for he t
and there in

ED. TOR'S PREFACE.

'CAN it be wondered at (says Mr. Gifford) that Shakspeare should swell into twenty or even twice twenty volumes, when the latest editor (like the wind Cecias) constantly draws round him the floating errors of all his predecessors?' Upwards of twenty years ago, when the evil was not so great as it has since become, Steevens confessed that there was an 'exuberance of comment,' arising from the 'ambition in each little Hercules to set up pillars ascertaining how far he had travelled through the dreary wilds of black letter; ' so that there was some danger of readers being 'frighted away from Shakspeare, as the soldiers of Cato deserted their comrade when he became bloated with poisons—crescens fugere cadaver.' He saw with a propitious eye that the evil must cure itself, and that the time would arrive when some of this ivy must be removed, which only served to 'hide the princely trunk, and suck the verdure out of it.'

This expurgatory task has been more than once undertaken, but has never hitherto, it is believed, been executed entirely to the satisfaction of the admirers of our great Poet: and the work has even now devolved upon one who, though not wholly unprepared for it by previous studies, has perhaps manifested his presumption in undertaking it 'with weak and unexamined shoulders.' He does not, however, shrink from a comparison with the labours of his predecessors, but would rather solicit that equitable mode of being judged; and will patiently, and with all becoming submission to the decision of a competent tribunal, abide the result.

As a new candidate for public favour, it may be expected that the Editor should explain the ground of his pretensions. The object then of the present publication is to afford the general reader a correct edition of Shakspeare, accompanied by an abridged commentary, in which all superfluous and refuted explanations and conjectures, and all the controversies and squabbles of contending critics should be omitted; and such elucidations only of obsolete words and obscure phrases, and such critical illustrations of the text as might be deemed most generally useful be retained. To effect this it has been necessary, for the sake of compression, to condense in some cases several pages of 'excursive discussion into a few lines, and often to blend together the information conveyed in the notes of several commentators into one. When these explanations are mere transcripts or abridgments of the labours of his predecessors, and are unaccompanied by any observation of his own, it will of course be understood that the Editor intends to imply by silent acquiescence that he has nothing better to produce.' Fortune, however, seems to have been advantageous to his labours, for he flatters himself that he has been enabled in many instances to present the reader with more satisfactory explanations of difficult passages, and with more exact definitions of obsolete words and phrases, than are to be found in the notes to the variorum editions.

The causes which have operated to overwhelm the pages of Shakspeare with superfluous notes are many; but Steevens, though eminently fitted for

the task he undertook, was chiefly instrumental in increasing the evil. He has indeed been happily designated 'the Puck of commentators:' he frequently wrote notes, not with the view of illustrating the Poet, but for the purpose of misleading Malone, and of enjoying the pleasure of turning against him that playful ridicule which he knew so well how to direct. Steevens, like Malone, began his career as an Editor of Shakspeare with scrupulous attention to the old copies, but when he once came to entertain some jealousy of Malone's intrusion into his province, he all at once shifted his ground, and adopted maxims entirely opposed to those which guided his rival editor. Upon a recent perusal of a considerable portion of the correspondence between them, one letter seemed to display the circumstances which led to the interruption of their intimacy in so clear a light, and to explain the causes which have so unnecessarily swelled the comments on Shakspeare, that it has been thought not unworthy of the reader's attention. The letter has no date :—

'Sir,—I am at present so much harassed with private business that it is not in my power to afford you the long and regular answer which your letter deserves. Permit me, however, to desert order and propriety, replying to your last sentence first.—I assure you that I only erased the word *friend* because, considering how much controversy was to follow, that distinction seemed to be out of its place, and appeared to carry with it somewhat of a burlesque air. Such was my single motive for the change, and I hope you will do me the honour to believe I had no other design in it.

'As it is some time since my opinions have had the good fortune to coincide with yours in the least matter of consequence, I begin to think so indifferently of my own judgment, that I am ready to give it up without reluctance on the present occasion.—You are at liberty to leave out whatever parts of my note you please. However we may privately disagree, there is no reason why we should make sport for the world, for such is the only effect of public controversies; neither should I have leisure at present to pursue such an undertaking. I only meant to do justice to myself; and as I had no opportunity of replying to your reiterated contradictions in their natural order, on account of your perpetual additions to them; I thought myself under the necessity of observing, that I ought not to be suspected of being impotently silent in regard to objections which I had never read till it was too late for any replication on my side to be made. You rely much on the authority of an editor; but till I am convinced that volunteers are to be treated with less indulgence than other soldiers, I shall still think I have some right at least to be disgusted; especially after I had been permitted to observe a truth, not victory, was the object of our criticism, warfare.

Is for the note at the conclusion of The Puritan, since it gives so much offence, (an offence as undesigned as unforeseen,) I will change a part of it, and subjoin reasons for my dissent both from you

EDITOR'S PREFACE.

IV

and Mr. Tyrwhitt. You cannot surely suspect me of having wished to commence hostilities with either of you; but you have made a very singular commitment on this remark indeed. Because I have said I could overturn some of both your arguments on other occasions with ease, you are willing to infer that I meant all of them. Let me ask, for instance sake, what would become of his "undertakers," &c. were I to advance all I could on that subject. I will not offend you by naming any particular position of your own which could with success be disputed. I cannot, however, help adding, that had I followed every sentence of your attempt to ascertain the order of the plays, with a contradiction sedulous and unremitted as that with which you have pursued my Observations on Shakspeare's Will and his Sonnets, you at least would not have found your undertaking a very comfortable one. I was then an editor, and indulged you with even a printed foul copy of your work, which you enlarged as long as you thought fit.—The arrival of people on business prevents me from adding more than that I hope to be still indulged with the correction of my own notes on the Y[orkshire] T[ragedy]. I expect almost every one of them to be disputed, but assure you that I will not add a single word by way of reply. I have not returned you so complete an answer as I would have done had I been at leisure. You have, however, the real sentiments of your most humble servant, G. STEEVENS.¹

The temper in which this letter was written is obvious. Steevens was at the time assisting Malone in preparing his Supplement to Shakspeare, and had previously made a liberal present to him of his valuable collection of old plays; he afterwards called himself 'a dowager editor,' and said he would never more trouble himself about Shakspeare. This is gathered from a memorandum by Malone, but Steevens does in effect say in one of his letters: adding, 'Nor will such assistance as I may be able to furnish ever go towards any future *gratuitous* publication of the same author: ingratitude and impertinence from several booksellers have been my reward for conducting two laborious editions, both of which, except a few copies, are already sold.'

In another letter, in reply to a remonstrance about the suspension of his visits to Malone, Steevens says: —'I will confess to you without reserve the cause why I have not made even my business submit to my desire of seeing you. I readily allow that any distinct and subjoined reply to my remarks on your notes is fair; but to change (in consequence of private conversation) the notes that drew from me those remarks, is to turn my own weapons against me. Surely, therefore, it is unnecessary to let me continue building when you are previously determined to destroy my very foundations. As I observed to you yesterday, the result of this proceeding would be, that such of my strictures as might be just on the first copies of your notes, must often prove no better than idle cavils, when applied to the second and amended editions of them. I know not that any editor has insisted on the very extensive privileges which you have continued to claim. In some parts of my Dissertation on Pericles, I am almost reduced to combat with shadows. We had resolved (as I once imagined) to proceed without reserve on either side through the whole of that controversy, but finally you acquainted me with your resolution (in right of editorship) to have the last word. However, for the future, I beg I may be led to trouble you only with observations relative to notes which are *fixed* ones. I had that advantage over my predecessors, and you have enjoyed the same over me; but I never yet possessed the means of obviating objections before they could be effectually made,' &c.

Here then is the secret developed of the subsequent, unceasing, and unrelenting opposition with which Steevens opposed Malone's notes: their controversies served not 'to make sport for the world,' but to annoy the admirers of Shakspeare, by overloading his page with frivolous contention.

Steevens had undoubtedly, as he says of himself on another occasion—

'Fallen in the wash his wickedness had made; and in some instances contested the force and propriety of his own remarks when ascribed by Malone to parallel passages; or, as Malone observes: 'They are very good remarks, so far forth as they are his; but when used by me are good for nothing; and the disputed passages become printers' blunders, or Hemingisms and Condelisms.' Hence his unremitted censure of the first folio copy, and support of the readings of the second folio, which Malone treats as of no authority;—his affected contempt for the Poems of Shakspeare, &c.

Mr. Boswell has judiciously characterized Steevens: —'With great diligence, an extensive acquaintance with early literature, and a remarkably retentive memory: he was besides, as Mr. Gifford has justly observed, "a wit and a scholar." But his wit and the sprightliness of his style were too often employed to bewilder and mislead us. His consciousness of his own satirical powers made him much too fond of exercising them at the expense of truth and justice. He was infected with a lamentable degree with the jealousy of authorship; and while his approbation was readily bestowed upon those whose competition he thought he had no reason to dread, he was fretfully impatience of a brother near the throne: his clear understanding would generally have enabled him to discover what was right; but the spirit of contradiction could at any time induce him to maintain what was wrong. It would be impossible, indeed, to explain how any one, possessed of his taste and discernment, could have brought himself to advocate so many indefensible opinions, without entering into a long and ungracious history of the motives by which he was influenced.'

Malone was certainly not so happily gifted; though Mr. Boswell's partiality in delineating his friend, presents us with the picture of an amiable and accomplished gentleman and scholar. There seems to have been a want of grasp in his mind to proper use of the accumulated materials which his unwearied industry in his favourite pursuit had placed within his reach: his notes on Shakspeare are often tediously circumlocutory and ineffectual: neither does he seem to have been deficient in that jealousy of rivalship, or that pertinacious adherence to his own opinions, which have been attributed to his competitor.

It is superfluous here to enlarge on this topic, for the merits and defects of Johnson, Steevens, and Malone, as commentators on Shakspeare, and the characters of those who preceded them, the reader will find sketched with a masterly pen in the Biographical Preface of Dr. Symmons, which accompanies this edition. The vindication of Shakspeare from idle calumny and ill founded critical animadversion, could not have been placed in better hands than in those of the vindicator of Milton; and his eloquent Essay must afford pleasure to every lover of our immortal Bard. It should be observed that the Editor, in his adoption of readings, differs in opinion on some points from his able coadjutor, with whom he has not the honour of a personal acquaintance. It is to be regretted that no part of the work was communicated to Dr. Symmons until nearly the whole of the Plays were printed; or the Editor and the Public would doubtless have benefited by his animadversions and suggestions in its progress through the press. The reader will not therefore be surprised at the preliminary censure of some readings which are still retained in the text.

Dr. Johnson's far famed Preface—which has so long hung as a dead weight upon the reputation of our great Poet, and which has been justly said to look like 'a laborious attempt to bury the characteristic merits of his author under a load of cumbersome phraseology, and to weigh his excellencies and defects in equal scales stuffed full of swelling figures and sonorous epithets,'—will, for obvious reasons, form no part of this publication. His brief

## EDITOR'S PREFACE.

V

strictures at the end of each play have been retained in compliance with custom, but not without an occasional note of dissent. We may suppose that Johnson himself did not estimate these observations very highly, for he tells us that 'in the plays which are condemned there may be much to be praised, and in those which are praised much to be condemned! Far be it from us to undervale or speak slightly of our great moralist; but his most strenuous admirers must acknowledge that the construction of his mind incapacitated him from forming a true judgment of the creations of one who was 'of imagination all compact,' no less than his physical defects prevented him from relishing the beautiful and harmonious in nature and art.

'Quid valet ad surdas si cantet Phemius aures?' Quid sæcum Thamryam picta tabella juvat?'

It has been the studious endeavour of the Editor to avoid those splenetic and insulting reflections upon the errors of the commentators, where it has been his good fortune to detect them, which have been sometimes too captiously indulged in by labourers in this field of verbal criticism. Indeed it would ill become him to speak contemptuously of those who, with all their defects, have deserved the gratitude of the age; for it is chiefly owing to the labours of Tyrwhitt, Warton, Percy, Steevens, Farmer, and their successors, that attention has been drawn to the mine of wealth which our early literature affords; and no one will affect to deny that a recurrence to it has not been attended with beneficial effects, if it has not raised us in the moral scale of nations.

The plan pursued in the selection, abridgment, and concentration of the notes of others, precluded the necessity of affixing the names of the commentators from whom the information was borrowed; and, excepting in a few cases of controversial discussion, and of some critical observations, authorities are not given. The very curious and valuable illustrations of Shakspeare by Mr. Douce have been laid under frequent contribution; the obligation has not always been expressed; and it is therefore here acknowledged with thankfulness.

It will be seen that the Editor has not thought, with some of his predecessors, that the text of Shakspeare was 'fixed' in any particular edition 'beyond the hope or probability of future amendment.' He has rather coincided with the opinion of Mr. Gifford, 'that those would deserve well of the public who should bring back some readings which Steevens discarded, and reject others which he has adopted.'

The text of the present edition is formed upon those of Steevens and Malone, occasionally compared with the early editions; and the satisfaction arising from a rejection of modern unwarranted deviations from the old copies has not unfrequently been the reward of this labour.

The preliminary remarks to each play are augmented with extracts from the more recent writers upon Shakspeare, and generally contain brief critical observations which are in many instances opposed to the dictum of Dr. Johnson. Some of these are extracted from the Lectures on the Drama, by the distinguished German critic, A. W. Schlegel, a writer to whom the nation is deeply indebted, for having pointed out the characteristic excellencies of the great Poet of nature, in an eloquent and philosophical spirit of criticism; which, though it may sometimes be thought a little tinctured with mystical enthusiasm, has dealt out to Shakspeare his due meed of praise; and has, no doubt, tended to dissipate the prejudices of some neighbouring nations who have been too long wilfully blind to his merits.

Mr. Gifford, as it appears, once proposed to favour the public with an edition of Shakspeare: how admirably that excellent critic would have performed the task the world need not now be told. The Editor, who has been frequently indebted to the remarks on the language of our great Poet which occur in the notes to the works of Ben Jonson and Massinger, may be permitted to anticipate the public regret that these humble labours were not presented by that more skilful hand. As it is, he must console himself with having used his best endeavour to accomplish the task which he was solicited to undertake; had his power equalled his desire to render it useful and acceptable, the work would have been more worthy of the public favour, and of the Poet whom he and all unite in idolizing—

—The bard of every age and clime,
Of genius fruitful and of soul sublime,
Who, from the flowing mint of fancy, pours
No spurious metal, fused from common ores,
But gold, to matchless purity refin'd,
And stamp'd with all the godhead in his mind;
He whom I feel, but want the power to paint.'

JUVENAL, SAT. VII. Mr. Gifford's Translation.

MICKLEHAM,
Dec. 3, 1825.

THE LIFE OF WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

7

his life; and we have only to lament that the result of our labour must greatly disappoint the curiosity which has been excited by the grandeur of his reputation. The slight narrative of Rowe, founded on the information obtained, in the beginning of the last century, by the inquiries of Betterton, the famous actor, will necessarily supply us with the greater part of the materials with which we are to work.

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE, or SHAKSPERE, (for the floating orthography of the name is properly attached to one or the other of these varieties), was baptized in the church of Stratford upon Avon, as is ascertained by the parish register, on the 26th of April, 1564; and he is said to have been born on the 23d of the same month, the day consecrated to the tutelar saint of England. His parents, John and Mary Shakspeare, were not of equal ranks in the community; for the former was only a respectable tradesman, whose ancestors cannot be traced into gentility, whilst the latter belonged to an ancient and opulent house in the county of Warwick, being the youngest daughter of Robert Arden of Wilmecote. The family of the Ardens (or Ardenes, as it is written in all the old deeds,) was of considerable antiquity and importance, some of them having served as high sheriffs of their county, and two of them (Sir John Arden and his nephew, the grandfather of Mrs. Shakspeare,) having enjoyed each a station of honour in the personal establishment of Henry VII. The younger of these Ardens was made, by his sovereign, keeper of the park of Aldercar, and bailiff of the lordship of Codnor. He obtained, also, from the crown, a valuable grant in the lease of the manor of Yoxsal, in Staffordshire, consisting of more than 4,600 acres, at a rent of 42l. Mary Arden did not come dowerless to her plebeian husband, for she brought to him a small freehold estate called Asbies, and to him the sum of 6l. 13s. 4d. in money. The freehold consisted of a house and fifty-four acres of land; and, as far as it appears, it was the first piece of landed property which was ever possessed by the Shakspeares. Of this marriage the offspring was four sons and four daughters; of whom Joan (or, according to the orthography of that time, Jane,) and Margaret, the eldest of the children died, one in infancy and one at a somewhat more advanced age; and Gilbert, whose birth immediately succeeded to that of our Poet, is supposed by some not to have reached his maturity, and by others, to have attained to considerable longevity. Joan, the eldest of the four remaining children, and named after her deceased sister, married William Hart, a hatter in her native town; and Edmund, the youngest of the family, adopting the profession of an actor, resided in St. Saviour's parish in London; and was buried in St. Saviour's Church, on the last day of December, 1607, in his twenty-eighth year. Of Anne and Richard, whose births intervened between those of Joan and Edmund, the parish register tells the whole history, when it records that the former was buried on the 4th of April, 1579, in the eighth year of her age, and the latter on the 4th of February, 1612-13, when he had nearly completed his thirty-ninth.

In consequence of a document, discovered in the year 1770, in the house in which, if tradition is to be trusted, our Poet was born, some persons having concluded that John Shakspeare was a Roman Catholic, though he had risen, by the regular graduation of office, to the chief dignity of the corporation of Stratford, that of high bailiff; and, during the whole of this period, had unquestionably conformed to the rites of the Church of England. The asserted fact seemed not to be very probable; and the document in question, which, drawn up in a testamentary form and regularly attested, zealously professes the Roman faith of him in whose name it speaks, having been subjected to a rigid examination by Malone, has been pronounced to be spurious. The trade of John Shakspeare, as well as his reli-

gious faith, has recently been made the subject of controversy. According to the testimony of Rowe, grounded on the tradition of Stratford, the father of our Poet was a dealer in wool, or, in the provincial vocabulary of his country, a wool-driver; and such he has been deemed by all the biographers of his son, till the fact was thrown into doubt by the result of the inquisitiveness of Malone. Finding, in an old and obscure MS. purporting to record the proceedings of the bailiff's court in Stratford, our John Shakspeare designated as a glaver, Malone exults over the ignorance of poor Rowe, and assumes no small degree of merit to himself as the discoverer of a long sought and a most important historic truth. If he had recollected the remark of the clown in the Twelfth Night,* that "a sentence is but a cheverglue to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turned outwards!" he would, doubtless, have pressed the observation into his service, and brought it as an irresistible attestation of the veracity of his old MS.

Whatever may have been the trade of John Shakspeare, whether that of wool-merchant or of glaver, it seems, with the little fortune of his wife, to have placed him in a state of easy competence. In 1569 or 1570, in consequence of his alliance with the Ardens, and partly of his attainment of the prime municipal honours of his town, he obtained a concession of arms from the herald's office, a grant, which placed him and his family on the file of the gentry of England; and, in 1574, he purchased two houses, with gardens and orchards annexed to them, in Henley Street, in Stratford. But before the year 1578, his prosperity, from causes not now ascertainable, had certainly declined; for in that year, as we find from the records of his borough, he was excused, in condescension to his poverty, from the moiety of a very moderate assessment of six shillings and eight pence, made by the members of the corporation on themselves; at the same time that he was altogether exempted from his contribution to the relief of the poor. During the remaining years of his life, his fortunes appear not to have recovered themselves; for he ceased to attend the meetings of the corporation hall, where he had once presided; and, in 1586, another person was substituted as alderman in his place, in consequence of his magisterial inefficiency. He died in the September of 1601, when his illustrious son had already attained to high celebrity; and his wife, Mary Shakspeare, surviving him for seven years, decreased in the September of 1608, the burial of the former being registered on the eighth and that of the latter on the ninth of this month, in each of these respective years.

On the 30th of June, 1564, when our Poet had not yet been three months in this breathing world, his native Stratford was visited by the plague; and, during the six succeeding months, the ravaging disease is calculated to have swept to the grave more than a seventh part of the whole population of the place. But the favoured infant reposed in security in his cradle, and breathed health amid an atmosphere of pestilence. The Genius of England may be supposed to have held the arm of the destroyer, and not to have permitted it to fall on the consecrated dwelling of his and Nature's darling. The disease, indeed, did not overstep his charmed threshold; for the name of Shakspeare is not to be found in the register of deaths throughout that period of accelerated mortality. That he survived this desolating calamity of his townsmen, is all that we know of William Shakspeare from the day of his birth till he was sent, as we are informed by Rowe, to the free-school of Stratford; and was stationed there in the course of his education, till, in consequence of the straitened circumstances of his father, he was recalled to the paternal roof. As we are not told at what age he was sent to school, we cannot form any estimate of the time during which he remained there. But if he was placed under his

* Act III. sc. I.

E.

The history of the rag
ness and vabbi-
reness of the age
ignorance of the
intellec
of our en-
d from us by
the causes may
be read in
William Shaks-
peare's
; in neither
nt in them
in his con-
ind, with
the age of monarch-
s of the
the most intre-
the age of the
it, he could
or comprehe-
knew little al-
life, and for
statistis outran him
the flood of the
the stage together
of the school of
France
the last en-
till the last en-
William Shal-
peare in the
tomb, in al
enqain became the
enquiry; but in-
at it could re-
only a few bi-
by be united in
personal ignoran-
ce he had added
the life of his
gemal works, ig-
abandoned them
or to fame. It
had grown into the
out any refor-
s, in which he
as an interest,
s of obscurity,
provincial to-
we to attribu-
the Life of
in myriads of
of myriads of
with the civi-
loss the ocean
region of trans-
only a shadow
undefined form
covered to the
the little use it
can be told of
the best use it
may be called

["WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.", "9", "of his life, and his fixed habitation in the country,\nhis strong and eager passion for all the pleas-\nsures of the field. As a sportsman, in his rank of\nlife, he would naturally become a poacher; and\nthen it is highly probable that he would fall into\nthe acquaintance of poachers; and, associating with\nthem in his idler hours, would occasionally be one\nof their fellow-marauders on the manors of their\nrich neighbours. In one of these licentious excursions\non the grounds of Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlec-\ncote, in the immediate vicinity of Stratford, for the\npurpose, as it is said, of stealing his deer, for his\nyoung bard was detected; and, having farther irri-\ntated the knight by affixing a satirical ballad on him\nto the gates of Charlecote, he was compelled to fly\nbefore the enmity of his powerful adversary, and to\nseek an asylum in the capital. Malone,* who is\nprone to doubt, wishes to question the truth of this\nwhole narrative, and to ascribe the flight of young\nShakspeare from his native country to the embar-\nrassment of his circumstances, and the persecution\nof his creditors. But the story of the deer-steal-\ning rests upon the uniform tradition of Stratford,\nand is confirmed by the character of Sir T. Lucy,\nwho is known to have been a rigid preserver of\nhis game, by the emtry displayed against his memory\nby Shakspeare in his succeeding life; and by a\npart of the offensive ballad† itself, preserved by\nMr. Jones of Tarbick, a village near to Stratford,\nwho obtained it from those who must have been\nacquainted with the fact, and who could not be\nbiased by any interest or passion to falsify or mis-\nstate it. Besides the objector, in this instance,\nseems not to be aware that it was easier to escape\nfrom the resentment of an offended proprietor of\ngame, than from the avance of a creditor; that\nwhilst the former might be satisfied with the re-\nmoval of the delinquent to a situation where he\ncould no longer infest his parks or his warrens, the\nlatter would pursue his debtor wherever bailiffs\ncould find and writs could attach him. On every\naccount, therefore, I believe the tradition, recorded\nby Rowe, that our Poet retired from Stratford before\nthe exasperated power of Sir T. Lucy, and found a\nrefuge in London, not possibly beyond the reach of\nthe arm, but beyond the hostile purposes of his pro-\nvincial antagonist.", "The time of this eventful flight of the great bard of England cannot now be accurately determined: but we may somewhat confidently place it between the years 1585 and 1588; for in the former of these we may conclude him to have been present with his family at the baptism of his twins, Hammet and Judith; and then the latter of them we cannot well assign a later date for his arrival in London, since we know† that before 1592 he had not only written two long poems, the Venus and Adonis, and the Rape of Lucrece, but had acquired no small degree of celebrity as an actor and as a dramatic writer.", "At this agitating crisis of his life, the situation of\nyoung Shakspeare was certainly, in its obvious\naspect, severe and even terrific. Without friends\nto protect or assist him, he was driven, under the\nfrown of exasperated power, from his profession;\nfrom his native fields; from the companions of his\nchildhood and his youth; from his wife and his in-", "* Malone was much addicted to doubt. Knowing, perhaps, that, on all the chief topics of the Grecian schools of philosophy, the great mind of Cicero faltered in doubt, our commentator and critic wished, possibly, to establish his claim to a superiority of intellect by the same academic withholding of assent. He ought, however, to have been aware that scepticism, which is sometimes the misfortune of wise men, is generally the affection of fools.", "† The first stanza of this ballad, which is admitted to be genuine, may properly be preserved as a curiosity. But as it is to be found in every life of our author, with the exception of Rowe's, I shall refer my readers, to whom it could not be gratifying, to some other page for it than my own.", "‡ From Robert Greene's posthumous work, written in 1592, and Chettle's Kind Hart's Dream, published very soon afterwards", "fantling spring. The world was spread before him,\nlike a dark ocean, in which no fortunate iste could\nbe seen to glitter amid the gloomy and sullen tide.\nBut he was blessed with youth and health; his\nconscience was unwounded, for the adventure for\nwhich he suffered, was regarded, in the estimation\nof his times, as a mere boy's frolic, of not greater\nguilt than the robbing of an orchard; and his mind,\nrich beyond example in the gold of heaven, could\nthrow lustre over the black waste before him, and\ncould people it with a beautiful creation of her own.\nWe may imagine him, then, departing from his\nhome, not indeed like the great Roman captive as\nhe is described by the poet—", "Fertur pudicæ conjugis osculum,\nParvosque natos, ut capids minor,\nAb se removisse, et virremi\nTorvus humi posuisset, vultum, &c.", "but touched with some feelings of natural sorrow,\nyet with an unfaltering step, and with hope vigour-\nous at his heart. It was impossible that he should\ndespair; and if he indulged in sanguine expecta-\ntion, the event proved him not to be a visionary.\nIn the course of a few years, the exile of Stratford\nbecame the associate of wits, the friend of nobles,\nthe favourite of monarchs; and in a period which\nstill left him not in sight of old age, he returned to\nhis birth-place in affluence, with honour, and with\nthe plaudits of the judicious and the noble resound-\ning in his ears.", "His immediate refuge in the metropolis was the\nstage; to which his access, as it appears, was easy.\nStratford was fond of theatrical representations,\nwhich it accommodated with its town or guildhall\nand had frequently been visited by companies of\nplayers when our Poet was of an age, not only\nto enjoy their performances, but to form an acquaint-\nance with their members. Thomas Greene, who\nwas one of their distinguished actors, has been con-\nsidered by some writers as a kinsman of our au-\nthor's; and though he, possibly, may have been\nconfounded by them with another Thomas Greene,\na barrister, who was unquestionably connected\nwith the Shakspeares, he was certainly a fellow\ntownsman of our fugitive bard's; whilst Heminge\nand Burbage, two of the leaders of the company in\nquestion, belonged either to Stratford or to its im-\nmediate neighbourhood. With the door of the the-\natre thus open to him, and under the impulse of\nhis own natural bias, (for however m after life he\nmay have lamented his degradation as a profes-\nsional actor, it must be concluded that he now felt\na strong attachment to the stage,) it is not wonder-\nful that young Shakspeare should solicit this asylum\nin his distress; or that he should be kindly re-\nceived by men who knew him, and some of whom\nwere connected, if not with his family, at least with\nhis native town. The company, to which he united\nhimself, was the Earl of Leicester's or the Queen's;\nwhich had obtained the royal license in 1574. The\nplace of its performances, when our Poet became\nenrolled among its members, was the Globe on the\nBankside; and its managers subsequently pur-\nchased the theatre of Blackfriars, (the oldest thea-\ntre in London,) which they had previously rented\nfor some years; and at these two theatres, the\nfirst of which was open in the centre for summer\nrepresentations, and the last covered for those of\nwinter, were acted all the dramatic productions of\nShakspeare. That he was at first received into the\ncompany in a very subordinate situation, may be\nregarded not merely as probable, but as certain:\nthat he ever carried a link to light the frequenters\nof the theatre, or ever held their horses, must be\nrejected as an absurd tale, fabricated, no doubt, by\nthe lovers of the marvellous, who were solicitous\nto obtain a contrast in the humility of his first to\nthe pride of his subsequent fortunes. The mean\nand service occupation, thus assigned to him, was\nincompatible with his circumstances, even in their\npresent afflicted state; and his relations and connec-", "ust, he remained\nin us, and came\nout to us, and\ndid us good.\nBut in the\nend he was\nburied in un\nvain, and un\ngrateful\nand un\nhonourable\nand un\ngrateful\nand un\ngrateful\nand un\ngrateful

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

11

merit; and, with his influence, obtained its intro-
duction on the stage. To this story some specious
objections have been raised; and there cannot be
any necessity for contending for it, as no lucky ac-
cident can be required to account for the induc-
ement of amity between two men of high genius, each
treading the same broad path to fame and fortune,
yet each with a character so speculably his own,
that he might attain his object without wounding the
prejudice or invading the interests of the other. It has
been generally believed that the intellectual superi-
ority of Shakspeare excited the envy and the con-
sequent enmity of Jonson. It is well that of these
asserted facts no evidences can be adduced. The
friendship of these great men seems to have been
unbroken during the life of Shakspeare; and, on
his death, Jonson made an offering to his memory
of present and past, and appropriate panegyric. He places
him above not only the modern but the Greek dra-
matists; and he professes for him admiration short
only of idolatry. They who can discover any pe-
asantiousness of praise in the surviving poet must be
gifted with a very peculiar vision of mind. With
the flowers, which he strewed upon the grave of
his friend, there certainly was not blended one
poisonous or bitter leaf. If, therefore, he was, as
he is represented to have been by an impartial and
able judge, (Drummond of Hawthornden,) "a great
lover and praiser of himself; a contemner and
scorcher of others; jealous of every word and ac-
tion of those about him," &c. &c., how can we
otherwise account for the uninterrupted harmony of
his intercourse with our bard than by supposing
that the frailties of his nature were overruled by
that pre-eminence of mental power in his friend
which precluded competition; and by his friend's
sweetness of temper and gentleness of manners,
which repressed every feeling of hostility. Be-
tween Shakspeare and Thomas Wriothesly, the
municipal and the noble Earl of Southampton, dis-
tinguished in history by his inviolable attachment
to the rash and the unfortunate Essex, the friendship
was permanent and stard. At its commencement,
in 1593, when Shakspeare was twenty-nine years
of age, Southampton was not more than nineteen;
and, with the love of general literature, he was
particularly attached to the exhibitions of the thea-
tre. His attention was first drawn to Shakspeare
by the poet's dedication to him of the "Venus and
Adonis," that "first heir," as the dedicator calls it,
"of his invention;" and, the acquaintance, once
begin between characters and hearts like theirs,
would soon mature into intimacy and friendship.
In the following year (1594) Shakspeare's second
poem, "The Rape of Lucrece," was addressed by
him to his noble patron in a strain of less distant
timidity; and he may infer from it that the poet
had then obtained a portion of the favour which he
sought. That his fortunes were essentially pro-
moted by the munificent patronage of Southampton
cannot reasonably be doubted. We are told by
Sir William Davenant, who surely possessed the
means of knowing the fact, that the peer gave at
one time to his favoured dramatist the magnificent
present of a thousand pounds. This is rejected by
Malone as an extravagant exaggeration; and be-
cause the donation is said to have been made for
the purpose of enabling the poet to complete a pur-
chase which he had then in contemplation; and
because no purchase of an adequate magnitude
seems to have been accomplished by him, the cri-
tic treats the whole story with contempt; and is
desires of substituting a dedication fee of one hun-
dred pounds for the more princely liberality which
is attested by Davenant. But surely a purchase
might be within the view of Shakspeare, and even-
tually not be effected; and then of course the
thousand pounds in question would be added to his
personal property; where it would just complete
the income on which he is reported to have retired
from the stage. As to the incredibility of the gift
in consequence of its value, we have not witnessed
a gift, made in the present day, by a noble of the

land to a mere actor, of ten times the nominal and
twice the effective value of this proud bounty of
the great Earl of Southampton's* to one of the
master spirits of the human race? †

Of the degree of patronage and kindness extend-
ed to Shakspeare by the Earls of Pembroke and
Montgomery, we are altogether ignorant: but we
know, from the dedication of his works to them by
Hemingue and Condell, that they had distinguished
themselves as his admirers and friends. That he
numbered many more of the nobility of his day
among the homagers of his transcendent genius,
we may consider as a specious probability. But
we must not indulge in conjectures, when we can
gratify ourselves with the reports of tradition, ap-
proaching very nearly to certainties. Elizabeth, as
it is confidently said, honoured our illustrious dra-
matist with her especial notice and regard. She
was unquestionably fond of theatrical exhibitions;
and, with her literary mind and her discriminating
eye, it is impossible that she should overlook; and
that, not overlooking, she should not appreciate the
man, whose genius formed the prime glory of her
reign. It is affirmed that, delighted with the cha-
acter of Falstaff as drawn in the two parts of Henry
IV., she expressed a wish to see the gross and dis-
solute knight under the influence of love and that
the result of our Poet's compliance, with the degree
of his royal mistress, was "The Merry Wives of
Windsor."† Favoured, however, as our Poet
seems to have been by Elizabeth, and, notwithstanding
the fine incense which he offered to her
vanity, it does not appear that he profited in any
degree by her bounty. She could distinguish and
could smile upon genius; but unless it were imme-
diately serviceable to her personal or her political
interests, she had not the soul to reward it. How-
ever inferior to her in the arts of government and
in some of the great characters of mind might be
her Scottish successor, he resembled her in his love
of letters, and in his own cultivation of learning.
He was a scholar, and even a poet: his attach-
ment to the general cause of literature was strong;
and his love of the drama and the theatre was par-
ticularly warm. Before his accession to the Eng-
lish throne he had written, as we have before no-
ticed, a letter, with his own hand, to Shakspeare,

* As the patron and the friend of Shakspeare, Thomas Wriothesly, Earl of Southampton, is entitled to our especial attention and respect. But I cannot admit his eventful history into the text, without breaking the unity of my biographical narrative; and to speak of him within the compass of a note will be only to inform my readers, that he was born on the 6th of October, 1573; that he was engaged in the mad attempts of his friend, the Earl of Essex, against the government of Elizabeth: that, in consequence, he was confined during her life by that Queen, who was so lenient as to be satisfied with the blood of one of the friends: that, immediately on her death, he was liberated by her successor, not disposed to adopt the enities of the murderess of his mother: that he was promoted to honours by the new sovereign; and that, finally, being sent with a military command to the Low Countries, he caught a fever from his son, Lord Wriothesly; and, surviving him only five days, concluded his active and honourable career of life at Bergen-op-zoon, on the 10th of November, 1624. It may be added, that, impoverished by his liberalities, he left his widow in such circumstances as to call for the assistance of the crown.

† The late Duke of Northumberland made a present to John Kemble of 10,000.

† Animated as this comedy is with much distinct de-
lineation of character, it cannot be pronounced to be
unworthy of its great author. But it evinces the dif-
culty of writing upon a prescribed subject, and of work-
ing with effect under the control of another mind. As
he sported in the scenes of Henry IV., Falstaff was in-
substantible of love; and the egregious dupe of Windsor,
ducked and cudgelled as he was, cannot be the wit of
Eastcheap, or the guest of Shallow, or the military
commander on the field of Shrewsbury. But even the
genius of Shakspeare could not effect impossibilities.
He did what he could to revive his own Falstaff: but
the life which he reinfused into his creature was not the
vigorous vitality of Nature; and he placed him in a
scene where he could not subsist.

["WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.", "13", "With a privilege, rarely indulged even to the sons\nof genius, he had produced his admirable works\nwithout any throes or labour of the mind: they had\nobtained for him all that he had asked from them,\n—the patronage of the great, the applause of the\nwitty, and a competency of fortune adequate to\nthe moderation of his desires. Having filled, or,\npossibly, exceeded his expectations, they had dis-\ncharged their duty; and he threw them altogether\nfrom his thought; and whether it were their des-\ntiny to emerge into renown, or to perish in the\ndrawer of a manager; to be brought to light in a\nstate of integrity, or to revisit the glimpses of the\nmoon with a thousand mortal murders on their head,\nengaged no part of his solicitude or interest. They\nhad given to him the means of easy life, and he\nassured the world that he would devote himself to\nthe study of acting. How much he had devoured\nin the last five years, and how much he had devoured\nin the present, he did not say. He was not the\nonly one who devoted himself to study, and the\nobjects of his mind were so diverse, that he\n* we find that he devoted himself to study, and the\nobjects of his mind were so diverse, that he\ndevoted himself to study, and the objects of his\n* we find that he devoted himself to study, and the\nobjects of his mind were so diverse, that he\ndevoted himself to study, and the objects of his

14

THE LIFE OF

it most unfortunately began with the year 1617; and the preceding part of the register, which most probably had been in existence, could no where be found. The mortal complaint, therefore, of William Shakspeare is likely to remain for ever unknown; and as darkness had closed upon his path through life, so darkness now gathered round his bed of death, awfully to cover it from the eyes of succeeding generations.

On the 25th of April, 1616, two days after his decease, he was buried in the chancel of the church of Stratford; and at some period within the seven subsequent years, (for in 1623 it is noticed in the verses of Leonard Digges,) a monument was raised to his memory either by the respect of his townsmen, or by the piety of his relations. It represents the Poet with a countenance of thought, resting on a cushion and in the act of writing. It is placed under an arch, between two Corinthian columns of black marble, the capitals and bases of which are gilt. The face is said, but, as far as I can find, not on any adequate authority, to have been modelled from the face of the deceased; and the whole was painted, to bring the imitation nearer to nature. The face and the hands wore the carnation of life: the eyes were light hazel: the hair and beard were auburn: a black gown, without sleeves, hung loosely over a scarlet doublet. The cushion in its upper part was green: in its lower, crimson; and the tassels were of gold colour. This certainly was not in the high classical taste; though we may learn from Pausanias that statues in Greece were sometimes coloured after life; but as it was the work of contemporary hands, and was intended, by those who knew the Poet, to convey to posterity some resemblance of his lineaments and dress, it was a monument of rare value; and the tastelessness of Malone, who caused all its tints to be obliteratèd with a daubing of white lead, cannot be sufficiently ridiculed and condemned. Its material is a species of free-stone; and as the chisel of the sculptor was most probably under the guidance of Doctor Hall, it bore some promise of likeness to the mighty dead. Immediately below the cushion is the following distich :—

Judicio Pylium; genio Socratem; arte Maronem
Terra tegit; populus mœret; Olympus habet.

On a tablet underneath are inscribed these lines :—

Stay, passenger, why dost thou go so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death has placed
Within this monument—Shakspeare; with whom
Quick Nature died; whose name doth deck the tomb
Far more than cost; since all that he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve his wit:

and the flat stone, covering the grave, holds out, in
very irregular characters, a supplication to the read-
er, with the promise of a blessing and the menace
of a curse:

Good Friend ! for Jesus' sake forbear
To dig the dust inclosed here.
Blest be the man that spares these stones;
And cursed be he that moves my bones.

The last of these inscriptions may have been written
by Shakspeare himself under the apprehension of
his bones being tumbled, with those of many of his
townsmen, into the charnel-house of the parish.
But his dust has continued unviolated, and is likely
to remain in its holy repose till the last awful scene
of our perishable globe. It were to be wished that
the two preceding inscriptions were more worthy,
than they are, of the tomb to which they are at-
tached. It would be gratifying if we could give any
faith to the tradition, which asserts that the bust of
this monument was sculptured from a cast moulded
on the face of the departed poet; for then we might
assure ourselves that we possess one authentic re-
semblance of this pre-eminently intellectual mortal.
But the cast, if taken, must have been taken im-
mediately after his death; and we know neither at

whose expense the monument was constructed;
nor by whose hand it was executed; nor at what
precise time it was erected. It may have been
wrought by the artist, acting under the recollections
of the Shakspeare family into some likeness of the
great townsman of Stratford; and on this proba-
bility, we may contemplate it with no inconsider-
able interest. I cannot, however, persuade my-
self that the likeness could have been strong. The
forehead, indeed, is sufficiently spacious and intel-
lectual: but there is a disproportionate length in the
under part of the face: the mouth is weak; and
the whole countenance is heavy and inert. Not
having seen the monument itself, I can speak of it
only from its numerous copies by the graver; and by
these it is possible that I may be deceived. But if we
cannot rely on the Stratford bust for a resemblance
of our immortal dramatist, where are we to look
with any hope of finding a trace of his features? It
is highly probable that no portrait of him was paint-
ed during his life; and it is certain that no portrait of
him, with an incontestable claim to genuineness, is
at present in existence. The fairest title to au-
thenticity seems to be assignable to that which is
called the Chandos portrait; and is now in the col-
lection of the Duke of Buckingham, at Stowe. The
possession of this picture can be distinctly traced
up to Betterton and Davenant. Through the hands
of successive purchasers, it became the property
of Mr. Robert Keck. On the marriage of the heir-
ess of the Keck family, it passed to Mr. Nicholl, of
Colney-Hatch, in Middlesex: on the union of this
gentleman's daughter with the Duke of Chandos, it
found a place in that nobleman's collection; and,
finally, by the marriage of the present Duke of
Buckingham with the Lady Anne Elizabeth Brydges,
the heiress of the house of Chandos, it has settled
in the gallery of Stowe. This was pronounced by
the late Earl of Orford, (Horace Walpole,) as we
are informed by Mr. Granger, to be the only orig-
inal picture of Shakspeare. But two others, if not
more, contend with it for the palm of originality; one,
which in consequence of its having been in the pos-
session of Mr. Felton, of Drayton, in the county of
Salop, from whom it was purchased by the Boydells,
has been called the Felton Shakspeare; and one, a
miniature, which, by some connection, as I believe,
with the family of its proprietors, found its way into
the cabinet of the late Sir James Lamb, more gene-
rally, perhaps, known by his original name of James
Bland Burgess. The first of these pictures was
reported to have been found at the Boar's Head in
Eastheap, one of the favourite haunts, as it was
erroneously called, of Shakspeare and his compa-
nions; and the second by a tradition, in the family
of Somervile the poet, is affirmed to have been
drawn from Shakspeare, who sate for it at the pres-
sing instance of a Somervile, one of his most inti-
mate friends. But the genuineness of neither of
these pictures can be supported under a rigid in-
vestigation; and their pretensions must yield to
those of another rival portrait of our Poet, which
was once in the possession of Mr. Jennens, of Gop-
sal in Leicestershire, and is now the property of
that liberal and literary nobleman, the Duke of
Somerset. For the authenticity of this portrait,
attributed to the pencil of Cornelius Jansenn, Mr.
Boaden* contends with much zeal and ingenuity.
Knowing that some of the family of Lord South-
ampton, Shakspeare's especial friend and patron,
had been painted by Jansenn, Mr. Boaden spe-
cially infers that, at the Earl's request, his favourite
dramatist had, likewise, allowed his face to this
painter's imitation; and that the Gopsal portrait,
the result of the artist's skill on this occasion, had
obtained a distinguished place in the picture-gal-
ery of the noble Earl. This, however, is only unsup-
ported assertion, and the mere idleness of conject-
ture. It is not pretended to be ascertained that the
Gopsal portrait was ever in the possession of Shal-

* An Inquiry into the Authenticity of Pictures and
Prints offered as Portraits of Shakspeare, p. 67—80.

["WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.", "15", "speare's illustrious friend; and its transfers, during\nthe hundred and thirty-seven years, which inter-\nposed between the death of Southampton, in 1624,\nand the time of its emerging from the darkness at Gop-\nsal, in 1761, are not made the subjects even of a\nrandom guess. On such evidence, therefore, if\nevidence it can be called, it is impossible for us to\nrely with Mr. Boaden, the Gopsal picture as a\ngenuine portrait of Shakspeare. We are now as-\nsured that it was from the Chandos portrait Sir\nGodfrey Kneller copied the painting which he pre-\nsented to Dryden, a poet inferior only to him whose\nportrait constituted the gift. The beautiful verses,\nwith which the poet required the kind attention of\nthe painter, are very generally known: but many\nmay require to be informed that the present, made\non this occasion by the great master of the pen-\ncil to the greater master of the pen, is still in\nexistence, preserved no doubt by the respect felt to\nbe due to the united names of Kneller, Dryden,\nand Shakspeare; and is now in the collection of\nEarl Fitzwilliam at Wentworth Castle.* The ori-\nginal painting, from which Droeshout drew the copy\nfor his engraving, prefixed to the first folio edition\nof our Poet's dramas, has not yet been discovered;\nand I feel persuaded that no original painting ever\nexisted for his imitation; but that the artist worked\nin this instance from his own recollection, assisted\nprobably by the suggestions of the Poet's theatrical\npainters. We are, indeed, strongly of opinion that\nShakspeare, remarkable, as he seems to have been,\nfor a lowly estimate of himself, and for a carelessness\nof all personal distinction, would not readily submit\nhis face to be a painter's study, to the loss of hours,\nwhich he might more usefully or more plausibly\nassign to reading, to composition, or to conviviality.\nIf any sketch of his features was made during his\nlife, it was most probably taken by some rapid and\nunprofessional pencil, when the Poet was unaware\nof his own presence. But his first appearance in\nthe public life of Mr. Netto, the union of\nMr. Netto, the union of Chandos collection;\nand present Elizabeth Bryderes, who has set\nup his pronounced Walpole, as the only original\nno other, was not disposed to resist it.\nWe are convinced that no authentic portrait of this\ngreat man has yet been produced, or is likely to be\ndiscovered; and that we must not therefore hope\nto be gratified with anything which we can contem-\nplate with confidence as a faithful representation of\nhis countenance. The head of the statue, executed\nby Scheemaker, and erected, in 1741, was sculptured\nafter a mezzotinto, scraped by Simon nearly twenty\nyears before, and said to be copied from an ori-\nginal portrait, by Zoust. But as this artist was not\nknown by any of his productions in England till\nthe year 1657, no original portrait of Shakspeare\ncould be drawn by his pencil; and, consequently,\nthe marble chiselled by Scheemaker, under the\ndirection of Lord Burlington, Pope, and Mead,\nand cannot any claim to an authorized resemblance\nto the man, for whom it was wrought. We must\nbe satisfied, therefore, with knowing, on the au-\nthority of Aubrey, that our Poet \"was a handsome,\nwell-shaped man;\" and our imaginations must sup-\nply the expansion of his forehead, the sparkling and\nflash of his eyes, the sense and good-temper play-\ning round his mouth; the intellectuality and the\nbenevolence mantling over his whole countenance.", "It is well that we are better acquainted with the\nrectitude of his morals, than with the symmetry of\nhis features. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the", "* I derive my knowledge on this topic from Malone; for till I saw the fact asserted in his page, I was not aware that the picture in question had been preserved amid the wreck of poor Dryden's property. On the authority also of Malone and of Mr. Boaden, I speak of Sir Godfrey's present to Dryden as of a copy from the Chandos portrait.", "poetic palm. I have already cited Chettle: let me\nnow cite Jonson, from whose pages much more of\na similar nature might be adduced. \"I loved,\" he\nsays in his 'Discoveries,' \"I loved the man, and do\nhonour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much\nas any. He was, indeed, honest, of an open and\nfree nature; had an excellent fancy, brave notions\nand gentle expressions,\" &c. &c. When Jonson\napostrophizes his deceased friend, he calls him,\n\"My gentle Shakspeare,\" and the title of \"the\nsweet swan of Avon,\" so generally given to him,\nafter the example of Jonson, by his contemporaries,\nseems to have been given with reference as much\nto the suavity of his temper as to the harmony of\nhis verse. In their dedication of his works to the\nEarls of Pembroke and Montgomery, his fellows,\nHeminge and Condell, profess that their great ob-\nject in their publication was \"only to keep the\nmemory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as\nwas our Shakspeare:\" and their preface to the\npublic appears evidently to have been dictated by\ntheir personal and affectionate attachment to their\ndeparted friend. If we wish for any further evi-\ndence, in the support of the moral character of\nShakspeare, we may find it in the friendship of South-\nampton; we may extract it from the pages of his\nimmortal works. Dr. Johnson, in his much over-\npraised Preface, seems to have taken a view, very\ndifferent from ours, of the morality of our author's\nscenes. He says, \"His (Shakspeare's) first defect\nis that to which he may be imputed most of the evil in\nbooks or in men. He sacrifices virtue to conve-\nnience; and is so much more careful to please than\nto instruct, that he seems to write without any moral\npurpose. From his writings, indeed, a system of\nmoral duty may be selected,\" (indeed!) \"but his\nprecepts and axioms drop casually from him:\"\n(Would the preface-writer have wished the drama-\nature to give a connected treatise on ethics like\nthe offices of Cicero?) \"he makes no just distribution\nof good or evil, nor is always careful to show in\nthe virtuous a disapprobation of the wicked: he\ncarries his persons indifferently through right and\nwrong; and at the close dismisses them without\nfurther care, and leaves their examples to operate\nby chance. This fault the barbarity of the age can-\nnot extenuate; for it is always a writer's duty to\nmake the world better, and justice is a virtue inde-\npendent on time or place.\" Why this commonplace\non justice should be compelled into the station in\nwhich we here most strangely find it, I cannot for\nmy life conjecture. But absurd as it is made by its\nassociation in this place, it may not form an im-\nproper conclusion to a paragraph which means little,\nand which, intending censure, confers dramatic\npraise on a dramatic writer. It is evident, however,\nthat Dr. Johnson, though he says that a system of\nmoral duty may be selected from Shakspeare's\nwritings, wished to inculcate that his scenes were\nnot of a moral tendency. On this topic, the first\nand the greater Jonson seems to have entertained\nvery different sentiments—", "—\"Look, how the father's face", "(says this great man)", "Lives in his issue; even so the race\nOf Shakspeare's mind and manners, brightly shines\nIn his well-torned and truefiled lines.\"", "We think, indeed, that his scenes are rich in ster-\nling morality, and that they must have been the effu-\nsions of a moral mind. The only crimination of his\nmorals must be drawn from a few of his sonnets;\nand from a story first suggested by Anthony Wood,\nand afterwards told by Oldys on the authority of\nBetterton and Pope. From the Sonnets* we can\ncollect nothing more than that their writer was\nblindly attached to an unprincipled woman, who\npreferred a young and beautiful friend of his to him\nself. But the story told by Oldys presents some", "* See Son. 141, 144, 147, 151, 152.", "was constructed; nor at all\nmay have the recollection\nof the completeness of\nand on this point with no in-\nconceivable length; but\nis not strong enough to\nbe held up to the test of\nthe strict definition of\na direct title to the\nwork; and now, at Slope. In\ndistinctly drawn through\nthe proper division of\nthe marriage of the two\nby Mr. Netto, the union of\nthe Chandos collection;\nand present Elizabeth\nBryderes, who has set\nup his pronounced Walpole,\nas the only original\nno other, was not disposed to\nresist it.\nWe are convinced that no\noriginal portrait of this\ngreat man has yet been produced,\nor is likely to be\ndiscovered; and that we must not therefore\nhope to be gratified with anything which we can contem-\nplate with confidence as a faithful representation of\nhis countenance. The head of the statue, executed\nby Scheemaker, and erected, in 1741, was sculptured\nafter a mezzotinto, scraped by Simon nearly twenty\nyears before, and said to be copied from an ori-\nginal portrait, by Zoust. But as this artist was not\nknown by any of his productions in England till\nthe year 1657, no original portrait of Shakspeare\ncould be drawn by his pencil; and, consequently,\nthe marble chiselled by Scheemaker, under the\ndirection of Lord Burlington, Pope, and Mead,\nand cannot any claim to an authorized resemblance\nto the man, for whom it was wrought. We must\nbe satisfied, therefore, with knowing, on the au-\nthority of Aubrey, that our Poet \"was a handsome,\nwell-shaped man;\" and our imaginations must sup-\nply the expansion of his forehead, the sparkling and\nflash of his eyes, the sense and good-temper play-\ning round his mouth; the intellectuality and the\nbenevolence mantling over his whole countenance.\nIt is well that we are better acquainted with the\nrectitude of his morals, than with the symmetry of\nhis features. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name, and the symmetry of his\nfeatures. To the integrity of his heart; the\ngentleness and benignity of his manners, we have\nthe positive testimony of Chettle and Ben Jonson;\nthe former of whom seems to have been drawn, by\nour Poet's good and amiable qualities, from the fac-\ntion of his dramatic enemies; and the latter, in his\nlove and admiration of the man, to have lost all his\nnatural jealousy of the successful competitor for the\nprestige of his name,

16

THE LIFE OF

thing to us of a more tangible nature; and as it
possesses some intrinsic merit as a story, and rests,
as to its principal facts, on the authority of Wood,
who was a native of Oxford and a veracious man,
we shall not hesitate, after the example of most of
the recent biographers of our Poet, to relate it, and
the in the very words of Oldys. "If tradition may be
trusted, Shakspeare often baited at the Crown Inn
or Tavern in Oxford, on his journey to and from
London. The landlady was a beautiful woman and
of a sprightly wit; and her husband, Mr. John
Davenant, (afterwards mayor of that city,) a grave,
melancholy man, who, as well as his wife, used
much to delight in Shakspeare's pleasant company.
Their son, young Will Davenant (afterwards Sir
William Davenant) was then a little schoolboy, in
the town, of about seven or eight years old; and so
fond also of Shakspeare that, whenever he heard of
his arrival, he would fly from school to see him.
One day, an old townsman, observing the boy runn-
ing homeward almost out of breath, asked him
whither he was posting in that heat and hurry. He
answered, to see his god-father, Shakspeare. There
is a good boy, said the other; but have a care
that you don't take God's name in vain! This story
Mr. Pope told me at the Earl of Oxford's table,
upon occasion of some discourse which arose about
Shakspeare's monument, then newly erected in
Westminster Abbey."

On these two instances of his frailty, under the
influence of the tender passion, one of them sup-
ported by his own evidence, and one resting on au-
thority which seems to be not justly questionable,
depend all the charges which can be brought against
the strict personal morality of Shakspeare. In these
days of peculiarly sensitive virtue, he would not
possibly be admitted into the party of the saints;
but, in the age in which he lived, these errors of his
human weakness did not diminish the respect, com-
manded by the probity of his heart; or the love,
concielated by the benignity of his manners; or the
admiration exacted by the triumph of his genius. I
blush with indignation when I relate that an offence,
of a much more foul and atrocious nature, has been
suggested against him by a critic* of the present
day, on the pretended testimony of a large number
of his sonnets. But his own proud character, which
raised him high in the estimation of his contempo-
ralies, sufficiently vindicates him from this abomi-
nable imputation. It is admitted that one hundred
and twenty of these little poems are addressed to a
male, and that in the language of many of them
love is too strongly and warmly identified with
friendship. But in the days of Shakspeare love and
friendship were almost synonymous terms. In the
Merchant of Venice,† Lorenzo speaking of Antonio
to Portia, says,

"But if you knew to whom you show this honour,
How true a gentleman you send relief to;
How dear a lover of my lord, your husband," &c.

and Portia, in her reply calls Antonio "the bosom lover of her lord." Drayton, in a letter to his friend, Drummond of Hawthornden, tells him that Mr. Joseph Davies is in love with him; and Ben Jonson concludes a letter to Dr. Donne by professing himself as ever his true lover. Many more instances of the same perverted language might be educed from the writings of that gross and indelicate age; and I have not a doubt that Shakspeare, without exposing himself to the hazard of suspicion, employed this authorized dialect of his time to give the greater glow to these addresses to his young friend. But who was this young friend? The question has frequently been asked; and never once been even with the late Mr. G. Chalmers, that this object of our author's poetic ardour, was Queen Elizabeth, changed for the particular purpose, like the Iphis of

* See Monthly Review for Dec. 1824; article, Skot-
towe's Life of Shakspeare.
† Act iii. sc. 4.

the Roman poet, into a man, as I would be induced
to think, with the writer "On Shakspeare and his
Times," that these familiar and fervent addresses
were made to the proud and the lofty Southampton.
Neither can I persuade myself, with Malone, that
the friend and the mistress are the mere creatures
of our Poet's imagination, raised for the sport of
his muse, and without "a local habitation or a
name." They were, unquestionably, realities: but
who they were must for ever remain buried in in-
scrutable mystery. That those addressed to his
male friend are not open to the infamous interpre-
tation, affixed to them by the monthly critic, may
be proved, as I persuade myself, to demonstration.
The odious vice to which we allude, was always in
England held in merited detestation; and would
our Poet consent to be the publisher of his own
shame? to become a sort of outcast from society?
to be made

"A fixed figure for the hand of time
To point his slow, unmoving finger at?"

If the sonnets in question were not actually publis-
ed by him, he refrained to guard them from manu-
script distribution; and they soon, as might be ex-
pected, found their way to the press; whence they
were rapidly circulated, to the honour of his poetry
and not to the discredit of his morals. So pure
was he from the disgusting vice, imputed to him,
for the first time, in the nineteenth century, that he
alludes to it only once (if my recollection be at all
accurate) in all his voluminous works; and that is
where the foul-mouthed Thersites, in Troilus and
Cressida,* calls Patroclus "Achilles's masculine
whore." Under all the circumstances of the case,
therefore, that these sonnets should be the effusions
of sexual love is incredible, inconceivable, impossi-
ble; and we must turn away from the injurious
suggestion with honest abhorrence and disdain.

The Will of Shakspeare, giving to his youngest
daughter, Judith, not more than three hundred
pounds, and a piece of plate, which probably was
valuable, as it is called by the testator, "My broad
silver and gilt bowl," assigns almost the whole of his
property to his eldest daughter, Susanna Hall, and
her husband; whom he appoints to be his executors.
The cause of this evident partiality in the father
appears to be discoverable in the higher mental ac-
complishments of the elder daughter; who is re-
ported to have resembled him in her intellectual
endowments, and to have been eminently distin-
guished by the piety and the Christian benevolence
which actuated her conduct. Having survived her
estimable husband fourteen years, she died on
the 11th of July, 1649; and the inscription on her tomb,
preserved by Dugdale, commemorates her intellec-
tual superiority, and the influence of religion upon
her heart. This inscription, which we shall tran-
scribe, bears witness also, as we must observe, to
the piety of her illustrious father.

Witty above her sex; but that's not all:
Wise to salvation was good Mistress Hall;
Something of Shakspeare was in that; but this
Wholly of him, with whom she's now in bliss.
Then, passenger, hast ne'er a tear
To weep with her, that wept with all?
That wept, yet set herself to cheer
Then up with comforts cordial.
Her love shall live, her mercy spread,
When thou hast ne'er a tear to shed.

As Shakspeare's last will and testament will be
printed at the end of this biography, we may refer
our readers to that document for all the minor lega-
cies which it bequeaths; and may pass immediately
to an account of our great Poet's family, as far as it
can be given from records which are authentic.
Judith, his younger daughter, bore to her husband,
Thomas Quiney, three sons; Shakspeare, who
died in his infancy, Richard and Thomas, who de-
ceased, the first in his 21st year, the last in his 19th,

* Act v. sc. 1.

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

19

observed on the extraordinary,—may wonderful in-
difference of this illustration man toward the offspring
of his fancy; and we make it again the subject of
our remark solely for the purpose of illustrating the
cause of those numerous and pernicious errors
which deform all the early editions of his plays.
He must have known that many of these, his intel-
lectual children, were walking through the commu-
nity in a state of gross disease, with their limbs
spotted, as it were, with the leprosy or the plague.
But he looked on them without one parental feeling,
and stretched not out his hand for their relief. They
had broken from the confinement of the players, to
whose keeping he had consigned them; and it was
their business and not his to reclaim them. As for
the rest of his intellectual progeny, they were where
he had placed them; and he was utterly uncon-
cerned about their future fate. How fraught and
glowing with the principle of life must have been
their nature to enable them to subsist, and to force
themselves into immortality under so many circum-
stances of evil!

The copies of the plays, published antecedently
to his death, were transcribed either by memory
from their recitation on the stage; or from the sepa-
rate parts, written out for the study of the particu-
lar actors, and to be pieced together by the skill of
the editor; or, lastly, if stolen or bried access
could be attained to it, from the prompter's book
itself. From any of these sources of acquisition
the copy would necessarily be polluted with very
flagram errors; and from every edition, through
which it ran, it would naturally contract more pol-
lution and a deeper stain. Such of the first copies
as were fortunately transcribed from the prompter's
book, would probably be in a state of greater rela-
tive correctness: but they are all, in different de-
grees, deformed with inaccuracies; and not one of
them can claim the right to be followed as an au-
thority. What Steevens and Malone call the re-
storeing of Shakspeare's text, by reducing it to the
reading of these early quartos, is frequently the re-
storeing of it to error and to nonsense, from which it
had likeably been reclaimed by the felicity of conjec-
tural criticism. One instance immediately occurs
to me, to support what I have affirmed; and it may
be adduced instead of a score, which might be easi-
ly found, of these vaunted *restorations*.

In that fine scene between John and Hubert,
where the monarch endeavours to work up his
agent to the royal purposes of murder, the former
says,

> If thou couldst
> Hear me without thine ears, and make reply
> Without a tongue, using conceit alone, &c. &c.

Then in despite of *brooded*, watchful day,
I would into thy bosom pour my thoughts, &c. &c.

The passage thus stood in one of these old copies
of *authority*: but Pope, not able to discover any
meaning in the epithet, *brooded*, most happily sub-
stituted "broad-eyed" in its stead. As the com-
pound was poetic and Shakspearian (for Shakspeare
has dull-eyed and fire-eyed,) and was also most pe-
cularly suited to the place which it was to fill, the
substitution for a while was permitted to remain;
till Steevens, discovering the reading of the old copy,
restored *brooded* to the station whence it had been
felicitously expelled, and abandoned the line once
more to the nonsense of the first editor.

In 1623, the first complete edition of our author's
dramatic works was published in folio by his com-
rades of the theatre, Heminge and Condell; and in
this we might expect a text tolerably incorrupt, if
not perfectly pure. The editors denominated the
copies which had preceded their edition as "stolen
and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by
the frauds and stealths of injurious impostors, that
exposed them; even those are now offered to your

the names given in this copy to the Polonius and Rey-
naldo of the more perfect editions; and the young lord,
Osrick, is called in it only a braggart gentleman.

view cured and perfect of their limbs; and all the
rest absolute in their numbers as he conceived
them." But notwithstanding these professions,
and their honest resentment against impostors and
surreptitious copies, the labours of these sole pos-
sessors of Shakspeare's MSS. did not obtain the
credit which they arrogated; and they are charged
with printing from those very quartos, on which
they had heaped so much well-merited abuse. They
printed, as they cannot be a doubt, from their
prompter's book, (for by what temptation could they
be enticed beyond it?) but then, from the same
book, were transcribed many, perhaps, of the sur-
reptitious quartos; and it is not wonderful that
transcripts of the same page should be precisely
alike. These editors, however, of the first folio,
have incurred the heavy displeasure of some of our
modern critics, who are zealous on all occasions to
depreciate their work. Wherever they differ from
the first quartos, which, for the reason that I have
assumed, they must in general very closely resem-
ble Malone is ready to decide against them, and
to defer to the earlier edition. But it is against the
editor of the second folio, published in 1632, that
he points the full storm of his indignation. He
charges this luckless wight, whoever he may be,
with utter ignorance of the language of Shakspeare's
time, and of the fabric of Shakspeare's verse; and
he considers him and Pope as the grand corrupters
of Shakspeare's text. Without reflecting that to
be ignorant of the language of Shakspeare's time
was, in the case of this hapless editor, to be igno-
rant of his own, for he who published in 1632 could
hardly speak with a tongue different from his who
died only sixteen years before, Malone indulges in
an elaborate display of the unhappy man's igno-
rance, and of his presumptuous alterations. He
(the editor of the second folio) did not know that the
double negative was the customary and authorized
dialect of the age of Queen Elizabeth; (God help
him, poor man! for if he were forty years old when he
edited Shakspeare, he must have received the first
rudiments of his education in the reign of the maid-
en queen;) and thus egregiously ignorant (igno-
rant, by the bye, where Shakspeare himself was
ignorant, for his Twelfth Night,* the clown says,
"If your four negatives make your two affirmatives
—why then the worse for my friends and the better
for my foes," &c.) but thus egregiously ignorant,
instead of

"Nor to her bed *no* homage do I owe."

this editor has stupidly printed,

"Nor to her bed a homage do I owe."

Again, in "As you Like It," for "I cannot go no
further," this blockhead of an editor has substituted
"I can go no further." In "Much Ado about
Nothing," for

"There will she hide her
To listen our purpose."

this corrupting editor has presumed to relieve the
halting metre by printing,—

"There will she hide her
To listen *to* our purpose."

In these instances, I feel convinced that the editor is
right, and consequently that the critic is the block-
head who is wrong. In what follows also, I am
decided of opinion that the scale inclines in favour
of the former of these deadly opposites. The double
comparative is common in the plays of Shakspeare,
says Malone:—true, as I am willing to allow; but
always, as I am persuaded, in consequence of the
illiteracy or the carelessness of the first transcriber:
for why should Shakspeare write more anomalous
English than Spenser, Daniel, Hooker, and Bacon?
or why in his plays should he be guilty of barba-

* Act v. sc. I.

20

THE LIFE OF

risms with which those poems of his,* that were
printed under his own immediate eye, are altoge-
ther unstained? But, establishing the double com-
parative as one of the peculiar anomalies of Shak-
speare's grammar, Malone proceeds to arraign the
unfortunate editor as a criminal, for substituting, in
a passage of Coriolanus, more worthy for more wor-
tliar; in Othello—for, “opinion, a sovereign mis-
tress, throws a more safer voice on you,” “opinion,
&c. throws a more safe voice on you;” and, in Ham-
let, instead of “Your wisdom should show itself
more richer to signify this to the doctor,” “Your
wisdom should show itself more rich to signify this to
the doctor.” Need I express my conviction that in
these passages the editor has corrected the text into
what actually fell from Shakspeare's pen? Can it
be doubted also that the editor is accurate in his
printing of the following passage in “A Midsum-
mer Night's Dream?” As adopted by Malone it
stands.

“So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord,
Ere I will yield my virgin patent up
Unto his lordship, whose unwished yoke
My soul consents not to give sovereignty.”

i. e., says the critic, to give sovereignty to, &c.—To
be sure—and, without the insertion, in this instance,
of the preposition, the sentence would be nonsense.
As it is published by the editor, it is,—

“So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord,
Ere I will yield my virgin patent up
Unto his lordship, to whose unwish'd yoke
My soul consents not to give sovereignty.”

Having now sufficiently demonstrated the editor's
ignorance of Shakspeare's language, let us proceed
with his critique to ascertain his ignorance of Shak-
speare's metre and rhythm. In "The Winter's
Tale,"† says Malone, we find,

“What wheels, racks, fires; what flaying, boiling
In leads and oils!"

Not knowing that ‘fires’ was used as a dissyllable,
the editor added the word burning, at the end of
the line (I wish that he had inserted it before ‘boil-
ing’)—

“What wheels, racks, fires; what flaying, boiling,
burning.”

It is possible that fires may be used by Shakspeare
as a dissyllable, though I cannot easily persuade
myself that, otherwise than as a monosyllable, it
would satisfy an ear, attuned as was his, to the
finest harmonies of verse; yet it may be employed
as a dissyllable by the rapid and careless bard;
and I am ready to allow that the defective verse
was not happily supplied, in that place at least,
with the word, burning, yet I certainly believe that
Shakspeare did not leave the line in question as
Malone has adopted it, and that some word has
been omitted by the carelessness of the first tran-
scriber. In the next instance, from Julius Caesar,
I feel assured that the editor is right, as his sup-

plement is as beneficial to the sense, as it is ne-
cessary to the rhythm. Malone's line is,

“And with the brands fire the traitors' houses:”

the editor's

“And with the brands fire all the traitors' houses.”

The next charge, brought against the editor, may
be still more easily repelled. In a noted passage
of Macbeth—

“I would while it was smiling in my face
Have pluck'd my nipple from its boneless gums,
And dash'd the brains out, had I so sworn
As you have done to this.”

“Not perceiving,” says Malone, “that ‘sworn’
was used as a dissyllable,” (the devil it was?)
“He (the editor) reads ‘had I but so sworn,’”—
much as we think, to the advantage of the sense
as well as of the metre; and supplying, as we con-
ceive, the very word which Shakspeare had writ-
ten, and the carelessness of the transcriber omit-
ted. ‘Charms’ our Poet sometimes uses, accord-
ing to Malone, as a word of two syllables.”—No!
impossible! Our Poet might, occasionally, be guilty
of an imperfect verse, or the omission of his tran-
scriber might furnish him with one: but never
could he use “charms” as a word of two syllables.
We feel, therefore, obliged by the editor’s supply-
ing an imperfect line in “The Tempest,” with the
very personal pronoun which, it is our persuasion,
was at first inserted by Shakspeare. In the most
modern editions, the line in question stands—
“Cursed be I that did so! all the charms,” &c.,
but the second folio reads with unquestionable pro-
priety, “Cursed be I that I did so! all the charms,”
&c. As ‘hour’ has the same prolonged sound
with fire, sire, &c., and as it is possible, though,
with reference to the fine ear of Shakspeare, I
think most improbable, that it might sometimes be
made to occupy the place of two syllables. I shall
pass over the instance from “Richard II.” in which
Malone triumphs, though without cause, over his
adversary; as I shall also pass over that from
“All’s Well that End’s Well,” in which a defec-
tive line has been happily supplied by our editor,
in consequence of his not knowing that ‘sire’ was
employed as a dissyllable. In the first part of
“Henry VI.” “Rescued is Orleans from the Eng-
lish,” is prolonged by the editor with a syllable
which he deemed necessary because he was igno-
rant that the word, ‘English,’ was used as a tri-
syllable. According to him the line is—“Rescued
is Orleans from the English wolves.” We rejoice
at this result of the editor’s ignorance; and we
wish to know who is there who can believe that
‘English’ was pronounced, by Shakspeare or his
contemporaries, as Engerlish, or even as Engleish,
with three syllables? Again, not knowing that
‘Charles’ was used as a word of two syllables, (and
he was sufficiently near to the time of Shakspeare
to know his pronunciation of such a common word:
but the blockhead could not be taught the most
common things,) this provoking editor instead of

“Orleans the bastard, Charles, Burgundy.”

has printed,

“Orleans the bastard, Charles, and Burgundy.”

In the next instance, I must confess myself to be
ignorant of Malone's meaning. “Astræa being
used,” he says “as a word of three syllables,” (I
conclude that he intended to say, as a word of four
syllables, the diphthong being dialytically separated
into its component parts, and the word written and
pronounced Astræa,) for “Divinest creature, As-
traæa's daughter,” the editor has given “Divinest
 creature, bright Astræa's daughter.”—Shameless
interpolation! Not aware that 'sure' is used as a
dissyllable, this grand corrupter of Shakspeare's
text has substituted, “Gloster, we'll meet to thy
dear cost, be sure,” for “Gloster, we'll meet to thy
cost, be sure.”—Once more, and to conclude an
examination which I could extend to a much greater

* In his “Venus and Adonis,” and his “Rape of Lu-
crece,” printed under his immediate inspection; and in
his 154 Sonnets, printed from correct MSS., and no doubt
barbarous anomalies. “The Passionate Pilgrim,” and
“The Lover’s Complaint,” are, also, free from them.
Worser and lesser may sometimes occur in these po-
ems; but the last of these improprieties will occasionally
“Rape of Lucrece,” the only anomaly of the double
lowing:—

“She touch'd no unknown baits, nor fear'd no hooks.”
and the same impropriety may be found in three or four
instances in the Sonnets. And substituted for nor would
restore these few passages to perfect grammar.

