A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
Page: 38

Pyramus, or nothing.

[Enter BOTTOM.]

BOTTOM
Where are these lads? where are these hearts?

QUINCE
Bottom!--O most courageous day! O most happy hour!

BOTTOM
Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not
what; for if I tell you, I am not true Athenian. I will tell you
everything, right as it fell out.

QUINCE
Let us hear, sweet Bottom.

BOTTOM
Not a word of me. All that I will tell you is, that the
duke hath dined. Get your apparel together; good strings to
your beards, new ribbons to your pumps; meet presently at the
palace; every man look over his part; for the short and the long
is, our play is preferred. In any case, let Thisby have clean
linen; and let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for
they shall hang out for the lion's claws. And, most dear actors,
eat no onions nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath; and
I do not doubt but to hear them say it is a sweet comedy. No more
words: away! go; away!

[Exeunt.]



ACT V

SCENE I. Athens. An Apartment in the Palace of THESEUS.

[Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTA, PHILOSTRATE, Lords, and Attendants.]

HIPPOLYTA
'Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

THESEUS
More strange than true. I never may believe
These antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.
The lunatic, the lover, and the poet
Are of imagination all compact:
One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is the madman: the lover, all as frantic,
Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:
The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination,
That, if it would but apprehend some joy,
It comprehends some bringer of that joy;
Or in the night, imagining some fear,
How easy is a bush supposed a bear?

HIPPOLYTA
But all the story of the night told over,