“The course of true love never did run smooth.”
Lysander, Act 1, Scene 1
Lysander comforts Hermia moments after Theseus has offered her marriage, death or the convent. The line sounds like a proverb, and he goes on to list what has always wrecked love: a difference in rank (“different in blood”), in age, “the choice of friends”, and war, death or sickness. Hermia answers the first three with a cry, the sharpest being “O hell! to choose love by another’s eyes!” The rest of the play tests the line: the lovers are blocked first by a father, then by magic, and finally set free by the same Duke who threatened them.
“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind; / And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blind.”
Helena, Act 1, Scene 1
Helena explains why Demetrius prefers Hermia although she is thought as beautiful: love is not a judgement of the eyes but of the mind, and the mind is not rational, since “Nor hath love’s mind of any judgment taste.” The neat rhyming couplet gives her idea the sound of a moral while describing chaos. The image of blind Cupid prepares for the love-juice, which works through the eyes, so the plot makes her metaphor literal.
“As she is mine I may dispose of her;”
Egeus, Act 1, Scene 1
The possessive “mine” and the verb dispose, which can mean to give away or to get rid of, turn a daughter into property. Egeus calls this “the ancient privilege of Athens” and offers only two ways to dispose of her, “either to this gentleman / Or to her death”. Theseus backs him, telling Hermia her father should be to her “as a god”. The play begins by making a father’s power as extreme as possible, so that its comic ending has something real to overcome.
“Hippolyta, I woo’d thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries;”
Theseus, Act 1, Scene 1
The marriage that frames the play admits its origin in conquest: Theseus courted the Amazon queen by defeating her. The next line, “But I will wed thee in another key”, promises the change from war to festivity that comedy makes. Yet the violence is not quite forgotten. Hippolyta falls silent during Hermia’s trial, and an actor can make her silence a judgement on a court where men decide women’s futures.
“I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius, / The more you beat me, I will fawn on you.”
Helena, Act 2, Scene 1
Helena makes herself a dog that loves the master who beats it, and she presses the metaphor further: “Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me”. An audience may laugh at the exaggeration, but it is also painful self-abasement, and Demetrius answers with threats. The speech makes clear what love costs her, and she understands it: “We cannot fight for love as men may do.” It is a good example of the play keeping comedy and cruelty in the same moment.
“And this same progeny of evils comes / From our debate, from our dissension; / We are their parents and original.”
Titania, Act 2, Scene 1
Titania ends her account of floods, rotting crops and confused seasons by taking responsibility: the fairy marriage quarrel has disordered nature itself. The metaphor of evils as children, a “progeny” with “parents”, is pointed in a speech that is really about a disputed child. Her “We” shares the blame, while Oberon answers “It lies in you” and blames her alone. The speech gives Titania a moral seriousness that makes her later humiliation harder to laugh at.
“Lord, what fools these mortals be!”
Puck, Act 3, Scene 2
Puck invites Oberon to watch the lovers’ “fond pageant” as if it were a show, and his exclamation gives the audience his detached, amused view of human passion. But the line cuts both ways. The chaos is Puck’s own mistake, as he admits (“Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook”), and the mortals he laughs at include everyone in the theatre, which is exactly who he will speak to at the end of the play.
“Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! Thou art translated.”
Quince, Act 3, Scene 1
Quince’s horrified blessing is the comic climax of the rehearsal, and translated, meaning transformed, is one of the play’s key words. Helena used it in Act 1 when she wished to be made into Hermia, and Puck repeats it when he reports that he “left sweet Pyramus translated there”. Bottom’s change is literal, but it stands for the invisible transformations that love works on everyone else. His reaction, to sing loudly so that no one thinks he is afraid, shows that inside the ass’s head he has not changed at all.
“reason and love keep little company together nowadays”
Bottom, Act 3, Scene 1
The play’s wisest remark about love comes from the man with an ass’s head, answering a fairy queen who has just fallen in love at first sight under a charm. The dramatic irony is double: Bottom is right without knowing why, and Titania replies “Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful”, praise that is true in a way she cannot see. The line connects Helena’s point in Act 1 to everything the lovers do in Act 3.
“And though she be but little, she is fierce.”
Helena, of Hermia, Act 3, Scene 2
In the quarrel that follows both men’s desertion of Hermia, the two friends turn on each other’s bodies: Hermia accuses Helena of making her seem “dwarfish” and calls her a “painted maypole”. Helena’s line is an insult with grudging respect in it, and its plain monosyllables make it memorable. It comes just after she has asked the men to protect her, calling herself “a right maid for my cowardice”, so the scene also shows how the charm has destroyed not only romantic loyalty but a lifelong friendship.
“Egeus, I will overbear your will;”
Theseus, Act 4, Scene 1
In Act 1 Theseus said the law was one “which by no means we may extenuate”; now, with Demetrius loving Helena, he overrides the father in a single line and gives no further reason. The comic resolution arrives by decree, not by any change in the law. A few lines earlier Egeus begged for “the law, the law upon his head”, and after this line he says nothing more, which leaves the audience to decide what the ending does with him.
“And I have found Demetrius like a jewel, / Mine own, and not mine own.”
Helena, Act 4, Scene 1
Waking beside the man who spurned her, Helena compares him to a jewel someone has found: hers by possession, but perhaps not by right, and perhaps not for good. The paradox catches the uncertainty the ending never quite removes, since Demetrius’s love is still the work of the charm. It is one of several lines in the waking scene, including Hermia’s sense that “everything seems double”, which make the lovers doubt what they see.
“I have had a most rare vision.”
Bottom, Act 4, Scene 1
Bottom wakes alone and tries to describe what happened in prose that keeps breaking off. He warns that “Man is but an ass if he go about to / expound this dream”, an unconscious joke on what he has just been, and then mixes up the senses: “The eye of man hath not / heard”. Catherine Belsey points out that he is garbling St Paul on the glory God has prepared (1 Corinthians 2:9). The speech is absurd and also genuinely awed, the one mortal account of the fairy world, and he plans to call the ballad Bottom’s Dream “because it hath no bottom”.
“The lunatic, the lover, and the poet / Are of imagination all compact:”
Theseus, Act 5, Scene 1
Theseus groups madmen, lovers and poets as people who imagine what is not there, the lover seeing “Helen’s beauty in a brow of Egypt”, the poet giving “airy nothing / A local habitation and a name”. He means it as a dismissal of the lovers’ story, yet the speech is itself a superb description of what Shakespeare’s play has just done. The audience knows the fairies were real, so the rational Duke is wrong, and the speech ends up defending the imagination it attacks.
“If we shadows have offended, / Think but this, and all is mended,”
Puck, Act 5, Scene 1, the play’s final speech
Puck steps outside the play and speaks to the audience in short rhyming lines. Shadows means both spirits and actors: earlier in the scene Theseus said that “The best in this kind are but shadows”. Puck offers the audience a way out, to think they have “but slumber’d here” and dreamed it all, and ends by asking for applause, “Give me your hands, if we be friends”. The play becomes the audience’s dream, which makes them the last of its dreamers.