Is Hermia Black?

The dark lady that never was

Argument

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare’s most popular comedy, Lysander calls Hermia dark or black, and most critics take him at his word. But he only calls her this during the night of enchantment, after his sight is charmed by a derangement-inducing narcotic—the same that compels Titania to mistake an ass for an angel. According to five other characters, she’s “fair,” a term that indicates she has light hair and skin.

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Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind.
—Helena, A Midsummer Night’s Dream

According to the current critical consensus, Hermia has relatively dark hair and skin.

The basis for this view? Lysander calls her dark or black three times.

First, he calls her a crow, after dumping her for Helena. “Not Hermia but Helena I love,” he states, before asking rhetorically,

Who will not change a raven for a dove? (2.2.120-1)

(A raven is a “large heavily built crow,” in case you didn’t know. I didn’t.)

Second, he calls her an African, in the first of two racial epithets. In particular, after his fiance herself confronts him for leaving her, he commands,

Away, you Ethiop! (3.2.265)

Third, he calls her a dark-visaged Mongol. As Hermia tries to shake some sense into him, he cries,

Out, tawny Tartar, out! (274)

At present, editors take these references literally, assuming they tell us something objective about Hermia’s appearance.

For example, here’s how the terms above are glossed in the 2017 Arden edition of Dream, perhaps the most heavily glossed version now available.

Raven: “alluding to Hermia’s darker appearance.”

Ethiope: “Ethiopian, hence African; alluding to Hermia’s dark hair and/or skin.”

Tawny: “brown of any shade, hence dark or swarthy.”

Tartar: “dark-skinned.”

These glosses aren’t unique but representative, all other editions I’ve seen indicating the same. For example, in his note on “raven,” the Oxford editor says,

Since Hermia is also an ‘Ethiope’ at 3.2.257, she was presumably intended to be played dark-haired and also perhaps dark-complexioned.

Here are six reasons this view is ill-founded.

1. Lysander makes his judgment in the dark of night

Lysander leaves Hermia for Helena for overtly superficial reasons, but does so in the middle of the night, when it’s pitch-black outside.

Just how dark is it? Dark enough that Hermia must use her ears rather than her eyes to find the man who has abandoned her. As she searches for Lysander, she remarks on how “Dark night… from the eye his function takes,” that is, makes sight impossible (3.2.181). Upon finding him, she says,

Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;
Mine ear, I thank it, brought me to thy sound. (185-6)

In other words, I couldn’t see anything, but heard your voice and followed that.

As such, the first reason to doubt Lysander’s claims is circumstantial: it’s too dark for the lovers to see anything, let alone make aesthetic judgments.

Hermia herself goes on to say as much. Hearing her betrothed repeatedly denigrate her appearance, she cries,

Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?
I am as fair now as I was erewhile.
Since night you loved me; yet since night you left me. (285-7)

I look the same as I ever did! It was dark earlier, when you were my sworn love. It’s still dark now. But suddenly you’ve decided I’m unattractive?

Hermia also calls herself “fair.” In this, she’s both contradicting Lysander and reminding him how he used to praise her—as a light-haired, light-skinned beauty.

Below, we’ll see everyone else calls her just the same.

2. All of Lysander’s claims are self-evidently dubious

Lysander’s claims are dubious under the circumstances. But they’re also dubious inherently.

For example, he doesn’t just stop loving Hermia. He decides he absolutely “loathes” her.

Early on in 2.2, Lysander is trying to sweet-talk Hermia into consummating their marriage prematurely. “One turf shall serve as pillow for us both,” he says, cuddling up to her (47).

But then, just 100 lines later, he’s telling his fiance how much he despises her. Abandoning her in the middle of the dark, dangerous forest, he says,

Hermia, sleep thou there,
And never mayst thou come Lysander near.
For, as a surfeit of the sweetest things
The deepest loathing to the stomach brings,
Or as the heresies that men do leave
Are hated most of those they did deceive,
So thou, my surfeit and my heresy,
Of all be hated, but the most of me! (142-9)

Pure hatred, the “deepest loathing”—this is how he feels about the lady who, but a moment earlier, he intended to marry. Further, he wants her to “of all be hated,” that is, to be despised by everyone. Clearly, he’s lost his mind and nothing he says can be taken seriously. And it’s in this same state that he calls Hermia a “raven”—a comparison found just 20 lines earlier!

