A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Famous Quotes

The play’s fourth speech, and its most unsettling. Theseus, Duke of Athens, is four days from his wedding, and he reminds his bride how the courtship went: he defeated her Amazon army and took her as a prize. He does not hide it or apologise for it. The war is over, and the wedding will be in – his word – another key.

Hippolyta says nothing in reply, and the play never returns to the subject except in the fairies' mouths. Whether she is a willing bride or a captive is a question the text leaves open, and productions have answered it both ways. What the line establishes is the pattern of the whole play: a conquest, followed by a celebration that asks everyone to forget the conquest. Every marriage in the play is made by a man’s force or a fairy’s, and blessed afterwards.

Theseus explaining the law of Athens to Hermia. Her father Egeus has chosen Demetrius for her; she loves Lysander; and the duke’s job is to tell her what a daughter is. The image is precise and appalling: she is wax, her father pressed the shape into it, and he may keep the figure or melt it down.

It is the most complete statement of paternal control in Shakespeare, and it is delivered courteously by a reasonable man as a description of how things are. Hermia’s answer, that she wishes her father could see with her eyes, changes nothing; the duke gives her four days to choose between Demetrius, a convent and death. There was no such law in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare invented it to state the principle underneath all the real ones, and then, in Act 4, had Theseus ignore it without a word.

Hermia’s reply to the duke. He has just described the convent as a life of chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon, and she chooses it, to his face, over the husband her father has picked. "Sovereignty" is a political word and she uses it about her own body: the law may give Demetrius her father’s consent, but her soul will not give him rule.

She has no power in the room and speaks as though she had. A few lines earlier she admitted she did not know by what power she was made bold, and the play’s first unexplained power is not magic; it is a young woman’s will. The rebellion changes nothing in Athens, which is why the lovers run for the wood. But it tells the audience who Hermia is before the fairies get to her.

The most quoted line in the play, and it is spoken to comfort a girl under sentence of death. Lysander goes on to list every way love has been crossed – by blood, by age, by parents, and when none of those, by war, sickness and death – and ends with an image of lightning that lights up heaven and earth for an instant before the jaws of darkness devour it: "So quick bright things come to confusion".

It is beautiful, and it is also a young man enjoying his own misery. Hermia’s answer, that if lovers are always crossed they had better be patient, is the sensible one, and Lysander immediately proposes something impatient: they will run away tomorrow night. The irony arrives an act later, when his own love proves as brief as the lightning and it is a flower, not war or death, that ends it.

Bottom the weaver has been cast as Pyramus, the lover. He has already asked for Thisbe, the lady. Now he wants the lion as well, and his pitch is the encore: he will roar so well that the duke will call for it twice. Quince objects that a real roar would frighten the ladies and get them all hanged, and Bottom offers to roar as gently as any sucking dove.

It is the portrait of a particular kind of amateur, and everyone who has been in a school play knows him. What lifts Bottom above the type is the scale of his appetite: he wants to be a lover, a tyrant, a woman and a beast in the same evening, and he cannot imagine a part he would not play better than the man who has it. Samuel Johnson (1765) saw the eternal actor who "is for engrossing every part"; Hazlitt (1817) saw "the most romantic of mechanics". Both are right. Bottom’s greed for parts is a kind of wonder at what a theatre is.

The first fairy verse in the play, and the audience’s first entry into the wood. Puck has asked a passing fairy where she is going, and she answers in a metre the mortals never use: short lines, heavy stresses, a skipping rhythm that covers hill, dale, bush, brier, park, pale, flood and fire in four lines. She serves the fairy queen and hangs dew on the cowslips.

Coleridge called the play "one continued specimen of the dramatised lyrical", and this is where the lyric starts. The speech also does practical work: it tells the audience, on a bare afternoon stage, that they are now among creatures who move faster than the moon, and it sets up the fairy quarrel, since the fairy’s next lines warn Puck to keep the queen out of the king’s sight. The modern translation keeps the rhyme and the gallop.

Puck’s account of himself, confirming everything the fairy has just said about him: he is Robin Goodfellow, the sprite who frightens village girls, spoils the butter and misleads travellers at night. He adds a few tricks of his own – a horse cheated with a false neigh, an old woman’s ale spilt down her chin, a stool pulled from under her so the whole room laughs.

This is the folklore Puck, the hobgoblin of country stories whom Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) records being paid with a bowl of milk, and Shakespeare keeps his rough edges. What he adds is a court to belong to and a king to please: Puck jests to Oberon and makes him smile. He is a performer before he is a servant, and the mortals in the wood are about to become his audience.

Oberon’s first line, and the beginning of a marital row. The fairy king and queen have not spoken since early summer; each accuses the other of old affairs with mortals; and behind the insults is a practical dispute over a stolen Indian boy whom Titania has adopted and Oberon wants as a page. "Ill met" is a greeting turned inside out.

