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A Midsummer Night's Dream: Characters
A Midsummer Night's Dream character analysis for all 10 main characters – Puck, Oberon, Titania, Bottom, Hermia, Lysander, Helena, Demetrius, Theseus and Hippolyta. Each profile explores the character's psychology, motivation, and structural role within the play, supported throughout by a modern verse translation and key quotes.
A complete character study guide and revision resource for GCSE, A-Level, AP English, IB, and undergraduate Shakespeare – equally useful to teachers and actors.
Select a character below to begin.
Supporting Cast
Beyond the ten figures who carry the main action, A Midsummer Night's Dream has a court, a company of workmen, a train of fairies, and a handful of people who are talked about but never seen. The wider cast is grouped below by where it belongs.
The Athenian Court
Egeus
Hermia's father, who opens the plot by dragging his daughter before the duke and demanding the ancient privilege of Athens: she will marry Demetrius or die. He never gives a reason for preferring Demetrius to Lysander; the suitor he chose has simply not won her, and the one he rejects has. In A4S1 he finds the four lovers asleep in the wood, demands the law again, and is overruled by Theseus in a single line. In this text he does not appear in Act 5.
Philostrate
Theseus's master of the revels, sent in A1S1 to stir the Athenian youth to merriments and, in A5S1, to offer the duke a list of entertainments for the wedding night. He has seen the workmen rehearse and tries to spare the court: the play is nothing, nothing in the world, and the men who perform it have never laboured in their minds till now. Theseus overrules him too. Since Peter Brook's 1970 production the part has often been doubled with Puck.
The Mechanicals
Peter Quince
A carpenter, and the author, director and casting manager of Pyramus and Thisbe. He reads the roll in A1S2, manages Bottom by flattery, and in the wood works out how to bring a wall and the moon into a room. In A5S1 he speaks the Prologue with every stop in the wrong place, so that his polite apology says the opposite of what it means; Theseus's verdict is that this fellow doth not stand upon points. He is the company's steady centre, and the only one of them who writes.
Francis Flute
A bellows-mender, cast as Thisbe against his will because he has a beard coming. At the rehearsal he says all his lines at once, cues and all. In A4S2 it is Flute who mourns the vanished Bottom, reckoning that the duke would have paid him sixpence a day for life for such a Pyramus. In A5S1 his Thisbe finds Pyramus dead and laments him in Quince's short rhymed lines, and the court, which has laughed at everything, quietens to hear it.
Tom Snout
A tinker, first cast as Pyramus's father and then, when the company discovers that the lovers must whisper through a wall, given the wall itself. In A3S1 he is the first to see Bottom with the ass's head and flees. In A5S1 he plays Wall in lime and rough-cast, holds up his fingers for the chink, and explains himself so thoroughly that Demetrius calls him the wittiest partition that ever he heard discourse.
Snug
A joiner, the slowest of the company, who asks in A1S2 for the lion's part in writing because he is slow of study and is told it is nothing but roaring. In A5S1 he has learned eight lines of rhymed apology in which the lion explains that he is only Snug the joiner and would not frighten the ladies for the world. Theseus calls him a very gentle beast, of a good conscience. Hazlitt thought him the moral man of the piece, proceeding by measurement and discretion in all things.
Robin Starveling
A tailor, cast first as Thisbe's mother and then as Moonshine, with a lantern, a thorn-bush and a dog. He is the company's worrier, sure that the killing must be left out and that the lion will frighten the ladies. In A5S1 the court heckles his lantern so relentlessly that he gives up on his verses and simply tells them what everything is: the lantern is the moon, he is the man in the moon, this is his thorn-bush and this his dog.
The Fairies
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth and Mustardseed
The four fairies Titania assigns to wait on Bottom in A3S1, with orders to feed him apricots and dewberries, steal honey from the bees, and fan the moonbeams from his eyes with butterfly wings. Bottom greets each with elaborate courtesy, asks after Peaseblossom's parents, promises to make use of Cobweb if he cuts his finger, and sympathises with Mustardseed for all the beef his family has been eaten with. In A4S1 they scratch his head. Their names are the smallest things in the wood, and the play treats them with complete seriousness.
The Fairy
Titania's attendant who meets Puck in A2S1 and speaks the play's first fairy verse: over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough brier. She recognises Puck by reputation as the shrewd and knavish sprite who frightens village maidens and skims the milk, and her exchange with him is the audience's first account of the fairy quarrel over the changeling boy.
The Singing Fairies
The First and Second Fairies who lead Titania's lullaby in A2S2, warning off spotted snakes, thorny hedgehogs, newts, blind-worms, weaving spiders and black beetles, and calling on Philomel to sing. They post a sentinel and leave; Oberon walks straight past it. The song is one of the play's set pieces and the moment the fairy world is at its most delicate, immediately before it is at its most cruel.
