“Have you the lion’s part written? Pray you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study,” said Snug modestly, for he was a very meek and mild little man.
“You may do it extempore, for it is nothing but roaring,” said Quince.
“Let me play the lion, too,” burst in Bottom. “I will roar that it will do any man’s heart good to hear me. I will roar that I will make the Duke say: ‘Let him roar again.’”
“If you should do it too terribly, you would frighten the Duchess and the ladies out of their wits, so that they would shriek, and that were enough to hang us all,” said Quince.
“That would hang us, every mother’s son,” agreed the rest of the little band, quaking with terror.
“I grant you, friends, that if you should frighten the ladies out of their wits, they would have no more discretion but to hang us,” said Bottom. “But I will aggravate my voice so that I will roar as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar as if it were any nightingale.”
“You can play no part but Pyramus,” said Quince firmly. So Bottom had reluctantly to give in, and to devote his energies to deciding what coloured beard it would be best to play the important part of Pyramus in. It was really quite a difficult matter, there were so many to choose from,—straw-colour, orange tawny, purple-in-grain, or French-crown, which was perfect yellow. But Quince said any colour would do, or he might play it without a beard.
“Masters, here are your parts,” he concluded, “and I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you, to know them by to-morrow night, and meet me in the palace wood, a mile outside the town, by moonlight. There we will rehearse, for if we meet in the city we shall be dogged with company, and our devices known. I pray you, do not fail me.”
The Magic Flower
Now, the wood which Hermia and Lysander had appointed as their trysting-place, and where Bottom and his fellow-actors were also to meet to rehearse their play, was the favourite haunt of fairies, and on this Midsummer Night Oberon, King of the Fairies, was to hold his revels there. Sad to say, for some time past there had been great dissension between Oberon and his Queen, Titania, and because of their quarrels nothing went well in the surrounding country. The cause of their disagreement was a lovely Indian boy, the sweetest little changeling imaginable. Queen Titania had him as her attendant, and jealous Oberon wanted the boy for his own page. Titania refused to give him up; he was the child of a dear friend, now dead, and for her sake she had reared up the boy, and for her sake she would not part with him.