The wood — Oberon, Titania, and the love-flower

A wood near Athens. Puck, Oberon's mischievous servant, meets a fairy attendant on the path; she serves Titania. Their masters, the king and queen of the fairies, are due to meet here tonight, and Puck warns the fairy to keep her queen out of his master's way. They are quarreling. The cause is a changeling boy — an Indian child Titania has taken into her train and refuses to give up. Oberon wants the boy as one of his henchmen. The argument has gone on long enough that the fairies' attendants now avoid each other in the wood.

Oberon and Titania enter from opposite directions and the quarrel resumes. Titania's central speech is the play's strangest: their fight, she says, has thrown the human seasons themselves into disorder. The winds, "as in revenge," have sucked up fogs from the sea; the rivers have flooded; the corn has rotted in green ear; "the seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose." She refuses again to give up the boy — his mother, a votaress of her order, died in childbirth and Titania is keeping the child in her honor. They part still hostile.

Oberon, alone, decides on revenge. He sends Puck for a flower called "love-in-idleness" whose juice, applied to a sleeper's eyes, makes the sleeper love the first creature seen on waking. He intends it for Titania. While Puck is away, Demetrius and Helena cross the stage — Helena pursuing him, Demetrius cruel, threatening to leave her to wild beasts. Oberon, invisible, listens. He decides to use the juice on Demetrius too, so he will love Helena. When Puck returns with the flower, Oberon takes some for himself and instructs Puck to find a young Athenian man being chased by a young Athenian woman, and apply the juice to the man's eyes. Puck goes.