One of Shakespeare's themes in A Midsummer Night's Dream is the lunacy of love. Love is blind, love is foolish, love is fickle (unreliable); in sum, love is a form of insanity. These versions of love give the play its comic, madcap tone.

The love potions are plot devices that help Shakespeare exaggerate the theme of love's madness to a comic extent. The most striking use of the love potions/magic as a plot device emerges with Titania and Bottom. Oberon wants Titania's young Indian boy for his own entourage. Titania refuses to give him up, because she promised his mother, her good friend, that she would care for the boy if his mother died, which she does. To try to force Titania into compliance, Oberon has Puck use a love potion that will cause her to fall in love with the first being she sees. This happens to be Bottom—and to add to the comic effect, Puck magically gives him an ass's head. The love potion/magic highlights the idea that love is mad and blind by showing a beautiful queen falling in love with a ridiculously altered lower-class man.

The love potions works to comic effect again to show love's fickleness and madness when Puck puts a potion meant to make Demetrius fall in love with Helena in Lysander's eyes by mistake. Both Demetrius and Lysander fall madly in love with Helena, when moments before they had both been madly in love with Hermia.