A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comedy about love’s madness, in which four young Athenians run away into an enchanted wood, a fairy king and queen quarrel over a child, a weaver is given the head of an ass, and a company of amateur actors stages the worst tragedy ever performed at a royal wedding.
Written around 1595 or 1596, it weaves four separate stories into one night of confusion and one morning of weddings. This guide covers the plot act by act, the main characters, the themes, and the most famous lines, and ends with a reading of the play the lovers laugh at, which turns out to be their own story. For the other plays, see our guide to all of Shakespeare’s plays.
At a Glance
Here are the key facts about A Midsummer Night’s Dream for quick reference.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Study Guide
Every page on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, from scene-by-scene summaries to characters, themes, and famous lines.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Brief
The whole story in a few sentences, before the act-by-act detail.
In Athens, Duke Theseus is about to marry Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons. A young woman, Hermia, refuses to marry the man her father has chosen, Demetrius, because she loves Lysander. Under Athenian law she must obey, die, or become a nun, so she and Lysander run away into the wood at night. Demetrius follows them, and Hermia’s friend Helena, who loves Demetrius, follows him.
In the same wood, the fairy king Oberon is quarreling with his queen, Titania, and uses a magic flower to make her fall in love with the first creature she sees. His servant Puck uses the same flower on the young lovers, with chaotic results, and gives a weaver named Bottom the head of an ass, with whom Titania falls in love. By morning, Oberon has set everything right. The lovers pair off happily, three couples marry, and Bottom and his fellow craftsmen perform their play, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” at the wedding feast. The fairies bless the marriages, and Puck asks the audience to think of the whole play as a dream.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Plot Summary, Act by Act
What happens in each of the play’s five acts.
Act 1: The Law and the Escape
Theseus and Hippolyta will marry in four days. Egeus arrives to complain that his daughter, Hermia, will not marry Demetrius, the husband he has chosen, because she loves Lysander. Theseus gives her until his wedding day to decide: marry Demetrius, be put to death, or live the rest of her life as a nun. Left alone, Lysander and Hermia agree to run away through the wood to his aunt’s house, beyond the reach of Athenian law. They tell their plan to Helena, who once had Demetrius’s love and still loves him. Hoping to win his thanks, she decides to tell Demetrius.
Elsewhere in Athens, a group of craftsmen meet to cast a play they hope to perform at the duke’s wedding: “The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.” Nick Bottom, a weaver, is cast as Pyramus, and would happily play every other part too. They agree to rehearse in the wood the next night.
Act 2: The Quarrel in the Wood
In the wood, Oberon and Titania, the king and queen of the fairies, meet and quarrel. Oberon wants a little Indian boy that Titania is raising for the sake of his mother, one of her followers, who died giving birth to him. Titania refuses to give him up, and their feud has thrown the seasons into disorder. To punish her, Oberon sends his servant Puck to fetch a flower called “love-in-idleness,” whose juice, dropped on sleeping eyelids, makes the sleeper dote on the next creature they see.
Oberon watches Demetrius cruelly reject Helena, and takes pity on her. He anoints Titania’s eyes himself, and tells Puck to anoint the eyes of the young man in Athenian clothes. But Puck finds the wrong Athenian: Lysander, asleep near Hermia. When Helena stumbles across Lysander and wakes him, he falls instantly in love with her and abandons Hermia.
Act 3: Everything Goes Wrong
The craftsmen gather to rehearse near Titania’s sleeping place. Puck turns Bottom’s head into an ass’s head, and his terrified friends run away. Titania wakes, sees Bottom, and falls in love with him on the spot, ordering her fairies to wait on him.
Meanwhile, Oberon discovers Puck’s mistake and anoints Demetrius’s eyes himself. Now both young men are in love with Helena, who is sure they are mocking her, and Hermia, abandoned, turns on her old friend in fury. The two men go off to fight. Oberon orders Puck to cover the night with fog, lead the rivals apart until they fall asleep exhausted, and then undo the spell on Lysander. “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” says Puck.
Act 4: Morning
Titania has given Oberon the Indian boy, so he releases her from the spell, and Puck removes Bottom’s ass’s head. The fairy king and queen are reconciled. At dawn, Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus come to the wood to celebrate the May morning and find the four lovers asleep. Lysander loves Hermia again, and Demetrius now loves Helena. Egeus demands the law against Lysander, but Theseus overrules him: the two couples will marry alongside Theseus and Hippolyta.
Bottom wakes alone, trying to remember what happened: “I have had a most rare vision.” He hurries back to his friends, who were about to give up their play without their Pyramus, and tells them the duke has chosen to see it.
Act 5: The Wedding Play
After the weddings, Theseus dismisses the lovers’ story of their night as the kind of fantasy that lovers, madmen, and poets invent. For the evening’s entertainment, he chooses the craftsmen’s play, though he is warned it is terrible. The performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe,” with actors playing a Wall, Moonshine, and a Lion, is so bad that the newly married couples mock it throughout.
