A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Plot Summary
Plot Profile – At a Glance
- The Setting: Athens, in a legendary past, and the wood outside the city walls; the action runs from four days before Duke Theseus’s wedding to the midnight after it, with the whole middle of the play taking place in a single night in the wood.
- The Protagonist: No single hero. The plot belongs to four young lovers – Hermia, Lysander, Helena and Demetrius – with Bottom the weaver and the fairy Puck taking every scene they enter.
- The Antagonist: No villain either. The obstacles are Hermia’s father Egeus and the Athenian law behind him, the quarrel between the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania, and a magic flower that Puck applies to the wrong man.
- The Inciting Incident: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, and Theseus gives her four days to obey, become a nun, or die. She and Lysander decide to run away through the wood.
- The Core Conflict: Love against law in Athens; then, in the wood, love against itself, as the flower’s juice makes both men abandon Hermia for Helena and turns the four friends on each other.
- The Climax: Act 3, Scene 2, the long night scene in which the four lovers fight, the two men go off to duel, and Puck fogs the wood, wears them all out and lays them down to sleep in the right pairs.
- The Outcome: Theseus overrules Egeus; three couples marry and watch the workmen’s tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe; the fairies bless the house; and Puck, alone, asks the audience to think of it all as a dream.
- Genre: Comedy – printed among the comedies in the First Folio of 1623, and first published on its own in 1600. Usually dated 1595 or 1596.
Four days before Duke Theseus marries Hippolyta, the Amazon queen he has conquered, a father asks him to enforce the law of Athens against a daughter who refuses to marry the man he has chosen. Hermia loves Lysander, so the two of them run away through the wood at night, followed by Demetrius, the man she was meant to marry, and by Helena, who loves Demetrius and betrays the plan to him. In the same wood a group of workmen are rehearsing a play for the duke’s wedding, and the king and queen of the fairies are in the middle of a quarrel. The fairy king sends his servant Puck for a flower whose juice makes the sleeper love the first creature it sees on waking. Puck drops it on the wrong Athenian, gives the leading workman the head of an ass, and the fairy queen falls in love with him. One night of confusion later, the lovers wake in the right pairs, the duke overrules the father, the workmen perform their play at the triple wedding, and the fairies bless the beds.
Act 1: The Law and the Lovers
Theseus, Duke of Athens, is counting the four days to his wedding with Hippolyta, the queen of the Amazons, whom he tells he "wooed thee with my sword". Egeus interrupts with a complaint: his daughter Hermia refuses to marry Demetrius, the man he has chosen, because she loves Lysander. Theseus reminds Hermia that "To you your father should be as a god" and lays out the law: obey, or "Either to die the death or to abjure" the society of men for ever as a nun. She has until his wedding day to decide. Left alone, Lysander tells Hermia that "The course of true love never did run smooth" and proposes an escape: tomorrow night they will meet in the wood outside the city and go on to his aunt’s house, beyond the reach of Athenian law. They tell the plan to Helena, Hermia’s oldest friend, who is in love with Demetrius and cannot understand why he has switched to Hermia. Alone, Helena works out that "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind" and decides to tell Demetrius about the elopement, so that she can at least follow him into the wood. In a carpenter’s house across town, Peter Quince is casting a play for the duke’s wedding, "The most lamentable comedy" of Pyramus and Thisbe, and Bottom the weaver, cast as the lover, asks to play the lady and the lion as well; he will roar, he promises, "as gently as any sucking dove". They agree to rehearse in the wood by moonlight.
