CHAPTER III

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE AND E. E. CUMMINGS: A STUDY IN ORIGINAL PUNCTUATION AND SPELLING

THE objections that are raised against the ‘freakishness’ of modernist poetry are usually supported by quotations from poems by E. E. Cummings and others which are not only difficult in construction and reference but are printed queerly on the page. The reader naturally looks for certain land-marks in the poem before he can begin to enjoy it: as the visitor to Paris naturally sets his mental map of the city by the Eiffel Tower and, if the Eiffel Tower were to collapse, would have a difficult time finding his way about for a few days. Modernist poets have removed the well-known land-marks and the reader is likewise bothered. The reasons given for this removal are that land-marks tend to make paths, that paths grow to roads, that roads soon mean walls and railings, and that the pedestrian or motorist, who must keep to the roads, never sees any new scenery.

because you go away i give roses who will advise even yourself, lady in the most certainly (of what we everywhere do not touch) deep things; remembering ever so ... etc.

This is the beginning of one of Mr. Cummings’ poems. The first obvious oddity is the degrading of the personal pronoun ‘I’ into ‘i’. This has a very simple history. The ‘upper case’ was in mediaeval times used for all nouns and proper names and the adjectives formed from them; for the Deity; for Royalty (in ‘We’ and ‘Our’); for certain quasi-divine abstractions such as Mystery, Power, Poetry; and sometimes for ‘She’ and ‘Thou’ and so on, where love gives the pronoun a quasi-divine character. Mr. Cummings protests against the upper case being also allotted to ‘I’: he affects a casualness, a humility, a denial of the idea of personal immortality responsible for ‘I’. Moreover ‘i’ is more detached: it dissociates the author from the speaker of the poem. This use of ‘i’ is in keeping with his use of the word ‘who’, instead of ‘which’, to qualify the roses; the roses become so personal as to deserve the personal rather than the neutral relative. His next idiosyncrasy is his refusal of a capital letter to each new line of the poem. Now, if this convention were not so ancient, it would seem as odd and unnecessary as, for instance, quotation-marks seem in eighteenth-century books enclosing each line of a long speech instead of occurring only at the beginning and end of a passage. The modernist rejection of the initial capital can be justified on the grounds that it gives the first word of each line, which may be a mere ‘and’ or ‘or’, an unnatural emphasis. If for special reasons the poet wishes to capitalize the first word, the fact that it is anyhow capitalized like all the other initial ‘And’s’ and ‘Or’s’ makes any such niceness impossible. Later in the poem Cummings uses the capital letter at the beginning of a new sentence to call attention to the full-stop which might otherwise be missed: but the ‘because’ at the beginning of the poem need not be capitalized because it obviously _is_ the beginning. Similarly, he has suppressed the conventional comma after ‘lady’ because the end of the line makes a natural pause without punctuation. Commas he uses to mark pauses, not merely as the geographical boundaries of a clause. He has even in another poem inserted one between the ‘n’ and ‘g’ of the word ‘falling’ to suggest the slowness of the falling. Colons and semicolons and full stops he uses to mark pauses of varying length. To give a longer pause still he will leave a blank line. In the quotation just given, the new line at ‘remembering’ is to mark a change of tone, though the pause is not longer than a semicolon’s worth. Parentheses he uses for _sotto voce_ pronunciation; or, if they occur in the middle of the word, as in “the taxi-man p(ee)ps his whistle”, they denote a certain quality of the letters enclosed--here the actual sharp whistling sound between the opening and closing (the two p’s) of the taxi-man’s lips. When this system is carried to a point of great accuracy we find lines like the following:

with-ered unspea-king: tWeNtY, f i n g e r s, large

which, quoted detached from their context, seem to support any charge of irrational freakishness, but in their context are completely intelligible. Moreover, Mr. Cummings is protecting himself against future liberties which printers and editors may take with his work, by using a personal typographical system which it will be impossible to revise without destroying the poem.

