At it’s heart, love is a chemical reaction. Norepinephrine, dopamine, oxytocin and serotonin work together to create a cocktail of passion, desire, and that heart-fluttering feeling of love. There are varying levels, of course, like there is with anything. Love that is short and fatal, and love that is long and everlasting. A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a play by William Shakespeare, seeks to explore love in through a critical lense of reality, and the blur of the fantastic. Using a particular sprite as his tool, Shakespeare drafts and builds a dialectic surrounding love that never reaches completion; that is, he never answers the questions he composes through the play using metaphors, characters, and dialogue. Robin Goodfellow, also known as …show more content…
His importance is underlined again when he closes the play in the first scene of the fifth act. Many mentions of nature are proclaimed again, but this time, they are all acting in harmony. The “hungry lion roars/and the wolf behowls the moon” (5.1.373), as would occur naturally. Instead of flowers and animals acting oddly and out of character, things have returned to normal; the fairies that commandeer these occurrences “[follow] darkness like a dream” (5.1.387). As Puck moves to “sweep the dust behind the door” (5.1. 393), the play closes in harmony and well-mannered dialogue. Puck begins to rhyme again, which also indicates consensus between the characters and their intentions. It is his ending monologue, however, that is the most important bit. This is what drives Shakespeare’s dialectic home. Puck promises to “scrape the serpent’s tongue” (5.1.435) all wary thoughts with his final message: All that has happened in the play is like a dream, because life with love is just that. Love is “no more yielding but a dream” (5.1.430) as Puck states. Shakespeare uses this ending monologue to “make amends ere long” to the dialectic he’s been constructing using Puck. Because he is “an honest Puck” (5.1.433), audiences are to trust what he says, as people so quickly do when love speaks to them in one way or …show more content…
Shakespeare, like love, is fickle and unyielding. He disguises his message in Puck’s line so that readers and audience members alike have to search for them. Much like the young lovers of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, too often is humankind blinded by what is right in front of them. Very few go deep enough to find the true meaning to the one-hundred some-odd years that they will spend walking the Earth. Why is that? Because, the truth is scary. What would it be like for humanity to realize it, as Shakespeare suggests, bases every decision off of something that might not even exist? Love is not tangible, or measurable in any quantitative way. Like Puck, it is akin to smoke in the air: impossible to grab with bare hands. It is natural like a fairy, and mischievous like a sprite. It’s blinding, capricious, and can be downright means. Still, people offer themselves up to pain, like Oberon and Demetrius, in the hope that love will let up and covet them as they do
Is love controlled by human beings who love one another or is love controlled by a higher power? There are many people who believe that a higher power has control over love. An example of a higher power would be a cupid, a flying angel-type creature who is supposed to shoot arrows at people to make them fall in love. There are other people who reject the idea that a higher power controls love and that the people who experience love can control it. In the novel, "A Midsummer Night's Dream", by William Shakespeare, several examples of love's association with a higher power are presented. With the use of examples from the above novel, this essay will discuss the evidence that love is associated with a higher power. Examples like: Thesius arranging a marriage between himself and Hippolyta, Egeus choosing who Hermia should marry and the fairies who have the ability to control love in the Enchanted Forest.
In this text, Dorothea Kehler discusses the modern aspects of theatre and play writing that were evident in Shakespeare’s play. The book uncovered several complex and advanced styles in music, dance and humor that have been used in contemporary theatre. The author is a professor in English literature from San Diego university. Dorothea is also a private novelist and part-time poet. The book provided a modern approach towards analyzing Elizabethan literature.
Webster’s Dictionary defines love as a feeling of strong attachment induced by that which delights or commands admiration; preeminent kindness or devotion to another; affection; tenderness; as, the love of brothers and sisters. By the end of Shakespeare’s play Midsummer Night’s Dream, it goes without saying that Webster’s Dictionary definition was able to hit this definition head on. Shakespeare is able to paint the perfect picture for this play mainly because he is one of the great masters of the English Language.
