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I see a great many parallels between ROMEO AND JULIET and A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, and although I realize that one is a comedy and the other is a tragedy, they both seem to have at the core a love that goes to such extremes it is not love at all, but madness.
These similarities occurred to me after I viewed the two movies back-to-back, and then reviewed a few websites and re-read parts of the plays on-line. I have to say I found the "text and commentary" site for MND very helpful ( http://cmc.uib.no/dream/ ) even though my eyes feel very tired after reading online. I ordered several books from amazon.com & I even ordered my own copies of some of the movies. I like to watch them more than once -- I find this intriguing and relaxing.
Perhaps what I find most inspiring about Shakespeare is that love and madness are very closely related, as are love and death.
In MND, the "rude mechanicals" perform a play for Theseus and the wedding party. In it, hilariously inept actors stage
'A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus
And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.'
Although this is nice, absurd fun with many malapropisms, the issue is that of forbidden, "outlaw" love (Pyramus and Thisbe are prohibited from marrying because of a tyrannical father) -- the bottom line is that they commit suicide when they are not allowed to marry. So, the separation required by the patriarch is a separation indead -- forever. That certainly echoes R+J. It also echoes the intensity of Helena's love for Demetrius -- she so desperately craves his presence that she pursues him -- although it could be to the death. Death is a constant undercurrent to love in all of Shakespeare, but in some places more than others. As the antithesis of unity, death posits existential isolation, and the possibility that a nihilistic universe perhaps exists, where everything can collapse to nothingness if societal strictures are too rigid. As a matter of fact, rigidity of all sorts leads to collapse and destruction - whether it be in patriarchal roles (Taming of the Shrew) or in the case of gender and gender roles. Gender absolutes are always suspect -- the "pure woman" is usually not so, and the societally desirable male (rich, powerful, proud) is usually the one person in the play who is rotten to the core.
But, what is "love" in Shakespeare? In A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, lovers and madmen are closely allied. If there is any doubt of all of that, Act V, Scene 1 clears it up, when Theseus states that lovers, madmen, and poets all possess "seething brains" and
The lunatic, the lover and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
But what could be more lunatic than what was presented to Theseus at the beginning of the play? Egeus, Hermia's father, was asking Theseus to invoke an old law and to put Hermia to death because she refused to marry the man her father had selected for her!
The true madness is in the social order and in the laws of society! If "madness" and "love" disrupt the social order, they are, at least in Shakespeare, very positive. They allow people to transform and to
"Nature is an unbalancing act," Stephen Greenblatt has remarked of another Shakespearean comedy. Love is an even more unbalancing force -- which is good, because the society that is created is unhealthy, rigid, moribund, and unsurvivable. We see this throughout Romeo and Juliet -- especially in the plague-ridden walled city, and the rigid social order that demands death (honor killings, etc.) to keep it alive.
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