It may be that he has learned a lesson from the fate that has overtaken Shakespeare’s sonnets: in which not only have changes in spelling and pronunciation been used to justify the liberties that have been taken in ‘modernizing’ the texts; but certain very occasional and obvious printer’s errors in the only edition printed in Shakespeare’s lifetime have been made the excuse for hundreds of quite unjustifiable emendations. Mr. Cummings and Shakespeare have in common a deadly accuracy, and that accuracy makes poems difficult rather than easy. It is this accuracy that frightens Mr. Cummings’ public, it was Shakespeare’s accuracy that provoked his editors to meddle with his texts as being too incomprehensible as they were written. Actually we shall find that Shakespeare is more difficult than Mr. Cummings in thought, though his poems have a more familiar look on the page: Mr. Cummings expresses with an accuracy peculiar to him what is common to everyone, Shakespeare expresses in the conventional form of the time, with greater accuracy, what is peculiar to himself. Let us print two versions of a sonnet by Shakespeare, first the version found in the _Oxford Book of English Verse_ and other popular anthologies which have apparently chosen this sonnet from all the others as being particularly easy to understand, and next the version printed in the 1609 edition of the Sonnets, and apparently, though pirated, printed from Shakespeare’s original manuscript. The alterations, it will be noticed in a comparison of the first with the second, are, with a few exceptions which we will point out later, chiefly in the punctuation and spelling. By showing what great difference in the sense the juggling of punctuation marks has made in Shakespeare’s original sonnet, we shall perhaps be able to sympathize somewhat with what seems typographical perversity in a poet like Mr. Cummings. The modernizing of the spelling is not quite so serious a matter, though we shall see that to change a word like _blouddy_ to _bloody_ makes a difference not only in the atmosphere of the word but in its sound as well.

I

Th’ expense of Spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action; and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoy’d no sooner but despisèd straight; Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallow’d bait On purpose laid to make the taker mad: Mad in pursuit and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell

II

(No. 129)

Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action, and till action, lust Is periurd, murdrous, blouddy full of blame, Sauage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust. Injoyd no sooner but dispised straight, Past reason hunted, and no sooner had Past reason hated as a swollowed bayt, On purpose layd to make the taker mad. Made In pursut and in possession so, Had, hauing, and in quest, to have extreame, A blisse in proofe and proud and very wo, Before a joy proposd behind a dreame, All this the world well knowes yet none knowes well, To shun the heauen that leads men to this hell.

Let our method first be, before trying to match our own intelligence with Shakespeare’s intelligence, to compare these two versions, the original one and the modern one, in order to feel as intimate with the language in which the poem was written as if all these years did not stand between ourselves and Shakespeare. First, then, as to the spelling. As a matter of course the _u_ in _proud_ and _heauen_ changes to _v_; the Elizabethans had no typographical _v_. There are other words in which the change of spelling does not seem to matter. _Expence_, _cruell_, _bayt_, _layd_, _pursut_, _blisse_, _proofe_, _wo_--any of these words taken by themselves are not necessarily affected by modernization; but undoubtedly much of the original atmosphere of the poem is lost by changing them in the gross. Sheer facility in reading a poem is no gain when we are trying to discover what the poem was like for the poet. And when one considers all that has happened to the language since Shakespeare’s time one can understand why Mr. Cummings should set his poems down so that when read they are read as ‘in the original’. But other changes to make this sonnet comprehensible to modern readers have involved more than changes in spelling. _Periurd_ to _perjured_ would have meant, to Shakespeare, the addition of another syllable, as _murdrous_ to _murderous_. _Injoyd_, with the same number of syllables as _periurd_, is however made _Enjoy’d_; while _swollowed_, which must have been meant as a three-syllabled word (Shakespeare used _ed_ as a separate syllable very strictly and did frequently allow himself an extra syllable in his iambic foot) is printed _swallow’d_. When we come to _dispised_, we find in the modern version an accent over the last syllable. By apostrophes and accents and changes of spelling the rhythm and the consistency in spelling of the original is sacrificed; and without making it an easier poem, only a less accurate one. The sound of the poem suffers through respelling as well as through false alterations in the rhythm. _Blouddy_ was pronounced more like _blue-dy_ than _bluddy_; the _ea_ of _extreame_ and _dreame_ were sounded like the _ea_ in great; _Injoyd_ was pronounced as it was written; _periurd_ was probably pronounced _peryurd_. But the changes in punctuation do the most damage: not only to the personal atmosphere of the poem but to the meaning itself. In the second line a semicolon after the first _action_ instead of a comma gives a longer rest than Shakespeare gave; but it also cuts off the idea at _action_ instead of keeping _in action_ and _till action_ together as well as the two _lust_’s. A comma after _blouddy_ separates it from _full_ with which it really forms a single word meaning “full as with blood”. Next come several semicolons for commas; these introduce pauses which break up the continuous flow of ideas treading on one another’s heels. (If Shakespeare had wanted such pauses he would have used semicolons as he does elsewhere.) Particularly serious is the interpolation of a comma after _no sooner had_; for this confines the phrase to a special meaning, _i.e._ “lust no sooner had is hated past reason,” whereas it also means “lust no sooner had _past reason_ is hated past reason”. The comma might as well have been put between _reason_ and _hated_; it would have limited the meaning but no more than has been done. On the other hand a comma is omitted where Shakespeare actually did put one, after _bayt_. With the comma, _On purpose layd_--though it refers to _bayt_--also takes us back to the original idea of _lust_; without the comma it merely carries out the figure of _bayt_. In the original there is a full stop at _mad_, closing the octave; in the revised version a colon is used, making the next line run right on and causing the unpardonable change from _Made_ to _Mad_. The capital _I_ of _In_ shows how carefully the printer copied the manuscript. Shakespeare undoubtedly first wrote the line without _Made_, but probably deciding that such an irregular line was too bold, added _Made_ without changing the capital _I_ to a small one. _Made_ logically follows from _make_ of the preceding line: ‘to make the taker mad, Made (mad)’; but it also returns to the general idea of lust. This change from _Made_ to _Mad_ limits the final _so_ of this line to _Mad_ and provokes another change from comma to semicolon, _i.e._ ‘Mad in pursut and in possession so (mad)’, whereas the idea of _Mad_ is only vaguely echoed in this line from the preceding line. The meaning of the line might reasonably be restricted to: ‘Made In pursut and in possession as follows’: since it is the first line of the sestet, it is more likely to refer forward than back. As a matter of fact, it does both.

