People have categorized A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a romantic comedy. How accurate is that?
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s beloved comedies, is generally thought of as a romantic story. However, while the play is lovely and comic, it has a strong trace of darkness and cruelty. Midsummer may end with a progression of happy weddings yet it unmistakably portrays (male-female) relationships can include an incredible measure of cruelty, with the possibility to spread dissension.
About all the male characters undermine their female partners with brutality sooner or later in the play. Theseus won Hippolyta through military conquest of Amazonia. He says in the opening scene, “I wooed thee with my sword,/And won thy love doing thee …show more content…
In the most vicious exchange in the play, Lysander bluntly tells the lovesick Helena that he does not love her and that he is “sick” when he looks at her. He warns her that he will “do [her] mischief” in the woods—a far more menacing promise when we realize that mischief had a much stronger connotation in the period, meaning something closer to “harm” or “evil” than “naughtiness” Helena, however, is undeterred. She accepts the aggression directed at her and turns it into an argument for her stamina, pleading with him to treat her like his “spaniel,” since the more he “beat[s]” her, the more she will “fawn” on him. Eventually, the two young women fall victim to the hostility in the air and turn on one another. Their confrontation in Act III, scene ii is often played as a comic catfight, but that ignores the poignancy of Helena’s speech, in which she pleads with her “sister” not to “rend [their] ancient love asunder” by conspiring with the men to shame her. Hermia, however, does not listen, and the two dissolve into a torrent of mutual abuse. Even at the end of the play, when the couples are paired off harmoniously, it is unclear whether the women’s intimate friendship will ever be repaired.
Throughout the play, romantic strife is portrayed as a force that can spread, like a contagion. At one point, the whole earth becomes infected. When the sparring fairy monarchs, Titania
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare’s beloved comedies, is generally thought of as a romantic story. However, while the play is lovely and comic, it has a strong trace of darkness and cruelty. Midsummer may end with a progression of happy weddings yet it unmistakably portrays (male-female) relationships can include an incredible measure of cruelty, with the possibility to spread dissension.
About all the male characters undermine their female partners with brutality sooner or later in the play. Theseus won Hippolyta through military conquest of Amazonia. He says in the opening scene, “I wooed thee with my sword,/And won thy love doing thee …show more content…
In the most vicious exchange in the play, Lysander bluntly tells the lovesick Helena that he does not love her and that he is “sick” when he looks at her. He warns her that he will “do [her] mischief” in the woods—a far more menacing promise when we realize that mischief had a much stronger connotation in the period, meaning something closer to “harm” or “evil” than “naughtiness” Helena, however, is undeterred. She accepts the aggression directed at her and turns it into an argument for her stamina, pleading with him to treat her like his “spaniel,” since the more he “beat[s]” her, the more she will “fawn” on him. Eventually, the two young women fall victim to the hostility in the air and turn on one another. Their confrontation in Act III, scene ii is often played as a comic catfight, but that ignores the poignancy of Helena’s speech, in which she pleads with her “sister” not to “rend [their] ancient love asunder” by conspiring with the men to shame her. Hermia, however, does not listen, and the two dissolve into a torrent of mutual abuse. Even at the end of the play, when the couples are paired off harmoniously, it is unclear whether the women’s intimate friendship will ever be repaired.
Throughout the play, romantic strife is portrayed as a force that can spread, like a contagion. At one point, the whole earth becomes infected. When the sparring fairy monarchs, Titania