Note 144 — INDEX TO THE NOTES.

light fantastic round: comp. L’Alleg. 34, “Come, and trip it, as you go, On the light fantastic toe.” A round is a dance or ‘measure’ in which the dancers join hands, ‘Fantastic’ = full of fancy, unrestrained. So Shakespeare uses it of that which has merely been imagined, and has not yet happened. It is now used in the sense of grotesque. Fancy is a form of fantasy (Greek phantasia).