Love and Folly
Theme Profile – At a Glance
- Focus: How the play treats romantic love: as a disorder of the eyes that makes a lover see a goddess in a plain face, an ass in a fairy queen’s arms, and a rival’s girl as the only woman alive.
- Key Characters: Helena, Hermia, Lysander, Demetrius, Titania, Bottom, Puck.
- The Core Tension: Every lover in the play is sure of what they feel, and the play shows that the feeling can be moved from one person to another with a drop of juice. If love can be switched, what is it worth?
- Key Manifestations: Helena’s speech on blind Cupid and Lysander’s on crossed love (A1S1); Helena’s spaniel plea (A2S1); Lysander waking to love Helena and reasoning his way to it (A2S2); Titania doting on Bottom (A3S1, A4S1); the two men wooing Helena and the two women fighting (A3S2); Demetrius’s love melting like snow (A4S1); Pyramus and Thisbe (A5S1).
- Famous Quote:
"Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind..."
(Act 1, Scene 1) - The Outcome: Three weddings, one of them made by a spell that is never lifted. The play calls it a happy ending and lets the audience decide what kind of love survived the night.
Winged Cupid Painted Blind
The play states its theory of love in Act 1, before any fairy has touched anyone, and gives the statement to the character least able to act on it. Helena has just watched Hermia and Lysander plan an elopement, and she is in love with the man Hermia is running from. Alone, she works out why.
Original
Things base and vile, folding no quantity,
Love can transpose to form and dignity:
Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind:
Nor hath Love's mind of any judgement taste;
Wings and no eyes figure unheedy haste...
(Helena, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
The rude and ugly, wicked and pugnacious,
Through eyes that love, seem beautiful and gracious;
Love doesn’t look with eyes, but with the mind,
So that’s why Cupid, god of love, is blind;
And Cupid’s taste is mired with imprecisions;
His wings and blindness drive his rash decisions.
Love does not see; it makes things. Base and vile objects are given "form and dignity" by the lover’s mind, which is why Cupid is painted blind and winged: he cannot look and he will not wait. Helena knows this about Demetrius, who dotes on Hermia and cannot see Helena, and she knows it about herself, and knowing it changes nothing. She decides in the same speech to betray her friend for the pleasure of watching Demetrius walk past.
Everything the wood does to the lovers is a demonstration of Helena’s speech. The magic flower does not invent feelings; it moves them, and the moved feeling is exactly as sincere as the original. The theme of magic and illusion in the play is Helena’s theory with a mechanism attached.
I Am Your Spaniel
The play’s most uncomfortable love scene has no magic in it. Demetrius tells Helena, in plain words, that he does not and cannot love her, and orders her to stop following him. Her answer has been embarrassing audiences for four centuries.
Original
I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:
Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
(Helena, Act 2, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
I am your puppy; and, Demetrius,
The more you tell me off, the more I love you.
So use me as your puppy, spurn me, slap me,
Ignore me, run away; but only let me
Run after you, although I am not worthy.
Spurn me, strike me, neglect me, lose me: she asks for a bad master’s treatment of a dog as a privilege, and when he threatens to leave her to the wild beasts she says the beasts are kinder than he is. This is not the blindness she diagnosed in Act 1. Helena sees Demetrius exactly and loves him anyway, which the play seems to think is the more common condition.
It is also the scene that turns the plot. Oberon, invisible, hears a woman ask to be treated like a dog and decides she deserves better. The fairy king’s intervention in the human story is a response to love at its most abject, and the remedy he chooses is more of the same drug.
Reason Becomes the Marshal to My Will
When Puck anoints the wrong Athenian, Lysander wakes, sees Helena, and forgets the woman he ran away with. What is striking is not the change but the case he makes for it.
Original
The will of man is by his reason swayed;
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
(Lysander, Act 2, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Through thinking, man’s opinion can be swayed,
And thinking tells me you’re the finer maid.
The audience has just watched the flower squeezed on his eyes, so every word is a joke; but Lysander is not lying. He has grown up, he explains; he was unripe when he loved Hermia; reason has matured in him and pointed him at the better woman. The spell has changed what he loves and left his intelligence intact, and the intelligence goes straight to work justifying the change.
Then he turns to the sleeping Hermia and hates her, with a disgust as complete as his devotion an hour before. The flower does not only redirect love; it converts the old love into loathing, and the play lets the audience hear how much a lover’s praise and a lover’s contempt have in common. Hermia is "dwarfish", an "Ethiope", a "tawny Tartar" by the middle of Act 3, and nothing about her has altered except the eyes looking at her.
