Act 2, Scene 1

A wood near Athens.

[Enter a FAIRY at One door, and PUCK at another.]
Puck
346 How now, spirit! whither wander you?
A Fairy
347 Over hill, over dale,
348 Thorough bush, thorough brier,
349 Over park, over pale,
350 Thorough flood, thorough fire,
351 I do wander everywhere,
352 Swifter than the moon's sphere;
353 And I serve the fairy queen,
354 To dew her orbs upon the green.
355 The cowslips tall her pensioners be:
356 In their gold coats spots you see;
357 Those be rubies, fairy favours,
358 In those freckles live their savours;
359 I must go seek some dew-drops here,
360 And hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear.
361 Farewell, thou lob of spirits; I'll be gone:
362 Our queen and all her elves come here anon.
Puck
363 The king doth keep his revels here to-night;
364 Take heed the Queen come not within his sight.
365 For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,
366 Because that she, as her attendant, hath
367 A lovely boy, stol'n from an Indian king;
368 She never had so sweet a changeling:
369 And jealous Oberon would have the child
370 Knight of his train, to trace the forests wild:
371 But she perforce withholds the loved boy,
372 Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her joy:
373 And now they never meet in grove or green,
374 By fountain clear, or spangled starlight sheen,
375 But they do square; that all their elves for fear
376 Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.
A Fairy
377 Either I mistake your shape and making quite,
378 Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprite
379 Call'd Robin Goodfellow: are not you he
380 That frights the maidens of the villagery;
381 Skim milk, and sometimes labour in the quern,
382 And bootless make the breathless housewife churn;
383 And sometime make the drink to bear no barm;
384 Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?
385 Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,
386 You do their work, and they shall have good luck:
387 Are not you he?
Puck
388 Thou speak'st aright;
389 I am that merry wanderer of the night.
390 I jest to Oberon, and make him smile,
391 When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,
392 Neighing in likeness of a filly foal;
393 And sometime lurk I in a gossip's bowl,
394 In very likeness of a roasted crab;
395 And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob,
396 And on her withered dewlap pour the ale.
397 The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,
398 Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me;
399 Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,
400 And 'tailor' cries, and falls into a cough;
401 And then the whole quire hold their hips and loffe,
402 And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear
403 A merrier hour was never wasted there.—
404 But room, fairy, here comes Oberon.
A Fairy
405 And here my mistress.—Would that he were gone!
[Enter OBERON at one door, with his Train, and TITANIA, at another, with hers.]
Oberon
406 Ill met by moonlight, proud Titania.
Titania
407 What, jealous Oberon! Fairies, skip hence;
408 I have forsworn his bed and company.
Oberon
409 Tarry, rash wanton: am not I thy lord?
Titania
410 Then I must be thy lady; but I know
411 When thou hast stol'n away from fairy-land,
412 And in the shape of Corin sat all day,
413 Playing on pipes of corn, and versing love
414 To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,
415 Come from the farthest steep of India,
416 But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,
417 Your buskin'd mistress and your warrior love,
418 To Theseus must be wedded; and you come
419 To give their bed joy and prosperity.
Oberon
420 How canst thou thus, for shame, Titania,
421 Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,
422 Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?
