A Midsummer Night’s Dream Essay Importance of the...

A Midsummer Nights Dream: The Importance of the Nighttime Forest In Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Nights Dream the dark forest is the center of the world, relegating Athens, center of the civilized Greek world, to the periphery. Day gives way to night, and mortal rulers leave the stage to be replaced by fairies. The special properties of night in a forest make it the perfect setting for the four lovers to set out on a project of self-discovery. Shakespeare implies that in darkness, reliance on senses other than eyesight leads to true seeing. In A Midsummer Nights Dream, the nighttime forest, by disrupting and transforming vision, forces introspection and improvisation that help the four lovers on their way to†¦show more content†¦Setting eyes on someone is also an expression for falling in love. Note Helenas tortured complaint that ere Demetrius looked on Hermias eyne / He hailed down oaths that he was only mine (1.1., ll. 242-3). Vision as a key part of love plays itself out fully in this line: eye contact is vital, because looki ng at someone looking at you is perhaps the most basic physical confrontation of another persons subjectivity (compare the experience of eye contact to the impossibility of hearing someone hear you, or smelling someone smell you). Demetrius looks into Hermias eyes and falls in love. At the end of the same monologue, Helena uses more sight imagery in her resolution to get Demetrius back: But herein mean I to enrich my pain, / To have his sight thither and back again (1.1 ll. 250-1). What has wandered must be made to come back, and so Demetrius gaze becomes shorthand for Demetrius love. Sight, eyes, looking-all are part of a vocabulary of love that would seem to require the light of day rather than a setting in the darkest of all places at the darkest of all hours. But if Lysanders plan gives the first hint about the plays setting (aside from the plays title), Helena gives the first hint of a way to negotiate the tension between a nighttime setting and the visual language of love. Although the language of love makes extensive use of sight