A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the seasons alter
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Titania speaks these lines in the second act of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, printed in quarto in 1600. Hiems, named in the speech, is Latin for winter. The name stands there as a figure for the season. The passage is often read as an echo of the cold wet summers England had in the middle of the 1590s. Project Gutenberg carries the complete works.
Where this text comes fromThe speech blames the weather on an argument. Two fairies have quarrelled, and the consequence is that the seasons have swapped places, with frost in summer flowers and heat where cold should be. It is a large claim to make in a comedy and the writing takes it seriously, piling up disordered images without a joke anywhere in them. The Latin name for winter is used as a figure rather than translated, which was normal for an educated audience in the 1590s.
What you might not noticeThe word distemperature carries fourteen letters and means a disturbance of the proper balance, a medical term of the period applied here to the weather rather than to a body. Source
What it trainsNine commas and three semicolons in 491 characters, with the semicolons separating whole images rather than clauses, so each one is a full stop that has decided not to be. Fourteen capitals, eleven of them opening a verse line rather than a sentence. Two words carry the weight: distemperature at fourteen letters and the hyphenated hoary-headed, and both arrive in the first two lines before any rhythm is established. Three sentences average twenty-eight 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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