89 Fun Facts About A Midsummer Night's Dream

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, where on a sleeper's body must Oberon's love potion be applied?

The eyelids. Oberon squeezes the juice on Titania's as she sleeps and wishes her a rude awakening: 'Wake when some vile thing is near.'

Hippolyta, whom Theseus is about to marry, is queen of which people?

The Amazons. Theseus admits he won his warrior-queen bride in battle, 'I woo'd thee with my sword', and promises to wed her 'in another key', with pomp and revelling.

What does the Athenian law invoked by Egeus threaten if Hermia refuses to marry the man he has chosen?

Death, under what Egeus calls 'the ancient privilege of Athens'. Theseus softens the choice by adding a third option: Hermia may instead live out her days as a nun of Diana.

Where do Hermia and Lysander plan to flee to escape Athenian law?

His aunt's house, seven leagues from Athens, where the city's law cannot follow. Lysander's widowed aunt is rich and childless and treats him as her only son, so the lovers plan to marry there.

What does Theseus's Master of the Revels say happened when he watched the mechanicals rehearse?

He wept with laughter. The official, called Philostrate in the play's first edition, begs Theseus not to pick the play, calling it 'nothing, nothing in the world', but is overruled: nothing offered in 'simpleness and duty' can be amiss.

Over what are Oberon and Titania quarrelling?

An Indian changeling boy. Titania is raising him for the sake of his mother, a devoted follower who died giving birth to him, while Oberon wants the child for his own train; their feud has upset the seasons.

Oberon sends Puck to fetch which flower, whose juice makes a sleeper dote on the first creature seen on waking?

Love-in-idleness, the wild pansy. Oberon says it was milk-white until Cupid's arrow, aimed at a 'fair vestal', missed its mark and stained the flower 'purple with love's wound'.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, a fairy who recognises Puck by his pranks calls him what?

A shrewd and knavish sprite, known as Robin Goodfellow. The fairy lists his tricks, from frightening village girls to stopping butter from churning, and he cheerfully owns up to them all.

When Puck anoints the wrong sleeping Athenian, who wakes him and instantly becomes the object of his love?

Helena. Told only to look for a man in Athenian clothes, Puck charms Lysander by mistake; Helena takes his sudden vows for mockery and flees, with him in pursuit.

What does Hermia dream just before she wakes to find Lysander gone?

A snake ate her heart while Lysander sat smiling, she says. The nightmare is half true: under the spell of the love juice, he has just abandoned her as she slept to chase another woman.

What is Nick Bottom's trade?

Weaver. Bottom is the keenest actor among the six workmen: handed the lead in their play, he begs Quince to let him take two more parts on top of it.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, which mechanical is a bellows-mender cast as Thisbe?

Francis Flute, who protests, 'let not me play a woman; I have a beard coming'. Quince is unmoved: Flute can wear a mask, he says, and speak as small as he likes.

Which role does Snug the joiner take, because he is 'slow of study'?

The Lion. Quince promises the part needs no learning, 'for it is nothing but roaring', and on the night Snug stops to assure the ladies he is only Snug the joiner, so that nobody takes fright.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, where does Quince tell his actors to meet to rehearse?

At the Duke's oak, in the palace wood a mile outside town. Quince wants privacy: in the city, he says, they would be 'dogged with company' and their plans found out.

What does Puck do to Bottom during the rehearsal in the woods?

Gives him a donkey's head. Bottom's friends flee, Quince crying 'Thou art translated!', while Bottom, unaware of any change, decides they are only trying to make an ass of him.

What wakes the sleeping Titania so that Bottom is the first creature she sees?

His singing. Deserted by his friends, Bottom sings to show he is not afraid, and Titania wakes asking, 'What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?'

How does Puck stop the two Athenian men from fighting over the same woman?

He mimics their voices, taunting each rival in the other's voice and leading them astray in the dark until both drop asleep exhausted; then he gives Lysander the antidote.

What are Theseus and Hippolyta doing when they discover the sleeping lovers?

