Snug (A Midsummer Night's Dream) on:
[Wikipedia]
[Google]
[Amazon]
Snug is a minor character from
Snug is a minor character from William Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's nation ...
play '' A Midsummer Night's Dream''. He is a joiner
A joiner is an artisan and tradesperson who builds things by joining pieces of wood, particularly lighter and more ornamental work than that done by a carpenter, including furniture and the "fittings" of a house, ship, etc. Joiners may work in ...
who comes from Athens
Athens ( ; el, Αθήνα, Athína ; grc, Ἀθῆναι, Athênai (pl.) ) is both the capital and largest city of Greece. With a population close to four million, it is also the seventh largest city in the European Union. Athens dominates ...
who is hired by Peter Quince
Peter Quince is a character in William Shakespeare's ''A Midsummer Night's Dream''. He is one of the six mechanicals of Athens who perform the play which Quince himself authored, "The Most Lamentable Comedy and Most Cruel Death of Pyramus and This ...
to play the part of the lion in Pyramus and Thisbe
Pyramus and Thisbe are a pair of ill-fated lovers whose story forms part of Ovid's ''Metamorphoses''. The story has since been retold by many authors.
Pyramus and Thisbe are two lovers in the city of Babylon who occupy connected houses. Their r ...
. When he is first assigned the part, he is afraid it may take him a while to finally remember his lines (even though the lion's role was nothing but roaring originally). Bottom
Bottom may refer to:
Anatomy and sex
* Bottom (BDSM), the partner in a BDSM who takes the passive, receiving, or obedient role, to that of the top or dominant
* Bottom (sex), a term used by gay couples and BDSM
* Buttocks or bottom, part of th ...
offers to play the part of the lion (as he offers to play all other parts), but he is rejected by Quince, who worries (as do the other characters) that his loud and ferocious roar in the play will frighten the ladies of power in the audience and get Quince and all his actors hanged
Hanging is the suspension of a person by a noose or ligature around the neck.Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. Hanging as method of execution is unknown, as method of suicide from 1325. The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' states that hanging i ...
. In the end, the lion's part is revised to explain that he is in fact not a lion and means the audience no harm.
Snug is often played as a stupid man, a manner describing almost all of the Mechanicals.
Snug is the only Mechanical to whom the playwright did not assign a first name.
In Jean-Louis and Jules Supervielle's French adaptation, '' Le Songe d'une nuit d'été'' (1959), Snug is renamed Asène to , where Georges Neveux's 1945 adaptation used the English names.
On the Elizabethan stage, the role of Snug and the other Mechanicals was intended to be doubled with Titania's four fairy escorts: Moth, Mustardseed, Cobweb, and Peaseblossom.
References
Sources
* * * *See also
*Mechanical (character)
The mechanicals are six characters in ''A Midsummer Night's Dream'' who perform the play-within-a-play '' Pyramus and Thisbe''. They are a group of amateur and mostly incompetent actors from around Athens, looking to make names for themselves by ...
Male Shakespearean characters
Characters in A Midsummer Night's Dream
Fictional artisans
Fictional actors
Literary characters introduced in 1596
Fictional Greek people
{{lit-char-stub