Thou Art as Wise as Thou Art Beautiful
The play’s clearest picture of love as folly is the fairy queen with an ass. Titania wakes to Bottom singing, with a donkey’s head on his shoulders, and swears within five lines that she loves him. His reply is the sanest thing anyone says in the wood.
Original
Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that: and yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together now-a-days; the more the pity that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek upon occasion.
(Bottom, Act 3, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Lady, I don’t think you should have any reason to love me; but, then again, truth, logic and love rarely go together these days. What a shame that some of their kind friends don’t introduce them to one another. No, I can tell a joke occasionally.
Reason and love keep little company nowadays, says the weaver, and it is a pity their friends do not introduce them. Titania answers that he is as wise as he is beautiful, and the audience, who can see the ears, laughs. But the verse she speaks to him is not comic. It is some of the loveliest in the play, and she means every word. The spell has not made her ridiculous; it has made her sincere about something ridiculous.
That is the play’s joke about all its lovers, and it is not a cruel one. Titania in Bottom’s arms, Lysander at Helena’s feet, Demetrius comparing a woman he threatened to the snow on Mount Taurus: each is doing exactly what lovers do, with the object changed. The theme of dreams and reality is how the play lets them forget it in the morning.
"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."
— Catherine Belsey, A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Modern Perspective, 1993
Key Quotes on Love and Folly
Quote 1
Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth...
(Lysander, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
My dear! In every book that I could read,
And hearing every story ever told,
The path to true love isn’t ever easy...
Quote Analysis: Lysander’s famous line, spoken to comfort Hermia under sentence of death. He goes on to list every way love has been crossed, by blood, by age, by parents, by war and sickness, and ends with lightning swallowed by darkness. It is beautiful and it is also a young man enjoying his own misery; Hermia’s answer, that lovers had better be patient, is the sensible one. The irony arrives an act later, when Lysander’s own love proves as brief as the lightning and it is a flower, not war or death, that ends it.
O Helena, goddess, nymph, perfect, divine!
To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?
Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show
Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!
(Demetrius, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Oh Helena, you goddess, golden dove!
What shall I match your eyes to, oh my love?
Crystals seem muddy next to them. Perfection
Your lips are, kissing cherries, sweet affection!
Quote Analysis: Demetrius waking with the juice on his eyes. Crystal is muddy beside her, and the rest of the speech makes the snow on Mount Taurus a crow beside her hand. It is the sonnet tradition turned up as far as it will go, and it comes from the man who told this woman, a few hours earlier, that he was sick when he looked at her. Helena decides the two men have conspired to mock her, and her reasoning is sound: a woman who has been told she is hateful will not believe sudden worship. The play lets the audience laugh at the situation and not at her.
Here she comes, curst and sad:
Cupid is a knavish lad,
Thus to make poor females mad.
(Puck, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Here she comes, cursed and sad:
Cupid is a crafty lad,
For making these poor ladies mad.
Quote Analysis: Puck, watching Hermia stumble in exhausted. Cupid is a knavish lad, and it is the women who suffer for it: the observation is Puck’s, and it is fair. The two men have spent the night wooing and fighting; the two women have spent it being loved by the wrong person, abandoned by the right one, and set against each other. Puck is the one who caused most of it, and his verdict on Cupid is a way of not blaming himself. The rhyme makes it a nursery moral, which is what the play wants: love’s cruelty said lightly.
But, my good lord, I wot not by what power, –
But by some power it is, – my love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud
Which in my childhood I did dote upon...
(Demetrius, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
But, my good lord, I don’t know what has caused it –
But something’s done it – for my love for Hermia
Has melted like the snow, and now it seems
Much like a little trinket I remembered
From childhood that once I used to love...
Quote Analysis: Demetrius in the morning, explaining to the duke that his love for Hermia has melted like snow and now seems like a childhood toy. He does not know the power that did it. The audience does, and knows too that Demetrius is the one lover Puck never releases: the juice is still on his eyes as he speaks, and will be at the altar. The speech is the play’s quietest statement about love. Demetrius cannot tell the difference between the feeling a flower gave him and the feeling he had before, and neither, the play suggests, can anyone.
