Winged Cupid Painted Blind: Shakespeare’s C...

Winged Cupid Painted Blind: Shakespeare’s Concise about Love

Author Name : Sudha Shaw

Helena utters these lines as she remarks on the irrational nature of love. They are extremely necessary to the play’s average 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. She believes that love has the power to transform “base and vile” qualities into “form and dignity”- that is even ugliness and bad behaviour 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.