Love is all you need.. or is it?

 

BOTTOM

              Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that.

70   And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays

 

These lines from A mid summer nights dream, though not spoken by the wisest of characters, are one of my favorites. Reason and love, as much as we would like them to be one in the same, we find that they often are not. Reason is good or obvious cause to do something, it is also the power of the mind to think logically and understand things. This is often the opposite of love. Love does not need logic or a good cause to do something. Love in itself could be called a good enough cause. Love is something Shakespeare found himself writing about more than any other subject. Although most of Shakespeare’s characters lose reason completely when they fall in love they are constantly looked at as examples of what love should be. Romeo and Juliet for instance is viewed as one of the most passionate and romantic stories of all time, even though they both end up dead. They lost all reason when they fell in love and it could have saved them. I think in Bottom’s lines Shakespeare was summing up his entire play. The reason that Mid summer nights dream is one of Shakespeare’s funniest plays is the lack of reason found n all the lovers. We don’t only see this in stories though. Love and reason keep very little company in most relationships. Sometimes it can be a good thing to let go and let love guide you and at other times it can be both irritating and hazardous.