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Indiana University Studies 
heroes in the seductive company of beguiling women. Shakes- 
peare has varied the theme greatly by his replacement of 
the Vices with fairies: Puck’s motive is not theft, or moral 
injury to Bottom, but fun; and Titania is not a temptress, 
but an unwitting partner in the hero’s enchantment. The 
extravagant speeches of the attendant fairies in Titania’s 
bower are not intended as conscious mockery of the hero, as 
are the song and dance of The Cobler’s Prophecy; the music 
played for Bottom is not meant to stupefy him or to lull his 
moral sensibilities, but is the honest “Musicke Tongs, Rurall 
Musicke” for which he has expressed a preference ; and 
afterwards the awakened weaver, in his stolid inability to 
comprehend what has befallen him, or to believe that his 
strange adventure can have been more than a dream, becomes 
more British and more profound than any of his predecessors. 
But A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems, in each of these 
passages, distinctly reminiscent of the earlier treatment of 
metamorphosis in the moralities. It is likely enough that the 
'‘tedious brief scene” of Pyramus and Thisbe was not the only 
episode in Shakespeare’s comedy which was recognized by the 
Elizabethan audience as presenting, at least in part, a travesty 
of the plays of lesser dramatists. 
