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And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear

A merrier hour was never wasted there.

-But room, Faery, 8 here comes Oberon.

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

SCENE II.

Enter OBERON, at one door, with his train, and TITANIA, at another, with her's.

Ob. Ill met by moon-light, proud Titania.

Tita. What, jealous Oberon ?-Fairy, skip hence ; I have forsworn his bed and company.

Ob. Tarry, rash wanton; Am not I thy lord?
Tita. Then I must be thy lady: But I know
When thou hast stol'n away from fairy land,
And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
Playing on pipes of corn,1 and versing love
To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
Come from the farthest steep 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.

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

Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?

Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering night?

[8] The word Fairy, or Faery, was sometimes of three syllables, as often in Spenser.

JOHNSON.

[9] As to the Fairy Queen, (says Mr. Warton, in his Observations on Spenser,) considered apart from the race of fairies, Chaucer, in his Rime of Sir Thopas, mentions her, together with a Fairy land. Again, in the The Wif of Bathes Tale, v. 6439:

"In old days of the king Artour,

"Of which that Bretons spoken gret honour;
"All was this lond fulfilled of faerie;

"The Elf-quene, with hire joly compagnie
"Danced ful oft in many a grene mede :
"This was the old opinion as I rede."

STEEVENS.

[Richard Brathwaite, (Strappado for the Devil, 1615,) has a poem addressed" To the queen of harvest, &c. much honoured by the reed, corn pipe, and whistle:" and it must be remembered, that the shepherd boys of Chaucer's time, had

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......many a floite and litling horne, "And pipés made of greené corne."

RITSON.

[2] The glimmering night is the night faintly illuminated_with_stars.

STEEVENS.

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From Perigenia, whom he ravished ?3

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

Tita. These are the forgeries of jealousy:
And never, since the middle summer's spring,4
Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
By paved fountain,5 or by rushy brook,
Or on 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 river6 made so proud,
That they have over-borne their continents :7
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 murrain flock;8

[3] Thus all the editors; but our author, who diligently perused Plutarch, and gleaned from him, where his subject would admit, knew, from the life of Theseus, that her name was Perygine, (or Perigune,) by whom Theseus had his son Menalippus. She was the daughter of Sinnis, a cruel robber, and tormenter of passengers in the Isthmus. Plutarch and Athenæus are both express in the circumstance of Theseus' ravishing her. THEOBALD.

Egle, Ariadne, and Antiopa, were all at different times mistresses to Theseus. See Plutarch.

Theobald cannot be blamed for his emendation; and yet it is well known that our ancient authors, as well as the French and the Italians, were not scrupulously nice about proper names, but almost always corrupted them. STEEVENS.

[4] By the middle summer's spring, our author seems to mean the beginning of middle or mid summer. Spring, for beginning, he uses again in King Hen ry IV. Part II.

"As flaws congealed in the spring of day :" which expression has authority from the scripture, St. Luke, i. 78: "whereby the day-spring from on high hath visited us." STEEVENS.

[5] A fountain laid round the edge with stone. JOHNSON.

The epithet seems here intended to mean no more than that the beds of these fountains were covered with pebbles, in opposition to those of the rushy brooks which are oozy. HENLEY.

[6] Thus the quartos: the folio reads, petty. Shakspeare has in Lear the same word, low pelting farms. The meaning is plainly, despicable, mean, sorry, wretched; but as it is a word without any reasonable etymology, I should be glad to dismiss it for petty: yet it is undoubtedly right. We have "" petty pelting officer" in Measure for Measure. JOHNSON.

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[7] Borne down the banks that contained them. So, in Lear:
--close pent up guilts,
"Rive your concealing continents."

[8] The murrain is the plague in cattle.

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JOHNSON.

STEEVENS.

3

The nine-men's morris is fill'd up with mud ;9
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green, 1
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable :
The human mortals want their winter here ;2
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 Hyems' chin, and icy crown,
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set :5 The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn,6 angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the 'mazed world,

[9] In that part of Warwickshire where Shakspeare was educated, and the neighbouring parts of Northamptonshire, the shepherds and other boys dig up the turf with their knives to represent a sort of imperfect chess-board. It consists of a square,sometimes only a foot diameter,sometimes 3 or 4 yards. Within this is another,every side of which is a parallel to the external square; and these squares are joined by lines drawn from each corner of both squares, and the middle of each line. One party, or player, has wooden pegs, the other stones, which they move in such a manner as to take up each other's men as they are called, and the area of the inner square is called the pound, in which the men taken up are impounded. These figures are by the country people called Nine Men's Morris, or Merrils; and are so called, because each party has nine men. These figures are always cut upon the green turf or leys, as they are called, or upon the grass at the end of ploughed lands, and in rainy seasons never fail to be choaked up with mud. JAMES.

[1] This alludes to a sport still followed by boys; i. e. what is now called running the figure of eight. STEEV.

[2] The confusion of seasons here described, is no more than a poetical account of the weather, which happened in England about the time when this play was first published. For this information I am indebted to chance, which furnished me with a few leaves of an old meteorological history. STE. [3] Rheumatic diseases signified in Shakspeare's time, not what we now call rheumatism, but distillations from the head, catarrhs, &c. MALONE. [4] i.e. this perturbation of the elements. STEEV.

By distemperature, I imagine is meant, in this place, the perturbed state in which the king and queen had lived for some time past. MAL.

[5] This singular image was, I believe, suggested to our poet by Golding's translation of Övid, Book II:

"And lastly, quaking for the colde, stood Winter all forlorne,
"With rugged head as white as dove, and garments all to torne,
"Forladen with isycles, that dangled up and downe

"

Upon his gray and hoarie beard, and snowie frozen crown."

MAL.

[6] The childing autumn is the pregnant autumn, frugifer autumnus. STE. Childing is an old term of botany, when a small flower grows out of a large one; "the childing autumn," therefore means the autumn which unseasonably produces flowers on those of summer. Florists have also a childing daisy, and a childing scabious. HOLT WHITE.

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