Hermia
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: Daughter of Egeus, in love with Lysander. Her father wants her to marry Demetrius, and Athenian law gives her a choice between obedience, a convent and death. She runs away instead.
- Key Traits: Brave, quick-tongued and sure of her own mind. Small, dark and fierce. Loyal to Lysander and, until the wood turns everything upside down, to her oldest friend.
- The Core Conflict: Hermia is told to see with her father’s eyes and refuses. The price of refusing is death, and she pays it by running into a wood where the man she ran away with stops loving her.
- Key Actions: Defies Egeus and Theseus before the court and plans to elope (A1S1). Confides the plan to Helena. Refuses to let Lysander sleep beside her, dreams of a serpent, and wakes alone (A2S2). Accuses Demetrius of murder, then loses Lysander to Helena and fights her friend (A3S2). Wakes with the others and is married to Lysander (A4S1, A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"I would my father looked but with my eyes."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Married to Lysander after Theseus overrules her father. She says nothing in the final act.
Before the Duke
Hermia has three lines in the opening trial and each of them is a refusal. Told that her father should be as a god to her, she wishes he could see with her eyes. Told that Demetrius is worthy, she says so is Lysander. Then, in front of the duke and the whole court, she asks what the worst punishment is, and having heard it, chooses it.
Original
So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord,
Ere I will my virgin patent up
Unto his lordship, whose unwished yoke
My soul consents not to give sovereignty.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And so that’s how I’ll live and die, my lord,
Before I give up my virginity
To that man, whose control I don’t desire
And unto whom my heart won’t acquiesce.
"Sovereignty" is a political word, and she uses it about her own body. Egeus has told the court that she is his to dispose of; Theseus has explained that she is a shape in wax that her father printed and may destroy; and Hermia’s answer is that her soul does not consent. She has no power in the room, and she speaks as though she had.
The scene sets the terms of the whole play. The theme of gender and patriarchy is stated here as law: a daughter is property, and a woman who chooses her own husband is a rebel. The theme of control and rebellion begins with her, a daughter who will not be disposed of. Everything that follows in the wood is the working out of what happens when the rebel runs.
The Course of True Love
Left alone with Lysander, Hermia does something the scene does not require: she takes the tragedy out of the situation. Lysander lists every way that lovers have been crossed, in blood, in years, in the choice of friends, and Hermia answers each with a cry, "O cross!", "O spite!", "O hell!", until the pattern becomes a kind of game. Then she draws the moral.
Original
If then true lovers have been ever crossed,
It stands as an edict in destiny:
Then let us teach our trial patience,
Because it is a customary cross,
As due to love as thoughts and dreams and sighs,
Wishes and tears, poor fancy's followers.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So if true lovers always suffer setbacks,
That’s just the way true love is meant to be;
So let us teach ourselves to act with patience
To overcome the crosses we must bear,
For love will make us think and dream and sigh,
And, inescapably, love makes us sob.
It is a remarkably level-headed thing for a girl under sentence of death to say. If love is always crossed, then being crossed is simply what love is, and the right response is patience. Lysander, who has been enjoying his own eloquence, immediately proposes running away instead, and Hermia agrees. But she has already shown the audience the quality that will carry her through the wood: she does not panic.
The oath she swears a few lines later, by Cupid’s bow and Venus’s doves and Dido’s funeral fire and all the vows men ever broke, is comic in its excess and serious in its intent. The theme of love and folly in this play is about lovers who cannot see straight. Hermia, in Act 1, is the one lover who can.
Lie Further Off
Lost in the wood at night, Lysander suggests they sleep, and then suggests they share a pillow, arguing prettily that two hearts with one troth make one bed no sin. Hermia sends him further off. She is polite about it, and firm, and the audience learns that the girl who defied her father is not going to be talked into anything by her lover either.
Original
Help me, Lysander, help me! Do thy best
To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!
Ay me, for pity! What a dream was here!
Lysander, look how I do quake with fear:
Methought a serpent eat my heart away,
And you sat smiling at his cruel pray.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Help me, Lysander, help me! Do your best
To get this crawling serpent off my breast!
