Passages from A Midsummer Night's Dream

A description of a place so lush it can put a queen to sleep.

I know a banke where the wilde time blowes,Where Oxslips and the nodding Violet growes,Quite ouer-cannoped with luscious woodbine,With sweet muske roses, and with Eglantine;There sleepes Tytania, sometime of the night,Lul’d in these flowers, with dances and delight:And there the snake throwes her enammel’d skinne,Weed wide enough to rap a Fairy in.

The friend left behind when the wedding invitations go out.

We Hermia, like two Artificiall gods,Haue with our needles, created both one flower,Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,Both warbling of one song, both in one key:As if our hands, our sides, voices, and mindesHad beene incorporate. So we grew together,Like to a double cherry, seeming parted,But yet a vnion in partition,Two louely berries molded on one stem,So with two seeming bodies, but one heart,Two of the first life coats in Heraldry,Due but to one and crowned with one crest.And will you rent our ancient loue asunder,To ioyne with men in scorning your poore friend?

The brighter the flash, the less of it there is to keep.

Swift as a shadow, short as any dreame,Briefe as the lightning in the collied night,That (in a spleene) vnfolds both heauen and earth;And ere a man hath power to say, behold,The iawes of darkness do deuoure it vp:So quicke bright things come to confusion

She is as pretty as her rival, and it changes nothing.

How happy some, ore othersome can be?Through Athens I am thought as faire as she.But what of that? Demetrius thinkes not so:He will not know, what all, but he doth know,And as hee erres, doting on Hermias eyes;So I, admiring of his qualities:Things base and vilde, holding no quantity,Loue can transpose to forme and dignity,Loue lookes not with the eyes, but with the minde,And therefore is wing’d Cupid painted blinde.Nor hath loues minde of any iudgement taste:Wings and no eyes, figure, vnheedy haste.

A job description from the smallest, fastest worker in the wood.

Ouer hil, ouer dale, through bush, through briar,Ouer parke, ouer pale, through flood, through fire,I do wander euerie where, swifter then y Moons sphere;And I serue the Fairy Queene, to dew her orbs vpon the green.The Cowslips tall, her pensioners bee,In their gold coats, spots you see,Those be Rubies, Fairie fauors,In those freckles, liue their sauors,I must go seeke some dew drops heere,And hang a pearle in euery cowslips eare.

Meet the household spirit who hides in the ale and trips your aunt.

I iest to Oberon, and make him smile,When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,Neighing in likenesse of a silly foale,And sometime lurke I in a Gossips bole,In very likenesse of a roasted crab:And when she drinkes, against her lips I bob,And on her withered dewlop poure the Ale.The wisest Aunt telling the saddest tale,Sometime for three-foot stoole, mistaketh me,Then slip I from her bum, downe topples she,And tailour cries, and fals into a coffe.And then the whole quire hold their hips, and loffe,And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and sweare,A merrier houre was neuer wasted there.

Why the brain turns a bush into a bear on a dark walk home.

And as imagination bodies forth the forms of thingsVnknowne; the Poets pen turnes them to shapes,And giues to aire nothing, a locall habitation,And a name. Such tricks hath strong imagination,That if it would but apprehend some ioy,It comprehends some bringer of that ioy.Or in the night, imagining some feare,Howe easie is a bush suppos’d a Beare?

The hour when the fire is dying and the dead are allowed out.

Now the wasted brands doe glow,Whil’st the scritch-owle, scritching loud,Puts the wretch that lies in woe,In remembrance of a shrowd.Now it is the time of night,That the graues, all gaping wide,Euery one lets forth his spright,In the Church-way paths to glide,And we Fairies, that do runne,By the triple Hecates teame,From the presence of the Sunne,Following darkenesse like a dreame,Now are frollicke; not a MouseShall disturbe this hallowed house.

He won his bride with a sword; tonight he tries another instrument.

Stirre vp the Athenian youth to merriments,Awake the pert and nimble spirit of mirth,Turne melancholy forth to Funerals:The pale companion is not for our pompe,Hippolita, I woo’d thee with my sword,And wonne thy loue, doing thee iniuries:But I will wed thee in another key,With pompe, with triumph, and with reuelling.