Quince
Quince is the mechanicals' organiser and the formal director of their Pyramus and Thisbe, a role he holds in theory while Bottom exercises it in practice. His earnest theatrical conscientiousness is the foil to Bottom's blithe confidence, and the comedy of their scenes together depends on the contrast.
Appears In
Biography
Peter Quince is a carpenter and the nominal director of the mechanicals' Pyramus and Thisbe — nominal because Bottom is the production's real gravitational centre, and Quince spends most of their scenes trying to maintain enough authority to keep the project coherent in the face of Bottom's enthusiastic expansionism. He assigns the parts, organises the rehearsal, writes the prologue, and prepares the production, and in return Bottom proposes to play all the parts himself.
His prologue in Act V — delivered in the wrong places, punctuating itself at all the wrong moments — is one of the play's sustained comic set pieces, and Theseus's commentary on it ('He hath rid his prologue like a rough colt; he knows not the stop') gives it a quality of rueful appreciation that the play extends to the entire mechanicals' effort. Quince's prologue is badly delivered; it is also sincerely meant.
He is the most earnest figure in the mechanicals' company — the one who most believes in the project as a project, who worries about offending the ladies with the lion and the sword, who takes the practical problems of theatrical illusion seriously. Bottom finds solutions to these problems; Quince raises them. Both functions are necessary, and the play affords Quince his quiet dignity alongside his comic inadequacy.
Motivation
Quince is motivated by a genuine desire to do the job properly — to stage a play that will please the Duke, honour the wedding, and reflect well on the company — and by a persistent, ultimately futile effort to maintain directorial authority over Bottom.
Personality
Quince is the play's most gently self-aware comic figure among the mechanicals: he knows the prologue should be better than he delivers it, he knows the production is not what it should be, and he proceeds anyway out of commitment to the enterprise. His anxiety about the theatrical problems — the lion, the moonlight, the wall — is a comic exaggeration of real directorial concern, and the play treats it with a mild affection that stops short of condescension.