Act 2: The Flower
The wood at night. Puck, the fairy king’s servant and the spirit village people call Robin Goodfellow, meets one of the fairy queen’s attendants and warns her to keep the two courts apart: Oberon and Titania have quarrelled over an Indian boy she has adopted and he wants as his page. The king and queen meet anyway – "Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania" – and she describes what their quarrel has done: floods, rotten harvests, and seasons out of order, "forgeries of jealousy" he calls them. She refuses to give up the boy and leaves. Oberon sends Puck to fetch a flower once struck by Cupid’s arrow, which maidens call "love-in-idleness": its juice on sleeping eyelids makes the sleeper dote on the first living thing it sees. He means to use it on Titania and make her give up the child. While he waits, Demetrius comes through the wood hunting for the lovers with Helena at his heels, and Oberon, invisible, hears him spurn her and hears her answer that she is his spaniel: "I am your spaniel". He orders Puck to anoint the Athenian man’s eyes too, so that he will love the woman who follows him; Puck will know him "By the Athenian garments he hath on". Oberon squeezes the juice on Titania as she sleeps on her bank of wild thyme. Puck, finding Lysander and Hermia asleep apart, takes him for the Athenian and anoints him. Helena, abandoned by Demetrius, wakes Lysander, who looks at her and declares that reason has led him to the worthier maid. He runs after her, and Hermia wakes alone from a dream in which "a serpent eat my heart away", calling for a lover who has gone.
Act 3: Translated
The workmen rehearse by Titania’s bower, solving the problems of a lion that might frighten the ladies, a wall the lovers must talk through, and moonlight for a scene that needs it. Puck, watching, follows Bottom into the bushes and sends him back with the head of an ass. His friends flee – "Bless thee, Bottom! Bless thee! Thou art translated" – and Bottom, thinking it a joke, sings to show he is not afraid. The song wakes Titania, who sees him, loves him, and sets four fairies to wait on him. Bottom observes that "reason and love keep little company together" these days, and accepts the honour. Puck reports to Oberon, who is delighted about the queen and furious to learn, when Demetrius and Hermia come by quarrelling, that the wrong Athenian was anointed. He sends Puck for Helena and puts the juice on Demetrius himself. Puck brings Helena with Lysander still wooing her, Demetrius wakes and worships her too, and Puck settles down to watch: "Lord, what fools these mortals be" Helena is sure the men have joined forces to mock her, and when Hermia arrives she is sure her friend is in on it. Hermia, hearing Lysander swear that he hates her, turns on Helena – "You juggler! You canker-blossom!" – and the two men, each defending Helena, go off to fight a duel. Oberon orders Puck to put it right: he is to mimic each man’s voice in the fog until they are lost and exhausted, then squeeze a second herb into Lysander’s eyes to undo the spell. Puck herds all four into the same clearing, where they drop asleep one by one, and he applies the antidote with a rhyme: "Jack shall have Jill".
Act 4: Waking
Titania garlands Bottom with flowers, kisses his long ears, and falls asleep with him in her arms while Oberon looks on. Having got the Indian boy from her while she was enchanted, Oberon now pities her, releases her with the antidote, and tells Puck to take off the ass’s head. Titania wakes – "Methought I was enamoured of an ass" – and the fairy king and queen dance together for the first time in the play, then leave to bless the duke’s wedding. Dawn. Theseus, Hippolyta and Egeus, out hunting at dawn, find the four lovers asleep together and wake them with horns; the duke supposes they rose early "to observe / The rite of May". Lysander confesses the elopement; Egeus demands the law; and Demetrius announces that his love for Hermia has "Melted as the snow" and that Helena is the woman he wants. Theseus overrules the father – "Egeus, I will overbear your will" – and orders that the two couples marry alongside him that day. The lovers, half-awake, cannot tell whether they dreamed the night. Then Bottom wakes, alone, with his own head, and tries to say what happened to him: "I have had a most rare vision". He will have Quince write a ballad of it, called Bottom’s Dream, "because it hath no bottom". Back in Athens his friends are mourning the loss of their leading man and their chance at the duke’s bounty when he bursts in with the news that "our play is preferred".
