The characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream live in four worlds that collide in one night: the court of Athens, four young lovers on the run, a quarreling fairy kingdom, and a company of craftsmen rehearsing a play, and almost every one of them ends up loving someone they did not choose.
This guide explains every major character, grouped by the world they belong to, with their key lines and what drives each of them. For the plot, themes, and famous quotations, see our full guide to A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
At a Glance
Here are the main characters of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and their roles.
The Athenian Court
The rulers and parents of Athens, whose law sets the lovers’ story in motion and whose wedding ends it.
Theseus
The duke of Athens, a legendary hero, who opens the play impatient for his wedding in four days. He won his bride in war, and tells her so: “Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love, doing thee injuries.” When Egeus brings his complaint, Theseus upholds the law. He tells Hermia that her father should be to her “as a god,” and she “but as a form in wax” in his hands, and gives her until his wedding day to choose between marrying Demetrius, death, and a life as a nun.
He is the play’s voice of reason, and he does not believe in fairies. When the lovers tell their story, he calls it “More strange than true,” mere “antique fables” and “fairy toys” of the kind lovers, madmen, and poets invent. Yet he is also generous. In Act 4 he overrules Egeus and lets the lovers marry as they choose, and in Act 5 he insists on seeing the craftsmen’s play, because “never anything can be amiss, / When simpleness and duty tender it.”
Hippolyta
The queen of the Amazons, whom Theseus has defeated and is about to marry. She says little, but what she says is sharp. At the wedding play she has no patience for the performers: “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.”
On the lovers’ story, though, she disagrees with her husband. Where Theseus dismisses it as fantasy, she points out that all four tell the same tale, and that their night, told over, “More witnesseth than fancy’s images, / And grows to something of great constancy.” She is the one person at court willing to believe something strange really happened.
Egeus
Hermia’s father, who arrives “Full of vexation” to complain that Lysander has “bewitch’d the bosom of my child.” He wants Hermia to marry Demetrius, and he claims the full force of the law: “I beg the ancient privilege of Athens, / As she is mine, I may dispose of her,” either to Demetrius “Or to her death.”
He is the only character who never changes. When the lovers are found in the wood, he still demands the law against Lysander, and Theseus has to overrule him. He is the stern father of old comedy, the obstacle the young lovers must get around.
The Four Lovers
Two young women and two young men, whose loves are rearranged three times in a single night.
Hermia
A young Athenian woman who refuses to marry the man her father has chosen. She is brave from the first scene, standing up to the duke himself, and she sums up her whole situation in one cry: “O hell! to choose love by another’s eye!” When Lysander proposes they run away, she agrees at once. In the wood she is careful of her honor, asking him to sleep a little farther off.
She is short and quick-tempered, and the quarrel in Act 3 shows it. When Lysander abandons her for Helena, she decides her taller friend has won him with her height, calls Helena a “painted maypole,” and threatens her: “I am not yet so low / But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.” Helena’s description of her is the play’s most famous line about a character: “though she be but little, she is fierce.”
Lysander
Hermia’s lover, who argues before the duke that he is every bit as good a match as Demetrius, and adds that Demetrius once courted Helena and left her. He plans the escape to his aunt’s house, and it is Lysander who comforts Hermia with the play’s best-known line: “The course of true love never did run smooth.”
Under the spell of Puck’s flower, he turns instantly on Hermia and pursues Helena. The comedy is that he believes he is being perfectly rational: “The will of man is by his reason sway’d; / And reason says you are the worthier maid.” When the spell is lifted, he returns to Hermia and marries her.
Helena
Hermia’s childhood friend, tall and fair, desperately in love with Demetrius, who once courted her and then left her for Hermia. Her love makes her abject: “I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.” She knows it is foolish, and she understands love better than anyone: “Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.” She also knows the rules are unfair: “We cannot fight for love, as men may do; / We should be woo’d and were not made to woo.”
When both men suddenly declare their love for her, she cannot believe it and assumes they are mocking her. When Hermia seems to join in, she is most hurt of all, and reminds her of their childhood, when they grew together “Like to a double cherry, seeming parted, / But yet an union in partition.” In the end she gets the man she wanted, though only by magic.
Demetrius
Egeus’s choice for Hermia. According to Lysander, he “Made love to Nedar’s daughter, Helena, / And won her soul,” then abandoned her for Hermia. In the wood he is cruel to Helena, telling her bluntly, “I love thee not, therefore pursue me not.”
Oberon, taking pity on Helena, has the flower applied to his eyes, and he wakes in love with her. The spell is never removed. In Act 4 he tells the duke that his love for Hermia has melted like snow “by some power,” though he does not know which. He is the only one of the four lovers who marries while still enchanted.
The Fairies
The rulers and spirits of the wood, whose quarrel disturbs the natural world and whose magic reshapes the mortals’ loves.
Oberon
The king of the fairies. He wants the little Indian boy that Titania is raising, and when she refuses to give him up, he punishes her. His first words to her set the tone: “Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.” Each accuses the other of loving a mortal, he with Hippolyta, she with Theseus.
He can be spiteful, but he is not cruel. Watching Demetrius reject Helena, he takes her side and sets out to change Demetrius’s heart. Once Titania has given him the boy, he begins to pity her “dotage” on Bottom and releases her. By the end he is the play’s peacemaker, reconciling with his queen, setting the lovers right, and blessing the three marriages.
Titania
The queen of the fairies. She refuses to give up the Indian boy out of loyalty to his mother, one of her followers, who died giving birth to him: “for her sake I will not part with him.” She knows their feud has damaged the world. Because of it, “The seasons alter,” and frost falls on summer roses.
