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Nascent Drama

[Athens. QUINCE'S house.]
[Enter QUINCE, FLUTE, SNOUT, and STARVELING]
 
QUINCE
Have you sent to Bottom's house? is he come home yet?
 
STARVELING
He cannot be heard of. Out of doubt he is
transported.
 
FLUTE
If he come not, then the play is marred: it goes
not forward, doth it?
 
QUINCE
It is not possible: you have not a man in all
Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he.
 
FLUTE
No, he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft
man in Athens.
 
QUINCE
Yea and the best person too; and he is a very
paramour for a sweet voice.
 
FLUTE
You must say 'paragon:' a paramour is, God bless us,
a thing of naught.
[Enter SNUG]
 
SNUG
Masters, the duke is coming from the temple, and
there is two or three lords and ladies more married:
if our sport had gone forward, we had all been made
men.
 
FLUTE
O sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a
day during his life; he could not have 'scaped
sixpence a day: an the duke had not given him
sixpence a day for playing Pyramus, I'll be hanged;
he would have deserved it: sixpence a day in
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 no true Athenian. I
will tell you every thing, right as it fell out.
 
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
o'er 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
pair his nails, for they shall hang out for the
lion's claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onions
nor garlic, 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]
 
[Athens. 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 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,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy's images
And grows to something of great constancy;
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
 
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