A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a bank of wild thyme
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DramaAs You Like It, all the world’s a stageWilliam Shakespeare, published 1599Jaques calls the world a stage and gets as far as the infant, the schoolboy, and the lover.medium447 characters
ProseLittle Women, the gray dawn of ChristmasLouisa May Alcott, published 1868Jo wakes early on Christmas morning and finds the gift her mother promised.easy363 characters
Oberon speaks these lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, printed in quarto in 1600. The play itself is usually dated to the middle of the 1590s. The list of plants, from oxlips to musk roses, is one of the fullest garden descriptions in the plays. Botanists have used it to argue about which flowers grew in Warwickshire hedges. Project Gutenberg carries the complete works.
Where this text comes fromThese lines are directions. A fairy king is telling a servant where to find a particular place, and the plants are how you identify it: thyme first, then oxlips, then violets, then the roses overhead. Read as instructions rather than as poetry the speech makes immediate practical sense, and that is why it works on stage, because the audience is being shown a map rather than offered a description. The plant names are specific enough that botanists have argued about which species he meant.
What you might not noticeThe compound over-canopied is set with a hyphen and runs thirteen characters, joining a preposition to a past participle in a way English no longer forms new words. Source
What it trainsThree apostrophes and two hyphens share 437 characters with seven commas and a semicolon, so four kinds of mark crowd a short passage, and the apostrophes all come from one key in your home row. It turns up three times, in Lull’d, enamell’d and I’ll, always where a letter has been cut out. Twelve capitals, nine of them opening a verse line rather than a sentence, because every line of the speech starts one. The longest word, over-canopied, carries its hyphen in the middle where the hand least expects it. Three sentences average twenty-five words.
From our blogHow to Learn Touch Typing Without Bad Habits
Public domain status: published in 1600, more than 125 years ago. public domain, Project Gutenberg
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