† Act III. sc. 2.

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

21

length in favour of this much-injured editor, but
which I feel to be now becoming tedious, for,

"And so to arms, victorious father,"

as the line is sanctioned by Malone, 'arms,' being
used, as he asserts, for a dissyllable, (arms a dis-
syllable!) the second folio presents us with—

"And so to arms, victorious, *noble* father."

I have said enough to convince my readers of the
fatality of the charges of stupidity and gross igno-
rance, brought by Malone against the editor of the
second folio edition of our Poet's dramatic works.
I am far from assuming to vindicate this editor
from the commission of many flagrant errors: but
he is frequently right, and was unquestionably con-
versant, let Malone assert what he pleases, with
his author's language and metre. It was not,
therefore, without cause, that Steevens held his la-
bours in much estimation. Malone was an invaluable
collector of facts: his industry was indefatigable:
his researches were deep: his pursuit of
truth was sincere and ardent: but he wanted the
talents and the taste of a critic; and of all the edi-
tors, by whom Shakspeare has suffered, I must
consider him as the most pernicious. Neither the
indulged fancy of Pope, nor the fondness for innova-
tion in Hanmer, nor the arrogant and headlong
self-confidence of Warburton has inflicted such
erucler wounds on the text of Shakspeare, as the as-
suming dulness of Malone. Barbarism and broken
rhythm dog him at the heels wherever he treads.

In praise of the third and the fourth folio editions
of our author's dramas, printed respectively in 1664
and 1685, nothing can be advanced. Each of these
editions implicitly followed its immediate predeces-
sor, and, adopting all its errors, increased them to
a frightful accumulation with its own.
With the text of Shakspeare in this disarray, the public of
Britain remained satisfied during many years.
From the period of his death he had not enforced
that popularity to which his title was untenable.
From the period of his death he had not enforced
that popularity to which his title was untenable.
Great, though inferior, Ford, Menon, Fletcher,
Massinger, Shirley, Ford, &c. got possession of
the stage, and retained it till it ceased to exist un-
der the puritan retained. On the restoration of
the monarchy in 1660, the theatre itself was again
opened; but, under the influence of the vicious taste
of the new monarch, it was surrendered to a new
school (the French school) of the drama; and its
mastery was held by Dryden, with many subordi-
nates, during a long succession of years. Through-
out this whole period, Shakspeare was nearly for-
gotten by his ungrateful or blinded countrymen. His
splendour, it is true, was gleaming above the horizon;
and his glory, resting in purple and gold upon the
hill-summits, obtained the homage of a select band
of his worshippers: but it was still hidden from
the eyes of the multitude; and it was long before
it gained its "meridian tower," whence it was to
throw its "glittering shafts" over a large portion
of the earth. At length, about the commencement
of the last century, Britain began to open her eyes
to the excellence of her illustrious son, THE GREAT
POET OF NATURE, and to discover a solicitude for
the integrity of his works. A new and a more
perfect edition of them became the demand of the
public; and, to answer it, an edition, under the
superintendence of Rowe, made its appearance in
1709. Rowe, however, either forgetting or shrink-
ing from the high and laborious duties, which he
had undertaken, selected, most unfortunately, for
his model, the last and the worst of the folio edi-
tions; and, without collating either of the first two
folios or any of the earlier quartos, he gave to the
disappointed public a transcript much too exact of
the impure text which lay opened before him.
Some of its grosser errors, however, he corrected;
and he prefixed to his edition a short memoir of
the life of his author; which, meagre and weakly
written as it is, still constitutes the most authentic
biography that we possess of our mighty bard.

On the failure of this edition, after the pause of

a few years, another was projected; and that it
might be more adequate to the claims of Shakspeare
and of Britain, the conduct of it was placed, in
homage to his just celebrity, in the hands of Pope.
Pope showed himself more conscious of the nature
of his task, and more faithful in his execution of
it than his predecessor. He disclosed to the pub-
lic the very faulty state of his author's text, and
suggested the proper means of restoring it; he
collated many of the earlier editions, and he cleared
the page of Shakspeare from many of its deformi-
ties; but his collations were not sufficiently exten-
sive; and he indulged, perhaps, somewhat too
much in conjectural emendation. This exposed
him to the attacks of the petty and minute critics;
and, the success of his work falling short of his ex-
pectations, he is said to have contracted that en-
mity to verbal criticism, which actuated him during
the remaining days of his life. His edition was
published in the year 1725. Before this was under-
taken, Theobald, a man of no great abilities and of
little learning, had projected the restoration of
Shakspeare; but his labours had been suspended,
or their result had been withheld from the press,
till the issue of Pope's attempt was ascertained by
its accomplishment, and publication. The Shak-
speare of Theobald's editing was not given to the
world before the year 1733; when it obtained more
of the public regard than of illustrious predecessor,
in consequence of its being drawn from a somewhat
wider field of collation; and of its less frequent and
preemptuous admission of conjecture. Theobald,
indeed, did not wholly abstain from conjecture: but
the palm of conjectural criticism was placed
much too high for the reach of his hand.

To Theobald, as an editor of Shakspeare, suc-
ceeded Sir Thomas Hanmer, who, in 1744, publish-
ed a superb edition of the great dramatist from
the press of Oxford. But Hanmer, building his work
on that of Pope, and indulging in the wildest and
most wanton innovations, deprived his edition of
all pretensions to authenticity, and, consequently, to
merit.

The bow of Ulysses was next seized by a
mighty hand—by the hand of Warburton; whose
Shakspeare was published in 1747. It failed of
success; for, conceiving that the editor intended to
make his author his showman to exhibit his erudi-
tion and intellectual power, the public quickly neg-
lected his work; and it soon disappeared from cir-
culation, though some of its proffered substitutions
must be allowed to be happy, and some of its ex-
planations to be just.

After an interval of eighteen years, Shakspeare
obtained once more an editor of great name, and
seemingly in every way accomplished to assert the
rights of his author. In 1765 Doctor Samuel John-
son presented the world with his long-promised
edition of our dramatist: and the public expecta-
tion, which had been highly raised, was again
doomed to be disappointed. Johnson had a power-
ful intellect, and was perfectly conversant with hu-
man life: but he was not sufficiently versed in
black-letter lore; and, deficient in poetic taste, he
was unable to accompany our great bard in the
higher flights of his imagination. The public in
general were not satisfied with his commentary or
his text: but to his preface they gave the most un-
limited applause. The array and glitter of its
words; the regular and pompous march of its pe-
riods, with its pervading affection of deep thought
and of sententious remark, seem to have fascinated
the popular mind; and to have withdrawn from
the common observation its occasional poverty of
meaning; the inconsistency of its praise and cen-
sure; the falsity in some instances of its critical
remarks; and its defects now and then even with
respect to composition. It has, however, its merits,
and Heaven forbid that I should not be just to them.
It gives a right view of the difficulties to be encoun-
tered by the editor of Shakspeare: it speaks mo-
destly of himself, and candidly of those who had
preceded him in the path which he was treading:

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

23

amass; but he could not combine and arrange.
Like a weak soldier under heavy armour, he is
oppressed by his means of safety and triumph.
He sinks beneath his knowledge, and cannot pro-
fitably use it. The weakness of his judgment de-
prived the result of his industry of its proper effect.
He acts on a right principle of criticism: but, ig-
norant of its right application, he employs it for
the purposes of error. He was not, in short,
formed of the costly materials of a critic; and no
labour, against the inhibition of Nature, could
fashion him into a critic. His page is pregnant
with information: but it is thrown into so many
invitations and tangles, that it is lighter labour to
work it out of the original quarry than to select it
amid the confusion in which it is thus brought to
your hand. If any copy of indisputable authority
had been in existence, Malone would have produced
a fac-simile of it, and would thus, indeed, have been
an admirable editor of his author, for not a prepo-
sition, a copulative, a particle, a comma to be found
in his original, would have been out of its place in
his transcript. But no such authentic copy of
Shakspeare could be discovered; and something
more than diligence and accuracy was required in
his editor: and to nothing more than diligence and
accuracy could Malone's very humble and circu-
scribed abilities aspire. Attaching, therefore, fic-
titious authority to some of the earlier copies, he
followed them with conscientious precision; and,
disclaiming all emendatory criticism, he rejoiced in
his fidelity to the errors of the first careless or ili-
ate transcriber. He closed the long file of the
editors of Shakspeare. But although no formal
editorial or commentary has hitherto appeared to
supply the place left vacant by Malone, yet does
the importance of our bard continue to excite
the man of talents to write in his cause, and to refresh
the wreath of fame, which has hung for two centu-
ries on his tomb. On this occasion I must adduce
the name of Skottowe, a gentleman who has recently
gratified the public with a life of Shakspeare, invol-
ving a variety of matter respecting him, in a style
eminent for its compression and its neatness. To
Mr. Skottowe I must acknowledge my especial
obligations, for not infrequently relieving me from
the proxities and the perplexities of Malone; and
sometimes for giving to me information in a com-
pendious and lucid form, like a jewel set in the
rich simplicity of gold.

When I speak of Malone as the last of the editors of Shakspeare, I speak, of course, with reference to the time at which I am writing, when no later editor has shown himself to the world. But when I am placed before the awful tribunal of the Public, a new Editor of our great dramatist will stand by my side: who, whilst I can be only a suppliant for pardon, may justly be a candidate for praise. With MR. SINGER, the editor in question, I am personally unacquainted; and till a period, long subsequent to my completion of the little task which I had undertaken, I had not seen a line of his Shakspearian illustrations. But, deeming it right to obtain some knowledge of the gentleman, who was bound on the same voyage of adventure, in the same vessel with myself, I have since read the far greater part of his commentary on my author; and it would be unjust in me not to say, that I have found much in it to applaud, and very little to censure. Mr. Singer's antiquarian learning is accurate and extensive; his critical sagacity is considerable; and his judgment generally approves itself to be correct. He enters on the field with the strength of a giant; but with the diffidence and the humility of a child. We sometimes wish, indeed, that his humility had been less: for he is apt to defer to inferior men, and to be satisfied with following when he is privileged to lead. His explanations of his author are frequently happy; and sometimes they illustrate a passage, which had been left in unregarded darkness by the commentators who had preceded him. The sole fault of these explanatory notes (if such indeed can be deemed a fault) is their redundancy;

and their recurrence in cases were their aid seems
to be unnecessary. Mr. Singer and I may occasionally
differ in our opinions respecting the text,
which he has adopted: but, in these instances of
our dissent, it is fully as probable that I may be
wrong as he. I feel, in short, confident, on the
whole, that Mr. Singer is now advancing, not to
claim, (for to claim is inconsistent with his modesty,)
but to obtain a high place among the editors of
Shakspeare; and to have his name enrolled with
the names of those who have been the chief bene-
factors of the reader of our transcendent Poet.

We have now seen, from the first editorial attempt of Rowe, a whole century excited by the greatness of one man, and sending forth its most ambitious spirits, from the man of genius down to the literary mechanic, to tend on him as the vassals of his royalty, and to illustrate his magnificence to the world. Has this excitement had an adequate cause? or has it been only the frenzy of the times, or a sort of meteorous exhalation from an idle and over-exuberant soil? Let us examine our great poet, and dramatist, with the eye of impartial criticism; and then let the result of our examination form the reply to these interrogatories of doubt.

Shakspeare took his stories from any quarter,
whence they were offered to him; from Italian
novels; from histories; from old story-books;
from old plays; and even from old ballads. In one
instance, and in one alone, no prototype has been
found for his fiction; and the whole of "The Tem-
pest," from its first moving point to the pleni-
tude of its existence, must be admitted to be the
offspring of his wonderful imagination.* But
whence soever he drew the first suggestion of his
story, or whatever might be its original substance,
he soon converts it into an image of ivory and
gold, like that of the Minerva of Phidias; and then,
beyond the efficacy of the sculptor's art, he breathes
into it the breath of life. This, indeed, is spoken
only of his tragedies and comedies: for his histories,
as they were first called, or historical dramas, are
transcripts from the page of Hall or Hollingshead;
and, in some instances, are his workings on old
plays, and belong to him no otherwise than as he
imparted to them the powerful delineation of char-
acter, or enriched them with some exquisite scenes.
These pieces, however, which affect not the com-
bination of a fable; but, wrought upon the page of
the chronicler or of the elder dramatist, follow the
current of events, as it flows on in historic success-
sion, must be made the first subjects of our re-
marks; and we will then pass to those dramas,
which are more properly and strictly his own. To
these historical plays, then, whatever may be their
original materials, the power of the Poet has com-
municated irresistible attraction; not, as Samuel
Johnson would wish us to believe, "by being not
long soft or pathetic without some idle conceit or
contemptible equivocation:" not "by checking
and blasting terror and pity, as they are rising in
the mind, with sudden frigidity," but by the strong-
est exertions of the highest poetry; and by com-
manding, with the royalty of genius, every avenue
to the human heart. For the truth of what we
assert, we will make our appeal to the frantic and
soul-piercing lamentations of Constance in "King
John;" to the scene between that monarch and
Hubert; and between Hubert and young Arthur;
to the subsequent scene between Hubert and his
murderous sovereign, when the effects of the re-
ported death of Arthur on the populace are de-
scribed, and the murderer quarrels with his agent:
to the scene, finally, in which the king dies, and
which concludes the play.

For the evidence of the power of our great Poet we might appeal also to many scenes and descriptions even in "Richard II.;" though of all his historical dramas this, perhaps, is the least instinct

* This, perhaps, may be affirmed also of "A Mid summer Night's Dream"

24

THE LIFE OF

with animation, and the least attractive with dramatic interest. Of "Richard II." we may say with Mr. Skottowe, that, "though it is an exquisite poem, it is an indifferent play." But in the drama which, in its historic order, succeeds to it, we receive an ample compensation for any failure of the dramatist in "Richard II." In every page of "Henry IV.," both the serious and the comic, Shakspeare "is himself again;" and our fancy is either elevated or amused without the interruption of a single discordant or uncharacteristic sentiment. Worcester, indeed, says,

"And 'tis no little reason bids us speed
To save our heads by raising of a head;"

and is thus guilty of a quibble; an offence of which the Prince, on two occasions, shows himself to be capable; once when he sees Falstaff apparently dead on the field of Shrewsbury; and once when, on his accession to the throne, he appoints his father's Chief Justice to a continuance in his high office: and these, as I believe, are the sole instances of our Poet's dalliance with his Cleopatra, for whose love he was content to lose the world, throughout the whole of the serious parts of this long and admirable drama.

The succeeding play of "Henry V." bears noble testimony to the poetic and the dramatic supremacy of Shakspeare: to the former, more especially in its three fine choruses, one of them serving as the prologue to the play, one opening the third act, and one describing the night preceding the battle of Agincourt: to the latter, in every speech of the King's, and in the far greater part of the remaining dialogue, whether it be comic or tragic. "Henry V.," however, is sullied with some weak and silly scenes; and, on the whole, is certainly inferior in dramatic attraction to its illustrious predecessor. But it is a very fine production, and far—far above the reach of any other English writer, who has been devoted to the service of the stage.

Of "Henry VI.," that drum and trumpet thing, as it has happily been called by a man of genius,* who ranged himself with the advocates of Shakspeare, I shall not take any notice on the present occasion, as the three parts of this dramatized history are nothing more than three old plays, corrected by the hand of Shakspeare, and here and there illustrious with the fire-drops which fell from his pen. Though we consider them, therefore, as possessing much attraction, and as disclosing Shakspeare in their outbreaks of fine writing, and in their strong characteristic portrature, we shall now pass them by to proceed without delay to their dramatic successor, "Richard III." Of "Richard II.," fine as it occasionally is in poetry, and rich in sentiment and the other productions of its great author, it was low in the scale of merit. In "Richard II." he found an insufficient and an unawakening subject for his genius, and it acted drowsily, and as if it were half asleep: but in the third Richard there was abundant excitement for all its powers; and the victim of Tudor malignity and calumny rushes from the scene of our mighty dramatist in all the black efficiency of the demoniac tyrant. Besides Sir Thomas More's history of Richard of Gloster, our Poet had the assistance, as it seems, of a play upon the same subject, which had been popular before he began his career upon the stage. Adhering servilely neither to the historian nor to the old dramatist, Shakspeare contented himself with selecting from each of them such parts as were suited to his purpose; and with the materials thus obtained, compounded with others supplied by his own invention, he has produced a drama, which cannot be read in the closet, or seen in its representation on the stage without the strongest agitation of the mind. The character of Richard is drawn with

inimitable effect; and in the minor parts of the execution of the drama, there is nothing among all the creations of poetry more splendid and terrific than the dream of Clarence. But this noble effort of the tragic power is not altogether faultless. Some of its scenes, as not promoting the action of the drama, are superfluous and even tedious; and the violation of history, for the purpose of introducing the deposed queen, Margaret, upon the stage, may reasonably be censured. I am not certain, however, that I should be satisfied to resign her on the requisition of truth. Her curses are thrilling, and their fulfilment is awful. Shakspeare, as it may be remarked, has accumulated uncommitted crimes on the head of the devoted Richard. By the historian, this monarch is cleared of the deaths of Clarence and of Anne, his wife: to the latter of whom he is said to have approved himself an affectionate husband; whilst the murder of Clarence is imputed to the intrigues of the relations of his sister-in-law, the queen. His hand certainly did not shed the blood of the pious Henry; and even his assassination of the two illegitimate sons of his brother, Edward, is supported by very questionable evidence, for there is reason to think that the eldest of these young princes walked at his uncle's coronation; and that the youngest escaped to meet his death, under the name of Perkin Warbeck, from the hand of the first Tudor. But the scene of Shakspeare has stamped deeper and more indelible deformity on the memory of the last sovereign of the house of York, than all the sycophants of the Tudors had been able to impress; or than all that the impartiality, and the acute research of the modern historian have ever had the power to erase. We are certain that Richard possessed a lawful title to the throne which he filled: that he was a wise and patriotic sovereign: that his death was a calamity to his country, which it surrendered to a race of usurpers and tyrants, who trampled on its liberties, and stained its soil with much innocent and rich blood:—to that cold-blooded murderer and extortior, Henry VII.—to that monster of cruelty and lust, his ferocious son: to the sanguinary and ruthless bigot, Mary: to the despotic and unamiable Elizabeth; the murderess of a supplant queen, of kindred blood, who had fled to her for protection. Such was the result of Bosworth's field, preceded, as it was on the stage of Shakspeare, by visions of bliss to Richmond, and by visions of terror to Richard. But Shakspeare wrote with all the prejudices of a partisan of the Tudors; and at a time also when it was still expedient to flatter that detestable family.

His next task was one of yet greater difficulty:—to smooth down the rugged features of the eighth Henry, and to plant a wreath on the brutal and blood-stained brow of the odious father of Elizabeth. This task he has admirably executed, and without offering much violation to the truth of history. He has judiciously limited his scene to that period of the tyrant's reign in which the more disturbing deformities of his character had not yet been revealed—to the death of Catharine, the fall of Wolsey, and the birth of Elizabeth: and the crowned savage appears to us only as the generous, the munificent, the magnanimous monarch, striking down the proud, and supporting with a strong arm the humble and the oppressed. But the whole pathos and power of the scene are devoted to Catherine and Wolsey. On these two characters the dramatist has expended all his force; and our pity is inseparably attached to them to the last moment of their lives. They expire, indeed, bedewed with our tears. Of this, the last of Shakspeare's dramatic histories, it may be remarked that it is written in a style different from that of its predecessors: that it is less interspersed with comic scenes; that in its serious parts its diction is more stately and formal; more elevated and figurative: that its figures are longer and more consistently sustained: that it is more rich in theatrical exhibition, or in the spectacle, as Aristotle calls it, and by whom it is

* The late Mr. Maurice Morgann; who wrote an eloquent essay on the dramatic character of Falstaff.

THE LIFE OF

26

of them as the impulse of his fancy may direct. When we follow Macbeth to the chamber of Duncan: when we stand with him by the enchanted caldron; or see him, under the infliction of science, glaring at the spectre of the *blood-boltered* Banquo in the possession of the royal chair, horror is by our side, thrilling in our veins, and bristling in our hair. When we attend the Danish prince to his midnight conference with the shade of his murdered father, and hear the ineffable accents of the dead, willing, but prohibited, "to tell the secrets of his prison-house," we are appalled, and our faculties are suspended in terror. When we see the faithful and the lovely Juliet awaking in the house of darkness and corruption with the corpse of her husband on her bosom: when we behold the innocent Desdemona dying by the hand, to which she was the most fondly attached; and charging on herself, with her latest breath, the guilt of her murder: when we witness the wretchedness of Lear, contending with the midnight storm, and strewing his white locks on the blast; or carrying in his withered arms the body of his Cordelia murdered in his cause, is it possible that the tear of pity should not start from our eyes and trickle down our cheeks? In the forest of Arden, as we ramble with its accidental inmates, our spirits are soothed into cheerfulness, and are, occasionally, elevated into gaiety. In the tavern at Eastcheap, with the witty and debauched knight, we meet with "Laughter holding both his sides;" and we surrender ourselves, willingly and delighted, to the inebriation of his influence. We could dwell for a long summer's day amid the fertility of these charming topics, if we were not called from them to a higher region of poetic enjoyment, possessed by the genius of Shakespeare alone, where he reigns sole lord, and where his subjects are the wondrous progeny of his own creative imagination. From whatever quarter of the world, eastern or northern, England may have originally derived her elves and her fairies, Shakspeare undoubtedly formed these little beings, as they flutter in his scenes, from an idea of his own; and they came from his hand, beneficent and friendly to man; immortal and invulnerable; of such corporeal minuteness as to lie in the bell of a cowlslip; and yet of such power as to disorder the seasons; as

"to bedim
The noontide sun; call forth the mutinous winds:
And 'twixt the green sea and the azured vault,
Set roaring war."

To this little ethereal people our Poet has assigned manners and occupations in perfect consistency with their nature; and has sent them forth, in the richest array of fancy, to gambol before us, to astonish and delight us. They resemble nothing upon earth: but if they could exist with man, they would act and speak as they act and speak, with the inspiration of our Poet, in "The Tempest," and "A Midsummer Night's Dream." In contrast with his Ariel, "a spirit too delicate," as the servant of a witch, "to act her earthy and abhorred commands:" but ready, under the control of his philosophic master,

"To answer his best pleasure, be it to fly,
To swim; to dive into the fire; to ride
On the curl'd clouds;"

in contrast with this aerial being, the imagination of Shakspeare has formed a monster, the offspring of a hag and a demon; and has introduced him into the scene with a mind and a character appropriate and strictly his own. As the drama, into which are introduced these two beings, beyond the one of them rising above, and one sinking beneath the level of humanity, may be received as the proudest evidence, which has hitherto been produced, of the extent and vigour of man's imagination; so it bids fair to stand unrivalled amid all

the loftiest aspirations of the human mind in the ages which are yet to come. The great Milton's imagination alone can be placed in competition with that of Shakspeare; and even Milton's must yield the palm to that which is displayed in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and in the almost divine "Tempest."

But having sported a while with the fairies,

"as on the sands with printless feet
They chase the ebbing Neptune,"

or

"in the spiced Indian air,
They dance their ringlets to the whistling wind,"

the mighty Poet turns from their bowers, "overcanopied with luscious woodbine," and plants us on "the blasted heath," trodden by the weird sisters, the Fates of the north; or leads us to the dreadful cave, where they are preparing their infernal caldron, and singing round it the incantations of hell. What a change, from all that is fascinating, to all that is the most appalling to the fancy; and yet each of these scenes is the product of the same astonishing intellect, delighting at one time to lull us on beds of roses, with the spirit of Orpheus, and at another to curdle our blood by throwing at us the viper lock of Alecto. But to show his supreme command of the super-human world, our royal Poet touches the sepulchre with his magic rod, and the sepulchre opens "its pondrous and marble jaws," and gives its dead to "revisit the glimpses of the moon." The belief that the dead, on some awful occasions, were permitted to assume the semblance of those bodies, in which they had walked upon earth; or that the world of spirits was sometimes disclosed to the eye of mortality, has prevailed in every age of mankind, in the most enlightened as well as in the most dark. When philosophy had attained its widest extent of power, and had enlarged and refined the intellect; not only of its parent Greece, but of its pupil Rome, a spectre is recorded to have shaken the firmness of Dion, the scholar and the friend of Plato; and another to have assayed the constancy of the philosophic and the virtuous Brutus. In the superstitious age of our Elizabeth and of her Scottish successor, the belief in the existence of ghosts and apparitions was nearly universal; and when Shakspeare produced upon his stage the shade of the Danish sovereign, there was not, perhaps, a heart, amid the crowded audience, which did not palpitate with fear. But in any age, however little tainted it might be with superstitious credulity, would the ghost of royal Denmark excite an agitating interest, with such awful solemnity is he introduced, so sublimely terrible is his tale of woe, and such are the effects of his appearance on the persons of the drama, who are his immediate witnesses. We catch, indeed, the terrors of Horatio and the young prince; and if the illusion be not so strong as to seize in the first instance on our own minds, it acts on them in its result from theirs. The melancholy, which previously preyed on the spirits of the youthful Hamlet, was certainly heightened into insanity by this ghostly conference; and from this dreadful moment his madness is partly assumed, and partly unaffected. It is certain that no spectre, ever brought upon the stage, can be compared with this phantom, created by the power of Shakspeare. The apparition of the host, in "The Lover's Progress," by Fletcher, is too contemptible to be mentioned on this occasion: the spirit of Almanzor's mother, in "The Conquest of Granada," by Dryden, is not of a higher class; and even the ghost of Darius, in "The Persians," of the mighty and sublime Æschylus, shrinks into insignificance before this of the murdered Majesty of Denmark. For his success, indeed, in this instance, Shakspeare is greatly indebted to the superior awfulness of his religion; and the use which he has made of the Romish purgatory must be regarded as

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

27

supremely felicitous. When the imagination of
Shakspeare sported without control amid these
creations of its own, it unquestionably lifted him
high above any competition. As he plays with the
fairies in their bowers of eglantine and woodbine;
or directs the operations in the magic cave; or calls
the dead man from the "cold obstruction" of the
tomb, "to make night hideous," he may challenge
the poets of every age, from that of Homer to the
present, and be fearless of the event. But either
from his ignorance of them, which is not easily cre-
dible, or from his disregard to them, or rather, per-
haps, from his desire to escape from their yoke, he
violates without remorse the dramatic unities of
time and place, contenting himself to preserve the
unity of action or design, without which, indeed,
nothing worthy of the name of composition can
exist. And who steps forward, in this instance of
his licentious liberty, as the champion of Shak-
speare, but that very critic who brings such charges
against him as a poet and a dramatist, that, if they
were capable of being substantiated, would overturn
him from his lofty pedestal; and would prove the
object of our homage, during two centuries, to be a
little deformed image, which we had with the most
silly idolatry mistaken for a god? But Johnson's
defence of Shakspeare seems to be as weak as his
attack; though in either case the want of power in
the warrior is concealed under the glare of his
ostentations arms. It is unquestionable that, since
the days of the patrician of Argos, recorded by
Horace,* who would sit for hours in the vacant
theatre, and give his applause to actors who were
not there, no man, unattended by a keeper, ever
mistook the wooden and narrow platform of a stage
for the fields of Philippi or Agincourt; or the painted
cavass, shifting under his eye, for the palace of the
Ptolemies or the Cæsars; or the walk, which had
brought him from his own house to the theatre, for
a voyage across the Mediterranean to Alexandria;
or the men and women, with whom he had probably
conversed in the common intercourse of life; for old
Romans and Grecians. Such a power of illusion,
quite incompatible with any degree of sanity of
mind, has never been challenged by any critic, as
attached to poetry and the stage; and it is adduced,
in his accustomed style of argument, by Johnson,
only for the purpose of confounding his adversaries
with absurdity, or of baffling them with ridicule.
But there is a power of illusion, belonging to ge-
nune poetry, which, without overthrowing the rea-
son, can seize upon the imagination, and make it
subservient to its purposes. This is asserted by
Horace in that often cited passage:

"Ile per extentum funem mihi posse videtur
Ire poeta, meum qui pectus inaniter angit,
Irritam, mulctur falsis terroribus implement
Ut magus; et modo me Thebis modo ponti Athenis."

Assisted by the scenery, the dresses of the actors,
and their fine adaptation of the voice and counte-
nance to the design of the poet, this illusion becomes
so strong as intimately to blend us with the fictitious
personages whom we see before us. We know,
indeed, that we are seated upon benches, and are
spectators only of a poetic fiction: but the power,
which mingles us with the agents upon the stage, is
of such a nature that we feel, as it were, one inter-
est with them: we resent the injuries which they
suffer, we rejoice at the good fortune which betideth
them: the pulses of our hearts beat in harmony
with theirs; and as the tear gushes from their eyes,
it swells and overflows in ours. To account for
this influence of poetic imitation, for this contagion
of represented passion belongs to the metaphysic-
an, the sole business of the critic is to remark
and to reason from the fact. It is unquestionable
that our imaginations are, to a certain extent, under
the control of authentic poetry, and especially of
that poetry which employs the scenic imitation for its

—* Fuit haud ignobilis Argis, &c. Epis. lib. ii. Ep.
ii. 1. 128.

instrument. The stream of passion, like a stream
of electricity, rushes from the actor to us, and we
are as unable as we are unwilling to resist it. Now
it is this feeling, which constitutes the poetic pro-
jectivity of what we see and hear, and which may
be violated by an injudicious and lawless shifting of
the scene. If our passions be interested by an
action passing at a place called Rome, it must
shock and chill them to have our attentions hurried
suddenly, without any reason for the discontinuance
of the action, to a place called Alexandria, separa-
ted by the intervention of a thousand miles. Let
us suppose, then, that in the fulness of the scenic
excitement, a friend at our elbow, with the impas-
sible fibre of a Johnson, were to shake us and to
say, "What! are you mad? Know you not where
you are? in Drury Lane theatre? within a few
hundred yards of your own chambers in Lincoln's
Inn, and neither at Rome nor at Alexandria? and
perceive you not that the old man whom you see
there on his knee, with his hands clenched, and his
eyes raised in imprecation to heaven, is our old
friend, Garrick, who is reciting with much propriety
some verses made by a man, long since in his
grave? Yes! Garrick, with whom you conversed
not many hours ago; and who, a few hours hence,
will be talking with his friends, over a comfortable
supper, of the effects of his present mimickry?"
If we should be thus addressed, (and a sudden shift-
ing of the scene may produce an equal dissipation
of the illusion which delights us,) should we be
thankful to our wise friend for thus informing our
understanding by the interruption of our feelings?'
Should we not rather exclaim with the Argive noble
of Horace, when purged by hellebore into his senses,

— Pol me occidenti
— cui sic exporta volutæ
Et demptus per vim mentis gratissimus error."

With the illusion of the poetic or dramatic imita-
tion, established as an unquestionable truth in our
minds, let us now turn and consider the dramatic
unities in their origin and effect. The unity of
action, indeed, may be thrown altogether from our
notice; for, universally acknowledged to be essen-
tially necessary to the drama, and constituting what
may be called its living principle, it has escaped
from violation even by our lawless Poet himself.
The drama, as we know, in Greece, derived its ori-
gin from the choral odes, which were sung at certain
seasons before the altar of Bacchus. To these, in
the first instance, was added a dialogue of two per-
sons; and, the number of speakers being subse-
quently increased, a regular dramatic fable was, at
length, constructed, and the dialogue usurped the
prime honours of the performance. But the chorus,
though degraded, could not be expelled from the
scene, which was once entirely its own; and, con-
secrated by the regard of the people, it was forced
upon the acceptance of the dramatist, to act with it
in the best manner that he could. It was stationed,
therefore, permanently on the stage, and made to
occupy its place with the agents who were to con-
duct the action of the fable. From the circumstance
of its being stationary on the stage, it secured the
strict observance of the unity of place: for with a
stage, which was never vacant, and consequently
with only one scene, the Grecian dramatist could
not remove his agents whithersoever he pleased, in
accommodation to his immediate convenience; but
on the spot, where the scene opened, he was con-
strained to retain them till the action of the drama
was closed, and what could not consistently be
acted was necessarily consigned to narration. This
was a heavy servitude to the dramatist; but it had
its compensations in uninterrupted feeling, and in
the greater conservation of probability. To the
unity of time, as time is more pliant to the imagi-
ation than place, the Grecian dramatist seems to
have paid little if any regard. In the Agamemnon
of Æschylus, the fire signals have only just an-
nounced to Mycenæ the fall of Troy, when the
herald arrives with the tidings of the victorious

WILLIAM SHAKSPEARE.

29

er's or the reader's mind; but, if submitted to the
philosophical grammarian's examination, they will
not easily stand under it; and they may puzzle us to
account for their effect in the communication of
the poet's ideas.

'Ay, but to die, and go we know not where :

To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot :

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod ; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods; or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice :

To be imprisoned in the viewless winds ;

And blown with restless violence about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and uncertain thoughts

Imagine howlings!——'tis too horrible !

The weariest and most loathed worldly life,

That age, ache, penury, imprisonment

Can lay on nature, is a paradise

To what we fear of death."

This entire passage, terminating at “howling,” is
deficient in grammatical correctness, for it contains
an antecedent not succeeded by a consequent:
but is there a reader of taste who would wish it to
be any thing but what it is? As for those barbar-
isms of the double negative and the double com-
parative, which Malone is studious to recall from
the old copies into Shakspeare's text, I have already
declared my conviction that they are falsely charged
upon Shakspeare. They are not to be found in those
effusions of my muse which issued from the press
under his own immediate inspection; and they
must assuredly be considered as the illeterate errors
of an illiterate transcriber.

I could now easily, and the task would be delight-
ful to me, produce examples, from the page of
Shakspeare, of all the excellencies which I have
attributed to his diction; of its sublimity, its force,
its tenderness, its pathos, its picturesque character,
its sweet and very varying harmony. But I have
already very far transgressed the limits prescribed
to me in volume; and I must restrain myself.
When, therefore, I have cited, at the close of what
I am now writing, the description by Jaques, in
"As you Like it," of the seven ages of man, as an
illustration of Shakspeare's power to touch the most
familiar topics into poetry, as the Phrygian mon-
arch could touch the basest substances into gold,
I shall conclude this long and, as I fear, this fatiguing
treatise on Shakspeare and his works, by asking if
he be not a mighty genius, sufficiently illustrous
and commanding to call forth the choice spirits of
a learned and intellectual century to assert his
greatness, and to march in his triumph to fame ?

Yes, master of the human heart! we own

thy sovereign sway; and bow before thy throne :

Where, richly deck'd with laurels never sere,

It stands aloft, and baffles Time's song:

There warbles Poesy her sweetest song :

There was the wild Passions wait, thy vassal throng,

There Love, there Hate, there Joy in turn presides;

And rosy Laughter holding both his sides.

At thy command the varied tumult rolls :

Now Pity melts, now Terror chills our souls.

Now, as thou wavest the wizard-rod, are seen

The Fays and Elves quick glancing o'er the green:

And, as the moon her perfect orb displays,

The little people sparkle in her rays.

There, mid the lightning's blaze, and whirlwind's
howl,

On the scath'd heath the fatal sisters scowl :

Or, as hell's caldron bubbles o'er the flame,

Prepare to do a deed without a name.

These are thy wonders, Nature's darling birth !

And Fame exulting bears thy name o'er earth.

There, where Rome's eagle never stoop'd for blood,
By hallow'd Ganges and Missouri's flood :

Where the bright eyelids of the Morn unclose ;

And where Day's steeds in golden stalls repose ;

Thy peaceful triumphs speak, and mock the pride
Of Pella's Youth, and Julius slaughter-dyed.

