Lysander
Character Profile – At a Glance
- Role: A young Athenian in love with Hermia, whose father has promised her to Demetrius. He persuades her to elope through the wood, where Puck’s mistake makes him fall for Helena instead.
- Key Traits: Eloquent, ardent and quick to act. Persuasive rather than steady. Every feeling he has, he has completely, including the ones a fairy gives him.
- The Core Conflict: Lysander loves Hermia against the law, and the wood rewards him by making him love someone else. He is the play’s clearest example of a lover who cannot trust his own heart.
- Key Actions: Argues his case before Theseus and proposes the elopement (A1S1). Loses the way in the wood and is anointed by Puck (A2S2). Wakes, loves Helena, and abandons Hermia. Fights Demetrius for Helena and turns on Hermia with insults (A3S2). Is released by Puck, wakes, and is married to Hermia (A4S1). Mocks Pyramus and Thisbe (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"The course of true love never did run smooth..."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Restored to Hermia by Puck’s counter-charm and married to her by Theseus’s order. He never learns what he said in the wood.
As Well Derived as He
Lysander’s first real speech is a legal argument. Egeus has told the court that Hermia is his to give and that he gives her to Demetrius; Lysander’s reply is that he is Demetrius’s equal in birth and wealth, his better in love, and, unlike his rival, faithful.
Original
I am, my lord, as well derived as he,
As well possessed; my love is more than his;
My fortunes every way as fairly ranked,
If not with vantage, as Demetrius';
And, which is more than all these boasts can be,
I am beloved of beauteous Hermia:
Why should not I then prosecute my right?
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My lord, I am as noble as he is,
And just as rich; I love Hermia more;
My fortunes and my prospects are the same,
And maybe better, as Demetrius’;
And most of all, outweighing all these boasts,
The beautiful Hermia loves me back.
Why can’t I have the right to marry her?
The word "right" is the point. Lysander does not argue that love should overrule law; he argues that the law, properly applied, should be on his side. He then produces his evidence, which is that Demetrius has already seduced and abandoned Helena. Theseus admits he had heard as much and forgotten to do anything about it. The case is sound and it changes nothing, because the law is not about which suitor is better. It is about who owns Hermia.
The scene tells us what kind of lover Lysander is: articulate, confident and used to winning arguments. The theme of order and chaos in Athens is that arguments do not matter. Egeus has the right of disposal, and a good speech cannot touch it.
Swift as a Shadow, Short as Any Dream
Alone with Hermia, Lysander gives the speech the play is remembered for. True love, he says, has never run smooth; it is crossed by blood, by age, by parents, and when it is not crossed it is cut short by war, death or sickness.
Original
Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say 'Behold!'
The jaws of darkness do devour it up:
So quick bright things come to confusion.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Or, if there was approval of the choice,
War, death or sickness had put paid to it,
To make it momentary, like a sound,
Or like a darting shadow, or a short dream;
As brief as lightning bolts within the night,
That split the sky and earth as they unfold,
Before a man has time to cry ‘look out!’
The lightning’s gone and darkness has returned:
For things that brightly shine will quickly vanish.
It is a beautiful speech and it is also a young man enjoying his own misery. The lightning that lights up heaven and earth for an instant and is swallowed by the dark is the finest image in the scene, and Hermia’s answer, that if lovers are always crossed they had better be patient, is the sensible one. Lysander immediately proposes something impatient: they will run away tomorrow night.
The speech is also prophecy. Before the play is over Lysander’s own love will prove as brief as the lightning, and it will not be war, death or sickness that ends it but a flower. The theme of love and folly is announced here, in the mouth of the lover who least suspects it applies to him.
Reason Becomes the Marshal to My Will
Puck finds Lysander asleep in the wood, mistakes him for the Athenian Oberon meant, and anoints his eyes. The next person he sees is Helena, and he wakes in love. What is striking is not the change but the explanation he gives for it.
Original
Content with Hermia! No; I do repent
The tedious minutes I with her have spent.
Not Hermia but Helena I love:
Who will not change a raven for a dove?
The will of man is by his reason swayed;
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Be glad with Hermia! You must be mad!
With her, so many dull times I have had.
Not Hermia but Helena I love:
Who wouldn’t change a raven for a dove?
Through thinking, man’s opinion can be swayed,
And thinking tells me you’re the finer maid.
Lysander is convinced that he has grown up. He was young and unripe when he loved Hermia; now reason has matured in him and shown him the better woman. The audience, who saw the flower squeezed on his eyelids thirty lines earlier, knows that reason has nothing to do with it. The speech is the play’s sharpest joke about love, because the lover under a spell is the one who talks most about judgement.