The line has become a phrase in its own right, and it sets the play’s fairy plot going: within a hundred lines Oberon has sent Puck for the flower that will punish his queen for refusing him. Titania’s answer, "What, jealous Oberon!", names the motive he never admits to. The fairy marriage is the play’s only existing marriage, and it is introduced in a quarrel over authority.

Titania answering Oberon’s accusations, and then, in the longest speech in the play, describing what their quarrel has done to the world. Because the fairies have not danced since early summer, the winds have raised fogs, the rivers have flooded, the corn has rotted, the sheepfolds stand empty and the seasons have exchanged their clothes. She ends by naming the cause: "We are their parents and original".

It is a queen’s speech, and it makes the fairy marriage a public matter: when the king and queen fall out, the harvest fails. The English summers of 1594 to 1596 were disastrously wet, and most editors have heard them in these lines; Samuel Johnson preferred to see an imitation of Ovid’s grieving Ceres. Either way, the scale is the point. The disorder in the wood is not four young people getting lost. It reaches from the palace of Theseus to the weather.

Puck’s answer when Oberon tells him to fetch the love-in-idleness flower before a whale can swim a league. The boast is a measure of scale: the fairies move at a speed no mortal can imagine, and Puck says so in a line and a half. It is also a promise he keeps; the next time we see him he has the flower in his hand.

Directors love the line because it is the first time Puck leaves the stage, and how he goes tells the audience what kind of creature he is. In Peter Brook’s 1970 production he went by trapeze. The magic of the play is enormous in its reach and tiny in its instrument, a hedgerow flower, and this line is the reach.

Oberon’s story of where the magic flower came from. He once watched Cupid take aim at a virgin queen enthroned in the west; the moon’s chaste beams quenched the arrow, and the queen passed on untouched. The arrow fell on a white flower and turned it purple, and its juice now does what the arrow could not.

The "fair vestal throned by the west" is almost certainly Elizabeth I, unmarried by choice and celebrated in verse as Diana, and the compliment is pointed: she alone is beyond the play’s magic. Louis Adrian Montrose, in "Shaping Fantasies" (1983), noticed the shape of the myth: the Queen escapes love, and the instrument of her escape becomes the instrument of everyone else’s subjection. Shakespeare wrote, for a queen who answered to no man, a play in which every other woman ends up answering to one.

Helena to Demetrius, who has just told her in the plainest words that he does not and cannot love her. Spurn me, strike me, neglect me, lose me: she asks for a bad master’s treatment of a dog as a privilege, and when he threatens to leave her to the wild beasts she says the beasts are kinder than he is.

The speech has embarrassed audiences for four centuries, and the text supports the discomfort. This is not the blindness Helena diagnosed in Act 1; she sees Demetrius exactly and loves him anyway. Jan Kott, in 1964, read the speech as close to masochism. What it does for the plot is decisive: Oberon, invisible, hears a woman ask to be treated like a dog and decides she deserves better, and the fairy king’s intervention in the human story begins here.

Helena, abandoned in the wood by Demetrius. The couplet states the rule of courtship and confesses that she is breaking it: she is in the wood, she is doing the wooing, and she knows it is a scandal on her sex. The pun on "wood", which meant mad as well as forest, is one of the play’s best; she is mad with love and lost among the trees in the same word.

The play does not punish her for it. It laughs at her, has two men mock her with worship, and then gives her the husband she chased, by a spell she never learns of. Helena’s rebellion against the rule that women are wooed is the only one in the play that succeeds, and it succeeds by a fairy’s whim.

Oberon describing the place where Titania sleeps. The lines are among the most quoted in Shakespeare, and it is worth remembering what they are for: he is telling Puck where to find his wife so that he can drug her. The beauty of the description and the meanness of the purpose sit side by side without apology.

Notice how the bank is built up flower by flower – thyme, oxlips, violet, woodbine, musk-rose, eglantine – until the whole verse is over-canopied. Hazlitt wrote that reading the play "is like wandering in a grove by moonlight: the descriptions breathe a sweetness like odours thrown from beds of flowers", and this is the passage he meant. The wood is Oberon’s, and he knows every inch of it.

Lysander, thirty lines after Puck has squeezed the flower on his eyes, explaining to Helena why he now loves her and not Hermia. He has grown up, he says: he was unripe when he loved Hermia, and now reason has matured in him and pointed him at the better woman.

The audience has just watched the spell being cast, so every word is a joke, but Lysander is not lying. The flower has changed what he loves and left his intelligence intact, and the intelligence goes straight to work justifying the change. It is the play’s sharpest observation about love: the lover under a spell is the one most sure he is being reasonable. Theseus will say the same of all lovers in Act 5, from a great height, and Lysander has already proved it from inside.

