A Midsummer Night's Dream Love Analysis

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, love is explored between the discord of reason and imagination. In Act 1, Helena’s soliloquies her inner thoughts and present’s Shakespeare’s unique perspective on childlike and mischievous love: “And therefore is Love said to be a child” (1.1.238). This perspective of a capricious love is echoed throughout and forms a basis to propel the action of the play. It is within this framework that Shakespeare reveals that the complex nature of love is so powerful that it renders those in pursuit of it disillusioned, impulsive, and irrational, like a child. In Act 1 scene 1, Helena is introduced by way of Lysander. Beautiful Helena is the original object of Demetrius’ affections. Since Demetrius

A jealous Oberon and mischievous Puck are two “waggish boys” in their own right. Puck boasts the triumphs of his pranks and trickery for the sake of his amusement, having frightened the maidens of the village, frustrated housewives, beguiled a horse by “neighing in the likeness of a filly foal” (2.1.32), and befuddled an old woman by transforming himself into the likeness of a crab and three-legged stool. Shakespeare utilizes the inadvertent mistakes and waggish nature of Puck, “the shrewd and knavish sprite” (2.1.19), to exemplify the chaotic and complicated entanglements of love. Together with Fairy King Oberon, they turn the “little western flower” struck by Cupid’s arrow into the magic potion known as “love-in-idleness”, reinforcing the idea that love cannot be reasoned. Shakespeare uses the magic potion as a device to express love’s fickleness with the repeated allusion to the unpredictable influence of Cupid’s arrows. Moreover, it is Fairy King’s anger, jealousy and resentment over Titania’s tenderness towards the Indian boy, in conjunction with her refusal to give turn him over to Oberon, which is the seed for the cunning and illusory love-in-idleness potion. Oberon, like an impudent child, deprived of what he desires, acts with guile and duplicity affecting not only

Perhaps it is Shakespeare’s last unspoken word on the concept of love: childlike and mischievous. For those under love’s spell, perception becomes distorted in the subjectivity of the imagination rather than the objectivity of truth. Helena’s metaphor effectively imparts Shakespeare’s notion that Love has a beguiling and capricious nature. For Shakespeare, lover’s left disillusioned and irrational is conceivably the happiest