Page:Midsummer Night's Dream (1918) Yale.djvu/96

84  A popular retort which is flung out by Bottom with no consciousness of its special appropriateness.

 plain-song. Just what characterization of the cuckoo's song is intended is not clear. Perhaps the comparison is between the simple musical interval of the cuckoo's song and that which often occurs at the end of a phrase in the chanting of the psalms. The bird's cry of 'Cuckoo' gives rise in the following lines to one of the common Elizabethan jokes about cuckolds.

 Moth. The meaning of this name appears when it is given its Elizabethan pronunciation, 'mote,' i.e., a minute particle, as of dust in a sunbeam.

 our stamp. Those who are puzzled by the unexpected 'our' instead of 'my,' or who fail to see the alarming effect of the stamping of so diminutive a being, may escape the difficulty by adopting the emendation (first suggested by Allen) at one stamp, i.e., 'in one rush.' But cf. IV. i. 91, 92.

 costs the fresh blood dear. An allusion to the once popular belief that sighing lowers vitality.

 'If Lysander's present protestations are true, they destroy the truth of his former vows to Hermia, and the contest between these two truths, which in themselves are holy, must in the issue be devilish and end in the destruction of both.' (W. A. Wright.)

 There is some doubt as to the extent to which Shakespeare here pushes his allusion to heraldry, but the following note is satisfactory enough: 'Helen exemplifies her position by a simile,—"we had two of the first, i.e., bodies, like the double coats [of arms] in heraldry that belong to man and wife as one person, but which, like our single heart, have but one crest. (Douce.)

 The punctuation adopted in the text is the result of an attempt to make sense out of the