In ages far remote, when Albion's state

Hath touch'd the mortal limit, marked by Fate :

When Arts and Science fly her naked shore :

And the world's Empress shall be great no more :

Then Australasia shall thy sway prolong ;

And her rich cities echo with thy song.

There myriads still shall laugh, or drop the tear,

At Falstaff's humour, or the woes of Lear :

Man, wave-like, following man, thy powers admire;

And thou, my Shakespeare, reign till time expire.

C. S.

Newstead Abbey,

Aug. 4th, 1825.

SHAKSPEARE'S WILL.

FROM THE ORIGINAL IN THE OFFICE OF THE
PREROGATIVE COURT OF CANTERBURY.

Vicesimio quinto die Martii, Anno Regni Domini
nostri Jacobi nunc Regis Anglia, &c. decimo quar-
to, et Scotiae quadragesimo nono. Anno Domini
1616.

In the name of God, Amen. I William Shaks-
speare of Stratford upon Avon, in the county of
Warwick, gent. in perfect health and memory (God
be praised!) do make and ordain this my last
will and testament in manner and form following;
that is to say :

First, I commend my soul into the hands of God
my creator, hoping, and assuredly believing, through
the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour, to be
made partaker of life everlasting; and my body to
the earth whereof it is made.

Item, I give and bequeath unto my daughter
Judith, one hundred and fifty pounds of lawful Eng-
lish money, to be paid unto her in manner and form
following: that is to say, one hundred pounds in
discharge of her marriage portion within one year
after my decease, with consideration after the rate
of two shillings in the pound for so long a time as
the same shall be unpaid unto her after my decease;
and the fifty pounds residue thereof, upon her sur-
rendering of, or giving of such sufficient security as
the overseers of this my will shall like of, to sur-
render or grant, all her estate and right that shall
descend or come into her after my decease, or that
she now hath, of, in, or to, one coppyhold tenement,
with the appurtenances, lying and being in Strat-
ford upon Avon aforesaid, in the said county of
Warwick, being parcel or holden of the manor of
Rowington, unto my daughter Susanna Hall, and
her heirs for ever.

Item, I give and bequeath unto my said daughter
Judith one hundred and fifty pounds more, if she,
or any issue of her body, be living at the end of
three years next ensuing the day of the date of this
my will, during which time my executors to pay her
consideration from my decease according to the rate
aforesaid: and if she die within the said term with-
out issue of her body, then my will is, and I do give
and bequeath one hundred pounds thereof to my
niece Elizabeth Hall, and the fifty pounds to be set
forth by my executors during the life of my sister
Joan Hart, and the use and profit thereof coming,
shall be paid to my said sister Joan, and after her
decade the said fifty pounds shall remain amongst
the children of my said sister, equally to be divided
amongst them; but if my said daughter Judith be
living at the end of the said three years, or any
issue of her body, then my will is, and so I devise
and bequeath the said hundred and fifty pounds to
be set out by my executors and overseers for the
best benefit of her and her issue, and the stock not
to be paid unto her so long as she shall be married
and covert baron; but my will is, that she shall
have the consideration yearly paid unto her during
her life, and after her decease the said stock and
consideration to be paid to her children, if she have
any, and if not, to her executors and assigns, she
living the said term after my decease: provided
that if such husband as she shall at the end of the
said three years be married unto, or at any [time]
after, do sufficiently assure unto her, and the issue

COMMENDATORY VERSES.

31

For names; but call forth thund'ring Eschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us,

Pacuvius, Accius, him of Cordova dead,
To live again, to hear thy buskin tread,
And shake a stage: or when thy socks were on,
Leave thee alone for the comparison

Of all, that insolent Greece, or haughty Rome
Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come.
Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show,
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe.

He was not of an age, but for all time!

And all the Muses still were in their prime,
When, like Apollo, he came forth to warm
Our ears, or like a Mercury to charm !

Nature herself was proud of his designs,

And joy'd to wear the dressing of his lines !

Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit,

As since, she will vouchsafe no other wit.

The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes,
Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please ;
But antiquated and deserted lie,

As they were not of Nature's family.

Yet must I not give Nature all: thy art,

My gentle Shakspeare, must enjoy a part.

For though the poet's matter nature be,
His art doth give the fashion. And that he
Who casts to write a living line, must sweat,

(Such as thine are) and strike the second heat

Upon the Muse's anvil; turn the same,

And himself with it, that he thinks to frame ;

Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn,

For a good poet's made, as well as born.

And such wert thou. Look how the father's face

Lives in his issue: even so the race

Of Shakspeare's mind and manners brightly shines
In his well-turned, and true filed lines :

In each of which he seems to shake a lance,
As brandish'd at the eyes of ignorance.

Sweet Swan of Avon ! what a sight it were,

To see thee in our water yet appear,

And make those slightes upon the banks of Thames,
That so did take Eliza, and our James !

But stay, I see thee in the hemisphere

Advanc'd, and made a constellation there !

Shine forth thou star of poets, and with rage,

Or influence, chide, or cheer the drooping stage,
Which, since thy flight from hence, hath mourn'd
like night,

And despairs day, but for thy volumes' light.

BEN JONSON.

ON
WORTHY MASTER SHAKSPEARE,
AND HIS POEMS.

A MIND reflecting ages past, whose clear

And equal surface can make things appear,
Distant a thousand years, and represent

Them in their lively colours, just extent :

To outrun hasty time, retrieve the fates,

Rowl back the heavens, blow ope the iron gates

Of death and Lethe, where confused lie

Great heaps of ruinous mortality :

In that deep dusky dungeon, to discern

A royal ghost from churls; by art to learn

The physiognomy of shades, and give

Them sudden birth, wond'ring how oft they live ;

What story coldly tells, what poets feign

At second hand, and picture without brain,

Senseless and soulless shews: To give a stage,—
Ample, and true with life,—voice, action, age,

As Plato's year, and new scene of the world,
Them unto us, or us to them had hur'l'd :

To raise our ancient sovereigns from their herse,

Make kings his subjects; by exchanging verse

Enlive their pale trunks, that the present age

Joys in their joy and trembles at their rage :

Yet so to temper passion, that our ears

Take pleasure in their pain, and eyes in tears

Both weep and smile; fearful at plots so sad,

Then laughing at our fear; abus'd, and glad

To be abus'd; affected with that truth

Which we perceive is false, pleas'd in that ruth
At which we start, and, by elaborate play,

Tortur'd and tickl'd; by a crab-like way,

Time past made pastime, and in ugly sort

Disgorging up his ravin for our sport :—

— While the plebeian imp, from lofty throne,

Creates and rules a world, and works upon

Mankind by secret engines; now to move

A chilling pity, then a rigorous love ;

To strike up and stroke down, both joy and ire ;

To steer the affections; and by heavenly fire

Mould us anew, stol'n from ourselves :—

This,—and much more, which cannot be exprest

But by himself, his tongue, and his own breast,—
Was Shakspeare's freehold; which his cunning brain
Improv'd by favour of the nine-fold train ;—

The buskin'd muse, the comick queen, the grand

And louder tone of Clio, nimble hand

And nimbler foot of the melodious pair,

The silver-voic'd lady, the most fair

Calliope, she whose speaking silence daunts,

And she whose praise the heavenly body chants.

These jointly woo'd him, envying one another ;

Obey'd by all as spouse, but lov'd as brother ;—

And wrought a curious robe, of sable grave,

Fresh green, and pleasant yellow, red most brave,

And constant blue, rich purple, guiltless white,

The lowly russet, and the scarlet bright :

Branch'd and embroider'd like the painted spring ;

Each leaf match'd with a flower, and each string

Of golden wire, each line of silk: there run

Italian works, whose thread the sisters spun ;

And there did sing, or seem to sing, the choice

Birds of a foreign note and various voice,

Here hangs a mossy rock; there plays a fair

But chiding fountain, purled: not the air,

Nor clouds, nor thunder, but were living drawn ;

Not out of common tiffany or lawn,

But fine materials, which the Muses know,

And only know the countries where they grow.

Now, when they could no longer him enjoy,

In mortal garments pent,—Death may destroy,

They say, his body; but his verse shall live,

And more than nature takes our hands shall give :

In a less volume, but more strongly bound,
Shakspeare shall breathe and speak; with laurel
crown'd,

Which never fades; fed with ambrosian meat ;

In a well-lined vesture, rich and neat :—

So with this robe they clothe him, bid him wear it ;

For time shall never stain, nor envy tear it.

The friendly admirer of his Endowments,

I. M. S.

These admirable verses were first prefixed to the
second folio printed in 1632: they are here placed as a
noble tribute from a contemporary to the genius of our
immortal Poet. Conjecture has been vainly employed
upon the initials I. M. S. affixed. I entirely subscribe
to Mr. Boaden's opinion that they are from the pen of
George Chapman; the structure of the verse and the
phraseology bear marks of his hand, and the vein of
poetry such as would do honour to his genius.

S. W. S

THE PREFACE OF THE PLAYERS.

*Prefixet to the First Folio Edition published in 1623.*

TO THE GREAT VARIETY OF READERS,

FROM the most able, to him that can but spell: there you are number'd. We had rather you were weigh'd. Especially, when the fate of all Bookes depends upon your capacities: and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! it is now publique, and you wil stand for your privileged wee know: to read, and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a Booke, the Stationer saies. Then, how odde soever your braines be, or your wisedomes, make your licence the same, and spare not. Judge your sixe-pen'orth, your shillings worth, your five shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, Buy. Censure will not drive a Trade, or make the Jacke go. And though you be a Magistrate of wit, and sit on the Stage at Black-Friers, or the Cockpit, to arraigne Playes dailie, know, these Playes have had their triall already, and stood out all Appeales; and do now come forth quitted rather by a Decree of Court, than any purchas'd Letters of commendation.

It had bene a thing, we confesse, worthie to have bene wished, that the Author
himselfe had lived to have set forth, and overseen his owne writings; But since it
hath bin ordain'd otherwise, and he by death departed from that right, we pray
you, doe not envie his Friends, the office of their care and paine, to have collected
and publish'd them; and so to have publish'd them, as where (before) you were
abus'd with divers stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the
frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors, that expos'd them: even those are now
offer'd to your view cur'd, and perfect of their limbes; and all the rest, absolute in
their numbers, as he conceived the: Who, as he was a happie imitator of Nature,
was a most gentle expresser of it. His mind and hand went together: and what
he thought, he uttered with that easinesse, that wee have scarse received from
him a blot in his papers. But it is not our province, who only gather his works,
and give them you, to praise him. It is yours that reade him. And there we
hope, to your divers capacities, you will finde enough, both to draw, and hold you:
for his wit can no more lie hid, then it could be lost. Reade him, therefore; and
againe, and againe: And if then you doe not like him, surely you are in some ma-
nifest danger, not to understand him. And so we leave you to other of his Friends,
whom if you need, can bee your guides: if you neede them not, you can leade
yourselves, and others. And such readers we wish him.

JOHN HEMINGE,
HENRIE CONDELL.

TEMPEST.

PERSONS REPRESENTED. ¹

ALONSO, King of Naples.

SEBASTIAN, his Brother.

PROSPERO, the rightful Duke of Milan.

ANTONIO, his Brother, the usurping Duke of Milan.

FERDINAND, Son to the King of Naples.

GONZALO, an honest old Counsellor of Naples.

ADRIAN, Lords.

FRANCISCO,

CALIBAN, a savage and deformed Slave.

TRINCULO, a Jester.

STEFHANO, a drunken Butler.

Master of a Ship, Boatswain, and Mariners.

MIRANDA, Daughter to Prospero.

ARIEL, an airy Spirit.

IRIS,
CERES,
JUNO,
Nymphs,
Reapers,

Spirits.

Other Spirits attending on Prospero.

SCENE, the Sea, with a Ship; afterwards an uninhabited Island.

ACT. I.

### SCENE I.—On a Ship at Sea. A Storm, with Thunder and Lightning. Enter a Ship-master and a Boatswain.

Master.

BOATSWAIN,—

Boats. Here, master: what cheer?

Mast. Good: speak to the mariners: fall to't lareyely,² or we run ourselves aground: bestir, be-stir. [Exit.]

Enter Mariners.

Boats. Heigh, my hearts; cheerly, cheerly, my hearts; yare, yare: Take in the top-sail; Tend to the master's whistle.—Blow till thou burst thy thyme, if room enough!

Enter ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, FERDINAND, GONZALO, and others.

Alon. Good Boatswain, have care. Where's the master? Play the men.³

Boats. I pray now, keep below.

Ant. Where is the master, boatswain?

Boats. Do you not hear him? You mar our labour! keep your cabins: you do assist the storm. Gon. Nay, good, be patient.

Boats. When the sea is. Hence! What care these roarers for the name of king? To cabin: silence: trouble us not.

Gon. Good; yet remember whom thou hast aboard.

Boats. None that I more love than myself. You are a counsellor; if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present,⁴ we will not hand a rope more; use your authority. If you cannot, give thanks you have lived so long, and make your self a friend in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap—Cheerly, good hearts.—Out of our way, I say.

Gon. I have great comfort from this fellow: methinks, he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good fate, to his hanging! make the rope of his destiny our cable, for our own doth little advantage! if he be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable. [Exit.]

1 From the Folio Edition of 1623.

2 That is, readily, nimbly.

3 That is, act with spirit, behave like men. Thus Baret in his Alvearie: "To play the man, or to show himself a valiant man in any matter. Se virum prebere." P. 399.

"Viceroys and peers of Turkey play the men."

Tamberlaine, 1590.

4 The present instant.

5 In Smith's Sea Grammar, 1627, 4to. under the article How to handle a Ship in a Storme:—"Let us lie as Triee with our main course; that is, to hale the tacke aboard, the sheet close aft, the boling set up, and the helm tied close aboard."

Re-enter Boatswain.

Boats. Down with the top-mast; yare; lower, lower; bring her to try with main course.⁵ [A cry within.] A plague upon this howling! they are louder than the weather, or our office.—

Re-enter SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, and GONZALO.

Yet again! what do you hear? Shall we give o'er, and drown? Have you a mind to sink?

Seb. A pox o' your throat! you bawling, blasphemous, uncharitable dog! Boats. Work you, then.

Ant. Hang, cur, hang! you whoreson, insolent noise-maker, we are less afraid to be drowned than thou art.

Gon. I'll warrant him from drowning; though the ship were no stronger than a nut-shell, and as leaky as an unstitched⁶ wench.

Boats. Lay her a-hold, a-hold; set her two courses;⁷ off to sea again, lay her off.

Enter Mariners, wet.

Mar. All lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost! [Exeunt.]

Boats. What, must our mouths be cold?

Gon. The king and prince at prayers! let us assist them.

For our case is as theirs.

Seb. I am out of patience.

Ant. We are merely⁸ cheated of our lives by drunkards.— This wide-chapped rascal; —'Would, thou might'st lie drowning,

The washing of ten tides! He'll be hanged yet;

Though every drop of water swear against it, And gape at wid'st to glut⁹ him.

[A confused noise within.] Mercy on us!—We split, we split!—Farewell my wife and children!— Farewell, brother!—We split, we split, we split.—

Ant. Let's all sink with the king.

[Exit.]

Seb. Let's take leave of him.

[Exit.]

Gon. Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground; long¹⁰ heath,

6 Mr. Steevens says incontinent, but the meaning is evident. In Beaumont and Fletcher's Mad Lover, Chilas says to the frightened priestess:

—Down, you dog, then;
Be quiet and be staunch too, no invocations.

7 The courses are the main sail and fore sail. To lay a ship a-hold, is to bring her to lie as near the wind as she can, in order to keep clear of the land and get her out to sea.

8 Merely, absolutely, entirely; *Mere*, Lat.

9 To enclut, to swallow him.

10 Instead of—long heath, brown furze, &c. Sir Thomas Hanmer reads—ling; heath, broom, furze, &c. and I have no doubt rightly.

36

TEMPEST.

ACT I.

brown furze, any thing: The wills above be done! [Exit.
but I would fain die a dry death.

### SCENE II. The Island : before the Cell of Prospero. Ender PROSPERO and MIRANDA.

Mira. If by your art, my dearest father, you have
Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them :
The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
But that the sea, mounting to the welkin's cheek,
Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffer'd
With those that I saw suffer! a brave vessel,
Who had no doubt some noble creature in her,
Dash'd all to pieces. O, the cry did knock
Against my very heart! Poor souls! they perish'd.
Had I been any god of power, I would
Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e'er¹
It should the good ship so have swallowed, and
The freighting² souls within her.

Pro. Be collected:

No more amazement: tell your piteous heart,
There's no harm done.

Mira. O, woe the day!

Pro. No harm.

I have done nothing but in care of thee,
(Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter!) who
Art ignorant of what thou art, nought knowing
Of whence I am; nor that I am more better³
Than Prospero, master of a full poor cell,
And thy no greater father.

Mira. More to know

Did never meddle⁴ with my thoughts.
Pro.

''Tis time
I should inform thee further. Lend thy hand,
And pluck my magick garment from me.—So:

[Lays down his mantle.

Lie there, my art.⁵—Wipe thou thine eyes; have
comfort.

The direful spectacle of the wreck, which touch'd
The very virtue of compassion in thee,

I have with such provision in mine art
So safely order'd, that there is no soul—

No, not so much perdition as an hair,

Beid to any creature in the vessel

Which thou heardst cry, which thou sawst sink.

Sit down;

For thou must now know further.

Mira. You have often

Begun to tell me what I am; but stopp'd

And left me to a bootless inquisition;

Concluding, Stay, not yet.—

Pro. The hour's now come;

The very minute bids thee ope thine ear;

Obey, be attentive. Can't thou remember

A time before we came unto this cell?

I do not think thou canst¹; for then thou wast not Out⁶ three years old.

Mira. Certainly, sir, I can.

Pro. By what? by any other house, or person?
Of any thing the image tell me, that

Hath kept with thy remembrance.

Mira. 'Tis far off;

And rather like a dream than an assurance

That my remembrance warrants: Had I not
Four or five women once, that tended me?

Pro. Thou hadst¹, and more, Miranda: But
how is it,

That this lives in thy mind? What seest thou else
In the dark backward and abysm¹ of time?

If thou rememberst² aught, ere thou canst¹ here,
How camst thou here, thou mayst¹.

Mira. But that I do not.

Pro. Twelve years since, Miranda, twelve
years since.

Thy father was the duke of Milan, and
A prince of power.

Mira. Sir, are not you my father?

Pro. Thy mother was a piece of virtue, and
She said—thou wast my daughter; and thy father
Was duke of Milan; and his only heir

A princess; —no worse issued.

Mira. O, the heavens!

What foul play had we, that we came from thence?
Or blessed was't we did?

Pro. Both, both, my girl:

By foul play, as thou sayst, where we heave'd thence;
But blessedly holt hither.

Mira. O, my heart bleeds

To think o' the teen⁹ that I have turned you to,
Which is from my remembrance! Please you,
further.

Pro. My brother, and thy uncle, call'd Antonio—
I pray thee, mark me,—that a brother should
Be so perfidious! —he whom, next thyself,
Of all the world I lov'd, and to him put
The manage of my state; as, at that time,
Through all the signories it was the first,
And Prospero the prime duke; being so reputed

In dignity, and, for the liberal arts,

Without a parallel; those being all my study,

The government I cast upon my brother,

And to my state grew stranger, being transported,

And wrapped in secret studies. Thy false uncle—

Dost thou attend me?

Mira. Sir, most heeffectully.

Pro. Being once perfected how to grant suits,
How to deny them; whom to advance, and whom
To trash⁹ for overtopping; new created

The creatures that were mine; I say, or chang'd
them,

Or else new form'd them; having both the key

Of officer and office, set all hearts ? th' state

To what tune pleas'd his ear; that now he was

The ivy, which had hid my princely trunk,

And suck'd my verdure out on't.—Thou attend'dst not,

Mira. O good sir, I do,

Pro. I pray thee mark me.

I thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicate

To closeness, and the bettering of my mind

With that, which, but by being so retir'd,

O'er-priz'd all popular rate; in my false brother

Awak'd an evil nature: and my trust,

Like a good parent,¹⁰ did beget of him,

A falsehood, in its contrary as great

1. I. e. or ever, ere ever; signifying, in modern English, sooner than at any time.

2. Instead of *freighting* the first folio reads *fraughting*.

3. The double superlative is in frequent use among our elder writers.

4. To meddle, is to *mix*, or to *interfere* with.

5. Lord Burleigh, when he put off his gown at night, used to say "Lie there, Lord Treasurer."—*Fuller's Holy State*, p. 257.

6. Out is used for entirely, quite. Thus in Act iv: "And be a boy right out."

7. *Abysm* was the old mode of spelling *abyss*; from its French original *abisme*.

8. *Teen* is *grief*, sorrow.

9. To trash means to check the pace or progress of any one. The term is said to be still in use among sportsmen in the North, and signifies to correct a dog for misbehaviour in pursuing the game; or *overtopping* or outrunning the rest of the pack. *Trashes* are clogs strapped round the neck of a dog to prevent his overspeed.

10. Todd has given four instances from Hammond's works of the word in this sense. "Clog and trash"—"en-

cumber and trash"—"to trash or overslow"—and "foresighted and trashed."

There was another word of the same kind used in Falconry (from whence Shakspeare very frequently draws his similes): "Trassing is when a hawk raises aloft any fowl, and soaring with it, at length descends therewith to the ground."—*Dictionarium Rusticum*, 1704.

11. Probably this term is used by Chapman in his address to the reader prefixed to his translation of Homer "That whosoever muse dares use her wing, When his muse flies she will be trass't by his,

And show as if a Bernacle should spring
Beneath an Eagle."

There is also a passage in the Bonduca of Beaumon and Fletcher, wherein Caratach says:

But not so fast; your jewel had been lost then,
Young Hengo there, he trass't me, Nennius."

i. e. checked or stopped my flight.

I rather think it will be found that the Editors have been very precipitate in changing *trace* to *trash* in Othello, Act ii. Scene 1. See note on that passage.

1) Alluding to the observation that a father above the

## SCENE II.

## TEMPEST.

37

As my trust was ; which had, indeed, no limit,
A confidence sans bound. He being thus lorded,
Not only with what my revenue yielded,
But what my power might else exact,—like one,
Who having, unto truth, by telling of it,
Made such a sinner of his memory,
To credit his own lie,—he did believe

He was indeed the duke; out of the substitution,
And executing the outward face of royalty,
With all prerogative;—Hence his ambition
Growing,—Dost hear?

Mira. Your tale, sir, would cure deafness.
Pro. To have no screen between this part he play'd

And him he play'd it for, he needs will be
Absolute Milan: Me, poor man!—my library
Was dukedom large enough ; of temporal royalties
He thinks me now incapable ; confederates
(So dry he was for sway) with the king of Naples,
To give him annual tribute, do him homage;
Subject his coronet to his crown, and bend
The dukedom, yet unbow'd, (alas, poor Milan !)
To most ignoble stooping.

Mira. O the heavens.
Pro. Mark his condition, and the event; then tell me,

If this might be a brother.
Mira. I should sin
To think but² nobly of my grandmother:
Good wombs have borne bad sons.

Pro. Alack, for pity !
Now the condition.
This king of Naples, being an enemy
To me inveterate, hearkens my brother's suit;
Which was, that he in lieu³ o' the premises,—
Of homage, and I know not how much tribute,—
Should presently extirpate me and mine
Out of the dukedom; and confer fair Milan,
With all the honours, on my brother: Whereon,
A treacherous army levied, one midnight
Fated to the purpose, did Antonio open
The gates of Milan; and, p' the dead of darkness,
The ministers for the purpose hurried thence
Me, and the crying self.

Mira. Alack, for pity !
I, not rememb'ring how I cried out then,
Will cry it o'er again; it is a hint,⁴
That wrings mine eyes to't.

Pro. Hear a little further,
And then I'll bring thee to the present business
Which now's upon us; without the which, this story
Were most impertinent.
Mira. Wherefore did they not
That hour destroy us?

Pro. Well, great demand, well
My tale provokes that question. Dear, they durst
not;
(So dear the love my people bore me) nor set
A mark so bloody on the business; but
With colours fairer painted their foul ends.
In few, they hurried us aboard a bark;
Bore us some leagues to sea; where they prepar'd
A rotten carcass of a boat, not rigg'd,

common rate of men has generally a son below it. He-
roum filii noxe.

1. 'Who having made his memory such a sinner to
truth as to credit his own lie by telling of it.'

2. Tooke, in his Diversions of Purley, has clearly
shown that we use one word, *But*, in modern English,
for two words Bot and But, originally (in the Anglo
Saxon) very different in signification, though (by re-
peated abbreviation and corruption) approaching in
sound. Bot is the imperative of the A. S. *Botan*, to boot.
But is the imperative of the A. S. *Be-utan*, to be out.
By this means all the seemingly anomalous uses of *But*
may be explained; I must however content myself with
referring the reader to the Diversions of Purley, vol. i.
p. 190. Merely remarking that *but* (as distinguished
from *Bot*) and *be-out* have exactly the same meaning,
viz. in modern English, *without*.

3. In *lieu* of the premises: that is, "in consideration
of the premises,—&c." This seems to us a strange use
of this French word, yet it was not then unusual.

“But takes their oaths *in lieu* of her assistance.”

*Beaumont and Fletcher's Prophetus*.

Nor tackle, sail, nor mast; the very rats
Instinctively had quit² it; there they hoist us,
To cry to the sea that roar'd to us; to sigh
To the winds, whose pity, sighing back again,
Did us but loving wrong.

Mira. Alack! what trouble
Was I then to you!

Pro. O! a cherubim

Thou wast, that did preserve me! Thou didst smile,
Infuse with a fortitude from heaven,
When I have deck'd¹ the sea with drops full salt;
Under my burden groan'd; which rais'd in me
An undergoing stomach,⁷ to bear up
Against what should ensue.

Mira. How came we ashore ?
Pro. By Providence divine.

Some food we had, and some fresh water, that
A noble Neapolitan, Gonzalo,
Out of his charity, (who being then appointed
Master of this design,) did give us; with
Rich garments, linens, stuffs, and necessaries,
Which since have steaded much; so, of his gen-
tleness,

Knowing I lov'd my books, he furnish'd me,
From my own library, with volumes that
I prize above my dukedom.

Mira. 'Would I might

But ever see that man !
Pro. Now I arise:—

Sit still, and hear the last of our sea-sorrow.
Here in this island we arriv'd; and here
Have I, thy school-master, made thee more profit
Than other princes can, that have more time
For vainer hours, and tutors not so careful.

Mira. Heavens thank you for't! And now, I
pray you, sir,

(For still 'tis beating in my mind,) your reason
For raising this sea-storm?

Pro. Know thus far forth.—

By accident most strange, bountiful fortune,
Now my dear lady, hath mine enemies
Brought to this shore: and by my prescience
I find my zenith doth depend upon

A most auspicious star; whose influence
If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes,
Will ever after droop.—Here cease more questions;
Thou art inclin'd to sleep; 'tis a good dulness,
And give it way;—I know thou can't not choose.—

[MIRANDA sleeps.

Come away, servant, come: I am ready now;
Approach, my Ariel; come.

## Enter ARIEL.

Ari. All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I
come

To answer thy best pleasure; be't to fly,

To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride

On the curl'd clouds⁹: to thy strong bidding, task
Ariel, and all his quality⁹.

Pro. Hast thou, spirit,

Perform'd to point¹⁰ the tempest that I bade thee?

⁴ Hint is here for cause or subject. Thus in a future
passage we have:—" Our hint of woe."

⁵ Quit was commonly used for guitted.

⁶ To deck, or deg, is still used in the northern coun-
tries for *sprinkle*.

⁷ An *undergoing stomach* is a *stubborn resolution*,
a *temper* or *frame of mind* to bear.

⁸ This is imitated in Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess;
"—tell me, sweetest,

What new service now is meestet

For the satyre; shall I stray

In the middle air, and stay

The sailing racke, or nimbly take

Hold by the moon, and gently make

Suit to the pale queen of night,

For a beame into the sea,

And bring thee coral, making way

Through the rising waves, &c.

⁹ Ariel's *quality* is not his confederates, but the powers
of his nature as a spirit, *his qualification in sprichting*

¹⁰ i. e. to the minutest article, literally from the French
a point; so in the Chances,

"are you all fit?"
To point, Sir"

33

TEMPEST.

Act I.

Ari. To every article.
I boarded the king's ship; now on the beak',
Now in the waist, the deck, in every cabin,
I flam'd amazement: Sometimes, I'd divide,
And burn in many places: on the top-mast,
The yards, and bowsprit, would I flame distinctly,
Then meet, and join: Jove's lightnings, the pre-
cursors

Of sulphurous roaring, the most mighty Neptune
Seem'd to besiege, and make his bold waves tremble,
Yea, his dread trident shake.

Pro.
My brave spirit!
Who was so firm, so constant, that this coil²
Would not infect his reason ?

Ari. Not a soul

But felt a fever of the mad³, and play'd
Some tricks of desperation: All, but mariners,
Plung'd in the foaming brine, and quit the vessel,
Then all a-fire with me: the king's son, Fëdinand,
With hair up-staring (then like reeds, not hair,)
Was the first man that leap'd; cried, Hell is empty,
And all the devils are here.

Pro. Why, that's my spirit!

But was not this nigh shore ?

Ari. But are they, Ariel, safe ?

Pro. Not a hair perish'd;

On their sustaining garments not a blemish,
But fresher than before: and as thou badst me,
In troops I have dispers'd them 'bout the isle:
The king's son have I landed by himself;
Whom I left cooling of the air with sighs,
In an odd angle of the isle, and sitting
His arms in this sad knot.

Pro.
Of the king's ship,
The mariners, say, how thou hast dispos'd,
And all the rest o' the fleet ?

Ari.
Safely in harbour
Is the king's ship; in the deep nook, where once
Thou call'st me up at midnight to fetch dew
From the still-vex'd Bermoothes,⁴ there she's hid:
The mariners all under hatches stow'd;
Whom, with a charm join'd to their suffer'd labour,
I have left asleep: and for the rest o' the fleet,
Which I dispers'd, they all have met again ;
And are upon the Mediterranean flote,⁵
Bound sadly home for Naples ;
Supposing that they saw the king's ship wreck'd,
And his great person perish.

Pro.
Ariel, thy charge
Exactly is performed; but there's more work :
What is the time o' the day?

Ari. Past the mid season.

Pro. At least two glasses: the time 'twixt six
and now

Must by us both be spent most preciously.

Ari. Is there more toil? since thou must give me
pains,

Let me remember thee what thou hast promis'd,
Which is not yet perform'd me.

Pro. How now ? moody?

What is't thou canst demand ?

Ari. My liberty.

Pro. Before the time be out? no more.

Ari.
I pray thee
Remember, I have done thee worthy service;
Told thee no lies, made no mistakes, serv'd
Without or grudge or grumblings: thou didst pro-
mise

To bate me a full year.

Pro. Dost thou forget

From what a torment I did free thee?

Ari. No.

Pro. Thou dost; and think'st it much, to tread
the ooze

Of the salt deep; —

To run upon the sharp wind of the north;
To do me business in the veins o' the earth,
When it is bak'd with frost.

Ari. I do not, sir.

Pro. Thou liest, malignant thing! Hast thou
forgot

Ari. No, sir.

Pro. Thou hast: where was she born?
speak; tell me.

Ari. Sir, in Argier.⁶

Pro. O, was she so? I must,

Once in a month, recount what thou hast been,
Which thou forget'st. This damn'd witch, Sycorax,
For mischiefs manifold, and sorceries terrible
To enter human hearing, from Argier,

Thou know'st, was banish'd; for one thing she did,
They would not take her life: Is not this true?

Ari. Ay, sir.

Pro. This blue-ey'd hag was hither brought with
child,

And here was left by the sailors: Thou, my slave,
As thou report'st thyself, was then her servant:

And, for thou wast a spirit too delicate
To act her earthly and abhorr'd commands,
Refusing her grand hests,' she did confine thee,

By help of her more potent ministers,

And in her most unmitigable rage,

Into a cloven pine; within which rift
Imprison'd, thou didst painfully remain

A dozen years; within which space she died,

And left thee there; where thou didst vent thy
grains,

As fast as mill-wheels strike: Then was this island,
(Save for the son that she did litter here,
A freckled whelp, hag-born) not honoured with
A human shape.

Ari. Yes; Caliban her son.

Pro. Dull thing, I say so; he, that Caliban,
Whom now I keep in service. Thou best know'st
What torment I did find thee in: thy groans
Did make wolves howl, and penetrate the breasts
Of ever-angry bears: it was a torment
To lay upon the damn'd, which Sycorax
Could not again undo; it was mine art.

When I arriv'd, and heard thee, that made gape
The pine, and let thee out.

Ari. I thank thee, master.

Pro. If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak,
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, till
Thou hast howl'd away twelve winters.

Ari. Pardon, master:

I will be correspondent to command,

And do my sprighting gently.

Pro. Do so; and after two days

I will discharge thee.

Ari. That's my noble master!

What shall I do? say what? what shall I do?

Pro. Go, make thyself like a nymph o' the sea;
be subject.

To no sight but thine and mine; invisible

To every eyeball else. Go, take this shape,

And hither come in't: go hence, with diligence.

[Exit ARIEL.]
Awake, dear heart, awake ! thou hast slept well;
Awake!

1 The beak was a strong pointed body at the head of ancient galleys; it is used here for the forecastle or bolt-sprit. The waist is the part between the quarter-deck and the forecastle.

2 Coil is bustle, tumult.

3 That is such a fever as madmen feel when the frantic fit is on them.

4 The epithet here applied to the Bermudas will be best understood by those who have seen the chafing of

the sea over the rugged rocks by which they are sur-
rounded, and which renders access to them so difficult.
It was then the current opinion that Bermudas was in-
habited by monsters and devils. Setebos, the god of
Caliban's dam, was an American devil, worshipped by
the giants of Patagonia.

