Blog 2

Megan Pawlowski

The point of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is to highlight how love parallels dreams, or essentially an alternate reality.  In this play love is portrayed as something that is fleeting, confusing, and hard to figure out.  In the beginning of the play Helena can’t seem to get enough love, then suddenly she is the center of attention.  Understandably, she is confused, and this confusion parallels the confusion the four characters have when waking up from the forest.  This back and forth of love and excess of emotions highlights how love causes many to act and think irrationally.  This play demonstrates the fact that dreams and love have a lot in common; they are confusing and unexplainable.  

Puck is essentially the cause of all the confusion.  He plays a sort of “cupid” in the story with the ability to change people’s emotion just with a potion.  By introducing a character that is so ridiculous, who can’t even put the love potion on the right person, the author demonstrates how human’s emotions are easily tampered with and altered.  The love that is “so strong” with Lysander and Hermia is quickly thrown out the door when Lysander is affected with the love potion.  Shakespeare is poking fun at the idea of true love, and how many may confuse lust and affection with love.  Puck is a fairy that essentially is in charge of keeping the peace for his king.  Puck is also a representation of people who like to meddle in other’s love affairs and ends up just hurting not helping anyone.  He turns Bottom’s head into that of an ass as a joke essentially demonstrating how he has a joking, but cruel side.  This can be linked to how sometimes people can joke and try to mess with other’s love lives but end up really hurting them, and being cruel. 

Puck sees love as a joke and something easily changed because he has the power to change it.  He states:

“My mistress is a monster in love

Near to her close and consecrated bower,

While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,

A crew of patches, rude mechanicals,

That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,

Were met together to rehearse a play

Intended for great Thesus’ nuptial day.

The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,

Who Pyramus presented, in their sport,

Forshook his scene, and ent’red in a brake;

When I did him at this advantage take,

A ass’s nole I fixed on his head,

Anon his Thisby must be answered”

This passage was interesting because Puck refers to his Queen as a “monster in love” which is a statement on how she dotes now on a man who has the face of an ass.  This demonstrates how love is ridiculous sometimes and does not make sense and is confusing.

Additionally, dreams can be confusing as well and people tend to read into their own dreams more than necessary.  Some have a bad dream and then they think that means something bad will happen to them, when in fact it may mean nothing.  There are tons of studies on dreams, but in reality, what good is it to study one’s subconscious?  The four Athenians wake up and essentially have no memory of what happened in the woods because it felt like a dream, not real and hazy.  They cannot understand what happened, just like many can’t understand their dreams, and similar to how sometimes love makes no sense.