A Midsummer Night's Dream — chapter by chapter
All 9 scenes, by act and beat — from the duke's palace to Puck's closing epilogue.
The Dream is structured as five acts, nine scenes total. Act 1 (two scenes) sets up the three plots — the lovers, the mechanicals, the fairies as quarrel — in the city. Acts II and III (four scenes between them) belong almost entirely to the wood and to the night, with the love-juice doing its rearranging. Act 4 brings the morning and the disenchantments. Act 5 is the wedding feast and the play-within-a-play. Most of what matters happens in the wood between sundown and sunrise.
Act 1 · Athens
The duke, the lovers, the tradesmen — three plots set in motion.
Scene 1
Theseus's court, four days before his wedding. Egeus accuses his daughter Hermia of refusing the husband he has chosen and demands the full penalty of Athenian law. Theseus confirms it. Hermia and Lysander plan to elope into the wood, where Athenian law cannot reach them. Helena, hopelessly in love with Demetrius and rejected by him, decides to tell him the plan and follow him into the wood — not because it will help her, but to be near him in the chase that follows.
Appears: Theseus · Hippolyta · Egeus · Hermia · Lysander
Scene 2
Six tradesmen meet at Quince's cottage to cast a tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe for the duke's wedding feast. Bottom the weaver wants to play every part — Pyramus, Thisbe, the lion. They worry the lion will frighten the ladies and propose a tactful prologue. The troupe agrees to rehearse the next night in the wood outside Athens, where no one will overhear them and steal the play before they perform it. The third plot of the night is now in motion.
Appears: Quince · Bottom · Flute · Snug · Snout
Acts II–III · The wood at night
Fairies, the love-juice, Bottom translated, the lovers' quarrel.
Scene 3
Puck and a fairy meet on the path; their masters Oberon and Titania are at war over a changeling boy that Titania refuses to give up. The two enter and quarrel — Titania notes the human seasons have been thrown into disorder. Oberon sends Puck for a love-flower whose juice will make Titania fall in love with whatever she next sees on waking. Demetrius and Helena cross the wood. Oberon orders Puck to anoint Demetrius too, so he will love Helena instead.
Appears: Puck · Oberon · Titania · Demetrius · Helena
Scene 4
Oberon squeezes the love-juice on the sleeping Titania's eyes. Puck, looking for "an Athenian," finds the wrong one — Lysander asleep on the ground beside Hermia — and anoints him by mistake. Helena, pursuing Demetrius through the wood, stumbles on Lysander and wakes him; he falls in love with her on sight and runs after her, leaving Hermia abandoned in the dark. Hermia wakes alone from a nightmare in which a serpent has eaten her heart while Lysander watched and smiled.
Appears: Titania · Oberon · Lysander · Hermia · Puck
Scene 5
The mechanicals begin their rehearsal in the wood, very near Titania's sleeping bower. They worry through the staging problems — lion, moonlight, wall — and start the play. Puck, watching, transforms Bottom's head into a donkey's; the others flee in terror. Bottom, certain his friends are joking, paces and sings to keep his courage. The singing wakes Titania, who is instantly in love with him. Her fairies — Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseed — lead the half-donkey weaver away to her bower.
Appears: Quince · Bottom · Flute · Snug · Snout
Scene 6
Oberon discovers Puck's mistake and applies the juice to the right Athenian himself. Now both Lysander and Demetrius are in love with Helena, who is convinced she is being mocked. Hermia arrives and accuses her oldest friend of stealing Lysander; the women's friendship breaks into open quarrel — "we, Hermia, like two artificial gods, have with our needles created both one flower." Oberon orders Puck to part the men in fog and remove the spell from Lysander only, leaving Demetrius's intact.
Appears: Puck · Oberon · Demetrius · Hermia · Helena
Act 4 · Morning
Enchantments lifted; the lovers found; the mechanicals reunited.
Scene 7
Oberon, having obtained the changeling boy, releases Titania from the spell. She wakes disgusted by Bottom's donkey head; they reconcile and dance. Theseus's hunting party finds the four lovers asleep in the wood, paired correctly — Demetrius (still enchanted, though no one knows it) loves Helena, Lysander loves Hermia. Theseus overrules Egeus on the spot and announces the three weddings will take place alongside his own this morning. The lovers follow him out. Bottom wakes alone in the empty wood.
Appears: Titania · Bottom · Oberon · Puck · Theseus
Scene 8
Bottom wakes alone in the wood after his transformation and gives the play's strangest speech: "I have had a most rare vision." He cannot describe it and resolves to have it set to a ballad. At Quince's house, the troupe have given him up for lost — without Pyramus there is no play. He bursts in restored, refuses to explain what happened in the wood, and tells them the play is on at the palace immediately. They must hurry, dress, and be ready.
Appears: Bottom · Quince · Flute · Snout · Starveling
Act 5 · The wedding
Pyramus and Thisbe; Puck's epilogue.
Scene 9
The triple wedding feast at Theseus's palace. Hippolyta and Theseus debate the lovers' story; he dismisses it as fable, she finds it consistent enough to believe. The mechanicals stage Pyramus and Thisbe; the aristocrats laugh, and Theseus defends the players with grace. The fairies arrive to bless the house and the marriages. Puck closes the play alone with the famous epilogue, offering the entire performance back to the audience as a dream they had for two hours, and asking, gently, whether any of what they saw was real.
Appears: Theseus · Hippolyta · Lysander · Hermia · Demetrius
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