Hunting at dawn. Theseus has the horns sounded to wake the four sleepers, then overrules Egeus and invites both couples to be married alongside him and Hippolyta.

Which fairy attends Titania alongside Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Moth?

Mustardseed. Bottom jokes with the fairies about their names, telling Mustardseed that his kindred, so often eaten with beef, have made his eyes water before now.

In his full title for the mechanicals' play, how does Peter Quince describe the story of Pyramus and Thisbe?

The most lamentable comedy 'and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe', Quince calls it. The contradiction sails past Bottom, who pronounces it 'a very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry'.

Who has the last word in A Midsummer Night's Dream, suggesting the audience may only have dreamed it all?

Puck. 'If we shadows have offended', he tells the audience, they need only think they slumbered while these visions appeared, and he asks for their applause: 'Give me your hands, if we be friends.'

Some scholars believe A Midsummer Night's Dream was written to be performed at what kind of occasion?

An aristocratic wedding is the long-standing guess, with the marriage of Elizabeth Carey and Thomas Berkeley a favourite candidate, but no evidence that the play was first staged at one has ever been found.

Oberon, Titania and Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream all give their names to moons of which planet?

Uranus. When its first two known moons were named in 1852, Greek myth was passed over for Shakespeare's fairy king and queen, and almost every Uranian moon found since has taken a literary name.

Which of Chaucer's works, along with Ovid's Metamorphoses, is a recognised source for A Midsummer Night's Dream?

The Knight's Tale. Chaucer's story also has Duke Theseus bringing home his bride Hippolyta, and it sends two young men into a wood to fight over the same woman.

Which diarist called A Midsummer Night's Dream 'the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life'?

Samuel Pepys, after seeing it in 1662. He swore never to sit through it again, though he confessed to enjoying 'some good dancing and some handsome women, which was all my pleasure'.

In the 1640s and 1650s, Bottom's scenes were performed alone as a comic 'droll' because of what?

A theatre ban, in force while the Puritans kept London's playhouses shut from 1642 to 1660. Drolls dodged it: short comic scenes cut from longer plays were put on at fairs and inns, beside acrobats and jugglers.

Which composer's 1692 semi-opera The Fairy-Queen was based on A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Henry Purcell. Oddly, he set none of Shakespeare's words: every text he put to music is an addition, sung in masques added to an anonymous reworking of the play.

Madame Vestris's 1840 revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream began a seventy-year tradition of women playing which two roles?

Oberon and Puck. Vestris cast herself as the fairy king at Covent Garden, and women went on playing both parts until Harley Granville-Barker handed them back to men in 1914.

Harley Granville-Barker's pared-back 1914 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream replaced Mendelssohn's score with what?

English folk tunes. Granville-Barker also swapped the elaborate sets of earlier stagings for simple curtains and had his fairies painted gold, like Cambodian idols.

Peter Brook's landmark 1970 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream used what kind of set?

A blank white box, brilliantly lit, in place of the usual pretty forest. Inside it Brook's actors wore bright silks and did circus turns, spinning plates and swinging on trapezes.

Which part of his music for A Midsummer Night's Dream did Mendelssohn write at 17?

The Overture, written in 1826 for the concert hall, not for any staging. When a production called for more music in the 1840s, Mendelssohn kept the teenage piece and added the rest around it, the Wedding March included.

Mendelssohn's Wedding March for A Midsummer Night's Dream became a bridal fashion after whose wedding in 1858?

Victoria, Princess Royal, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, chose it for her marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia, a decade after its composer died, and brides have followed her ever since.

Which word completes Puck's verdict on the lovers in A Midsummer Night's Dream: 'Lord, what fools these … be'?

Mortals. Puck says it as he invites Oberon to watch the lovers quarrel, though the muddle is his own doing: he put the love juice on the wrong man.

Which composer supplied new music for A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1939, after the Nazis banned Mendelssohn's?

Carl Orff. Mendelssohn's score was banned because he was born to Jewish parents, though he had been baptised a Lutheran as a child; Orff's replacement, commissioned by the city of Frankfurt, was first heard there in 1939.

