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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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ACT III. SCENE I The wood. TITANIA lying asleep Enter QUINCE, SNUG, BOTTOM, FLUTE, SNOUT, and STARVELING BOTTOM Are we all met? QUINCE Pat, pat; and here’s a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal. This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake our tiring-house; and we will do it in action, as we will do it before the Duke. BOTTOM Peter Quince! QUINCE What sayest thou, bully Bottom? BOTTOM There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisby that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself; which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that? SNOUT By’r lakin, a parlous fear. STARVELING I believe we must leave the killing out, when all is done. BOTTOM Not a whit; I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue; and let the prologue seem to say we will do no harm with our swords, and that Pyramus is not kill’d indeed; and for the more better assurance, tell them that I Pyramus am not Pyramus but Bottom the weaver. This will put them out of fear. QUINCE Well, we will have such a prologue; and it shall be written in eight and six. BOTTOM No, make it two more; let it be written in eight and eight. SNOUT Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion? STARVELING I fear it, I promise you. BOTTOM Masters, you ought to consider with yourself to bring inGod shield us!- a lion among ladies is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful wild-fowl than your lion living; and we ought to look to’t. SNOUT Therefore another prologue must tell he is not a lion. BOTTOM Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion’s neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect: ‘Ladies,’ or ‘Fair ladies, I would wish you’ or ‘I would request you’ or ‘I would entreat you not to fear, not to tremble. My life for yours! If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life. No, I am no such thing; I am a man as other men are.’ And there, indeed, let him name his name, and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner. QUINCE Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things-that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber; for, you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moonlight. SNOUT Doth the moon shine that night we play our play? BOTTOM A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanack; find out moonshine, find out moonshine. QUINCE Yes, it doth shine that night. BOTTOM Why, then may you leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open; and the moon may shine in at the casement. QUINCE Ay; or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern, and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine. Then there is another thing: we must have a wall in the great chamber; for Pyramus and Thisby, says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall. SNOUT You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom? BOTTOM Some man or other must present Wall; and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough- |
