A Midsummer Night's Dream

Act Four scene one

Quiz Questions:
  1. What do you see, hear and smell on stage as Titania, Bottom and the fairies cavort in Titania's Bower? (Where are the four lovers sleeping?) (Where is Oberon standing as he watches the scene?)
  2. What services does Bottom request from:
  • Peaseblossom
  • Cobweb
  • Mustardseed
  1. What does Bottom want to eat?
  2. How did Oberon get his changeling boy back? (What happened earlier off stage when Oberon and Titania met?)
  3. When Titania awakens, what does Oberon tell her when she exclaims about the strange dream she has had?
  4. What kind of music do you imagine the musicians are playing as Oberon and Titania dance around Bottom and the sleeping lovers?
  5. As soon as morning breaks (and Oberon and Titania disappear), what sounds are heard throughout the vale where the lovers and Bottom lie asleep? What is going on?
  6. How does Hippolyta describe these sounds?
  7. How does Theseus explain to Egeus the prescense of the four lovers sleeping in the vale?
  8. Once awake, how does Demetrius instantly resolve the conflict that tortured the four lovers throughout the play's action?
  9. Once the lovers are alone, how do they explain to each other the strange night from which they have just awakened ?
  10. Explain what is on the tip of his tongue as Bottom tries to describe what happened to him the night before:
                                    I have had a most rare
vision. I have had a dream, past the wit of man to
say what dream it was: man is but an ass, if he go
about to expound this dream. Methought I was--there
is no man can tell what. Methought I was,--and
methought I had,--but man is but a patched fool, if
he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye
of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not
seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue
to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream
was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of
this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream,
because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the
latter end of a play, before the duke:
peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall
sing it at her death.