The Consequences of Young Love

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the characters Hermia and Lysander are faced with a difficult situation when they decide to enter into marriage and consequently are forbidden to by Hermia’s father, who instead wishes her to be married to another young man, Demetrius. Hermia and Lysander forced to plead her case to both her father and the duke of Athens, Theseus. But Theseus’ only words to Hermia are those that tell her she should be obedient to her father. Her pleas are essentially ignored. While it is unfortunate that her thoughts should not be given a second thought, the audience is usually quick to judge Hermia’s father as an old, tradition-bound man intent on ruining his daughter’s happiness. In fact, it should be important to

The unfortunate circumstances of the two lovers is one facet of the driving force of the play. It reveals an enormous amount about the nature of love, especially in someone’s younger years. Even though we as an audience can relate to and root for the two, and are satisfied at the end of the play with their happy union, it is important to call into question the actual intelligence of entering into a marriage, purely in the interests of starry-eyed, headstrong, idealistic love given the context of their situation. It seems improbable that they really know what they’re getting themselves into.

Certainly if anyone were to decide to marry their first love, they should do so with caution if they want the relationship to last. A relationship takes commitment and determination, especially when the two are so young. First love, especially, takes a special kind of determination to allow it to succeed. There is no question that entering into a relationship, and especially one as serious as Hermia an...

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...the future, we as readers can only hope for the best.

Works Cited

Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece: Wilson, N. G. "Demography." Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge, 2006. 214. Print.

Midsummer Night’s Dream: Shakespeare, William, Gail Kern Paster, and Skiles Howard. "Act 1, Scene 1." A Midsummer Night's Dream: Texts and Contexts. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999. Print.

Romeo and Juliet: Shakespeare, William. Romeo and Juliet. Ware: Wordsworth Classics, 1992. Print.

NCHS: Copen, Casey E., Ph.D, Kimberly Daniels, Ph.D, Jonathan Vespa, Ph.D, and William D. Mosher, Ph.D. First Marriages in the United States: Data From the 2006–2010 National Survey of Family Growth. Rep. no. 49. Hyattsville, MD: National Center for Health Statistics, 2012. Print.

Infoplease: "Median Age at First Marriage: 1890 to 2010." Infoplease. Infoplease, 2009. Web. 5 Apr. 2014.