Puck To Cupid By Charney In Shakespeare On Love And Lust

Set in the age of antiquity in Athens, Theseus, King of Athens, prepares to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, in a four-day ceremony. All is going smoothly when Egeus appears at the court of Theseus with a conflict between him and his daughter, Hermia. The problem is that Hermia is in love with Lysander, but Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius. After Hermia’s options are given by Theseus, her and Lysander decide to run away into the mischievous woods outside Athens. This causes Demetrius to pursue them along with Helena, his ex-lover, at his heels. In the woods, the fairy couple, Oberon and Titania, are in a feud over a changeling Indian boy, while a group of Athenian craftsmen practice for a play that they will perform at the wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta. After a struggle to locate each other and interference from supernatural fairy influence, the four Athenian lovers have their complicated love dynamic twisted, skewed, and yet, eventually resolved before the final ceremony of Theseus and …show more content…
“This is an unflattering representation of love as the boy Cupid, capricious and undependable, blind and waggish, loving, like Puck, to play jokes with a malicious intent—an alternative version of Lysander’s speech asserting that “The course of true love never did run smooth” (Charney 31). In both the passage by Shakespeare and the analysis by Charney, Cupid is described as blind with wings, almost inevitably making him reckless and having poor judgment. Puck mirrors the characteristics of Cupid because of his fickle and undependable nature, along with his use of the love potion to influence Titania, Lysander, and Demetrius. The actions of Puck add another dimension to the concept of love’s difficulty because his incompetence to use the potion causes temporary disorder in the already imbalanced love dynamic between the four young