Hermia waking alone in the wood. She has dreamed that a serpent was eating her heart while Lysander sat smiling, and at that moment Lysander, bewitched, is a few yards away telling Helena that he loves her. The dream knows what Hermia does not.

It is the only real dream in the play. Everything else the characters call a dream – Titania’s night with Bottom, the lovers' muddle, Bottom’s vision – actually happened. Peter Holland, in his Oxford edition (1994), built his reading on the distinction: the play "contains only one description of something that may unequivocally be taken to be a dream", and it is this one. The serpent is the old emblem of betrayal, and Oberon has just described Titania’s bank as the place where the snake sheds her enamelled skin. The wood has a serpent in it, and Hermia’s sleeping mind is the only one that sees it.

Quince’s reaction to Bottom returning from the thicket with an ass’s head. The other workmen have fled; Quince comes back for one look, blesses him twice, and runs. "Translated" is exactly the right word. Bottom has been carried across into another shape without being changed inside it, and he cannot see the head at all.

Bottom’s own response is to decide the whole thing is a joke at his expense – "this is to make an ass of me" – and to sing, loudly, so that everyone will hear he is not afraid. The song wakes Titania. The play’s one physical transformation, meant as a humiliation, becomes within twenty lines the greatest thing that has ever happened to him.

Bottom’s reply when Titania, waking to his song, swears that she loves him. A fairy queen has just declared her love to a weaver with a donkey’s head, and the weaver observes, mildly, that she has no reason to, and that reason and love seldom keep company anyway. Then he apologises for the joke.

It is the sanest thing anyone says in the wood, and it is spoken by the least enchantable man in Athens to the most enchanted creature in the play. Titania answers that he is as wise as he is beautiful, and the audience, who can see the ears, laughs. But Bottom is right, and the play knows it: every lover in the wood is proving his point at that moment. He is the only character who is loved without being bewitched himself, and he treats it as a pleasant social occasion.

Puck has just watched Lysander kneel to Helena, who thinks she is being mocked, while Demetrius sleeps nearby with the love-juice on his eyes. He knows what is about to happen, and he invites Oberon to watch it with him. "Fond" meant foolish as well as loving; "pageant" is a show. The lovers are a play, and the fairies are its audience.

The line is often quoted as a piece of wisdom about human nature, and it is, but the speaker is not wise. He is the one who caused the muddle, and he is enjoying it. From the fairies' height the lovers' oaths and tears are ridiculous, and the audience, sitting with Puck, is invited to find them so. But the audience is mortal too, and the laugh is not entirely comfortable. Hazlitt quoted the line to define Puck himself: a mad-cap sprite who laughs at those he misleads.

Helena to Hermia, in the middle of the lovers' quarrel. Both men now adore Helena; she is certain it is a conspiracy; and when Hermia arrives she assumes the ringleader has come to enjoy the show. Her accusation is a memory: two girls on one cushion, sewing one flower, singing one song in one key, so grown together that they were one body with two faces.

It is the play’s finest description of friendship, and it is spoken as the friendship ends. Within twenty lines it is a fight about height, and the two women do not exchange another friendly word in the play. Shirley Nelson Garner, in 1981, read this as the play’s design rather than its accident: the comedy needs each woman paired with a man and cannot afford the double cherry. The most-taught passage in the play at school is an elegy for something the play throws away.

Helena on Hermia, who has just tried to reach her eyes with her fingernails. The men are holding Hermia back; Helena is explaining, to nobody in particular, that her friend was a vixen at school. The line has become Hermia’s epitaph, and it is fair. She has lost her father, her city, her lover and her friend in a single night, and the only thing she can still do is fight.

The joke is about height – Hermia is short and dark, Helena tall and fair, and Shakespeare almost certainly had one short boy actor and one tall one – but the play uses the contrast to make a serious point. Lysander loved the short dark one and then the tall fair one, and the only reasons he can give for the change are the women’s bodies, which have not altered. Hermia’s fury at being called low is the fury of a woman who has understood that she is being rejected for nothing.

Puck’s spell over the sleeping Lysander, which undoes his earlier mistake. The magic is dressed as a nursery rhyme: Jack and Jill, the man and his mare, everyone paired off as the proverb says they should be. It is the play’s comic promise in miniature, that whatever chaos the night produces, the morning will sort the couples into their proper pairs.

It is also the moment the audience sees that the chaos was never out of hand. Puck has counted the sleepers, "Two of both kinds make up four", and laid them out in the pairs the morning will confirm. Whether the proverb is a comfort or a cage is a question the play leaves open. Northrop Frye (1957) called this the comedy’s return from the green world; the proverb is the sound of the return.