The Absent
The Changeling Boy
The Indian boy over whom Oberon and Titania have quarrelled since early summer. He never appears and never speaks. Puck says he was stolen from an Indian king; Titania says his mother was a votaress of her order who died bearing him, and that she keeps him for her sake. Oberon wants him as a henchman. Titania surrenders him while enchanted in A4S1, and he is sent to Oberon's bower in fairyland. Everything the play says about power between husband and wife is argued over a child with no lines.
The Indian Votaress
The changeling's mother, remembered by Titania in A2S1: a mortal woman who sat with the fairy queen on the Indian shore, laughed with her at the sails filling like pregnant bellies, and imitated them with her own, sailing up and down the sand to fetch her queen trifles. She died in childbirth. Her ten lines are the play's one picture of a friendship between women untouched by men, and the reason Titania will not give up the boy.
Theseus's Past Loves
Perigenia, Aegle, Ariadne and Antiopa, the women Oberon says Titania led Theseus away from and made him break faith with. They belong to the myth Shakespeare inherited from Plutarch and Chaucer, in which the conqueror of the Amazons was also a serial abandoner of women. The play mentions them once, in a fairy's taunt, and never again; the audience is free to remember them when the duke marries his Amazon.
Pyramus and Thisbe
The lovers of Babylon in the workmen's play, taken from Ovid: kept apart by their fathers, they whisper through a chink in a wall, agree to meet at Ninus's tomb, and die by a double mistake when Pyramus finds Thisbe's bloodied cloak. Bottom plays Pyramus and Flute plays Thisbe. Their story is the tragedy the four Athenian lovers narrowly avoided, performed for them as a comedy on their wedding night, and none of them notices.
Frequently asked questions about the characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Who are the main characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream?
The play has ten featured figures across three worlds. In the fairy world, Oberon is the king whose quarrel with his queen has unbalanced the seasons; Titania is the queen who refuses him the changeling boy and is drugged into loving a weaver; and Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is the mischievous spirit who does the king's errands and gets one of them wrong.
Among the Athenians, Hermia is the daughter who defies her father and the law to elope with Lysander; Helena is her oldest friend, in love with Demetrius, the suitor Hermia's father has chosen and who once courted Helena himself. Theseus is the Duke of Athens, about to marry Hippolyta, the Amazon queen he defeated in war.
And in the workmen's world, Bottom the weaver is the star of Pyramus and Thisbe, the man Puck fits with an ass's head, and the only mortal who spends a night in the fairy queen's arms. Around them are Egeus and Philostrate, Quince and his company, Titania's fairies and the people who are only talked about, grouped in the Supporting Cast section above.
Who is Puck, and what does he do in the play?
Puck is a spirit of the countryside who has taken service with the fairy king. Village stories knew him as Robin Goodfellow, the hobgoblin who spoilt the butter and misled travellers at night, and the play keeps those tricks and adds a court to perform them for. He fetches Oberon the magic flower, boasting that he will "I'll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes"; he anoints the wrong Athenian, so that Lysander wakes loving Helena; he fits Bottom with an ass's head; and he leads the two rivals apart in the fog with borrowed voices.
He is not malicious, but he is not kind. When Oberon scolds him for the mistake he apologises, blames the instructions, and admits he is glad it happened because the quarrel is such good sport. His verdict on the whole human plot, watching the lovers from a height, is the play's most quoted line: "Lord, what fools these mortals be".
Puck also has the last word. His epilogue invites the audience to treat everything they have seen as a dream and asks for their hands, and the mischief-maker ends the play as its host.
See Puck for the full analysis.
Why are Oberon and Titania quarrelling?
Over a child. Titania has adopted a mortal boy, the changeling, and Oberon wants him as a henchman; she refuses, and the two have not spoken since early summer. Their first meeting in the play is a marital row that opens "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania" and runs through every old affair each can accuse the other of. Then Titania explains what the fight has done: the winds have raised fogs, the rivers have flooded, the corn has rotted and the seasons have swapped their clothes. "These are the forgeries of jealousy", she calls his accusations, but she takes her share of the blame for the weather.
The two give different reasons for the boy. Oberon wants a page. Titania is keeping a promise to the boy's mother, a mortal friend who died bearing him. Oberon never answers this. He waits until she is asleep on the bank "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows", squeezes the love-juice on her eyes, and lets her fall in love with the first creature she sees, which is Bottom with an ass's head. While she is enchanted she hands over the boy; only then does he release her, with a blessing and a dance.
The reconciliation is real, and so is the fact that Titania is never told what was done to her. The fairy marriage is the play's only existing marriage, and it is mended by the wife giving way.
What happens to Bottom, and what is Bottom's Dream?
Bottom the weaver goes into the wood to rehearse Pyramus and Thisbe with his friends, exits into a thicket for his cue, and comes back with an ass's head that Puck has fixed on him. His friends run; Quince cries "Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated"; and Bottom, who cannot see the head, sings to show he is not afraid. The song wakes Titania, and she swears she loves him. His reply is the sanest line in the wood: "reason and love keep little company together now-a-days".