Act 5: Pyramus and Thisbe
Theseus does not believe the lovers' story; "The lunatic, the lover and the poet" all see what is not there. Hippolyta answers that four people telling the same tale add up to "something of great constancy". To fill the hours between supper and bed, the duke chooses the workmen’s play over the court’s objections, because he prefers honest effort to polished flattery. What follows is the funniest bad play in Shakespeare. Quince’s prologue, wrongly punctuated, apologises for everything; Snout plays the Wall and holds up his fingers for the chink; Snug the Lion explains that he is only a joiner; Starveling is Moonshine with a lantern and a dog; and Bottom, as Pyramus, finds Thisbe’s bloodied mantle and stabs himself at length – "Now die, die, die, die, die" – before getting up to answer the duke’s questions. Theseus, defending the actors, tells Hippolyta that "The best in this kind are but shadows". At midnight the three couples go to bed, and the fairies take over the house. Oberon and Titania lead their trains through the rooms, blessing the marriage beds and promising the children born of them will be free of blemish. Last of all Puck, alone with a broom, turns to the audience: "If we shadows have offended", think of it as a dream, and give the actors your hands.
Key Takeaways
- Three worlds, one wood: The court of Athens, the workmen and the fairies each have their own plot, and the wood at night is where all three collide.
- One flower does all the damage: Every confusion in the play – the two men switching to Helena, the fairy queen loving an ass – comes from love-in-idleness, and a second herb undoes it.
- Puck’s mistake is the plot: Oberon meant to fix one couple; Puck anointed the wrong man, and the play’s long central night is the consequence.
- Nobody chooses the ending: Theseus overrules the law, Demetrius stays enchanted, and the lovers agree they must have dreamed it – the resolution is handed to the mortals, not made by them.
- The play ends with a play: Pyramus and Thisbe is the lovers' story told as tragedy and played as farce, and the fairies' blessing and Puck’s epilogue turn the whole evening into a dream.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream Plot Summary – Frequently Asked Questions
How does A Midsummer Night’s Dream end?
With three weddings, a play and a blessing. In Act 4, Scene 1, Theseus finds the four lovers asleep in the wood, hears Demetrius say that he now loves Helena, and overrules Egeus: the two couples will marry alongside him and Hippolyta that day. Act 5 is the wedding night. The court watches the workmen perform the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe, laughing throughout, and at midnight the couples go to bed.
Then the fairies come in. Oberon and Titania, reconciled, lead their followers through the palace, blessing the three marriage beds and promising that the children conceived in them will be born without blemish. Last of all, Puck steps forward alone and tells the audience that if the play has offended them they should think they slept and dreamed it. He asks for their hands, meaning their applause, and promises to make amends. Nobody dies; the only deaths are Pyramus and Thisbe’s, acted by a weaver and a bellows-mender.
What is the love-in-idleness flower, and how does it work?
A small white flower that turned purple when Cupid’s arrow, aimed at a virgin queen and turned aside by the moon, fell on it instead. Oberon tells Puck the story in Act 2, Scene 1, and sends him to fetch it. Its juice, squeezed onto the eyelids of a sleeper, makes the sleeper fall madly in love with the first living creature it sees on waking, whatever that creature is.
Oberon uses it on Titania, who wakes to Bottom with an ass’s head. Puck uses it on Lysander by mistake, so that he wakes to Helena and abandons Hermia; Oberon then uses it on Demetrius, so that both men love Helena and neither loves Hermia. A second herb, which Oberon calls Dian’s bud, undoes the spell. Oberon releases Titania with it and Puck releases Lysander, but nobody releases Demetrius, who marries Helena with the juice still on his eyes.
Why does Bottom get an ass’s head?
Because Puck finds the workmen rehearsing next to the sleeping Titania and cannot resist. In Act 3, Scene 1, Bottom steps into the bushes to wait for his cue as Pyramus, and Puck follows him and sends him back with the head of a donkey. Bottom cannot see it, his friends run away in terror, and he decides they are playing a trick to frighten him. He sings to prove he is not afraid, and the singing wakes Titania, whose eyes Oberon has already anointed with the flower.