His poetic speech is no less extreme. Lysander may call Hermia black, but earlier he had called her white, as we’ll see below. As such, he’s the parallel of Demetrius, who also speaks in black-and-white terms. For instance, Demetrius tells Helena,

That pure congealed white, high Taurus’ snow,
Fanned with the eastern wind, turns to a crow
When thou hold’st up thy hand. (3.2.144-6)

Your hand’s so white it makes a snow-covered mountaintop appear crow-black, that is.

Of course, the claim is self-evidently absurd. In fact, it’s so absurd that not even Helena, the woman who followed Demetrius into the woods, can accept its validity.

And yet that’s what we’re doing when we accept Lysander’s equally categorical claim about the blackness of his white lady.

3. Lysander’s sight is called erroneous

Near the end of the play, as Oberon releases the lovers from their spell, he instructs Puck to apply an antidote to Lysander’s eye. “Then crush this herb into Lysander’s eye,” the fairy king tells the goblin,

Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,
To take from thence all error with his might
And make his eyeballs roll with wonted sight. (3.2.388-90)

Lysander’s “sight” has been characterized by “error,” says Oberon, in a remark about the falseness of the Athenian’s vision the previous night, while enchanted.

Of course, he shared his affliction with Titania, whose “charmed eye” also has to be “release[d]” (397)—and whose vision was sufficiently distorted that she mistook an ass for an angel.

Lysander’s perception was no more reliable, Oberon implies.

4. Everyone else calls Hermia “fair”

Lysander is alone in calling Hermia dark. Everyone else calls her “fair,” a term that, as applied to “complexion and hair,” means “light as opposed to dark,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary (6). This includes five separate characters.

First, in his initial words to her, Theseus addresses her as a “fair maid” (1.1.47).

Subsequently, he twice uses the epithet, “fair Hermia”:

Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires. (1.1.69)

For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself
To fit your fancies to your father’s will. (119-20)

Second, Helena comments repeatedly on Hermia’s fairness, obsessing over it as the reason for Demetrius’s fondness for her friend. When Hermia addresses Helena as “fair Helena,” Helena responds,

Call you me “fair”? That “fair” again unsay.
Demetrius loves your fair. O happy fair!
Your eyes are lodestars…
Sickness is catching. O, were favor so!
Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go. (184-90)

According to this remark, Hermia is “fair” in the stereotypical way, with bright, star-like eyes. Helena also calls her friend “fair Hermia,” like Theseus. And she’ll do both of these again before the end of the scene, again commenting on Hermia’s bright eyes (236) and again calling her “fair Hermia” (252)—the fourth use of this epithet in this one scene.

A third such witness is Demetrius. “Where is Lysander and fair Hermia?” he asks in 2.1, using the same epithet as Helena and Theseus (196). Later, he tells Hermia she looks “as bright, as clear, / As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere” (3.2.62-3). “Fair,” “bright”: we’re on observer number three, and if there’s anything unconventional about Hermia’s appearance, the other characters have thus far completely failed to mention it.

Nor is Lysander himself an exception—not before he’s been drugged, anyway. Rather, in the opening conversation with Theseus, he speaks of “beauteous Hermia” (106), an epithet synonymous with “fair Hermia.”

Furthermore, he calls her “fair” in the very scene in which he’ll suddenly turn and call her black! Specifically, in 2.2, Lysander says to Hermia,

Fair love, you faint with wand’ring in the wood.

This is at line 40. When does he call her a “raven?” In the same scene, just 80 lines later.

Therefore, the change is sudden, the transformation total. Hermia goes from white to black—in an instant.

But what’s changed? Her appearance? Or his perception? The answer is obviously the latter—and below we’ll see exactly how and why.

