Scene 1. Page 157.
Moon. This lantern doth the horned moon present.
But why horned? He evidently refers to the materials of which the lantern was made.
Scene 2. Page 168.
Puck. By the triple Hecat's team.
By this team is meant the chariot of the moon, said to be drawn by two horses, the one black, the other white. It is probable that Shakspeare might have consulted some translation of Boccaccio's Genealogy of the gods, which, as has been already remarked, appears to have occasionally supplied him with his mythological information. As this is the first time we meet with the name of Hecate in our author, it may be proper to notice the error he has committed in making it a word of two syllables, which he has done in several other places, though in one (viz. I. Henry Sixth, if he wrote that play) it is rightly made a trisyllable:
"I speak not to that railing Hĕcătē."
Act III. Scene 2.
His contemporaries have usually given it properly. Thus Spenser in the Fairy queen,
"As Hĕcătē, in whose almighty hand."
B. vii. Canto 6.
Ben Jonson has, of course, always been correct. Mr. Malone observes, in a note on Macbeth, Act III. Scene 5, that Marlowe, though a scholar, has used the word Hecate as a dissyllable. It may be added that Middelton and Golding have done the same; the latter in his translation of Ovid, book vii. has used it in both ways.