Love is always present in the world, and has been since the dawn of time. It spans through every culture, every religion, every city, town, person, and all in between. Love infects the mind, like a parasite, and spreads throughout the body, leaving traces of its bubbling emotional gravy on the heart and the soul. Due to the growing influence of the media on every consecutive generation, love has been ‘Hollywood-ized’ into portraying a flawless, unbreakable connection between the hearts of two separate individuals. However, Shakespeare seems to disagree with the notion of love being a perfect entity. He conveys his opinion on the matter very well in the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Throughout the entirety of the play, love is described and presented as an irrational, misinformed logic that only fools would pursue. In saying that, Shakespeare does present his disregard to love as a sane thought exceptionally well on three specific occasions: the relationship between Bottom and Titania; the love-potion spread upon the eyes of many characters throughout the play; and last but not least, the relationship between Egeus, Hermia, and Lysander.
Love plays a very significant role in this Shakespearian comedy, as it is the driving force of the play: Hermia and Lysander’s forbidden love and their choice to flee Athens is what sets the plot into motion. Love is also what drives many of the characters, and through readers’ perspectives, their actions may seem strange, even comical to us: from Helena pursuing Demetrius and risking her reputation, to fairy queen Titania falling in love with Bottom. However, all these things are done out of love. In conclusion, A Midsummer Night’s Dream displays the blindness of love and how it greatly contradicts with reason.
In the comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the plethora of comedic styles used by Shakespeare illustrate his intention to poke fun at love throughout the play. The play is notorious for its intricate and irrational plotline, mainly due to the constantly shifting love triangles. Once the powerful fairies become involved with the fate of the naive lovers – Demetrius, Helena, Lysander and Hermia – matters are further complicated. The complication inflicted by the fairies is credited to the powerful love potion that Oberon, King of the Fairies, hands over to Puck, a mischievous fairy, to use on his wife Titania, with intentions to embarrass and distract her. This spiteful attitude is due to Oberon and Titania’s argument over the custody of an Indian boy. This argument is what ends up affecting all and throwing everything out of whack. This conniving plan, intended to act as a diversion, ends up affecting many more than just Titania, but rather all three distinctive groups in the play: the lovers, fairies, and mechanicals. This comical journey of jumbled up love affairs is not entirely comprised of slapstick-type comedy, but also crucial lessons about love. The comedic styles of both farce and irony appear frequently throughout the play, fortifying the play comedically and morally. The obliviousness of a character that is displayed with dramatic irony represents how love is truly blind. The randomness of farce represents how love truly has no reason, and is very confusing, like the play itself. Farce and dramatic irony both serve as vehicles to exemplify the absurd, out of control, and illogical realities of love.
Love can exist in many different ways, especially in William Shakespeare’s play, Romeo and Juliet. The types of love in the play include love between or for family members, love for friends, love for self, love of an idea or cause, and, of course, romantic love. There are many different perspectives of what type of love Shakespeare is trying to focus on during his play, or, better yet, what he is trying to tell them about it. In his personal life, Shakespeare did not seem to be a big fan of love. He was forced to marry a woman named Anne Hathaway due to impregnating her prior to marriage, but after a while moved away and never saw her again. In his will, he only left her his bedclothes. This inspired people to come up with different theories, one of which is that he simply fell out of love, and could never look at Anne again. For that reason, Shakespeare aims to show the reader that when taken too far, passionate love leads to destruction. This becomes evident through the actions and words of three important characters. The first is friar Lawrence, the priest in the play, who warns Romeo about his dangerous love. In addition, there is Juliet, the young girl in the relationship, who takes her own life as a consequence of love after marrying impulsively. Lastly, there is Mercutio, Romeo's best friend, who shows his opinions about love and women in general. The play circulates around the idea of obsessive love and its disastrous outcomes.
