Flute
Flute is the mechanicals' most reluctant performer, assigned the female lead in Pyramus and Thisbe and making the best of it with a combination of self-consciousness and earnest effort. His Thisbe gives the play-within-the-play its closing note, which is funnier and more affecting than it has any right to be.
Appears In
Biography
Francis Flute is a bellows-mender assigned the role of Thisbe in the mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe — a casting he objects to on the grounds that he is 'a man with a beard coming,' which is both a complaint about playing a woman and an optimistic assessment of his current facial hair. He is the most reluctant of the mechanicals' performers, and the contrast between his awkwardness and Bottom's enthusiasm is one of their scenes' reliable comic resources.
His performance as Thisbe in Act V — delivering the play's final lament in a comic version of high tragic register — is the mechanicals' most sustained theatrical effort, and the nobility of Thisbe's grief, filtered through Flute's earnest inadequacy, gives the scene its strange double quality: it is clearly funny, and it is also, in a way the characters watching it cannot quite articulate, almost moving.
He is less individually drawn than Bottom or Quince, his characterisation largely defined by his reluctance and his eventual game compliance — the company member who would rather not but does it anyway, with a sincerity that redeems the performance if not the acting.
Motivation
Flute is motivated by loyalty to the company and eventual acceptance of his role — he would prefer not to play a woman, but once committed, commits fully.
Personality
Flute is the mechanicals' most purely ordinary member — neither Bottom's confident enthusiasm nor Quince's managerial anxiety, just a working man doing something outside his comfort zone with enough goodwill to see it through.