423 Didst not thou lead him through the glimmering night
424 From Perigenia, whom he ravish'd?
425 And make him with fair Aegle break his faith,
426 With Ariadne and Antiopa?
Titania
427 These are the forgeries of jealousy:
428 And never, since the middle summer's spring,
429 Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,
430 By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,
431 Or on the beached margent of the sea,
432 To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,
433 But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.
434 Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
435 As in revenge, have suck'd up from the sea
436 Contagious fogs; which, falling in the land,
437 Hath every pelting river made so proud
438 That they have overborne their continents:
439 The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,
440 The ploughman lost his sweat; and the green corn
441 Hath rotted ere his youth attain'd a beard:
442 The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
443 And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
444 The nine men's morris is fill'd up with mud;
445 And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,
446 For lack of tread, are undistinguishable:
447 The human mortals want their winter here;
448 No night is now with hymn or carol blest:—
449 Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
450 Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
451 That rheumatic diseases do abound:
452 And thorough this distemperature we see
453 The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
454 Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
455 And on old Hyem's thin and icy crown
456 An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
457 Is, as in mockery, set: the spring, the summer,
458 The childing autumn, angry winter, change
459 Their wonted liveries; and the maz'd world,
460 By their increase, now knows not which is which:
461 And this same progeny of evils comes
462 From our debate, from our dissension:
463 We are their parents and original.
Oberon
464 Do you amend it, then: it lies in you:
465 Why should Titania cross her Oberon?
466 I do but beg a little changeling boy
467 To be my henchman.
Titania
468 Set your heart at rest;
469 The fairy-land buys not the child of me.
470 His mother was a vot'ress of my order:
471 And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
472 Full often hath she gossip'd by my side;
473 And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,
474 Marking the embarked traders on the flood;
475 When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive,
476 And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind;
477 Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait
478 Following,—her womb then rich with my young squire,—
479 Would imitate; and sail upon the land,
480 To fetch me trifles, and return again,
481 As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.
482 But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;
483 And for her sake do I rear up her boy:
484 And for her sake I will not part with him.
Oberon
485 How long within this wood intend you stay?
Titania
486 Perchance till after Theseus' wedding-day.
487 If you will patiently dance in our round,
488 And see our moonlight revels, go with us;
489 If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts.
Oberon
490 Give me that boy and I will go with thee.
Titania
491 Not for thy fairy kingdom. Fairies, away:
492 We shall chide downright if I longer stay.
[Exit TITANIA with her Train.]
Oberon
493 Well, go thy way: thou shalt not from this grove
494 Till I torment thee for this injury.—
495 My gentle Puck, come hither: thou remember'st
496 Since once I sat upon a promontory,
497 And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,
498 Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,
499 That the rude sea grew civil at her song,
500 And certain stars shot madly from their spheres
501 To hear the sea-maid's music.
Puck
502 I remember.
Oberon
503 That very time I saw,—but thou couldst not,—
504 Flying between the cold moon and the earth,
505 Cupid, all arm'd: a certain aim he took
506 At a fair vestal, throned by the west;
507 And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
508 As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts;
509 But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
510 Quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon;
511 And the imperial votaress passed on,
512 In maiden meditation, fancy-free.
513 Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:
514 It fell upon a little western flower,—
515 Before milk-white, now purple with love's wound,—
516 And maidens call it love-in-idleness.
517 Fetch me that flower, the herb I showed thee once:
518 The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
519 Will make or man or woman madly dote
520 Upon the next live creature that it sees.
521 Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again
522 Ere the leviathan can swim a league.
Puck
523 I'll put a girdle round about the earth
524 In forty minutes.
[Exit PUCK.]
Oberon
525 Having once this juice,
526 I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
527 And drop the liquor of it in her eyes:
528 The next thing then she waking looks upon,—
529 Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
530 On meddling monkey, or on busy ape,—
531 She shall pursue it with the soul of love.
532 And ere I take this charm from off her sight,—
533 As I can take it with another herb,
534 I'll make her render up her page to me.
535 But who comes here? I am invisible;
536 And I will overhear their conference.
[Enter DEMETRIUS, HELENA following him.]
Demetrius
537 I love thee not, therefore pursue me not.
538 Where is Lysander and fair Hermia?
539 The one I'll slay, the other slayeth me.
540 Thou told'st me they were stol'n into this wood,
541 And here am I, and wode within this wood,
542 Because I cannot meet with Hermia.
543 Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more.
Helena
544 You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant;
545 But yet you draw not iron, for my heart
546 Is true as steel. Leave you your power to draw,
547 And I shall have no power to follow you.
Demetrius
548 Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?
