Description: I'm Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. SHAKE-SPEARE. I wrote it all, now I write a blog. Re-learn everything you think you know, because most of what you were taught is wrong.
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream , Act 5, Scene 1. We’re near the end of the play, at the climax of the play inside the play, The Most Lamentable Comedy, and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and Thisbe . The story, adapted by carpenter Peter Quince, is being performed by his fellow mechanicals. Puck’s the one who called them rude. Weaver Nick Bottom, recovered from his enchantment with an ass’s head, plays the young lover Pyramus. Pyramus arrives at an arranged meeting place to find his sweetheart Thisbe missing. She w
Pyramus begins in (iambic) pentameter, then switches to couplet-rhymed fourteeners, heptameter. What follows beneath this screencap from the First Folio is the text with a few tweaks and the lines laid out more clearly than they are in most printed editions of the play. That’s how Quince’s heptameter is hidden, or nearly so. If you see the lines set like this: and you aren’t already aware of what they are, it’s less likely that your mind’s ear will hear them as heptameter. The long lines were too wide for t