EGL 204-4                                                                                                                          Due April 2, 2004

 

           

shakespear’s veiws on romantic love as voiced by theseus in the beginning of act five, scene one, of “a midsummer night’s dream”

 

 

In reading and thinking about Theseus’ speech to Hippolyta, which opens the fifth act of Shakespear’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” one can hear the author voicing his opinion on the foolishness of instant love. While this theme is repeated throughout the play, it is spelled out quite clearly here.

Hippolyta remarks in line one that the stories the two pairs of lovers told when they were awakened in the forest seem rather fantastical to her, perhaps even unbelievable. This is the opening for Theseus’ dissertation on the unreliability of “These antique fables nor these fairy toys” (5.1.3). He explains to his betrothed that the stories they were told are simply the result of the fever-dreams that love causes in the minds of people under its spell. He likens lovers to lunatics and poets in line seven as a way of bolstering his claim that these youngsters are not in their right minds. This reader would not have been surprised to hear him compare them to someone drunk on mead or wine as well.

In class on March 31, 2004, Professor Videbaek indicated that the idea that love was transient and passing was not popular in the 1600’s, when this play was written. By making the lovers in this play succumb to the potion pressed into their eyes by Puck, Shakespeare was standing the notion of true love as forever on its head. In this speech, Theseus, who is in love himself, expounds at length on the madness that is romantic love.

This is interesting on two levels. First there is the author’s sly attack on the whole idea of romantic love as an idée fix. Then there is the underlying humor in Theseus’ rant about how foolish people are in love, when he is in love himself and susceptible to the same irrationality.

In contemplating the first level, one is reminded over and over that Shakespeare thinks romantic love of this type is nonsensical. He has Theseus compare the eyesight of the man in love to that of a madman seeing visions. “One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;/ That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic./ Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. (9-11). He is saying that the madman sees things that are not there at all, and the lover projects beauty, grace, intelligence, charm, wit – whatever is desired, onto the persona of the beloved. In that sense, he too often sees things that are not there.

Theseus implies that the lover cares no more to be told that what he is seeing is a mirage than does the madman. Then he goes on to flesh out his comparison to the poet.

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to an airy nothing

A local habitation and a name (12-17).

Here he is making his case again for the unreliability of the vision of the lover. He reminds Hippolyta that the stories of these young lovers are no more likely to be true than are the airy imaginings of the poet seeing shapes and stories in the clouds.

            In the last few lines of this speech, he speaks of the habit of conflating the bearer of happy news or the person with whom one has fun with the happy or fun event itself; the lover’s habit of confusing the messenger with the message. He looks at this phenomenon from both sides, reminding her that it works for the fair and the frightening.

            Such tricks hath strong imagination

            That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

            It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

            Or in the night, imagining some fear,

            How easy is a bush supposed a bear! (18-22)

The mind plays tricks on itself, he says. It makes things both better and worse than they actually are. To illustrate the way the mind might make things worse, he uses an example anyone can relate to, being frightened in the dark by something inanimate and innocuous. Something one would walk past with no inkling of trepidation in the day, or with a lantern, but which, in the combination of darkness and imagination, becomes terrifying.

            The irony here is in the idea that as Theseus is going on and on about the foolishness and unreliability of people under love’s spell, he is under it himself, and he is talking to his beloved, who is presumably under the spell as well. He seems to unconsciously exempt himself and his love from the generalities he is ascribing to fools in love. The author, of course, is not unconscious, and places these words in Theseus’ mouth most deliberately.

            This is another indication of Shakespear’s less-than-favorable impression of romantic love and its durability in the long term. It is also another indication of his understanding of human nature. No one willingly counts him or herself a fool, and no one is likely to ascribe that characteristic to their lover, especially not in his or her presence. So he has Theseus pronouncing wisely on all the other lovers, yet exempting himself and Hippolyta from that unreliable group.

 

 

Works Cited

Shakespeare, William. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” An Introduction to Literature. Ed. Sylvan, Barnet et al. 13th ed. New York: Longman, 2004. 1277.