Under Oberon’s spell she wakes to Bottom’s braying song, “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?”, and falls in love with him, ass’s head and all. She orders her fairies, Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed, to wait on him. When she wakes from the spell, she remembers it only as a dream: “My Oberon! what visions have I seen! / Methought I was enamour’d of an ass.”
Puck
Oberon’s servant, a shape-shifting spirit from English folklore known as Robin Goodfellow and, to some, “Hobgoblin” and “sweet Puck.” He introduces himself proudly: “I am that merry wanderer of the night.” He likes to play tricks on ordinary people, neighing like a young mare to fool a horse or hiding in an old woman’s drink.
He causes most of the play’s confusion by anointing the wrong Athenian, and he gives Bottom his ass’s head for fun. He watches the chaos with delight: “Lord, what fools these mortals be!” He also has the last word. In the epilogue he steps forward to ask the audience’s pardon: “If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended.”
The Mechanicals
Six Athenian craftsmen who rehearse a play for the duke’s wedding, and the source of most of the play’s comedy.
Bottom
Nick Bottom, a weaver, cast as Pyramus. He wants every part. He offers to play Thisbe in “a monstrous little voice,” and then the lion: “Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will do any man’s heart good to hear me.” When the others worry that his roar would frighten the ladies, he promises to “roar you as gently as any sucking dove.”
Given an ass’s head by Puck and adored by the fairy queen, he takes it all in stride, and even gets in a wise remark: “reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.” Waking alone, he tries to describe what happened and gets his senses muddled: “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen.” He will have it made into a ballad called “Bottom’s Dream,” “because it hath no bottom.”
Peter Quince
A carpenter, and the organizer of the company. He hands out the parts from his scroll of names, runs the rehearsals, and does his best to keep Bottom from taking over. He is the one who reminds Flute that he has spoken all his lines at once, “cues and all.”
The Rest of the Company
Francis Flute, a bellows-mender, is cast as Thisbe and protests, “let me not play a woman; I have a beard coming.” Snug, a joiner, plays the Lion and worries that he is “slow of study,” though the part is nothing but roaring. Tom Snout, a tinker, plays the Wall, and Robin Starveling, a tailor, plays Moonshine with a lantern, a thornbush, and a dog.
Their great fear is that the audience will take their play for reality. So the Lion explains to the ladies that he is not really a lion, and Moonshine announces that “the lanthorn is the moon.” Their efforts to protect the audience from the illusion are what make the performance so funny.
A Closer Reading: The Spell No One Breaks
Every enchantment in the play is lifted except one, and the play gives the enchanted man its happiest ending.
Oberon’s cure is precise. He orders Puck to crush the antidote into Lysander’s eye, so that he wakes loving Hermia again. He frees Titania himself, and Puck removes Bottom’s ass’s head. But no one ever touches Demetrius’s eyes. He goes back to Athens, and to the altar, still under the flower’s power.
Listen to how he explains it. His love for Hermia has “Melted as the snow,” by a power he cannot name, and now all the faith of his heart “Is only Helena.” Then he offers his own theory: he was engaged to Helena first, and his love for Hermia was like a sick man’s loathing of good food. Now, “as in health, come to my natural taste,” he loves Helena again. To Demetrius, the enchantment feels like getting well.
Lysander said much the same thing when the spell was on him: “The will of man is by his reason sway’d; / And reason says you are the worthier maid.” From the inside, magic love and real love feel exactly alike. Both men think they are being reasonable, and the play never gives us a way to tell the difference. Bottom, of all people, puts it best: “reason and love keep little company together now-a-days.” Helena said it at the start: love looks “with the mind,” not with the eyes.
So the play leaves Demetrius enchanted and lets that stand as a happy ending. Perhaps that is its quiet joke about all love. Every lover in the play has been a little drugged, whether by a flower or by their own imagination, and the lucky ones simply wake up next to the right person. As Hippolyta says of the lovers’ story, it “grows to something of great constancy,” however strange its cause. Our full guide to A Midsummer Night’s Dream follows love and imagination through the whole play.
Common Questions
The questions readers ask most often about the characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, answered briefly.
Who Is the Main Character in A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
There is no single main character. The play weaves together four groups: the court, the four lovers, the fairies, and the craftsmen. Puck and Bottom are often seen as the most memorable, and Puck has the final word.
Who Are the Four Lovers?
Hermia and Lysander, who love each other, and Helena and Demetrius. At the start Demetrius wants to marry Hermia and Helena loves Demetrius. By the end, Hermia marries Lysander and Helena marries Demetrius.
What Is the Difference Between Hermia and Helena?
They are childhood friends, but opposites in looks and temper. Hermia is short and fiery, and loved by both men at the start; Helena is tall, unsure of herself, and loved by neither. The magic reverses their positions for a night.
Why Is Bottom Given an Ass’s Head?
Puck does it as a prank while the craftsmen rehearse in the wood. It fits Oberon’s plan, since Titania, under the spell, falls in love with the first creature she sees, and the joke is that Bottom, already something of an ass, barely notices the change.
Who Are the Mechanicals?
Six Athenian craftsmen who perform “Pyramus and Thisbe” at the duke’s wedding: Peter Quince, a carpenter; Nick Bottom, a weaver; Francis Flute, a bellows-mender; Tom Snout, a tinker; Snug, a joiner; and Robin Starveling, a tailor.
Related Reading
Three pages that take A Midsummer Night’s Dream further.