Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night 's Dream

When confronted with “Love”, most people’s minds immediately jump to a happily married couple, or a pair of young lovers. While this is the most obvious conclusion, love extends its reaches into other aspects of relationships as well, beyond saying, “I love you,” on the way out the door. Famous playwright, William Shakespeare, was a master at capturing these many different essences of love. The two specific plays that will be examined for love themes in this paper are Romeo and Juliet and The Tempest. He did this so successfully that these works have endured the test of time, where they are enjoyed and analyzed centuries later.

“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.

Love is a timeless topic which Shakespeare explores in depth in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream “. Shakespeare utilizes the format of a play within a play to communicate the complexities of love. Love is a force that characters cannot control. The play includes scenes of lovers searching for fulfillment in the arms of characters who are unavailable. The magic love potion wreaks havoc between actual lovers and it is clear just how negatively it is portrayed. The entire play revolves around the difficulties of maintaining love and how foolish and insecure the pursuit of love can make us. It also touches on the fickleness of love, that love can be

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.

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,

William Shakespeare masters this art throughout A Midsummer Night’s Dream, building through his characters’ actions the façade of love as pure and noble, but at the same time dashing this façade by exposing weaknesses and flaws in these characters’ perceptions of love. Shakespeare does not show this irony in individual lines, but painstakingly develops it over entire scenes and acts. Eastman dubs this development “large-scale irony”: an author can create subtle irony throughout his work as a “sustained strategy of indirect attack” (Eastman 126). Throughout his play, Shakespeare uses this long-term, indirectly critical irony to sharpen his assertion that love is not benevolent, but willfully destructive.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Love is a theme which reoccurs through many of Shakespeare’s Plays. In ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, the theme ‘Love’ is presented from the very beginning in Act 1 Scene 1, through Shakespeare’s use of poetic language, structure and vivid imagery.

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.

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.

Thus, it is implied that Shakespeare’s skills as a lover are mimetic to those of his poetry, prose and plays for which he is still celebrated today. Euphemism is employed in the instance of a “verb dancing in the center of a noun”(Line 7) and the description of the narrator as a “softer rhyme”(Line7), where the poet personifies literary terms in order to describe their bodies and movement. The purposeful inclusion of this comparison escalates their lovemaking to an art form, in this case poetry, and as a result all literary terms are loaded with euphemism and sensuality. In addition, Duffy employs the senses, “touch”, “scent” and “taste” (Line10) in order to heighten the already sensual tone and to reinforce how vivid the memory of their lovemaking is to the narrator. Furthermore, contrast is employed by comparing the poetic sensuality of their lovemaking and intensity of their bond with that of their guests in the “other bed” (Line 11) of whom she asserts are merely capable of unsatisfactorily “dribbling their prose”(Line