50 Fun Facts About A Midsummer Night's Dream

In which city is A Midsummer Night's Dream set?

The plots revolve around the wedding of Duke Theseus and Hippolyta, though most of the action takes place in the fairy-haunted woods outside the city.

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

The couple are four days from their wedding when the play opens, and Theseus complains about the wait.

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

Theseus offers a third option: lifelong chastity as a nun of Diana, which the lovers reject before fleeing to the woods.

How many days before Theseus and Hippolyta's wedding does the play open?

Theseus is unhappy about the wait, while Hippolyta says it will pass like a dream.

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

Hermia tells the plan to Helena, who betrays it to Demetrius in the hope of winning back his love.

What is Theseus's Master of the Revels called?

He is one of the Athenians listed alongside Egeus, Hermia's father.

Over what are Oberon and Titania quarrelling?

Titania refuses to give up the child because his mother was one of her worshippers; Oberon wants him as his 'knight' or 'henchman'.

What is the name of the flower whose juice makes a sleeper dote on the first creature seen on waking?

It turned from white to purple when struck by Cupid's arrow; Oberon can undo the charm 'with another herb'.

How does Oberon describe Puck when he first summons him?

Puck's other name is Robin Goodfellow; the Quarto and Folio use both names inconsistently.

Puck anoints the wrong sleeping Athenian. Who wakes him and instantly becomes the object of his love?

Never having seen either man, Puck mistook Lysander for Demetrius; Helena thinks she is being mocked and runs away.

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

She goes out into the woods to search for him.

What is Nick Bottom's trade?

He plays Pyramus but wants to play Thisbe and the Lion as well; Quince the carpenter directs.

Which of the mechanicals is a bellows-mender who plays Thisbe?

Snout the tinker plays Wall and Starveling the tailor plays Moonshine.

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

Quince reassures him that the part is 'nothing but roaring'.

Where does Quince tell the players they will meet to rehearse?

They rehearse in the forest near Titania's bower, which is how Bottom comes to be transformed.

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

Puck takes the name Bottom as another word for a jackass; the other workmen flee, crying that they are haunted.

What wakes Titania and makes her fall in love with the transformed Bottom?

In the play's words, 'Titania waked, and straightway loved an ass'; while she dotes on him, Oberon takes the changeling.

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

Once all four lovers sleep in the glade, he applies the antidote to Lysander so his love returns to Hermia.

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

Since Demetrius no longer loves Hermia, Theseus overrules Egeus and arranges a group wedding.

Which of these is one of Titania's fairy servants?

Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Moth are the others who wait on the transformed Bottom at her command.

What is the full title of the mechanicals' play?

The nobles laugh at the terrible performance as if it were meant to be a comedy.

Who has the last word in the play, suggesting the audience may only have dreamed it all?

After the fairies bless the house, he 'restores amends' in a closing speech to the audience.

The play is usually dated to 1595 or early 1596 partly because of an allusion to which poem?

Some scholars think it was written for an aristocratic wedding such as that of Thomas Berkeley and Elizabeth Carey.

Which bookseller registered the play in October 1600 and published the first quarto?

Jaggard printed the second quarto in 1619 as part of his 'False Folio', and the play appeared again in the First Folio of 1623.

Which of Chaucer's works, along with Ovid's Metamorphoses, is cited as an inspiration for the play?

The play is not an adaptation of any single earlier work.

Which diarist wrote in 1662 that it was 'the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life'?

He conceded it had 'some good dancing and some handsome women'.

During the Puritan closure of the theatres, the Bottom subplot survived as what kind of performance?

Drolls were short comic playlets attached to acrobats' and jugglers' acts to get round the ban.

Which composer's 1692 masque The Fairy-Queen was based on the play?

It ran successfully at the Dorset Garden Theatre but was not revived; the full play was not staged again until the 1840s.

Madame Vestris's 1840 revival began a seventy-year tradition of which two roles being played by women?