For pity’s sake! What awful dream was here!
Lysander, see I’m shaking out of fear:
I thought a serpent ate my heart away,
Whilst you were laughing as it ate its prey.
She wakes from the only real dream in the play, and it is a nightmare with an exact meaning. A serpent has eaten her heart while Lysander sat smiling; and Lysander, at that moment, is somewhere in the wood telling Helena that he loves her. The dream knows what Hermia does not. She calls his name four times, gets no answer, and goes to look for him.
The scene is short and it is the hinge of her story. Before it, Hermia has a lover who cannot keep his hands to himself; after it, she has a lover who cannot bear the sight of her. The theme of dreams and reality is usually the play’s way of softening what happened. For Hermia the dream is the one thing that tells her the truth.
Though She Be But Little
The quarrel in Act 3 is the play’s longest scene and Hermia arrives in the middle of it, following Lysander’s voice through the dark. She finds him kneeling to Helena, is told he hates her, and refuses to believe it until he calls her an Ethiope, a cat, a burr and a dwarf. Then she turns on her friend.
Original
How low am I, thou painted maypole? Speak;
How low am I? I am not yet so low
But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
How small am I, you painted maypole? Tell me;
How small am I? I know I’m not so small
That my own nails cannot reach your eyes.
The joke is about height, and it is a good one: Hermia is small and Helena is tall, and Hermia has decided that Lysander’s change of heart can only be explained by Helena’s inches. The men have to hold her back. But the anger underneath the comedy is real, because Hermia has lost everything in a single night, her father, her city, her lover and now her friend, and the only thing she can still do is fight.
Helena’s verdict, "though she be but little, she is fierce", has become the line by which Hermia is remembered, and it is fair. The friendship between the two women is tested to breaking in this scene, and it is Hermia, not Helena, who breaks it: Helena pleads, Hermia attacks. The morning will mend the lovers. Whether it mends the friendship, the play does not say.
"The lovers, silly and artificial before they leave the city, find themselves confronted in the woods with forces they do not begin to understand, forces which are at once within and outside them."
— David P. Young, Something of Great Constancy, 1966
Key Quotes
Quote 1
I swear to thee, by Cupid's strongest bow,
By his best arrow with the golden head,
By the simplicity of Venus' doves,
By that which knitteth souls and prospers loves,
And by that fire which burned the Carthage queen,
When the false Troyan under sail was seen,
By all the vows that ever men have broke,
In number more than ever women spoke,
In that same place thou hast appointed me,
To-morrow truly will I meet with thee.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I swear, by Cupid, god of love’s strong bow,
And by his finest arrow tipped with gold,
And doves that pulled the chariot of Venus,
By that which binds our souls with love between us,
And by that fire which burned the Carthage queen,
When cheating Aeneas was, sailing, seen,
And by all promises that men have broke,
Which number more than women ever spoke,
That in that place you’ve said that I should be,
I swear, tomorrow, there you’ll meet with me.
Quote Analysis: Hermia’s oath to meet Lysander in the wood. It starts conventionally, with Cupid and Venus, and then swerves: she swears by the fire that burned Dido when Aeneas sailed away, and by every vow that men have ever broken. A girl promising to elope has chosen, for her guarantee, the most famous abandoned woman in classical poetry and the faithlessness of men in general. Whether Hermia is being witty or Shakespeare is being prophetic, the oath tells the audience that she knows exactly what men’s promises are worth, and is going anyway.
But, gentle friend, for love and courtesy
Lie further off; in human modesty,
Such separation as may well be said
Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid,
So far be distant; and, good night, sweet friend:
Thy love ne'er alter till thy sweet life end!
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, gentle friend, for love and for respect
Lie further off, for it is more correct
To sleep further apart so we can say
We’re pure when bachelor and fiancée.
So, go sleep over there; goodnight, dear friend;
And may your love endure till your life’s end!
