Quince's house — the mechanicals cast their play

A room in Quince's cottage. Six Athenian tradesmen gather to cast a play. They hope to perform it at the duke's wedding feast and earn a reward — "sixpence a day during his life," Bottom hopes. Quince has chosen "the most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe": a tragic story of two lovers separated by a wall who arrange to meet at a tomb outside the city, miscommunicate, and kill themselves in turn. Quince has prepared the parts on scrolls and begins to assign them.

Bottom is the company's would-be star. He wants to play Pyramus. He also volunteers, when Flute is cast as Thisbe, to play Thisbe instead — "I'll speak in a monstrous little voice." When Snug is cast as the lion, Bottom volunteers for that too, promising to roar so well that "the duke shall say, 'Let him roar again.'" Quince patiently keeps redirecting him. The roaring is then itself a problem: the women in the audience may be frightened. Bottom proposes a tactful prologue identifying himself, mid-roar, as Snug the joiner, to reassure them. The troupe agrees this is wise.

Quince distributes the scrolls. They will need beards, costumes, and a place to rehearse where no one will overhear them and steal the play. Quince proposes the wood, a mile outside Athens, by moonlight, the next evening. Everyone agrees. Bottom closes the meeting with the line that has come to stand for the whole troupe's relationship to language: "we will meet, and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously." The third plot has now joined the first two. Tomorrow night the lovers will be in the wood; the mechanicals will be in the wood; and the wood, as the next scene reveals, has plans of its own.