Key Takeaways
- Love Sees with the Mind: Helena's speech in Act 1 is the play's theory: lovers make what they see, which is why Cupid is blind and winged.
- The Flower Moves Love, It Does Not Make It: The juice redirects feeling without changing its sincerity, and turns the old love into loathing.
- Reason Serves Desire: Lysander, freshly enchanted, argues that reason has matured him; the lover under a spell is the one surest he is sane.
- Folly Without Cruelty: Titania doting on an ass is the play's picture of all love: absurd, sincere, and forgiven in the morning.
Study Questions and Analysis
What does the play say love is?
That it is a way of seeing rather than a response to what is seen. Helena says so in Act 1: love looks with the mind, not the eyes, gives dignity to base things, and is painted as a blind child because it chooses badly and in haste. The rest of the play tests her theory and confirms it. Lysander, enchanted, finds a whole philosophy of ripeness to explain why Helena is now the better woman; Titania finds an ass beautiful; Demetrius finds his old love a childhood trinket.
As waggish boys in game themselves forswear,
So the boy Love is perjured every where...
(Helena, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
As cheeky boys renounce what they once said,
So, much the same, will Love make his lies spread.
Catherine Belsey, in her essay for the Folger edition (1993), drew the conclusion the play seems to invite: because the lovers are "virtually indistinguishable", "Romantic love is in this sense oddly impersonal". The beloved is not a person but a position, and the position can be filled by anyone the flower points to. Jan Kott, in Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), took the same evidence further and called the Dream "the most erotic of Shakespeare’s plays", in which the lovers discover in the wood how interchangeable their desires are. C. L. Barber, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (1959), was gentler, reading the night as a holiday "release" that ends in "clarification": the lovers learn nothing they can say, but they come home sorted. The play permits all three readings and, characteristically, sends everyone to bed before choosing.
Why is Helena’s speech about blind Cupid so important?
Because it is the play in miniature, delivered before the play has properly begun. Every claim in it is then acted out: the two men see Helena with altered minds and their eyes follow; Cupid’s arrow, in Oberon’s story, literally misses its target and hits a flower; the lovers’ oaths melt like hail, as Helena says Demetrius’s did when he first saw Hermia:
For ere Demetrius looked on Hermia's eyne,
He hailed down oaths that he was only mine;
And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,
So he dissolved, and showers of oaths did melt.
(Helena, Act 1, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Before Demetrius saw Hermia’s eyes,
His words of love would just for me arise.
But when he melted, seeing Hermia,
His words of love dissolved from me to her.
What makes the speech remarkable is that the diagnosis comes from a patient. Helena understands that love is a disorder of perception and then behaves, for four acts, exactly as the disorder dictates. R. W. Dent, in an essay on imagination in the play for Shakespeare Quarterly (1964), argued that the lovers’ unchecked imaginations are what the wood exposes, and that Helena’s speech is the first and most accurate diagnosis; Theseus will say something similar in Act 5, from a great height, about lovers and madmen. Helena said it first, from inside, and went on loving. The theme of gender and patriarchy is close by: she also says, in Act 2, that women cannot fight for love as men do, and the speech about blind Cupid is what a woman is left with when the fighting is not allowed.
Are the four lovers really 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 and Hermia the other, and no reason is given for either. 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.
(Hermia, Act 3, Scene 2)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Am I not Hermia? Aren’t you Lysander?
I’m just as beautiful now as before.
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 as psychological portraits, and Alexander Leggatt, in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Love (1974), developed the point: the audience is kept at a distance from the lovers so that it can watch the pattern of what happens to them. Against this, it is worth insisting that the women are not interchangeable and the play takes trouble to make them different. Hermia is short, dark, fierce and defiant; Helena is tall, fair, self-doubting and persistent; and the quarrel in Act 3 depends on the contrast. The men are interchangeable. The women are not, and the comedy needs both facts.
Is Titania’s love for Bottom funny or disturbing?
Both, and productions choose. On stage the scenes are funny because Bottom is asking for hay while the fairy queen kisses his ears. On the page they are love poetry, and the fact that the beloved is an ass does not change the quality of the verse:
Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.
(Titania, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
Come here and sit down on this bed of flowers,
While I caress your cheeks that I adore,
And stick sweet roses in your hair for hours,
And kiss your massive ears, my love amour.
