Boundaries Of Love In A Midsummer Night's Dream

When Lysander says, “the course of true love never did run smooth” (Shakespeare 1.1.134) he appeals to how the construction of love in a society that creates and reinforces boundaries –albeit unstable boundaries– informs the failures of love. Moreover, boundaries and expectations that reinforce constructs of concepts exemplify an overarching insecurity towards love in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. One way to examine how love fails is by looking at the way Shakespeare presents the synthesizing of concepts and boundaries. Thus, one might look at the player’s representation of Pyramus and Thisbe –“ ‘A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus/ And his love Thisbe: very tragical mirth’ ”(Shakespeare 5.1.56-57). In doing so, one might assess the idea of romantic constructs by locating failures in Peter Quince’s play, and how it aligns with …show more content…
The attempt to manufacture love in this homosocial context is unsuccessful insofar as boundaries in love between men are preceded by and only noticed when heterosexual love fails. Thus, the reader can postulate that the boundaries of love cannot privilege both homosocial and heterosexual bonds. By enacting heterosexual love in a homosocial context the player’s set themselves up for failure; constructs of these boundaries would imply that the acting out heterosexual that is restrained by the boundaries of the player’s gender, render the play, as Hippolyta says, “ . . . the silliest stuff ever [she has] heard” (Ibid.5.1.207). Thus, unlike what Theseus believes, the play cannot be mended through use of the imagination. The boundaries asserted at the beginning of Pyramus and Thisbe are too concrete to imagine them as anything else “ . . .but shadows” (Ibid.5.1.208). The materiality and the creation of concrete meaning –neglecting imagination and abstraction– is a heavily relied on device for Quince and his