Tragedy in a Comedy: A Life Without Love is No Life at All

Themes in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream

Love is general and complex, an idiom of life. It transforms us. We are but children and fools, vulnerable to the arrows of Cupid, who mercilessly shoots, almost blindly; and, in a whir of golden dust, we stumble about grasping for the truth. It is like a baited hook--a white light; we are drawn to it, inexplicably or irrationally, only to come to an end foreseen by all but those involved in the imbalance of perception. Out of imbalance, conflicts arise, and William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream illustrates these conflicts with a touch of humour and light-heartedness, though the subject is quite serious.

Love is ever growing and ever changing, as we are with time, but it is always true that all love beauty. But what beauty is is only to the one who asks, as one's view of beauty may differ significantly from another's, and perception is lost in the furore of time for each. Beauty is the aesthetics in life--the aesthetics of the material world and the aesthetics of the heart: We see with our eyes and like a pretty face, often confusing material for immaterial. Our hearts see hearts. The imbalance and mistakes of the material and immaterial eye, the priority of each, and the constant need to have and be committed make love this complex entanglement of concrete and abstract pathways running into and away from each other, mating to conceive children such as kindness, jealousy, honestly, and lies, which, if unbalanced, may lead anyone astray.