549 Or, rather, do I not in plainest truth
550 Tell you I do not, nor I cannot love you?
Helena
551 And even for that do I love you the more.
552 I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,
553 The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:
554 Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,
555 Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,
556 Unworthy as I am, to follow you.
557 What worser place can I beg in your love,
558 And yet a place of high respect with me,—
559 Than to be used as you use your dog?
Demetrius
560 Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit;
561 For I am sick when I do look on thee.
Helena
562 And I am sick when I look not on you.
Demetrius
563 You do impeach your modesty too much,
564 To leave the city, and commit yourself
565 Into the hands of one that loves you not;
566 To trust the opportunity of night,
567 And the ill counsel of a desert place,
568 With the rich worth of your virginity.
Helena
569 Your virtue is my privilege for that.
570 It is not night when I do see your face,
571 Therefore I think I am not in the night;
572 Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company;
573 For you, in my respect, are all the world:
574 Then how can it be said I am alone
575 When all the world is here to look on me?
Demetrius
576 I'll run from thee, and hide me in the brakes,
577 And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.
Helena
578 The wildest hath not such a heart as you.
579 Run when you will, the story shall be chang'd;
580 Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase;
581 The dove pursues the griffin; the mild hind
582 Makes speed to catch the tiger,—bootless speed,
583 When cowardice pursues and valour flies.
Demetrius
584 I will not stay thy questions; let me go:
585 Or, if thou follow me, do not believe
586 But I shall do thee mischief in the wood.
Helena
587 Ay, in the temple, in the town, the field,
588 You do me mischief. Fie, Demetrius!
589 Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex:
590 We cannot fight for love as men may do:
591 We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo.
592 I'll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell,
593 To die upon the hand I love so well.
[Exeunt DEMETRIUS and HELENA.]
Oberon
594 Fare thee well, nymph: ere he do leave this grove,
595 Thou shalt fly him, and he shall seek thy love.—
[Re-enter PUCK.]
Oberon
596 Hast thou the flower there? Welcome, wanderer.
Puck
597 Ay, there it is.
Oberon
598 I pray thee give it me.
599 I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,
600 Where ox-lips and the nodding violet grows;
601 Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
602 With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine:
603 There sleeps Titania sometime of the night,
604 Lulled in these flowers with dances and delight;
605 And there the snake throws her enamell'd skin,
606 Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:
607 And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes,
608 And make her full of hateful fantasies.
609 Take thou some of it, and seek through this grove:
610 A sweet Athenian lady is in love
611 With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes;
612 But do it when the next thing he espies
613 May be the lady: thou shalt know the man
614 By the Athenian garments he hath on.
615 Effect it with some care, that he may prove
616 More fond on her than she upon her love:
617 And look thou meet me ere the first cock crow.
Puck
618 Fear not, my lord; your servant shall do so.
[Exeunt.]

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Notes

TLN 354cultural context
“orbs”
Orbs = fairy rings: the circular patches of darker grass (or rings of mushrooms) that country people attributed to fairies dancing. The fairy servant is tasked with making these rings on the village green.
TLN 355historical topical
“pensioners”
Pensioners = the Gentlemen Pensioners, Queen Elizabeth's corps of fifty tall, richly dressed bodyguards. The fairy compares the gold-spotted cowslips to these splendidly uniformed courtiers — a compliment to the Queen embedded in fairy imagery.
TLN 365archaic vocab
“passing fell and wrath”
Passing = exceedingly, extremely (an intensifier now obsolete in this sense). Fell = fierce, cruel. The phrase means 'extremely fierce and angry.' Both words were common in Elizabethan English for violent emotion; neither carries its modern meaning here.
TLN 368cultural context
“changeling”
A changeling is a human child secretly swapped with a fairy substitute. In Elizabethan popular belief, fairies would steal healthy infants and leave a sickly fairy child in their place; the stolen child was raised in the fairy world. Here the 'lovely boy' is the stolen child, coveted by Oberon as a page.