Vestris herself took the fairy king's role at Covent Garden, adding music and ballet.

What live animals followed trails of food across the stage in Herbert Beerbohm Tree's 1911 production?

It also had mechanical birds in beech trees, a simulated stream and fairies wearing battery-powered lights.

Peter Brook's landmark 1970 RSC production was staged in what kind of set?

Masculine fairies performed trapeze tricks, and Brook popularised doubling Theseus with Oberon and Hippolyta with Titania.

How old was Mendelssohn when he finished his concert overture to the play in August 1826?

George Grove called it 'the greatest marvel of early maturity that the world has ever seen in music'.

Which piece from Mendelssohn's 1842 incidental music is among the most played ever written?

It is the intermezzo between acts 4 and 5; the incidental music was written for a production at Potsdam in 1843.

Mendelssohn's overture borrows a theme from which composer's opera Oberon, apparently as a tribute?

The overture shares the same key and orchestration as that section of the recently deceased composer's opera.

Why did Nazi cultural officials call for a new score for the play, a call Carl Orff answered?

Mendelssohn's parents had converted to Lutheranism, but that did not save his score from the ban; Orff reworked his version as late as 1964.

Britten's 1960 opera of the play wrote Oberon for which unusual voice?

The role was composed for Alfred Deller; the libretto was by Britten and Peter Pears.

Whose first original full-length ballet, for New York City Ballet in 1962, was based on the play?

Ashton's shorter version, The Dream, followed for the Royal Ballet in 1964.

Which actor played Bottom in the 1935 Warner Bros. film, in his only Shakespearean role?

Mickey Rooney was Puck and Olivia de Havilland made her film debut as Hermia, both reprising roles from Max Reinhardt's Hollywood Bowl production.

How did Hal Mohr win the cinematography Oscar for the 1935 film?

The Academy stopped accepting write-in votes the following year; Mohr had the trees sprayed with orange paint for the fairyland glow.

Where did Michael Hoffman's 1999 film relocate the action?

Kevin Kline played Bottom and Michelle Pfeiffer Titania, and critics grumbled about the bicycles.

Which actor played Puck in the 1999 film alongside Kevin Kline and Michelle Pfeiffer?

Everett was Oberon, Bale Demetrius and West Lysander, with Calista Flockhart as Helena.

Judi Dench played Titania and Ian Holm Puck in a 1968 film directed by whom?

The Royal Shakespeare Company cast also included Diana Rigg as Helena and Helen Mirren as Hermia.

Neil Gaiman's 1990 Sandman issue based on the play was the first and only comic to win what?

In the story Shakespeare's company performs the play for the real Oberon and Titania, with his son Hamnet as the Indian boy.

Woody Allen's 1982 sex comedy takes its plot mainly from which Ingmar Bergman film?

Bergman's film also inspired the musical A Little Night Music.

Which German critic argued in 1808 that Bottom's donkey head reflects his true nature?

He also read Pyramus and Thisbe as a burlesque of the Athenian lovers' story; his translation of the play inspired Mendelssohn.

Whom has Egeus chosen as Hermia's husband, prompting her flight into the woods?

Demetrius had abandoned Helena for Hermia, which is why Helena betrays the lovers' escape plan to him.

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

He decides to sing it after the mechanicals' play, at the moment Thisbe dies, calling the dream 'past the wit of man'.

Which director staged the play thirteen times between 1905 and 1934, introducing a revolving set?

After fleeing Germany he mounted a spectacular open-air version at the Hollywood Bowl, which led Warner Bros. to sign him for the 1935 film.

Which critic in 1677 defended the play, The Tempest and Jonson's Masque of Queens as fantasy?

He was the next critic known to comment after Pepys, in The Authors Apology for Heroique Poetry; and Poetique Licence.

After the 1600 quarto, where did the play next appear in print?

Bookseller Thomas Fisher had entered the play in the Stationers' Register in October 1600.