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.

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Quin. Some of your French crowns have no hair at all, and then you will play barefaced. But, masters, here are your parts: and I am to entreat 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 moonlight: there will we rehearse; for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogged 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 me not.

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Bot. We will meet; and there we may rehearse most obscenely and courageously. Take pains; be perfect: adieu.

Quin. At the duke's oak we meet.

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Bot. Enough; hold or cut bow-strings. [Exeunt.

ACT II.

SCENE I. A wood near Athens.

Enter, from opposite sides, a Fairy, and PUCK.

Puck. How now, spirit! whither wander you ? Over hill, over dale,

Fai.

Thorough bush, thorough brier,

Over park, over pale,

Thorough flood, thorough fire,

I do wander every where,
Swifter than the moon's sphere;
And I serve the fairy queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green.
The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
In their gold coats spots you see;
Those be rubies, fairy favours,

In those freckles live their savours.
I must go seek some dewdrops here,
And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone:
Our queen and all her elves come here anon.

Puck. The king doth keep his revels here to

night:

Take heed the queen come not within his sight;

For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

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Because that she as her attendant hath

A lovely boy, stolen from an Indian king;
She never had so sweet a changeling;
And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild;

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But she perforce withholds the loved boy,

Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her

joy:

And now they never meet in grove or green,
By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
But they do square, that all their elves for fear
Creep into acorn-cups and hide them there.

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Fai. Either I mistake your shape and making quite,

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Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
Call'd Robin Goodfellow. Are not you he
That frights the maidens of the villagery;
Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,
And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck, 40
You do their work, and they shall have good luck :
Are not you he?

Puck.

Thou speak'st aright;

I am that merry wanderer of the night.
I jest to Oberon, and make him smile,
When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:
And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl,
In very likeness of a roasted crab;

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And when she drinks, against her lips I bob
And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.
The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,
And tailor' cries, and falls into a cough;

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And then the whole quire hold their hips and

laugh,

And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear

A merrier hour was never wasted there.

But, room, fairy! here comes Oberon.

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Fai. And here my mistress. Would that he were gone!

Enter, from one side, OBERON with his train; from the other, TITANIA, with hers.

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Obe. Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania. Tita. What, jealous Oberon! - Fairies, skip hence:

I have forsworn his bed and company.

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Obe. Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord? Tita. Then I must be thy lady; but I know When thou hast stolen away from fairy land, And in the shape of Corin sat all day, Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here, Come from the farthest steppe of India? But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon, Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love, To Theseus must be wedded, and you come To give their bed joy and prosperity.

Obe. How canst thou thus for shame, Titania, Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,

Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?

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Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering

night

From Perigenia, whom he ravished?

And make him with fair Egle break his faith,
With Ariadne and Antiopa?

Tita. These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,

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Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,

By paved fountain or by rushy brook,

Or in the beached margent of the sea,

To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents:
The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest:
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hiems' thin and icy crown
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change

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