TLN 375archaic vocab
“square”
Square = quarrel, bicker, fall out. The verb is now obsolete in this sense. Puck says whenever Oberon and Titania meet, they inevitably squabble — so violently that even the fairy attendants hide in acorn-cups from fear.
TLN 378cultural context
“knavish sprite”
Robin Goodfellow was the standard Elizabethan name for a household hobgoblin who might help with chores if treated kindly, or play mischievous tricks if offended. Reginald Scot's Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) catalogs him alongside other English fairy beings. Shakespeare merges this English folklore figure with the classical concept of a woodland spirit.
historical Robin Goodfellow
TLN 381archaic vocab
“quern”
A quern is a hand-turned stone mill for grinding grain. Robin Goodfellow was said to sometimes grind grain for a household overnight — or, as a prank, to let the quern run empty so no grinding was done.
TLN 383archaic vocab
“barm”
Barm = the frothy yeast head on fermenting ale or beer. If a batch of ale 'bore no barm,' it failed to ferment properly — a disaster for an Elizabethan household where ale was the daily drink. Robin Goodfellow was blamed for such brewing failures.
TLN 394archaic vocab
“a roasted crab”
A crab here is a crab-apple, not a crustacean. Roasted crab-apples were a common Elizabethan addition to mulled ale or wassail, floating in the bowl and bobbing against drinkers' lips. Puck lurks in a gossip's (old woman's) ale-bowl disguised as one.
TLN 412cultural context
“Corin”
Corin and Phillida are stock names from pastoral poetry: the shepherd-lover and his country sweetheart. Titania accuses Oberon of disguising himself as a rustic shepherd to woo a mortal woman. The names signal the pastoral-romance genre — Corin and Phillida recur across Elizabethan pastoral verse and song.
TLN 416classical allusion
“Amazon”
The Amazons were a legendary nation of warrior women in Greek myth, ruled here by Hippolyta. Titania accuses Oberon of having been Hippolyta's lover; the 'buskin'd mistress' (buskins = high hunting or warrior boots) confirms her identity as the warrior queen who will marry Theseus. Plutarch's Life of Theseus is the main source for his conquest of the Amazons.
classical Theseus (Plutarch's Life)
TLN 424classical allusion
“Perigenia”
Perigenia, Aegle, Ariadne, and Antiopa are four women Theseus was said to have seduced or abducted, according to Plutarch's Life of Theseus. Oberon throws these past conquests at Titania to counter her jealousy — the quarreling royals trade accusations of infidelity using classical myth as ammunition.
classical Theseus (Plutarch's Life)
TLN 437archaic vocab
“pelting”
Pelting = paltry, insignificant, petty. The rivers are normally small and contemptible ('pelting'), but Titania says the floods have swelled them so proud (arrogantly swollen) that they have overflowed their banks. The word has no connection to throwing.
TLN 443archaic vocab
“murrion”
Murrion (murrain) is an epidemic livestock disease, feared throughout early modern England. The image is of sheep and cattle killed by murrain left lying in flooded fields, their carcasses feeding the crows. Titania's speech catalogues the real agricultural miseries caused when the seasons go wrong.
TLN 444cultural context
“nine men's morris”
Nine men's morris is an outdoor board game, played on a diagram of three concentric squares cut into the turf of the village green. Each player has nine pieces and tries to form rows of three. When Titania says the board is 'filled up with mud,' she means the wet weather has obliterated the playing field entirely — ordinary communal recreation has been washed away by the fairy quarrel.
TLN 445archaic vocab
“want”
Want here means lack, not desire. 'The human mortals want their winter here' means they are deprived of the customs of winter — the hymns and carols of Christmas and the church calendar that follow. The disrupted seasons have robbed people of their seasonal rituals.
TLN 455classical allusion
“old Hyem's”
Hyems (Latin: hiems, winter) is the personification of winter as an old man with an icy crown. Shakespeare's image inverts the expected: winter is made to wear a garland of summer buds in mockery, because the seasons have become confused. The Latin name signals a classical personification familiar from Ovid and Virgil.
