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This is the second of six posts on A Midsummer Night’s Dream as part of the Reading Shakespeare A Play A Month Reading Challenge hosted by Risa of Breadcrumb Reads.

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Act II has been by far my favorite.  I loved the dialogues in this Act.  In this Act, we get to meet Oberon and Titania, the King and Queen of the Fairies.  We also get to meet the mischievous Robin Goodfellow a.k.a. “Puck.”  I find his name rather intriguing as he is called Goodfellow but “good” is not entirely what he does! :) And we also get to see the lovers out in the wood.

Oberon and Titania bicker like an old married couple.  Well they are. :) But their fight is rather childish because it is over a young little Indian boy. The mother of the Indian boy was a devotee of Titania and she took it upon herself to look after the boy following the after his mother passed.  Now, Oberon wants him as his page and Titania won’t allow it.  And this has caused problems in their marriage with Titania refusing to share his bed.  Now, I don’t get why Titania couldn’t let Oberon “borrow” the child and since they are a married couple, she would still see the child and attend to his welfare.  But, what do I know? This is a fantasy. :)

Oberon declares revenge and instructs Puck to retrieve a flower whose juices when applied to the eyelids of a sleeping person would cause that person to fall in love with the first creature they see.  While Puck goes searching for the flower, Demetrius enters the wood searching for Hermia and Lysander with Helena following after him like a lost puppy.

I know that I’m probably supposed to take Helena’s declarations of love to be serious but I found her relentless pursuit of Demetrius through the woods to be rather comical.  Take this dialogue between the two:

Demetrius
     Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?
     Or rather do I not in plainest truth
     Tell you I do not, nor I cannot love you?

Helena
     And even for that do I love you the more.
     I am your spaniel, and, Demetrius,
     The more you beat me I will fawn on you.
     Use me but as your spaniel: spurn me, strike me,
     Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave
     (Unworthy as I am ) to follow you.
     What worser place can I beg in your love
     (And yet a place of high respect with me)
     Than to be used as you use your dog?

Demetrius
     Tempt me not too much the hatred of my spirit,
     For I am sick when I look on thee.

Helena
     And I am sick when I look not on you.

I just don’t know how much pain this woman (Helena) could take.  She is very relentless.  You could put up a tally board of how many times Demetrius has insulted her and they would still come up a tie because for every insult, she has a corresponding rebuttal.

But despite my dislike of Helena’s apparent lack of self-respect, I still found the following dialogue to be rather cute (in my country, words like these are the staple of romantic movies) :

Helena
     For you, in my respect, are all the world.
     Then, how can it be said I am alone
     When all the world is here to look on me?

Anyway, Helena continues to chase after this awful man and all the while Oberon has heard the entire thing.  When Puck arrives, he instructs him to drop the nectar on Demetrius and describes him as a man with “Athenian garments.”  I don’t know if Shakespeare intended it but Helena did call Demetrius by his name during their “conversation” in the woods and I wonder why Oberon did not pick it up.  Well, what fun would that be if he did pick it up? :)

The scene changes to one with Titania and her fairies.  She instructs her fairies to sing her to sleep and I find the song they sung rather amusing, especially the lines: “Never harm, Nor spell nor charm.”  Because we all know that Oberon intends to inflict “harm” by dropping nectar into Titania’s eyelids and wishing her to “wake when something vile is near.”

The scene we see next is of the two lovers, Lysander and Hermia running away (as they agreed upon in Act I).  Lysander is and lost suggests they rest and somewhat suggests that they lie together but when Hermia protests, he segues into an oration of how he was misunderstood.  Hermia’s modesty prevails and they both sleep apart from each other.  I don’t know if he really meant to sleep with Hermia because if that was the case then he is no different than Demetrius whose claims of love seem to be of lust. :)

Since the description given by Oberon to Puck of Demetrius was an “Athenian man” and Lysander being the only Athenian man that Puck sees, drops nectar into his eyelids.  And the very unfortunate Helena, who comes by Lysander through her relentless pursuit of Demetrius through the wood, thinking Lysander to be dead tries to wake him and much to her surprise, declares his love for her.  Thinking that she is being fooled, leaves …. and Lysander follows her.

Now, Hermia is awakened by a dream of a serpent eating her heart while Lysander just smiles and watches.  I think that this is a foreshadowing of the things to come.  Since we know that Lysander is now pursuing Helena, not because he loves her, but because of the deceit of magic. :) She wakes up begging for help from Lysander and since she couldn’t find him because he is out chasing poor unfortunate Helena, she decides to find him.

And that sums up my post on Act II of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.