LYSANDER     Keep promise, love. Look, here comes Helena.

Enter HELENA.

HERMIA         God speed, fair Helena. Whither away?

HELENA         Call you me fair? That fair again unsay.

Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair!

Your eyes are lodestars, and your tongue’s sweet air

More tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear

When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.        (1.1.179-185)

Keep promise, love, a hasty confirmation from Lysander, perhaps because he’s already spotted Helena and needs to wrap this up: look, here comes Helena. So we need not to be having this conversation, for lots of reasons, secrecy among them. Hermia’s polite, even friendly: God speed, fair Helena. Whither away? Hel-LO, how ARE you, where are you off to then? But Helena—who has been introduced into the play already, in a manner which might predispose an audience to sympathy (as a woman jilted by Demetrius)—seizes on the most trivial thing in Hermia’s innocuous greeting, and all too quickly suggests that she is a sad, pathetic bore, going on and ON about Demetrius: call you me fair? Oh, that’s nice of you, but it’s not true, is it? that fair again unsay. Demetrius loves your fair: O happy fair! You’re the one that Demetrius fancies now, I’m not his type at all. Apparently. And you’re PRETTY. Your eyes are lodestars: men—Demetrius—are drawn to them, two polestars!—and your tongue’s sweet air more tunable than lark to shepherd’s ear when wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear. You’ve got a nice voice; Demetrius can listen to YOU for hours, apparently. You smell nice too. Basically, you bring the spring; why do birds suddenly appear, stars fall down from the sky. Etc.

Helena makes Hermia sound like a Disney princess. She’s being unfair, and yes, trying the patience of her—former?—friend. But what matters in this moment is that Helena—for whom I have a very soft spot—is feeling utterly defeated and humiliated; the self-loathing is partly a performance, but it’s also deeply sad; she loves a man who apparently loved her once, and is now trying to marry her best friend. Poor Helena.