The course of true love never did run smooth

The passage

LYSANDER Ay me! For aught that I could ever read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth.
But either it was different in blood,
HERMIA O cross! Too high to be enthralled to low.
LYSANDER Or else misgraffed in respect of years,
HERMIA O spite! Too old to be engaged to young.
LYSANDER Or else it stood upon the choice of friends,
HERMIA O hell, to choose love by another’s eyes!
LYSANDER Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,
War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it,
Making it momentany as a sound,
Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,
Brief as the lightning in the collied night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and Earth,
And, ere a man hath power to say “Behold!”
The jaws of darkness do devour it up.
So quick bright things come to confusion.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream · Act 1, Scene 1

In plain English

Lysander: From everything I have read or heard in stories, true love has never gone easily. Either the lovers were of different rank, or badly matched in age, or the choice depended on their families. Hermia answers each case: what a burden, to be bound to someone beneath you, or too old, or picked by someone else’s eyes. Lysander goes on: and where the lovers did agree, war, death or illness attacked their love and made it as brief as a sound, a shadow, a dream, or a flash of lightning in a black night, which shows heaven and earth in an instant and is swallowed by darkness before anyone can say “Look”. That is how quickly bright, living things come to ruin.

Where it comes in the play

We are early in the first scene of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595-96). Hermia’s father, Egeus, has dragged her before Duke Theseus because she refuses to marry Demetrius, the man he has chosen. Theseus has stated the Athenian law: she must obey, or enter a convent, or die. Then the adults leave, and the lovers are alone.

Lysander has just noticed that Hermia is pale. This speech is his attempt to comfort her. It is immediately followed by his plan to run away through the wood, which sets the comic plot in motion. The line is not a conclusion. It is the last thing said before the lovers act.

Close reading

Love learned from books

Lysander’s authority is reading: For aught that I could ever read, / Could ever hear by tale or history. What he knows about love comes from stories. He is placing himself and Hermia in a tradition of thwarted lovers, with a note of pride. If love is always opposed, then opposition proves their love is the real thing.

The famous line is a metaphor of a river: a course that does not run smooth. Its tense matters. Lysander says never did, a claim about the past as recorded in books, not a law of nature. And the line itself runs perfectly smoothly: ten plain syllables, mostly monosyllables, with no pause. The verse is calmer than the claim.

A duet of complaint

What follows is stichomythia, the exchange of single lines between two speakers. Lysander lists an obstacle and Hermia caps it. His lines share an opening (But either, Or else, Or else), a repetition called anaphora. Hers share a shape too: an exclamation, then a contrast of Too high and low, Too old and young.

The patterning is so neat that it is hard to take the grief entirely seriously. Her exclamations climb, O cross!, O spite!, O hell, and the lovers are in perfect harmony about how unhappy they are. Shakespeare lets us feel for them and smile at them at once, which is the tone of the whole comedy.

Only the third obstacle is actually theirs. the choice of friends means the choice of relatives, and Hermia’s reply, O hell, to choose love by another’s eyes!, introduces the play’s central image. In this play, love is a matter of eyes: who looks at whom, and what has been done to their sight.

Four similes and a flash of lightning

Then the speech changes key. Lysander stops listing social obstacles and turns to time. Love is momentany as a sound, / Swift as a shadow, short as any dream. The similes come quickly, and the sibilant sounds hurry them along. short as any dream is a quiet signal: the play we are about to watch will itself be offered as a dream.

The fourth simile is allowed to grow. Lightning in the collied night (a night black as coal) unfolds both heaven and Earth: for an instant, everything is visible. Then The jaws of darkness do devour it up. The darkness is a predator, and the alliteration on “d” closes over the image. Love is a moment of total vision surrounded by night.

The final line stands alone: So quick bright things come to confusion. quick means both rapid and alive. confusion means ruin. To fill the line, confusion is spoken as four syllables, so the word lingers just where the sense says everything is cut short.

This is the language of tragedy, and at about the same time Shakespeare gave it to another young lover. In Romeo and Juliet, Juliet fears that their vow is Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be before it can be named. The situations match: young lovers, a father’s choice, a secret plan. This first scene could go either way.

What it tells us about the play

The irony of the speech is that Lysander’s list is wrong about his own future. He names rank, age, family, war, death and sickness. What actually goes wrong in the wood is that Lysander himself, with juice on his eyelids, falls out of love with Hermia and in love with Helena within a few seconds. The obstacle he never imagines is his own inconstancy.

So the play tests the phrase true love harder than the phrase never did run smooth. Helena says that Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind, and the play shows the mind to be as unreliable as the eyes. Bottom, of all people, states the case most sensibly: reason and love keep little company together nowadays. Puck’s verdict on the lovers is Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Single lines like these are what Daily Bard’s daily page is designed for: the passage on the front of the leaf, a plain-English reading on the back.

The speech also explains the play’s structure. The tragic possibilities Lysander raises are displaced into comedy: the mechanicals’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe is a tale of lovers divided by their parents who die through haste and darkness, performed so badly that the newly married couples laugh at it. They are laughing at what might have been their own story.

Hermia’s reply matters too. If lovers have always been crossed, she says, It stands as an edict in destiny, and they must teach our trial patience. She counsels patience. Lysander’s next word is Therefore, and what follows is an elopement.

What people get wrong

It is not Shakespeare’s considered verdict on love. A young man is consoling a frightened girl with what he has read. Quoting it as “Shakespeare says” misses the dramatic irony.

The tense is past. The line is often misquoted as “never does run smooth” or “never runs smooth”. Lysander says never did: he is generalising from stories, and the play goes on to give this course a smooth ending, by magic.

It is not only comforting. The line is quoted as a shrug about romantic difficulty. The speech it opens ends with love eaten by darkness.

Using it in an essay

The passage is ideal for questions on love, on comedy and tragedy, or on the Athenian law, and it shows that you can read tone. Make the point that the speech is patterned and literary, and connect its images of eyes, dreams and darkness to later scenes. The lesson plans for A Midsummer Night’s Dream include work on the lovers’ language, and the quotation sheet collects the other lines you will need beside this one.

Fragments worth memorising:

• For aught that I could ever read - Lysander’s knowledge of love is second-hand and literary.
• to choose love by another’s eyes - the first statement of the play’s concern with sight.
• The jaws of darkness do devour it up - a tragic image inside a comedy.
• So quick bright things come to confusion - “quick” as both fast and alive.

To build a reading like this into a full answer, use the essay planner and the close reading toolkit. For the other side of the comparison, our essays on “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” and Sonnet 116 show two more of Shakespeare’s speakers defining love, one by hyperbole and one by denial.

Learn the speech to its final line, not only its first. If a daily habit helps, the Daily Bard app is free to download, and its Full Edition keeps every page you have seen in a Commonplace Book. It is a companion to the play, not a replacement for reading it.