Snout Quotes

QUINCE: Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things: that is, to bring the moonlight into a chamber, for you know Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight.
SNOUT: Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?
BOTTOM: A calendar, a calendar! Look in the almanac. Find out moonshine, find out moonshine.
QUINCE: Yes, it doth shine that night.

– William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 1. Shakespeare’s theater of the absurd continues, as Quince says that moonlight is required because Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight. Snout worries about how to provide moonlight indoors and wonders if the moon shines on the night of their play. The players consult the almanac to discover that there is indeed moonshine that night.

QUINCE: We must have a wall in the great chamber, for Pyramus and Thisbe, says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall.
SNOUT: You can never bring in a wall. What say you, Bottom?
BOTTOM: Some man or other must present Wall, and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some roughcast about him to signify wall.

– William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 1. Director Quince insists that the play must have a wall, as Pyramus and Thisbe spoke to each other through a hole in a wall. The players have a ludicrous discussion on whether a wall can be brought onto the stage with Bottom suggesting that one of them must play the part of Wall. Snout is selected for the important role.

SNOUT: O Bottom, thou art changed! What do I see on thee?
BOTTOM: What do you see? You see an ass head of your own, do you?

– William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 3, Scene 1. A fearful Snout lets out a yell when he sees a donkey’s head in place of Bottom’s human head. He asks his friend what does he have on his head. Bottom’s reaction is unintentionally ironic when he retorts that Snout is seeing his own ass head. There is dramatic irony in this exchange since Bottom is not aware of his ass-head, but the audience is.

In this same interlude it doth befall
That I, one Snout by name, present a wall;
And such a wall, as I would have you think,
That had in it a crannied hole or chink,
Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe,
Did whisper often very secretly.
This loam, this rough-cast and this stone doth show
That I am that same wall; the truth is so:
And this the cranny is, right and sinister,
Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper.

– William Shakespeare

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 5, Scene 1. Tinker Snout bizarrely playing the role of a wall and taking his part so seriously is one of the more hilarious features of the Mechanicals’ royal command performance. The lovers Pyramus and Thisme communicate and speak through a "chink" in his wall, Snout explains.
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