Imagination Vs. Perception In A Midsummer Night's Dream

In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the eye leads the characters in and out of love, confusion, and unbounded imagination. Warped vision poses a serious problem for the four main lovers, Helena, Hermia, Lysander, and Demetrius, who trust their eyes too dearly, without the capacity to judge what they see. The character’s eyes act as windows into their minds, but their imagination fogs over their judgement when in the forest leaving them to act upon their imagination’s fickleness in relation to love. At the beginning of the play the audience gets to see Helena’s explanation of how one falls in love using their imagination by comparing that to Cupid and this idea of imagination versus perception is shown throughout the play until

She also says that love is not affected or impacted by and kind of judgement or reason, but rather done with hastily. This idea is proven in the play when the lovers act solely on their imaginations and not their understanding of what is happening in front of them playing on the idea that ‘love is blind’. Before Demetrius had looked into Hermia's eyes, he had sworn to Helena that she was his one and only. After looking upon Hermia's eye, Demetrius fell in love with her, and the oaths that he had previously sworn to Helena seemed to just drift away. Thus, a person's eyes can be playing into one’s imagination and create love out of nothing

Everything that happens in the forest is dreamlike just like our imagination, this is where the lovers come in contact with the mischievous Puck who uses a spell to change the eyes of Lysander and Demetrius to fall in love with the first thing that they see representing the fickleness of the imagination and love when they both instantly fall in love with Helena, since they had both just been pursuing Hermia. The following confusion of Helena's disbelief that the two men really love her, as well as her accusations that Hermia has conspired with them to play a prank on her, create yet another display of the fickleness of the imagination. Possibly the greatest representation of the concept of the fickleness of the imagination in relation to love in the play is at the beginning of Act 5, Scene 1 when Theseus