Forbidden Desire in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream
In his play A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare explores the conflict of forbidden desire, as revealed through the experience of four young lovers dwelling in ancient Greece. Hermia and Lysander are two of these lovers, and their desire to marry one another is prohibited by Hermia's father Egeus, and enforced by the governor of Athenian law-King Theseus. Hermia is informed that she may only agree to one of three undesirable choices: marry Demetrius unwillingly, submit to an austere, celibate life as a nun, or face certain execution. Confronted with these dreadful options, Hermia agrees to flee from Athens towards the remote house of Lysanders' widowed aunt, in the wood of Greece. While wandering in this nearby wood, Hermia and Lysander lose their way in the silent, moonlit night, and drift into sleep. Here-away from the prohibitions of rational Greek civilization-Shakespeare plunges his audience into the psychological realm of his characters, by developing the dream-filled, darkened wilderness of Greece as a medium offering access to the unconscious realm of his characters. In the ensuing forest scenes, Shakespeare blends fiction with fantasy, and ultimately allows his characters to confront the boundaries of consciousness and unconsciousness, thus resolving the conflict of socially repressed desire.
The departure of Hermia and Lysander from the city of Athens to the wood intentionally coincides with the first appearance of fantasy in the play. In Act 2, Scene 1, Robin Goodfellow (also known as Puck the mischievous spirit), and a fairy, enter into the plot outside the perimeter of Athens; with the entrance of these otherworldly figures, Shakespeare is ...
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...er Night's Dream is comedic in nature, it provides serious insight into the importance of fantasy and desire to humanity-especially amidst certain intellectual thought in advancing civilization. A Midsummer Night's Dream demonstrates that fantasy is inseparably interconnected with desire, existent both within the imagination, and within the unconscious.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The Norton Shakespeare.Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. W.W. Norton and Co: New York, 1997. 1.1, 65-67. 2.2, 155. 4.1, 167. 5.1, 1-8.
Freud, Sigmund. "The Interpretation of Dreams." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Julie Rivkin, and Michael Ryan, eds. Blackwell: Malden, Massachussets. 2000. 148
Freud, Sigmund. "The Uncanny." Literary Theory: An Anthology. Julie Rivkin, and Michael Ryan, eds. Blackwell: Malden, Massachussets. 2000. 166.
William Shakespeare has a habit of creating complicated plots, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream is no exception. Three distinct worlds are presented within the play, and the story’s theme is most prevalent when they collide or mirror one another. Shakespeare’s allusions very intentionally cast light on these themes as he uses them to develop characters, settings, and comedy. The point of that development is the effective delivery of the theme that love renders us equals.
Love can be quite chaotic at times. As much as poets and songwriters promote the idea of idyllic romantic love, the experience in reality is often fraught with emotional turmoil. When people are in love, they tend to make poor decisions, from disobeying authority figures to making rash, poorly thought-out choices. In the play A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare uses various motifs to illustrate how love, irrationality, and disobedience are thematically linked to disorder.
A Midsummer Night's Dream is one of Shakespeare's most widely read comedies about love. This seems somewhat strange, however, in light of the fact that so few of its characters seem to display any kind of full or true love. A close examination of the actions and words of each of the players will reveal that only one of them, by the end of Act V, should be considered a "lover".
SparkNotes Editors. (2002). SparkNote on A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Retrieved April 9, 2014, from http://www.sparknotes.com/shakespeare/msnd/
Similar to other works by Shakespeare, such as The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night’s Dream embellishes the pressures that arise between genders dealing with complicated family and romantic situations. The plot includes a duke who is going to marry a woman he conquered in battle, the king and queen of the fairies embroiled in a fight so fierce that it unbalances the natural world, and a daughter fighting with her father for her right to marry the man she chooses. The girl’s father selects Demetrius to marry his daughter, but she is in love with another man, Lysander, who loves her in return, and her friend Helena is in love Demetrius, but he wants nothing to do with her. Considering the fact that males were dominant during that era, whereas, men chased women, and women remained submissive, Shakespeare dallies with those traditional roles and there are several possible reasons why. Perhaps he made women a stronger force in his plays because he wanted to give his audience a break fr...
