A Midsummer Night's Dream

             Main Characters .
             Duke Theseus.
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             The Athenian duke has recently defeated the Amazonian Queen Hippolyta in battle, and plans to marry her four days after the opening of the play. He is asked by Egeus, an Athenian father, to command a marriage between Hermia, Egeus' daughter, and Demetrius, a young Athenian man who loves her (and whose love is not returned). Theseus bids Hermia obey her father, or else be sent to a convent. In this command, as in his unorthodox manner of "wooing- Hippolyta by "doing her injury,"" Theseus seems to represent a rather unpleasant model of forced love. By the time Theseus reappears at the end of the play, however, he and Hippolyta seem genuinely and mutually happy together, and he presides over a magically resolved triple wedding in which everyone gains their heart's desire. The character of Theseus appears in Greek myth (he was a friend of Hercules and a giant-killer), but Shakespeare more likely got the idea for his character from Chaucer's Knight's Tale, which refers to Theseus and Hippolyta in the larger context of the story of Palamon and Arcite, two men in love with the same woman (a plot that resembles aspects of this play). .
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             Hippolyta, Queen of the Amazons.
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             Theseus' betrothed at the beginning of the play is his former enemy in war. Strangely, she does not seem to resent her vanquisher, but rather seems just as impatient for their wedding day. In the play's final scene, however, when the three married couples watch the rustic play, Hippolyta argues (mildly) with Theseus over the nature of fiction. Theseus argues that the poet, like the lover and the lunatic, simply invents the impossible. Hippolyta counters with the more sympathetic idea that even impossibilities can be powerful and moving when they are represented well. .
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             Egeus.
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             Egeus is a member of the Athenian nobility, but not as elevated as the Duke. He asks Theseus to arbitrate in his dispute with his daughter over her proper marriage.