User:Chrisamst/sandbox

In A Midsummer Night's Dream
The Love-in-idleness was originally a white flower, struck by one of Cupid’s arrows, which turned it purple and gave it its magic love potion. This love potion, when dripped into someone else’s eyes, causes the individual to madly fall in love with the next person at their first sight. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare uses this flower as a plot device to introduce the comical disturbance and chaos of love, but also to highlight the irrationality of love and eventually to restore all romances that are present in the play.

Background:
Love-in-idleness is another name for the mid-western wild pansy (Viola tricolor), which naturally occurs in white and purple colours. According to Roman mythology, the wild pansy turned into the Love-in-idleness as Cupid shot one of his arrows at the imperial votaress, but miss and instead struck it. As Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love, the flower’s juice received the trait, to act as a love potion. Its name relates to the use of the flower, as it is often used for idleness or vileness acts. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Love-in-idleness is especially used in relation to the theme of love. In Act II and III, Oberon’s and Puck’s intervention with the magic love potion of the flower, they can control the fates of various characters, but also speed up the process of falling in and out of love, so that the actual romances of the lovers and their love itself appears to become very comical. Shakespeare uses the flower to provide the essential dramatic and comical features for his play. Besides that the love potion gained from the flower, does not only interfere with the lovers fates, but also gives the play structure as it affects the plot of the lovers romances drastically, as it at first upsets the balance of love and creates asymmetrical love among the four Athenian lovers. The fact that this flower introduces magical love to this play creates the potential for many possible outcomes for this play.

Effect on Character and Plot:
Although Love-in-idleness can only be used to make someone fall in love, the intentions for the use of it vary throughout the play. Oberon announces that he will use the love potion, gained from the flower to take revenge on Titania, the Queen of the fairies, hoping that she would fall in love with a hideous creature, in this case Nick Bottom, the ass-headed. Even though Titania and Bottom shared the shortest time together, it was long enough to demonstrate the extremes of love’s irrationality. With this relationship, caused by the love flower, Shakespeare is presenting the fact that sexual attraction is arbitrary, but accountable to sometimes take form which is unsustainable if not even perverse. The use of the Love-in-idleness presents may key features of love in the play.

Another case of the use of the love potion in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is when Puck misplaces the potion in Lysander’s eyes instead of Demetrius’s eyes, who sees Helena. As an effect of that, Lysander’s and Hermia’s love is disturbed. Although later in the play Puck manages to place the love potion in the right lovers eyes (Demetrius who then see Helena), peace is not restored until the love potion is also applied to Lysander, who then sees Hermia. Within the meantime the lovers held up speeches, trying to explain and justify their love as rational and consistent as possible, not realising that their normal thinking made them only more absurd. Here love is depicted as a sort of benevolent affliction. Shakespeare presents love to be something contradicting to one’s normal feelings and ideas. However he also depicts the fact that those can lead to foolish and hurtful things and present the idea that love can also end in tragedy.

The effects of the love-in-idleness can be very dramatic and tragic, no matter if the intentions were right. The play reaches its point at which Demetrius and Lysander are trying to kill one another. Although Hermia and Helena are not trying to kill one another, they are suffering from the rejection of their lovers and considerable verbal abuse. However this still happened at a very comical level as the lovers were not aware of their situation. Again the more they were trying to present the dramatic side of love, the hate, jealousy and anger, the less they became serious and so their anger turned unreal. In the end love is not denied and the lovers are back together. Nevertheless Shakespeare ends the lover’s story as a comedy, but ends the play with a tragedy. This is supposed to show that love can be a source of comedy as easily as of tragedy and therefore show that the power that the love potion from the Love-in-idleness inherits is beyond the comprehension of the fairies and mortals.