A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night's Dream is a comedy in which four young Athenian lovers, a quarrelling fairy king and queen, and a troupe of amateur actors collide in an enchanted wood over one bewildering night.

Main characters

• Theseus, Duke of Athens, and Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons
• Hermia and Lysander, lovers
• Helena and Demetrius
• Egeus, Hermia's father
• Oberon and Titania, King and Queen of the Fairies
• Puck (Robin Goodfellow), Oberon's mischievous servant
• Nick Bottom, a weaver, and the 'rude mechanicals': Quince, Flute, Snout, Snug and Starveling

Plot summary

This summary gives away the ending.

Athens is preparing for the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta. Egeus demands that his daughter Hermia marry Demetrius, but she loves Lysander. Under Athenian law she must obey, become a nun or die. Hermia and Lysander decide to run away through the wood; Helena, who loves Demetrius, tells him, and he follows them, with Helena following him.

In the same wood the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania are locked in a quarrel over a changeling boy, and their discord has thrown the seasons into disorder. Oberon sends Puck for a flower whose juice, dropped on sleeping eyes, makes the sleeper love the first creature they see. He uses it on Titania, and tells Puck to use it on 'the Athenian' to make Demetrius love Helena. Puck anoints the wrong Athenian. Soon both young men are chasing Helena, who thinks she is being mocked, and Hermia is furious.

Meanwhile a group of Athenian workmen are rehearsing a play, Pyramus and Thisbe, for the Duke's wedding. Puck gives the weaver Bottom an ass's head, and Titania wakes and falls in love with him. By dawn Oberon has the changeling boy, releases Titania from the spell and sets the lovers right: Lysander loves Hermia again, and Demetrius stays enchanted with Helena. Theseus overrules Egeus and a triple wedding follows.

The play ends with the mechanicals' gloriously bad performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, a tragedy of star-crossed lovers played as farce, before the fairies bless the newlyweds' house and Puck asks the audience to think the whole thing a dream.

Themes

• The irrationality of love
• Dreams, imagination and theatre
• Order and disorder in nature and society
• Transformation

Famous lines

The course of true love never did run smooth.

Lysander, Act 1 Scene 1

Lord, what fools these mortals be!

Puck, Act 3 Scene 2

And though she be but little, she is fierce.

Helena, Act 3 Scene 2

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows.

Oberon, Act 2 Scene 1

If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended, That you have but slumbered here While these visions did appear.

Puck, Epilogue

More in our collection of famous Shakespeare quotes.

Sources

The story of Pyramus and Thisbe comes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, which Shakespeare knew in Latin and in Arthur Golding's 1567 translation. Theseus and Hippolyta come from Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Plutarch. Puck draws on English folklore about Robin Goodfellow. The main plot appears to be Shakespeare's own invention.

On stage and screen

It is one of the most performed of all Shakespeare's plays and a favourite in schools and open-air theatres. Felix Mendelssohn's music for it, including the Wedding March, remains one of the best-known pieces of classical music, and Peter Brook's 1970 Royal Shakespeare Company production, set in a white box with trapezes, changed how many directors approached Shakespeare.

See where A Midsummer Night's Dream sits in Shakespeare's career on the timeline, or read about the playhouses it was written for.