5 I. e. waves, or the sea. Flot, Fr.

6 The old English name of Algiers

7 Behests, commands

["40", "TEMPEST.", "ACT I.", "ARIEL sings.", "Full fathom five thy father lies;\nOf his bones are coral made;", "Those are pearls that were his eyes:\nNothing of him that doth fade,", "But doth suffer a sea-change", "Into something rich and strange.", "Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:", "[Burden, ding-dong,", "Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.", "For. The ditty does remember my drown'd father.—", "This is no mortal business, nor no sound", "That the earth owes :1— I hear it now above me.", "Pro. The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,", "And say, what thou seest yond?", "Mira.", "What is't? a spirit?", "Lord, how it looks about! Believe me, sir,", "It carries a brave form :—But 'tis a spirit.", "Pro. No, wench; it eats and sleeps, and hath\nsuch senses", "As we have, such: This gallant, which thou seest,\nWas in the wreck; and but he's something stain'd", "With grief, that's beauty's canker, thou mightst call him", "A goodly person: he hath lost his fellows,", "And strays about to find them.", "Mira.", "I might call him", "A thing divine; for nothing natural", "I ever saw so noble.", "Pro.", "It goes on, I see,", "[Aside.", "As my soul prompts it:—Spirit, fine Spirit! I'll free thee", "Within two days for this.", "Fer.", "Most sure, the goddess", "On whom these airs attend!—Vouchsafe, my prayer\nMay know, if you remain upon this island;", "And that you will some good instruction give,", "How I may bear me here; My prime request,", "Which I do last pronounce, is, O you wonder!", "If you be maid,² or no?", "Mira.", "No wonder, sir;", "But, certainly a maid.", "Fer.", "My language! heavens !—", "I am the best of them that speak this speech,", "Were I but where 'tis spoken.", "Pro.", "How! the best?", "What wert thou, if the king of Naples heard thee?", "Fer. A single thing, as I am now, that wonders", "To hear thee speak of Naples: he does hear me;", "And, that he does, I weep: myself am Naples;", "Who with mine eyes, ne'er since at ebb, behold", "The king my father wreck'd.", "Mira.", "Alack, for mercy !", "Fer. Yes, faith, and all his lords; the duke of\nMilan,", "And his brave son, being twain.", "Pro.", "The duke of Milan,", "And his more braver daughter, could control³ thee,\nIf now 'twere fit to do't:—At the first sight [Aside.", "They have chang'd eyes;—Delicate Ariel,", "I'll set thee free for this!—A word, good sir;", "I fear, you have done yourself some wrong:⁴ a\nword.", "Mira. Why speaks my father so ungently? This\nIs the third man that e'er I saw; the first", "That e'er I sighed for: pity move my father", "To be inclin'd my way!", "1 i. e. *ovens*. To owe was to possess or appertain to,\nin ancient language.", "2 The folio of 1685 reads *made*, and many of the modern editors have laboured to persuade themselves that it was the true reading. It has been justly observed by M. Mason that the question is “whether our readers will adopt a natural and simple expression, which requires no comment, or one which the ingenuity of many commentators has but imperfectly supported.”", "3 To *control* here signifies to *confute*, to contradict unansweringly. The ancient meaning of *control* was to check or exhibit a *contrary account*, from the old French *contre-roller*.", "⁴ “— you have done yourself some wrong;”", "Fer.", "O, if a virgin,\nAnd your affection not gone forth, I'll make you\nThe queen of Naples.", "Pro.", "Soft, sir; one word more.—", "They are both in either's powers: but this swift\nbusiness", "I must uneasy make, lest too light winning [Aside.\nMake the prize light.—One word more; I charge\nthere,", "That thou attend me: thou dost here usurp", "The name thou ow'st not; and hast put thyself", "Upon this island, as a spy, to win it", "From me, the lord on't.", "Fer.", "No, as I am a man.", "Mira. There's nothing ill can dwell in such a\ntemple:", "If the ill spirit have so fair an house,", "Good things will strive to dwell with 't.", "Pro.", "Follow me.—[To FERD.", "Speak not you for him; he's a traitor.—Come.", "I'll manacle thy neck and feet together;", "Sea-water shall thou drink, thy food shall be", "The fresh-brook muscles, wither'd roots, and husks", "Wherein the acorn cradled: Follow.", "Fer.", "No;", "I will resist such entertainment, till", "Mine enemy has more power.", "Mira.", "[He draws.", "O dear father,\nMake not too rash a trial of him, for", "He's gentle, and not fearful.⁵", "Pro.", "What, I say,", "My foot my tutor !—Put thy sword up, traitor;", "Who mak'st a show, but dar'st not strike, thy conscience", "Is so possess'd with guilt: come from thy ward", "For I can here disarm thee with this stick,", "And make thy weapon drop.", "Mira.", "Beseech you, father!", "Pro. Hence; hang not on my garments.", "Mira.", "Sir, have pity;", "I'll be his surety.", "Pro.", "Silence: one word more", "Shall make me chide thee, if not have thee. What!", "An advocate for an impostor ? hush!", "Thou think'st there are no more such shapes as he,", "Having seen but him and Caliban: Foolish wench!", "To the most of men this is a Caliban,", "And to them he are angels.", "Mira.", "My affections", "Are then most humble; I have no ambition", "To see a goodlier man.", "Pro.", "Come on; obey: [To FERD.", "Thy nerves are in their infancy again,", "And have no vigour in them.", "Fer.", "So they are:", "My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.", "My father's loss, the weakness which I feel,", {"

TEMPEST.

ACT II.

42

Where she, at least, is banish'd from your eye,
Who has cause to wet the grief on't.

Alon. Pr'ythee, peace.

Seb. You were kneel'd to, and importun'd other-
wise.

By all of us; and the fair soul herself
Weigh'd,¹ between loathness and obedience, at
Which end o' the beam she'd bow. We have lost
Your own.

Alon. So is the dearest² of the loss.
Gon. My lord Sebastian,

The truth you speak doth lack some gentleness,
And time to speak it in; you rub the sore,
When you should bring the plaster.

Seb. Very well.

Ant. And most chirurgeonly.
Gon. It is foul weather in us all, good sir,

When you are cloudy.

Seb. Foul weather? Very foul.

Ant. Gon. Had I a plantation of this isle, my lord,—

Ant. He'd sow it with nettle-seed.

Seb. Or docks, or mallows.

Gon. And were the king of it. What would I do?

Seb. 'Scape getting drunk, for want of wine.

Gon. I' the commonwealth I would by contraries

Execute all things: for no kind of traffic³

Would I admit; no name of magistrate;

Letters should not be known; riches, poverty,
And use of service, none; contract, succession,

Bourn, bound of land, tilth, vineyard, none:

No use of metal, corn, or wine, or oil:

No occupation; all men idle, all;

And women too; but innocent and pure:

No sovereignty:—

Seb. And yet he would be king on't.

Ant. The latter end of his commonwealth for-
gets the beginning.

Gon. All things in common nature should pro-
duce.

Without sweat or endeavour: treason, felony,
Sword, pike, knife, gun, or need of any engine,⁴
Would I not have; but nature should bring forth,
Of its own kind, all foison,⁵ all abundance,
To feed my innocent people.

Seb. No marrying among his subjects?

Ant. None, man; all idle; whores, and knaves.

Gon. I would with such perfection govern, sir,

To excel the golden age.⁶

Seb. 'Save his majesty!'

Ant. Long live Gonzalo!

Gon. And, do you mark me, sir?—

Alon. Pr'ythee, no more: thou dost talk no-
thing to me.

Gon. I do well believe your highness; and did it
to minister occasion to these gentlemen, who are
of such sensible and nimble lungs, that they always
use to laugh at nothing.

Ant. 'Twas you we laughed at.

Gon. Who, in this kind of merry fooling, am
nothing to you; so you may continue, and laugh at
nothing still.

Ant. What a blow was there given?

Seb. An it had not fallen flat-long.

Gon. You are gentlemen of brave mettle: you

would lift the moon out of her sphere, if she would
continue in it five weeks without changing.⁷

Enter ARIEL, invisible, playing solemn music.

Seb. We would so, and then go bat-fowling.

Ant. Nay, good my lord, be not angry.

Gon. No, I warrant you; I will not adventure
my discretion so weakly. Will you laugh me
asleep, for I am very heavy?

Ant. Go sleep, and hear us.

[All sleep but ALON. SEB. and ANT.

Alon. What, all so soon asleep! I wish mine eyes
Would, with themselves, shut up my thoughts: I
find,

They are inclined to do so.

Seb. Please you, sir,

Do not omit the heavy offer of it:

It seldom visits sorrow; when it doth,

It is a comforter.

Ant. We two, my lord,

Will guard your person, while you take your rest,
And watch your safety.

Alon. Thank you: Wondrous heavy.

Seb. [ALONSO sleeps. Exit ARIEL.

Seb. What a strange drowsiness possesses them!

Ant. It is the quality o' the climate.

Seb. Why

Doth it not then our eye-lids sink? I find not

Myself dispos'd to sleep.

Ant. Nor I; my spirits are nimble.

They fell together all, as by consent;

They dropp'd, as by a thunder-stroke. What might

Worthy Sebastian?—O, what might?—No more;—
And yet, methinks, I see it in thy face,

What thou should'st be: the occasion speaks thee;

and

My strong imagination sees a crown

Dropping upon thy head.

Seb. What, art thou waking?

Ant. Do you not hear me speak?

Seb. I do; and, surely,

It is a sleepy language; and thou speak'st

Out of thy sleep: What is it thou didst say?

This is a strange repose; to be asleep

With eyes wide open; standing, speaking, moving,
And yet so fast asleep.

Ant. Noble Sebastian,

Thou let'st thy fortune sleep—die rather; wink'st
Whiles thou art waking.

Seb. Thou dost snore distinctly;

There's meaning in thy snores.

Ant. I am more serious than my custom: you
Must be so too, if heed me; which to do,

Trebles thee o'er.⁸

Seb. Well; I am standing water.

Ant. I'll teach you how to flow.

Seb. Do so: to ebb,

Hereditary sloth instructs thee.

Ant. O,

If you but knew how you the purpose cherish,
Whiles thus you mock it! how, in stripping it,
You more invest it.¹⁹ Ebbing men, indeed,
Most often do so near the bottom run,
By their own fear, or sloth.

Seb. Pr'ythee, say on >

The setting of thine eye, and cheek, proclaim

A matter from thee; and a birth, indeed,

Which throes thee much to yield.

impracticable inconsistent schemes therein recom-
mended.”

S Antonio apparently means to say, “You must be
more serious than you usually are, if you would pay
attention to my proposals; which attention, if you be-
stow it, will in the end make you thrice what you are.”

9 Sebastian introduces the simile of water. It is ta-
ken up by Antonio, who says he will teach his stagnant
waters to flow. “It has already learned to ebb,” says
Sebastian. To which Antonio replies—“O, if you but
knew how much even that metaphor, which you use
in jest, encourages the design which I hint at; how, in
stripping it of words of their common meaning, and
using them figuratively, you adapt them to your own
situation.”—*Edinburgh Magazine* Nov. 1796.

1 i. e. Deliberated, was in suspense.

2 See note on Twelfth Night, Act v. Sc. 1.

3 See Montaigne's Essays translated by John Florio,
fol. 1603, Chap.

4 An engine was a term applied to any kind of ma-
chine in Shakspeare's age.

5 Foison is only another word for plenty or abun-
dance of provision, but chiefly of the fruits of the earth.
In a subsequent scene we have—

“Earth's increase, and foison plenty.”

6 See Montaigne as cited before.

7 Warburton remarks that “all this dialogue is a fine
satire on the Utopian Treatise of Government, and the

## SCENE I.

## TEMPEST.

43

**Ant.** Thus, sir: Although this lord of weak remembrance, this (Who shall be of as little memory, When he is earth'd,) hath here almost persuaded (For he's a spirit of persuasion, only Professes to persuade) the king, his son's alive; 'Tis as impossible that he's undrown'd, As that he sleeps here, swims.

**Seb.** I have no hope That he's undrown'd.

**Ant.** O, out of that no hope, What great hope have you ! no hope, that way, is Another way so high in hope, that even Ambition cannot pierce a wink beyond,¹ But doubts discovery there. Will you grant, with me, That Ferdinand is drown'd?

**Seb.** He's gone.
**Ant.** Then tell me, Who's the next heir of Naples ?

**Seb.** Claribel.
**Ant.** She that is queen of Tunis ; she that dwells Ten leagues beyond man's life ; she that from Naples
Can have no note,² unless the sun were post, (The man i' the moon's too slow,) till new-born chins Be rough and razorable : she, from whom We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again; And, by that destiny, to perform an act, Whereof what's past is prologue ; what to come, In your's and my discharge.³

**Seb.** What stuff is this?—How say you ? 'Tis true, my brother's daughter's queen of Tunis; So is she heir of Naples ; 'twixt which regions There is some space.

**Ant.** A space whose every cubit Seems to cry out, *How shall that Claribel Measure us back to Naples*?—Keep in Tunis, And let Sebastian wake !—Say, this were death That now hath seiz'd them ; why they were no worse

than now they are: There be, that can rule

As well as he that sleeps ; lords, that can prato As amply, and unnecessarily, As this Gonzalo ; I myself could make A chough⁴ of as deep chat. O, that you bore The mind that I do ! what a sleep were this For your advancement ! Do you understand me ?

**Seb.** Methinks, I do.
**Ant.** And how does your content Tender your own good fortune ?

**Ant.** I remember, You did supplant your brother Prospero.

**True.**

And, look, how well my garments sit upon me; Much feater than before : My brother's servants Were then my fellows, now they are my men.

**Seb.** But, for your conscience—

**Ant.** Ay, sir ; where lies that ? if it were a kybe, 'Twould put me to my slipper ; but I feel not This deity in my bosom : twenty consciences, That stand 'twixt me and Milan, candied be they, And melt, ere they molest ! Here lies your brother, No better than the earth he lies upon, If he were that which now he's like, that's dead ; Whom I, with this obedient steel, three inches of it, Can lay to bed for ever: whiles you, doing thus, To the perpetual wink for aye might put This ancient morsel, this sir Prudence, who

Should not upbraid our course. For all the rest, They'll take suggestion,⁵ as a cat laps milk; They'll tell the clock to any business that We say befits the hour.

**Seb.** Thy case, dear friend, Shall be my precedent ; as thou go'th st Milan, I'll come by Naples. Draw thy sword : one stroke Shall free thee from the tribute which thou pay'st ; And I the king shall love thee.

**Ant.** Draw together : And when I rear my hand, do you the like, To fall it on Gonzalo.

**Seb.** O, but one word.

**[They converse apart.**

Music. Re-enter ARIEL, invisible.

**Ari.** My master through his art foresees the danger

That you, his friend, are in ; and sends me forth, For else his projects die,⁶ to keep them living.

[Sings in GONZALO'S ear.

While you here do snoring lie,
Open-ey'd conspiracy
His time doth take :
If of life you keep a care,
Shake off stumber, and beware :
Awake ! awake !

**Ant.** Then let us both be sudden.

**Gon.** Now, good angels, preserve the king.

**Alon.** Why, how now, ho! awake! Why are you drawn?

Wherefore this ghastly looking ?

**Gon.** What's the matter ?

**Seb.** Whiles we stood here securing your repose, Even now, we heard a hollow burst of bellowing Like bulls, or rather lions ; did it not wake you ? It struck mine ear most terribly.

**Alon.** I heard nothing.
**Ant.** O, 'twas a din to fright a monster's ear; To make an earthquake; sure it was the nap
Of a whole herd of lions.

**Alon.** Heard you this, Gonzalo ?
**Gon.** Upon mine honour, sir, I heard a humming, And that a strange one too, which did awake me : I shak'd you, sir, and cried ; as mine eyes open'd, I saw their weapons drawn :—there was a noise, That's verity : 'Best stand upon our guard ; Or that we quit this place : let's draw our weapons.

**Alon.** Lead off this ground ; and let's make further search

For my poor son.

**Gon.** Heavens keep him from these beasts !

For he is, sure, i' the island.

**Alon.** Lead away.

**Ari.** Prospero my lord shall know what I have done : [Aside.—
So, king, go safely on to seek thy son.

[Exeunt.

**Cal.** All the infections that the sun sucks up From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him By inch-meal a disease ! His spirits hear me, And yet I needs must curse. But they'll nor pinch, Fright me with urchin shows, pitch me i' the mire, Nor lead me, like a fire-brand, in the dark,

1 i. e. The utmost extent of the prospect of ambition, the point where the eye can pass no farther.

2 The commentators have treated this as a remarkable instance of Shakspeare's ignorance of geography; but though the real distance between Naples and Tunis is not so immeasurable, the intercourse in early times between the Neapolitans and the Tunisians was not so frequent as to make it popularly considered less than a formidable voyage; Shakspeare may however be countedenanced in his poetical exaggeration, when we remember that Æschylus has placed the river Eridanus in Spain; and that Appolionius Rhodius describes the Rhone and the Po as meeting in one and discharging themselves into the Gulf of Venice.

3 What is past is the prologue to events which are to come; that depends on what you and I are to perform.

4 A chough is a bird of the jackdaw kind.

5 Suggestion is frequently used in the sense of temptation, or seduction, by Shakspeare and his contemporaries. The sense here is, that they will adopt and bear witness to any tale that may be dictated to them.

6 The old copies read "For else his project dies," By the transposition of a letter, this passage, which has much puzzled the editors, is rendered more intelligible. —"—to keep them living," relates to projects, and not "Alonzo and Gonzalo," as Steevens and Johnson erroneously supposed

44

TEMPEST.

ACT II.

Out of my way, unless he bid them; but
For every trifle are they set upon me:
Sometimes like apes, that moe¹ and chatter at me,
And after, bite me; then like hedge-hogs, which
Lie tumbling in my bare-foot way, and mount
Their pricks² at my foot-fall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
Do hiss me into madness:—Lo! now! lo!

*Enter TRINCULO.*

Here comes a spirit of his; and to torment me,
For bringing wood in slowly: I'll fall flat;
Perchance he will not mind me.

Trin. Here's neither bush nor shrub, to bear off
any weather at all, and another storm brewing: I
hear it sing i' the wind: yond' same black cloud,
yond' huge one, looks like a foul bumbard³ that
would shed his liquor. If it should thunder, as it
did before, I know not where to hide my head: yond'
same cloud cannot choose but fall by painfuls.—
What have we here? a man or a fish? Dead or
alive? A fish: he smells like a fish; a very ancient
and fish-like smell; a kind of, not of the newest,
Poor-John. A strange fish! Were I in England
now, (as once I was,) and had but this fish painted,
not a holiday-fool there but would give a piece of
silver: there would this monster make a man;⁴ any
strange beast there makes a man: when they will
not give a doit to relieve a lame beggar, they will
lay out ten to see a dead Indian. Legg'd like a
man! and his fins like arms! Warm, o' my troth! I
do now let loose my opinion, hold it no longer;
this is no fish but an islander, that hath lately suf-
fered by a thunderbolt. [Thunder.] Alas! the
storm is come again: my best way is to creep
under his garberdine;⁵ there is no other shelter
hereabout: Misery acquaints a man with strange
bed-fellows. I will here shroud, till the dregs of
the storm be past.

*Enter STEPHANO, singing; a bottle in his hand.*

Ste. I shall no more sea, to sea,
Here shall I die ashore;—

This is a very scurvy tune to sing at a man's fu-
neral:

Well, here's my comfort. [Drinks,

The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I,
The gunner, and his mate,

Lov'd Mall, Megg, and Marian, and Margery,
But none of us cared for Kate:

For she had a tongue with a tang,
Would cry to a sailor, Go! hang,

She lov'd not the savour of tar nor of pitch,
Yet a tailor might scratch her where'er she did itch:

Then to sea boys, and let her go hang,

This is a scurvy tune too: But here's my comfort.

Cal. Do not torment me: O!

[Drinks.

Ste. What's the matter? Have we devils here?
Do you put tricks upon us with savages, and men
of lide ? Ha! I have not scap'd drowning, to be
afaread now of your four legs; for it hath been said,
As proper a man as ever went on four legs, cannot

make him give ground: and it shall be said so again,
while Stephano breathes at nostrils.

Cal. The spirit torments me: O!

Ste. This is some monster of the isle, with four
legs; who hath got, as I take it, an ague: Where
the devil should he learn our language? I will give
him some relief, if it be but for that: if I can re-
cover him, and keep him tame, and get to Naples
with him, he's a present for any emperor that ever
trod on neat's-leather.

Cal. Do not torment me, pr'ythee;
I'll bring my wood home faster.

Ste. He's in his fit now; and does not talk after
the wisest. He shall taste of my bottle: if he hath
never drunk wine afore,⁶ it will go near to remove
his fit: if I can recover him, and keep him tame, I
will not take too much? for him: he shall pay for
him that hath him, and that soundly.

Cal. Thou dost me yet but little hurt; thou wilt
Anon, I know it by thy trembling:
Now Prosper works upon thee.

Ste. Come on your ways; open your mouth;
here is that which will give language to you, cat;
open your mouth: this will shake your shaking, I
can tell you, and that soundly: you cannot tell
who's your friend: open your chaps again.

Trin. I should know that voice: It should be—
But he is drowned; and these are devils: O! de
fend me!—

Ste. Four legs, and two voices; a most delicate
monster! His forward voice now is to speak well
of his friend; his backward voice is to utter foul
speeches, and to detract. If all the wine in my
bottle will recover him, I will help his ague;
Come, —Amen! I will pour some in thy other
mouth.

Trin. Stephano,—

Ste. Doth thy other mouth call me? Mercy!
mercy! This is a devil, and no monster: I will
leave him; I have no long spoon.⁸

Trin. Stephano!—If thou beest Stephano,
touch me, and speak to me; for I am Trinculo;—
be not afeard,—thy good friend Trinculo.

Ste. If thou beest Trinculo, come forth; I'll
pall thee by the lesser legs; If any be Trinculo's
legs, these are they. Thou art very Trinculo, in-
deed: How cam'st thou to the siege⁹ of this
moon-calf? Can he vent Trinculos?

Trin. I took him to be killed with a thunder-
stroke:—But thou not drowned, Stephano? I
hope now, thou art not drowned. Is the storm
overblown? I hid me under the dead moon-calf's¹⁰
gaberdine, for fear of the storm: And art thou
living, Stephano? O Stephano, two Neapolitans
'scap'd!

Ste. Pr'ythee, do not turn me about; my
stomach is not constant.

Cal. These be fine things, an if they be not
squares.

That's a brave god, and bears celestial liquor:
I will kneel to him.

Ste. How did't thou 'scape? How cam'st
thou hither? swear by this bottle, how thou cam'st
hither. I escaped upon a butt of sack, which the
sailors heaved over-board, by this bottle! which I

Chapman's version of the fourth Book of the Odyssey:

“—The sea calves savour was

So passing sowe (they still being bred at seas)

It much afflicted us, for who can please

To tie by one of these same sea-bred whales.”

6 No impertinent hint to those who indulge in the con-
stant use of wine. When it is necessary for them as a
medicine, it produces no effect.

7 Any sum, ever so much, an ironical expression im-
plying that he would get as much as he could for him.

8 Shakspeare gives his characters appropriate lan-
guage, “They belch forth proverbs in their drink,”
“Good liquor will make a cut speak,” and “he who
eats with the devil had need of a long spoon.” The last
is again used in The Comedy of Errors, Act iv. Sc. 2.

9 *Siege for stool*, and in the dirtiest sense of the
word.

10 The best account of the moon-calf may be found in
Drayton's poem with that title

["## ACT II.", "## TEMPEST.", "45", "made of the bark of a tree, with mine own hands,\nsince I was cast a-shore.", "Cal. I'll swear, upon that bottle, to be thy true\nsubject: for the liquor is not earthly.", "Ste. Here; swear then how thou escap'dst.", "Trin. Swam a-shore, man, like a duck; I can\nswim like a duck, I'll be sworn.", "Ste. Here, kiss the book: Though thou cant\nswim like a duck, thou art made like a goose.", "Trin. O Stephano, hast any more of this?", "Ste. The whole butt, man; my cellar is in a\nrock by the sea-side, where my wine is hid. How much, moon-calf? how does thine ague?", "Cal. Hast thou not dropped from heaven?¹", "Ste. Out o' the moon, I do assure thee: I was\nthe man in the moon,² when time was.", "Cal. I have seen thee in her, and I do adore\nthée; my mistress shewed me thee, and thy dog,\nand thy bush.", "Ste. Come, swear to that: kiss the book: I will\nfurnish it anon with new contents: swear.", "Trin. By this good light, this is a very shallow\nmonster:—I afeard of him?—a very weak mon-\nster:—The man i' the moon?—a most poor cre-\ndulous monster:—Well drawn, monster, in good\nsooth.", "Cal. I'll shew thee every fertile inch o' the\nisland;", "And I'll kiss thy foot: I pr'ythee, be my god.", "Trin. By this light, a most perfidious\ndrunken monster; when his god's asleep, he'll rob\nhis bottle.", "Cal. I'll kiss thy foot: I'll swear myself thy\nsubject.", "Ste. Come on then; down, and swear.", "Trin. I shall laugh myself to death at this pup-\npy-headed monster: A most scurvy monster! I\ncould find in my heart to beat him,—", "Ste. Come, kiss.", "Trin. —but that the poor monster's in drink:\nAn abominable monster!", "", "Cal. I'll shew thee the best springs; I'll pluck\nthee berries:", "I'll fish for thee, and get thee wood enough.", "A plague upon the tyrant that I serve!", "I'll bear him no more sticks, but follow thee,", "Thou wondrous man.", "Trin. A most ridiculous monster; to make a\nwonder of a poor drunkard.", "Cal. I pr'ythee, let me bring thee where crabs\ngrow;", "And I with my long nails will dig thee pig-nuts;", "Shew thee a jay's nest, and instruct thee how", "To snare the nimble marmozet; I'll bring thee", "To clust'ring filberds, and sometimes I'll get thee", "Young sea-mells³ from the rock: Wilt thou go\nwith me?", "Ste. I pr'ythee now, lead the way, without any\nmore talking.—Trinculo, the king and all our com-\npany else being drowned, we will inherit here.—\nHere; bear my bottle. Fellow Trinculo, we'll fill\nhim by and by.", "Cal. Farewell, master; farewell, farewell.", "[Sings drunkenly.]", "Trin. A howling monster; a drunken monster.", "Cal. No more dams I'll make for fish;", "Nor fetch in firing", "At requiring,", "Nor scrape trenchering, nor wash dish;", "'Ban' 'Ban, Ca—Caliban,", "Has a new master—Get a new man.", "Freedom, hey-day! hey-day, freedom! hey-day,\nfreedom!", "Ste. O brave monster! lead the way. [Exeunt.]", "1. The Indians of the Island of S. Salvador asked by signs whether Columbus and his companions were not come down from heaven.", "2. The reader may consult a curious note on this passage in Mr. Douce's very interesting Illustrations of Shakspeare; where it is observed that Dante makes Cain the man in the moon with his bundle of sticks; or in other words describes the moon by the periphrasis \"Caino e le spine.\"", "## ACT III.", "### SCENE I.—Before Prospero's Cell. Enter FERDINAND, bearing a Log.", "Fer. There be some sports are painful; and⁴ their labour", "Delight in them sets off:⁵ some kinds of baseness", "Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters", "Point to rich ends. This my mean task", "Would be as heavy to me, as odious; but", "The mistress, which I serve, quickens what's dead,", "And makes my labours pleasures: O, she is", "Ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed;", "And he's composed of harshness. I must remove", "Some thousands of these logs, and pile them up,", "Upon a sore injunction: My sweet mistress", "Weeps when she sees me work; and says, such baseness", "Had ne'er like executor. I forget:", "But these sweet thoughts do even refresh my labours;", "Most busy-less, when I do it.", "Enter MIRANDA; and PROSPERO at a distance.", "Mira.", "Alas, now! pray you,\nWork not so hard: I would, the lightning had", "Burnt up those logs, that you are enjoin'd to pile!", "Pray, set it down, and rest you: when this burns,", "\"Twill weep for having wearied you: My father", "Is hard at study; pray now, rest yourself;", "He's safe for these three hours.", "Fer.", "The sun will set, before I shall discharge", "What I must strive to do.", "Mira.", "If you'll sit down,", "I'll bear your logs the while: Pray, give me that;", "I'll carry it to the pile.", "Fer.", "No, precious creature;", "I'd rather crack my sinews, break my back,", "Than you should such dishonour undergo,", "While I sit lazy by.", "Mira.", "It would become me", "As well as it does you: and I should do it", "With much more ease; for my good will is to it,", "And your's it is against.", "Pro.", "Poor worm! thou art infected;", "This visitation shews it.", "Mira.", "You look wearily.", "Fer. No, noble mistress; 'tis fresh morning with me,", "When you are by at night.⁶ I do beseech you,", "(Chiefly that I might set it in my prayers.)", "What is your name?", "Mira.", "Miranda:—O my father,", "I have broke your hest⁷ to say so!", "Fer.", "Admir'd Miranda!", "Indeed, the top of admiration; worth", "What's dearest to the world! Full many a lady", "I have ey'd with best regard; and many a time", "The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage", "Brought my too diligent ear: for several virtues", "Have I lik'd several women; never any", "With so full soul, but some defect in her", "Did quarrel with the noblest grace she ow'd,⁹", "And put it to the foil: But you, O you,", "So perfect, and so peerless, are created", "Of every creature's best,⁹", "3. A smaller species of sea-gulls.", "4. Pope changed and to but here, without authority: we must read and in the sense of and yet.", "5. Mollitus austerum studio fallentie laborem.—Hor-\nSat. ii. 1, 2.", "So, in Macbeth:", "\"The labour we delight in physics pain.\"", "6. \"Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atra\nLumen.\" Tibull. lib. iv. el. 13.", "7. See Note 27, p. 26.", "8. See Note 37, p. 31.", "9. In the first book of Sidney's Arcadia, a lover says of his mistress:", {"bbox": [481, 1251

46

TEMPEST.

ACT III.

Mira. I do not know
One of my sex; no woman's face remember,
Save, from my glass, mine own; nor have I seen
More that I may call men, than you, good friend,
And my dear father: how features are abroad,
I am skill-less of; but, by my modesty,
(The jewel in my dower,) I would not wish
Any companion in the world but you;
Nor can imagination form a shape,
Besides yourself, to like of: but I prattle
Something too wildly, and my father's precepts
I therein do forget.

Fer. I am, in my condition,
A prince, Miranda; I do think, a king;
(I would, not so!) and would no more endure
This wooden slavery, than to suffer
The flesh-fly blow my mouth. —Hear my soul
speak; —

The very instant that I saw you, did
My heart fly to your service; there resides,
To make me slave to it; and, for your sake,
Am I this patient log-man.

Mira. Do you love me?
Fer. O heaven, O earth, bear witness to this
sound,

And crown what I profess with kind event,
If I speak true; if hollowly, invert
What best is boded me to mischief! I,
Beyond all limit of what else¹ i' the world,
Do love, prize, honour you.

Mira. I am a fool,

To weep at what I am glad of.²

Pro. Fair encounter
Of two most rare affections! Heavens rain grace
On that which breeds between them!

Fer. Wherefore weep you?

Mira. At mine unworthiness, that dare not
offer

What I desire to give; and much less take,
What I shall die to want: But this is trifling;
And all the more it seeks to hide itself,
The bigger bulk it shows. Hence, bashful cunning:
And prompt me, plain and holy innocence!
I am your wife, if you will marry me;
If not, I'll die your maid : to be your fellow³
You may deny me; but I'll be your servant,
Whether you will or no.

Fer. My mistress, dearest,

And I thus humble ever.

Mira. My husband then?

Fer. Ay, with a heart as willing

As bondage e'er of freedom; here's my hand.

Mira. And mine, with my heart in't: and now
farewell.

Till half an hour hence.

Fer. A thousand! thousand! [Exeunt FER. and MIR.

Pro. So glad of this as they, I cannot be,
Who are surpris'd with all; but my rejoicing
At nothing can be more. I'll to my book;
For yet, ere supper time, must I perform
Much business appertaining. [Exit]

## SCENE II.—Another part of the Island. Enter STEPHANO and TRINCULO; CALIBAN following with a Bottle.

Ste. Tell not me; —when the butt is out, we
will drink water; not a drop before: therefore bear
up, and board 'em: Servant-monster, drink to me.

Trin. Servant-monster? the folly of this island!
They say, there's but five upon this isle: we are
three of them; if the other two be brained like us,
the state totters.

1 What else, for whatsoever else,

2 Steevens observes justly that this is one of those touches of nature which distinguish Shakspeare from all other writers. There is a kindred thought in Romeo and Juliet:

"Back, foolish tears, back to your native spring!

Your tributary drops belong to woe,

Which you mistaking offer up to joy."

3 i. e. your companion Malone has cited a very

Ste. Drink, servant-monster, when I bid thee;
your eyes are almost set in thy head.

Trin. Where should they be set else? he were
a brave monster indeed, if they were set in his tail.

Ste. My man-monster hath drowned his tongue
in sack: for my part, the sea cannot drown me: I
swam, ere I could recover the shore, five-and-
thirty leagues, off and on, by this light.—Thou
shalt be my lieutenant, monster, or my standard.

Trin. Your lieutenant, if you list; he's no
standard.

Ste. We'll not run, monsieur monster.

Trin. Nor go neither: but you'll lie, like dogs;
and yet say nothing neither.

Ste. Moon-calf; speak once in thy life, if thou
beest a good moon-calf.

Cal. How does thy honour? Let me lick thy
shoe: I'll not serve him, he is not valiant.

Trin. Thou liest, most ignorant monster; I am
in case to justle a constable: Why, thou de-
boshed⁴ fish thou, was there ever man a coward,
that hath drunk so much sack as I to-day? Wilt
thou tell a monstrous lie, being but half a fish, and
half a monster?

Cal. Lo, how he mocks me! wilt thou let him,
my lord?

Trin. Lord, quoth he !—that a monster should
be such a natural !

Cal. Lo, lo, again ! bite him to death, I pry'thee.

Ste. Trinculo, keep a good tongue in your head;
if you prove a mutineer, the next tree—The poor
monster's my subject, and he shall not suffer indig-
nity.

Cal. I thank my noble lord. Wilt thou be
pleas'd to hearken once again to the suit I made
thee?

Ste. Marry will I: kneel, and repeat it; I will
stand, and so shall Trinculo.

Enter ARIEL, invisible.

Cal. As I told thee before, I am subject to a
tyrant; a sorcerer, that by his cunning hath cheated
me of this island.

Ari. Thou liest.

Cal. Thou liest, thou jesting monkey, thou !
I would, my valiant master would destroy thee:
I do not lie.

Ste. Trinculo, if you trouble him any more in
his tale, by this hand, I will supplant some of your
teeth.

Trin. Why, I said nothing.

Ste. Mum then, and no more.—[To CALIBAN.]

Proceed.
Cal. I say, by sorcery he got this isle :

From me he got it. If thy greatness will
Revenge it on him—for, I know, thou dar'st;
But this thing dare not.

Ste. That's most certain.

Cal. Thou shall be lord of it, and I'll serve thee.

Ste. How now shall this be compassed? Canst
thou bring me to the party?

Cal. Yea, yea, my lord; I'll yield him thee
asleep.

Where thou may't knock a nail into his head.

Ari. Thou liest, thou canst not.

Cal. What a pied⁵ ninny's thjs? Thou scurvy
patch !—

I do beseech thy greatness, give him blows,
And take his bottle from him: when that's gone,
He shall drink nought but brine; for I'll not shew
him

Where the quick freshes⁶ are.

Ste. Trinculo, run into no further danger: in-

apposite passage from Catullus; but, as Mr. Douce
remarks, Shakspeare had more probably the pathetic
old poem of The Nut Brown Maid in his recollection.

4 Deboshed, this is the old orthography of debauch-
ed; following the sound of the French original. In
altering the spelling we have departed from the proper
pronunciation of the word.

5 He calls him a pied ninny, alluding to Trinculo's
party-coloured dress, he was a licensed fool or jester.

6 Quick freshes are living springs.

## SCENE III.

terrupt the monster one word further, and, by this
hand, I'll turn my mercy out of doors, and make a
stock-fish of thee.

Trin. Why, what did I ? I did nothing; I'll go
further off.

Ari. Didst thou not say, he lied ?

Ste. You liest.

Ste. Do I so ? take thou that.

[Strikes him.]

As you like this, give me the lie another time.

Trin. I did not give the lie :—Out o' your wits,
and hearing too.—A pox o' your bottle! this
can sack, and drinking too.—A mutrain on your mon-
ster, and the devil take your fingers!

Cal. Ha, ha, ha !

Ste. Now, forward with your tale. Pr'ythee
stand further off.

Cal. Beat him enough : after a little time,
I'll beat him too.

Ste.

Stand further.—Come, proceed.

Cal. Why, as I told thee, 'tis a custom with him
I the afternoon to sleep: there thou may'st brain
him,

Having first seiz'd his books; or with a log
Batter his skull, or paunch with his knife, a stake,
Or cut his wezand¹ with thy hand; Remember,
First to possess his books; for without them
He's but a pot, as I, nor hath any

One spirit to command: They all do hate him,
As rootedly as I: Burn but his books;
He has brave utensils, (for so he calls them.)

Which, when he has a house, he'll deck withal.
And that most deeply to consider, is
The beauty of his daughter; he himself

Calls her a non-pareil: I never saw a woman,
But only Sycorax my dam, and she;
But she as far surpasseth Sycorax,

As great'st does least.

Ste.

Is it so brave a lass ?

Cal. Ay, my lord; she will become thy bed, I
warrant,

And bring thee forth brave brood.

Ste. The Monster, I will kill this man: his daughter
and I will be king and queen: (save our graces !)
and Trinculo and thyself shall be viceroys :—Dost
thou like the plot, Trinculo ?