Quote Analysis: Hermia refusing to let Lysander sleep beside her. Modern audiences sometimes find the scene prudish; it is not. Hermia has run away from home with a man, in defiance of the law, and she is drawing the one line that is still hers to draw. "Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid" is a statement about what she intends to be on her wedding day. The blessing she sends him off with, that his love may never alter, is answered within fifty lines by Puck’s flower.
Dark night, that from the eye his function takes,
The ear more quick of apprehension makes;
Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,
It pays the hearing double recompense.
Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;
Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound
But why unkindly didst thou leave me so?
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Dark night, that makes my eyes be less astute,
Has made my hearing ears be more acute;
So though my eyesight’s not as cognitive,
It makes my hearing twice as sensitive.
I haven’t found you with my eyes, Lysander,
But I hear sounds from you as they meander.
But why did you just leave me so unkindly?
Quote Analysis: Hermia finding Lysander in the dark. The speech is a small essay on the senses, night taking away sight and doubling hearing, and it is spoken by a woman who has just tracked her lover through a wood by the sound of his voice. The tenderness of "Mine ear, I thank it" makes what follows crueller. She has found him. He wishes she had not. The question at the end is asked in good faith, and the answer she gets is that he hates her.
Methinks I see these things with parted eye,
When every thing seems double.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
To me, it’s like my eyes are out of focus,
And everything is doubled.
Quote Analysis: Hermia waking in the morning, with the duke gone and the night behind her. "Parted eye" is the look of someone not yet focused, and "double" is the whole play in a word: two men, two women, two worlds, two accounts of every event. The lovers agree to tell each other their dreams on the way home, and after three more words, "Yea; and my father", Hermia does not speak again. The girl who had the sharpest tongue in Athens ends the play in silence, watching Pyramus and Thisbe.
Key Takeaways
- The Rebel Daughter: Hermia refuses her father, the duke and the law of Athens, and chooses death or a convent over Demetrius.
- Level-Headed in Love: Faced with a sentence of death, she is the lover who counsels patience; Lysander is the one who panics.
- The Serpent Dream: Her nightmare in the wood is the play's only real dream, and it tells her the truth about Lysander.
- Little but Fierce: Stripped of father, city, lover and friend in one night, she fights, and the friendship with Helena is the casualty.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why does Egeus want his daughter put to death?
He does not, quite; he wants her to obey, and death is the law’s way of making sure she does. Egeus comes before Theseus with a complaint that Lysander has bewitched Hermia with songs and trinkets, and then invokes an Athenian custom that gives a father absolute power over a disobedient daughter:
As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman
Or to her death, according to our law
Immediately provided in that case.
(Egeus, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Since she is mine, that I may choose her fate:
Which is she either weds this gentleman
Or she’ll be killed, as stated in our law,
Immediately if that proves the case.
There was no such law in Elizabethan England, and there is no such law in Shakespeare’s sources. He invented it, or rather imported it from the world of romance, where fathers routinely threaten daughters with death, in order to give the comedy a real edge. Theseus softens it by adding the convent as a third option, but he does not overrule it. "Which by no means we may extenuate," he says, and sends Hermia off to think.
Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), placed Hermia among the "willful daughters" whose pride and power the play’s festive ending brings "under the control of lords and husbands". The observation is fair as far as it goes. It is worth adding that the law is never used. Theseus ignores it in Act 4 without explanation, and Egeus, who has demanded "the law, the law, upon his head", is simply overborne. The death sentence is there to establish what Hermia is defying, and once she has defied it the play loses interest in it. The theme of order and chaos in Athens is a law that nobody enforces, which is either the play’s mercy or its evasion, depending on the reader.
Is Hermia brave?
Extraordinarily. She is a young woman in a court where her father has just called her a possession, the duke has agreed, and the punishment for disagreement is death. Her response is to ask permission to speak, and then to speak:
I do entreat your grace to pardon me.
I know not by what power I am made bold,
Nor how it may concern my modesty,
In such a presence here to plead my thoughts...
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I ask your grace to offer me forgiveness.
I don’t know whether I may be so bold,
Nor how it will affect my reputation,
Expressing my desires in your presence...