At midnight the couples go to bed. The fairies enter the sleeping palace to bless the three marriages, and Puck, alone, speaks the epilogue, asking the audience to pardon the play as nothing more than a dream.
Characters
The main figures in the play, and what drives each of them.
Hermia
A young Athenian woman who defies her father and the law to marry the man she loves. She is small, quick-tempered, and brave, and she is devastated when Lysander suddenly abandons her in the wood.
Lysander
Hermia’s lover, who plans their escape from Athens. Under the spell of the flower, he turns on Hermia with startling cruelty and pursues Helena instead.
Helena
Hermia’s childhood friend, desperately in love with Demetrius, who has abandoned her for Hermia. When both men suddenly declare their love for her, she is sure it is a cruel joke.
Demetrius
The suitor Egeus has chosen for Hermia. He once courted Helena and now scorns her, until Oberon’s flower turns him back to her. The play never undoes his enchantment.
Oberon
The king of the fairies. His quarrel with Titania over the Indian boy sets the magic in motion, but he also takes pity on Helena and tries to set the lovers right.
Titania
The queen of the fairies. She refuses to give up the boy out of loyalty to his dead mother, and under Oberon’s spell she falls in love with Bottom and his ass’s head.
Puck
Oberon’s mischievous servant, also called Robin Goodfellow, a figure from English folklore. He delights in tricks, causes most of the play’s confusion by anointing the wrong man, and speaks its final lines.
Bottom
Nick Bottom, a weaver and the most enthusiastic of the amateur actors. Confident, boastful, and completely unflappable, he accepts being adored by a fairy queen with hardly a sign of surprise.
Theseus and Hippolyta
The duke of Athens and the queen of the Amazons, whose wedding frames the play. Theseus is the voice of reason and law, who doubts “these fairy toys,” though he finally overrules Egeus and lets the lovers marry as they choose.
Egeus
Hermia’s father, who would rather see her dead than married to the man she loves. His demand sets the lovers’ story in motion.
The Mechanicals
Bottom and his fellow Athenian craftsmen, including Peter Quince, who organizes their play, and Francis Flute, who plays Thisbe. Earnest and hopelessly literal, they worry that the ladies in the audience will be frightened by a lion.
Themes
The ideas that run through A Midsummer Night’s Dream and give it its lasting charm.
The Madness of Love
Love in this play is sudden, irrational, and blind. As Helena puts it, “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.” The magic flower only exaggerates what love already does: it makes people dote on the wrong person for no good reason, and change their minds overnight.
Dreams and Imagination
Everyone who spends the night in the wood wakes up unsure what was real. Titania remembers loving an ass as a vision; Bottom calls his night “a most rare vision” that is “past the wit of man” to explain. Theseus insists it is all imagination, which is exactly what the play itself asks its audience to use.
Order and Disorder
Athens is a place of law, where a father can demand his daughter’s death. The wood is the opposite: a place of freedom, magic, and chaos, where the fairy king and queen’s quarrel has turned the seasons upside down. The lovers must pass through the wood’s disorder before Athens can welcome them back.
Theater and Illusion
The craftsmen worry that their audience will mistake a play for reality, so they explain everything, even that the lion is really a joiner named Snug. Their clumsy efforts make the audience notice how much any play depends on the spectators’ willingness to imagine.
Key Quotations
The most famous lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who speaks them, and what they mean.
“The Course of True Love Never Did Run Smooth”
Lysander, Act 1, scene 1, comforting Hermia after Theseus’s judgment. In every story he has ever read or heard, true lovers have met obstacles, whether differences of rank, age, or the choice of family and friends.
“Love Looks Not with the Eyes, but with the Mind”
Helena, Act 1, scene 1: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.” Love is not guided by what is really there, which is why Cupid is shown blindfolded.
“Ill Met by Moonlight, Proud Titania”
Oberon, Act 2, scene 1, his first words to his queen. The greeting sets the tone of their quarrel: this is an unlucky meeting, and he blames her pride.
“I’ll Put a Girdle Round About the Earth in Forty Minutes”
Puck, Act 2, scene 1, when Oberon sends him for the magic flower. A “girdle” is a belt: he will circle the whole world in forty minutes.
“Lord, What Fools These Mortals Be!”
Puck, Act 3, scene 2, watching the lovers’ confusion. To a fairy, human passion looks absurd, though Puck himself caused much of the chaos he laughs at.
“Though She Be but Little, She Is Fierce”
Helena, Act 3, scene 2, about Hermia during their quarrel: “O, when she’s angry, she is keen and shrewd! / She was a vixen when she went to school; / And though she be but little, she is fierce.” The line is now often used as praise, though Helena meant it as a warning.