William Shakespeare’s writings are famous for containing timeless, universal themes. A particular theme that is explored frequently in his writings is the relationship between men and women. A Midsummer Night’s Dream contains a multitude of couplings, which are often attributed to the fairies in the play. Each of these pairings has positive and negative aspects, however, some relationships are more ideal than others. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream the optimal pairings are Lysander and Hermia, Demetrius and Helena, and Oberon and Titania; while the less desirable pairings are Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia and Demetrius, Lysander and Helena, and Titania and Bottom. Throughout A Midsummer
Real love often becomes a very important theme in Shakespeare’s plays, especially A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, it does not evidence in any of the characters. For example, Lysander, Demetrius, Hermia, and Helena all chase real love and think they can find it in each other. In spite of this, it does not quite work out at first, since Lysander and Demetrius both love Hermia, while Hermia loves Lysander and Helena loves Demetrius. Yet as it typically does, everything works out and ‘true love’ wins the day. Seen here, love becomes fleeting, unfulfilling, and often, mistaken.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Shakespeare is full of comical jokes and humorous scenes, but something that subtly masks the stories of these characters is the recurring theme of love, specifically in dreams. Love can render one blind, letting them fall into a rabbit hole of a strange dream-like state. By act four, all (except for Demetrius) return to their normal selves, where Bottom says, "I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what / dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t'expound this dream"(4.1.200-201). The events that he had just experienced were too bizarre to comprehend, as he says he sounds like a fool trying to explain them. Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream shows how being infatuated can not only blind one, but it can feel like a hazy dream.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, true love as well as fake love are boldly defined. Lysander and Hermia, as well as Oberon and Titania’s love towards one another, is legitimate and honest. However, the fictitious love in the play dwells down to one sole character. Demetrius is the only character who’s love is a lie which only exists due to magical potions. Demetrius’s love for Helena will forever be just a fraudulent feeling, which leads to the conclusion that forged love exists within Shakespeare’s play.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s “High Comedy” plays, contains the following line: “the course of true love never did run smooth” (Shakespeare, 196). This truth resonates throughout Shakespeare’s sonnets, as real love is not all looks of longing and quiet desire, despite what poets such as Petrarch would have one believe. In reality, love is far more complex, with both positive and negative facets. Throughout the sonnets, Shakespeare provides keen insight into the true nature of love; positive connotations are rarely used in his description of love, instead Shakespeare describes it as war, disease, and madness. Through the speaker in his sonnets, Shakespeare explores love as a multifaceted entity, painting an authentic portrait
Emotions are among the most potent forces humanity has ever faced, and, as William Shakespeare emphasizes, love is one of the most influential emotions an individual can experience. Throughout Twelfth Night, Shakespeare focuses on one main characteristic about love that helps to solidify the strength of this emotion on the characters. He wants to reader to understand that love is one of the few forces that can instantaneously incapacitate and cripple human beings, yet it simultaneously wields the capacity to bestow the highest level of satisfaction within an individual.
Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare's sixteenth century tragedy, remains one of the most famous, timeless pieces of literature yet created. This bittersweet tale documents the forbidden attraction between two impulsive children, and their tragic suicides. The story's incidents, saturated with Shakespeare's views and opinions, reveal the playwright's philosophies on love. Many consider Romeo and Juliet the greatest love story of all time, yet when the "love" between the two main characters is analyzed, it cannot truly be considered love. Instead Shakespeare wrote this play as a testament of the harsh consequences of reckless lust and attraction, and endeavored to send an admonition. Shakespeare meant not for Romeo and Juliet to define true love, rather, to define what true love is not.
As you can quickly tell by looking at RVMS around Valentine's day, love makes people do crazy things. Some people are infatuated with the idea of love, some people are devastated they didn't get a valentine, some are curious who their secret admirer is, and some are desperately longing for someone who doesn't love them back. The presence of all these emotions makes RVMS a frantic place. Shakespeare creates a similar emotional rollercoaster in his most prized comedy, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, where a very hectic scenario is the result of love. Shakespeare’s most famous line from the play, “the course of true love never did run smooth,” is true because love makes people forget the instincts that protect them both physically and emotionally.