The comma between _in quest_ and _to have extreame_ has been moved forward to separate _have_ from _extreame_. The line originally stood for a number of interwoven meanings:

1. The taker of the bait, the man in pursuit and in possession of lust, is made mad, is made like this: he experiences both extremes at once. (What these extremes are the lines following show.)

2. The _Had, having, and in quest_, might have been written in parentheses if Shakespeare had used parentheses. They say, by way of interjection, that lust comprises all the stages of lust: the after-lust period (_Had_), the actual experience of lust (_having_), and the anticipation of lust (_in quest_); and that the extremes of lust are felt in all these stages (_to have extreame_, _i.e._ to have extremes, to have in extreme degrees).

3. Further, one stage in lust is like the others, as extreme as the others. All the distinctions made in the poem between _lust in action_ and lust _till action_, between lust _In pursut_ and lust _in possession_ are made to show that in the end there are no real distinctions. _Had, having and in quest_ is the summing up of this fact.

4. The _Had_, _having_, separately sum up _possession_: that is, the _action_ of lust includes the _expence of Spirit_, _the waste of shame_. The _in quest_, naturally refers to _In pursut_.

5. It must be kept in mind throughout that words qualifying the lust-business refer interchangeably to the taker (the man who lusts), the bait (the object of lust) and lust in the abstract. So: _Had_ may mean the swallowing of the bait by the taker, or the catching of the taker by the bait, or ‘lust had’, or ‘had by lust’; _having_ and _in quest_ are capable of similar interpretations.

