The Use of Cupid in Midsummer Nights Dream

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the social order of both the fairy world and of Athens is disrupted and complicated by a series of mishaps, conflicts, and mistakes. In the fairy world, the trouble starts between Oberon (King of the Fairies) and his wife Titania. They are fighting over a changeling, which Oberon wants in his retinue but which Titania refuses to give up as it belonged to one of her devotees. The squabble causes the fairy king and queen to separate. In Athens, the problems abound as well: two young lovers, Hermia and Lysander, are fleeing Athens because of Egeus (Hermia’s father), who has refused to assent to their marriage (Egeus wants Hermia to marry Demetrius). Hermia does not wish to wed Demetrius; Helena loves Demetrius; but Demetrius wants nothing to do with Helena (he has loved Helena once but now has eyes for Hermia). Demetrius follows after Hermia and Lysander into the woods, and Helena after Demetrius so that all four end up getting lost in the forest, where quarrels ensue. Also in the forest is a group of amateur actors attempting to rehearse a play in honor of the wedding of Duke Theseus and the Amazon Queen Hippolyta. The amateur actors, the fairies, the four lovers and the Duke and Queen all end up being involved in the resolution of the multiple conflicts of the play, and social order is restored—thanks to the help of Oberon and his trusty servant Puck. The restoration of social order has everything to do with the work of the fairies and the special love potion that Puck puts on the eyes which helps the lovers to sort out their problems. This paper will explore how social order is re-established through the intercession of the fairies (with some very necessary albeit indirect help from winged Cupid) by examining a few select scenes from the play in detail.
From the beginning, the indirect role of Cupid in solving the social conflicts in the play is announced by Hermia—the true lover of Lysander. After Egeus has sued to Theseus to force his daughter to marry Demetrius (or die), Lysander and Hermia plot their escape. Hermia announces in an act of foreshadowing, “I swear to thee, by Cupid's strongest bow, / By his best arrow with the golden head… / To-morrow truly will I meet with thee” (1.1.176-185). Her reference to Cupid’s bow sets the stage for Oberon who will use a flower, pierced by one of Cupid’s missed arrows, to win back his own wife as well as to set things right among the four young Athenians in the woods. It is also quite fortuitous that Oberon knows of this flower (which in effect works just like one of Cupid’s own arrows to make the person touched by it fall in love with what is first seen after being touched). Without out, the complications and social order would not be restored. Theseus has already announced by the end of Act 1, Scene 1, that he knows of Demetrius’s love-making to Helena: “I must confess that I have heard so much, / And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof; / But, being over-full of self-affairs, /
My mind did lose it” (1.1.116-119). He admits that being consumed with his own upcoming wedding he has not taken the time to address Demetrius’s misbehavior. Thanks to the intervention of the fairies, Theseus does not end up having to force anyone’s hand—but the social order would surely have been disrupted to a much more exacerbating extent had the happy ending concocted by Oberon and Puck not allowed things to work out for the good for all involved.
Oberon tells Puck of the flower pierced by Cupid’s arrow—“love-in-idleness” (2.1.540)—as it is called by maidens (so says Oberon). Oberon orders Puck to retrieve the flower that it might be applied to Titania’s eyes while she sleeps. Oberon’s plan is to have her fall in love with a “lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, / On meddling monkey, or on busy ape” (2.1.554-555) and then get the changeling (she’ll be too in love to care). When Oberon sees the quarreling lovers, he decides to do what Theseus did not: compel Demetrius to love Helena. Oberon orders Puck to use the same flower and apply it to the eyes of the Athenian youth Demetrius so that when he wakes he will see Helena and be in love with her. Puck mistakenly applies the love potion to the eyes of Lysander so that he falls in love with Helena and spurns Hermia. This creates quite the confusion—but Oberon and Puck eventually sort it out and apply the right potions to the right set of eyes so that both Hermia and Helena are satisfied in the end.
