Bot. A very good piece of work, I assure you, and a merry. Now, good Peter Quince, call forth your actors by the scroll: Masters, spread yourselves. Quin. Answer, as I call you. -Nick Bottom, the weaver. Bot. Ready: Name what part I am for, and proceed. Quin. You, Nick Bottom, are set down för Pyramus. Bot. What is Pyramus? a lover, or a tyrant ? Quin. A lover, that kills himself most gallantly for love. Bot. That will ask some tears in the true performing of it: If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes; I will move storms, I will condole in some measure. To the rest:- -Yet my chief humour is for a tyrant: I could play Ercles3 rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split. "The raging rocks, And shivering shocks, Of prison gates: And Phibbus' car And make and mar The foolish fates." This was lofty!-Now name the rest of the playThis is Ercles' vein, a tyrant's vein: a lover is more condoling. ers. Quin. Francis Flute, the bellows-mender. 3 Ercles-Hercules - was one of the roarers of the old ude stage. Thus Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit, 1592: «The twelve labours of Hercules have I terribly thundered on the stage." H. Flu. Here, Peter Quince. Quin. You must take Thisby on you. Flu. What is Thisby? a wandering knight? Quin. It is the lady that Pyramus must love. Flu. Nay, faith, let me not play a woman: I have a beard coming. Quin. That's all one: You shall play it in a inusk, and you may speak as small as you will.^ Bot. An I may hide my face, let me play Thisby too: I'll speak in a monstrous little voice: ne, Thisne "This Ah, Pyramus, my lover dear! thy Thisby dear, and lady dear!" Quin. No, no; you must play Pyramus, and Flute, you Thisby. Bot. Well, proceed. Quin. Robert Starveling, the tailor. Star. Here, Peter Quince. Quin. Robert Starveling, you must play Thisby s mother. Tom Snout, the tinker. Snout. Here, Peter Quince. Quin. You, Pyramus's father; myself, Thisby's father. Snug, the joiner, you, the lion's part: and, I hope, here is a play fitted. Snug. Have you the lion's part written? pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study. Quin. You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring. Bot. Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that 4 See The Merry Wives of Windsor, Act i. sc. 1, note 8, where Slender says of Anne Page,. -" She has brown hair, and speaks small like a woman." This speech of Peter Quince's shows, what is known from other sources, that the parts of women were used to be played by boys, or, if these could not be had, by men in masks. Prynne, the Puritan hero, informs us that female actors appeared on the stage at the Blackfriars as early as 1629. The pious dare-devil comes down upon women's acting with a tempest of wrath; but then he is still harder upon the personating of I will do any man's heart good to hear me: I will roar, that I will make the duke say, "Let him roar again let him roar again." Quin. An you should do it too terribly, you would fright the duchess and the ladies, that they would shriek; and that were enough to hang us all. All. That would hang us every mother's son. Bot. I grant you, friends, if that you should fright the ladies out of their wits, they would have no more discretion but to hang us: but I will aggravate my voice so, that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you an 'twere any nightingale. Quin. You can play no part but Pyramus: for Pyramus is a sweet-fac'd man; a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day; a most lovely, gentleman-like man: therefore you must needs play Pyramus. Bot. Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I best to play it in? Quin. Why, what you will. Bot. I will discharge it in either your strawcolour beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purplein-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow.5 Quin. Some of your French crowns have no hai. at all, and then you will play bare-fac'd."- But, masters, here are your parts: and I am to entreat women by boys and men: he could endure the histrionic art nowhere but in religion. H. 5 It seems to have been a custom to stain or dye the beard. So, in Ben Jonson's Silent Woman: I have fitted my divine and canonist, dyed their beards and all." And, in The Alchemist: He has dy'd his beard and all." This allusion to the Corona Veneris, or baldness attendant upon a particular stage of what was then termed the French disease. is too frequent in Shakespeare, and is here explained once for wil you, request you, and desire you, to con them by to-morrow night; and meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moon-light: there will we rehearse; for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogg'd with company, and our devices known. In the mean time, I will draw a bill of properties,' such as our play wants. I pray you, fail ne not. Bot. We will meet; and there we may rehearse more obscenely, and courageously. Take pains; be perfect; adieu. Quin. At the duke's oak we meet. Bot. Enough: Hold, or cut bow-strings. [Exeunt. ACT II. SCENE I. A Wood near Athens. Enter a Fairy, and Pʊcê, from opposite sides. Thorough bush, thorough brier, Thorough flood, thorough fire, The properties were the furnishings of the stage, the keeper of which is still called the property-man. A curious list of them is given by Brome, 1640: "He has got into our tiring-house amongst us, Our planets and our constellations, Our giants, monsters, furies, beasts, and bugbears, B I do wander every where, Swifter than the moon's sphere;' To dew her orbs 2 upon the green: ality among archers; as we should say,- -"I'll be there, rain or shine." H. 1 Mr. Collier informs us that “ Coleridge, in his lectures in 1818, was very emphatic in his praises of the beauty of these lines: 'the measure,' he said, 'had been invented and employed by Shakespeare for the sake of its appropriateness to the rapid and airy motion of the Fairy by whom the passage is delivered.'" And in his Literary Remains, after analyzing the measure, he speaks of the "delightful effect on the ear," caused by "the sweet transition" from the amphimacers of the first four lines to the trochaic of the next two. An absurd passion for rhymed regularity has caused moon's to be usually printed as a dissyllable, moones. There is no authority for this: besides, it mars the beauty of the verse; and is quite unnecessary, as the pronouncing of moon's naturally occupies the time of a trochee. Coleridge is rather hard upon Theobald for shortening thorough into through, as he had the authority of the folio and one of the quartos for doing so. But if any confirmation of thorough be wanted, we have it in Dray ton's imitation of the passage in his Nymphidia, 1619 : "Thorough brake, thorough brier, Thorough muck, thorough mier, And thus goes Puck about it." H. These orbs were the verdant circles which the sweet old superstition here so sweetly delineated called fairy-rings, supposing them to be made by the night-tripping fairies dancing their merry roundels. As the ground became parched under the feet of the moonlight dancers, Puck's office was to refresh it with sprinklings of dew, thus making it greener than ever. Science has of course brushed away the charm that once hung about these circles; but we are not aware that it has given any better explanation of them than that of the old superstition. H. 3 The allusion is to Elizabeth's band of gentlemen pensioners, who were chosen from among the handsomest and tallest young men of family and fortune; they were dressed in habits richly garnished with gold lace. See The Merry Wives of Windsor Act ii. sc. 2, note 9 |