In 'A Midsummer Night's Dream', which mechanical plays the role of Thisbe?

In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the mechanical Francis Flute plays Thisbe. Flute is a bellows-mender from Athens and one of the amateur actors who stage Pyramus and Thisbe for Theseus and Hippolyta’s wedding celebration.

Peter Quince assigns Flute the female role because the mechanicals are organizing a play with a small cast. Flute initially objects to playing a woman, but accepts the part and performs opposite Nick Bottom, who plays Pyramus. Tom Snout plays the wall separating the lovers, adding to the deliberately clumsy comedy.

The play-within-the-play parodies the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe, a classical tale also associated with Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Shakespeare turns its doomed lovers into a badly rehearsed entertainment whose mistakes become part of the joke. Francis Flute is sometimes confused with Bottom because both are prominent mechanicals, but Bottom plays Pyramus, while Flute plays Thisbe. The character’s surname also echoes his trade: a bellows-mender worked with equipment used to force air through pipes, like those of an organ or flute.