Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night 's Dream

Love is a timeless topic. It will forever be the theme of popular entertainment and source of confusion for men and women alike. No one understands this better than William Shakespeare, and he frequently explores this complex emotion in his plays. In "A Midsummer Night’s Dream" Shakespeare cleverly reveals the fickle and inebriating aspects of love through his mischievous character Puck.

Here, the structure and rhyme scheme of the lovers’ lines reveals Shakespeare’s underlying meaning for this otherwise playful comedy. Most of the lines between the lovers in the woods are heroic couplets, rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. Being nobles, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius and Helena speak in the formal, intellectual iambic pentameter; yet, love has left them acting foolish and silly, as shown through the constant rhymes reminiscent of a juvenile love poem. The couplets dismantle the formality and intellectual aspect of the lovers’ language, as the lovers rhyme lines including Helena’s “No, no I am as ugly as a bear,/For beasts that meet me run away for fear” (Shakespeare II.ii.100-101). This structure creates the chaotic, comedic tone of the scene, which ultimately leaves the lovers looking like fools lost in delirium as they run about the woods. Yet, emerging from the woods in Act 3, Demetrius has been detached of his previous life of delusion, saying that it is as if he has recovered from a sickness and now can properly taste. Finally disenchanted with Hermia, Demetrius has realized his true love for Helena. Meanwhile, Lysander and Hermia reunite after splitting earlier in the woods. It was not the lawful decree of the logical Theseus that concluded the primary conflict of this play. The illogical lovers with their heroic couplets ultimately created two stable couples out of the abstract social

Another example of Love present in the play is unrequited love. This love is presented through the characters Helena and Demetrius. Helena is deeply in love with Demetrius, but

Hermia’s speech in Act 2, Scene 2, of Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night’s Dream, contains an abundance of dream imagery. She has awoken from a terrible dream after falling asleep in the forest with Lysander. They were lost and tired so they decided to rest. Lysander wanted to sleep beside her but, she refused since they are not yet married and while they slept Puck applied a love potion on Lysander’s eyes thinking he was Demetrius. Lysander wakes and is repulsed by the sight of Hermia and never wants to see her again because he is now in love with Helena. Hermia awakes from her terrible dream and retells it thinking that Lysander is nearby listening. Then she realizes that he is not there and she does not see him anywhere. Hermia expresses the sentiment that she will find Lysander or she will surely die. She stated,

In Romeo and Juliet, love is depicted in several ways. Both Luhrman and Shakespeare represent love in different ways in different contexts to both the Elizabethan era and the contemporary audience. Both the original and later manifestations of the text are valued because they both communicate to the audience on the values of love and society by employing a variety of devices.

In conclusion, Shakespeare shows us that love has two faces. One face shows us that love can be beautiful and can bring happiness, the other shows a darker and more painful side where love can be heartbreaking and mournful.

Romeo and Juliet, a tragic love story between two-star crossed lovers, portrays themes that tend to revolve around young love. As the play introduces it’s two main characters, you soon see the challenge that the young lovers would have to face which lead them to the fate of death. The use of imagery and metaphoric language allows us to visualize the theme that is being set throughout the play. Shakespeare gave us several opportunities with his delicate word choice to understand the themes such as “love” and “duality of light and dark”. To help convey these themes to the given audience, Shakespeare carefully words the dialogue of each character to give us different views on each scene.

The use of the language is not only to speak a story of love, but also to stay somewhat true to the original story by Shakespeare so that the audience of today can still experience it the way the audience of Shakespeare’s time would

Love is such an abstract and intangible thing, yet it is something that everyone longs for. In Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the difficulty of love is explored through the obstacles that characters have to face while pursuing their loved ones. Those characters that are in love in the play were conflicted with troubles; however, the obstacles of love do not seem to stop them from being infatuated with each other. The concept of true love is examined throughout this play. By creating obstacles using authority and a higher power, Shakespeare examines the power of love. Through Hermia and Lysander’s loving words, it is reasonable to conclude that love conquers all if you believe in it.

“O, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence! Love takes the meaning in love's conference.” Lysander's quote, “The course of true love never did run smooth,” is proven throughout the play as three couples face challenges and hardships as time goes on, that no love is easy and that anyone would do anything they can to keep the love they have. In “A Midsummer Night's Dream,” there are many examples of rough love, as seen with Hermia and Lysander when Lysander stops loving Hermia, when Helena love Demetrius but he does not love her back and with Titania and Oberon, as they argue over the changeling boy.

Love has always played a major key role in the lives of everyday people. However, that doesn’t mean that love is easy and goes the way you expect it to. In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the author, William Shakespeare, portrays numerous examples of the theme the course of true love does not run smooth. In the play, an Athenian couple love each other, but the father of the girl does not approve the marriage. He wants the girl to marry another man, but that man is loved by the girl’s bestfriend.

Shakespeare’s usage of metaphor and simile in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is best understood as an attempt to provide some useful context for relationships and emotions, most often love and friendship, or the lack thereof. One example of such a usage is in Act 3, Scene 2 of the play. Here, the two Athenian couples wake up in the forest and fall under the effects of the flower, thus confusing the romantic relationships between them. Hermia comes to find her Lysander has fallen for Helena. Hermia suspects that the two have both conspired against her in some cruel joke, and begins lashing out against Helena. She says “We, Hermia, like two artificial gods, / Have with our needles created both one flower, / Both one sampler sitting on one cushion, / Both warbling of one song, both in one key; / As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds, / Had been incorporate. So we grew together, / Like a double cherry, seeming parted; / But yet a union in partition / Two lovely berries moulded on one stem: / So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart; / Two of the first, like coats in heraldry, / Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.” (Shakespeare 2.3.206-13). Shakespeare writes this list of vibrant metaphors to establish the prior relationship between these two characters and to make it evident how affected Helena is by this unexpected turn of events, as well as to add a greater range of emotion to the comedy, thereby lending it more literary and popular appeal.

“The course of true love never did run smooth,” comments Lysander of love’s complications in an exchange with Hermia (Shakespeare I.i.136). Although the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly deals with the difficulty of romance, it is not considered a true love story like Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare, as he unfolds the story, intentionally distances the audience from the emotions of the characters so he can caricature the anguish and burdens endured by the lovers. Through his masterful use of figurative language, Shakespeare examines the theme of the capricious and irrational nature of love.

The creativity entangled in the plays written by Shakespeare is quite unique. The passion that he pours out through each of the characters in his plays is particularly fascinating. Specifically, the love that is elucidated through the characters in Twelfth Night is passionate, but unfortunately it is not always accepted by the desired character. Viola relays Orsino’s love for Olivia with devotion and warmth but sadly, the love is still refused by Olivia (1.5.244-245). Shakespeare writes about love with such importance and ecstasy, loves presence in Shakespeare 's works, highlighted in Twelfth Night is comparable to fertile tears, thunder and fire. Love is variable, it is able to be soft like “fertile tears”, or undisciplined like thunder and fire.

The history of literature as a whole demonstrates that competing for a love interest is a common element that provides parallels between characters, give interesting themes, humor and drama to a story. William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream is an excellent example of how the element can be so central in developing the story. Besides the two main women in the story, Helena and Hermia fighting for men, they are also depicted as having different personalities which add to the intrigues of the play. There is a constant change of the relationship between these women as they compete for the men that they love and yet remain as friends. This essay will look into the two young women and see how they manage to be so different and having opposite personalities while being the best of friends.