Some True Love's Sight

A Midsummer Night's Dream displays love in the most extreme forms of irrationality, and a superficial reader might think that the end of the story. Loves get reversed on a dime, and the mechanisms for reversal are all very similar. In actuality, however, the play is very consistent in distinguishing true love from false love: it is insistent on the fact that there is a right and a wrong in these cases. One of the reasons I like A Midsummer Night's Dream is how it connects love and reason, and distinguishes between a reason properly oriented by true love, even if it occasionally gets a bit carried away, and a reason oriented by false love, which by nature spreads disharmony around it. The best expression of this is in a speech Lysander makes to Helena. Lysander's true love for Hermia has been twisted into a false love for Helena, and his reason has been twisted in the process. Naturally, as people with twisted reasons often do, he appeals to reason to justify his irrationality:

Content with Hermia? No, I do repent
The tedious minutes I with her have spent.
Not Hermia but Helena I love.
Who will not change a raven for a dove?
The will of man is by his reason swayed,
And reason says you are the worthier maid.
Things growing are not ripe until their season;
So I, being young, till now ripe not to reason.
And touching now the point of human skill,
Reason becomes the marshal to my will,
And leads me to your eyes, where I o'erlook
Love's stories written in love's richest book.

The perfection of this speech exceeds my capacity to praise it. Despite Lysander's pompous statement that "The will of man is by his reason swayed," it is clear that his false love has swayed his reason and he, right where he appeals so much to reason, is reasoning falsely.

The false love spreads discord around it. This is true when Demetrius's true love for Helena becomes false (before the play): this twisting of love, his unapt passion for Hermia, degrades both Helena and himself: himself, by making him cruel to the one who truly loves him (despite the fact that he is the one who has acted falsely), and Helena, who, being bound to him by a true love, cannot tear herself away from his abusiveness. As she says to him:

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.

The physical imagery here is metaphorical, since Demetrius's abusiveness appears to be emotional rather than physical, but the degradation is clear. Had Demetrius treated her better, the degradation would not necessarily have been there; but there is something twisted about Demetrius at the start of the play, and although we don't know the ultimate cause (although perhaps it is hinted at when Puck notes that it is simply more natural for true love to turn false than for false love to turn true), we do know the nature of the twistedness: he is not in his right mind, because his love is false, both in the sense of disloyal (to Helena) and in the sense of wrong (since his love for Hermia is unfitting).

Much the same begins to happen with Lysander's transformation. The falseness of his love having twisted his reason, he begins to treat treat Hermia with the same abusiveness that Demetrius had given to Helena. This starts spreading general discord - Hermia, frightened at this sudden change in her Lysander, assumes that Helena has done something to seduce him, and a catfight nearly breaks out in the forest outside Athens. Fortunately everything is finally restored to its proper form, with Lysander loving Hermia and Demetrius loving Helena, and concord comes again. But the loves must be righted first, and, given this, reason will be restored to its right state. False love makes false reason, and true love makes true reason: a moral for everyone to keep in mind, I think, within the context of romance and without.