Note to A Midsummer's Night Dream, 3.2.25: "at our stamp"


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A Midsummer's Night Dream,
Act 3, Scene 2, Line 25.
at our stamp: Puck's use of our instead of my has puzzled editors, as has the notion that a fairy's stamp would be frightening. (This is the first occurrence of the word stamp in that sense recorded in the OED, the Oxford English Dictionary). Many editors adopt Lewis Theobald's conjecture that the phrase should read at a stump. Theobald was a famed British Shakespearian textual editor and author (1688 - 1744).