Social Order in A Midsummer Night's Dream
This paper examines how social order is disrupted and ultimately restored in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream through the intercession of the fairy world. Beginning with the conflicts between Oberon and Titania over a changeling and among the four young Athenian lovers lost in the forest, the essay traces how the love potion derived from a flower pierced by Cupid's arrow creates confusion before Puck and Oberon redirect its effects. The paper analyzes key scenes to show how the corrective power of Diana's bud counterbalances passion with reason, reuniting the fairy king and queen and properly pairing the human lovers, while Duke Theseus's speech on imagination reinforces the play's thematic resolution.
- Introduction: Conflict and Social Disorder: Overview of conflicts in fairy and Athenian worlds
- Cupid's Arrow and the Love Potion: Hermia's oath foreshadows Oberon's floral love potion
- Puck's Mistake and the Lovers' Confusion: Puck misapplies potion, tangling the four lovers
- Bottom, Titania, and the Fairy World's Disorder: Titania enchanted by Bottom with donkey's head
- Diana's Bud and the Restoration of Order: Diana's bud reverses Titania's enchantment
- Imagination, Reason, and the Wedding Celebration: Theseus's speech balances reason with charitable imagination
- Conclusion: Fairies, Gods, and Social Harmony: Fairies and gods together restore social harmony
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What makes this paper effective
- The essay establishes a clear central argument early — that social order is restored through fairy intercession aided by divine tools — and follows it consistently through each scene discussed.
- The analysis connects mythological symbolism (Cupid versus Diana) to thematic meaning, showing how passion and reason are contrasted and balanced across both the human and fairy plots.
- Direct quotations from the play are woven into the argument naturally, with line citations provided, grounding interpretive claims in textual evidence.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates close reading as its primary analytical method. Rather than surveying the play broadly, it selects specific scenes and passages — Hermia's oath by Cupid's bow, Oberon's instructions to Puck, Titania's submission, Theseus's speech on imagination — and unpacks their thematic significance within the larger argument about social restoration. This focused, evidence-based approach is a model for literary analysis essays.
Structure breakdown
The essay opens by mapping all major conflicts (fairy world and Athenian world), then introduces the role of Cupid's flower as a narrative and thematic hinge. Subsequent sections trace the misapplication of the potion, its consequences for both the lovers and Titania, and the corrective use of Diana's bud. The paper closes with Theseus's speech on imagination and a brief synthesis, connecting the gods' tools to the play's social resolution. Works Cited follows standard MLA format with a single primary source.
Introduction: Conflict and Social Disorder
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 only 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 further 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 play's multiple conflicts, and social order is ultimately 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 applies to the eyes of the sleeping characters, helping the lovers sort out their problems. This paper explores 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.
Cupid's Arrow and the Love Potion
From the beginning, the indirect role of Cupid in solving the social conflicts of 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 face death), Lysander and Hermia plot their escape. Hermia declares 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 works just like one of Cupid's own arrows — making the person touched by it fall in love with the first thing seen after being touched. Without it, the complications would never be resolved and social order would not be restored. Theseus has already acknowledged 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, consumed with preparations for 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 far more aggravating extent had the happy ending concocted by Oberon and Puck not allowed things to work out for all involved.
Puck's Mistake and the Lovers' Confusion
Oberon tells Puck of the flower pierced by Cupid's arrow — called "love-in-idleness" (2.1.540) by maidens, so says Oberon. Oberon orders Puck to retrieve the flower so 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 take the changeling while she is too distracted to resist. When Oberon also sees the quarreling lovers in the forest, 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 fall in love with her.
Puck, however, mistakenly applies the love potion to the eyes of Lysander, so that Lysander falls in love with Helena and spurns Hermia. This creates considerable confusion — but Oberon and Puck eventually sort it out, applying the right potions to the right set of eyes so that both Hermia and Helena are satisfied in the end.
Conclusion: Fairies, Gods, and Social Harmony
The fairy king and queen close out the play with another reminder of what 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 bestow a blessing upon the world in which the humans live. The play suggests, in short, that 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 demonstrates.
The several conflicts and problems that destabilize social order 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 consumed with his own affairs to manage to fix the problems of the youths on his own.
Works Cited
Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night's Dream. Open Source Shakespeare, www.opensourceshakespeare.org.
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