ABSTRACT
The Duke sides with the enraged father, and rules that if Hermia disobeys her old man she must either die or spend the rest of her life in a convent. Poor Hermia is on the verge of tears and Lysander observes that 'the course of true love never did run smooth'. One of the pleasures of reading Shakespeare is that you keep stumbling across well-known quotations in their original context and greeting them with little cries of pleasure (well, I do, anyway). There will be lots more, some of which I shall gleefully point out to you. Meanwhile, our young lovers have decided to run aw ay and meet secretly in the forest. At this point Herm ia's old school chum Helena appears. Now she is besotted with Dem etrius (H erm ia's rejected suitor, you remember), with whom she once had an understanding. She keeps pursuing Demetrius but he rather cruelly ignores her. Helena decides that she will let Demetrius know that Hermia is running off to the forest so that he will follow her - and she will follow him.
