Love in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Helen chases Demetrius through the forest, degrading herself without hesitation: “I am your spaniel, and Demetrius, the more you beat me, I will fawn upon you.” She knows what she is doing. She watches her own abasement with open eyes and cannot stop. This is love as Shakespeare understands it in this play—not a choice made by a reasoning mind, but a force that unmakes reason itself, that can turn a woman into something less than human and leave her willing. Love is not, for most of this play, about mutual recognition or growth. It is about obsession, about the helpless pursuit of someone who does not want you.

In Act 1, love appears as obedience and social law. Hermia is told her father’s will is like a god’s will, and she must either marry the man chosen for her or accept death or a convent. Lysander offers escape—but even his love is tinged with the language of possession and property. By Act 2, when Puck’s magic spills across the forest, love becomes something wilder. It is no longer about social structures or rational choice. It is about the eye and the heart working at cross purposes. Lysander wakes from the love-juice and speaks as if he has discovered a truth: “The will of man is by his reason sway’d, and reason says you are the worthier maid.” But there is no reason in it. He has simply been remade by magic. He uses the language of logic to justify pure irrationality.

Yet the play does not mock love entirely. When Oberon sees Titania enchanted, falling into rapture over Bottom’s donkey head, he begins to pity her. “Her dotage now I do begin to pity,” he says, and he undoes the spell. More importantly, by the end of Act 3, something has shifted. Demetrius’s love for Helena, though brought about by magic, is allowed to persist. The spell is not reversed. He wakes and his heart remains changed. The play suggests that magic, in this case, has done what nature could not—it has brought two people into alignment. Helena gets what she pursued with such desperation, and the magic that seemed a curse becomes a blessing.

By the final act, all four lovers are paired, married, and heading toward the temple. They speak of their night in the forest as a dream, something they cannot quite remember or explain. Theseus dismisses it all as the work of imagination, and in a way he is right. But the play does not dismiss it. The lovers are changed. Their desires have been redirected, their identities remade, and they accept these changes without resistance. Love, the play finally argues, is not something reason governs. It is something that governs us, that rewrites us without our permission. And sometimes that rewriting is exactly what we need, even if we cannot explain how or why it happened.