TLN 470cultural context
“vot'ress of my order”
A votress is a woman who has taken a vow — here, a devotee of Titania's fairy cult. The Indian boy's mother served Titania as a kind of sacred attendant before her death in childbirth. This explains why Titania refuses to surrender the child: he is the orphan of her faithful companion, held by a bond of loyalty that transcends Oberon's royal command.
TLN 497classical allusion
“mermaid, on a dolphin's back”
The image recalls the legend of Arion, the Greek poet who was saved from drowning by a dolphin charmed by his music (Herodotus 1.23-24; Ovid, Fasti II.79-118). Shakespeare pairs it with a mermaid-singer; both figure the power of music to move sea creatures. Oberon's speech frames the fairy realm as overlapping with classical mythology.
TLN 505classical allusion
“Cupid, all arm'd: a certain aim he took”
Cupid (Eros), the Roman god of love, carries a bow and quiver of golden arrows that cause love and leaden arrows that cause repulsion. 'All armed' emphasizes his full martial readiness. His miss creates the magical flower whose juice drives the entire plot.
classical Cupid's golden and leaden arrows
TLN 506historical topical
“fair vestal”
The 'fair vestal, throned by the west' has traditionally been identified as Queen Elizabeth I, the Virgin Queen. A Vestal Virgin in Roman religion was a priestess of Vesta sworn to chastity; Elizabeth cultivated this imagery deliberately. Cupid's arrow fails to pierce her chastity ('quench'd in the chaste beams of the watery moon') — a compliment to the reigning monarch, appropriate for a play likely written for a court wedding.
TLN 516cultural context
“love-in-idleness”
Love-in-idleness is a popular name for the wild pansy (Viola tricolor), also called heartsease. The name evokes idle (unoccupied, foolish) love. Shakespeare invents a mythological origin: the white flower was stained purple when Cupid's arrow grazed it, and its juice — squeezed on sleeping eyelids — causes the afflicted person to dote on the first creature seen.
TLN 522biblical allusion
“leviathan”
Leviathan is the great sea-monster of the Hebrew Bible, used in the Geneva Bible as the ultimate image of vast oceanic power. Oberon's boast — that Puck can circumnavigate the globe before even this enormous creature can swim a single league — is a measure of Puck's supernatural speed.
TLN 523cultural context
“put a girdle round about the earth”
Puck's boast to circumnavigate the globe in forty minutes was contemporary in resonance: Magellan's fleet had completed the first circumnavigation in 1522, and English sea-voyages were a live topic by the 1590s. A girdle (belt) encircling the earth was a standard Elizabethan metaphor for global navigation, used in the cosmographical literature of the age.
TLN 544archaic vocab
“adamant”
Adamant had two meanings in Elizabethan English: the hardest substance known (diamond or loadstone), and a magnet or lodestone. Helena plays on both: Demetrius is hard-hearted (adamant as stone) yet also draws her magnetically (adamant as lodestone). She immediately makes the wordplay explicit — 'you draw not iron, for my heart / Is true as steel.'
TLN 580classical allusion
“Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase”
In Ovid's Metamorphoses, Apollo pursues the nymph Daphne, who flees until she is transformed into a laurel tree. Helena inverts the myth: here the god flees and the nymph is the pursuer — an adynaton (a statement of impossibility) signaling that the natural order has been reversed. The dove-pursues-griffin image in the next line extends the same figure.
TLN 599cultural context
“wild thyme blows”
Oberon's bank is a gallery of real English wildflowers: wild thyme (Thymus serpyllum), oxlips (Primula elatior, a primrose-cowslip cross), violet (Viola), woodbine (honeysuckle, Lonicera periclymenum), musk-roses (Rosa moschata), and eglantine (sweetbriar, Rosa rubiginosa). The list evokes the actual flora of an English wood-edge or hedgebank rather than any Mediterranean setting. Gerard's Herball (1597) identifies all six.