Hermia might well have been a dark-haired, dark-eyed beauty, like Rosaline in Love’s Labor’s Lost. Furthermore, one or both of the men might have struggled with their attraction to an unconventional beauty, as Berowne does.

Instead, we have multiple, sober-minded, mutually corroborating descriptions of Hermia as a stereotypically light beauty, including one from the very man who, in the middle of the night, suddenly starts calling her epithets of a very different sort.

She’s the dark lady that never was.

5. Helena twice says she and her friend look alike

Early on in the play, as she laments Demetrius’s love for her friend, Helena states,

Through Athens I am thought as fair as [Hermia]. (1.1.227)

Here Helena doubts whether she is as “fair” as her friend—a remark that, if anything, might prompt us to think Hermia the fairer of the two. That said, this is Helena’s doubt speaking. The truth of the matter appears to be that the women are indeed comparably attractive, comparably “fair.”

Later on, Helena says they’re so alike as to be indistinguishable. Recounting their childhood friendship, she says,

So we grew together
Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,
But yet an union in partition,
Two lovely berries molded on one stem;
So with two seeming bodies but one heart,
Two of the first, like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest. (3.2.114-19)

We’re practically twins! Two cherries, two berries, two sides of a symmetrical coat of arms—the women are the mirror-image of one another, according to this set of similes.

To think otherwise? You’d have to be mad! Which brings us to the final point.

6. Lysander’s under the influence of a madness and blindness-inducing narcotic

The darkness of the night is one circumstantial reason to doubt Lysander’s claims. But there’s a still more important one: he’s just fallen victim to the mischief-making and herb-wielding hobgoblin, Puck!

In particular, just 30 lines before Lysander calls his love a crow, Puck, finding him on the ground, applies his love-juice to his sight. “Churl,” he says,

upon thy eyes I throw
All the power this charm doth owe. (2.2.84-5)

As you’ll recall, Puck extracted his charm from a flower that had been hit with one of Cupid’s arrows. In 2.1, Oberon tells Puck about “Cupid’s flower” and its efficacy. The juice extracted from this flower, says Oberon,

Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees (2.1.169–72).

To dote means “to be silly, deranged, or out of one’s wits; to act or talk foolishly or stupidly,” according to the OED (1). Etymologically, the word is related to the Dutch doten, meaning “to be crazy” and the French radoter, meaning “to rave.”

As such, to “madly dote” is to go altogether crazy.

Thus, the instant he’s victimized by Puck, Lysander’s insane, and nothing he says can be accepted as remotely true.

His are the literal ravings of a madman.

Conclusion

In seeing something that isn’t there, Lysander appears to be the stereotype of the Cupidean lover, as characterized by Helena in her speech on the blind god in 1.1. As she says,

Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind;
And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind. (240-1)

This says it. Once under the influence of Cupid, Lysander becomes blind in the sense of incapable of seeing his beloved as she is. Instead, he sees his own mental construct, which he projects on to her.

Lysander also typifies the mad lover described by Theseus. “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact,” says the duke, at the beginning of the final act,

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold:
That is the madman. The lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt. (5.1.7-11)

In other words, a lover’s perception is often directly at odds with empirical reality. And if he can see something dark in something light—the whiteness or brightness of Helen of Troy in the complexion of an African woman—he can evidently see something dark in something light. An Ethiopian in an Athenian, say.

Rather than be taken seriously, it seems to me Lysander’s claims ought to elicit laughter from all onlookers, beginning with the internal audience of Oberon and Puck, who, having applied the love-juice to both of the Athenian men’s eyes, sit by and watch the craziness that ensues. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” the goblin tells the king, in the middle of the episode (3.2.117). He adds,

And those things do best please me
That befall prepost’rously. (122-3)

One man suddenly calling his ex an African-Athenian? This isn’t some exception to the preposterousness and folly. It’s one of the surest signs of derangement.

Right now, with Hermia often being played as relatively dark, the king and his companion must hear Lysander’s comparisons and mostly nod along, acknowledging their empirical or semi-empirical quality.

What would better fit the tone and import of the episode? For them to be nudging each other and slapping their thighs, delighting in some of the mortals’ most nonsensical utterances of all.