At it’s heart, love is a chemical reaction. Norepinephrine, dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin work together to create a cocktail of passion, desire, and that heart-fluttering feeling of love. There are varying levels, of course, like there is with anything. Love that is short and fatal, and love that is long and everlasting. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play by William Shakespeare, seeks to explore love in through a critical lense of reality, and the blur of the fantastic. Using a particular sprite as his tool, Shakespeare drafts and builds a dialectic surrounding love that never reaches completion; that is, he never answers the questions he composes through the play using metaphors, characters, and dialogue. Robin Goodfellow, also known as …show more content…
His importance is underlined again when he closes the play in the first scene of the fifth act. Many mentions of nature are proclaimed again, but this time, they are all acting in harmony. The “hungry lion roars/and the wolf behowls the moon” (5.1.373), as would occur naturally. Instead of flowers and animals acting oddly and out of character, things have returned to normal; the fairies that commandeer these occurrences “[follow] darkness like a dream” (5.1.387). As Puck moves to “sweep the dust behind the door” (5.1. 393), the play closes in harmony and well-mannered dialogue. Puck begins to rhyme again, which also indicates consensus between the characters and their intentions. It is his ending monologue, however, that is the most important bit. This is what drives Shakespeare’s dialectic home. Puck promises to “scrape the serpent’s tongue” (5.1.435) all wary thoughts with his final message: All that has happened in the play is like a dream, because life with love is just that. Love is “no more yielding but a dream” (5.1.430) as Puck states. Shakespeare uses this ending monologue to “make amends ere long” to the dialectic he’s been constructing using Puck. Because he is “an honest Puck” (5.1.433), audiences are to trust what he says, as people so quickly do when love speaks to them in one way or …show more content…
Shakespeare, like love, is fickle and unyielding. He disguises his message in Puck’s line so that readers and audience members alike have to search for them. Much like the young lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, too often is humankind blinded by what is right in front of them. Very few go deep enough to find the true meaning to the one-hundred some-odd years that they will spend walking the Earth. Why is that? Because, the truth is scary. What would it be like for humanity to realize it, as Shakespeare suggests, bases every decision off of something that might not even exist? Love is not tangible, or measurable in any quantitative way. Like Puck, it is akin to smoke in the air: impossible to grab with bare hands. It is natural like a fairy, and mischievous like a sprite. It’s blinding, capricious, and can be downright means. Still, people offer themselves up to pain, like Oberon and Demetrius, in the hope that love will let up and covet them as they do
In this text, Dorothea Kehler discusses the modern aspects of theatre and play writing that were evident in Shakespeare’s play. The book uncovered several complex and advanced styles in music, dance and humor that have been used in contemporary theatre. The author is a professor in English literature from San Diego university. Dorothea is also a private novelist and part-time poet. The book provided a modern approach towards analyzing Elizabethan literature.
Is love controlled by human beings who love one another or is love controlled by a higher power? There are many people who believe that a higher power has control over love. An example of a higher power would be a cupid, a flying angel-type creature who is supposed to shoot arrows at people to make them fall in love. There are other people who reject the idea that a higher power controls love and that the people who experience love can control it. In the novel, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", by William Shakespeare, several examples of love's association with a higher power are presented. With the use of examples from the above novel, this essay will discuss the evidence that love is associated with a higher power. Examples like: Thesius arranging a marriage between himself and Hippolyta, Egeus choosing who Hermia should marry and the fairies who have the ability to control love in the Enchanted Forest.
Love can be quite chaotic at times. As much as poets and songwriters promote the idea of idyllic romantic love, the experience in reality is often fraught with emotional turmoil. When people are in love, they tend to make poor decisions, from disobeying authority figures to making rash, poorly thought-out choices. In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare uses various motifs to illustrate how love, irrationality, and disobedience are thematically linked to disorder.
William Shakespeare’s writings are famous for containing timeless, universal themes. A particular theme that is explored frequently in his writings is the relationship between men and women. A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains a multitude of couplings, which are often attributed to the fairies in the play. Each of these pairings has positive and negative aspects, however, some relationships are more ideal than others. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream the optimal pairings are Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, and Oberon and Titania; while the less desirable pairings are Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia and Demetrius, Lysander and Helena, and Titania and Bottom. Throughout A Midsummer
Deceiving and irrational, love can be a challenging emotion to endure. It can be difficult to find happiness in love, and on the journey to find that happiness, love can influence one’s thought process. Shakespeare uses specific wording in his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, to poke fun while exploring the individual’s quest for love. The desire to find love and a happy ending with a lover is so strong in the foundation of mankind, that people will not accept a life without it. In fact, they would rather give up their attribute of rationality than their opportunity to find a significant other. The heart’s control of the mind can make a foolish man.
Webster’s Dictionary defines love as a feeling of strong attachment induced by that which delights or commands admiration; preeminent kindness or devotion to another; affection; tenderness; as, the love of brothers and sisters. By the end of Shakespeare’s play Midsummer Night’s Dream, it goes without saying that Webster’s Dictionary definition was able to hit this definition head on. Shakespeare is able to paint the perfect picture for this play mainly because he is one of the great masters of the English Language.
Love is always present in the world, and has been since the dawn of time. It spans through every culture, every religion, every city, town, person, and all in between. Love infects the mind, like a parasite, and spreads throughout the body, leaving traces of its bubbling emotional gravy on the heart and the soul. Due to the growing influence of the media on every consecutive generation, love has been ‘Hollywood-ized’ into portraying a flawless, unbreakable connection between the hearts of two separate individuals. However, Shakespeare seems to disagree with the notion of love being a perfect entity. He conveys his opinion on the matter very well in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Throughout the entirety of the play, love is described and presented as an irrational, misinformed logic that only fools would pursue. In saying that, Shakespeare does present his disregard to love as a sane thought exceptionally well on three specific occasions: the relationship between Bottom and Titania; the love-potion spread upon the eyes of many characters throughout the play; and last but not least, the relationship between Egeus, Hermia, and Lysander.
