Act 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the morning after: Oberon lifts his spells, the fairy king and queen make peace, Theseus finds the four lovers asleep and lets them marry as they choose, and Bottom wakes alone from a dream he cannot explain.
This summary takes Act 4 scene by scene. Each scene covers what happens, the key lines, and why it matters for the rest of the play. For the whole story, see our full guide to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. For what came before, see our Act 3 summary, and for everyone who appears here, see our guide to the A Midsummer Night’s Dream characters.
At a Glance
Here is Act 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in brief.
Act 4, Scene 1: The Spells Are Lifted
With the four lovers still asleep nearby, Titania pampers Bottom in her bower.
She invites him to sit on a bed of flowers while she strokes his cheeks, sticks roses in his head, and kisses his “fair large ears.” Bottom enjoys himself. He has Peaseblossom scratch his head, sends Cobweb to kill a bee and bring him its honey, and explains, “I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.” Soon he feels “an exposition of sleep” coming on, and the two fall asleep in each other’s arms. “O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!” says Titania.
Oberon and Titania Reconciled
Oberon, watching with Puck, has begun to pity her: “Her dotage now I do begin to pity.” Earlier, he explains, he met her gathering flowers for Bottom and mocked her until she begged his patience. Then he asked for the changeling boy, and she gave him up at once. “And now I have the boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.” He tells Puck to remove Bottom’s ass’s head, so that he and the lovers will wake and remember the night only as “the fierce vexation of a dream.”
He touches Titania’s eyes with the antidote and wakes her. “My Oberon! what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamour’d of an ass.” Oberon points to the sleeping weaver: “There lies your love.” “O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!” she says. Puck removes the head. Oberon and Titania join hands, reconciled, and plan to dance at Theseus’s house the next night and bless the lovers’ marriages. As the lark sings, they leave.
The Lovers Found
Horns sound. Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus arrive to celebrate May Day with a hunt, and discover the four young people asleep on the ground. Theseus supposes they rose early to observe “The rite of May.” Then he remembers: this is the day Hermia must give her answer.
The lovers wake, confused. Lysander admits that he and Hermia were running away from Athens. Egeus is furious: “Enough, enough, my lord; you have enough: / I beg the law, the law, upon his head.” But Demetrius explains that his love for Hermia has melted “as the snow,” by some power he cannot name, and now “Is only Helena.” He was engaged to her first, he says, and now he has come back to his “natural taste.”
That settles it. “Fair lovers, you are fortunately met,” says Theseus, and he sets the law aside: “Egeus, I will overbear your will; / For in the temple by and by with us / These couples shall eternally be knit.” He calls off the hunt, and the royal party returns to Athens.
Left behind, the lovers can hardly believe they are awake. “These things seem small and undistinguishable, / Like far-off mountains turned into clouds,” says Demetrius. “Methinks I see these things with parted eye, / When every thing seems double,” says Hermia. Helena has found Demetrius “like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.” “Are you sure / That we are awake?” asks Demetrius. The duke was here, they agree, so they must be. They follow him, planning to tell one another their dreams along the way.
Bottom’s Dream
Bottom wakes last, still in the middle of the rehearsal: “When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer.” His friends are gone. Then he remembers something else. “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.” He tries to describe it and gets tangled up: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was.” He will have Quince write it into a ballad called “Bottom’s Dream,” “because it hath no bottom,” and sing it before the duke.
Act 4, Scene 2: Bottom Returns
In Athens, the craftsmen gather in despair. Bottom has not come home.
Without him, the play cannot go forward: there is no one else in Athens who can play Pyramus. Snug arrives with news that the duke has come from the temple, and that two or three other lords and ladies have been married too. If their play had gone on, they would have been made men. Flute is sure the duke would have given Bottom a pension of sixpence a day for his Pyramus.
Then Bottom walks in. “O most courageous day! O most happy hour!” cries Quince. Bottom has wonders to tell them, he says, but will not tell them: “Not a word of me.” All that matters is that their play has been chosen. They must get their costumes, and the actors must eat no onions or garlic, “for we are to utter sweet breath.” Off they go to the palace.
A Closer Reading: The Dream That Hath No Bottom
Of all the mortals in the wood, only Bottom actually met the fairies. And he is the only one who refuses to tell the story.
The lovers never saw a fairy at all. For them, the night was a confusion of their own feelings, and when they wake, they are eager to talk it over. They compare notes on what they saw and agree to “recount our dreams” on the walk back to Athens. Their night can be told, and by Act 5 it has been told to Theseus.
Bottom’s night was different. He was waited on by fairies and loved by their queen, and when he wakes, the experience is simply too big for words. His description collapses into nonsense, with eyes that hear and ears that see. Many readers hear in it a comic echo of a passage in Saint Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, about wonders that no eye has seen and no ear has heard. Bottom has had the play’s only real encounter with the marvelous, and it leaves the most talkative man in Athens tongue-tied: “man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream.”
So when he finds his friends, the man who wanted to play every part will not tell them a thing. “Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not what.” Then: “Not a word of me.” The dream, as he said, hath no bottom. It is the play’s gentlest joke, and also its most serious one. Theseus, in the next act, will dismiss the lovers’ story as the kind of fantasy that imagination invents. The one person who could tell him otherwise is standing in front of him in a play costume, and says nothing. 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 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, answered briefly.
What Happens in Act 4 of A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
Oberon, having gotten the Indian boy, releases Titania from the spell, and Puck removes Bottom’s ass’s head. Theseus, out hunting, finds the four lovers, who now love the right partners. He overrules Egeus and decides the couples will marry alongside him. Bottom wakes from his “rare vision” and rejoins his friends in time for their play.
Why Does Oberon Release Titania?
He has what he wanted: while under the spell, she gave him the Indian boy. He also admits he has begun to pity her.
Why Does Theseus Overrule Egeus?
Because Demetrius no longer wants to marry Hermia. He now loves Helena, so the lovers have paired themselves off, and Theseus decides they will marry as they wish, in the same ceremony as his own wedding.
What Is “Bottom’s Dream”?
Bottom’s name for the ballad he wants Peter Quince to write about his night in the wood, which he cannot otherwise describe. He says it will be called “Bottom’s Dream” because “it hath no bottom.”
Does Demetrius Stay Enchanted?
Yes. Oberon’s antidote is used on Lysander and Titania, but never on Demetrius, who still loves Helena because of the flower when Theseus agrees to his marriage.
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