Britten's 1960 opera of A Midsummer Night's Dream gives Oberon to which voice type?

Countertenor. Britten wrote the fairy king's part for Alfred Deller, who had led the modern return of that high male voice, and made Puck a speaking role with no singing at all.

Who made A Midsummer Night's Dream for New York City Ballet, his first wholly original full-length ballet in America?

George Balanchine. Short of an evening's worth of Mendelssohn, he stitched in five of the composer's other works, and the ballet went on to open the company's first Lincoln Center season in 1964.

Which actor played Bottom in Warner Bros.' 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream, his only Shakespearean role?

James Cagney, typecast as a screen tough guy since playing the gangster Tom Powers in The Public Enemy four years earlier; Warner Bros. cast the film largely from its own contract players.

How did Hal Mohr win the cinematography Oscar for the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

By write-in votes: Mohr was not even nominated, but enough Academy members added his name to their ballots for him to win. He remains the only write-in Oscar winner, because the Academy ended the practice straight afterwards.

Where did Michael Hoffman's 1999 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream move the action?

19th-century Tuscany, with Shakespeare's language kept. The update put the lovers on bicycles and brought Italian opera onto the soundtrack.

Which actor played Puck in the 1999 film A Midsummer Night's Dream, alongside Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer?

Stanley Tucci, a Puck in his late thirties where Hollywood's 1935 film had cast a teenage Mickey Rooney. Rupert Everett played his master Oberon, with Christian Bale and Dominic West as the rival lovers.

Judi Dench played Titania and Ian Holm Puck in whose 1960s film of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Peter Hall, founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company, who built the film on his own stage production and cast company actors, with a young Helen Mirren and Diana Rigg among the lovers.

Neil Gaiman's Sandman issue based on A Midsummer Night's Dream won which award for short fiction in 1991?

The World Fantasy Award, a first for a comic in a fiction category. In Gaiman's story Shakespeare's company gives the play its first performance on an English hillside, before an audience of real fairies who see themselves on stage.

The mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe shares its plot with which tragedy that Shakespeare wrote in the same years?

Romeo and Juliet. Shakespeare told one story twice, parted lovers and a suicide over a loved one wrongly thought dead, once as tragedy and once, in the workmen's hands, as farce.

Bottom's waking line 'The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen' garbles which book?

The Bible. Bottom scrambles St Paul's words to the Corinthians about what no eye has seen and no ear heard, swapping the senses around as he struggles to describe his night.

Which word ends Lysander's famous line to Hermia, 'The course of true love never did run …'?

Smooth. Lysander is consoling Hermia, and he goes on to list what has always crossed lovers: differences of rank and age, the meddling of relatives, war and sickness.

After waking, Bottom vows to have Peter Quince write a ballad of his night, to be called what?

Bottom's Dream, 'because it hath no bottom', he says, pleased with the pun. He plans to sing it before the Duke at the end of the workmen's play.

Which director staged A Midsummer Night's Dream many times before filming it in Hollywood in 1935?

Max Reinhardt. His open-air staging at the Hollywood Bowl in 1934 led Warner Bros. to sign him for the film, which he ended up co-directing with William Dieterle.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, a workman plays the wall: what does he hold up as the chink the lovers whisper through?

His fingers. Bottom proposes daubing a man with loam and rough-cast to 'present Wall' and having him part his fingers for a cranny; on the night, Wall ends his speech, declares his part discharged and walks off.

The 1600 first edition of A Midsummer Night's Dream says it was 'sundry times publicly acted' by which company, Shakespeare's own?

The Chamberlain's Men, in full the Lord Chamberlain's Men, the troupe for which Shakespeare wrote most of his plays. In 1603 the new king, James I, took the company under his own patronage, and it became the King's Men.

Which band performed the mechanicals' play from A Midsummer Night's Dream on a 1964 British television special?

The Beatles hammed up the scene for the special Around the Beatles, with Paul McCartney and John Lennon as the doomed lovers.

