Yorick

Plays › A Midsummer Night's Dream › Thisbe

Thisbe

A Midsummer Night's Dream · 8 speeches across 1 scenes

Thisbe is the tragic heroine in the Rude Mechanicals' play-within-a-play, a parody of Ovid's Pyramus and Thisbe.

Who they are

Thisbe appears only in Act 5, Scene 1, as a character in the Mechanicals' amateur performance. She is Pyramus's lover and his eventual counterpart in death. Her arc is purely farcical—overwrought passion met with inept delivery. Key relationships: with Pyramus (affected devotion) and with Wall (an actor in a costume).

Playing them

Deliver with exaggerated, melodramatic intensity—hand to forehead, breathless pauses, over-articulated sorrow. Vocal quality should be high-pitched or mock-tragic, breaking on key words like 'dumb' and 'dead.' Physicality: sweeping gestures, excessive sighing, and comic freeze when discovering the body. Tradition often has Thisbe played by a male actor (since the Mechanicals are all-male), so lean into the mismatched earnestness.

Where they appear

Play Thisbe

Take the part and Yorick reads every other role aloud, following you line by line as you speak.

Rehearse A Midsummer Night's Dream on your phone: App Store · Google Play

Shakespeare the way it was meant to be had — out loud

These plays were written to be performed, not silently read. Yorick is a rehearsal app that lets you perform them: you take a part in any of Shakespeare’s 38 plays, and Yorick reads every other role aloud, listens while you speak your lines, keeps your place, and prompts you the moment you dry.

It is built for the person who has to be off book by tech week — school and college productions, community theatre, festivals, drama students and classical auditions — and for anyone who wants to hear a scene rather than skim it. Alongside the performance you get a plain-English translation of every speech, scene context, performance notes, and the ability to ask about any line and get an answer that already knows the play, the scene and who is speaking.

The text is the public-domain Cambridge/Globe edition. Translations and notes are AI-generated rehearsal aids for actors and students, not a scholarly apparatus. Yorick runs in a browser with nothing to install, and on iPhone and Android.