What follows is a night as the fairy queen's beloved, with four fairies to scratch his head and fetch him honey, and Bottom asking for hay. When the spell is lifted he wakes alone, calls for his cue, and tries to say what happened: "I have had a most rare vision". Three times he begins and three times he stops, because what he was and had cannot be said. He garbles St Paul in the attempt, resolves to have Quince write it up as a ballad called Bottom's Dream, because it has no bottom, and goes home to play Pyramus. William Hazlitt called him "the most romantic of mechanics", and the play agrees: of all the mortals, Bottom is the only one who was actually inside the fairy world, and the only one honest enough to admit it was beyond him.
See Bottom for the full analysis.
Who are the four lovers, and how do they get mixed up?
Hermia loves Lysander; her father has promised her to Demetrius; and Helena, Hermia's oldest friend, loves Demetrius, who once courted her and dropped her. When Theseus gives Hermia four days to marry Demetrius or face death or a convent, she wishes aloud that her father "I would my father looked but with my eyes" and agrees to elope with Lysander through the wood. Helena betrays the plan to Demetrius so that she can follow him following Hermia.
In the wood Oberon sees Demetrius reject Helena and orders Puck to anoint the scornful Athenian. Puck finds the wrong one. Lysander wakes loving Helena and abandons Hermia; Oberon corrects the error by anointing Demetrius himself, so that both men now adore Helena, who assumes they are mocking her, and both despise Hermia, who assumes Helena has stolen her lover. The long quarrel in A3S2 turns on Hermia's height – "And though she be but little, she is fierce", says Helena – and ends with the men going off to fight and the women running from each other.
Puck reverses Lysander's spell before dawn; nobody reverses Demetrius's. In the morning Theseus finds the four asleep in their proper pairs and orders a triple wedding. Lysander's warning in Act 1 that "The course of true love never did run smooth" turns out to be the play's plot, and Helena's that "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind" turns out to be its explanation.
See Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius for the full analysis.
Is Demetrius still under the spell at the end of the play?
Yes. Puck restores Lysander with a second herb so that he wakes loving Hermia again; Demetrius was anointed by Oberon on purpose, to love Helena, and Oberon sees no reason to undo his own work. Demetrius goes to the altar with the love-juice on his eyes, and the play treats his marriage exactly like the others.
He explains it to the duke as a recovered childhood love: "my love to Hermia, Melted as the snow", he says of his love for Hermia, and claims he was betrothed to Helena before he ever saw Hermia. It is a good story and it saves the day, because once Demetrius withdraws his claim the father's case collapses and Theseus overrules Egeus. Helena's own verdict is two lines: she has found Demetrius "And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, Mine own, and not mine own". Catherine Belsey, in 1993, noted that the play "gives no indication of a difference between this marriage and the others", and that silence is either the play's comedy or its quiet joke about all marriages.
What is the relationship between Theseus and Hippolyta?
Theseus is the Duke of Athens and Hippolyta is the queen of the Amazons he defeated in war, and the play opens four days before their wedding. He does not hide how the courtship went: "Hippolyta, I wooed thee with my sword, And won thy love, doing thee injuries". She says nothing in reply; her one speech in the first scene is about the moon. Whether she is a willing bride or a captive is a question the text leaves open, and productions have answered it both ways, especially since Peter Brook's 1970 production doubled her with Titania.
The couple frame the play. Theseus judges Hermia's case in Act 1, upholding a law that gives a father power of life and death over his daughter, and overrules the same father in Act 4 without explanation. On the wedding night he dismisses the lovers' story of the wood as imagination, in the famous speech on "The lunatic, the lover and the poet Are of imagination all compact". Hippolyta answers that four people telling the same story is evidence, not fancy, and that it "something of great constancy". He does not reply. It is the one argument the duke loses in the play, and the Amazon wins it.
Who are the Mechanicals?
The six Athenian workmen who rehearse and perform Pyramus and Thisbe for the duke's wedding: Peter Quince the carpenter, who writes and directs; Bottom the weaver, who plays Pyramus and wants every other part too; Francis Flute the bellows-mender, who plays Thisbe; Tom Snout the tinker, who plays Wall; Snug the joiner, who plays Lion; and Robin Starveling the tailor, who plays Moonshine. Puck, watching them rehearse, calls them "A crew of patches, rude mechanicals", and the name has stuck.
Their comedy is that they do not trust theatre. Afraid of frightening the ladies, they decide that the lion must explain he is only Snug, that Pyramus must say he is really Bottom, and that a man must announce he is a wall. In A5S1 they perform it all before the court, are heckled throughout, and are praised by Theseus at the end as very notably discharged. Each of them is sketched in the Supporting Cast section above; Bottom, the company's star, has a page of his own.
See Bottom for the full analysis.