Page:Midsummer Night's Dream (1918) Yale.djvu/99

Night's Dream  and 'wall all' (i.e., mure all), it still seems unlikely to be what Shakespeare wrote. In despair most editors have taken refuge in the emendation of Pope here adopted, despite the fact that it is open to serious objection both on literary grounds and because the noun 'mural' does not elsewhere appear as part of Shakespeare's vocabulary. The true reading seems irretrievably lost.

 horns. Moon's lantern had sides of horn instead of glass, so that there is a double significance in his reference to the horned, i.e., crescent, moon. Thereupon Demetrius makes the inevitable Elizabethan joke about the horns which were supposed to grow upon the head of the married man whose wife was unfaithful to him.

 No ace. Demetrius attempts to make a pun on a second sense of 'die,' i.e., one of a pair of dice. Some editors have attempted to help out Demetrius' wit by taking the word as related to 'duo,' i.e., two. The Elizabethan pronunciation of 'ace' gives Theseus a chance for another pun.

 Hecate is called triple because she was as Luna a heavenly goddess, as Diana an earthly one, and as Hecate one of the lower world. When, as the moon-goddess, she disappears at the coming of the sun, the fairies accompany her car.

 It is not improbable that these lines were printed in the wrong order and should be transposed.