These are the numerous possibilities in the line if the original punctuation is kept. But in the revised punctuation it has only one narrow sense, and this not precisely Shakespeare’s intention. By the semicolon placed after _so_ of the preceding line, it is cut off from close co-operation both with the line before and the other preceding lines. By the shifting of the comma not only is a pause removed where Shakespeare put one and the rhythm thus changed, but the line itself loses its point and really does not pull its weight in the poem. In this punctuation the _whole_ line ought to be put into parentheses, as being a mere repetition. The _to have_ linked with _in quest_ is superfluous; _extreme_ set off by itself like this is merely a descriptive adjective already used. Moreover, when the line is thus isolated between two semicolons (after _so_, after _extreme_) _Had_, _having_, etc., instead of effecting a harmony between the various senses given to _lust_ (taker, bait, lust in the abstract), disjoint them and become ungrammatical. _Mad in pursuit, and in possession so_; only refers to _the taker mad_. _A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe_; can only refer to lust in the abstract. Thus this intervening line is just a pompous confusion. The next line (_A blisse in proofe and provd and very wo_,) should explain _to have extreame_; it is not merely another parenthetical line as in the revised version. To fulfil the paradox implied in _extreame_ it should mean that lust is a bliss during the proof and after the proof, and also _very wo_ (real woe) during and after the proof. The altered line only means that lust is a bliss during the proof but a woe after the proof, denying what Shakespeare has been at pains to show all along, that lust is all things at all times. Once the editors tried to repunctuate the line they had to tamper with words themselves in the text. A comma after _proof_ demanded a comma after _proved_. A comma after _proved_ made it necessary to change _and very wo_ to apply to _provd_ only. Another semicolon at the end of this line again detaches a line and further breaks the continuity of the poem. Specifically, by cutting off the following line from itself, it in turn does to the following line what the preceding line did to it: makes it only another antithesis or rhetorical balance (‘a joy in prospect, as against a dream in retrospect’, to repeat the sense of a bliss during proof as against a woe after proof) instead of permitting it to carry on the intricate and careful argument that runs without a stop through the whole sestet. The important thing about this line is that it takes all the meanings in the poem one stage further. Lust in the extreme goes beyond both bliss and woe; it goes beyond reality. It is no longer lust _Had, having and in quest_, it is lust face to face with _love_. Even when consummated, lust still stands before an unconsummated joy, a proposed joy, and proposed not as a joy possible of consummation but one only to be desired through the dream by which lust leads itself on, the dream behind which this proposed joy, this love, seems to lie. This is the final meaning of the line. It is inlaid with other meanings, but these should follow naturally from the complete meaning, it should not be built up from them. For example the line may also be read: “Before a joy (lust) can be proposed, there must be a dream behind, a joy lost by waking” (“So that I wake and cry to dream again”); or: “Before a joy can be proposed, it must first be renounced as a joy, it must be put behind as a dream; you know in the pursuit that possession is impossible”; or: “Before the man, in lust is a prospect of joy, yet he knows by experience that this is only a dream”; or: “Beforehand he says that he definitely proposed lust to be a joy, afterwards he says that it came as a dream”; or: “Before (in face of) a joy proposed only as a consequence of a dream, with a dream pushing him from behind”. All these and even more readings of the line are possible and legitimate, and each reading could in turn be made specially to explain why the taker is made mad or how lust is _to have extreme_ or why it is both _a bliss_ and _very wo_. The punctuated line in the revised version, cut off from what has gone before and from what follows, can only mean: ‘In prospect, lust is a joy; in retrospect, a dream.’ Though a possible contributory meaning, as the _only_ meaning it makes the theme of the poem that lust is impossible of satisfaction, whereas the theme is, as carried on by the next line, that lust as lust _is_ satisfiable but that satisfied lust is in conflict with itself. The next line, if unpunctuated except for the comma Shakespeare put at the end, is a general statement of this conflict: the man in lust is torn between lust as he well-knows it with the world and lust in his personal experience, which crazes him to hope for more than lust from lust. The force of the second _well_ is to deny the first _well_: no one really knows anything of lust except in personal experience, and only through personal experience can lust be known _well_ rather than “well-known”. But separate the second _well_ from the first, as in the revised version, and the direct opposition between _world_ and _none, well knowes_ and _knowes well_ is destroyed, as well as the whole point of the word-play between _well knowes_ and _knowes well_; for by the removal of the comma after the second _well_, this is made merely an adverb to modify _To shun_ in the following line--_well_ here means merely _successfully_ with _To shun_, not _well enough_ with _knowes_. This repunctuation also robs _All this_ of its real significance, as it refers not only to all that has gone before but to the last line as well: “All this the world well knows yet all this none knows well” (_i.e._ the character of lust), and “All this the world well knows yet none knows well” the moral to be drawn from the character of lust (_i.e._ _to shun the heaven that leads men to this hell_). The character and the moral of lust the whole world well knows, but no one knows the character and the moral really well unless he disregards the moral warning and engages in lust, no one knows lust well enough to shun it because, though he knows it is both heavenly and hellish, lust can never be recognized until it has proved itself lust by turning heaven into hell.

