Love In A Midsummer Night's Dream

The course of true love is not only unsmooth, it is also irrational, whimsical, and unpredictable. This truth written by William Shakespeare is on ample display in one of his most popular romantic comedies, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Theseus formulates the correlation that exists between the insanity often expressed in the actions of desire and the words of a poet during his speech near the end of the play when he observes that "The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact" (V.i. 7-8). The lunatic, lover and poet share the trait of achieving a state of consciousness that lifts them high over the hindrances that come with logic and allows them to glide sweetly over the chasm that will place them gently at the feet of
Throughout A Midsummer Night's Dream, the unpredictability of love and desire is surveyed as the characters set forth on their respective journeys toward a love that is completely off-kilter while also maintaining a foundation of reality that belies the magic of the forest. Helena's speech in the opening scene is the play's most direct evidence of Shakespeare's thematic concern: "Things base and vile, holding no quantity / Love can transpose to form and dignity. / Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind, / And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind" (I.i. 232-235). What Helena intuits is that desire is exempt from explanation, that it is contradictory and maddeningly and, ultimately, has the single greatest influence on human actions. Distraught over the revelation that her own beloved, Demetrius, is in love with Hermia instead of her, Helena asserts that though Demetrius is incapable of seeing she is as beautiful as Hermia. She believes that love is endowed with the authority to convert "base and vile" qualities into "form and dignity"-even ugliness and bad behavior can seem attractive to someone you love. She argues that since "love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind" that love therefore is not based on objective analysis, but subjective perception. These lines anticipate facts of the play's assessment of love to come, including Titania's desire for the ass-headed