The ass’s head is the play’s only physical transformation, and Bottom is the only mortal who spends the night inside the fairy world rather than merely wandering through it. He takes a fairy queen’s adoration as a pleasant social occasion, orders the fairies about, asks for hay, and falls asleep in her arms. When Oberon has what he wants he has Puck remove the head, and Bottom wakes in Act 4, Scene 1 to give his account of the night, which he calls Bottom’s Dream.
What is Pyramus and Thisbe, and why is it in the play?
Pyramus and Thisbe is an ancient love story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the same source Shakespeare drew on for Romeo and Juliet. Two young lovers in Babylon, forbidden to meet by their parents, whisper through a crack in the wall between their houses and agree to meet at night by a tomb. Thisbe arrives first, is frightened off by a lion and drops her cloak; Pyramus finds the bloodied cloak, thinks her dead, and kills himself; Thisbe returns and kills herself over his body.
In the play it is performed by the Athenian workmen as the entertainment at the duke’s wedding, with Bottom as Pyramus, Flute as Thisbe, Snout as the Wall, Snug as the Lion and Starveling as Moonshine. The performance is a disaster and the court heckles it throughout. It sits at the end of the play because it is the lovers' own story with a different ending: two young people escape their parents into the dark and, without a fairy to sort things out, die. The lovers laugh at it without seeing the resemblance.
Why is it called A Midsummer Night’s Dream when it is set in May?
It is a fair question, and one that editors have asked since the eighteenth century. Theseus, finding the lovers in Act 4, Scene 1, says they must have risen early to observe the rite of May, and Lysander in Act 1 speaks of going into the wood to do observance to a morn of May. The wedding is timed to the new moon. Nothing in the text says it is midsummer.
The best explanation is that the title names a mood rather than a date. Midsummer Eve was the night when English folk belief said the fairies were abroad and young people went mad with love, and May Day was the festival of going out into the woods before dawn. Shakespeare seems to have combined the two, and the title tells the audience what kind of night to expect. Titania mentions the middle summer’s spring, which may have suggested the title, and Theseus’s May Day hunt gives the lovers their waking.
How many acts and scenes does A Midsummer Night’s Dream have?
Five acts and nine scenes: two in Act 1, two in Act 2, two in Act 3, two in Act 4 and one in Act 5. It is one of Shakespeare’s shorter plays, and its scenes are very uneven. Act 3, Scene 2, the night of the lovers' quarrel, is nearly five hundred lines long and does the work of a whole act; Act 4, Scene 2, in which the workmen mourn Bottom and he returns, is over in forty.
The structure is symmetrical. Athens frames the play at either end, Act 1 and Act 5, and the three middle acts take place in the wood on a single night. Act 5 has no scene break and contains the whole of Pyramus and Thisbe, the fairies' blessing and Puck’s epilogue. The Shakespeare Retold translation follows the play scene by scene, and the links below open each act at its first scene.
Who ends up with whom, and why does Demetrius stay under the spell?
Three couples marry: Theseus and Hippolyta, Hermia and Lysander, and Helena and Demetrius. Hermia and Lysander are the couple who ran away in Act 1, restored to each other when Puck applies the antidote in Act 3, Scene 2. Helena and Demetrius are the pair the play began with as a problem, since Helena loved a man who had jilted her for Hermia.
Demetrius is the one lover nobody releases. Oberon anoints him in Act 3, Scene 2 so that he will love Helena, and the antidote goes only to Lysander, whose spell was a mistake. Demetrius wakes in Act 4 saying that he does not know by what power his love for Hermia has melted, and that Helena is the woman he was betrothed to before he ever saw Hermia. It is a convenient story, it satisfies the duke, and it is the only way the play can end with two pairs rather than one; but the audience knows that one of the three marriages has a fairy flower at the bottom of it.