Theme Of Love In A Midsummer Night's Dream

Throughout the play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, one of the main themes is love. Shakespeare takes this theme and twists it around, showing how he perceives love based on how his characters react in the presence of it.
One of the first things that Shakespeare says about love is that it’s messy. It’s imperfect. A popular quote from the play that supports this is said by Lysander in Act I, Scene i, “The course of love never did run smooth.” By saying this, Lysander is stating that love, like life itself, is full of ups and downs, and not everything is always going to go as planned. The whole story itself is basically a fight over who loves who, even without any outside magical interference. Lysander loves Hermia, and she loves him back, but Demetrius also loves her, and Helena loves Demetrius, but he doesn’t love her, nor does anyone else for that matter. To add to this already “messy” situation, Lysander and Demetrius both succumb to Oberon and Puck’s mischief and end up in love with Helena, leaving Hermia with nobody to love her. By creating
Obviously, not all of the love that he writes about is true, but he is stating that true love does exist, and is important. To me, the only couple that really showed true love was Hermia and Lysander, due to the fact that all of the other couples that ended up together were influenced in some way by either the love potion, or some other type of outside pressure to be together. They were together in t the beginning, but also in the end not because they had to, but because they wanted to. The love between the two is shown in a quote from Egeus, Hermia’s father, “With cunning hast thou filched my daughter’s heart, turn’d her obedience, which is due to me, to stubborn harshness.” It is easy to see the rage that he feels because he is unable to control his daughter anymore because the love that she feels for Lysander is