Fairies, mortals, magic, love, and hate all intertwine to make A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare a very enchanting tale, that takes the reader on a truly dream-like adventure. The action takes place in Athens, Greece in ancient times, but has the atmosphere of a land of fantasy and illusion which could be anywhere. The mischievousness and the emotions exhibited by characters in the play, along with their attempts to double-cross destiny, not only make the tale entertaining, but also help solidify one of the play’s major themes; that true love and it’s cleverly disguised counterparts can drive beings to do seemingly irrational things.
In the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the plethora of comedic styles used by Shakespeare illustrate his intention to poke fun at love throughout the play. The play is notorious for its intricate and irrational plotline, mainly due to the constantly shifting love triangles. Once the powerful fairies become involved with the fate of the naive lovers – Demetrius, Helena, Lysander and Hermia – matters are further complicated. The complication inflicted by the fairies is credited to the powerful love potion that Oberon, King of the Fairies, hands over to Puck, a mischievous fairy, to use on his wife Titania, with intentions to embarrass and distract her. This spiteful attitude is due to Oberon and Titania’s argument over the custody of an Indian boy. This argument is what ends up affecting all and throwing everything out of whack. This conniving plan, intended to act as a diversion, ends up affecting many more than just Titania, but rather all three distinctive groups in the play: the lovers, fairies, and mechanicals. This comical journey of jumbled up love affairs is not entirely comprised of slapstick-type comedy, but also crucial lessons about love. The comedic styles of both farce and irony appear frequently throughout the play, fortifying the play comedically and morally. The obliviousness of a character that is displayed with dramatic irony represents how love is truly blind. The randomness of farce represents how love truly has no reason, and is very confusing, like the play itself. Farce and dramatic irony both serve as vehicles to exemplify the absurd, out of control, and illogical realities of love.
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare's sixteenth century tragedy, remains one of the most famous, timeless pieces of literature yet created. This bittersweet tale documents the forbidden attraction between two impulsive children, and their tragic suicides. The story's incidents, saturated with Shakespeare's views and opinions, reveal the playwright's philosophies on love. Many consider Romeo and Juliet the greatest love story of all time, yet when the "love" between the two main characters is analyzed, it cannot truly be considered love. Instead Shakespeare wrote this play as a testament of the harsh consequences of reckless lust and attraction, and endeavored to send an admonition. Shakespeare meant not for Romeo and Juliet to define true love, rather, to define what true love is not.
This duality of love is established early within the play with Orsino’s commentary on love. In Orsino’s lines, he describes the “spirit of love” as being “quick and fresh” (1.1.9), and he continues to explain how love “…falls into abatement and low pride even in a minute” (1.1.13-14). With these lines, Shakespeare expresses how quickly love can alternate from an entity of joy to one of extreme depression. By employing these lines so early in the play, the vision of love as a force of exceeding strength is firmly planted within the reader’s subconscious, and Shakespeare has prepared the reader to fully grasp the central theme of the play.
Love plays a very significant role in this Shakespearian comedy, as it is the driving force of the play: Hermia and Lysander’s forbidden love and their choice to flee Athens is what sets the plot into motion. Love is also what drives many of the characters, and through readers’ perspectives, their actions may seem strange, even comical to us: from Helena pursuing Demetrius and risking her reputation, to fairy queen Titania falling in love with Bottom. However, all these things are done out of love. In conclusion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream displays the blindness of love and how it greatly contradicts with reason.
Love can exist in many different ways, especially in William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet. The types of love in the play include love between or for family members, love for friends, love for self, love of an idea or cause, and, of course, romantic love. There are many different perspectives of what type of love Shakespeare is trying to focus on during his play, or, better yet, what he is trying to tell them about it. In his personal life, Shakespeare did not seem to be a big fan of love. He was forced to marry a woman named Anne Hathaway due to impregnating her prior to marriage, but after a while moved away and never saw her again. In his will, he only left her his bedclothes. This inspired people to come up with different theories, one of which is that he simply fell out of love, and could never look at Anne again. For that reason, Shakespeare aims to show the reader that when taken too far, passionate love leads to destruction. This becomes evident through the actions and words of three important characters. The first is friar Lawrence, the priest in the play, who warns Romeo about his dangerous love. In addition, there is Juliet, the young girl in the relationship, who takes her own life as a consequence of love after marrying impulsively. Lastly, there is Mercutio, Romeo's best friend, who shows his opinions about love and women in general. The play circulates around the idea of obsessive love and its disastrous outcomes.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare is full of comical jokes and humorous scenes, but something that subtly masks the stories of these characters is the recurring theme of love, specifically in dreams. Love can render one blind, letting them fall into a rabbit hole of a strange dream-like state. By act four, all (except for Demetrius) return to their normal selves, where Bottom says, "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"(4.1.200-201). The events that he had just experienced were too bizarre to comprehend, as he says he sounds like a fool trying to explain them. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows how being infatuated can not only blind one, but it can feel like a hazy dream.
In “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare shows that love can overpower your need for emotional and physical self-preservation. When you are in love, what you currently love seems to be your only concern. Throughout the play, there are several instances where someone risks their lives for love. Your life, pride, and something you once loved, all are inferior to getting your new love. In the play, the chaos of love makes for crazy entertainment. But just like in life, sometimes it leads to “happily ever