A Midsummer Night's Dream a guided tour

The play's framing authority. Returning from war with Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, whom he is about to marry. He is patient with Hermia, polite to her father, and entirely willing to enforce a death sentence if the law requires it. The play's moral weight rests partly on the fact that he is a kindly enough man whose office still rests on a coercive law — and on the morning after the wood, he simply overrules it.

Theseus's bride, won "with my sword" in war. She speaks rarely but precisely; her four lines on the lovers' story in Act 5 — "all the story of the night told over... grows to something of great constancy" — are the play's clearest moment of taking the wood seriously as more than a dream. She is also the only aristocrat at the wedding feast who finds Pyramus and Thisbe painful rather than merely funny.

Childhood friends whose friendship nearly snaps under the strain of the night. Hermia loves Lysander; her father has chosen Demetrius for her. Helena loves Demetrius; he has cast her aside for Hermia. Once the love-juice rearranges the men, both Athenians court Helena, and Hermia accuses her oldest friend of conspiring against her. Their quarrel — "we, Hermia, like two artificial gods, have with our needles created both one flower" — is the play's most emotionally serious passage.

The two young men whose affections the love-juice keeps redirecting. They are barely distinguishable, which seems to be the point. Each loves Hermia at the start, both love Helena in the middle, and the play's ending pairs them off again on the basis of which enchantment Oberon has chosen not to remove. The women love them with total conviction; the men redirect their love like weather vanes.

The play's other married couple, quarreling over a changeling Indian boy at the start and reconciled by morning. Oberon directs the action — sends Puck for the love-flower, designs Titania's humiliation, undoes it once she has given up the boy. Titania's opening speech about how their quarrel has thrown the seasons themselves into disorder is one of the play's strangest and most adult passages. The verse given to both is some of Shakespeare's most beautiful.

A sprite who works for the fairy king and treats human confusion as entertainment. He 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. He gives the play its closing lines — the famous epilogue offering the whole performance back to the audience as a dream — and asks, gently, whether any of what they just saw was real.

An Athenian weaver and enthusiastic amateur actor who wants to play every part in his troupe's tragedy. 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 — "I have had a most rare vision" — is one of the quietest, strangest passages in Shakespeare. He is the play's most grounded character, paradoxically most himself when he is least human.