In which 1989 Robin Williams film does a student defy his father to act in A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Dead Poets Society has Neil Perry win the part of Puck in a local production, against a father who is set on medical school for him.

By what other name is Puck, Oberon's mischievous servant in A Midsummer Night's Dream, also known?

Robin Goodfellow is what the earliest printed text calls the character at his first entrance, switching to Puck later in the same scene.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, whose stray arrow does Oberon say struck a little white flower and turned it purple?

Cupid was aiming at a maiden throned in the west, Oberon recalls, but the shaft missed and fell on a little flower instead.

Theseus, the duke in A Midsummer Night's Dream, is the hero of Greek myth famous for slaying which monster?

The Minotaur was the bull-headed beast of the Cretan labyrinth, and some critics read the play's moonlit wood as a maze of its own.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, which physical difference do the quarrelling Hermia and her friend trade insults about?

Their height is the sore point: the taller friend is called a painted maypole, and Hermia a puppet and a dwarf who is little but fierce.

The chaste western ruler Oberon recalls in A Midsummer Night's Dream is usually read as a compliment to which royal?

Elizabeth I, the unmarried queen, is pictured walking on untouched by desire, a piece of flattery that helps date the play to her reign.

Offered any food by Titania in A Midsummer Night's Dream, what does the transformed Bottom say he greatly desires?

Hay is his heart's desire, with a peck of dry oats, though Titania offers to send a fairy to raid a squirrel's hoard for fresh nuts.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, what lifelong alternative to marrying her father's choice does Theseus offer Hermia?

Becoming a nun would mean a cloistered life sworn to the goddess Diana, which Theseus likens to a rose withering unpicked on its thorn.

How does Pyramus, the hero played by Bottom, die in the mechanicals' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Bottom's Pyramus stabs himself, then drags the moment out, declaring himself dead and gone several times before he finally lies still.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, what does Titania say her quarrel with Oberon has thrown into confusion for mortals?

The seasons have changed places, she says, with frost on the roses and fields drowned by floods, all bred by the fairies' feud.

Which teenage star, who broke a leg during the shoot, played Puck in the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Mickey Rooney had already played the part on stage, and after his tobogganing accident a stand-in ran the scenes he could not.

Which future Gone with the Wind star played Hermia in the 1935 screen version of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Olivia de Havilland had played the same part on stage the year before and kept it when most of that cast gave way to studio contract players.

Which future screen superhero played one of the young lovers in the 1999 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Christian Bale played Hermia's unwanted suitor, six years before Batman Begins, in a cast led by Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer.

Which future dame, then in her early twenties, played Hermia in the 1968 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Helen Mirren came back to the play in 1981, promoted to Titania, queen of the fairies, for the BBC Television Shakespeare series.

Which writer brought Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream back in the 1906 children's book Puck of Pook's Hill?

Rudyard Kipling has two children summon Puck by accident, by acting out scenes from the play three times over on Midsummer Eve.

Despite the title of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which month's rites does Theseus think the lovers rose early to keep?

May is the month Theseus names when he finds the sleepers in the wood, so the midsummer of the title sits beside a springtime festival.

Chasing a man who scorns her, Hermia's friend in A Midsummer Night's Dream likens herself to which fawning dog?

A spaniel, she says, that will fawn on him the more he beats and spurns her, among the play's bleakest pictures of one-sided love.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, which part does the tailor Starveling end up playing before Duke Theseus?

Moonshine enters with a lantern, a thorn bush and a dog, and the nobles heckle him so much that he ends up simply listing his props.

The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night's Dream is timed for which lunar phase?

The new moon is what Theseus waits for in the opening lines, grumbling at how slowly the old one fades while his desires linger.

Which Doctor Who writer adapted A Midsummer Night's Dream for a BBC One television film in 2016?

Russell T Davies trimmed the play to 90 minutes, casting Maxine Peake as Titania and Nonso Anozie as Oberon.

