A Midsummer Night's Dream — who's who

The framing authority. Returning from his war with the Amazons to marry Hippolyta, queen of the people he has just defeated. Hears Egeus's complaint against Hermia in the opening scene and confirms the law: marry the man your father chose, or die, or take a vow of celibacy. He is patient and courteous about it; the kindness does not change the law's content. On the morning after the wood, he finds the lovers paired correctly in the clearing and overrules Egeus on the spot. Hosts the wedding feast in Act 5 and defends the mechanicals' play with a generosity his guests do not match.

Theseus's bride, won "with my sword" in war and brought back to Athens to be married. Speaks rarely but with weight. Her four-line answer to Theseus's dismissal of the lovers' story — "all the story of the night told over, and all their minds transfigured so together... grows to something of great constancy" — is the play's clearest defense of the wood as something more than a dream. She is also the only aristocrat at the wedding play who finds the mechanicals' performance painful rather than merely funny: "this is the silliest stuff that ever I heard."

The play's spokesman for the Athenian law that gives a father the power to dispose of his daughter. Brings Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius before Theseus in Scene 1 and demands the death sentence if she refuses Demetrius — "as she is mine, I may dispose of her." Reappears in Scene 7 in the wood to demand the same sentence be carried out on the lovers found asleep there, and is overruled by Theseus on the spot, with the duke announcing the three weddings in his place. Disappears from the play after that; not present at Act 5's wedding feast.

Faces death or the convent if she refuses to marry Demetrius. Runs into the wood with Lysander at midnight to escape the Athenian law and reach his aunt's house, beyond the duke's jurisdiction. Wakes in the wood to find Lysander courting Helena instead and accuses her oldest friend of stealing him. The shortest of the four lovers, she nearly comes to blows with Helena in the four-way quarrel — Helena hides behind Lysander. Reunited with Lysander by morning, when the spell is lifted from him alone.

Loves Demetrius, who has cast her off for Hermia. Tells Demetrius about Hermia and Lysander's flight in hope of regaining his favor; he is rewarded with insults, and she follows him into the wood anyway. Her opening speech on Cupid being painted blind ("love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind") is one of the play's clearest statements on love. Wakes the next morning paired with Demetrius — still under the love-juice, though no one in Athens knows it. Her quarrel with Hermia in the wood is the play's most emotionally serious scene.

Hermia's lover. Plans the elopement, runs into the wood with her, falls asleep some yards apart at her insistence, has the love-juice applied by Puck's mistake, wakes in love with Helena, abandons Hermia in the dark. Restored by Oberon's reversal of the spell when Puck leads him in fog through the wood until he collapses exhausted. Speaks the play's most-quoted line on love — "the course of true love never did run smooth" — before he himself becomes its clearest demonstration. Wakes paired with Hermia.

Egeus's choice for Hermia, having abandoned Helena to pursue her. Follows Hermia and Lysander into the wood, with Helena pursuing him; cruel to Helena there, threatens to leave her to wild beasts. Has the love-juice applied by Oberon directly to fix Puck's mistake. Wakes in love with Helena. Critically, Oberon never lifts the enchantment; the renewed love for Helena that the Athenian court celebrates as restored to its proper object is the same magic that made Titania love a donkey. The play does not flag this as a problem.

Starts the entire plot by quarreling with Titania over a changeling boy and deciding to humiliate her in revenge. Not presented as wicked, only capricious — capricious in the way the powerful tend to be when their dignity is bruised. Directs Puck, designs Titania's enchantment with the love-juice, and reverses it once he has the boy. The play's most beautiful verse — "I know a bank where the wild thyme blows" — belongs to him. Blesses the marriages in the closing scene.

Bewitched by her husband's spite into loving Bottom the weaver while he wears the head of a donkey. Her scenes with Bottom are at once farcical and unexpectedly tender; she garlands his ears with roses and asks her fairies to feed him apricots and dewberries and to fan moonbeams from his sleeping eyes. She is not diminished by the enchantment. Her opening speech about how the quarrel with Oberon has thrown the human seasons themselves into disorder — fogs in the rivers, blighted corn, "hoary-headed frosts" falling on roses — is one of the play's strangest and most adult passages.

A sprite who works for the fairy king and treats human confusion as entertainment. Fetches the love-flower, applies its juice to the wrong Athenian, watches the resulting chaos with delight, and sets it right only after Oberon insists. Calls the mechanicals "the shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort" and gives Bottom a donkey's head for his trouble. Speaks the play's closing epilogue, alone on the empty stage, offering the whole performance back to the audience as a dream they had for two hours — and asking, gently, whether any of what they just saw was real.

An Athenian weaver and enthusiastic amateur actor who wants to play every part in the troupe's tragedy — Pyramus, Thisbe in falsetto, the lion with terrible roaring. Puck transforms his head into a donkey's. Titania falls in love with him. He accepts both with imperturbable courtesy, asking the fairy attendants for hay and a barber. His waking speech alone in the wood — "I have had a most rare vision, past the wit of man to say what dream it was" — garbling St. Paul on what eye has not seen, is one of the quietest, strangest passages in all of Shakespeare. The play's most grounded character, paradoxically most himself when he is least human.

The troupe's harassed director and prologue-reader. Casts the play in Scene 2 and tries to manage Bottom, who wants to play every part — patiently keeps redirecting him while the others wait. Distributes scrolls of lines, schedules the rehearsal in the wood, and delivers the famously mangled prologue at the wedding ("if we offend, it is with our good will") with absolute commitment. Mispunctuates it so badly the audience hears nonsense, but his sincerity is never in question. The chosen play is also his — "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe," picked, the troupe agrees, with great care.

Cast against his will as Thisbe — he protests he has a beard coming in. Plays the part anyway, in a falsetto, and delivers Thisbe's death speech at the wedding with surprising tenderness. One of the play's quiet jokes is that Flute is better at the role than the wedding audience is prepared for; his final lines, finding Pyramus dead and stabbing himself in turn, are played for laughs but land with a glimmer of real feeling. He is also the troupe's chief mourner when Bottom is missing in Scene 8: "he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens."

Cast as the Lion and given his lines late ("you may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring"). Worried, with the rest of the troupe, that the lion will frighten the ladies in the audience, and so the company invents a tactful prologue: Snug must identify himself as Snug the joiner before any roaring begins, so the audience knows there is no actual lion in the wedding hall. He does this with characteristic gravity. The joke that he is the only mechanical without a speaking part to butcher gives him, by accident, a quiet dignity the others lack.

Cast as the Wall that separates Pyramus and Thisbe — a problem the troupe solves by having Snout stand on stage holding up his fingers spread to make a chink the lovers can whisper through. The play's most literal-minded staging joke; the wedding audience finds it hilarious, and Theseus uses the moment for one of his quiet defenses of imagination ("the wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again"). Snout commits to the role completely. He is also briefly cast as Pyramus's father in early planning before the part is dropped to keep the cast at five plus the wall.

Cast as Moonshine, which the troupe stages by having Starveling enter with a lantern, a bundle of thorn, and a dog — the conceit being that the man in the moon is the figure of an exiled wanderer carrying his thorn-bush. Heckled mercilessly by the wedding audience and finally gives up on his lines: "All that I have to say is to tell you that the lantern is the moon, I the man in the moon, this thorn-bush my thorn-bush, and this dog my dog." Shakespeare lets him finish his work with that quiet declaration, and the audience moves on. He plays Thisbe's mother in early planning before the part is cut.