Helena thinks he is mocking her and leaves. Lysander turns to the sleeping Hermia and wishes her out of his sight, with a disgust as complete as his devotion was an hour before. The theme of magic and illusion in this play does not create feelings so much as swap them, and the swap leaves everything else, the eloquence, the certainty, the sense of being right, exactly where it was.
Half Sleep, Half Waking
Puck sets things right with a second herb, and Lysander wakes in the morning beside Hermia with the duke standing over him. Asked how he comes to be sleeping beside his enemy, he tells the truth as far as he knows it.
Original
My lord, I shall reply amazedly,
Half sleep, half waking: but as yet, I swear,
I cannot truly say how I came here;
But, as I think, – for truly would I speak,
And now do I bethink me, so it is, –
I came with Hermia hither: our intent
Was to be gone from Athens, where we might,
Without the peril of the Athenian law.
(Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My lord, I shall reply in some amazement,
Half sleeping, half awake. But now, I promise,
I cannot say for sure how I arrived here;
But I believe – for I will speak the truth,
And, come to think of it, this is the truth –
I came with Hermia. It was our plan
To get away from Athens so that we
Would not be threatened by Athenian law.
It is an honest answer and a dangerous one. He has just confessed the elopement to the duke, in front of Egeus, and Egeus at once demands the law upon his head. Lysander is saved not by his own words but by Demetrius, who announces that he no longer wants Hermia, and by Theseus, who decides on the spot to overrule the father.
What Lysander cannot say is anything about the night. He came with Hermia to the wood; the rest is amazement. The man who abandoned her, courted her friend, called her a serpent and a dwarf and tried to fight Demetrius for Helena remembers none of it, or remembers it as a dream. The theme of dreams and reality is the play’s mercy to its lovers, and Lysander needs it more than any of them.
"No wonder the four lovers are virtually indistinguishable. Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal."
— Catherine Belsey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Modern Perspective, 1993
Key Quotes
Quote 1
There, gentle Hermia, may I marry thee;
And to that place the sharp Athenian law
Cannot pursue us. If thou lovest me then,
Steal forth thy father's house to-morrow night;
And in the wood, a league without the town,
Where I did meet thee once with Helena,
To do observance to a morn of May,
There will I stay for thee.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
There, gentle Hermia, we can be married;
And over there the vicious laws of Athens
Do not apply. And, therefore, if you love me,
Tomorrow night sneak from your father’s house,
And in the wood, three miles out of town,
Where I once met with you and Helena
To watch the sunrise on a May-day morning,
There I will wait for you.
Quote Analysis: Lysander’s plan. It is a good one, as far as it goes: an aunt with money and no children, a house seven leagues beyond the reach of Athenian law, a meeting in the wood where he once saw Hermia keeping May morning with Helena. The detail about the aunt is the kind of thing a practical young man thinks of, and the detail about May morning is the kind of thing a romantic one does. The wood, as it turns out, is not a place you pass through on the way to somewhere safer. It is where the play happens.
One turf shall serve as pillow for us both;
One heart, one bed, two bosoms and one troth.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let’s share this pillow on this grassy ledge;
One heart, one bed, two bodies and one pledge.
Quote Analysis: Lysander’s suggestion, and Hermia’s refusal follows at once. The couplet is a piece of neat wooing, hearts and bed and troth all counted off, and it is also a small test of who is in charge. Hermia sends him further off and he goes, protesting his innocence in a speech about riddles. The scene is often played for laughs, and it is funny, but it also establishes that Lysander, for all his eloquence, does what Hermia tells him. That will not survive the flower.
For as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as the heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me!
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
For over-eating far too many sweets
Brings loathing, for one’s stomach just repeats,
Or as men change the things that they believe
And then are hated by those they deceive,
So you, my excess ideology
Be hated, but be hated most by me!
Quote Analysis: Lysander, newly in love with Helena, addressing the sleeping Hermia. The images are of sickness and heresy: she is the sweetness that made him sick, the false belief he has renounced, and a convert hates nothing so much as his old religion. The violence of the speech is out of all proportion to anything Hermia has done, and that is the point. The flower does not just redirect love; it turns the old love into loathing, and Lysander supplies the theology to justify it.
Hang off, thou cat, thou burr! Vile thing, let loose,
Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent!
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Let go of me, you clinging cat! Let go,
Or I will shake you from me like a serpent!
Quote Analysis: Lysander shaking Hermia off as she clings to him in the quarrel. The serpent is Hermia’s own image from her dream, thrown back at her, and the string of insults that follows, Ethiope, Tartar, dwarf, acorn, is the ugliest language in the play. It is spoken by a man under a spell, and the play expects us to remember that. It also expects us to notice that the spell did not invent the words. Lysander had them ready.
Key Takeaways
- The Eloquent Suitor: Lysander argues his right to Hermia before the duke, and loses because the law is not about who is the better man.
- The Course of True Love: His speech on crossed love is the play's most famous and its most ironic; his own love will prove as brief as lightning.
