A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
Page: 37

[Exeunt.]

[As they go out, BOTTOM awakes.]

BOTTOM
When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer. My next is 'Most
fair Pyramus.'--Heigh-ho!--Peter Quince! Flute, the
bellows-mender! Snout, the tinker! Starveling! God's my life,
stol'n hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare
vision. I have had a dream--past the wit of man to say
what dream it was.--Man is but an ass if he go about
to expound this dream. Methought I was--there is no man can tell
what. Methought I was, and methought I had,--but man is but a
patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The
eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man's
hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart
to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a
ballad of this dream: it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because
it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a
play, before the duke: peradventure, to make it the more
gracious, I shall sing it at her death.

[Exit.]



SCENE II. Athens. A Room in QUINCE'S House.

[Enter QUINCE, FLUTE, SNOUT, and STARVELING.]

QUINCE
Have you sent to Bottom's house? is he come home yet?

STARVELING
He cannot be heard of. Out of doubt, he is transported.

FLUTE
If he come not, then the play is marred; it goes not
forward, doth it?

QUINCE
It is not possible: you have not a man in all Athens
able to discharge Pyramus but he.

FLUTE
No; he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in
Athens.

QUINCE
Yea, and the best person too: and he is a very paramour
for a sweet voice.

FLUTE
You must say paragon: a paramour is, God bless us, a thing of
naught.

[Enter SNUG.]

SNUG
Masters, the duke is coming from the temple; and there is
two or three lords and ladies more married: if our sport had gone
forward, we had all been made men.

FLUTE
O sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a day
during his life; he could not have 'scaped sixpence a-day; an
the duke had not given him sixpence a-day for playing Pyramus,
I'll be hanged; he would have deserved it: sixpence a-day in