Mysterious Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream William Shakespeare College

Mysterious Love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy about how arbitrary love is. The play shows a cast of characters with conflicting love interests, and midway through the text, many of their desires are magically reversed. They all express love with honorable words to those they admire, yet the spontaneous reversal of many of these feelings seems to oversimplify love itself. Of all the relationships and circumstances that can be examined for examples of the arbitrariness of love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Oberon’s first conversation with Titania in act two holds a model of that arbitrariness better than any other, single scene.

The arbitrariness of love in A Midsummer Night’s Dream makes love seem like a mental whim. Whatever can change a lover’s mind in the text can redirect his or her love. It pulls love down to a shallow level that does not match with the flowery words characters like Lysander and Hermia speak to each other when they express love. Shakespeare makes love seem like a figment of the imagination when Titania dotes on Bottom or when Helena refuses to believe that either Lysander or Demetrius are in love with her even when they claim to be, but because...