Enter LYSANDER, DEMETRIUS, HERMIA and HELENA.

THESEUS        Here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth.

Joy, gentle friends, joy and fresh days of love

Accompany your hearts.

LYSANDER                 More than to us

Wait in your royal walks, your board, your bed.    (5.1.28-31)

Here are the lovers back again, now married—and definitely spruced up—and the general mood is one of rejoicing: here come the lovers, full of joy and mirth. Everyone’s happy! Joy, gentle friends, joy and fresh days of love accompany your hearts! I wish you every blessing, every happiness, in these honeymoon days ahead, and always! (Joy is Theseus’s word in this bit of the scene, a deeper word than happiness, perhaps, without the sense of fortune or luck; joy as a gift, given freely and unbidden.) Lysander is the spokesperson once again, and his reply is courtly, charming, perhaps a little daring—but Theseus has just addressed them as equals, more or less, so he can get away with something a little risqué, perhaps: more than to us—more joy, that is, to you and Hippolyta than to the four of us—wait in your royal walks, your board, your bed. In the garden, when you’re having dinner, and obviously… Let there be joy for everyone, everywhere!