Act One: Athens

Theseus, Duke of Athens, was to marry Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons, whom he had won in war, in four days' time, at the new moon. "Four happy days bring in another moon: but O, methinks, how slow this old moon wanes!" "Four days will quickly steep themselves in night," said Hippolyta; "four nights will quickly dream away the time."

Into the palace came an angry old man, Egeus, dragging his daughter Hermia, with two young men behind them. Egeus wanted Hermia to marry Demetrius; but Hermia loved Lysander, who had, Egeus said, bewitched her with rhymes and love-tokens, sung at her window by moonlight, and stolen her heart. He demanded the ancient law of Athens: she must marry the man her father chose, or die.

Theseus was gentle but firm: "To you your father should be as a god." Hermia must choose by the new moon, his own wedding day: to marry Demetrius; or to die; or to become a nun, "for aye to be in shady cloister mewed, to live a barren sister all your life, chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon." Lysander pointed out that Demetrius had once courted another girl, Helena, Hermia's dearest friend, and won her heart, and abandoned her — and she still doted on him. Theseus had heard so, but the law stood.

Left alone, Lysander and Hermia lamented. "Ay me! for aught that I could ever read, could ever hear by tale or history, the course of true love never did run smooth." And Lysander had a plan. He had a widowed aunt who lived seven leagues from Athens, beyond the reach of its law; there they could marry. Tomorrow night, Hermia must steal out of her father's house and meet him in the wood a league outside the town, where he had once met her with Helena to do observance to a morn of May.

Helena came by, miserable: Demetrius loved Hermia, and despised her, Helena, though she was thought as fair as Hermia through Athens. "Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; and therefore is winged Cupid painted blind." They told her of their plan, to comfort her. And Helena, alone, decided that she would tell Demetrius — he would follow Hermia into the wood, and she, Helena, would follow him, and at least have his sight thither and back again.

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In a cottage in Athens, a group of working men met to cast a play. They were to perform it before the Duke at his wedding feast, hoping for a reward. Peter Quince, the carpenter, was in charge; the play was "The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe."

The star was Nick Bottom, the weaver, who wanted to play every part: he would play Pyramus, the lover, and make the audience weep — but he could play a tyrant better: "I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in." When Francis Flute, the bellows-mender, was cast as Thisbe, the lady, and protested that he had a beard coming, Bottom wanted to play Thisbe too: "Let me play Thisbe too: I'll speak in a monstrous little voice." And when Snug the joiner was given the Lion, Bottom wanted that: "Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that I will do any man's heart good to hear me." But if he roared too terribly he would fright the ladies, and they would all be hanged; so he would "aggravate" his voice, and "roar you as gently as any sucking dove." Quince persuaded him that he must play Pyramus, "for Pyramus is a sweet-faced man; a proper man as one shall see in a summer's day; a most lovely gentlemanlike man." Snout the tinker and Starveling the tailor were cast too. They would meet to rehearse tomorrow night, in the palace wood, by moonlight, where no one could steal their ideas.