"I know not by what power I am made bold" is the play’s first mention of an unexplained power, and it is not magic. It is Hermia’s own will, which surprises her as much as it surprises the court. She has not planned to defy anyone. She simply finds that she cannot do otherwise.
Catherine Belsey, in her essay for the Folger edition (1993), noted that the play "does not ignore the trace of violence that exists within love when the other person fails to conform to the lover’s idealized image", and Hermia’s courage is tested against exactly that violence twice: first from her father, who would rather see her dead than married to the wrong man, and then from Lysander, who calls her a serpent and threatens to shake her off. She stands up to both. What she cannot stand up to is the one thing the play does not let her fight, which is enchantment. The theme of love and folly in this play is that even the bravest lover is at the mercy of a flower.
What does Hermia’s dream of the serpent mean?
It is the only dream in the play that is actually a dream. Everything else the characters call a dream, Titania’s night with Bottom, the lovers’ muddle, Bottom’s vision, really happened. Hermia’s did not, and it is the one that tells the truth. She wakes crying for help against a serpent eating her heart while Lysander sat smiling, and then discovers that Lysander has gone:
Lysander! What, removed? Lysander! Lord!
What, out of hearing? Gone? No sound, no word?
Alack, where are you? Speak, an if you hear;
Speak, of all loves! I swoon almost with fear.
No? Then I well perceive you all not nigh
Either death or you I'll find immediately.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Lysander! Have you left? Lysander! Lord!
What, can’t you hear me? Left without a word?
Oh no, where are you? Speak up if you hear;
Speak up! I’m almost fainting out of fear.
No word? It seems to me that you’re not nigh:
I’ll either find you soon, or else I’ll die.
The serpent is an old emblem of treachery and of sexual betrayal, and Hermia’s sleeping mind has produced it at the exact moment her lover is being bewitched a few yards away. The dream does not cause anything; it registers something. Hermia knows, before she is told, that Lysander has changed.
Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), built his reading of the play around this distinction: the play "contains only one description of something that may unequivocally be taken to be a dream, one ‘real’ dream, Hermia’s dream of the serpent", and everyone else uses the word to explain away what they cannot face. Marjorie Garber, in Dream in Shakespeare (1974), read the serpent dream as the play’s clearest case of a dream that is truer than waking life. The image also connects Hermia to the wood’s other snake: Oberon has just described the bank where Titania sleeps as the place where "the snake throws her enamelled skin". Hermia’s dream, in other words, is not a private symbol. It is the play’s way of telling us that the wood, for all its flowers, has a serpent in it, and that the serpent is love. The theme of dreams and reality begins here, with the one dream nobody would choose to have.
Why do Hermia and Helena fall out?
Because Helena thinks Hermia is in on the joke. When both men suddenly declare their love for her, Helena can only explain it as a conspiracy, and when Hermia arrives, she assumes the ringleader has come to enjoy the show:
Injurious Hermia! Most ungrateful maid!
Have you conspired, have you with these contrived
To bait me with this foul derision?
(Helena, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh, hurtful Hermia! You’re so ungrateful!
Have you colluded with these two, contriving
To wind me up with this sick ridicule?
What follows is the famous speech about the double cherry, the schooldays, the sampler and the song, in which Helena describes a friendship so close that the two girls were one person. Hermia, who has no idea what Helena is talking about, says she is amazed. And then Lysander calls her a dwarf, and the friendship goes up in a fight about height.
Shirley Nelson Garner, in a 1981 essay for Women’s Studies, argued that this is the play’s design rather than an accident: the comedy’s happy ending requires the breaking of women’s bonds, Titania’s with the votaress and Hermia’s with Helena, so that each woman can be handed to a man. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, two centuries earlier, had been troubled by the same friendship from the other side, describing Helena’s decision in Act 1 to betray Hermia’s elopement to Demetrius as a "broad determination of ungrateful treachery". Between them the two critics mark the problem. The friendship between the women is the warmest relationship in the play, and both women betray it, Helena for a man and Hermia in a rage. The friendship is not resolved in the morning. When the four lovers wake, the two men have made peace. The two women do not speak to each other again.
