William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night's Dream
The full script in Final Draft, Word & PDF
Four Athenian lovers, a quarrelling fairy court and a troupe of amateur actors collide in one enchanted night in the woods.
PDFs Only
$4.99
- ✓ Stageplay PDF (68 pp.)
- ✓ Screenplay PDF (68 pp.)
- ✓ Instant download
Full Package
$12.99
- ✓ Final Draft (.fdx)
- ✓ Microsoft Word + RTF
- ✓ Screenplay + Stageplay PDFs
Need more than a few plays?
All 37 plays in every format cost $99, less than 8 single Full Packages. PDFs only: $55 for all 37.
- Genre
- Comedy
- Written
- c. 1595–1596
- Setting
- Athens and a nearby wood
- Scenes
- 9
- Speaking roles
- 29
- Uncut running time
- ~2h 00m
What happens in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Duke Theseus of Athens is preparing for his wedding to Hippolyta when Egeus demands that his daughter Hermia marry Demetrius, though she loves Lysander. Hermia and Lysander flee into the woods, pursued by Demetrius and by Helena, who loves him. Nearby, a group of Athenian tradesmen led by Peter Quince rehearses a play to perform at the wedding.
In the wood, the fairy king Oberon and queen Titania are feuding. Oberon sends Puck to anoint sleeping eyes with a flower juice that makes the sleeper love the first creature seen. Mistakes multiply: both young men turn to Helena, Titania falls for Bottom, who has been given a donkey's head, and the lovers fall into furious argument. Order is restored by dawn, and the tradesmen's clumsy play closes the wedding celebrations.
See the formatting
The first page of Act I, exactly as it appears in the files you download.
The biggest roles
Share of the play's spoken words, counted from the script. 29 characters speak; 11 of them have under 1% of the text — natural candidates for doubling.
| Role | Share of the text | Speeches |
|---|---|---|
| Helena | | 230 |
| Theseus | | 231 |
| Bottom | | 203 |
| Oberon | | 226 |
| Puck | | 209 |
| Lysander | | 175 |
| Hermia | | 166 |
| Titania | | 143 |
For directors
The play is built from four interlocking groups (court, lovers, fairies, mechanicals), so the cast spreads out: Helena, Theseus, Bottom and Oberon each hold between 10 and 11 percent of the words, and nine roles exceed 5 percent. There are 29 speaking roles, 11 of them under 1 percent, which suits ensemble casts and student companies. Theseus and Oberon, and Hippolyta and Titania, are traditionally doubled. Uncut it runs about 120 minutes, comfortably inside an evening.
Cutting notes
- Trim the lovers' quarrel in Act III scene ii, which is long and repeats its comic beats.
- Shorten the mechanicals' performance of Pyramus and Thisbe in Act V, where the onstage audience's interjections can be thinned without losing the joke.
- Condense the opening Athenian legal setup if the wood is the priority, keeping Egeus's demand and the law.
For teachers
Students usually study the contrast between the ordered court and the disordered wood, the unreliability of love and perception, and the theme of dreams and imagination. Common exam material includes the lovers' quarrel in Act III, Titania's description of the disordered seasons, Theseus's speech on the lunatic, the lover and the poet, and Bottom's waking. The play-within-a-play invites discussion of theatre itself.
Questions
Is this the complete, uncut text of A Midsummer Night's Dream?
Yes. Every file contains the full play — 9 scenes and about 16,200 spoken words. Cut it yourself in Word or Final Draft to fit your running time.
What is the difference between the stageplay and screenplay layouts?
The stageplay layout indents stage directions and sets dialogue full-width, like a theatre script. The screenplay layout follows film conventions: scene headings and action flush left, character names centred, dialogue in a narrower column. Both tiers include both layouts as PDFs; the Full Package adds editable Final Draft and Word files of each.
Can I use this A Midsummer Night's Dream script for a production or a class?
Yes. Shakespeare's plays are in the public domain, so there are no royalties to pay for staging them. Edit, stage, film or teach with these files.
How do I receive the files?
Right after checkout you land on a private download page, and the link is also emailed to you. It keeps working, so you can re-download any time.
