With loyal blazon, evermore be blest.
And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,
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Like to the Garter compass, in a ring.
Th’expressure that it bears, green let it be,
More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;
And Honi soit qui mal y pense write
In em’rald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white,
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Like sapphire, pearl and rich embroidery,
Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee:
Fairies use flowers for their charactery.
Away, disperse. But till ’tis one o’clock,
Our dance of custom round about the oak
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Of Herne the hunter let us not forget.
EVANS
Pray you, lock hand in hand, yourselves in order set;
And twenty glow-worms shall our lanterns be
To guide our measure round about the tree. –
But stay, I smell a man of middle earth.
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FALSTAFF Heavens defend me from that Welsh fairy,
lest he transform me to a piece of cheese!
PISTOL
Vile worm, thou wast o’erlooked even in thy birth.
QUICKLY With trial fire touch me his finger end:
If he be chaste, the flame will back descend
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And turn him to no pain; but if he start,
It is the flesh of a corrupted heart.
PISTOL A trial, come.
EVANS Come, will this wood take fire?
[They put the tapers to his fingers, and he starts.]
FALSTAFF O, o, o!
QUICKLY Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire!
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About him, fairies, sing a scornful rhyme,
And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time.
The fairies’ song.
Fie on sinful fantasy,
Fie on lust and luxury!
Lust is but a bloody fire,
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Kindled with unchaste desire,
Fed in heart, whose flames aspire,
As thoughts do blow them, higher and higher.
Pinch him, fairies, mutually,
Pinch him for his villainy.
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Pinch him and burn him and turn him about,
Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out.
During the song they pinch him, and CAIUS comes one
way and steals away a boy in green, and SLENDER
another way takes a boy in white; FENTON comes in and
steals Mistress Anne. A noise of hunting is heard within,
and all the fairies run away. Falstaff pulls off his buck’s
head, and rises up.
Enter PAGE, FORD, MISTRESS PAGE and MISTRESS FORD.
PAGE
Nay, do not fly – I think we have watched you now.
Will none but Herne the hunter serve your turn?
MISTRESS PAGE
I pray you, come, hold up the jest no higher. –
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Now, good Sir John, how like you Windsor wives?
See you these, husband? [Points to the horns.]
Do not these fair yokes
Become the forest better than the town?
FORD Now, sir, who’s a cuckold now? Master Brook,
Falstaff ‘s a knave, a cuckoldly knave. Here are his
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horns, Master Brook. And, Master Brook, he hath
enjoyed nothing of Ford’s but his buck-basket, his
cudgel and twenty pounds of money, which must be
paid to Master Brook. His horses are arrested for it,
Master Brook.
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MISTRESS FORD Sir John, we have had ill luck, we could
never meet. I will never take you for my love again, but
I will always count you my deer.
FALSTAFF I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.
FORD Ay, and an ox too: both the proofs are extant.
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FALSTAFF And these are not fairies. I was three or four
times in the thought they were not fairies, and yet the
guiltiness of my mind, the sudden surprise of my
powers, drove the grossness of the foppery into a
received belief, in despite of the teeth of all rhyme and
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reason, that they were fairies. See now how wit may be
made a Jack-a-Lent when ’tis upon ill employment!
EVANS Sir John Falstaff, serve Got, and leave your
desires, and fairies will not pinse you.
FORD Well said, fairy Hugh.
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EVANS And leave you your jealousies too, I pray you.
FORD I will never mistrust my wife again, till thou art
able to woo her in good English.
FALSTAFF Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it,
that it wants matter to prevent so gross o’erreaching as
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this? Am I ridden with a Welsh goat too? Shall I have
a coxcomb of frieze? ’Tis time I were choked with a
piece of toasted cheese.
EVANS Seese is not good to give putter – your belly is all
putter.
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FALSTAFF ‘Seese’ and ‘putter’? Have I lived to stand at
the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is
enough to be the decay of lust and late-walking
through the realm.
MISTRESS PAGE Why, Sir John, do you think, though we
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would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head
and shoulders, and have given ourselves without
scruple to hell, that ever the devil could have made
you our delight?
FORD What, a hodge-pudding? A bag of flax?
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MISTRESS PAGE A puffed man?
PAGE Old, cold, withered and of intolerable entrails?
FORD And one that is as slanderous as Satan?
PAGE And as poor as Job?
FORD And as wicked as his wife?
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EVANS And given to fornication, and to taverns, and
sack, and wine, and metheglins, and to drinkings, and
swearings, and starings; pribbles and prabbles?
FALSTAFF Well, I am your theme: you have the start of
me. I am dejected, I am not able to answer the Welsh
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flannel, ignorance itself is a plummet o’er me. Use me
as you will.
FORD Marry, sir, we’ll bring you to Windsor to one
Master Brook that you have cozened of money, to
whom you should have been a pander. Over and above
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that you have suffered, I think to repay that money
will be a biting affliction.