Which filmmaker wrote the story for Strange Magic, a 2015 animated musical inspired by A Midsummer Night's Dream?

George Lucas spent about 15 years developing the project and described the film as Star Wars for a female audience.

The 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream grew out of a lavish 1934 open-air staging at which Los Angeles venue?

The Hollywood Bowl staging was the work of an émigré director newly arrived from Europe, and Warner Bros. adapted it for the screen the following year.

Which 2001 teen comedy with Kirsten Dunst builds to a high-school musical version of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Get Over It has its lovesick hero join the school show, a rock musical retelling of the play, to win back his ex-girlfriend.

Pyramus and Thisbe, the lovers in the play staged within A Midsummer Night's Dream, come from which city in Ovid?

Babylon is where Ovid sets the tale, with the two lovers whispering through a crack in the wall between their families' houses.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Puck boasts of tipping over an old storyteller by posing as which piece of furniture?

A stool, three-legged, is his disguise: he slips out from under the old woman mid-story and the whole company roars with laughter.

By his own account in A Midsummer Night's Dream, how did Theseus first win the love of Hippolyta?

With his sword, he admits, doing her injuries in war, so he promises to wed her in another key, with pomp, triumph and revelling.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, what does the doting Titania wind around the hairy temples of the transformed Bottom?

A crown of flowers, fresh and fragrant, is what Oberon sees on Bottom's head, and the sight of his queen so besotted finally moves him to pity.

Bedding down in the wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream, what does Hermia ask Lysander to do for modesty's sake?

Sleep further away is her request, made twice, which is why Puck later finds the pair lying apart and takes the man for a churl who scorns her.

Peter Brook's 1970 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream had its fairies perform on which piece of circus equipment?

Trapezes carried the fairies above the stage, and Brook's choice to have one actor double as both duke and fairy king has been widely copied since.

Theseus and Hippolyta return in which late play that Shakespeare co-wrote with John Fletcher?

The Two Noble Kinsmen, from about 1613, opens with three widowed queens begging the duke and his bride for help, and was among Shakespeare's last works.

Which star clown of Shakespeare's company probably created the role of Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Will Kempe left the company in 1599 and a year later morris-danced from London to Norwich, a nine-day feat cheered by crowds along the way.

Which Terry Pratchett Discworld novel sends up A Midsummer Night's Dream with an invasion of cruel elves?

Lords and Ladies, from 1992, makes its elves amoral predators who cloud human minds with glamour and are weakened only by iron.

Midsummer, the festival behind the title of A Midsummer Night's Dream, is the feast marking which saint's birth?

St John the Baptist's nativity falls on 24 June, a midsummer counterweight to Christmas, and is kept with bonfires, feasting and dancing.

In the Ovid tale behind the mechanicals' play in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the lovers' blood darkens which fruit?

Mulberry fruit was white, Ovid says, until the blood of Pyramus stained it dark beneath the tree where the pair had agreed to meet.

A Midsummer Night's Dream may have been the first play Shakespeare wrote for which newly formed acting company?

The Lord Chamberlain's Men took their name from their patron Henry Carey, the court official in charge of entertainments, and became the King's Men in 1603.

Shakespeare borrowed the name Oberon for A Midsummer Night's Dream from which medieval French romance?

Huon of Bordeaux has its knightly hero befriended in a forest by a fairy king of that name, and reached English readers in Lord Berners's Tudor translation.

Which choreographer turned A Midsummer Night's Dream into The Dream, a one-act ballet for the Royal Ballet in 1964?

Frederick Ashton cut the duke's court and the play-within-a-play entirely, and moved the fairies and lovers to about the 1840s.

Which Austrian composer was brought over to arrange Mendelssohn for the 1935 film of A Midsummer Night's Dream?

Erich Korngold went on to a legendary career in film music, staying in the United States once his homeland had been annexed.

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, Theseus turns down the mechanicals' epilogue and asks for which rustic dance instead?

A Bergomask was reckoned a clumsy country dance copied from the people of Bergamo in Italy, a fitting finish for Bottom's company.