Titania with Bottom, on the second morning of the spell. She sits him down, strokes his cheeks, sticks roses in his hair and kisses his ears. On stage the passage is funny because Bottom is asking for oats; on the page it is a love poem, and the fact that the beloved is an ass does not change the quality of the verse.

Hazlitt heard in her speeches to Bottom "a certain cloying sweetness", and the sweetness is the point: she is not pretending. Jan Kott (1964) pushed the scene to its limit and read the ass as an emblem of sexual potency, with the night as the play’s hidden centre; Peter Brook’s 1970 production followed him. Gentler readings treat it as a fairy’s whim. What the text insists on is the body – the ears, the hairy face, the bed – and what it refuses to do is make Titania contemptible.

Titania waking from the spell. She thinks she dreamed, and Oberon lets her: "There lies your love," he says, and she sees Bottom asleep at her feet and is revolted. Her "visions" happened. She was drugged, humiliated and robbed of the changeling boy while enchanted, and the word "dream" is the way her husband arranges for her not to know it.

Peter Holland (1994) pointed out that her love, the image she ascribes to a dream, "lies rather solidly beside her". She asks twice how it came about and is told to wait; the play never shows Oberon telling her. Of all the play’s dreamers, Titania is the only one who was wronged, and the only one never told.

Demetrius explaining himself to the duke in the morning. He does not know what power has changed him, but his love for Hermia has melted like snow and now seems like a childhood trinket, and he goes on to claim that he was betrothed to Helena before he ever saw Hermia. It is a good story and it saves the day: Theseus overrules Egeus on the strength of it.

The audience knows the power. It is Oberon’s flower, and Demetrius is the one lover Puck never releases; the juice is still on his eyes as he speaks, and will be at the altar. Catherine Belsey, in 1993, put the difficulty plainly: the play "gives no indication of a difference between this marriage and the others". Demetrius cannot tell the difference between the feeling a flower gave him and the feeling he had before, and neither, the play suggests, can anyone.

Theseus on the wedding night, explaining to Hippolyta why the lovers' story of the wood is not to be believed. Lovers, madmen and poets all have imaginations that see more than reason can: the madman sees devils, the lover sees Helen’s beauty in a plain face, and the poet gives airy nothing a local habitation and a name. It is a sceptic’s creed, delivered thirty lines before Puck comes on with a broom.

The speech undercuts itself, and the play means it to. Theseus describes the poet’s eye rolling from heaven to earth in verse only a poet could write, and dismisses as fantasy a night the audience has just watched. The lines about the poet have been taken as Shakespeare’s own account of his art ever since, and the irony is that Theseus is a shape given to airy nothing by a poet’s pen. Catherine Belsey (1993) put the audience’s position directly: having seen the fairies, we are in no position to share his entirely rational dismissal. Hippolyta says as much in her reply.

Hippolyta’s answer to the speech on lunatics, lovers and poets. Four people tell the same story, she says, and four minds changed in the same way are evidence, not fancy; the story grows to something of great constancy. Theseus does not reply. He announces the lovers and calls for a play.

It is the play’s last word on its own reality, and it is given to the character who saw least of it. Hippolyta was not in the wood, does not believe in fairies and has no stake in the lovers; she simply listens better than her husband. David P. Young took her phrase as the title of his 1966 study of the play because it states the play’s own claim for itself: strange, and true. It is the one argument the duke loses, and the Amazon wins it.

Theseus defending the workmen’s play to Hippolyta, who has called it the silliest stuff she ever heard. The best actors are only shadows of what they play, and the worst are no worse if the audience’s imagination helps them. "Shadows" is Oberon’s word for his fairies and Puck’s word, in the epilogue, for the whole company.

It is a generous theory of theatre from a man who has just denied that imagination shows anything true, and Hippolyta’s reply is the sharper line: in that case the imagination must be his and not the actors'. He changes the subject. The exchange is the play’s clearest account of how theatre works, and the woman has the better of it.

Quince’s prologue to Pyramus and Thisbe, punctuated by a nervous man who has learned his lines but not his stops. Read with the commas in the right places it is a polite apology: if we offend, it is against our will; we come with good will to show our skill. Read as Quince delivers it, it says the opposite of everything it means.

Theseus’s verdict, "This fellow doth not stand upon points", is a pun on punctuation and manners, and the court’s other jokes – a rough colt, a child on a recorder – are all about control. The prologue is a small essay on how much meaning depends on delivery, in a play about how much love depends on seeing. Quince’s words are right and his pauses are wrong, and the result is nonsense; the lovers' words are right and their eyes are wrong, and the result is the plot. The modern verse gives the speech as Quince meant it, not as he said it.