Cruelty as a Crucial Motivation in a Midsummer Night’s Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Play of Contrasts

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one of Shakespeare's most beloved plays, is often considered a cherished romantic comedy. However, the play contains a strong trace of darkness and cruelty, which is an ominous element present in most novels that is hard to separate from other themes. While Midsummer may end with a series of happy weddings, along the way, it clearly depicts how male and female relationships can involve a significant amount of cruelty with the potential to spread and affect other people’s lives. In literary works like this play, cruelty often functions as a crucial motivation or a major social factor, and it frequently shapes the overarching theme of the story.

Cruelty as a Crucial Motivation in A Midsummer Night’s Dream

From our knowledge, we understand that if the theme dictates much of the setting of a story, it also influences the characters and actions within it. While this is not always the case in many plays and novels, the theme is mainly developed around the love and relationships between the characters, with drama assembled upon it. To analyze how cruelty functions in the story as a whole, nearly all the male counterparts threaten their female counterparts at some point in the play. Theseus, for example, won Hippolyta not through seduction or courtship, but through military conquest, having to destroy her female counterparts. He says to her in the opening scene, “I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries.” This reveals the underlying aggression present in their relationship.

The female characters, particularly Helena and Hermia, end up internalizing much of this behavior. Helena, perhaps a little more underrated, struggles with her self-worth, while Hermia tends to deal with cruelty more directly. Shakespeare's words, “Do her mischief” in the woods, carry a far more menacing promise when we realize that "mischief" had a much stronger connotation in that period, meaning something closer to “harm” or “evil” than “naughtiness.” This suggests that the theme of cruelty is not just a superficial element but is deeply woven into the fabric of the play.

To some audiences, cruelty can be a bad indication that something unpleasant could happen. For example, ‘romantic strife’ at full force is portrayed in this play as cruelty. Because it spreads rather quickly, the whole earth becomes infected. The fairy monarchs, Titania and Oberon, confront each other, and Titania describes a troubled world filled with sickly clouds and rotting vegetation. She quotes, “Therefore the winds, piping us in vain, As in revenge, have we sucked up from the sea Contagious fogs which falling in the land have every pelting river made so proud That they have overborne their continents.” Using the evidence from the characters, we can analyze what cruelty reveals about a specific perpetrator and/or victim. Analyzing cruelty can help us understand the personality and thoughts of others, the way they think, and how they solve their situations.

The Significance of Cruelty in Dramatic Literature

To summarize the point, cruelty in plays can often function as motivation or a major social factor, which often shapes the theme of a story and represents who the characters really are. While encountering cruelty, it may sound harsh towards another character. However, it is significant to remember that cruelty can be beneficial in some ways to the plot of a story. This is especially significant in Shakespeare's works because it adds dramatic effect, which is important for how the scenes in his plays will unfold to form the theme. No matter what type of play or story it is, the chances of there being cruelty are always present, enriching the narrative and challenging the audience's understanding of human nature.

References

1. Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Edited by Harold F. Brooks, Methuen, 1979.
2. Brown, John Russell. Shakespeare and His Comedies. Routledge, 2001.
3. Kott, Jan. Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Translated by Boleslaw Taborski, W. W. Norton & Company, 1974.
4. Wells, Stanley, and Sarah Stanton, editors. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare. Cambridge University Press, 2002.