Shakespeare's play A Midsummer Night's Dream is simply a lighthearted comedy of the follies and tribulations of love. However it has some more complexities than this. The relationships between all the main characters serve to provide us with a glimpse of a deep dark truth hidden in the lighter side of the play. One way to find these deep, dark truths about characters is to analyze them and their relationships. The characters I will analyze are Titania and Oberon, and Theseus and Hippolyta. Fairy Queen Titania and Fairy King Oberon have very different personalities that make you wonder how their relationship could ever work. Oberon is a manipulative man who wants nothing more than his wife's attention. He is a selfish and controlling man and his problem is that Titania is paying a lot of attention to a child she is raising as her own. Oberon shows an act of selfishness by telling Titania that he wants the boy so that he can become his henchman: “Modify him, then. It's in you. Why should Titania cross paths with her Oberon? I ask a changeling boy to be my henchman” (Shakespeare 41). Titania refuses and leaves, but Oberon is willing to do anything to get her attention back, so he puts her under a spell so when she wakes up she falls in love with a donkey. His goal is to ensure that Titania makes a fool of herself in front of all the fairies by falling in love with a donkey. When she realizes who she has fallen in love with, she is completely and utterly humiliated, confused and embarrassed. This is the moment when she is finally ready to return all her love and attention to her husband, Oberon. What does this say about Oberon? Well, this basically says that h... in the middle of the paper... there are problems that have led to humiliation and breaking of the independent spirit. In Theseus and Hippolyta, Theseus was both thoughtful and stern and this could be seen in both Hermia's case and Hippolyta's conquest. As for Hippolyta, she is a strong woman and also very welcoming, but since Theseus conquered her she has suddenly become a rather weak spirit. Even though it might seem that way, he manages to show how he feels about Hermia's incident where Hermia was forced to marry someone she doesn't love, probably because she is putting herself in the same shoes just like Hermia. Shakespeare does a great job of making these relationships dark and deep when analyzed well, but to the naked eye they look just like any other relationship that has a few problems here and there. It also does a good job of disguising dark secrets with lighthearted comedy.