Love In A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s “High Comedy” plays, contains the following line: “the course of true love never did run smooth” (Shakespeare, 196). This truth resonates throughout Shakespeare’s sonnets, as real love is not all looks of longing and quiet desire, despite what poets such as Petrarch would have one believe. In reality, love is far more complex, with both positive and negative facets. Throughout the sonnets, Shakespeare provides keen insight into the true nature of love; positive connotations are rarely used in his description of love, instead Shakespeare describes it as war, disease, and madness. Through the speaker in his sonnets, Shakespeare explores love as a multifaceted entity, painting an authentic portrait

of human relationships, and the thin line between love and hate.
When reading Petrarch’s sonnets, one often finds longing, desire, and idealization of a distant figure.

In Il Canzoniere, the fact that Petrarch’s fictive speaker has only so much as shared eye contact with the infamous Laura does not deter him from clinging on to an imaginary relationship, even after her death: “If only she had lived, we would have come to where, speaking,/ I could have put down in those chaste ears the ancient burden of/ my sweet thoughts” (Durling, 317. 8-10). It is evident throughout the entirety of Il Canzoniere that Petrarch’s speaker is doomed to live in the “if only” stage of human relationships, thus confining love to its pure and idealistic facet. Though Petrarch’s sonnets are often seen as romantic, his portrait of human relationships is not realistic. Shakespeare’s sonnets are not wholly without the “pure” love associated with Petrarchan sonnets, particularly in the Fair Youth sequence. Take for instance Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, which begins with: “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?/Thou art more lovely and more temperate” (18. 1-2). Sonnet 18 shares the idealistic nature of a Petrarch sonnet, as the speaker is “free of that fear of the beloved’s corruption which enters the sequence at least as early as [Sonnet] 24” (Vendler, 120). However, Shakespeare’s portrait of love is not confined to this one facet: it changes along with his characters and their

relationships.
Shakespeare’s sonnets differ in the way of his fictive speaker actually reaching the point of being in a relationship with the beloved of whom he writes about. Shakespeare’s speaker and his lover(s) gradually move beyond the “honeymoon phase” and begin experiencing the rather turbulent cycle of love: “by moving his focus away from when a relationship is imagined and into the forum of real relationship/s, Shakespeare demonstrates that longing does not represent the end of a sonnet sequence, and the consummation does not represent the end of the narrative” (Kambaskovic-Sawers). In other words, his sonnets exemplify that the story does not end when the relationship begins, and that love is not an invariable entity. By Sonnet 120, Shakespeare’s speaker and the Fair Youth have been “lovers” for some time, and thus have inevitably begun to face some of the more negative facets of love: “For if you were by my unkindness shaken/As I by yours, y’have passed a hell of a time” (Shakespeare, 120. 5-6). Here the speaker is attempting to nullify a present transgression by weighing it against the past wrongdoings of the Fair Youth. The sonnet goes on to say “But your trespass becomes a fee,/Mine ransoms yours, and yours ransoms me” (Shakespeare 120. 13-14). Though a sonnet about the childish practice of displacing blame may not align with Pertrachan love poetry, this vexing side of love that Shakespeare describes is what sets him apart from other sonneteers: his humanistic approach to writing about relationships.
From the resentful tone of the previous sonnet, one is able to infer that though the speaker has willingly forgiven the betrayals of the Fair Youth in the past (out of love), he has not forgotten (out of hate). Throughout the sonnets, Shakespeare illustrates the speaker teetering on this line between love and hate, fueled by jealousy, insecurities, and his lovers’ transgressions: “Such civil war is in my love and hate,/That I am accessary needs must be,/To that sweet thief which sourly robs from me” (Shakespeare, 35. 12-14). The juxtaposition of “sweet thief” and “sourly robs” (14) emphasizes this idea of the internal “civil war” between love and hate (12), as the speaker attempts to work through his feelings for the Fair Youth following the transgression. As Helen Vendler astutely notes, Shakespeare creates an “image of civil strife, the division of selfhood in two, love and hate, each with a valid voice” (189). The speaker cannot help holding on to the hatred in his mind when he has been wronged, but at the same time cannot fathom letting go of the love in his heart for the Fair Youth, putting him at odds with himself.
By deciding he would rather “bear love’s wrong, than hate’s known injury” (Shakespeare, 40. 12), and thus excusing the Fair Youth’s trespasses, the speaker’s feelings of hate are transferred from the Fair Youth onto himself. The theme of self-hatred is seen throughout the sonnets, stemming from the speaker’s recurring forgiveness and rationalization regarding the inconstancy of his lovers: “hate goes in two directions—toward the friend […] and toward the self and its self-corruption—but the latter is the stronger” (Vendler, 186). This notion is all the more evident in Sonnet 89: “For thee against my self I’ll vow debate,/For I must ne’er love him whom thou dost hate” (Shakespeare 89. 13-14). Here, Shakespeare explores the very human concept of beginning to find fault in one’s self after being subjected to betrayal or unfaithfulness; consequently, the speaker pardons the bad deeds of his beloved and shoulders all the blame. By repeatedly “debating” (13) against himself in favor of his lover, the speaker becomes more self-corrupt, losing his power of will and sense of reason in the process. As the Fair Youth continues in his unfaithfulness, and these feelings of self-hatred and self-corruption continue to grow, the speaker’s heart hardens and his judgment weakens; by the time the focus of the sonnets shifts to the Dark Lady, the line between love and hate is considerably thinner.