Trin. Excellent.

Ste. Give me thy hand; I am sorry I beat thee :
but, while thou livest, keep a good tongue in thy
head.

Cal. Within this half hour will he be asleep;
Wilt thou destroy him then?

Ari.

Ay, on mine honour.

Cal. This will I tell my master.

Ari. Thou mak'st me merry: I am full of pleasure;

Let us be jocund: Will you troll the catch

You taught me but while-ere?

Ste. At thy request, monster, I will do reason,
any reason: Come on, Trinculo, let us sing.

[Sings.

Flout 'em, and skout 'em; and skout 'em, and
flout'em :

Thought is free.

Cal. That's not the tune.

[ARIEL plays the tune on a tabor and pipe.

Ste. What is this same ?

Trin. This is the tune of our catch, played by
the picture of No-body.²

## TEMPEST.

Ste. If thou beest a man, shew thyself in thy
likeness : if thou beest a devil, take't as thou list.

Trin. O, forgive me my sins!

Ste. He that dies, pays all debts: I defy thee :—

Mercy upon us!

Cal. Art thou afeard ?³

Ste. No, monster, not I.

Cal. Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt
not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds, methought, would open, and shewriches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cry'd to dream again.

Ste. This will prove a brave kingdom to me,
where I shall have my music for nothing.

Cal. When Prospero is destroyed.

Ste. That shall be by and by: I remember the
story.

Trin. The sound is going away: let's follow it,
and after, do our work.

Ste. Lead, monster; we'll follow.—I would, I
could see this taborer:⁴ he lays it on.

Trin. Wilt come ? I'll follow, Stephano. [Exeunt.

### SCENE III.—Another part of the Island.

ALONSO, SEBASTIAN, ANTONIO, GONZALO,

ADRIAN, FRANCISCO, and others.

Gon. By'r lakin,⁶ I can go no further, sir;

My old bones ache; here's a maze trod, indeed,
Through forth-rights, and meanders! by your pa-
tience,

I needs must rest me.

Alon.

Old lord, I cannot blame thee,

Who am myself attach'd with weariness,

To the dulling of my spirits: sit down, and rest.

Even here I will put off my hope, and keep it

No longer for my flatterer: he is drown'd.

Whom thus we stray to find; and the sea mocks

Our frustrate search on land: Well, let him go.

Ant. I am right glad that he's so out of hope.

[Aside to SEBASTIAN.]
Do not, for one repulse, forego the purpose
That you resolv'd to effect.

Seb.

The next advantage

Will we take thoroughly.

Ant.

Let it be to-night:

For, now they are oppress'd with travel, they

Will not, nor cannot, use such vigilance,

As when they are fresh.

Seb.

I say, to-night: no more.

Solemn and strange music; and PROSPERO above,
invisible. Enter several strange Shapes, bringing
in a Banquet; they dance about it with gentle ac-
tions of salutation; and inviting the King, &c. to
eat, they depart.

Alon. What harmony is this ? my good friends,
hark!

Gon. Marvellous sweet music!

Alon. Give us kind keepers, heavens! What
were these?

Seb. A living drollery:⁷ Now I will believe
That there are unicorns; that, in Arabia

There is one tree, the phoenix? throne;⁷ one
phoenix

At this hour reigning there.

“—calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire;

And aery tongues that syllable men's names

On sands, and shores, and desert wildernesses.”

5 By'r lakin is a contraction of *By our ladykin*, the diminutive of our lady.

6 Shows, called *Drolleries*, were in Shakspeare's time performed by puppets only. From these our modern *drollts*, exhibited at fairs, &c. took their name. “A living drollery,” is therefore a drollery not by wooden but by living personages.

7 “I myself have heard strange things of this kind of tree; namely, in regard of the Bird Phoenix, which is supposed to have taken that name of this date tree

1 Wezand, i. e. throat or windpipe.

2 The picture of No-body was a common sign. There is also a wood cut prefixed to an old play of No-body and Some-body, which represents this notable person.

3 To affear, is an obsolete verb with the same meaning as to affray, or make afraid.

4 “You shall heare in the ayre the sound of tabers and other instruments, to put the trauellers in feare, &c. by evill spirites that make these soundes, and also do call diverse of the trauellers by their names, &c.”—Trauels of Marcus Paulus, by John Frampton, 4to. 1579.—To some of these circumstances Milton also alludes:

48

TEMPEST.

Act III.

Ant.
I'll believe both; And what does else want credit, come to me, And I'll be sworn 'tis true: Travellers ne'er did lie, Though fools at home condemn them.

Gon.
If in Naples I should report this now, would they believe me?

If I should say I saw such islanders, (For, certes,¹ these are people of the island,) Who, though they are of monstrous shape, yet note, Their manners are more gentle, kind, than of Our human generation you shall find

Many, nay, almost all.

Honest lord,

Thou hast said well; for some of you there present, Are worse than devils.

[Aside.

Alon.
I cannot too much muse,² Such shapes, such gesture, and such sound, expressing

(Although they want the use of tongue) a kind Of excellent dumb discourse.

Pro.
Praise in departing.³

[Aside.

Fran. They vanish'd strangely.

Seb.
No matter, since they have left their viands behind; for we have stomachs.—

Will't please you taste of what is here?

Alon. Not I.

Gon. Faith, sir, you need not fear: When we were boys,

Who would believe that there were mountaineers, Dew-lapp'd like bulls, whose throats had hanging at them

Wallets of flesh? or that there were such men, Whose heads stood in their breasts? which now we find,

Each putter-out on five for one,⁴ will bring us Good warrant of.

Alon.
I will stand too, and feed,

Although my last: no matter, since I feel The best is past:—Brother, my lord the duke, Stand too, and do as we.

Thunder and lightning. Enter ARIEL like a Harpy; claps his wings upon the table, and, by quaint device, the Banquet vanishes.

Ari. You are three men of sin, whom destiny, (That hath to instrument this lower world,) And what is in't,) the never-surfeited sea Hath caused to belch up; and on this island Where man doth not inhabit; you 'mongst men Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad:

[Seeing ALON. SEB. &c. draw their swords.

And even with such like valour, men hang and drown

Their proper selves. You fools! I and my fellows Are ministers of hate; the elements

Of whom your swords are temper'd, may as well Wound the loud winds, or with bemock'd-at stabs Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish

(called in Greek φοινίζει) for it was assured unto me, that the said bird died with that tree, and revived of it-selfe as the tree springing againe."—Holland's Translation of Plim, B. xiii. C. 4.

1 Certainly.

2 Wonder.

3 "Praise in departing," is a proverbial phrase signifying. Do not praise your entertainment too soon, lest you should have reason to retract your commendation.

4. "Each putter-out on five for one," i. e. each traveller; it appears to have been the custom to place out a sum of money upon going abroad to be returned with enormous interest if the party returned safe; a kind of insurance of a gambling nature.

5. Bailey, in his dictionary, says that *dowle* is a feature, or rather the single particles of the down. Coles, in his Latin Dictionary, 1679, interprets young *dowle* by *Lanugo*. And in a history of most Manual Arts, 1661, *wool* and *dowle* are treated as synonymous. Tooke contends that this word and others of the same form are nothing more than the past participle of *deal*; and Julius and Skinner both derive it from the same. I fully believe that Tooke is right; the provincial word *dool*

One dowle⁵ that's in my plume; my fellow min-
isters

Are like invulnerable: if you could hurt, Your swords are now too massy for your strengths, And will not be uplifted; But, remember, (For that's my business to you,) that you three From Milan did supplant; good Prospero, Expos'd unto the sea, which hath requit it, Him, and his innocent child: for which foul deed The powers, delaying, not forgetting, have Incens'd the seas and shores, yen all the creatures, Against your peace: Thee, of thy son, Alonso, They have bereft; and do pronounce by me, Lingering perdition (worse than any death Can be at once,) shall step by step attend You, and your ways; whose wraths to guard you from

(Which here, in this most desolate isle, else falls Upon your heads,) is nothing, but heart's sorrow, And a clear⁶ life ensuing.

He vanishes in Thunder: then, to soft music, enter the Shapes again, and dance with mops and mowes, and carry out the table.

Pro. [Aside.] Bravely the figure of this harpy hast thou

Perform'd, my Ariel; a grace it had, devouring: Of my instruction hast thou nothing 'bated, In what thou hast to say: so, with good life,⁷ And observation strange, my meaner ministers Their several kinds have done: my high charms work

And these, mine enemies, are all knit up In their distractions: they now are in my power; And in these fits I leave them, whilst I visit Young Ferdinand, (whom they suppose is drown'd) And his and my lov'd darling.

[Exit PROSPERO from above.

Gon. I' the name of something holy, sir, why stand you

In this strange stare?

Alon.
O, it is monstrous! monstrous

Methought, the billows spoke, and told me of it; The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder, That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounced The name of Prosper; it did bass my trespass. Therefore my son i' the ooze is bedded; and I'll seek him deeper than e'er plummet sounded. And with him there lie muddled.

[Ext.
Seb.

But one fiend at a time, I'll fight their legions o'er.

Ant.
I'll be his second.

[Exeunt SEB. and ANT.

Gon. All three of them are desperate; their great guilt,

Like poison given to work a great time after,⁸ Now 'gins to bite the spirits: I do beseech you That are of supplier joints, follow them swiftly, And hinder them from what this ectasy⁹

May now provoke them to.

Adr.

Follow, I pray you.

Exeunt.

is a portion of unploughed land left in a field; Coles, in his English Dictionary, 1701, has given *dool* as a cant word, and interprets it *deal*. I must refer the reader to the Diversions of Purley for further proof.

6. A clear life: is a *pure, blameless, life*.

7. With good life, i. e. with the full bent and energy of mind. Mr. Henley says that the expression is still in use in the west of England.

8. The natives of Africa have been supposed to be possessed of the secret how to temper poisons with such art as not to operate till several years after they were administered. Their drugs were then as certain in their effect as subtle in their preparation.

9. Shakspeare uses *ectasy* for any temporary alienation of mind, a fit, or madness. Minsheu's definition of this word will serve to explain its meaning wherever it occurs throughout the following pages. "Extase or trance; G. extase; Lat. extasis, abstractio mentis. Est proprie mentis emotio, et quasi ex stensione sua deturbatio seu furore, eu admiratione, seu timore, aliove casu decidat." Guide to the Tongues, 1617.

## SCENE I.

## ACT IV.

### SCENE I.—Before Prospero's Cell. Enter PROSPERO, FERDINAND, and MIRANDA.

Pro. If I have too austerely punish'd you,
Your compensation makes amends: for I
Have given you here a thread of mine own life,
Or that for which I live¹; whom once again
I tender to thy hand: all thy vexations
Were but my trials of thy love, and thou
Hast strangely stood the test: here, afore Heaven,
I ratify this my rich gift. O Ferdinand,
Do not smile at me, that I boast her off,
For thou shall find she will outstrip all praise,
And make it halt behind her.
Fer.
I do believe it,

Against an oracle.

Pro. Then, as my gift, and thine own acquisition
Worthily purchase'd, take my daughter: But
If thou dost break her virgin knot¹ before
All sanctimonious ceremonies may
With full and holy rite be minister'd,
No sweet aspersion² shall the heavens let fall
To make this contract grow; but barren hate,
Sour-ey'd disdain, and discord, shall bestrew
The union of your bed with weeds so loathly,
That you shall hate it both: therefore, take heed,
As Hymen's lamps do light you.

Fer. As I hope
For quiet days, fair issue, and long life,
With such love as 'tis now; the murkiest den,
The most opportune place, the strong'st suggestion³
Our worse Genius can, shall never melt
Mine honour into lust; to take away
The edge of that day's celebration,
When I shall think, or Phœbus' steeds are founder'd,
Or night kept chaidn'd below.

Pro. Fairly spoke;
Sit then, and talk with her, she is thine own.—
What, Ariel, my industrious servant Ariel!

Enter ARIEL.

Ari. What would my potent master? here I am.

Pro. Thou and thy meaner fellows your last
service

Did worthily perform; and I must use you
In such another trick: go, bring the rabbile,
O'er whom I give thee power, here, to this place :
Incite them to quick motion; for I must
Bestow upon the eyes of these young couple
Some vanity⁴ of mine art; it is my promise,
And they expect it from me.

Ari. Presently?

Pro. Áy, with a twink.

Ari. Before you can say, Come, and go,

And breathe twice; and cry, so, so;

1 The same expression occurs in Pericles. Mr. Henley says that it is a manifest allusion to the zones of the ancients, which were worn as guardians of chastity before marriage.

2 Aspersion is here used in its primitive sense of sprinkling, at present it is used in its figurative sense of throwing out hints of alunum and detraction.

3 Suggestion here means temptation or wicked prompting.

4 "Some vanity of mine art" is some illusion. Thus in a passage, quoted by Warton, in his Dissertation on the Gesia Romanorum, from Emare, a metrical Romance.

"The emperor said on high
Sertes thys is a fayry
Or ellys a ranite?"

5 That is, bring more than are sufficient. "Corollary, the addition or vantage above measure, an overplus, or surplusage."—Blount.

6 Slover is fodder for cattle, as hay, straw, and the like: estovers is the old law term, it is from estouvier, old French.

7 The old editions read Pioned. and Twilled brims. In Ovid's Banquet of Sense, by Geo. Chapman, 1595, we meet with

"—Cuplike twill-pants strew'd in Bacchus bowers." If twill be the name of any flower, the old reading may stand. Mr. Henley strongly contends for the old reading, and explains pioned to mean faced up with mire in the manner that ditches trim the banks of ditches: twilled

## TEMPEST.

49

Each one, tripping on his toe,
Will be there with mop and mowe:

Do you love me, master? no.
Pro.

Dearly, my delicate Ariel: Do not approach,

Till thou dost hear me call.

Ari. Well I conceive, [Exit].

Pro. Look, thou be true; do not give dalliance
Too much the rein; the strongest oaths are straw
To the fire i' the blood: be more abstemious,
Or else, good night, your vow!

Fer. I warrant you, sir;
The white-cold virgin snow upon my heart
Abates the ardour of my liver.

Pro. Well.—
Now come, my Ariel; bring a corollary,⁵
Rather than want a spirit; appear, and pertly.—
No tongue; all eyes; be silent. [Soft music.

A Masque. Enter Iris.

Iris. Ceres, most bounteous lady, thy rich leas
Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats, and peas;
Thy turvy mountains, where live nibbling sheep,
And flat meads thatch'd with stover,⁶ them to keep;
Thy banks with peonied and lilyed brims;
Which spongy April at thy heat betrimms,

To make cold nymphs chaste crowds; and thy
broom groves,
Whose shadow the dismissed bachelor loves,
Being lass-lorn;⁷ thy pole-clipt vineyard;
And thy sea-marge, steril, and rocky-hard;
Where thy selfeth dost air: The queen o' the sky,
Whose watery arch, and messenger, am I,
Bids thee leave these; and with her sovereign
grace,

On this grass-plot, in this very place,

To come and sport: her peacocks fly amain;

Approach, rich Ceres, her to entertain.

Enter CERES.

Cer. Hail, many-colour'd messenger, that ne'er
Dost disobey the wife of Jupiter;

Who, with thy safron wings, upon my flowers

Diffusest honey-drops, refreshing showers;⁹

And with each end of thy blue bow dost crowd
My bosky¹⁰ acres, and my unshrub'd down.

Rich scarf to my proud earth: Why hast thy queen
Summon'd me hither, to this short-grass'd green?

Iris. A contract of true love to celebrate;

And some donation freely to estate

On the bless'd lovers.

Cer. Tell me, heavenly bow,

If Venus, or her son, as thou dost know,

Do now attend the queen ? since they did plot

The means, that dusky Dis my daughter got,

Her and her blind boy's scandal'd company

I have forsworn.

he derives from the French verb touiller, which Cotgrave interprets, “filthily to mix, to mingle, confound, or shuffle together.” He objects to peonied and tilled because these flowers never blow in April. But Mr. Boaden has pointed out a passage in Lord Bacon's Essay on Gardens which supports the reading in the text. “In April follow the double white violet, the wall-flower, the stock-silly-flower, the cowslip, flower-de-luces, and tillages of all natures; rose-mary flowers, the tulippe, the double pigris, &c.” Lyte, in his Herbar, says one kind of peonie is called by some, maiden or virgin peonie. And Pliny mentions the water-lilly as a preserver of chastity, B. xxvi. C. 10. Edward Fenton, in his “Secret Wonders of Nature,” 1569, 4to. B. vi. asserts that “the water-lilly mortifeth altogether the appetite of sensuality and defends from unchaste thoughts and dreams of venery.” The passage certainly gains by the reading of Mr. Steevens, which I have, for these reasons, retained.

8 That is, forsaken by his lass.

9 Mr. Douce remarks that this is an elegant expansion of the following lines in Phaer's Virgil Æneid, Lib. iv.

“Dame rainbow down therefore with safron wings of
drooping showres,

Whose face a thousand sundry hues against the sun
devours, &c.

From heaven descending came.”

10 Bosky acres are woody acres, fields intersected by luxuriant hedge-rows and copse.

7

["## SCENE I.", "## TEMPEST.", "51", "Advanc'd their eye-lids, lifted up their noses,\nAs they smelt music; so I charm'd their ears,\nThat, calf-like, they my lowing follow'd, through\nTooth'd briers, sharp furzes, pricking goss, and thorns,", "Which enter'd their frail shins: at last I left them\nI the filthy mantled pool beyond your cell,\nThere dancing up to the chins, that the foul lake\nO'er-stunk their feet.", "Pro. This was well done, my bird:", "Thy shape invisible retain thou still:\nThe trumpery in my house, go, bring it hither,\nFor stale¹ to catch these thieves.", "Ari.", "I go, I go. [Exit.]", "Pro. A devil, a born devil, on whose nature\nNurture² can never stick; on whom my pains,\nHumanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost;\nAnd as, with age, his body uglier grows,\nSo his mind cankers: I will plague them all,", "Re-enter ARIEL loaden with glistering apparel, &c.", "Even to roaring.—Come, hang them on this line.", "PROSPERO and ARIEL remain invisible. Enter CA-LIBAN, STEPHANO, and TRINCULO; all wet.", "Cal. Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole\nmay not", "Hear a foot fall: we now are near his cell.", "Ste. Monster, your fairy, which, you say, is a\nharmless fairy, has done little better than play'd the\nJack³ with us.", "Trin. Monster, I do smell all horse-piss; at\nwhich my nose is in great indignation.", "Ste. So is mine. Do you hear, monster? If I\nshould take a displeasure against you; look you,—", "Trin. Thou wert but a lost monster.", "Cal. Good my lord, give me thy favour still:", "Be patient, for this prize I'll bring thee to\nShall hood-wink this mischance; therefore, speak\nsoftly,", "All's hush'd as midnight yet.", "Trin. Ay, but to lose our bottles in the pool,—", "Ste. There is not only disgrace and dishonour in\nthat, monster, but an infinite loss.", "Trin. That's more to me than my wetting: yet\nthis is your harmless fairy, monster.", "Ste. I will fetch off my bottle, though I be o'er\nears for my labour.", "Cal. Pr'ythee, my king, be quiet: Seest thou here,\nThis is the mouth of the cell: no noise, and enter:\nDo that good mischief, which may make this island\nThine own for ever, and I, thy Caliban,\nFor aye thy foot-licker.", "Ste. Give me thy hand: for I do begin to have\nbloody thoughts.", "Trin. O king Stephano! O peer¹⁴ O worthy\nStephano! look, what a wardrobe here is for thee!\nCal. Let it alone, thou fool! it is but trash.", "Trin. O, ho, monster; we know what belongs to\na slippery:—O king Stephano!\nSte. Put off that gown, Trinculo; by this hand,\nI'll have that gown.", "Trin. Thy grace shall have it.", "Cal. The dropsy drown this fool! what do you\nmean?", "To doat thus on such luggage? Let it alone,⁶\nAnd do the murder first: if he awake,", "From toe to crown he'll fill our skins with pinches;\nMake us strange stuff.", "Ste. Be you quiet, monster.—Mistress line, is\nnot this my jerkin? Now is the jerkin under the\nline: now, jerkin, you are like to lose your hair,\nand prove a bald jerkin.", "1. *Stale,* in the art of fowling, signified a bait or lure to decoy birds.", "2. *Nurture* is *Education,* in our old language.", "3. To play the *Jack,* was to play the *Knave.*", "4. This is a humorous allusion to the old ballad\n\"King Stephen was a worthy peer,\" of which Iago\nsings a verse in Othello.", "5. A shop for the sale of old clothes.—*Fripperie,* Fr.", "6. The old copy reads—\"Let's alone.\"", "7. *Bird-time.*", "8. The *barnacle* is a kind of shell-fish, *lepus* anati-", "Trin. Do, do: We steal by line and level, and\nlike your grace.", "Ste. I thank thee for that jest; here's a garment\nfor't: it shall not go unrewarded, while I am king\nof this country: *Steal by line and level,* is an excel-\nlent pass of pate; there's another garment for't.", "Trin. Monster, come, put some lime⁷ upon\nyour fingers, and away with the rest.", "Cal. I will have none on't: we shall lose our time,\nAnd all be turn'd to barnacles,⁸ or to apes\nWith foreheads villanous low.", "Ste. The monster, lay-to your fingers; help to bear\nthis away, where my hogshead of wine is, or I'll\nturn you out of my kingdom: go to, carry this.", "Trin. And this.", "Ste. Ay, and this.", "A noise of Hunters heard.⁹ Enter divers Spirits\nin shape of hounds, and hunt them about; PROSPERO and ARIEL setting them on.", "Pro. Hey, *Mountain,* *hey!*", "Ari. Silver! there it goes, *Silver!*", "Pro. *Fury! Fury!* there, *Tyrant,* there! hark!\nhark!", "[CAL. STE. and TRIN. are driven out.", "Go, charge my goblins that they grind their joints\nWith dry convulsions; shorten up their sinews\nWith aged cramps; and more pinch-spotted make\nthem,", "Than pard,¹⁰ or cat-o'-mountain.", "Ari.", "Hark, they roar", "Pro. Let them be hunted soundly: At this hour\nLie at my mercy all mine enemies¹¹:", "Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou", "Shalt have the air at freedom; for a little,\nFollow, and do me service.", "[Exeunt.]", "## ACT V.", "### SCENE I.—Before the Cell of Prospero. Enter PROSPERO in his magic robes, and ARIEL.", "Pro. Now does my project gather to a head:\nMy charms crack not; my spirits obey; and time\nGoes upright with his carriage. How's the day?", "Ari. On the sixth hour; at which time, my lord,\nYou said our work should cease.", "Pro.", "I did say so,", "When first I rais'd the tempest. Say, my spirit,\nHow fares the king and his followers?", "Ari. Confin'd together", "In the same fashion as you gave in charge;", "Just as you left them; sir; all prisoners", "In the lime grove which weather-fends¹¹ your cell;", "They cannot budge, till you release.¹² The king,\nHis brother, and yours, abide all three distracted;", "And the remainder yomourning over them.", "Brim-full of sorrow, and dismay; but chiefly", "Him you term'd, sir, *The good old lord, Gonzato*;", "His tears run down his beard, like winter's drops", "From eaves of reeds: your charm so strongly\nworks them,", "That if you now beheld them, your affections\nWould become tender.", "Pro.", "Dost thou think so, spirit?", "Ari. Mine would, sir, were I human.", "Pro.", "And mine shall.\nHast thou, which art but air, a touch,¹³ a feeling\nOf their afflictions? and shall not myself,", "One of their kind, that relish all as sharply,\nPassion as they, be kindlier mov'd than thou art?", "fera, which ancient credulity believed to produce the\nbarnacle-goose. Bishop Hall refers to it in the second\nSatire of his fourth Book—", "\"That Scottish *barnacle*, if I might choose,", "That of a worm doth wax a winged goose.\"", "Gerrard, in his *Herbal*, 1597, p. 1391, gives a full de-\nscription of it; and the worthy Dr. Bullein treats those\nas ignorant and incredulous, who do not believe in the\ntransformation.—*Bulvarie of Defence*, 1562. Cali\nban's Barnacle is the *clakis*, or tree-goose.", "9. See *Tywhitt's Chaucer*, Note on v. 6441.", "10. *Pard*, i. e. *Leopard*.", "11. *Defends it from the weather.*", "12. i. e. *Until you release them.*", "13. A sensation.", "Act IV.", "ry, on,\none", "they join\ntowards the\nlently, and\np, and con-\nspire", "in some\ninspiration\nes,\ndone;—\n\nin some\nsort,\n\nors,", "this day,\ner'd,\nsort,\n\nin some\n\nalaces,\nf,\n\nstuff", "in some\nday,\ner'd,\nsort,\n\nin some\n\nalaces,\nf,\n\nstuff", {"bbox": [0, 1240,

["52", "TEMPEST.", "Act. V.", "Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,", "Yet, with my nobler reason, 'gainst my fury,\nDo I take part: the rarer action is\nIn virtue than in vengeance: they being penitent,\nThe sole drift of my purpose doth extend", "Not a frown further: Go, release them, Ariel;\nMy charms I'll break, their senses I'll restore,", "And they shall be themselves.", "Ari.\nI'll fetch them, sir. [Exit.\nPro. Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes,\nand groves':", "And ye, that on the sands with printless foot", "Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him", "When he comes back; you demy-puppets, that", "By moon-shine do the green-sour ringlets make,\nWhereof the ewe not bites; and you, whose past-\ntime", "Is to make midnight-mushrooms; that rejoice", "To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid", "(Weak masters though you be²) I have be-dimm'd", "The noon-tide sun, call'd forth the mutinous winds,", "And 'twixt the green sea and the azur'd vault", "Set roaring war: to the dread rattling thunder", "Have I given fire, and rifled Jgye's stout oak", "With his own bolt: the strong-bas'd promontory", "Have I made shake; and by the spurs pluck'd up", "The pine, and cedar: graves, at my command,", "Have wak'd their sleepers; op'd and let them forth,", "By my so potent art: But this rough magic", "I here abjure: and, when I have requir'd", "Some heavenly music, (which even now I do),", "To work mine end upon their senses, that", "This airy charm is for, I'll break my staff,", "Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,\nAnd, deeper than did ever plummet sound,", "I'll drown my book. [Solemn music.", "Re-enter ARIEL: after him, ALONSO, with a fran-\ntic gesture, attended by GONZALO; SEBASTIAN\nand ANTONIO in like manner, attended by ADRIAN\nand FRANCISCO: They all enter the circle which\nPROSPERO had made, and there stand charmed;\nwhich PROSPERO observing, speaks.", "A solemn air, and the best comforter", "To an unsettled fancy, cure thy brains,", "Now useless, boil'd within thy skull²! There stand,", "For you are spell-stopp'd.—", "Holy Gonzalo, honourable man,", "Mine eyes, even sociable to the shew of thine,", "Fall fellowly drops.—The charm dissolves apace;", "And as the morning steals upon the night,", "Melting the darkness, so their rising senses", "Begin to chase the ignorant fumes that mantle", "Their clearer reason.—O my good Gonzalo,", "My true preserver, and a loyal sir", "To him thou follow'st; I will pay thy graces", "Home, both in word and deed.—Most cruelly", "Didst thou, Alonso, use me and my daughter:\nThy brother was a furtherer in the act;—", "Thou'rt pinch'd for't now, Sebastian.—Flesh and\nblood,", "You brother mine, that entertain'd ambition,", "Expell'd reporse⁴ and nature; who with Sebas-\ntian", "(Whose inward pinches therefore are most strong;)\nWould here have kill'd your king; I do forgive\nthee,", "Unnatural though thou art!—Their understanding\nBegins to swell; and the approaching tide", "1 This speech is in some measure borrowed from Medea's, in Ovid; the expressions are, many of them in the old translation by Golding. But the exquisite fairy imagery is Shakspeare's own.", "2 That is: ye are powerful auxiliaries, but weak if\nleft to yourselves. Your employments are of the trivial\nnature before mentioned.", "3 So in Mids. Night's Dream—", "“Lovers and madmen have such seething brains.”", "4 *Remorse is pity, tenderness of heart; nature is natural affection.*", "5 This was the received opinion so in Fairfax's\nTasso, B. iv St. 18.—", "Will shortly fill the reasonable shores,", "That now lie foul and muddy. Not one of them,\nThat yet looks on me, or would know me :—Ariel,\nFetch me the hat and rapier in my cell;", "[Exit ARIEL.", "I will dis-case me, and myself present,", "As I was sometime Milan:—quickly, spirit;", "Thou shalt ere long be free.", "ARIEL re-enters, singing, and helps to attire\nPROSPERO.", "Ari. Where the bee sucks, there suck I;", "In a cove slip's bell I lie:", "There I couch when owls do cry.", "On the bat's back I do fly,", "After summer, merrily :", "Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,", "Under the blossom that hangs on the bough,", "Pro. Why, that's my dainty Ariel; I shall miss thee;", "But yet thou shall have freedom: so, so, so—", "To the king's ship, invisible as thou art:", "There shall thou find the mariners asleep", "Under the hatches; the master, and the boatswain,", "Being awake, enforce them to this place;", "And presently, I pr'ythee.", "Ari. I drink the air before me and return", "Or e'er your pulse twice beat. [Exit ARIEL.", "Gon. All torment, trouble, wonder, and amaze-\nment", "Inhabits here: Some heavenly power guide us", "Out of this fearful country!", "Pro.\nBehold, sir king,", "The wronged duke of Milan, Prospero:", "For more assurance that a living prince", "Does now speak to thee, I embrace thy body;", "And to thee and thy company, I bid", "A hearty welcome.", "Alon. Who'r'e thou beest he, or no", "Or some enchanted trifle to abuse me,", "As late I have been, I not know: thy pulse", "Beats, as of flesh and blood; and, since I saw thee,", "The affliction of my mind amends, with which,", "I fear, a madness held me: this must crave", "(An if this be at all) a most strange story.", "Thy dukedom I resign; and do entreat", "Thou pardon me my wrongs:—But how should", "Prospero", "Be living, and be here?", "Pro.\nFirst, noble friend,", "Let me embrace thine age; whose honour cannot", "Be measur'd, or confin'd.", "Gon.\nWhether this be,", "Or be not, I'll not swear.", "Pro.\nYou do yet taste", "Some subtilties? o' the isle, that will not let you", "Think things certain:—Welcome, my friends all:", "But you, my brace of lords, were I so minded,", "[Aside to SEB. and ANT.", "I here could pluck his highness' frown upon you,", "And justify you traitors: at this time\nI'll tell no tales.", "Seb.\nThe devil speaks in him. [Aside.", "Pro.\nNo:—", "For you, most wicked sir, whom to call brother", "Would even infect my mouth, I do forgive", "Thy rankest fault; all of them; and require", "My dukedom of thee, which, perforce, I know,", "Thou must restore.", "Alon. If thou beest Prospero,", "Give us particulars of thy preservation:", "How thou hast met us here, who three hours sinceª", "\"The goblins, fairies, fiends, and furies mad,\nRanged in flowrie dales, and mountaines hore,\nAnd under every trembling leaf they sit.\"", "6 Whether,", "7 Subtilties are quaint deceptive inventions; the\nword is common to ancient cookery, in which a dis-\nguised or ornamented dish is so termed.", {"bbox": [600, 1241, 905, 1319], "category": "Text", "text":

["ACT. V.", "of them,\n:—Ariadn.", "it ARIEL", "irit.", "it attire", "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "", "## SCENE I.", "## TEMPEST", "53", "Were wreck'd upon this shore; where I have lost\n(How sharp the point of this remembrance is!)", "My dear son Ferdinand.", "Pro. I am woe¹ for't, sir.", "Alon. Irreparable is the loss; and Patience", "Says, it is past her cure.", "Pro. I rather think,", "You have not sought her help; of whose soft grace,\nFor the like loss, I have her sovereign aid,", "And rest myself content.", "Alon. You the like loss?", "Pro. As great to me, as late; and portable²", "To make the dear loss, have I means much weaker\nThan you may call to comfort you; for I", "Have lost my daughter.", "Alon. A daughter?", "O heavens! that they were living both in Naples,\nThe king and queen there! that they were, I wish\nMyself were mudded in that oozy bed", "Where my son lies. When did you lose your\ndaughter?", "Pro. In this last tempest. I perceive, these lords", "At this encounter do so much admire,", "That they devour their reason; and scarce think", "Their eyes do offices of truth, their words", "Are natural breath: but, howsoe'er you have", "Been justled from your senses, know for certain,", "That I am Prospero, and that very duke", "Which was thrust forth of Milan; who most strangely", "Upon this shore, where you were wreck'd, was\nlanded,", "To be the lord on't. No more yet of this;", "For 'tis a chronicle of day by day,", "Not a relation for a breakfast, nor", "Befitting this first meeting. Welcome, sir;", "This cell's my court: here have I few attendants,", "And subjects none abroad: pray you, look in.", "My dukedom, since you have given me again,\nI will require you with as good a thing;", "At least, bring forth a wonder, to content ye,", "As much as me my dukedom.", "The entrance of the Cell opens, and discovers FERDINAND and MIRANDA playing at chess.", "Mira. Sweet lord, you play me false.", "Pro. No, my dearest love,", "I would not for the world.", "Mira. Yes, for a score of kingdoms you should\nwrangle.", "And I would call it fair play.", "Alon. If this prove", "A vision of the island, one dear son", "Shall I twice lose.", "Seb. A most high miracle!", "Pro. Though the seas threaten, they are merciful.", "I have curs'd them without cause.", "F[er. kneels to] ALON.", "Alon. Now all the blessings", "Arise, and say how thou cam'st here.", "Mira. O! wonder!", "How many goodly creatures are there here!\nHow beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,", "That has such people in't!", "Pro. 'Tis new to thee.", "Alon. What is this maid, with whom thou wast\nat play?", "Your eld'st acquaintance cannot be three hours:", "Is she the goddess that hath severed'd us,", "And brought us thus together?", "1 I am sorry for it.", "2 Bearable.", "3 Mr. Pye says, I conceive Shakspeare, who was no nice weigher of words, meant wrangling to be equiva lent with playing false, or with unfair advantage. So in Henry V. the king, in allusion to the tennis balls, directs the ambassadors to tell the dauphin—", "“He hath made a match with such a wrangler,\nThat all the courts of France shall be disturb'd\nWith chases.”", "4 Mr. Pye's explanation is correct; but his deduction that Shakspeare was “no nice weigher of words” is totally false. Shakspeare's words are always the most", "Fer. Sir, she's mortal;", "But, by immortal Providence, she's mine;", "I chose her, when I could not ask my father", "For his advice; nor thought I had one: she", "Is daughter to this famous duke of Milan,", "Of whom so often I have heard renown,", "But never saw before; of whom I have", "Received a second life, and second father", "This lady makes him to me.", "Alon. I am her's:", "But O, how oddly will it sound, that I", "Must ask my child forgiveness!", "Pro. There, sir, stop:", "Let us not burden our remembrances", "With heaviness that's gone.", "Gon. I have inly wept,", "Or should have spoke ere this. Look down, you\ngods,", "And on this couple drop a blessed crown;", "For it is you, that have chalk'd forth the way", "Which brought us hither!", "Alon. I say, Amen, Gonzalo", "Gon. Was Milan thrust from Milan, that his issue", "Should become kings of Naples? O, rejoice", "Beyond a common joy: and set it down", "With gold on lasting pillars: In one voyage", "Did Claribel her husband find at Tunis?", "And Ferdinand, her brother, found a wife", "Where he himself was lost; Prospero his dukedom,\nIn a poor isle; and all of us, ourselves,", "When no man was his own.", "Alon. Give me your hands:", "To F[er. and] M[ira].", "Let grief and sorrow still embrace his heat,", "That doth not wish you joy!", "Gon. Be't so! Amen!", "Re-enter ARIEL, with the Master and Boatswain\namazedly following.", "O look, sir, look, sir; here are more of us!", "I prophesied, if a gallows were on land,", "This fellow could not drown :—Now, blasphemy,", "That swear'st grace o'erboard, not an oath on\nshore?", "Hast thou no mouth by land? What is the news?", "Boats. The best news is, that we have safely found", "Our king, and company: the next our ship,—", "Which, but three glasses since, we gave out split,—\nIs tight and yare,⁵ and bravely rigg'd, as when", {"bbox": [467, 837

TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA.

