Character

Pyramus in A Midsummer Night's Dream

Role: A young lover in the mechanicals' tragic play-within-the-play First appearance: Act 5, Scene 1 Last appearance: Act 5, Scene 1 Approx. lines: 12

Pyramus is a tragic lover in the amateur production of “Pyramus and Thisby” staged by the mechanicals—the working-class actors of Athens—as entertainment for the Duke’s wedding. He exists only within the frame of Act 5’s play-within-the-play, performed by Bottom and his fellow tradesmen. Though his story echoes the peril that nearly befell Hermia and Lysander, Pyramus is wholly comic in execution: his speech is overwrought, his reasoning absurd, and his death—stabbed by his own sword after mistaking a bloodstained mantle for proof of Thisby’s death—is precisely the kind of ridiculous tragedy that the mechanicals promised to avoid through their prologue.

Pyramus speaks in exaggerated, baroque language full of classical allusions and emotional extremes. His opening invocation to “grim-look’d night” establishes him as a creature of passion untempered by reason, a lover who sees signs of doom in shadows and who leaps instantly from hope to despair. When he discovers what he believes to be Thisby’s body, he does not pause to investigate; he does not call for help or light; he simply draws his sword and “dies” with the same histrionic fervor with which he lived. His death is swift, certain, and entirely self-inflicted—a tragedy made comic by the obviousness of the misunderstanding that causes it and by the crude manner of its performance.

What makes Pyramus significant is not his own character but his function in the larger play. He represents the danger that love unchecked by reason can bring, yet he does so in such an exaggerated, bungled way that the danger becomes entertainment. The audience—both the wedding guests within the play and those watching the play itself—laughs at Pyramus precisely because his tragedy is so plainly preventable. Had he waited one moment longer; had he called out; had he questioned what his eyes reported, he would have lived. Yet he doesn’t, and in that refusal to pause, to think, to seek clarification, he embodies the play’s deeper truth: that love and reason are fundamentally at odds, and that passion, unmodified by the slowness of thought, will rush toward its own destruction.

Key quotes

O grim-look’d night! O night with hue so black! O night, which ever art when day is not! O night, O night! alack, alack, alack, I fear my Thisby’s promise is forgot! And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall, That stand’st between her father’s ground and mine! Thou wall, O wall, O sweet and lovely wall, Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine eyne!

Oh dark night! Oh night so black! Oh night, you’re always here when day is gone! Oh night, oh night! Alas, alas, alas, I fear Thisby’s promise has been forgotten! And you, oh wall, oh sweet, oh lovely wall, That stands between her father’s land and mine! You wall, oh wall, oh sweet and lovely wall, Show me your crack, so I can peek through with my eyes!

Pyramus · Act 5, Scene 1

Bottom, with an ass's head, arrives at the tomb to find Thisbe gone and addresses the wall, moon, and night in purple, overwrought language. The speech is ridiculous and sincere at once, a man trying to speak like a lover while sounding like a beggar. It shows how far love poetry can stretch when the speaker has no control over what he is saying or who hears him.

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus. Now am I dead, Now am I fled; My soul is in the sky: Tongue, lose thy light; Moon take thy flight:

This is how I die, this way, this way, this way. Now I am dead, Now I am gone; My soul is in the sky: Tongue, lose your power; Moon, take your flight:

Pyramus · Act 5, Scene 1

Pyramus stabs himself on stage, dying badly and repetitively, as if he cannot quite commit to the act. The performance is so clumsy it makes the courtiers laugh, yet it describes a real death—the death that should have been Lysander and Hermia's fate. The play-within-the-play succeeds by failing, turning near-tragedy into comedy through bad acting.

Relationships

Pyramus & Thisbe

beloved

Pyramus & Nick Bottom

played by

Where Pyramus appears

Act 5, Scene 1 Athens. An Apartment in the Palace of Theseus