- Reason and the Flower: Anointed by mistake, he wakes loving Helena and insists that reason, not magic, has changed his mind.
- The Forgotten Night: He abandons and abuses Hermia under the spell, is released, and remembers it, if at all, as a dream.
Study Questions and Analysis
Why does Egeus prefer Demetrius to Lysander?
He never gives a reason, and the play seems to want us to notice that he does not. His complaint against Lysander is not that he is poor, or base, or a bad match, but that he has courted Hermia successfully:
Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,
And interchanged love-tokens with my child:
Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,
With feigning voice verses of feigning love...
(Egeus, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Lysander, you have sent her rhyming poems,
And traded tokens of your love with her.
You’ve sung outside her window by the moonlight,
By falsely singing love songs of false love...
Rhymes, love-tokens, moonlight singing, bracelets of hair: the crimes Egeus lists are the ordinary equipment of a suitor, and the only thing wrong with them is that they worked. Theseus concedes the point directly. Lysander, he says, is worthy "in himself"; he is the worse choice only because he lacks the father’s voice.
This is the play’s first joke about the arbitrariness of love, and it is made at the father’s expense before it is made at the lovers’. Egeus prefers Demetrius for no reason anyone can name, and the fairies will later make Lysander prefer Helena for no reason he can name either. Catherine Belsey, in her essay for the Folger edition (1993), observed that the play’s lovers are "virtually indistinguishable" and that this is not a fault but a discovery about love, which "is in this sense oddly impersonal". The same is true of the father’s preference. The theme of gender and patriarchy in Athens is that a daughter’s choice needs justifying and a father’s does not.
Is Lysander a better man than Demetrius?
At the start of the play, clearly. Demetrius has courted and abandoned Helena; Lysander has courted Hermia and means to marry her. Lysander says as much to the duke, and nobody contradicts him:
Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
Upon this spotted and inconstant man.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Demetrius – I’ll say this to his face –
Toyed and seduced Helena, Nedar’s daughter
And won her heart; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Completely dotes, besotted, idolising,
Upon this tarnished, inconsistent man.
By the middle of the play the distinction has vanished. Both men love Helena, both hate Hermia, and both are ready to kill each other over a woman they mocked the day before. Lysander’s constancy, the one thing that set him apart, lasted exactly as long as it took Puck to find him asleep.
This is the play’s point rather than a flaw in it. The two young men are drawn as nearly alike as Shakespeare could make them so that the audience will see the swapping of partners as a comment on love rather than on character. Alexander Leggatt, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974), argued that the lovers are kept deliberately hard to tell apart so that the audience watches the pattern of their behaviour rather than sympathising with any one of them. If there is a difference, it is that Lysander is enchanted and Demetrius, at the start, is not: Demetrius abandoned Helena of his own free will, and Lysander abandons Hermia under a spell. Whether that makes Lysander the better man or merely the luckier one is a fair question for an essay. The theme of love and folly in this play does not reward constancy. It rewards waking up next to the right person.
What does Lysander mean when he says reason has changed his mind?
He means that he has grown up, and he is wrong. Having woken in love with Helena, Lysander explains the change as a matter of ripeness: he was young and foolish when he loved Hermia, and now his judgement has matured.
Things growing are not ripe until their season
So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason;
And touching now the point of human skill,
Reason becomes the marshal to my will
And leads me to your eyes, where I o'erlook
Love's stories written in love's richest book.
(Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Fruits ripen as they grow to harvest season;
Till now, I wasn’t ripe, so couldn’t reason.
And now I’ve reached a man’s maturity,
My reasoning shows who I need to be,
And leads me to your eyes, where I construe
A book of love with tales of me and you.
The audience has just watched Puck squeeze the flower on his eyes, so every word of this is comic. But it is comic in a particular way. Lysander is not lying; he believes it. The spell has changed what he loves and left his intelligence intact, so that his intelligence goes to work justifying the change.
R. W. Dent, in an essay on imagination in the play for Shakespeare Quarterly (1964), argued that the play’s real subject is the difference between a controlled imagination and mere dotage, and that neither the lovers’ passion nor Theseus’s dismissal of it gets the balance right. Lysander’s speech is the clearest case of dotage dressed as reason. It also anticipates Theseus in Act 5, who will explain that lovers and madmen have "seething brains" that "apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends". Theseus thinks he is describing other people. Lysander, an act earlier, has shown that the lover under a spell is the one most sure he is being reasonable. The theme of magic and illusion works best when its victim does not believe in it.
Why is Lysander so cruel to Hermia in the wood?
Because the flower does not only give him a new love; it gives him a new hatred. When Hermia finds him and begs to know what has changed, his answer is not indifference but revulsion:
Thy love! Out, tawny Tartar, out!
