Continuing our research into the voices of Shakespeares’ women we return to ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and to the words of one of the main female protangonists – Helena. Again there is a paucity of clips of this speech, and so we rely mainly on what appear to be audition tapes, however the extract featuring the late Dame Diana Rigg is worthy of our attention.
“How happy some o’er other some can be!” Helena utters these lines as she comments on the irrational nature of love. They are extremely important to the play’s overall presentation of love as erratic, inexplicable, and exceptionally powerful. Distressed by the fact that her beloved Demetrius loves Hermia and not her, Helena says that though she is as beautiful as Hermia, Demetrius cannot see her beauty.
Helena adds that she dotes on Demetrius (though not all of his qualities are admirable) in the same way that he dotes on Hermia. She believes that love has the power to transform “base and vile” qualities into “form and dignity”—that is, even ugliness and bad behavior can seem attractive to someone in love. This is the case, she argues, because “love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”—love depends not on an objective assessment of appearance but rather on an individual perception of the beloved. These lines prefigure aspects of the play’s examination of love, such as Titania’s passion for the ass-headed Bottom, which epitomizes the transformation of the “base and vile” into “form and dignity.”
This monologue occurs early on in the play, and provides much information to help us to understand where Helena is at. So first of all from the opening scene we get a sense of where this love rectangle is at. Lysander and Hermia are in love, but Hermia’s father Egeus doesn’t want a bar of it. He seems to have a man crush on Demetrius. Demetrius wants Hermia, but Hermia is all about the Lysander. Helena, is loveless, and the man she wants seems set on Hermia.
