Originally Posted by
Pompey Bum
Thank you, Danik. The changability of young love/infatuation is certainly a theme of A Midsummer Night's Dream (if that's what you meant by "this play"). Cupid is described as incompetent, blind, or just mischevious. "Cupid is a knavish lad/Thus to make poor females mad", as the Puck says. It's just the opposite of Romeo and Juliet, in which puppy love is constant unto death. But A Midsummer Night's Dream is the anti-Romeo and Juliet in some ways. And for all its fantasy, it is (paradoxically) the more realistic of the two--at least about that kind of love.
It's interesting to me that neither one of you knew a bark was a ship. "Though his bark cannot be lost/Yet it shall be tempest tossed" and all that. I don't think it's all that archaic a usage. Anyway, as Danik says, picking up the lingo just takes practice. And as someone or other said, the labor we delight in physics pain.