Out, loathed medicine! Hated potion, hence!
(Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Don’t call me love! Get out, brown Tartar!
Get out! You’re hated and you’re poisonous!
The insults that follow are about her colouring and her size, the two things she cannot change, and the play lets the audience hear how much a lover’s praise and a lover’s contempt have in common. The dark eyes Helena envied in Act 1 are now the marks of an Ethiope. Nothing about Hermia has altered except the eyes looking at her.
Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), made the brutality of the lovers’ night his central evidence for reading the play as something darker than a romantic comedy: in the wood, he argued, the lovers discover how interchangeable and how violent their desires really are. Catherine Belsey (1993) put it more temperately: 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". Lysander is the play’s demonstration. The spell made him love Helena; the cruelty to Hermia is what love does to whatever stands in its way. The night’s violence is not only the women’s story. Lysander and Demetrius, best of enemies, end the night trying to kill each other in the dark, and Puck has to lead them apart.
Does Lysander remember what he did?
The play arranges for him not to. Before Puck reverses the spell, Oberon gives precise instructions about what the lovers are to think when they wake:
When they next wake, all this derision
Shall seem a dream and fruitless vision...
(Oberon, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
So, when they wake up, all of this confusion
Will seem a dream-like, meaningless illusion.
And so it proves. In the morning Lysander tells Theseus that he came to the wood with Hermia and can say nothing more; Demetrius says his love for Hermia melted like snow; and all four agree to tell each other their dreams on the way back to Athens. Whether Lysander’s dream includes calling Hermia a serpent, the play does not say.
Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), pointed out that almost nothing in the play that is called a dream actually is one: the lovers’ night happened, and the word "dream" is what they use to make it bearable. On his reading the obligation falls on the audience to treat the play as a benevolent dream, a true and prophetic vision, because the characters cannot. For Lysander the arrangement is convenient. He gets Hermia back, he gets the duke’s blessing, and he gets to forget. Hermia, who was awake for all of it, does not get to forget, and the play gives her no line in which to say so. The theme of dreams and reality is kinder to the men than to the women, and Lysander is the man it is kindest to.
Why does Lysander propose running away?
Because he has an aunt. It is easy to miss how practical the elopement is. Lysander is not proposing to defy the law of Athens; he is proposing to go somewhere it does not apply, and he has the address:
A good persuasion: therefore, hear me, Hermia.
I have a widow aunt, a dowager
Of great revenue, and she hath no child:
From Athens is her house remote seven leagues;
And she respects me as her only son.
(Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Well-reasoned: therefore, listen, Hermia.
I have a widowed aunt, who was bequeathed
A massive fortune, and she has no children.
Her home is twenty-one miles outside Athens,
And she respects me like her only son.
Seven leagues, a widow’s house, an inheritance: the plan is respectable, and if the couple had reached it the play would have been a short one. What they reach instead is the wood, and the wood does not let anyone through.
Northrop Frye, in Anatomy of Criticism (1957), described the structure that Lysander’s plan sets in motion: "the action of the comedy begins in a world represented as a normal world, moves into the green world, goes into a metamorphosis there in which the comic resolution is achieved, and returns to the normal world." C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), read the same movement as a May game, out of the town into the grove and back. Lysander thinks he is planning an escape. He is in fact planning the play’s holiday, and like everyone who goes on holiday in Shakespeare, he comes back changed without quite knowing how. The theme of order and chaos depends on his plan failing. Athens cannot be escaped. It can only be left for a night.
What is Lysander doing in Act 5?
Heckling. Once the lovers are married and the workmen’s play begins, Lysander joins Theseus and Demetrius in a running commentary, and his first contribution is a joke about Quince’s prologue:
He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop. A good moral, my lord: it is not enough to speak, but to speak true.
(Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
He read his prologue like he was riding a wild horse; he doesn’t know to stop it, nor where the stops are. The moral is, my lord, you can’t just speak, but must speak accurately.
"It is not enough to speak, but to speak true" is a fine moral, and it comes from a man who, the night before, swore eternal love to two different women and meant it both times. The play does not underline the irony. It does not need to.
David P. Young, in Something of Great Constancy (1966), observed that the mechanicals’ play is a mirror in which the court can see its own story without recognising it: Pyramus and Thisbe are lovers who defy their parents, meet in the dark, and mistake a bloody cloak for a death, and the young men watching them have just spent a night mistaking everything. Anne Barton, in an essay on Shakespeare and the limits of language (1971), noted how oddly qualified Theseus’s confident speeches are by everything around them. Lysander’s jokes belong to the same pattern. He mocks a lover who cannot speak true, in a play that has shown him unable to do it himself. The theme of art and theatre in Act 5 is partly about who is allowed to laugh at whom, and Lysander, who was Puck’s entertainment a few hours earlier, has become the audience.
