Peter Quince
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In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Peter Quince is a carpenter that works in Athens. He is one of the six craftsmen (the mechanicals) that put on a play for Theseus and Hippolyta at their wedding.
Peter Quince meets Nick Bottom the weaver, Francis Flute the bellows-mender, Tom Snout the tinker, Starveling the tailor, and Snug the joiner in the woods. Quince directs their play of Pyramus and Thisbe.
In the play, he recites the prologue, but struggles to fit his lines into the meter and to make them rhyme. The Nobles interject to point out his errors. In the rehearsals he is seen in a managerial role even though most people believe Nick Bottom to be the more knowledgable individual.
Peter Quince is the director of the play that they perform to the duke and his wife.
His name is derived from “quines” or “quoins”, which are wooden wedges used by carpenters.
The character is obliquely alluded to in the title of a Wallace Stevens poem, "Peter Quince at the Clavier".
Traditionally, Peter Quince is portrayed as an extremely bookish character, caught up in the minute details of his play.[citation needed] But very recently, as seen in the 1999 film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, actors have portrayed him as a strong character extremely capable of being a director. It is he who leads the search party looking for Nick Bottom in the middle of the play. Some directors have even gone so far as to portray him as a woman with a secret love for Bottom (in the tradition of Shakespearean love stories, underlings also find love), often renamed Beatrice Quince.[citation needed]
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