The effect of this revised punctuation has been to restrict meanings to special interpretations of special words. Shakespeare’s punctuation allows the variety of meanings he actually intends; if we must choose any one meaning, then we owe it to Shakespeare to choose at least one he intended and one embracing as many meanings as possible, that is, the most difficult meaning. It is always the most difficult meaning that is the most final. (There are degrees of finality because no prose interpretation of poetry can have complete finality, can be difficult enough.) Shakespeare’s emendators, in trying to make him clear for the plain man, only weakened and diluted his poetry. Their attempts to make Shakespeare easy resulted only in depriving him of clarity. There is but one way to make Shakespeare clear: to print him as he wrote or as near as one can get to this. Making poetry easy for the reader should mean showing clearly that it is difficult.

Mr. Cummings makes himself safe from emendation by setting down his poems, which are really easy as poetry, so that their most difficult sense strikes the reader first. By giving typography an active part to play he makes his poems fixed and accurate in a way that Shakespeare’s are not. In doing this he loses the fluidity Shakespeare got by not cramping his poems with heavy punctuation and by placing more trust in the plain reader--by leaving more to his imagination than he seems to have deserved. The trouble with Mr. Cummings’ poems is that they are too clear, once the plain reader puts himself to work on them. Braced as they are, they do not present the eternal difficulties that make poems immortal, they merely show one difficulty, how difficult it is for Mr. Cummings or for any poet to stabilize a poem once and for all. Punctuation marks in Mr. Cummings’ poetry are the bolts and axels that make the poem a methodic and fool-proof piece of machinery requiring common-sense for its operation rather than imagination. The outcry against his typography shows that it is as difficult to engage the common-sense of the reader as his imagination. A reviewer of Mr. Cumming’s latest book, “is 5”, writes:

I know artists are always saying that a good painting looks as well upside down as any other way. And it may be true. The question now arises: does the same principle apply to a poem? But it is not necessary to answer the question; if a poem is good, people will gladly stand on their heads to read it. It is conceivable, if not probable, that the favourite poetic form of the future will be a sonnet arranged as a cross-word puzzle. If there were no other way of getting at Shakespeare’s sonnets than by solving a cross-word puzzle sequence, I am sure the puzzles would be solved and the sonnets enjoyed. But what about Mr. Cummings? Can his poems surmount such obstacles? Well, perhaps if they cannot survive as poems they can survive as puzzles.

This may be the immediate verdict on Mr. Cummings’ typography; but one thing Cummings can be sure of that Shakespeare could not have been sure of, is that three centuries hence his poems if they survive (and worse poets’ have) will be the only ones of the early twentieth century reprinted in facsimile, not merely because he will be a literary curiosity but because he has edited his poems with punctuation beyond any possibility of re-editing. The Shakespeare to whose sonnets this reviewer makes a rhetorical appeal is the popular Shakespeare of the anthologies and not the facsimile Shakespeare. How many of those who read this had ever before read sonnet 129 in the original? So few, surely, that it is safe to conclude that no one is willing to stand on his head to understand Shakespeare, that everyone wants a simplified Shakespeare as well as a simplified Cummings. Indeed, very few people can have looked at Shakespeare’s sonnets in the original since the eighteenth century, when the popular interest in Shakespeare’s more high-spirited comedies sent a few dull commentators and book-makers to his poems. In 1766 George Steevens printed the _Sonnets_ in the original and without annotations apparently because he thought they were not worth them. Twenty-seven years later he omitted the _Sonnets_ from an edition of Shakespeare’s works “because the strongest Act of Parliament that could be framed would fail to compel readers into their service”. People were certainly not more ready to stand on their heads to understand Shakespeare in that time than in this and Malone, who undertook in 1780 to justify Shakespeare to an apathetic public by simplifying the difficult originals (cross-word puzzles, if you like), was considered by Steevens to be “disgracing his implements of criticism by the objects of their culture”. Steevens’ view was the general one; (Chalmers reaffirmed it in 1810), and if Malone by his emendations, which have become the accepted Shakespearian text, had not overridden the general critical opinion of the _Sonnets_ and presented them fileted to the plain man, the plain man of to-day would undoubtedly be unaware of the existence of the _Sonnets_. Unlike Cummings’ poems, Shakespeare’s _Sonnets_ would not even have “survived as puzzles”.

