of the fairies fights with Titania who is the queen of the fairies. Oberon wants a changeling boy and she will not do it. To revenge Titania, Oberon sends Goodfelow to make a flower with magic, when Oberon puts the flower juice on Titania’s eye so that she will fall in love with the first creature she sees. Is it really love what is Oberon doing? How can one side hurt the other side because one side does not want something? That is not loving. Love means to respect each other, care about what they think or feel, love needs to be delicate and not even think to get revenge. There should be no expectation because love is love. If you want to do something and waiting for another side to do the same thing, either do not do it or do not be in the expectation from the opposite side. What Oberon tries for Titania is another example of why romanticism needs to be the dark one.
The inebriant nature of love is explaining in the play as making the characters act in the way that normally they would never.
