YAY! I finally have something to post for junior year! Unfortunately it's just revisions from an in-class essay and honestly the prompt wasn't that good and neither was my paper, but don't worry! I'll have a bunch more stuff to post soon! Get ready for my Hamlet theme! Woot!
Love and Reason
In his play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare characterizes love as unstable and rarely rational. When the lovers run off into the woods, Puck is able to easily manipulate who loved whom and causes chaos. Though the original plan was to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena, Robin Goodfellow mistook Lysander for Demetrius and true love is turned into chaos. Puck does not feel sorry for the mistake but blames it on fate saying that “A Million fail, confounding oath on oath” (Act 3 line 95). Love is not stable- not even the lovers who truly love each other- and by the end of the play, all four are dependent on the love juice.
Shakespeare continues to mock love in the fairy world with Titania and Bottom. Oberon intended to make a fool of Titania, of possibly even wished her to be killed, by making her fall in love with some wild animal. Instead she falls in love with the transformed and translated Bottom, and the couple is absurd. Titania is a regal fairy queen but she has fallen in love with an uneducated, working class man with the head of a donkey. If Titania had been in her right senses she would have never even spoken to such a creature, but she is under a spell that clouds her judgement. Shakespeare even went so far as to have Bottom say; “And yet to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (Act 3 lines 145-146). The love juice, even for the lovers, causes their love to override everything else, leaving little room for reason.
When Titania falls in love with Bottom, her language is flowery and she speaks in rhyming verse while Bottom speaks in prose. Poetry is often used for showing love and affections, but in this case, it is used to show the extreme difference between Titania and Bottom. Titania is regal and well educated while Bottom is an obviously uneducated working man. The two of them paired together is something that would have never happened if it was not for the love juice. Shakespeare uses their language to show the differences and ridiculousness of their match.