The trick plays out equally well for Oberon regarding his own wife. The juice is applied to Titania’s eyes when she sleeps and she ends up falling for one of the amateur actors working on his part in the woods as well. The actor is named Bottom, and Puck has played an extra bit of mischief on him by giving him a donkey’s head (which frightens off the other actors but has no effect on Titania because of the flower power that has touched her eyes). Titania pursues Bottom, who is completely bewildered by the attentions of the fairy queen. He has been far too literal in his interpretation of the text that he was meant to perform with his fellow actors, and now he is seeing something beyond all comprehension—which he will later refer to as “Bottom’s Dream” (4.1.1777). The “dream” allows him (to some extent) to get over his own literal hang-ups with the play he is meant to perform and embrace a kind of deeper appreciation of the magical and the mystical elements to nature and life. What his experience tells the viewer is that the stage carries with it a reflection of the fantastical, which is really found in the fairy world, where spirits intervene on behalf of (but also play tricks on) humans who need a little help and assistance as they stumble from one social obstacle to another.
As for Titania, her embarrassment at falling in love with a man-donkey is enough to bring her back to her senses and respectfully submit herself to her king: Come, my lord, and in our flight / Tell me how it came this night / That I sleeping here was found / With these mortals on the ground” (4.1.1650-1653). She refers to Oberon once again as her lord and asks him to explain how it was that she should fall in love with an ass and be slumbering with a group of mortals in the woods. Oberon, who of course knows all, gladly welcomes her back to her side (his trick having worked), and the two represent the restoration of the social order in the fairy world. How does Oberon do it?
Oberon reverses the trick of the love-in-idleness flower by using “Dian’s bud” (4.1.1621). This is important to consider because Diana is the goddess of the hunt, the woods, and the moon and was noted for having the ability to control animals. Here, Diana’s flower is used to counter the effects of passion wrought by Cupid’s flower. In other words, the love inspired by Cupid is tempered (and here reversed) by the wisdom associated with Diana. Or, to put it another way, intellect and reason control and subdue passion and feeling. This simple and subtle detail ultimately helps to drive home the play’s final point, which the wedding guests deliver while watching the amateur actors do their miserable best to perform and give entertainment to the Duke. The performances are laughable and the guests mock them, but Theseus in his wisdom asserts that “the best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst / are no worse, if imagination amend them… / If we imagine no worse of them than they of / themselves, they may pass for excellent men” (5.1.2056-2060). Theseus essentially argues that while reason might indicate that these performers are terrible, charity (aided by the use of the imagination) allows one to give them the same kind of respect that they imagine themselves to deserve. Through this respectful (but still pleasantly mirthful and critical—after all, one must not wholly disown one’s reason), the Duke and his happy guests are able to enjoy the show. Theseus and his wife along with the four lovers (now properly in love with the right other) allow the players to play on while they happily interact with the action, not even realizing that there is another world out there that is also happily interacting with theirs—the fairy world.
The fairy king and queen close out the play with another reminder of what it was that enabled the lovers and the fairies themselves to restore social order. Titania says, “First, rehearse your song by rote / To each word a warbling note: / Hand in hand, with fairy grace, / Will we sing, and bless this place” (5.1.2247-2250). She signifies that the fairies are the ones ultimately responsible for helping maintain order in the world: they will sing and give a blessing to the world in which the humans are living. In short, the play suggests that the social order in the Athenian world is restored thanks to the spiritual intercessions of the fairies—who, of course, rely on the intercession of the gods (namely Cupid and Diana) for their own troubles. And what is good for the fairies is also good for the humans, as Oberon shows.
In conclusion, the several conflicts and problems that cause the social order to become unstable in both the fairy and the Athenian world are treated through the application of a little love juice from Cupid’s arrow and a little corrective from Dian’s bud. The play’s use of the gods’ tools and the fairies’ intercession indicates that social order cannot really be maintained any other way. Certainly, Shakespeare shows, the Duke was too busy with his own self to manage to fix the problems of the youths.

Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
https://www.opensourceshakespeare.org/views/plays/play_view.php?WorkID=midsummer&Scope=entire&pleasewait=1&msg=pl