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A Midsummer Night's Dream By William Shakespeare

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Act 1: Part A:
Theseus is the Duke of Athens and is preparing for a large festival. His daughter Hermia wants to marry Lysander, and a man named Egeus wants her to marry Demetrius. Theseus offers Hermia only two options: she must marry Demetrius or join a nunnery. Lysander quickly convinces Hermia to sneak into the woods the next night so that they may get married at his aunt's house. She agrees to the plan. Helena arrives and doesn’t like the fact that Demetrius has eyes for Hermia, even though she loves Demetrius more than Hermia could. Helena, in a soliloquy, indicates that she will tell Demetrius about Hermia's plans and in turn might make him start to love her again. The Athenian workmen gather and Peter Quince hands out several parts …show more content…

Lysander and Demetrius, Helena and Hermia, each of them switches roles and becomes the other person. One of the primary ways that Shakespeare indicates maturity is to make his characters distinct. At this stage of the play the lovers are clearly not yet mature enough in their love to escape from the forest. Puck makes this clear by the way he leads them around in circles until they all collapse in exhaustion. It is this interchanging that must be resolved before the lovers can fully exit from the forest. The nature of this interchanging is further backed up by the characters themselves. Helena says to Hermia:"We, Hermia, like two artificial gods Have with our needles created both one flower, Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion, Both warbling of one song, both in one key, As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds Had been incorporate. So we grew together, Like to a double cherry" (3.2.204-210). "Like to a double cherry." This quote sums up the reason why they are lost in the forest: it is important for them to become distinct from one another. After all, Lysander and Demetrius have been able to shift their love to Helena without noticing any difference whatsoever. Therefore, the forest is not only a place of maturing, but also of finding each ones

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