PAGE Yet be cheerful, knight: thou shalt eat a posset
tonight at my house, where I will desire thee to laugh
at my wife that now laughs at thee. Tell her Master
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Slender hath married her daughter.
MISTRESS PAGE [aside] Doctors doubt that: if Anne Page
be my daughter, she is, by this, Doctor Caius’s wife.
Enter SLENDER.
SLENDER Whoa, ho, ho, father Page!
PAGE Son, how now? How now, son, have you
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dispatched?
SLENDER Dispatched? I’ll make the best in
Gloucestershire know on’t – would I were hanged, la,
else!
PAGE Of what, son?
SLENDER I came yonder at Eton to marry Mistress
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Anne Page – and she’s a great lubberly boy! If it had
not been i’the church, I would have swinged him – or
he should have swinged me. If I did
not think it had
been Anne Page, would I might never stir. – And ’tis a
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postmaster’s boy.
PAGE Upon my life, then, you took the wrong.
SLENDER What need you tell me that? I think so, when
I took a boy for a girl! If I had been married to him, for
all he was in woman’s apparel, I would not have had
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him.
PAGE Why, this is your own folly. Did not I tell you how
you should know my daughter by her garments?
SLENDER I went to her in white, and cried ‘mum’, and
she cried ‘budget’, as Anne and I had appointed. –
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And yet it was not Anne, but a postmaster’s boy.
MISTRESS PAGE Good George, be not angry: I knew of
your purpose, turned my daughter into green, and
indeed she is now with the Doctor at the deanery, and
there married.
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Enter CAIUS.
CAIUS Vere is Mistress Page? By gar, I am cozened, I ha’
married un garçon, a boy, un paysan, by gar! A boy it is
not Anne Page. By gar, I am cozened.
MISTRESS PAGE Why, did you take her in green?
CAIUS Ay, by gar, and ’tis a boy! By gar, I’ll raise all Windsor.
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FORD This is strange. Who hath got the right Anne?
Enter FENTON and ANNE PAGE.
PAGE My heart misgives me. – Here comes Master
Fenton. – How now, Master Fenton?
ANNE Pardon, good father – good my mother, pardon.
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PAGE Now, mistress, how chance you went not with
Master Slender?
MISTRESS PAGE
Why went you not with Master Doctor, maid?
FENTON You do amaze her. Hear the truth of it:
You would have married her most shamefully
Where there was no proportion held in love.
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The truth is, she and I, long since contracted,
Are now so sure that nothing can dissolve us.
Th’offence is holy that she hath committed,
And this deceit loses the name of craft,
Of disobedience, and unduteous title,
220
Since therein she doth evitate and shun
A thousand irreligious cursed hours
Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.
FORD Stand not amazed, here is no remedy.
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In love the heavens themselves do guide the state:
Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.
FALSTAFF I am glad, though you have ta’en a special
stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced.
PAGE Well, what remedy? Fenton, God give thee joy!
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What cannot be eschewed must be embraced.
FALSTAFF
When night-dogs run, all sorts of deer are chased.
MISTRESS PAGE
Well, I will muse no further. – Master Fenton,
God give you many, many merry days!
Good husband, let us every one go home,
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And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire,
Sir John and all.
FORD Let it be so, Sir John.
To Master Brook you yet shall hold your word,
For he tonight shall lie with Mistress Ford. Exeunt.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
This play first appeared in print in 1600 in a text which may possibly be based on an authorial manuscript, since it contains a number of spellings which have been identified as Shakespearean and which might have been normalized by a scribe making a copy. The First Quarto was followed by a second in 1619 (an illicit edition, falsely dated 1600) and then by the First Folio in 1623. A Midsummer Night’s Dream is listed amongst Shakespeare’s comedies by Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) and it is generally thought to date from 1594 or 1595, putting it probably after Love’s Labour’s Lost and more certainly before The Merchant of Venice in the chronology of the comedies. It seems to have been written very close in time to Romeo and Juliet; the play-within-the-play of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ provides a parody of the ending of that love-tragedy. More surprisingly, perhaps, its lyrical language has stylistic affinities with that of Richard II, also written around this time.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is relatively unusual in the Shakespeare canon in not having a readily identifiable main source; rather it assembles heterogeneous materials and links them narratively and thematically. Shakespeare could have read about Theseus in Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579), as well as in Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale (c. 1385), which he also adapted loosely for the plot of the four young lovers. (He was to use this poem again for The Two Noble Kinsmen at the very end of his career.) He probably used Arthur Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1565) for the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and he drew on folklore for Puck (Robin Goodfellow) and the fairies. He seems in this play to be thinking about the nature of artistic illusion itself, notably in Theseus’ speech about ‘The lunatic, the lover, and the poet’ in 5.1 and in the courtiers’ comments on the mechanicals’ performance. This final scene has parallels with the show of the Nine Worthies at the end of Love’s Labour’s Lost, though Bottom and his colleagues are less perturbed by their unsympathetic audience.
The Arden Shakespeare Complete Works Page 388