A Midsummer Night's Dream Trivia
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89 free A Midsummer Night's Dream trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This A Midsummer Night's Dream trivia quiz covers Shakespeare's most performed comedy from Theseus's wedding plans to Puck's closing apology. The early questions test the plot and characters: the ancient Athenian law that threatens Hermia, the four lovers and who loves whom, the changeling boy that sets Oberon against Titania, the flower called love-in-idleness, Puck's mistake with the sleeping Athenians, and the night Titania 'waked, and straightway loved an ass'. The mechanicals get their due too, from Peter Quince's casting session to Snug the joiner's roaring lion and the roles of Wall and Moonshine. The middle of the quiz turns to the play's history: when it was written and printed, Ovid and Chaucer among its sources, Samuel Pepys's verdict, the drolls of the Puritan years, Purcell's Fairy-Queen, Madame Vestris and the seventy years when women played Oberon, Beerbohm Tree's live rabbits, and Peter Brook's white box. The last questions cover the music and screen versions: Mendelssohn's overture written at 17 and his Wedding March, Britten's opera with a countertenor Oberon, Balanchine and Ashton, the 1935 Reinhardt film with James Cagney and Mickey Rooney, the 1999 Michael Hoffman film with bicycles in Tuscany, and Neil Gaiman's award-winning Sandman issue. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the play and its adaptations.
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Q 01In A Midsummer Night's Dream, where on a sleeper's body must Oberon's love potion be applied?
The eyelids
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.'
Q 02Hippolyta, whom Theseus is about to marry, is queen of which people?
The Amazons
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.
Q 03What does the Athenian law invoked by Egeus threaten if Hermia refuses to marry the man he has chosen?
Death
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.
Q 04Where do Hermia and Lysander plan to flee to escape Athenian law?
His aunt's house
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.
Q 05What does Theseus's Master of the Revels say happened when he watched the mechanicals rehearse?
He wept with laughter
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.
Q 06Over what are Oberon and Titania quarrelling?
An Indian changeling boy
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.
Q 07Oberon sends Puck to fetch which flower, whose juice makes a sleeper dote on the first creature seen on waking?
Love-in-idleness
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'.
Q 08In A Midsummer Night's Dream, a fairy who recognises Puck by his pranks calls him what?
A shrewd and knavish sprite
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.
Q 09When Puck anoints the wrong sleeping Athenian, who wakes him and instantly becomes the object of his love?
Helena
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.
Q 10What does Hermia dream just before she wakes to find Lysander gone?
A snake ate her heart
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.
Q 11What is Nick Bottom's trade?
Weaver
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.
Q 12In A Midsummer Night's Dream, which mechanical is a bellows-mender cast as Thisbe?
Francis Flute
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.
Q 13Which role does Snug the joiner take, because he is 'slow of study'?
The Lion
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.
Q 21Who has the last word in A Midsummer Night's Dream, suggesting the audience may only have dreamed it all?
Puck
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.'
Q 22Some scholars believe A Midsummer Night's Dream was written to be performed at what kind of occasion?
An aristocratic wedding
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.
Q 23Oberon, Titania and Puck from A Midsummer Night's Dream all give their names to moons of which planet?
Q 14In A Midsummer Night's Dream, where does Quince tell his actors to meet to rehearse?
At the Duke's oak
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.
Q 15What does Puck do to Bottom during the rehearsal in the woods?
Gives him a donkey's head
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.
Q 16What wakes the sleeping Titania so that Bottom is the first creature she sees?
His singing
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?'
Q 17How does Puck stop the two Athenian men from fighting over the same woman?
He mimics their voices
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.
Q 18What are Theseus and Hippolyta doing when they discover the sleeping lovers?
Hunting
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.
Q 19Which fairy attends Titania alongside Peaseblossom, Cobweb and Moth?
Mustardseed
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.
Q 20In his full title for the mechanicals' play, how does Peter Quince describe the story of Pyramus and Thisbe?
The most lamentable comedy
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'.
Uranus
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.
Q 24Which of Chaucer's works, along with Ovid's Metamorphoses, is a recognised source for A Midsummer Night's Dream?
The Knight's Tale
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.
Q 25Which diarist called A Midsummer Night's Dream 'the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in my life'?
Samuel Pepys
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'.
Q 26In the 1640s and 1650s, Bottom's scenes were performed alone as a comic 'droll' because of what?
A theatre ban
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.
Q 27Which composer's 1692 semi-opera The Fairy-Queen was based on A Midsummer Night's Dream?
Henry Purcell
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.
Q 28Madame Vestris's 1840 revival of A Midsummer Night's Dream began a seventy-year tradition of women playing which two roles?
Oberon and Puck
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.
Q 29Harley Granville-Barker's pared-back 1914 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream replaced Mendelssohn's score with what?
English folk tunes
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.
Q 30Peter Brook's landmark 1970 staging of A Midsummer Night's Dream used what kind of set?
A blank white box
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.