How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare Read Online Free PDF Page A

the play? Absolutely. Should we care? Absolutely not. When A Midsummer Night’s Dream is played onstage, the Lovers’ Plot is crystal clear. However, we should bear in mind that Shakespeare is up to something with all these teenage lovers who keep falling in and out of love with each other, and it has to do with the nature of love itself.
    It could be argued that all the round-robin shenanigans in the play about who loves whom are caused by the magic flower and not by the actual desires of the lovers. And yet isn’t falling in love a bit like magic? A gift, a song, a look—all these can alter our hearts in an instant. Shakespeare seems to be acknowledging this and using the flower as a colorful, theatrical literary device. Indeed, the magic flower is a metaphor for the central theme of the play, which, it seems to me, is the power of love in its many guises.
    Love is the theme of most of Shakespeare’s comedies, but in each one he treats the theme in a different way. Sometimes he emphasizes the melancholy, more philosophical side of love ( Twelfth Night ); sometimes the irrepressible, youthful side ( Love’s Labour’s Lost ); sometimes it’s farcical ( The Merry Wives of Windsor ); sometimes sardonic ( Troilus and Cressida );sometimes wise (As You Like It ); sometimes clear-sighted and earthy ( Much Ado About Nothing ); and sometimes ironic (The Taming of the Shrew ). In A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Shakespeare is focusing on the intellectual side of love, turning love over and over, analyzing its odd behaviors and unique powers.
    Shakespeare, as usual, tells us clearly, right up front, what he’s up to:
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind .
    (Cupid was the Roman god of erotic love and was frequently depicted with wings and a blindfold.) These two lines occur in the middle of a soliloquy by Helena when she is railing against her fate: Why should Demetrius love Hermia and not me?! I’m as pretty as she is! Everyone in Athens thinks so!
How happy some o’er other some can be!
Through Athens I am thought as fair as she .
But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so .
He will not know what all but he do know .
    Shakespeare makes it clear that Helena and Hermia are equally beautiful by objective standards. And yet Demetrius thinks Hermia is more beautiful because he sees her that way. Then when the juice of the magic flower is squeezed into his eyes, he falls in love with Helena and thinks that she’s more beautiful. Love is fickle, says Shakespeare. We see what we want to see. We don’t fall in love because of what our eyes tell us, but what our minds tell us.
Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind .
    Throughout this play, Shakespeare appears to be suggesting that the experience of love is like the experience of a dream—they are both irrational and changeable. The change can be caused by the juice of a magic flower. Or when we’re not in a magic forest, love can change for any number of reasons. In one of the most beautiful exchanges in the play, just afterHermia’s father has forbidden her to marry Lysander, the two lovers bewail their fate. Ay me , cries Lysander,
For aught [all] that I could ever read ,
Could ever hear by tale or history ,
The course of true love never did run smooth .
    The lovers then remind each other of the many ways that love can be thwarted: Lovers can be from different social classes (O cross! Too high to be enthralled to low .); they can be from different age groups (O spite! Too old to be engaged to young .); their relatives might not like each other (O hell, to choose love by another’s eyes! ); or—more profoundly—their love can be beset by war, death, or sickness ,
Making it momentary as a sound ,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ,
Brief as the lightning in the collied [coal-black] night,…
And, ere [before] a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do