“I Have Had a Most Rare Vision”
Bottom, Act 4, scene 1, waking alone in the wood. He cannot describe his dream, and gets his senses comically muddled trying: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen.” He decides to have it turned into a ballad called “Bottom’s Dream,” “because it hath no bottom.”
“The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet”
Theseus, Act 5, scene 1: “The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” Madmen, lovers, and poets are all made of imagination, and the poet gives “to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” Theseus means it as a dismissal of the lovers’ story, but the lines describe exactly what Shakespeare has just done.
“If We Shadows Have Offended”
Puck, the epilogue: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended, / That you have but slumber’d here / While these visions did appear.” If the audience did not like the play, they can simply think of it as a dream.
Language and Form
How Shakespeare builds the play, and the techniques that make it work.
Four Worlds, Four Ways of Speaking
Each group in the play has its own voice. The court of Athens speaks in stately blank verse. The young lovers often speak in rhyming couplets, trading matched lines like partners in a dance. The fairies sing and chant in short, rhyming lines. The craftsmen speak in plain, bumbling prose, until they perform their play in some of the worst verse Shakespeare ever wrote on purpose.
The Play Within the Play
“Pyramus and Thisbe” is a tragedy performed as a farce. Its actors explain themselves so carefully that the illusion never has a chance: a man with a lantern announces that he is the moon, and an actor playing a Wall points out the cranny the lovers whisper through.
Interwoven Plots
The play braids together four stories: the royal wedding, the young lovers, the fairy quarrel, and the craftsmen’s play. They meet in the wood, where the fairies interfere with the mortals, and come together again at the wedding, where everyone watches the craftsmen’s performance.
Moonlight
The moon runs through the play, from Theseus’s opening impatience for the new moon of his wedding to Oberon’s “Ill met by moonlight” and the craftsmen’s anxious search for a way to bring moonlight into a room. It lights a world where nothing is quite what it seems.
A Closer Reading: The Lovers Watch Their Own Story
The play the newly married lovers laugh at in Act 5 is their own story, told as a tragedy, and it shows how close their night in the wood came to ending the same way.
Look at the plot of “Pyramus and Thisbe.” Two young lovers are kept apart by their families; as Bottom explains, the Wall “parted their fathers.” They arrange to meet secretly at night, outside the city. A mistake in the dark, a lion and a bloodstained cloak, convinces Pyramus that Thisbe is dead, and both lovers die. Now look at the four people watching it. Hermia and Lysander fled a father who wanted her dead or married to someone else. They met at night, outside the city. And a mistake in the dark, Puck anointing the wrong Athenian, turned love into hatred and sent two young men off to kill each other.
The lovers do not see the resemblance. They spend the performance making jokes. Demetrius mocks the talking Wall. Hippolyta calls it “the silliest stuff that ever I heard.” Only Theseus defends the players: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” Every play is only a shadow of reality, and the audience must use its imagination to make it work.
It is the same Theseus who, earlier in the scene, dismissed the lovers’ account of their night as “antique fables” and “fairy toys.” And it is his word, “shadows,” that Puck picks up in the epilogue: “If we shadows have offended.” Puck asks the real audience for exactly what Theseus asked of Hippolyta. The whole comedy is a shadow, and it only works if we amend it with imagination. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a story of lovers who could easily have ended like Pyramus and Thisbe, or like Romeo and Juliet, written at about the same time. What saves them is a fairy’s change of mind, which is to say, the kindness of the play itself.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, answered briefly.
What Is A Midsummer Night’s Dream About?
Four young Athenians who run away into an enchanted wood, where a fairy’s magic flower makes them fall in and out of love. At the same time, the fairy king and queen quarrel, and a group of craftsmen rehearse a play. By morning the confusion is resolved, and the play ends with three weddings.
Does the Play Take Place on Midsummer Night?
Not exactly. The lovers’ night in the wood ends when Theseus and his party arrive at dawn to celebrate May Day, not midsummer. The title suggests the magic and strangeness traditionally associated with midsummer rather than a precise date.
Who Is Puck?
Oberon’s servant, a mischievous spirit also called Robin Goodfellow. He anoints the wrong young man with the love potion and gives Bottom his ass’s head, and he speaks the play’s epilogue.
Why Does Titania Fall in Love with Bottom?
Oberon puts the juice of the magic flower on her eyes while she sleeps, as punishment for refusing to give him the Indian boy. When she wakes, the first creature she sees is Bottom, whom Puck has just given an ass’s head.
Is Demetrius Still Under the Spell at the End?
Yes. Oberon removes the spell from Lysander, but never from Demetrius, whose love for Helena is still the work of the flower when he marries her. Demetrius himself says he does not know by what power his love for Hermia melted away.
Related Reading
Three pages that take A Midsummer Night’s Dream further.