A Midsummer Night’s Dream: the Course of True Love Essay

The love relationships in Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ connect deeply with the plot of the play since they form a large part of the interactions between the characters and their situational dilemmas. The course of love shows its unsmooth path in the way it shapes itself between the four lovers, the actors who are putting up a play and a ruling couple of Athens. There is also the involvement of a group of magical creatures of the forest where the lovers find themselves to be in and placed in difficult circumstances.

Of course, the central reason why Lysander says these words comes from Act 1 Scene 1 where Hermia’s father, Egeus has stopped them from marrying each other despite the fact that they are in love. This is an instance of society hindering the path of love since the characters themselves have got nothing but the best wishes towards each other but Egeus acts as a moral arm of the social order which stops them from being together. Egeus finds support from Theseus who tells Hermia that she must understand her father’s viewpoint by telling her that “Rather your eyes must with his judgment look (Act 1, Scene 1)”. Therefore, as a supporter of the social order, Theseus agrees with the sage father figure of Egeus rather than the youthful fancies of Hermia.

Lysander acknowledges this to be a difficult position to be in and assures Hermia that lovers in the past have also been through difficult periods in the course of their love. These challenges may seem impossible to overcome but true lovers are able to handle them with determination and courage which is uncommon amongst other mortals. In fact, social pressures are only part of the issues that lovers can face since differences in an age which is called a “Misgraft (Act 1, Scene 1)” by Lysander can also cause problems for lovers which are more akin to demographic issues rather than social issues.

While these issues make the life of the lovers difficult, they do not make love impossible such as is the result with the parting of a lover due to other circumstances beyond mortal control which are mentioned by Lysander as “war, death, or sickness (Act 1, Scene 1)”. At the same time, the play focuses greatly on the idea of love being magical in some way since magic forces the pair of lovers to change the person they love the most and turn away from others who they had loved in the past. This change, of course, came from the mischief and the drama created by Puck and other fairies in the forest but it certainly caused the lovers to lose sight of who they loved for some time before they could be reconciled.

Therefore, true love as it is shown by Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream certainly has a difficult path to take but since the lovers can persevere in their objective to find happiness with each other they manage to eventually set everything right and end the play on a happy note when Puck says “Good Night (Act 5, Scene 2)” to us all. The difficulties the lovers faced along with the false paths they were set on coming across as nothing more than a dream or perhaps the price they had to pay for by being in love and following the winding uneasy path that lovers must. 

Works Cited: Shakespeare, W. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, The Norton Introduction to Literature. Eds. Booth, A et. al. Norton, 2005.