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Many people have categorized A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a romantic comedy. How accurate is this assessment?
Nearly all the male characters threaten their female counterparts with violence at some point in the play. Theseus, for example, won Hippolyta not through seduction or courtship but by military conquest, having vanquished the Amazons, her tribe of woman warriors. He says to her in the opening scene, “I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries,” drawing an explicit connection between love and assault. Later in the same scene, Egeus publicly threatens to kill Hermia, his daughter, if she does not consent to marry Demetrius. Oberon, for his part, does not put Titania at risk of true physical danger, but he does brainwash her with a love-potion for the express purpose of humiliating and humbling her. Lysander may be the only male who does not consciously seek to harm his mate. But even so, Hermia cannot escape peril. Just after the bewitched Lysander abandons her, she wakes from a nightmare, trembling with fear as she describes how she dreamt she saw “a serpent [eat her] heart away.” Though Lysander isn’t in control of his own actions at this moment, Hermia’s subconscious still registers his desertion as an act of violation.
The female characters in the play, particularly Helena and Hermia, end up internalizing much of this violent behavior. In the most vicious exchange in the play, Demetrius 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
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 and Oberon, confront each other in Act II, scene i, Titania describes a tumultuous world filled with sickly clouds and rotting vegetation. She insists that this chaos has sprung from her and Oberon’s quarrel, and that they are the “parents” of the planet’s current state of turmoil.
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