PERSONS REPRESENTED.

DUKE of MILAN, *Father to Silvia*.

VALENTINE, { Gentlemen of Verona.

PROTEUS,

ANTIO; *Father to Proteus*.

THURIO, *a foolish Rival to Valentine*.

EGLAMOUR, *Agent for Silvia in her escape*.

SPEED, *a clownish Servant to Valentine*.

LAUNCE, *Servant to Proteus*.

PANTHINO, *Servant to Antonia*.

Host, where Julia lodges in Milan.

Outlaws.

JULIA, *a Lady of Verona, beloved by Proteus*.

SILVIA, *the Duke's Daughter, beloved by Valentine*.

LUCETTA, *Waiting-woman to Julia*.

Servants, Musicians.

SCENE, *sometimes in VERONA; sometimes in MILAN; and on the frontiers of MANTUA*.

ACT I.

SCENE I.—An open place in Verona. Enter VALENTINE and PROTEUS.

Valentine.

CEASE to persuade, my loving Proteus;

Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits:¹

Wert not, affection chains thy tender days

To the sweet glances of thy honour'd love,

I rather would entreat thy company,

To see the wonders of the world abroad,

Than living dully sluggardiz'd at home,

Wear out thy youth with shapeless idleness.²

But, since thou lov'st, love still, and thrive therein,
Even as I would, when I to love begin.

Pro. Wilt thou begone? Sweet Valentine,
adieu!

Think on thy Proteus, when thou, haply, seest

Some rare note-worthy object in thy travel:

Wish me partaker in thy happiness,

When thou dost meet good hap; and, in thy
danger,

If ever danger do environ thee,

Commend thy grievance to my holy prayers,

For I will be thy bead's-man, Valentine.

Val. And on a love-book pray for my success.

Pro. Upon some book I love, I'll pray for thee.

Val. That's on some shallow story of deep love,

How young Leander cross'd the Hellespont.³

Pro. That's a deep story of a deeper love ;

For he was more than over shoes in love.

Val. 'Tis true; for you are over boots in love,

And yet you never swam the Hellespont.

Pro. Over the boots ? nay, give me not the
boots.⁴

Val. No, I will not, for it boots thee not.

Pro. What?
Val. To be in love, where scorn is bought with
groans;

Coy looks, with heart-sore sighs; one fading moment's mirth,

With twenty watchful, weary, tedious nights :

If haply won, perhaps a hapless gain ;

If lost, why then a grievous labour won;

However, but a folly bought with wit,

Or else a wit by folly vanquished.

Pro. So by your circumstance, you call me fool.

Val. So, by your circumstance,⁵ I fear, you'll prove.

Pro. "Tis love you cavil at; I am not Love.

Val. Love is your master, for he masters you :

And he that is so yoked by a fool,

Methinks should not be chronicled for wise.

Pro. Yet writers say, As in the sweetest bud

The eating canker dwells, so eating love
Inhabits in the finest wits of all.

Val. And writers say, As the most forward bud

Is eaten by the canker ere it blow,

Even so by love the young and tender wit

Is turn'd to folly ; blasting in the bud,

Losing his verdure even in the prime,

And all the fair effects of future hopes.

But wherefore waste I time to council thee,

That art a votary to fond desire ?

Once more adieu: my father at the road

Expects my coming, there to see me shipp'd.

Pro. And thither will I bring thee, Valentine.

Val. Sweet Proteus, no; now let us take our
leave.

To⁶ Milan, let me hear from thee by letters,

Of thy success in love, and what news else

Betideth here in absence of thy friend;

And I likewise will visit thee with mine.

Pro. All happiness becase to thee in Milan !

Val. As much to you at home ! and so, farewell !

[Exit VALENTINE.

Pro. He after honour hunts, I after love.

He leaves his friends, to dignify them more;

I leave myself, my friends, and all for love.

Thou, Julia, thou hast metamorphos'd me ;

Made me neglect my studies, lose my time,

War with good counsel, set the world at nought ;

Made wit with musing weak, heart sick with thought.

Enter SPEED.

Speed. Sir Proteus, save you: Saw you my
master?

Pro. But now he parted hence, to embark for
Milan.

Speed. Twenty to one then he is shipp'd already;
And I have played the sheep,⁷ in losing him.

Pro. Indeed a sheep doth very often stray,
An if the shepherd be awhile away.

Speed. You conclude that my master is a sheep-
herd then, and I a sheep?

Pro. I do.

Speed. Why then, my horns are his horns, wher-
ther I wake or sleep.

Pro. A silly answer, and fitting well a sheep.

Speed. This proves me still a sheep.

Pro. True ; and thy master a shepherd.

Speed. Nay, that I can deny by a circumstance.

1 Milton has the same play upon words in his Comus.
"It is for homely features to keep home,
They had their name thence."

2 The expression *shapeless idleness* is admirably
expressive, as implying that idleness prevents the giv-
ing form or character to the manners.

3 The allusion is to Marlow's poem of Hero and
Leander, which was entered on the Stationers' books
in 1593, though not published till 1598. It was proba-
bly circulated in manuscript in the interim, as was the
custom at that period. The poem seems to have made
an impression on Shakspeare, who appears to have
recently perused it, for he again alludes to it in the
third act. And in *As You Like It* he has quoted a line
from it.

4 A proverbial expression, now disused, signifying,
'Don't make a laughing-stock of me.' The French
have a phrase *Bailier foin en corne* : which Coggrave
interprets, 'to give one the boots; to sell him a bargain.'
Perhaps deduced from a humorous punishment at har-
vest home feasts in Warwickshire.

5 *Circumstance* is used equivocally. It here means
*conduct*; in the preceding line, circumstantial de-
duction.

6 The construction of this passage is, "Let me hear
from thee by letters to Milan," i. e., addressed to Milan.

7 In Warwickshire, and some other counties, a sheep
is pronounced a *ship*. Without this explanation the
jest, such as it is, might escape the reader.

## SCENE II.

## OF VERONA.

57

*Pro.* It shall go hard, but I'll prove it by another.

*Speed.* The shepherd seeks the sheep, and not the sheep the shepherd; but I seek my master, and my master seeks not me: therefore I am no sheep.

*Pro.* The sheep for fodder follow the shepherd, the shepherd for food follows not the sheep; thou for wages followest thy master, thy master for wages follows not thee: therefore thou art a sheep.

*Speed.* Such another proof will make me cry ba.

*Pro.* But dost thou hear! gav'st thou my letter to Julia?

*Speed.* Ay, sir; I, a lost mutton, gave your letter to her, a laced mutton;¹ and she, a laced mutton, gave me, a lost mutton, nothing for my labour.

*Pro.* Here's too small a pasture for such a store of muttons.

*Speed.* If the ground be overcharged, you were best stick her.

*Pro.* Nay, in that you are astray;²twere best pound you.

*Speed.* Nay, sir, less than a pound shall serve me for carrying your letter.

*Pro.* You mistake; I mean the pound, a pinfold.

*Speed.* From a pound to a pin? fold it over and over.

'Tis threefold too little for carrying a letter to your lover.

*Pro.* But what said she? did she nod?²?

[SPEED nods.]

*Speed.* I.

*Pro.* Nod, I! why, that's noddy.

*Speed.* You mistook, sir? I say she did nod: and you ask me, if she did nod; and I say, I

*Pro.* And that set together is—noddy.

*Speed.* Now you have taken the pains to set it together, take it for your pains.

*Pro.* No, no, you shall have it for bearing the letter.

*Speed.* Well, I perceive I must be fain to bear with you.

*Pro.* Why, sir, how do you bear with me?

*Speed.* Marry, sir, the letter very orderly; having nothing but the word, noddy, for my pains.

*Pro.* Beshrew me, but you hav' a quick wit.

*Speed.* And yet it cannot overtake my slow purse.

*Pro.* Come, come, open the matter in brief: What said she?

*Speed.* Open your purse, that the money and the matter may be both at once delivered.

*Pro.* Well, sir, here is for your pains: What said she?

*Speed.* Truly, sir, I think you'll hardly win her.

*Pro.* Why?¹ Could'st thou perceive so much from her?

*Speed.* Sir, I could perceive nothing at all from her; no, not so much as a ducat for delivering your letter: And being so hard to me that brought your mind, I fear she'll prove as hard to you in telling your mind. Give her no token but stones, for she's as hard as steel.

*Pro.* What, said she nothing?

*Speed.* No, not so much as—take this for thy pains. To testify your bounty, I thank you, you have testern'd³ me; in requalit whereof, henceforth carry your letters yourself: and so, sir, I'll commend you to my master.

*Pro.* Go, go, begone, to save your ship from wreck;

Which cannot perish, having thee aboard,
Being destined to a drier death on shore :—

I must go send some better messenger;

I fear my Julia would not deign my lines,
Receiving them from such a worthless post.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. The same. Garden of Julia's house.
Enter JULIA and LUCETTA.

*Jul.* But say, Lucetta, now we are alone,
Would'st thou then counsel me to fall in love?

*Luc.* Ay, madam; so you stumble not unheed-
fully.

*Jul.* Of all the fair resort of gentlemen,
That every day with parle⁴ encounter me,
In thy opinion, which is worthiest love?

*Luc.* Please you, repeat their names, I'll show my mind.

According to my shallow simple skill.

*Jul.* What think'st thou of the fair Sir Eglamour?

*Luc.* As of a knight well-spoken, neat and fine;

But, were I you, he never should be mine.

*Jul.* What think'st thou of the rich Mercatio?

*Luc.* Well of his wealth; but of himself, so, so.

*Jul.* What think'st thou of the gentle Proteus?

*Luc.* Lord, lord! to see what folly reigns in us!

*Jul.* How now! what means this passion at his name?

*Luc.* Pardon, dear madam; 'tis a passing shame,
That I, unworthy body as I am,

Should censure⁵ thus on lovely gentlemen.

*Jul.* Why not on Proteus, as of all the rest?

*Luc.* Then thus,—of many good I think him best.

*Jul.* Your reason?

*Luc.* I have no other but a woman's reason;

I think him so, because I think him so.

*Jul.* And would'st thou have me cast my love on him?

*Luc.* Ay, if you thought your love not cast away.

*Jul.* Why, he of all the rest hath never mov'd me.

*Luc.* Yet he of all the rest, I think, best loves ye.

*Jul.* His little speaking shows his love but small.

*Luc.* Fire,⁶ that's closest kept, burns most of all.

*Jul.* They do not love that do not show their love.

*Luc.* O, they love least, that let men know their love.

*Jul.* I would, I knew his mind.

*Luc.* Peruse this paper, madam.

*Jul.* To Julia.—Say, from whom?

*Luc.* That the contents will show.

*Jul.* Say, say; who gave it thee?

*Luc.* Sir Valentine's page; and sent, I think, from Proteus:

He would have given it you, but I, being in the way,

Did in your name receive it; pardon the fault, I pray.

*Jul.* Now, by my modesty, a goodly broker!?

Dare you presume to harbour wanton lines?

To whisper and conspire against my youth?

Now, trust me, 'tis an office of great worth,
And you an officer fit for the place.

There, take the paper, see it be return'd;

Or else return no more into my sight.

*Luc.* To plead for love deserves more fee than hate.

¹ Cotgrave explains laced mutton, une garce, putain, fille de joye. It was so established a term for a cortexean, that a lane in Clerkenwell, much frequented by loose women, is said to have been thence called Mutton Lane.

² These words were supplied by Theobald to introduce what follows. In Speed's answer, the old spelling of the affirmative particle has been retained; otherwise the conceit would be unintelligible. Noddy was a game at cards.

³ Testens, or (as we now commonly call them, testers,) from a head that was upon them, were coined in 1542. Sir H. Spelman says they were a French coin of the value of 18d.; and he does not know but that they

might have gone for as much in England. They were afterwards reduced to 12d., 9d., and finally, to sixpence.

⁴ Parle is talk.

⁵ To censure, in Shakespeare's time, generally signified to give one's judgment or opinion. Thus in The Winter's Tale, Act. ii. Sc. 1:

"In my just censure? in my true opinion?"

⁶ Fire is here pronounced as a dissyllable.

⁷ A matchmaker. It was sometimes used for a procreuss.

8

["58", "TWO GENTLEMEN", "Act I.", "Jul. Will you¹ be gone?", "Luc.", "That you may ruminate. [Exit.]", "Jul. And yet, I would I had o’erlook’d the letter.", "It were a shame to call her back again,", "And pray her to a fault for which I chid her.", "What fool is she, that knows I am a maid,", "And would not force the letter to my view!", "Since maids, in modesty, say No, to that", "Which they would have the profferer construe, Ay,", "Fie, fie, how wayward is this foolish love,", "That, like a teasty babe, will scratch the nurse,", "And presently, all humbled, kiss the rod!", "How churlishly I chid Lucetta hence,", "When willingly I would have had her here!", "How angerly I taught my brow to frown,", "When inward joy enforc’d my heart to smile!", "My penance is, to call Lucetta back,", "And ask permission for my folly past:—", "What ho! Lucetta!", "Re-enter LUCETTA.", "Luc. What would your ladyship?", "Jul. Is it near dinner time?", "Luc. I would it were:", "That you might kill your stomach² on your meat,", "And not upon your maid.", "Jul. What is't you took up", "So gingerly?", "Luc. Nothing.", "Jul. Why didst thou stoop then?", "Luc. To take a paper up that I let fall,", "Jul. And is that paper nothing?", "Luc. Nothing concerning me.", "Jul. Then let it lie for those that it concerns.", "Luc. Madam, it will not lie where it concerns,", "Unless it have a false interpreter.", "Jul. Some love of your’s hath writ to you in\nrhyme.", "Luc. That I might sing it, madam, to a tune:", "Give me a note : your ladyship can set.³", "Jul. As little by such toys as may be possible:", "Best sing it to the tune of *Light o’ love*.", "Luc. It is too heavy for so light a tune.", "Jul. Heavy? belike it hath some burden then.", "Luc. Ay; and melodious were it, would you\nsing it.", "Jul. And why not you?", "Luc. I cannot reach so high.", "Jul. Let’s see your song :—How now, minion?", "Luc. Keep tune there still, so you will sing it out:", "And yet, methinks, I do not like this tune.", "Jul. You do not!", "Luc. No, madam; it is too sharp.", "Jul. You, minion, are too saucy.", "Luc. Nay, now you are too flat,", "And mar the concord with too harsh a descent:⁴", "There wanteth but a mean to fill your song.", "Jul. The mean is drown’d with your unruly base.", "Luc. Indeed, I bid the base⁵ for Proteus.", "Jul. This babble shall not henceforth trouble me.", "Here is a coil²² with protestation !", "[Tears the letter.", "Go, get you gone; and let the papers lie:", "You would be fingering them, to anger me.", "Luc. She makes it strange; but she would be\nbest pleas’d", "To be so anger’d with another letter. [Exit.]", "Jul. Nay, would I were as anger’d with the same!", "O hateful hands, to tear such loving words!", "1 *First folio, ye.*", "2 *Stomach, for passion or obstinacy.*", "3 *Set* is here used equivocally; in the preceding speech in the sense in which it is used by musicians, and in the present line in a quite different sense. To set *by* in old language signifies, to make account of, to estimate. See the first Book of Samuel, xviii. 30.", "4 *Descant* signified formerly what we now call variations. It has been well defined to be musical phrase. *The mean* is the tenor in music.", "5 *To bid the base* means, to run fast, challenging another to pursue at the rustic game called Base, or Prisonbase. The allusion is somewhat obscure, but it appears to mean here, “to challenge to an encounter.”", "6 i. e. bustle, stir.", "Injurious wasps! to feed on such sweet honey,", "And kill the bees, that yield it, with your stings!", "I’ll kiss each several paper for amends.", "And here is writ—*kind Julia*—unkind Julia!", "As in revenge of thy ingratitude,", "I throw his name against the bruising stones,", "Trampling contemptuously on thy disdain.", "Look, here is writ—*love-wounded Proteus*.", "Poor wounded name! my bosom, as a bed,", "Shall lodge thee, till thy wound be thoroughly heal’d;", "And thus I search it with a sovereign kiss.", "But twice, or thrice, was Proteus written down :", "Be calm, good wind, blow not a word away,", "Till I have found each letter in the letter,", "Except mine own name; that some whirlwind bear", "Unto a rugged, fearful, hanging rock,", "And throw it thence into the raging sea!", "Lo, here in one line is his name twice writ—", "*Poor forlorn Porteus, passionate Proteus,*", "*To the sweet Julia*;—that I’ll tear away;", "And yet I will not, sith⁷ so prettily", "He couples it to his complaining names:", "Thus will I fold them one upon another;", "Now kiss, embrace, contend, do what you will.", "Re-enter LUCETTA.", "Luc. Madam,", "Dinner is ready, and your father stays.", "Jul. Well, let us go.", "Luc. What shall these papers lie like tell-tales\nhere?", "Jul. If you respect them, best to take them up.", "Luc. Nay, I was taken up for laying them down:", "Yet here they shall not lie, for⁸ catching cold.", "Jul. I see you have a month’s mind⁹ to them.", "Luc. Ay, madam, you may say what sights you\nsee?", "I see things too, although you judge I wink.", "Jul. Come, come, will’t please you go?", "[Exeunt.]", "SCENE III.—The same. A Room in Antonio’s\nHouse. Enter ANTONIO and PANTHINO.", "Ant. Tell me, Panthino, what sad¹⁰ talk was that,", "Wherewith my brother held you in the cloister?", "Pant. ’Twas of his nephew Proteus, your son.", "Ant. Why, what of him?", "Pant. He wonder’d, that your lordship", "Would suffer him to spend his home at home;", "While other men, of slender reputation,", "Put forth their sons to seek preferment out:", "Some, to the wars, to try their fortune there;", "Some, to discover islands far away;", "Some, to the studious universities.", "For any, or for all these exercises,", "He said, that Proteus, your son, was meet;", "And did request me, to importune you,", "To let him spend his time no more at home,", "Which would be great impropriety¹¹ to his age,", "In having known no travel in his youth.", "Ant. Nor need’st thou much importune me to\nthat", {"bbox": [60

## ACT III.

## OF VERONA.

59

**Pant.** I think, your lordship is not ignorant,
How his companion, youthful Valentine,
Attends the emperor in his royal court.

**Ant.** I know it well.

**Pant.** 'Were good, I think, your lordship sent
him thither?

There shall he practise tilts and tournaments,
Hear sweet discourse, converse with noblemen;
And be in eye of every exercise,
Worthy his youth and nobleness of birth.

**Ant.** I like thy counsel: well thou hast advised:
And, that thou may'st perceive how well I like it,
The execution of it shall make known;
Even with the speediest expedition

I will despatch him to the emperor's court.

**Pant.** To-morrow, may it please you, Don Al-
phonso,

With other gentlemen of good esteem,
Are journeying to salute the emperor,
And to commend their service to his will.

**Ant.** Good company; with them shall Proteus go:
And, in good time,—now will we break with him.¹

### Enter PROTEUS.

**Pro.** Sweet love! sweet lines! sweet life!

Here is her hand, the agent of her heart:

Here is her oath for love, her honour's pawn;

O, that our fathers would applaud our loves,
To seal our happiness with their consents!

O heavenly Julia!

**Ant.** How now? what letter are you reading
there?

**Pro.** May't please your lordship, 'tis a word or
two.

Of commendations sent from Valentine,
Deliver'd by a friend that came from him.

**Ant.** Lend me the letter; let me see what news.

**Pro.** There is no news, my lord; but that he
writes

How happy he lives, how well he lov'd
And daily graced by the emperor;

Wishing you with him, partner of his fortune.

**Ant.** And how stand you affected to his wish?

**Pro.** As one relying on your lordship's will,

And not depending on his friendly wish.

**Ant.** My will is something sorted with his wish;

Muse⁶ not that I thus suddenly proceed;
For what I will, I will, and there an end.

I am resolv'd, that thou shall spend some time

With Valentinus in the emperor's court;

What maintenance he from his friends receives,

Like exhibition³ thou shall have from me.

To-morrow be in readiness to go:

Excuse it not, for I am peremptory.

**Pro.** My lord, I cannot be so soon provided;

Please you, deliberate a day or two.

**Ant.** Look, what thou want'st, shall be sent
after thee;

No more of stay; to-morrow thou must go.—

Come on, Panthino; you shall be employed

To hasten on his expedition.

[Exeunt ANT. and PANT.

**Pro.** Thus have I shunn'd the fire, for fear of
burning;

And drench me in the drench, where I am drown'd:
I fear'd to shew my father Julia's letter,

Lest he should take exceptions to my love;

And with the vantage of mine own excuse

Hath he excepted most against my love.

O, how this spring of love resembleth⁴

The uncertain glory of an April day;

Which now shows all the beauty of the sun,

And by and by a cloud takes all away!

### Re-enter PANTHINO.

**Pant.** Sir Proteus, your father calls for you;

He is in haste, therefore, I pray you go.

**Pro.** Why, this it is! my heart accords thereto;
And yet a thousand times it answers, no. [Exeunt.

1. i. e. break the matter to him.

2. i. e. *wonder* not.

3. *Exhibition* is allowance of money; it is still used in the Universities for a stipend.

## ACT II.

### SCENE I. Milan. A Room in the Duke's Palace. Enter VALENTINE and SPEED.

**Speed.** Sir, your glove.

**Val.** Not mine; my gloves are on.

**Speed.** Why then this may be yours, for this is
but one.⁵

**Val.** Ha! let me see: ay, give it me, it's
mine:—

Sweet ornament that decks a thing divine!

Ah Silvia! Silvia!

**Speed.** Madam Silvia! madam Silvia!

**Val.** How now, sirrah?

**Speed.** She is not within hearing, sir.

**Val.** Why, sir, who bade you call her?

**Speed.** Your worship, sir; or else I mistook.

**Val.** Well, you'll still be too forward.

**Speed.** And yet I was last chidden for being too
slow.

**Val.** Go to, sir; tell me, do you know madam
Silvia?

**Speed.** She that your worship loves?

**Val.** Why, how know you that I am in love?

**Speed.** Marry, by these special marks: First,
you have learned, like Sir Proteus, toωught your
arms like a male-content: to relish a love-song,
like a robin-red-breast; to walk alone, like one that
had the pestilence; to sigh, like a school-boy that
had lost his A, B, C; to weep, like a young wench
that had buried her grandam; to fast, like one that
takes diet;⁶ to watch, like one that fears robbing;
to speak puling, like a beggar at Hollowayms.
You were wont, when you laugh'd, to crow like a
cock; when you walked, to walk like one of the
lions; when you fasted, it was presently after din-
ner; when you looked sadly, it was for want of
money: and now you are metamorphosed with a
mistress, that, when I look on you, I can hardly
think you my master.

**Val.** Are all these things perceived in me?

**Speed.** They are all perceived without you?

**Val.** Without me? They cannot.

**Speed.** Without you! may, that's certain, for,
without you were so simple, none else would: but
you are so without these follies, that these follies
are within you, and shine through you like the wa-
ter in an urinal; that not an eye, that sees you, but
is a physician to comment on your malady.

**Val.** But, tell me, dost thou know my lady
Silvia?

**Speed.** She that you gaze on so, as she sits at
supper?

**Val.** Hast thou observed that? even she I mean.

**Speed.** Why, sir, I know her not.

**Val.** Dost thou know her by my gazing on her,
and yet know'st her not?

**Speed.** Is she not hard-favour'd, sir?

**Val.** Not so fair, boy, as well favour'd.

**Speed.** Sir, I know that well enough.

**Val.** What dost thou know?

**Speed.** That she is not so fair, as (of you) well-
favour'd.

**Val.** I mean, that her beauty is exquisite, but
her favour infinite.

**Speed.** That's because the one is painted, and
the other out of all count.

**Val.** How painted? and how out of count?

**Speed.** Marry, sir, so painted to make her fair,
that no man counts of her beauty.

4. *Resembleth* is pronounced as if written *resembleth*, which makes it a quadrisyllable.

5. *On* and *one* were anciently pronounced alike, and frequently written so.

6. *To take diet* is to be under a *regimen* for a disease.

7. The feast of All-hallows, or All Saints, at which time the poor in Staffordshire go from parish to parish a *souling*, as they call it; i. e., *begging and puling*, or singing small, as Bailey's Dictionary explains *puling*.) for soul cakes, and singing what they call the souler's song. These terms point out the condition of this benevolence, which was, that the beggars should pray for the souls of the giver's departed friends.

60

TWO GENTLEMEN

ACT II.

Val. How esteem'st thou me? I account of her beauty.

Speed. You never saw her since she was deformed.

Val. How long hath she been deform'd?

Speed. Ever since you loved her.

Val. I have loved her ever since I saw her; and still I see her beautiful.

Speed. If you love her, you cannot see her.

Val. Why?

Speed. Because love is blind. O, that you had mine eyes; or your own eyes had the lights they were wont to have, when you chid at Sir Proteus for going ungartered!!

Val. What should I see then?

Speed. Your own present folly, and her passing deformity: for he, being in love, could not see to garter his hose; and you, being in love, cannot see to put on your hose.

Val. Belike, boy, then you are in love; for last morning you could not see to wipe my shoes.

Speed. True, sir; I was in love with my bed: I thank you, you swung me for my love, which makes me the bolder to chide you for yours.

Val. In conclusion, I stand affected to her.

Speed. I would you were set,² so, your affection would cease.

Val. Last night she enjoined me to write some lines to one she loves.

Speed. And have you?

Val. I have.

Speed. Are they not lamely writ?

Val. No, boy, but as well as I can do them:—Peace, here she comes.

### Enter SILVIA.

Speed. O excellent motion!³ O exceeding puppet! now will he interpret to her.

Val. Madam and mistress, a thousand good-morrows.

Speed. O, 'give you good even! here's a million of manners.'

Sil. Sir Valentine and servant, to you two thousand.

Speed. He should give her interest; and she gives it him.

Val. As you enjoin'd me, I have writ your letter, Unto the secret nameless friend of yours; Which I was much unwilling to proceed in, But for my duty to your ladyship.

Sil. I thank you, gentle servant: 'tis very clerky⁴ done.

Val. Now trust me, madam, it came hardly off; For, being ignorant to whom it goes,

I writ at random, very doubtfully.

Sil. Perchance you think too much of so much pains?

Val. No, madam, so it stead you, I will write, Please you command, a thousand times as much:

And yet,

Sil. A pretty period! Well, I guess the sequel; And yet I will not name it:—and yet I care not;— And yet take this again;—and yet I thank you; Meaning henceforth to trouble you no more.

Speed. And yet you will; and yet another yet.

Val. What means your ladyship? do you not like it?

Sil. Yes, yes; the lines are very quaintly writ: But since unwillingly, take them again; Nay, take them.

Val. Madam, they are for you.

Sil. Ay, ay; you writ them, sir, at my request; But I will none of them; they are for you:

I would have had them writ more movingly.

Val. Please you, I'll write your ladyship another.

1. Going ungartered is enumerated by Rosalind as one of the undoubt'd marks of love. " Then your hose should be *ungartered*, your bonnet unbanded," &c. As You Like It, III, 2.

2. *Set*, for seated, in opposition to stand in the preceding line. It appears, however, to be used metaphorically in the sense applied to the sun when it sinks below the horizon in the west.

Sil. And, when it's writ, for my sake read it over:

And, if it please you, so; if not, why, so.

Val. If it please me, madam! what then?

Sil. Why if it please you, take it for your labour; And so good-morrow, servant.

[Exit SILVIA.
Speed. O jest unseen, inscrutable, invisible, As a nose on a man's face, or a weathercock on a steeple!

My master sues to her; and she hath taught her suitor,

He being her pupil, to become her tutor.

O excellent device! was there ever heard a better?

That my master, being scribe, to himself should write the letter?

Val. How now, sir? what are you reasoning with yourself?

Speed. Nay, I was rhyming; 'tis you that have the reason.

Val. To do what?

Speed. To be a spokesman from madam Silvia.

Val. To whom?

Speed. To yourself: why, she woos you by a figure.

Val. What figure?

Speed. By a letter, I should say.

Val. Why, she hath not writ to me?

Speed. What need she, when she hath made you write to yourself? Why, do you not perceive the jest?

Val. No, believe me.

Speed. No believing you indeed, sir: But did you perceive her earnest?

Val. She gave me none, except an angry word.

Speed. Why, she hath given you a letter.

Val. That's the letter I writ to her friend.

Speed. And that letter hath she deliver'd, and there an end.⁵

Val. I would, it were no worse.

Speed. I'll warrant you, 'tis as well:

For often have you writ to her; and she, in modesty,

Or else for want of idle time, could not again reply;

Or fearing else some messenger, that might her mind discover,

Herself hath taught her love himself to write unto her lover.

All this I speak in print;⁶ for in print I found it.—

Why muse you, sir? 'tis dinner-time.

Val. I have dined.

Speed. Ay, but hearken, sir: though the cameleon Love can feed on the air, I am one that am nourished by my victuals, and would fain have meat: O, be not like your mistress; be moved, be moved.

Val. [Exeunt.

### SCENE II. Verona. A Room in Julia's House.
#### Enter PROTEUS and JULIA.

Pro. Have patience, gentle Julia.

Jul. I must, where is no remedy.

Pro. When possibly I can, I will return.

Jul. If you turn not, you will return the sooner:

Keep this remembrance for thy Julia's sake.

[Giving a ring.

Pro. Why then we'll make exchange; here, take you this.

Jul. And seal the bargain with a holy kiss.

Pro. Here is my hand for my true constancy;

And when that hour o'er-slips me in the day,

Wherein I sigh not, Julia, for thy sake,

The next ensuing hour some foul mischance

Torment me for my love's forgetfulness!

My father stays my coming: answer not:

The tide is now: nay, not thy tide of tears;

That tide will stay me longer than I should;

[Exit JULIA.

the horizon in the west. It is a miserable quibble hardly worth explanation.

3. Motion signified, in Shakspeare's time, a puppet-shore. Speed means to say, what a fine puppet-show shall we have now? Here is the principal puppet to whom my master will be the interpreter. The show-man was then frequently called the interpreter.

4. i. e. like a scholar.

5. There's the conclusion.

6. i. e. with exactness.

## SCENE IV.

## OF VERONA.

61

Julia, farewell.—What! gone without a word!⁵

Ay, so true love should do: it cannot speak;
For truth hath better deeds than words to grace it.

### Enter PANTHINO.

Pant. Sir Proteus, you are staid for.

Pro. Go; I come, I come:—

Alas! this parting strikes poor lovers dumb.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE III.—The same. A Street. Enter LAUNCE, leading a Dog.

Laun. Nay, 'twill be this hour ere I have done weeping; all the kind¹⁰ of the Launces have this very fault; I have received my proportion, like the prodigious son, and am going with Sir Proteus to the Imperial's court. I think, Crab my dog be the sourest-natured dog that lives: my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear: he is a stone, a very pebble stone, and has no more pity in him than a dog: a Jew would have wept to have seen our parting; why, my grandam having no eyes, look you, wept herself blind at my parting. No, I'll show you the manner of it: This shoe is my father:—no, this left shoe is my father;—no, no, this left shoe is my mother;—nay, that cannot be neither;—yes, it is so, it is so; it hath the worser sole; This shoe, with the hole in it, is my mother; and this my father: A vengeance on't! there 'tis: now, sir, this staff is my sister; for, look you, she is as white as a lily, and as small as a wand: this hat is Nan, our maid; I am the dog:—no, the dog is himself, and I am the dog;—oh, the dog is me, and I am myself: Ay, so, so. Now come I to my father; Father, your blessing; now should not the shoe speak a word for weeping; now should I kiss my father; well he weeps on:—now come I to my mother, (O, that she could speak now! like a wood² woman;—well, I kiss her;—why there 'tis; here's my mother's breath up and down: now come I to my sister; mark the moon she makes: now the dog all this while sheds not a tear, nor speaks a word; but see how I lay the dust with my tears.

### Enter PANTHINO.

Pan. Launce, away, away, aboard; thy master is shipped, and thou art to post after with oars. What's the matter? why weepest thou, man? Away, ass; you will lose the tide, if you tarry any longer.

Laun. It is no matter if the ty'd were lost; for it is the unkindest ty'd that ever any man ty'd.

Pan. What's the unkindest tide?

Laun. Why, he that's ty'd here; Crab, my dog.

Pan. Tut, man, I mean thou'lt lose the flood; and, in losing the flood, lose thy voyage; and, in losing thy voyage, lose thy master; and, in losing thy master, lose thy service; and in losing thy service,—Why dost thou stop my mouth?

Laun. For fear thou shouldst lose thy tongue.

Pan. Where should I lose my tongue?

Laun. In thy tale.

Pan. In thy tail?

Laun. Lose the tide, and the voyage, and the master, and the service: And the tide!—Why, man, if the river were dry, I am able to fill it with my tears; if the wind were down, I could drive the boat with my sighs.

Pan. Come, come away, man; I was sent to call thee.

Laun. Sir, call me what thou darest.

Pan. Wilt thou go?

Laun. Well, I will go.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV.—Milan. A Room in the Duke's Palace. Enter VALENTINE, SILVIA, THURIO, and SPEED.

Sil. Servant—

Val. Mistress?

Speed. Master, Sir Thurio frowns on you.

1. Kind, is kindred.

2. Crazy, wild, distracted.

3. i. e. you are serious.

4. i. e. perhaps.

Val. Ay, boy, it's for love.

Speed. Not of you.

Val. Of my mistress then.

Speed. 'Twere good you knocked him.

Sil. Servant, you are sad.³

Val. Indeed, madam, I see so.

Thu. Seem you that you are not?

Val. Haply⁴ I do.

Thu. So do counterfeits.

Val. So do you.

Thu. What seem I, that I am not?

Val. Wise.

Thu. What instance of the contrary?

Val. Your folly.

Thu. And how quote⁵ you my folly?

Val. I quote it in your jerkin.

Thu. My jerkin is a doublet.

Val. Well, then, I'll double your folly.

Thu. How?

Sil. What, angry, Sir Thurio?⁶ do you change colour?

Val. Give him leave, madam; he is a kind of cameleon.

Thu. That hath more mind to feed on your blood, than live in your air.

Val. You have said, sir.

Thu. Ay, sir, and done too, for this time.

Val. I know it well, sir; you always end ere you begin.

Sil. A fine volley of words, gentlemen, and quickly shot off.

Val. 'Tis indeed, madam; we thank the giver.

Sil. Who is that, servant?

Val. Yourself, sweet lady; for you gave the fire: Sir Thurio borrows his wit from your ladyship's looks, and spends what he borrows, kindly in your company.

Thu. Sir, if you spend word for word with me, I shall make your wit bankrupt.

Val. I know it well, sir: you have an exchequer of words, and, I think, no other treasure to give your followers; for it appears by their bare liversies, that they live by your bare words.

Sil. No more, gentlemen, no more; here comes my father.

### Enter DUKE.

Duke. Now, daughter Silvia, you are hard besot.

Sir Valentine, your father's in good health:

What say you to a letter from your friends Of much good news?

Val. My lord, I will be thankful

To any happy messenger from hence.

Duke. Know you Don Antonio, your countryman?

Val. Ay, my good lord, I know the gentleman To be of worth, and worthy estimation,

And not without desert so well reputed.

Duke. Hath he not a son?

Val. Ay, my good lord; a son, that well deserves

The honour and regard of such a father.

Duke. You know him well?

Val. I knew him as myself; for from our infancy

We have convers'd, and spent our hours together:

And though myself have been an idle truant,

Omitting the sweet benefit of time,

To clothe mine age with angel-like perfection;

Yet hath Sir Proteus, for that's his name,

Made use and fair advantage of his days;

His years but young, but his experience old;

His head unmellow'd, but his judgment ripe;

And, in a word, (for far behind his worth

Come all the praises that I now bestow,) He is complete in feature,⁶ and in mind,

⁵ To quote is to mark, to observe, the old pronunciation was evidently cote from the French original.

