Midsummer Night's Dream Question 3

We see love and drama all around us. We see love that hurts, or makes someone smile. We see love that is feigned or true. Love is like a mountain range. One rises in their relationship, then they can fall, but then rise again. Love creates many emotions.

You see the couples in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, experience the many aspects of love. Theseus won Hippolyta over with his leadership and strength. Their ‘love’ doesn’t really seem like love to me. She seems not to have fallen for him because he is who he is, but because of his power. They’re engagement looks more of a, “whatever, let’s get married,” sort of thing. They’re not really in love. Hippolyta seems excited, but not exactly how excited a bride-to-be would be. She’s not running around all happy, not seeming to be able to take her eyes off her soon to be husband.   And neither is Theseus. They’re marriage semblances being forced, not like they actually really, truly cared about getting married.

Unlike Theseus and Hippolyta whose love looks more like infatuation, Lysander and Hermia’s love for each other is truly there. They love each other greatly, yet their love is frowned upon by Hermia’s father, Egeus who prefers Demetrius. But when Hermia is told that she was either going to marry Demetrius or die or become a nun she was unfazed, blinded by her love for Lysander. She chooses to rebel and abscond to Lysander’s aunt’s house in the forest with him. She is not scared and neither is Lysander, for they know that in the forest they can be together. Then, when Lysander is given the love potion from the flower and he awakes to Helena and says he ‘loves’ her, Hermia is hurt. Still she loves Lysander and that’s why she fights with Helena, because she loves him. She’s hurt, but still wants him for herself; she doesn’t want anyone to take him away from her since she cares about him. Then in the end, when they go back to all loving the right people, Hermia goes right back to Lysander, forgiving. It shows that they will do whatever they need to, to be with each other. You see their true, lasting love.

Titania and Oberon’s relationship is really messed up. They love each other, but they’re stuck in a place where they practically hate each other, and just because they want the child to be just like one of them. They fight with one another and Titania keeps the child. Oberon gets even more mad at her and decides to go as far as putting a flower love potion on her to make her fall in love with the first thing she sees, which is unfortunately Bottom turned into a donkey. In the end however, he feels sympathetic for her ‘loving’ a donkey and realizes he misses her. They get back together and are both happy.  This shows that really, ‘through thick and thin’ this couple will stay together; they can’t be separated.

Demetrius and Helena were once together and loved each other, but when Demetrius saw Hermia he wanted to be with her instead.  However Hermia doesn’t like him at all since her heart only belongs to Lysander.  Even though Demetrius left Helena for another woman, she can’t get over him.  She keeps chasing him, wanting him back, but he doesn’t love her anymore.  The more she adores and praises him, the more he seems to look upon her with a look of disgust.  Obviously she can’t let go, and the thought of him leaving can’t process her mind since she still loves him so much.  In the end of the play however, everything works out and Demetrius falls back in love with her by awaking to her first after being given the flower love potion.  Since everything works out you see they were ‘meant to be.’

With these four couple you see a few aspects of love, some being: pain when Demetrius left Helena for Hermia; betrayal when Lysander seems to love Helena; hate when Titania has custody of the child; and infatuation between Theseus and Hippolyta.