Why is Hermia mocked for being short?
Because the actors were. Shakespeare wrote for a company in which women were played by boys, and the plainest explanation for the play’s running joke about Hermia’s height and Helena’s is that he had one short boy and one tall one. The joke is built into the text so thoroughly that it survives any casting. Hermia is a "puppet", a "dwarf", a "minimus", a "bead", an "acorn":
Get you gone, you dwarf;
You minimus, of hindering knot-grass made;
You bead, you acorn.
(Lysander, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Get away, you dwarf;
You tiny thing, made from growth-stunting weed;
You bead and acorn.
She is also dark. Lysander calls her an "Ethiope" and a "tawny Tartar", and Helena, earlier, envies her "sphery eyne". The two women are drawn as physical opposites, short and dark against tall and fair, and the play uses the contrast to make the point that neither man’s love has anything to do with what the women look like.
That is the serious use of the joke. Catherine Belsey (1993) observed that "the four lovers are virtually indistinguishable" and that "Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal": the flower makes Lysander love Helena and hate Hermia, and the only reasons he can find for the change are her height and her colouring, which have not altered. Hermia’s fury at being called low is the fury of a woman who has understood that she is being rejected for nothing. The insults are funny because they are absurd, and the absurdity is the point. The theme of love and folly in this play is that lovers see with the mind, not the eyes, and what the mind sees can be changed by a drop of juice.
Are the four lovers interchangeable?
That is the oldest complaint about the play, and the play seems to invite it. Lysander and Demetrius are both well-born young Athenians with nothing to choose between them; Egeus prefers one, Hermia the other, and no reason is given for either preference. Under the spell the men swap women without any change in the language they use to woo them. Hermia, at the height of the confusion, asks the question the audience is asking:
Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?
I am as fair now as I was erewhile.
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Am I not Hermia? Aren’t you Lysander?
I’m just as beautiful now as before.
She is, and he is, and it makes no difference. The lovers are not characters in the way Bottom is a character; they are positions in a pattern, and the pattern is what the play is interested in.
Enid Welsford, in The Court Masque (1927), was among the first to argue that the lovers are deliberately drawn like figures in a dance rather than psychological portraits, and G. K. Hunter (1962) and Alexander Leggatt, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974), developed the same idea: the audience is kept at a distance from the lovers so that it can watch the shape of what happens to them. Catherine Belsey (1993) drew the modern conclusion: "No wonder the four lovers are virtually indistinguishable. Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal." Against all this, it is worth insisting that Hermia is distinguishable, and the play takes some trouble to make her so. She is the one who defies her father, the one who sends Lysander further off, the one who dreams of the serpent and the one who fights. The men are interchangeable. The women are not, and the play’s comedy depends on the difference.
Does Hermia get what she wants?
She gets Lysander, which is what she said she wanted, and she gets him because a fairy king took pity on someone else. Theseus, discovering the four lovers asleep in the wood, overrules Egeus in a single line and orders a triple wedding. The law that threatened Hermia with death is not repealed; it is ignored. Hermia says nothing. She has one more speech in the play, about seeing double, and then falls silent for the whole of Act 5, watching the workmen’s play while the men make jokes.
Readers have noticed the silence. In Act 1 Hermia was the boldest speaker in Athens; in Act 5 she and Helena do not speak at all, while Theseus, Lysander and Demetrius mock Pyramus and Thisbe. Louis Adrian Montrose (1983) read the pattern as the play’s purpose: the "willful daughter" of the first scene has been brought, by way of the wood, into the quiet of a bride. C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), read it more kindly as the natural end of a holiday, the release of the night giving way to the clarification of the morning, with the lovers restored to a society that now has room for them.
Both readings fit. Hermia wanted Lysander and a life not chosen by her father, and she has both. What she has lost is harder to name: a friend, a voice, and the certainty that the man beside her loves her for a reason. Lysander, at least, was released from the spell. The play never says whether Hermia knows what he said to her in the wood. The theme of gender and patriarchy does not end with the wedding; it ends with a bride who has stopped talking.
