Freedom in A Midsummer's Night Dream is portrayed as the right to choose your own mate. The play's madcap adventures get underway after Hermia and Lysander, deeply in love, declare their wish to marry. Hermia's father, Egeus, however, has already decided that Hermia will wed Demetrius. He storms into the presence of Theseus, Duke of Athens, filled with rage and indignation, to demand that Hermia honor his desires, saying:
As she is mine, I may...
Freedom in A Midsummer's Night Dream is portrayed as the right to choose your own mate. The play's madcap adventures get underway after Hermia and Lysander, deeply in love, declare their wish to marry. Hermia's father, Egeus, however, has already decided that Hermia will wed Demetrius. He storms into the presence of Theseus, Duke of Athens, filled with rage and indignation, to demand that Hermia honor his desires, saying:
As she is mine, I may dispose of her:
Which shall be either to this gentleman [Demetrius]
Or to her death, according to our law
Theseus moderates the harshness of the law by offering Hermia the choice of marriage to Demetrius or banishment to a cloister. Hermia says she would prefer the cloister to the "unwished yoke" of marriage to Demetrius. She says "my soul consents not to give sovereignty" to someone she doesn't love. She thus asserts her freedom to love where she will.
When Lysander suggests running away and eloping at his aunt's house, "seven leagues" from Athens, Hermia agrees. This is another expression of love's freedom over patriarchal authority. In the end, all sorts itself out happily, for Demetrius falls in love with Helena, and Theseus allows Hermia and Lysander to wed. However, a darker version of the same story is portrayed, if comically, when Bottom and his friends stage "Pyramus and Thisbe," a tale of forbidden love that ends tragically.
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