William Hazlitt (1817) heard in Titania’s speeches to Bottom "a certain cloying sweetness in the repetition of the rhymes", and the sweetness is the point: she is not pretending. Jan Kott (1964) pushed the scene to its limit, arguing that the ass was a symbol of sexual potency rather than stupidity and that Titania’s night with Bottom is the play’s hidden centre, a nightmare of desire that the morning politely forgets; Peter Brook’s 1970 production, which acknowledged Kott’s influence, carried Bottom off to Titania’s bower to the sound of the Wedding March. Earlier and gentler readings treat the episode as a fairy’s whim, closer to a child dressing up a pet. The text supports the darker reading more than the lighter one, because it insists on the body: the ears, the hairy face, the bed. What it does not do is make Titania contemptible. She loves badly, completely and beautifully, which is what everyone in the wood does.
Why does Demetrius stay under the spell?
Because Oberon wants Helena to have him. Puck anointed Lysander by mistake and is made to undo it; Oberon anointed Demetrius on purpose and sees no reason to undo his own work. So Demetrius wakes in the morning still enchanted, tells the duke a story about a childhood betrothal, and goes to the altar with the juice on his eyes. Helena’s own verdict is two lines:
And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own, and not mine own.
(Helena, Act 4, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
And, like a jewel, I’ve found Demetrius;
He’s mine but owned by someone else.
A jewel found in the road is yours and not yours; you have it, and someone else lost it. It is the only moment in the play where a lover half suspects the truth, and she lets it go. Catherine Belsey (1993) put the difficulty plainly: "Demetrius still has the love-juice on his eyes, and yet the play gives no indication of a difference between this marriage and the others." That silence is either the play’s comedy or its quiet joke about all marriages. If the audience cannot tell the enchanted husband from the others, and the play does not help them, then perhaps the flower has only done quickly what love always does. The theme of magic and illusion ends with one spell left running, and nobody in Athens knows.
How does Pyramus and Thisbe comment on the lovers?
By showing them the tragedy they narrowly avoided, as a comedy, on their wedding night. The workmen’s play is about two lovers kept apart by their fathers who meet in the dark, mistake a bloodied cloak for a death, and kill themselves in turn. Quince’s prologue tells the whole story in advance:
Whereat, with blade, with bloody blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast;
And Thisbe, tarrying in mulberry shade,
His dagger drew, and died.
(Quince as Prologue, Act 5, Scene 1)
Shakespeare Retold (Modern Verse)
At that he drew a bloody, blameful blade,
And bravely butchered his own beating breast;
Then Thisbe, hiding in the woodland shade,
Then dies, stabbed with his dagger.
The four Athenian lovers watch this and make jokes. They have just spent a night defying parents, meeting in a wood, and mistaking almost everything, and the only difference between their story and Pyramus’s is that a fairy intervened. David P. Young, in Something of Great Constancy (1966), read the play within the play as a distorted mirror in which the court can see its own night without recognising it, and noted that the mechanicals are "far too ambitious in their dramatic metaphors". The joke is theirs; the moral is the lovers’. Romeo and Juliet, written within a year or so of this play, tells the same story straight. The theme of art and theatre in Act 5 is partly the question of who is allowed to laugh at whom, and the lovers, laughing loudest, have the least right.
Does the play believe in true love at all?
It believes in marriage, which is not quite the same thing. Three couples go to the altar; Oberon blesses the bride-beds and promises faithful love and healthy children; and the play ends in a house at peace. What it does not offer is a single example of a love that the night could not have switched. Hermia and Lysander, the play’s true lovers, are separated by a flower and reunited by a herb; Helena and Demetrius are joined by a flower alone; Oberon and Titania are reconciled after he drugs her.
Critics have read this two ways. For C. L. Barber (1959) the night in the wood is a holiday whose confusions clear the way for the proper pairings, and the weddings are the return of the ordinary world, strengthened rather than undermined by what the lovers went through. For Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), the festive conclusion is the moment when "the female pride and power" of the play’s women, its warriors, mothers, wives and daughters, are "brought under the control of lords and husbands", and love is the name for the process.
The text gives a third answer, in Theseus’s speech about lunatics, lovers and poets. The lover, he says, is a kind of madman, seeing beauty where there is none; and the poet is the same, giving airy nothing a name. If love is an act of imagination, then the question whether it is "true" is the wrong one. It is true in the way a play is true. Helena said it first, and the play, which is itself a dream, does not contradict her. The theme of dreams and reality is where the play keeps its answer.
