Critical
3/ Briefly explain (to help your own understanding and that of your readers) the push and pull of all the relationships that emerge in Act 1 Scene 1 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream: There are those who have been forced into love, those who are resisting love, those who want to break out of enforcement and those who want to break into love!…. Can you catalogue all these processes, putting the names of characters to them?
Theseus: is the King of Athens who can barely contain his excitement and impatience at getting into his Fiancé, Hippoluta’s pants, “She lingers my desires/ Like to a stepdame or a dowager/Long withering out a young man’s revenue” (1.1. 4-6).
Hippolyta: once Queen of the Amazons, is now a bride to be to Theseus and a voice of reasonable calm to her overly excited fiancé.
Egeus: is the overly traditional, controlling and unromantic father of Hermia. His relationship with his daughter is rocky, due to his unwillingness to let her marry for love and instead insists that she marry a man that he has selected for her.
Demetrius: has been given Egeus’s tick of approval to marry his daughter Hermia and Demetrius is in chase mode. He will not take no for an answer from Hermia. In fact, Hermia complains that “I frown upon him, yet he loves me still” (1.1.194), “The more I hate, the more he follows me” (1.1.98). The old adage ‘thrill of the chase’ couldn’t be truer in this case.
Hermia: is Egeus’s confident and love struck daughter. She is madly in love with Lysander and is trying to fight tradition and escape having to marry Demetrius, whom her father seems to love more than she does.
Lysander: is a sweet talking bachelor who is loved by and in love with Hermia. In fact, his love and passion for her is so mushy that it is not for the faint hearted. For example he says things like, “I mean that my heart unto yours is knit/ so that but one heart we can make of it/ Two bosoms interchained with an oath/ So, then, two bosoms and a single troth” (2.2.53-56). A regular George Clooney, don’t you think?
Helena: is experiencing a sad case of unrequited love. She is somewhat infatuated with Demetrius and won’t take no for an answer. In fact, she is so in love that when Demetrius threatens her with violence (2.1.237) she continues to follow him and even says that she would be willing “To die upon the hand I love so well” (2.1.244). I think she needs to read a few self-help books and possibly seek counselling. In fact at this stage, a restraining order might be a good idea… hers and Demetrius’ inability to take no for an answer from their respective love interests makes me consider that they might have more in common than Demetrius thinks.
Oberon: is the King of the fairies who is jealous of the attention that his wife Titania gives her foster child. In fact Oberon wants the changeling child and Titania refuses to hand him over. As a result he arranges a spell using ‘love juice’ to trick Titania into falling in love with an ‘ass’.
Titania: the Queen of the fairies finds herself with love juice on her eyes (2.2.34-40) and as a result falls under a spell that fools her into thinking that she is in love with Nick Bottom, a weaver, dressed as an ‘ass’. I guess we have all fallen for an ‘ass’, at least once in our life time…
What a shemozzle! It seems that love is not only blind, it appears to render people senseless! I look forward to seeing how the rest of the play unfolds…
Below is a great character list and relationships diagram that I found on Pinterest:
![Who's who at the zoo](https://patriciaha.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/msnd.png?w=464&h=464)