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All Site ContentMidsummer Night's DreamAct 4Scene 2
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“made men”
Language
Act 4,
Scene 2
Lines 15-22

An explanation of the phrase “made men” in Act 4, Scene 2 of myShakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Snug

Masters, the Duke is coming from the temple, and
there is two or three lords and ladies more married. If
our sport had gone forward we had all been made men.

Flute

O sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a
day during his life; he could not have scaped sixpence a
day. An the Duke had not given him sixpence a day for
playing Pyramus, I'll be hanged. He would have
deserved it. Sixpence a day in Pyramus, or nothing.

In Shakespeare's day, to be a "made man" meant to have made your fortune. It was only in the middle of the 20th century that it came to refer to someone who had been inducted into the upper ranks of the Mafia.