Burke, Kenneth. “Why A Midsummer Night's Dream?”. Shakespeare Quarterly 57. 3 (2006): 297-308. Web. 25 Apr 2014.
Throughout the events which unfold in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare delivers several messages on love. Through this play, one of the significant ideas he suggests is that love is blind, often defying logic and overriding other emotions and priorities. Helena loves Demetrius unconditionally and pursues him despite knowing that he loathes her; conflict arises between Helena and Hermia, childhood best friends, over Demetrius and Lysander; and because she is in love, Queen Titania is able to see beauty and virtue in the ass-headed Nick Bottom.
In every given business, the name itself portrays different meanings. This serves as the reference point and sometimes the basis of customers on what to expect within the company. Since personality affects product image (Langmeyer & Shank, 1994), the presence of brand helps in the realization of this concept. Traditionally, brand is a symbolic manifestation of all the information connected with a company, product, or service (Nilson, 2003; Olin, 2003). A brand is typically composed of a name, logo, and other visual elements such as images, colors, and icons (Gillooley & Varley, 2001; Laforet & Saunders, 1994)). It is believed that a brand puts an impression to the consumer on what to expect to the product or service being offered (Mere, 1995). In other application, brand may be referred as trademark, which is legally appropriate term. The brand is the most powerful weapon in the market (LePla & Parker, 1999). Brands possess personality in which people associate their experience. Oftentimes, they are related to the core values the company executes.
Four lovers each with his or her own challenge in love, Lysander and Hermia who love each other but may never be together, and Demetrius who loves Hermia and rejects Helena’s truthful devotion. Shakespeare’s writing style is the essence that brings forth the emotions within his works. Throughout a Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, commonplace literary devices are used to emphasize his style of writing. , Shakespeare depicts the theme of love’s difficulty, especially with the use of figurative language, such as metaphor and personification, to show that though complications arise in complex situations, the ability to overcome becomes the true meaning of love. wise
Some of the most prominent themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are the omnipresence of love and desire and the tendencies of characters to manifest their defining traits. Helena and Hermia are two perfect examples of this. Hermia is the lover, and Helena the desirer, and both thrive off of their obsessions. In fact, both women are so tied to these traits that when they are taken away, their characters deflate and fall static.
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
A Midsummer Night’s Dream portrays magic through many places in the text. Magic is a key component to the plot of the story. Magic can make a problem disappear, or it can intensify the problem. There are many reasons magic is powerful, but one of the main ones is because not everyone understands it. Magic in one way or another affects everyone in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the perspective with which each character views magic is different. The power of magic is something that is hard to understand, even those who use magic often cannot fully understand magic because in many ways it is irrational and inexplicable.
The role of the brand in higher education has been considered as very important. The brand is possibly the most important connection a prospective student has with an institution. The brand of a university carries with it a promise of a particular level of service and student outcomes. In the case of education, the service is more than a simple set of tangible features but is a complex bundle of benefits that satisfy customer’s needs (Clarke, 2009).
The first question that arises in this play is the order and the disorder of society. For instance, the social order of this society emphasizes that the father must pick his daughter’s husband and that he should enforce this for the benefit of his family. However, in the beginning of this play, I was able to observe how a family 's reputation is threatened when a young woman wishes to marry her one true love against her dad 's will. Yet, all of this changes when the four lovers find themselves lost in the woods far away from the ordered and the hierarchical society. Once in the woods Lysander and Demetrius find themselves to be in love with Helena instead of Hermia. This confusion now causes Hermia to feel unwanted by both Lysander and Demetrius and jealous of Helena, as she is the one that has the attention of both men. This disorder of relationships also happens within the fairies when the queen of the fairies falls in love with a human who is mistakenly being transformed into an
Secondly, some light has been thrown on the previous researches by various authors on the similar topics by providing with a summarised form of the same. It helps in better understanding of the ongoing concepts and perceptions on the concept of brand and its importance.