Thus far does a study of the typography of Shakespeare take one. The lesson of this for modernist poetry is an appreciation of the difficulties of a poet with a large audience to whom his meanings are mysteries and for the most part must remain mysteries. The modernist poet handles the problem by trying to get the most out of his audience; Shakespeare by trying to get the most out of his poem. Logically, the modernist poet should have more readers than Shakespeare with an elementary understanding of his poems, and Shakespeare only a few readers, but these with an enlarged understanding of his poems. The reverse, however, is true because the reading public has been so undertrained on a simplified Shakespeare and on anthology verse generally, that modernist poetry seems as difficult as Shakespeare really ought to seem. Typography, we see, then, is really the subject of the fate of poetry with its audience. Since it is, even at its worst, the least disturbing method of communication, both for the ideas communicated and for the audience, it is still the surest guide to the understanding of a poem that we have--even when the typography of a poem has been through a whole history of misunderstanding.

Only a few points in sonnet 129 have been left uncovered in our typographical survey of the poem, and these occur principally in the first few lines; for these suffer less from emendations than the rest of the poem. The very delicate interrelation of the words of the first two lines should not be overlooked: the strong parallelism between _expense_ and _waste_ and _Spirit_ and _shame_ expressing in the very first line the terrible quick-change from lust as lust-enjoyed to lust as lust-despised; the double meaning of _waste_ as ‘expense’ and as ‘wilderness’, the _waste_ place in which the Spirit is _wasted_; the double meaning of _expense_ as ‘pouring out’ and as the ‘price paid’; the double meaning of _of shame_ as ‘shameful’, _i.e._ ‘deplorable’ and as _ashamed_, _i.e._ ‘self-deploring’; the double meaning of _shame_ itself as ‘modesty’ and ‘disgrace’; again the double meaning of _lust in action_ as ‘lust’ unsuspected by man ‘in his actions’ because disguised as ‘shame’ (in either sense of the word) and condemned by him because he does not recognize it in himself, and as ‘lust in progress’ as opposed to ‘lust contemplated’. All these alternate meanings acting on each other, and even other possible interpretations of words and phrases, make as it were a furiously dynamic cross-word puzzle which can be read in many directions at once, none of the senses being incompatible with any others. This intensified inbreeding of words continues through the rest of the poem. _Periurd_ is another obvious example, meaning both ‘falsely spoken of’ and ‘false’. Again, _heaven_ and _hell_ have the ordinary prose meaning of ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’, but also the particular meanings they had in Shakespeare’s poetic vocabulary. ‘Heaven’ to Shakespeare is the longing for a temperamental stability which at the same time he recognizes as false. ‘Hell’ is Marlowe’s hell, which

hath no limits nor is circumscribed In one selfe place, for where we are is hell.

The reader complaining of the obscurity of modernist poets must be reminded of the intimate Shakespearian background he needs to be familiar with before he can understand Shakespeare. The failure of imagination and knowledge in Shakespeare’s emendators has reduced Shakespeare to the indignity of being easy for everybody. Beddoes, an early nineteenth century imitator of Shakespeare, said:

About Shakespeare. You might just as well attempt to remodel the seasons and the laws of life and death as to alter one “jot or tittle” of his eternal thoughts. ‘A Star’, you call him. If he was a star all the other stage-scribblers can hardly be considered a constellation of brass buttons.

The modernist poets are not many of them Stars but they are most of them very highly polished brass buttons and are entitled to protect themselves from the sort of tarnishing from which Shakespeare, though a Star, has suffered.

Shakespeare’s attitude toward the perversely stupid reorganizing of lines and regrouping of ideas is jocularly shown in the satire on repunctuation given in the prologue of _Pyramus and Thisbe_ in his _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.

_Bottom._ If we offend, it is with our good will. That you should think, we come not to offend, But with good will. To show our simple skill, That is the true beginning of our end. Consider, then, we come but in despite. We do not come, as minding to content you, Our true intent is. All for your delight, We are not here. That you should here repent you The actors are at hand; and by their show, You should know all, that you are like to know.

_Theseus._--This fellow doth not stand upon points. His speech was like a tangled chain, nothing impaired but all disordered.