Titania And Theseus And Hippolyta Analysis

Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream is simply a lighthearted comedy of the follies and tribulations of love. It does however have quite a few more complexities that just that. The relationships between all of the main characters serve to provide us with a glimpse of a deep dark truth hidden within the lighter side of the play. One way to find these deep dark truths of the characters is by analyzing the characters and their relationships. The characters that I will be analyzing are Titania and Oberon, and Theseus and Hippolyta.
The fairy queen Titania and the fairy king Oberon have very different personalities that make one wonder how their relationship could ever work. Oberon is a manipulative man who wants nothing but the attention of his wife. He is a selfish, controlling man and his problem is that Titania is giving a lot of attention to a little boy that she is raising as if it were her own. Oberon shows an act of selfishness by telling Titania that he wants the little boy so he can become his henchman, “Do you amend it, then. It lies in you. Why should Titania cross her Oberon? I do beg a little changeling boy to be my henchman” (Shakespeare 41). Titania refuses and leaves, but Oberon is willing to do anything to get her attention back, so he puts her under a spell so when she wakes up she falls in love with a donkey. His goal is to make sure Titania makes a fool of her self in front of all the fairies by falling in love with a donkey. When she realizes whom she fell in love with she is completely and utterly humiliated and she is confused and embarrassed. This is when she finally is ready to give back all her love and attention to her husband, Oberon. What does this say about Oberon? Well this basically says that h...

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...to be problems that led to the humiliation and a broken independent spirit. In Theseus and Hippolyta, Theseus was both caring and strict and you could see this in both Hermia’s case and the conquering of Hippolyta. As for Hippolyta she is a strong woman and a very accepting one too, but since Theseus conquered her she has suddenly become somewhat of a weak spirit. Although she might seem like that she manages to show how she feels about Hermia’s incident where Hermia is being forced to marry someone who she does not love, probably because she is stepping in the same shoes just like Hermia. Shakespeare does a wonderful job of making these relationships dark and deep if well analyzed, but to the naked eye they just seem like any other relationship that has some problems here and there. He also does a good job in masking the dark secrets with the lighthearted comedy.