A Midsummer Night's Dream

Act V Scene I: The players are afraid Bottom will not return. Bottom arrives and summons them to the palace. The wedding feast. Theseus demands to see the play. The fairies bless the three couples.

Glossary
Aby -pay the penalty for something
Canker blossom -a worm that will destroy a flower
Choughs -crows
Conn'd -memorized
Fordone -exhausted
Hight -is named
Orbs -fairy rings
Peck -one quarter of a bushel
Purple-in-grain -dyed purple or red
Rere-mice -bats

A Midsummer Night's Dream

This play is pure fantasy. Many Elizabethans believed in fairies, but these beings were no Tinkerbells. They were dark, shriveled little creatures with pointy teeth, who existed somewhere between good and evil and loved to play tricks on foolish mortals. These were kind of like Irish leprechauns--the traditional kind, not the one on the cereal box. Shakespeare gave the world new and improved fairies--tiny creatures who love flowers and help people, especially royalty.
This would be a good time to discuss sexual slang. It would be wrong of me to give away all of a playwright's secrets, but here are a few of his favorite phrases. Arise or stand almost always refers to an erection. There's an amusing bit in Macbeth, for example, where the porter describes how alcohol can make a man "stand to or not stand to"--and makes the appropriate gesture with his key. The word "die" also refers to sexual climax, since the Elizabethans believed that every orgasm shortened a person's life by one minute--what a way to go, eh? (Embarrassed giggles all round>) There are numerous terms for private parts, both male (cod, thing, will, etc.) and female (hell, quaint, count, etc.). And the ultimate insult to a woman was to call her a prostitute or one of its many synonyms.
It only seems fair to offer the puritans equal air time. In 1818 a woman by the name of Harriet Bowdler (who you know was a big hit at parties) published The Family Shakespeare , "in which nothing is added to the original text, but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family." Among other things Miss Bowdler aged Juliet by four years and removed the incest (and thereby most of the main character's motive) from Hamlet. Feel free to check it out--although I'm not sure why you'd want to.

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