Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the wedding night: Theseus dismisses the lovers’ story as fantasy, the craftsmen perform the most gloriously bad tragedy in Shakespeare, and after the couples go to bed, the fairies slip into the palace to bless them.
This summary takes Act 5 in its parts. The act has a single scene, followed by the fairies’ blessing and Puck’s epilogue. Each part covers what happens, the key lines, and why it matters. For the whole story, see our full guide to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For what came before, see our Act 4 summary, and for everyone who appears here, see our guide to the A Midsummer Night’s Dream characters.
At a Glance
Here is Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in brief.
Act 5, Scene 1: The Lovers’ Story
The three couples are married. In the palace, Hippolyta remarks on the strange story the lovers have told.
“More strange than true,” answers Theseus. “I never may believe / These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.” Lovers and madmen, he says, have such “seething brains” that they imagine more than cool reason can grasp. “The lunatic, the lover and the poet / Are of imagination all compact.” The madman sees devils, the lover sees beauty where there is none, and the poet gives “to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.” In the dark, imagination makes fears out of nothing: “How easy is a bush supposed a bear!”
Hippolyta is not convinced. The four lovers all tell the same story, and their minds were all changed together. That, she says, “More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy.” Whatever happened, it was “strange and admirable.”
Choosing the Entertainment
The lovers arrive, and Theseus asks Philostrate, his master of revels, what entertainments are ready to fill the hours before bed.
Theseus reads the list aloud and rejects one offering after another: a battle with the Centaurs, which he has already told his bride about; an old story he has seen before; a satire unfit for a wedding. Then he comes to “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus / And his love Thisbe; very tragical mirth.” He is delighted by the contradictions: “Merry and tragical! tedious and brief! / That is, hot ice and wondrous strange snow.”
Philostrate tries to talk him out of it. The play is about ten words long, and ten words too long. There is “not one word apt, one player fitted.” It is tragic, since Pyramus kills himself, and at the rehearsal it made Philostrate cry, but with laughter. The actors are “Hard-handed men that work in Athens here, / Which never labour’d in their minds till now.” Hippolyta does not want to watch poor people fail. Theseus insists: “never anything can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it.”
“Pyramus and Thisbe”
Quince speaks a prologue that introduces every actor and gives away the whole plot: the lovers, the Wall, the Moonshine, the Lion that frightens Thisbe and stains her cloak with blood, and the deaths of both lovers.
Then the play begins. Snout, as Wall, explains that he is a wall, and shows the cranny the lovers must whisper through. Bottom, as Pyramus, curses the night, “O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black!”, and finds the chink: “I see a voice.” The lovers kiss through it, or try to: “I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.” They agree to meet at “Ninny’s tomb.” Wall, his part discharged, walks off.
The audience cannot resist commenting. “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” says Hippolyta. Theseus defends the players: “The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.” “It must be your imagination then, and not theirs,” she replies.
Snug, as Lion, reassures the ladies that he is only Snug the joiner. Starveling, as Moonshine, is heckled until he gives up and says it plainly: the lantern is the moon, he is the man in the moon, and the thornbush and the dog are his. Thisbe arrives, the Lion roars, and she runs. “Well roared, Lion,” says Demetrius. “Well run, Thisbe,” says Theseus. “Well shone, Moon,” says Hippolyta.
Pyramus finds the bloody cloak, decides Thisbe is dead, and stabs himself at great length. Thisbe returns, finds him dead, and mourns him in one of the play’s silliest laments, “His eyes were green as leeks,” before stabbing herself: “Thus Thisby ends: / Adieu, adieu, adieu.” “Moonshine and Lion are left to bury the dead,” says Theseus. “Ay, and Wall too,” adds Demetrius. At that, Bottom sits up to correct him: “the wall is down that parted their fathers.” Would they like an epilogue? Theseus asks for the dance instead, and the players finish with a rustic Bergomask.
“The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve,” says Theseus. “Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.” The couples leave for bed.
The Fairies’ Blessing and Puck’s Epilogue
Puck enters the silent palace. “Now the hungry lion roars, / And the wolf behowls the moon,” he says: it is the hour when spirits are abroad.
Oberon and Titania follow with their fairies to bless the house and the three marriages: “So shall all the couples three / Ever true in loving be.” Their children will be born without any blemish. The fairies are sent through the palace to bless every room, so that its owner “Ever shall in safety rest.” Then Oberon sends them off: “Trip away; make no stay; / Meet me all by break of day.”
Puck, alone, speaks the last words of the play. “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 treat it as a dream. And if they will give the actors their applause, “Robin shall restore amends.”
A Closer Reading: Fairy Time
The man who opens Act 5 by dismissing fairies as nonsense closes it by announcing their hour, and then the fairies come into his own house.
Theseus is the play’s great skeptic. He will not believe “These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.” To him, the lovers’ story is what happens when imagination runs wild in the dark, turning a bush into a bear. He is a reasonable man, a ruler of law and daylight, and his speech is so persuasive that most readers remember it better than anything else in the scene.
Yet when midnight strikes, it is Theseus who sends everyone to bed with the words “’tis almost fairy time.” He means it as a figure of speech, the way anyone might say it is the witching hour. The play takes him at his word. As soon as he leaves the stage, the fairies arrive in his palace. They are the same fairies whose quarrel turned the seasons upside down in Act 2, and who accused each other of loving Theseus and Hippolyta. Now they bless his marriage bed, his children, and every room of the house he rules, while he sleeps.
Theseus never learns any of this. The audience does. The play lets the skeptic be right about almost everything, lovers, madmen, and poets included, and then quietly shows him to be wrong about the one thing that mattered. Hippolyta, who suspected the lovers’ story was “something of great constancy,” was closer to the truth. And the protection over the house of reason comes from the world reason denies. Our guide to the themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows dreams and imagination through the whole play.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, answered briefly.
What Happens in Act 5 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
After the three weddings, Theseus dismisses the lovers’ story as imagination and chooses the craftsmen’s play, “Pyramus and Thisbe,” for the evening’s entertainment. The performance is hilariously bad, and the couples mock it. At midnight they go to bed, the fairies bless the marriages, and Puck ends the play with an epilogue.
Why Does Theseus Choose the Craftsmen’s Play?
He is amused by its contradictory title, “tedious brief” and “tragical mirth,” and he values the effort behind it. As he puts it, “never anything can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it.”
Who Plays Which Part in “Pyramus and Thisbe”?
Bottom plays Pyramus, Flute plays Thisbe, Snout plays the Wall, Snug plays the Lion, and Starveling plays Moonshine. Quince speaks the Prologue.
What Does “The Lunatic, the Lover, and the Poet” Mean?
That madmen, lovers, and poets are all ruled by imagination, and all see things that are not really there. Theseus uses the idea to dismiss the lovers’ story of their night in the wood.
How Does A Midsummer Night’s Dream End?
With the fairies blessing the three marriages in Theseus’s sleeping palace, and Puck asking the audience to think of the whole play as a dream, and to forgive it with their applause.
Related Reading
Three pages that take A Midsummer Night’s Dream further.