Love Is a Many Splendored Thing: Magic and the Imbalance of Love in Shakespeare’s a Midsummer Night’s Dream

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Love is a Many Splendored Thing: Magic and the Imbalance of Love in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream In William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the theme of love’s difficulty is prominent and is explored through the motif of love being out of balance. The fairies’ magic reinforces this motif. A Midsummer Night’s Dream employs a use of magic, dreams, and imagination in a valuable, as well as, wicked manner. In this essay, an exploration of the way magic affects the inharmonious love affairs of four young Athenians will occur. In doing so, the function of the magical world will be identified, and by the finality of this essay the representations of magic and its construction of out-of-balance love will be understood. From the onset, Shakespeare precisely depicts the lovers as being out of balance, a theme which generates stress during the play. For symmetry’s sake, the audience desires the four lovers to be arranged into two couples; as an alternative, Lysander and Demetrius love Hermia, and Helena is left out. Hermia and Helena are therefore in opposite positions, increasing the feeling of fundamental imbalance. This imbalance is introduced and reinforced in Act I, Scene I, when Lysander says “The course of true love never did run smooth” (136). By including the detail that Demetrius used to love Helena, Shakespeare implies the option of a compatible solution to this interweave of love: if Demetrius loved Helena again, then there would be no conflict. The closing stages of the conflict (the fairies’ involvement with magic) provides such a result, and all does get resolved, nevertheless it is important to note that the return of Demetrius’ love for Helena is the product of magic instead of an organic rebirth of his love. Demetrius, Lysander, Hermia, and Helena are not intended to be models of romance; but rather, compassionate figures tossed into the

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