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All Site ContentMidsummer Night's DreamAct 5Scene 1
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"thrice-three muses"
Mythological Reference
Act 5,
Scene 1
Lines 40-56

An explanation of Philostrate’s reference to the muses in Act 5, Scene 1 of myShakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Theseus

Say, what abridgement have you for this evening?
What masque, what music? How shall we beguile
The lazy time if not with some delight?

Philostrate

There is a brief how many sports are ripe.
Make choice of which your highness will see first.
[Reads] “The battle with the Centaurs, to be sung
By an Athenian eunuch to the harp.”

Theseus

We'll none of that. That have I told my love
In glory of my kinsman Hercules.

Philostrate

“The riot of the tipsy bacchanals 
Tearing the Thracian singer in their rage.”

Theseus

That is an old device, and it was played
When I from Thebes came last a conqueror.

Philostrate

“The thrice-three muses mourning for the death
Of Learning, late deceased in beggary.”

Theseus

That is some satire, keen and critical,
Not sorting with a nuptial ceremony.

The Muses were the inspirational goddesses of the nine arts, one of which is learning. Elizabethans proverbially linked learning and poverty, perhaps foreshadowing today’s notion of the “starving student.”

(Minerva and the Nine Muses by Arie de Vois, 1662)