Introduction
Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream give rise to a great deal of commentary on the topics of desire and love. When considering the words and actions of the characters within these plays, one can arrive at two very differing conclusions about love, complicated by the fact that one play is a tragedy and the other a comedy. What is the difference between love and desire? Is love fated and inescapable? Or is love arbitrary and messy, and purely a matter of chance? By examining the decisions and thoughts of characters within these two plays we can attempt to answer this question in different ways.
Shakespeare’s works have always held a special literary place in my mind, though I may not have always fully understood them. Each year I have taught, I have tried to extend that passion to my students with different works, and each year has met with varied successes and problematic hurdles. It can be challenging to inspire young people to care about the words of an author who died before their view of American history begins. It wasn’t until I began to use the connecting tissue of television programs, music and even pop culture that I started to have some success with increasing students’ interest in what this famous playwright had to say.
Once I’d motivated my students to care about Shakespeare’s works, the second biggest hurdle was sustaining that interest and helping my students to explore character and not just plot. Students who read the opening sonnet of Romeo and Juliet would discover that the two lovers would eventually die (or already knew that from hearsay), and they then considered the entire play and experience to be spoiled and impossible to enjoy. My struggle was repeatedly to show my students that these plays aren’t just the soap operas of Early Modern times, but character studies of deeply complicated and flawed individuals.
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