A pretty fancy is referred to in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Capulet says:
“When the sun sets, the air doth drizzle dew;
But for the sunset of my brother’s son
It rains downright.”
And so, too, in the “Rape of Lucrece:”
“But as the earth doth weep, the sun being set.”
“That Shakespeare thought it was the air,” says Singer,[91] “and not the earth, that drizzled dew, is evident from many passages in his works. Thus, in ‘King John’ (ii. 1) he says: ‘Before the dew of evening fall.’” Steevens, alluding to the following passage in “A Midsummer-Night’s Dream” (iii. 1), “and when she [i. e., the moon] weeps, weeps every little flower,” says that Shakespeare “means that every little flower is moistened with dew, as if with tears; and not that the flower itself drizzles dew.”
By a popular fancy, the sun was formerly said to dance at its rising on Easter morning—to which there may be an allusion in “Romeo and Juliet” (iii. 5), where Romeo, addressing Juliet, says:
“look, love, what envious streaks
Do lace the severing clouds in yonder east;
Night’s candles are burnt out, and jocund day
Stands tiptoe on the misty mountain tops.”
We may also compare the expression in “Coriolanus” (v. 4):
“The trumpets, sackbuts, psalteries, and fifes,
Tabors, and cymbals, and the shouting Romans,
Make the sun dance.”
Mr. Knight remarks, there was “something exquisitely beautiful in the old custom of going forth into the fields before the sun had risen on Easter Day, to see him mounting over the hills with tremulous motion, as if it were an animate thing, bounding in sympathy with the redeemed of mankind.”[92]