Well roared, Lion.

The line is spoken in Shakespeare’s comic play *A Midsummer Night’s Dream* during the artisans’ amateur performance of “Pyramus and Thisbe” at Theseus’s wedding festivities. In this play-within-a-play, the weaver Nick Bottom plays Pyramus, while another craftsman plays the Lion. The courtly audience (Theseus, Hippolyta, and others) heckles and comments throughout, treating the performers’ earnest but clumsy theatrics as entertainment. “Well roared, Lion” is one of these approvingly mocking asides, praising the Lion’s roar while also underscoring the humorous gap between grand tragic material and the rustic actors’ limited skill.

“Well roared, Lion” works as a compact joke about performance, taste, and social hierarchy. On its surface it is a compliment—an acknowledgment that the actor playing the Lion has delivered his one big effect. But in context it is also patronizing: the nobles applaud the artisans the way one might praise a child’s effort, enjoying the spectacle of “low” performers attempting “high” tragedy. Shakespeare uses such lines to satirize theatrical conventions (the artificiality of stage roaring, the mechanics of illusion) and to explore how audiences shape meaning through commentary. The phrase has endured as a wry way to commend a dramatic outburst, often with a hint of irony.