Demetrius
"I love thee not; therefore, pursue me not."
A Midsummer Night’s Dream might be the only early Shakespeare comedy where playing the girls is probably more fun than playing the boys, at least as far as the romantic leads are concerned. Two young men and two young women embroiled in a love quadrangle wander into the Athenian woods at night, where—as must happen in Shakespeare—the woods change them, at least temporarily. The strange exception is Demetrius, who apparently remains under a fairy spell even after departing the forest, and might tell us something about what the forest is really meant to reveal.
‘I shall do thee mischief in the woods.’
It was oddly hard to find an image of Demetrius: my usual sources were coming up short. While he and Lysander, the two male lovers, are—unusually for this stage in Shakespeare’s career, though this changes, at least as far as comedies are concerned— rather less dynamic than the women they love, at least Lysander gets a gorgeous scene about being in love with Hermia, his betrothed. Demetrius, on the other hand, gets a scene to shout abuse and threats at Helena, the woman who loves him and to whom he was promised before apparently falling in love with Hermia.
I was startled the first time a friend told me they found this dynamic troubling—and that it was not because Demetrius implies he might assault Helena if she doesn’t leave, but because Helena doesn’t leave, and we’re asked to view her aggressive pursuit of Demetrius despite his rejections as sympathetic. If the gender dynamics were reversed, this friend pointed out—indeed, when these dynamics are reversed in Shakespeare and other plays—we’re much more skeptical.
Suddenly, this line dividing the interests of the early comedies and later ones doesn’t feel so clear. Demetrius begins to look like a precursor to later plays (including Measure for Measure, which we discussed last week) that consider much more overtly what men owe to women they’ve made promises to, and how far women are allowed to go to hold them to such promises.
‘Are you sure / That we are awake?’
Oberon, King of the Fairies, sees Helena’s hopeless pursuit of Demetrius and takes pity on her. Complications involving a love-at-first-sight flower ensue, and soon both Demetrius and Lysander believe they are in love with Helena. Their expressions of this love are equally ridiculous, and Helena does not believe either of them—not even Demetrius, who is suddenly saying (a version of) the things she’s wanted to hear. The four lovers wear themselves out running through the woods, and the spell is removed... from Lysander. Despite the forest interlude coming to a tidy close with a series of neat couplets as the sun rises, Demetrius is apparently left to return to the waking world in a state of enchantment, forced to love Helena by magic, not his own will.
Even though on the level of narrative this seems obviously true, tonally—poetically— it’s not at all what seems to happen. When the human characters wake on the outskirts of the forest, all traces of magic are removed from them, and none of them can quite remember what happened—none of them are entirely sure that anything did happen, or if it was only (as the title suggests) a dream. Perhaps we’re invited to assume that Demetrius, too, is freed from enchantment by the rising of the sun, by exiting the forest.
And then there’s what Demetrius himself has to say about the matter:
But, my good lord, I wot not by what power
(But by some power it is) my love to Hermia,
Melted as the snow, seems to me now
As the remembrance of an idle gaud
Which in my childhood I did dote upon,
And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betrothed ere I saw Hermia.
But like a sickness did I loathe this food.
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now I do wish it, love it, long for it,
And will forevermore be true to it.
Demetrius’s reference to an unknown power seems to direct our attention to the fairy spell. But this calm, relatively straightforward speech is nothing like the florid, over-the-top love language he showered on Helena in the woods. Arguably, this wouldn’t really be the place for that kind of speech anyway—but in the woods, neither he nor Lysander seemed able to stop themselves, even despite Helena’s obvious dismay.
His language directly recalls the images used by Helena back in the first scene of the play, when she described favor as sickness she hoped to catch, love as an easily-tricked child, and Demetrius’s love for her like melting hail. Poetically, we’ve come full circle, Demetrius arriving at the place Helena began: understanding that love can be changeable, can stray and then return. But most essentially of all for Shakespearean lovers, their poetic frames of reference (like Romeo and Juliet’s talk of pilgrims) are now the same.
‘Mine own and not mine own.’
The forest does not really disrupt, it restores. Like those pairs of perfect couplets, Demetrius’s return to Helena allows not only for their happiness, but for Hermia and Lysander’s, too. As the ones who must be guided back to their partners by way of the woods, Demetrius and Helena are the mortal parallels to the fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania, whose jealousy and arguing have set the seasons themselves off-kilter. We don’t mind Helena’s pursuit of Demetrius because we know (and the play affirms) that she’s right.
Recent productions, including at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2016, have sought to lay this dynamic bare through casting Helena as a man, suggesting with varying levels of directness that Demetrius is closeted, denying his authentic self and feelings for Helena out of fear. While tipping into cliche as far as queer representation goes, it is an effective shorthand for what the play otherwise struggles to convey to modern audiences: a sense that Helena has good reason to be confident both about their past connection, and that there’s something besides falling out of love driving Demetrius’s coldness.
Though not without its problems in practice, it’s an excellent example of how casting can bring to the surface those textual currents that we can feel even when we can’t quite see or describe them at first glance. Even beyond the play’s sunny tone (Shakespeare never hesitated to drop tragedy into comedy, after all) we know there’s no reason to worry about Demetrius. A closeted gay love story makes that vague sensation plain, but the answers are there in the poetry.
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