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Jan Kott1 declares that the “philosophical theme” of A Midsummer Night's Dream is “Eros and T[h]anatos” (p. 223). However, his development of the idea is minimal and obscure. He seems to see the blindness of love and an almost violent animal erotic animality as an equivalent for the death-urge as it surrounds and intensifies the sex act. Hugh M. Richmond's approach2 is explicitly based on Denis de Rougemont's thesis, in his Love in the Western World,3 that romantic love pursues obstacles and finally death itself to enhance the desireability of the fading love-object and to achieve in death an extinction of self which love desires but cannot realize. In a passage not directly citing de Rougemont, Richmond summarizes the thesis: “Since the most excitingly intense feelings and idealizations are generated by impediments to love, and since the supreme impediment to love is death, unqualified passion solicits the death of both the beloved and the lover” (pp. 117-118). Richmond believes that all the young lovers in the play are motivated by pursuit of barriers based on this psychology, that the Pyramus-Thisby playlet ridicules this orientation, and that Bottom shows distinct scepticism towards it. Thus, Richmond finds in this play, as in Romeo and Juliet, powerful warnings against the celebration of love-and-death.
If one grants Richmond's interpretation of the young lovers' motives, his reading is coherent, but also one-sided and stiffly moralistic. Perhaps, as in Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare has intuited both a positive and a negative potential