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All Site ContentMidsummer Night's DreamAct 3Scene 2
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“This whole earth may be bored”
Imagery
Act 3,
Scene 2
Lines 43-57

An explanation of the tunneling imagery in Act 3, Scene 2 of myShakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Demetrius

O, why rebuke you him that loves you so?
Lay breath so bitter on your bitter foe.

Hermia

Now I but chide, but I should use thee worse,
For thou, I fear, hast given me cause to curse.
If thou hast slain Lysander in his sleep,
Being o'er shoes in blood, plunge in the deep
And kill me too.
The sun was not so true unto the day
As he to me. Would he have stolen away
From sleeping Hermia? I'll believe as soon
This whole earth may be bored, and that the moon
May through the center creep, and so displease
Her brother's noon-tide with th' Antipodes.
It cannot be but thou hast murdered him.
So should a murderer look: so dead, so grim.

Hermia imagines a tunnel bored through the earth which allows the moon (which controls the tides) to go to the opposite side of the earth (the Antipodes) and disrupt the tides where her brother, the sun, has made it noontime.