⁶ Feature in the poet's age was often used for form or person in general. Thus Baret: "The feature and facion, or the proportion and figure of the whole body. Conformatio quædam et figura totius oris et corporis." So in Ant. and Cleop. Act. ii. Sc. 5.

"Report the feature of Octavian."

Thus also Spenser:

"Which the fair feature of her limbs did hide."

["02", "TWO GENTLEMEN", "Act II.", "With all good grace to grace a gentleman.", "*Duke.* Beshrew¹ me, sir, but, if he make this good,", "He is as worthy for an empress' love,", "As meet to be an emperor's counsellor.", "Well, sir; this gentleman is come to me,", "With commendation from great potentates;", "And here he means to spend his time a while:", "I think, 'tis no unwelcome news to you.", "*Val.* Should I have wish'd a thing, it had been he.", "*Duke.* Welcome him then according to his worth.", "Silvia, I speak to you; and you, Sir Thurio:—", "For Valentine, I need not 'cite² him to it:", "I'll send him hither to you presently. [Exit DUKE.", "*Val.* This is the gentleman, I told your ladyship,\nHad come along with me, but that his mistress", "Did hold his eyes lock'd in her crystal looks.", "*Sil.* Belike, that now she hath enfranchis'd them", "Upon some other pawn for fealty.", "*Val.* Nay, sure, I think, she holds them prisoners still.", "*Sil.* Nay, then he should be blind; and, being blind,", "How could he see his way to seek out you?", "*Val.* Why, lady, love hath twenty pair of eyes.", "*Thu.* They say, that love hath not an eye at all.", "*Val.* To see such lovers, Thurio, as yourself;", "Upon a homely object love can wink.", "### Enter PROTEUS.", "*Sil.* Have done, have done; here comes the gentleman.", "*Val.* Welcome, dear Proteus!—Mistress, I be-seech you,", "Confirm his welcome with some special favour.", "*Sil.* His worth is warrant for his welcome hither.\nIf this be he you oft have wish'd to hear from.", "*Val.* Mistress, it is: sweet lady, entertain him.", "To be my fellow-servant to your ladyship.", "*Sil.* Too low a mistress for so high a servant.", "*Pro.* Not so, sweet lady; but too mean a servant.", "To have a look of such a worthy mistress.", "*Val.* Leave off discourse of disability:—", "Sweet lady, entertain him for your servant.", "*Pro.* My duty will I boast of, nothing else.", "*Sil.* And duty never yet did want his meed;", "Servant you are welcome to a worthless mistress.", "*Pro.* I'll die on him that says so, but yourself.", "*Sil.* That you are welcome?", "*Pro.* No; that you are worthless.", "### Enter Servant.", "*Ser.* Madam, my lord your father would speak with you.", "*Sil.* I'll wait upon his pleasure. [Exit Servant.", "Come, Sir Thurio,", "Go with me:—Once more, new servant, welcome!", "I'll leave you to confer of home affairs;", "When you have done, we look to hear from you.", "*Pro.* We'll both attend upon your ladyship.", "### [Exeunt SILVIA, THURIO, and SPEED.", "*Val.* Now, tell me, how do all from whence you came?", "*Pro.* Your friends are well, and have them much commended.", "*Val.* And how do yours?", "*Pro.* I left them all in health.", "*Val.* How does your lady? and how thrives your love?", "*Pro.* My tales of love were wont to weary you;", "I know you joy not in a love-discourse.", "*Val.* Ay, Proteus, but that life is alter'd now:", "I have done penance for contemning love;", "Whose high imperious³ thoughts have punish'd me", "With bitter fasts, with penitential groans,", "With nightly tears, and daily heart-sore sighs;", "For, in revenge of my contempt of love,", "Love hath chas'd sleep from my enthralled eyes,\nAnd made them watchers of mine own heart's sor-row.", "O, gentle Proteus, love's a mighty lord;", "And hath so humbled me, as, I confess,\nThere is no woe⁴ to his correction,", "Nor, to his service, no such joy on earth!", "Now, no discourse, except it be of love.", "Now can I break my fast, dine, sup, and sleep,\nUpon the very naked name of love.", "*Pro.* Enough; I read your fortune in your eye:\nWas this the idol that you worship so?", "", "*Val.* Even she; and is she not a heavenly saint?", "*Pro.* No; but she's an earthly paragon.", "*Val.* Call her divine.", "*Pro.* I will not flatter her.", "*Val.* O, flatter me; for love delights in praises.", "*Pro.* When I was sick, you gave me bitter pills;", "And I must minister the like to you.", "*Val.* Then speak the truth by her; if not divine,\nYet let her be a principality,", "Sovereign to all the creatures on the earth.", "*Pro.* Except my mistress.", "*Val.* Sweet, except not any,", "Except thou wilt except against thy love.", "*Val.* Have I not reason to prefer mine own?", "*Val.* And I will help thee to prefer her too:", "She shall be dignified with this high honour,—", "To bear my lady's train; lest the base earth", "Should from her vulture chance to steal a kiss,", "And, of so great a favour growing proud,", "Disdain to root the summer-swelling flower,", "And make rough winter everlastingly.", "*Pro.* Why, Valentine, what braggardism is this?", "*Val.* Pardon me, Proteus: all I can, is nothing", "to her, whose worth makes other worthies nothing;", "She is alone.", "*Pro.* Then let her alone.", "*Val.* Not for the world: why, man, she is mine own;", "And I as rich in having such a jewel,", "As twenty seas, if all their sand were pearl,", "The water nectar, and the rocks pure gold.", "Forgive me, that I do not dream on thee,", "Because thou seest me dote upon my love.", "My foolish rival, that her father likes,", "Only for his possessions are so huge,", "Is gone with her along; and I must after,", "For love, thou know'st, is full of jealousy.", "*Pro.* But she loves you?", "*Val.* Ay, and we are betroth'd;", "Nay, more, our marriage hour,", "With all the cunning manner of our flight,", "Determin'd of: how I must climb her window;", "The ladder made of cords: and all the means", "Plotted; and 'greed on, for my happiness.", "Good Proteus, go with me to my chamber,", "In these affairs to aid me with thy counsel.", "*Pro.* Go on before; I shall inquire you forth:", "I must unto the road,⁶ to disembark", "Some necessaries that I needs must use;", "And then I'll presently attend you.", "*Val.* Will you make haste?", "*Pro.* I will.—", "[Exit VAL.", "Even as one heat another heat expels,", "Or as one nail by strength drives out another,", "So the remembrance of my former love", "Is by a newer object quite forgotten.", "Is it her mien, or Valentinus' praise,", {"bbox": [607, 1124, 888, 11

## SCENE VII.

## OF VERONA.

63

And that I love him not, as I was wont:
O! but I love his lady, too, too much;
And that's the reason I love him so little,
How shall I dot on her with more advice,¹
That thus without advice begin to love her?
'Tis but her picture² I have yet beheld,
And that hath dazzled³ my reason's light;
But when I look on her perfections,
There is no reason but I shall be blind.
If I can check my erring love, I will;
If not, to compass her I'll use my skill.
[Exit.]

### SCENE V.—The same. A Street. Enter SPEED and LAUNCE.

Speed. Launce! by mine honesty, welcome to Milan.

Laun. Forswear not thyself, sweet youth; for I
am not welcome. I reckon this always—that a
man is never undone, till he be hanged; nor never
welcome to a place, till some certain shot be paid,
and the hostess say, welcome.

Speed. Come on, you mad-cap, I'll to the ale-
house with you presently; where, for one shot of
five pence thou shall have five thousand welcomes.
But, sirrah, how did thy master part with madam
Julia?

Laun. Marry, after they closed in earnest, they
parted very fairly in jest.

Speed. But will she marry him ?

Laun. No.

Speed. How then ? shall he marry her ?

Laun. No, neither.

Speed. What, are they broken ?

Laun. No, they are both as whole as a fish.

Speed. Why then, how stands the matter with
them?

Laun. Marry, thus; when it stands well with
him, it stands well with her.

Speed. What an ass art thou! I understand thee not.

Laun. What a block art thou, that thou canst not ?
My staff understands me.

Speed. What thou say'st?

Laun. Ay, and what I do too: look thee I'll but
lean, and my staff understands me.

Speed. It stands under thee, indeed.

Laun. Why, stand under and understand is all one.

Speed. But tell me true, will't be a match ?

Laun. Ask my dog: if he say, ay, it will; if
say, no, it will; if he shake his tail, and say nothing,
it will.

Speed. The conclusion is then, that it will.

Laun. Thou shall never get such a secret from
me, but by a parable.

Speed. 'Tis well that I get it so. But, Launce,
how say'st thou,⁴ that my master is become a no-
table lover?

Laun. I never knew him otherwise.

Speed. Than how?

Laun. A notable lubber, as thou reportest him
to be.

Speed. Why, thou whoreson ass, thou mistakest
me.

Laun. Why, fool, I meant not thee; I meant
thy master.

Speed. I tell thee, my master is become a hot
lover.

Laun. Why, I tell thee, I care not though he
burn himself in love. If thou wilt go with me to
the ale-house, so; if not, thou art a Hebrew, a
Jew, and not worth the name of a Christian.

Speed. Why?

Laun. Because thou hast not so much charity in
thee, as to go to the ale with a Christian. Wilt
thou go?

[Exeunt.]

Speed. At thy service.

1. i. e. on further knowledge, on better consideration.

2. Proteus means to say, that as yet he had only seen outward form, without having known her long enough to have any acquaintance with her mind.

3. Dazzled is used as a trisyllable.

4. i. e. what say'st thou to this circumstance.

### SCENE VI.—The same. An Apartment in the Palace. Enter PROTEUS.

Proteus. To leave my Julia, shall I be forsworn;

To love fair Silvia, shall I be forsworn;

To wrong my friend, I shall be much forsworn;

And even that power, which gave me first my oath,
Provokes me to this threefold perjury.

Love bade me swear, and love bids me forswear:

O sweet suggesting⁵ love, if thou hast sinn'd,
Teach me, thy tempted subject, to excite it.

At first I did adore a twinking star,

But now I worship a celestial sun.

Unheedingful vows may hefullyed be broken :

And he wants wit, that wants resolved will

To learn his wit to exchange the bad for better.—

Fie, fie, unreverend tongue! to call her bad,

Whose sovereignty so oft thou hast preferr'd

With twenty thousand soul-confirming oaths.

I cannot leave to love, and yet I do;

But there I leave to love, where I should love.

Julia I lose, and Valentine I lose:

If I keep them, I needs must lose myself;

If I lose them, thus find I by their loss,

For Valentine, myself; for Julia, Silvia.

I to myself am dearer than a friend;

For love is still most precious in itself:

And Silvia, witness heaven, that made her fair!

Shews Julia but a swarthy Ethiope.

I will forget that Julia is alive,

Rememb'ring that my love to her is dead;

And Valentine I'll hold an enemy,

Aiming at Silvia as a sweeter friend.

I cannot now prove constant to myself,

Without some treachery used to Valentine :—

This night, he meaneth with a corded ladder

To climb celestial Silvia's chamber-window;

Myself in counsel, his competitor :⁶

Now presently I'll give her father notice

Of their disguising, and pretended⁷ flight;

Who all enrag'd, will banish Valentine;

But, Valentine being gone, I'll quickly cross,

By some sly trick, blunt Thurio's dull proceeding,

Love, lend me wings to make my purpose swift,

As thou hast lent me wit to plot this drift! [Exit.]

## SCENE VII.

Verona. A Room in Julia's House. Enter JULIA and LUCETTA.

Jul. Counsel, Lucetta; gentle girl, assist me!

And, e'en in kind love, I do conjure thee⁸,—

Who art the table wherein all my thoughts

Are visibly character'd and engrav'd,—⁹

To lesson me; and tell me some good mean,

How, with my honour, I may undertake

A journey to my loving Proteus.

Luc. Alas! the way is wearisome and long.

Jul. A true-devoted pilgrim is not weary

To measure kingdoms with his feeble steps;

Much less shall she, that hath love's wings to fly;

And when the flight is made to one so dear,

Of such divine perfection, as Sir Proteus.

Luc. Better forbear, till Proteus make return.

Jul. O, know'st thou not, his looks are my
soul's food?

Pity the dearth that I have pined in,

By longing for that food so long a time,

Didst thou but know the inly touch of love,

Thou would'st as soon go kindle fire with snow,

As seek to quench the fire of love with words.

5. To suggest, in the language of our ancestors, was to tempt.

6. i. e. myself who am his competitor or rival, being admitted to his counsel. Competitor here means con-federate, assistant, partner. Thus in Ant. Cleop. Act v. Sc. 1.

7. That my brother, my competitor

8. In top of all design, my mate in empire,

9. Friend and companion in the front of war.

7. i. e. proposed or intended flight. The verb pre-tendre has the same signification in French.

8. The verb to conjure, or earnestly request, was then accented on the first syllable.

["64", "TWO GENTLEMEN", "ACT III.", "Luc. I do not seek to quench your love's hot\nfire;", "But qualify the fire's¹ extreme rage,", "Lest it should burn above the bounds of reason.", "Jul. The more thou dam'st² it up, the more it\nburns;", "The current, that with gentle murmur glides,\nThou know'st, being stopp'd, impatiently doth rage;", "But, when his fair course is not hindered,", "He makes sweet music with th' enamel'd stones,\nGiving a gentle kiss to every sedge", "He overtaketh in his pilgrimage;", "And so by many winding nooks he strays,", "With willing sport to the wild ocean.", "Then let me go, and hinder not my course:", "I'll be as patient as a gentle stream,", "And make a pastime of each weary step,", "Till the last step have brought me to my love;", "And there I'll rest, as, after much turmoil,³", "A blessed soul doth in Elysium.", "Luc. But in what habit will you go along?", "Jul. Not like a woman; for I would prevent", "The loose encounters of lascivious men:", "Gentle Lucetta, fit me with such weeds", "As may beseem some well reputed page.", "Luc. Why then your ladyship must cut your hair.", "Jul. No, girl; I'll knit it up in silken strings,", "With twenty odd-conceited true-love knots;", "To be fantastic may become a youth.", "Of greater time than I shall show to be.", "Luc. What fashion, madam, shall I make your\nbreeches?", "Jul. That fits as well, as—“tell me, good my\nlord,”", "“What compass will you wear your farthingale?”", "Why, even what fashion thou best lik'st, Lucetta.", "Luc. You must needs have them with a cod-\npiece,⁴ madam.", "Jul. Out, out, Lucetta; that will be ill favour'd.", "Luc. A round hose, madam, now's not worth a\npin,", "Unless you have a cod-piece to stick pins on.", "Jul. Lucetta, as thou lov'st me, let me have", "What thou think'st meet, and is most mannerly:", "But tell me, wench, how will the world repute me,\nFor undertaking so unstaid a journey?", "I fear me, it will make me scandaliz'd.", "Luc. If you think so, then stay at home, and go\nnot.", "Jul. Nay, that I will not.", "Luc. Then never dream on infamy, but go.", "If Proteus like your journey, when you come,\nNo matter who's displeas'd, when you are gone:", "I fear me, he will scarce be pleas'd withal.", "Jul. This is the least, Lucetta, of my fear:", "A thousand oaths, an ocean of his tears,", "And instances of infinite⁵ of love,", "Warrant me welcome to my Proteus.", "Luc. All these are servants to deceitful men.", "Jul. Base men, that use them to so base effect!", "But truer stars did govern Proteus' birth:", "His words are bonds, his oaths are oracles;", "His love sincere, his thoughts immaculate;", "His tears, pure messengers sent from his heart;", "His heart as far from fraud, as heaven from earth.", "Luc. Pray heaven, he prove so, when you come to him!", "Jul. Now, as thou lov'st me, do him not that\nwrong,", "To bear a hard opinion of his truth;", "Only deserve my love, by loving him;", "1 *Fire* as a dissyllable, as if spelt *Fier*.", "2 i. e. closest.", "3 Trouble.", "4 Whoever wishes to be acquainted with that singular appendage to dress, a cod-piece, may consult “Bulwer's Artificial Changeling.” Ocular instruction may be had from the armour shown as John of Gaunt's in the Tower. However offensive this language may appear to modern ears, it certainly gave none to any of the spectators in Shakspeare's days. He only used the ordinary language of his contemporaries.", "5 The second folio reads—“as infinite of love,” Ma-\nlone wished to read of the infinite of love, because he", "And presently go with me to my chamber,\nTo take a note of what I stand in need of,\nTo furnish me upon my longing⁶ journey.\nAll that is mine I leave at thy dispose,\nMy goods, my lands, my reputation;\nOnly, in lieu thereof despatch me hence:\nCome, answer not, but to it presently;\nI am impatient of my tarriance.", "[Exeunt.]", "ACT III.", "SCENE I.—Milan: An Anti-room in the Duke's\nPalace. Enter DUKE, THURIO, and PROTEUS.", "Duke. Sir Thurio, give us leave, I pray, awhile;\nWe have some secrets to confer about.", "[Exit THURIO.", "Now, tell me, Proteus, what's your will with me?", "Pro. My gracious lord, that which I would discover,", "The law of friendship bids me to conceal:", "But, when I call to mind your gracious favours", "Done to me, undeserving as I am,", "My duty pricks me on to utter that", "Which else no worldly good draw from me.", "Know, worthy prince, Sir Valentine, my friend,", "This night intends to steal away your daughter;", "Myself am one made privy to the plot.", "I know you have determined to bestow her", "On Thurio, whom your gentle daughter hates;", "And should she thus be stolen away from you,", "It would be much vexation to your age.", "Thus, for my duty's sake, I rather choose", "To cross my friend in his intended drift,", "Than, by concealing it, heap on your head", "A pack of sorrows, which would press you down,", "Being unprevented, to your timeless grave.", "Duke. Proteus, I thank thee for thine honest care\nWhich to require, command me while I live.", "This love of theirs myself have often seen,", "Haply, when they have judged me fast asleep;", "And oftentimes have purpos'd to forbid", "Sir Valentine her company, and my court:", "But, fearing lest my jealous aim might err,", "And so unworthily disgrace the man,", "(A rashness that I ever yet have shunn'd,)", "I gave him gentle looks; thereby to find", "That which thyself hast now disclos'd to me,", "And, that thou may't perceiv my fear of this,", "Knowing that tender youth is soon suggested⁷,", "I nightly lodge her in an upper tower,", "The key whereof myself have ever kept;", "And thence she cannot be convey'd away.", "Pro. Know, noble lord, they have devis'd a mean\nHow he her chamber-window will ascend,", "And with a corded ladder fetch her down;", "For which the youthful lover now is gone,", "And this way comes he with it presently;", "Where, if it please you, I may intercept him.", "But, good my lord, do it so cunningly,", "That my discovery be not aimed at;", "For love of you, not hate unto my friend,", "Hath made me publisher of this pretence⁹.", "Duke. Upon mine honour, he shall never know\nThat I had any light from thee on this.", "Pro. Adieu, my lord; Sir Valentine is coming.", "[Exit.]", "Enter VALENTINE.", "Duke. Sir Valentine, whither away so fast?", "Val. Please it your grace there is a messenger", "found “the infinite of thought” in Much Ado About\nNothing. The text seems to me sufficiently intelligible,\nthough we are not used to such construction. Malone\nhas cited an instance of infinite used for an infinity\nfrom Lord Lonsdale's Memoirs, written in 1688.", "6 By her longing journey, Julia means a journey\nwhich she shall pass in longing.", "7 i. e. *guess*. In Romeo and Juliet we have—", "“I aim'd so near when I suppos'd you lov'd.”", {"

["## SCENE I.", "## OF VERONA.", "65", "That stays to bear my letters to my friends,\nAnd I am going to deliver them.", "Duke. Be they of much import?", "Val. The tenor of their doth signet?", "My health, and happy being at your court.", "Duke. Nay, then no matter; stay with me a while;", "I am to break with thee of some affairs,", "That touch me near, wherein thou must be secret.", "'Tis not unknown to thee, that I have sought", "To match my friend, Sir Thurio, to my daughter.", "Val. I know it well, my lord; and, sure, the match", "Were rich and honourable; besides, the gentleman", "Is full of virtue, bounty, worth, and qualities", "Beseeching such a wife as your fair daughter:", "Cannot your grace win her to fancy him?", "Duke. No, trust me; she is peevish, sullen, fro-", "Proud, disobedient, stubborn, lacking duty;", "Neither regarding that she is my child,", "Nor fearing me as if I were her father:", "And, may I say to thee, this pride of hers,", "Upon advice, hath drawn my love from her;", "And where¹ I thought the remnant of mine age", "Should have been cherished'd by her, a childlike duty,", "I now am full resolv'd to take a wife,", "And turn her out to who will take her in:", "Then let her beauty be her wedding-dower:", "For me and my possessions she estems not.", "Val. What would your grace have me to do in this?", "Duke. There is a lady, sir, in Milan, here,", "Whom I affect; but she is nice, and coy,", "And nought estems her aged eloquence:", "Now, therefore, would I have thee to my tutor,", "(For long ago I have forgotten to court)", "Besides, the fashion of the time is chang'd;", "How, and which way, I may bestow myself,", "To be regarded in her sun-bright eye.", "Val. Win her with gifts, if she respect not words;", "Dumb jewels often, in their silent kind,", "More than quick words, do move a woman's mind.", "Duke. But she did scorn a present that I sent her.", "Val. A woman sometimes scorns what best con-", "tents her:", "Send her another; never give her o'r-", "For scorn at first makes after-love the more.", "If she do frown, 'tis not in hate of you,", "But rather to beget more love in you :", "If she do chide, 'tis not to have you gone;", "For why, the fools are mad, if left alone.", "Take no repulse, whatever she doth say:", "For, get you gone, she doth not mean, away :", "Flatter, and praise, commend, extol their graces,", "Though ne'er so black, say, they have angels' faces.", "That man that hath a tongue, I say, is no man,", "If with his tongue he cannot win a woman.", "Duke. But she, I mean, is promis'd by her friends", "Unto a youthful gentleman of worth;", "And kept severely from resort of men,", "That no man hath access by day to her.", "Val. Why then I would resort to her by night.", "Duke. Ay, but the doors be lock'd, and keys kept safe.", "That no man hath recourse to her by night.", "Val. What lets,² but one may enter at her win-", "Duke. Her chamber is aloft, far from the ground;", "And built so shelving that one cannot climb it", "Without apparent hazard of his life.", "Val. Why then, a ladder, quantibly made of cords,", "To cast up with a pair of anchoring hooks,", "Would serve to scale another Hero's tower,", "So bold Leander would adventure it.", "Duke. Now, as thou art a gentleman of blood,", "Advise me where I may have such a ladder.", "Val. When would you use it ? pray, sir, tell me that.", "1 Where for whereas, often used by old writers.", "2 i. e. hinders.", "3 i. e. cause.", "Duke. This very night; for love is like a child,\nThat longs for every thing that he can come by.", "Val. By seven o'clock I'll get you such a ladder.", "Duke. But, hark thee; I will go to her alone;", "How shall I best convey the ladder thither?", "Val. It will be light, my lord, that you may bear it", "Under a cloak that is of any length.", "Duke. A cloak as long as thine will serve the turn?", "Val. Ay, my good lord.", "Duke.", "Then let me see thy cloak;", "I'll get me one of such another length.", "Val. Why, my cloak will serve the turn, my lord.", "Duke. How shall I fashion me to wear a cloak ?—", "I pray thee, let me feel thy cloak upon me.—", "What letter is this same? What's here?—To\nSilvia!", "And here an engine fit for my proceeding?", "I'll be so bold to break the seal for once.", "[reads.]", "My thoughts do harbour with my Silvia nightly;", "And slaves they are to me, that send them flying:", "O, could their master come and go as lightly,", "Himself would lodge where senseless they are lying.", "My herald thoughts in thy pure bosom rest them;", "While I, their king, that thither them importune,", "Do curse the grace that with such grace hath bless'd them,", "Because myself do want my servants' fortune :", "I curse myself, for³ they are sent by me,", "That they should harbour where their lord should be.", "What's here?", "Silvia, this night I will enfranchise thee !", "'Tis so; and here's the ladder for the purpose.—", "Why, Phaeton (for thou art Merop's son),", "Wilt thou aspire to guide the heavenly car,", "And with thy daring folly burn the world?", "Wilt thou reach stars because they shine on thee ?", "Go, base intruder! over-weening slave!", "Bestow thy fawning smiles on equal mates;", "And think, my patience, more than thy desert,", "Is privilege for thy departure hence?", "Thank me for this, more than for all the favours", "Which, all too much, I have bestow'd on thee.", "But if thou linger in my territories", "Longer than swiftest expedition", "Will give thee time to leave our royal court,", "By heaven, my wrath shall far exceed the love", "I ever bore my daughter, or thyself.", "Be gone, I will not hear thy vain excuse,", "But, as thou lov'st thy life, make speed from hence.", "[Exit Duke.", "Val. And why not death, rather than living tro-\nment?", "To die, is to be banish'd from myself;", "And Silvia is myself: banish'd from her,", "Is self from self; a deadly banishment!", "What light is light, if Silvia be not seen?", "What joy is joy, if Silvia be not by?", "Unless it be to think that she is by,", {"bbox": [462, 997, 709, 1015], "category": "Text

68

TWO GENTLEMEN

ACT. IV.

**Duke.** And, Proteus, we dare trust you in this kind;
Because we know, on Valentine's report,
You are already love's firm votary,
And cannot soon revolt and change your mind.
Upon this warrant shall you have access,
Where you with Silvia may confer at large;
For she is lumpish, heavy, melancholy,
And, for your friend's sake, will be glad of you;
Where you may temper her, by your persuasion,
To hate young Valentine, and love my friend.

**Pro.** As much as I can do, I will effect:—
But you, Sir Thurio, are not sharp enough;
You must lay lime,¹ to tangle her desires,
By wilful sonnets, whose composed rhymes,
Should be full fraught with serviceable vows.

**Duke.** Ay, much is the force of heaven-bred poesy.

**Pro.** Say, that upon the altar of her beauty
You sacrifice your tears, your sighs, your heart:
Write till your ink be dry; and with your tears
Moist it again; and frame some feeling line,
That may discover such integrity:²—
For Orpheus' lute was strung with poets' sinews;
Whose golden touch could soften steel and stones,
Make tigers tame, and huge leviathans

Forsake unsounded deeps to dance on sands.

After your dire-lamenting elegies,
Visit by night your lady's chamber window

With some sweet consort:³ to their instruments

Tune a deploring dump;⁴ the night's dead silence

Will well become such sweet complaining grievance.

This, or else nothing, will inherit her.⁵

**Duke.** This discipline shews thou hast been in love.

**Thu.** And thy advice this night I'll put in practice:
Therefore, sweet Proteus, my direction-giver,
Let us into the city presently

To sort⁶ some gentlemen well skill'd in music:

I have a sonnet, that will serve the turn,

To give the onset to thy good advice.

**Val.** About it, gentlemen.

**Pro.** We'll wait upon your grace till after supper:
And afterward determine our proceedings.

**Duke.** Even now about it; I will pardon you.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT IV.

### SCENE I.—A Forest, near Mantua. Enter certain Out-laws.

1. Out. Fellows, stand fast; I see a passenger.

2. Out. If there be ten, shrink not, but down with'em.

Enter VALENTINE and SPEED.

3. Out. Stand, sir, and throw us that you have about you;

If not, we'll make you sit, and rifle you.

**Speed.** Sir, we are undone! these are the villains

That all the travellers do fear so much.

**Val.** My friends,—

1. Out. That's not so, sir; we are your enemies.

2. Out. Peace; we'll hear him.

3. Out. Ay, by my beard, will we; for he is a proper⁷ man.

**Val.** Then know, that I have little wealth to lose;
A man I am, cross'd with adversity:

My riches are these poor habiliments,

1. i. e. *birdtime*.

2. i. e. sincerity, such as would be manifested by such impassioned writing. Malone suspects that a line following this has been lost.

3. The old copy has *consort*, which, according to Bullokar and Phillips, signified "a set or company of musicians." If we print *concert*, as Malone would have it, the relative pronoun *their* has no correspondent word. It is true that Shakespeare frequently refers to words not expressed, but implied in the former part of a sentence. But the reference here is to *consort*, as appears by the subsequent words, "to their instruments."

4. A *dump* was the ancient term for a *mournful elegy*.

Of which if you should here disfurnish me,
You take the sum and substance that I have.

2. Out. Whither travel you?

**Val.** To Verona.

1. Out. Whence came you?

**Val.** From Milan.

3. Out. Have you long sojourned there?

**Val.** Some sixteen months; and longer might have staid,

If crooked fortune had not thwarted me,

1. Out. What, were you banish'd thence?

**Val.** I was.

2. Out. For what offence?

**Val.** For that which now torments me to hearse:

I kill'd a man, whose death I must repent;

But yet I slew him manfully in fight,

Without false vantage, or base treachery.

1. Out. Why ne'er repent it, if it were done so;

But were you banish'd for so small a fault?

**Val.** I was, and held me glad of such a doom.

1. Out. Have you the tongues?

**Val.** My youthful travel therein made me happy;

Or else I often had been miserable.

3. Out. By the bare scallop of Robin Hood's fat friar,⁸

This fellow were a king for our wild faction.

1. Out. We'll have him; sirs, a word.

**Speed.** Master, be one of them;

It is an honourable kind of thievery.

**Val.** Peace, villain !

2. Out. Tell us this: have you any thing to take to?

**Val.** Nothing but my fortune.

3. Out. Know, then, that some of us are gentlemen,

Such as the fury of ungovern'd youth

Thrust from the company of awful⁹ men:

Myself was from Verona banish'd,

For practising to steal away a lady,

An heir, and near allied unto the duke.

2. Out. And I from Mantua, for a gentleman,

Whom, in my mood,¹⁰ I I stabbed upon the heart.

1. Out. And I, for such like petty crimes as these.

But to the purpose,—(for we cite our faults,

That they may hold excus'd our lawless lives.)

And, partly, seeing you are beautify'd

With goodly shape; and by your own report

A linguist, and a man of such perfection,

As we do in our quality¹¹ much want;—

2. Out. Indeed, because you are a banish'd man,
Therefore, above the rest, we parley to you:

Are you content to be our general?

To make a virtue of necessity,

And live, as we do, in this wilderness?

3. Out. What sayst thou? wilt thou be of our consort?

Say ay, and be the captain of us all;

We'll do thee homage, and be rul'd by thee,

Love thee as our commander and our king.

1. Out. But if thou scorn our courtesy, thou diest.

2. Out. Thou shall not live to brag what we have offered.

**Val.** I take your offer, and will live with you;

Provided that you do no outrages

On silly women, or poor passengers.

3. Out. No, we detect such vile base practices.

Come, go with us, we'll bring thee to our crews,

And shew thee all the treasure we have got;

Which, with ourselves, all rest at thy dispose.

[Exeunt.]

5. To inherit is sometimes used by Shakespeare for to obtain possession of, without any idea of acquiring by inheritance. Milton in Comus has disinherit Chaos, meaning only to dispossess it.

6. To sort, to choose out.

7. A proper man, was a comely, tall, or well proportioned man. Uomo di bel taglio.

8. Friar Tuck, one of the associates of Robin Hood.

9. A useful men, men full of awe and respect for the laws of society, and the duties of life.

10. Mood is anger or resentment.

11. i. e. Condition, profession, occupation, v. Hamlet, Act ii. Sc. 2.

["## SCENE II.", "## OF VERONA.", "69", "### SCENE II.—Milan. Court of the Palace. Enter PROTEUS.", "Pro. Already have I been false to Valentine,\nAnd now I must be as unšt to Thurio.", "Under the colour of commending him,\nI have access my own love to prefer;", "But Silvia is too fair, too true, too holy,\nTo be corrupted with my worthless gifts.", "When I protest true loyalty to her,\nShe twits me with my falsehood to my friend;", "When to her beauty I commend my vows,\nShe bids me think, how I have been forsworn", "In breaking faith with Julia whom I lov'd:", "And, notwithstanding all her sudden quips,¹", "The least whereof would quell a lover's hope,\nYet, spaniel-like, the more she spurns my love,", "The more it grows and fawneth on her still.", "But here comes Thurio; now must we to her\nwindow,\nAnd give some evening music to her ear.", "", "### Enter THURIO, and Musicians.", "Thu. How now, Sir Proteus? are you crept\nbefore us?", "Pro. Ay, gentle Thurio; for, you know, that love", "Will creep in service where it cannot go.", "Thu. Ay, but, I hope, sir, that you love not here.", "Pro. Sir, but I do; or else I would be hence.", "Thu. Who? Silvia?", "Pro. Ay, Silvia,—for your sake.", "Thu. I thank you for your own. Now, gentlemen,", "Let's tune, and to it lustly awhile.", "### Enter Host, at a distance; and Julia in boy's clothes.", "Host. Now, my young guest! methinks you're\nallyholly; I pray you, why is it?", "Jul. Marry, mine host, because I cannot be\nmerry.", "Host. Come, we'll have you merry: I'll bring\nyou where you shall hear music, and see the gen-\ntleman that you ask'd for.", "Jul. But shall I hear him speak?", "Host. Ay, that you shall.", "Jul. That will be music.", "Host. Hark! hark!", "Jul. Is he among these?", "Host. Ay: but peace, lets hear 'em.", "## SONG.", "Who is Silvia? What is she?", "That all our swains commend her?", "Holy, fair, and wise is she;", "The heavens such grace did lend her,", "That she might admired be.", "Is she kind, as she is fair?", "For beauty lives with kindness;", "Love doth to her eyes repair,", "To help him of his blindness;", "And, being help'd, inhabits there.", "Then to Silvia let us sing,", "That Silvia is excelling;", "She excels each mortal thing,", "Upon the dull earth dwelling :", "To her let us garlands bring.", "Host. How now? are you sadder than you were\nbefore?", "How do you, man? the music likes you not.", "Jul. You mistake; the musician likes me not.", "Host. Why, my pretty youth?", "Jul. He plays false, father.", "Host. How? out of tune on the strings?", "Jul. Not so; but yet so false that he grieves my\nvery heart-strings.", "Jul. You have a quick ear.", "Jul. Ay, I would I were deaf! it makes me have\na slow heart.", "Host. I perceive, you delight not in music.", "Jul. Not a whit, when it jars so.", "Host. Hark, what fine change is in the music!", "Jul. Ay; that change is the spite.", "Host. You would have them always play but\none thing?", "Jul. I would always have one play but one thing.\nBut, host, doth this Sir Proteus, that we talk on,\noften resort unto this gentlewoman?", "Host. I tell you what, Launce, his man, told me,\nhe loved her out of all nick.²", "Jul. Where is Launce?", "Host. Gone to seek his dog; which, to-morrow,\nby his master's command, he must carry for a pre-\nsent to his lady.", "Jul. Peace! stand aside! the company parts.", "Pro. Sir Thurio, fear not you! I will so plead,\nThat you shall say, my cunning drift excels.", "Thu. Where meet we?", "Pro. At Saint Gregory's well.", "Thu. Farewell. [Exeunt THU. and Musicians,\nSILVIA appears above, at her window.", "Pro. Madam, good even to your ladyship.", "Sil. I thank you for your music, gentlemen:", "Who is that, that spake?", "Pro. One, lady, if you knew his pure heart's\ntruth,", "You'd quickly learn to know him by his voice.", "Sil. Sir Proteus, as I take it.", "Pro. Sir Proteus, gentle lady, and your servant.", "Sil. What is your will?", "Pro. That I may compass yours.", "Sil. You have your wish; my will is even this,—\nThat presently you lie you home to bed.", "Thou subtle, perjur'd, false, disloyal man!", "Think'st thou, I am so shallow, so conceitless,", "To be seduced by thy flattery,", "That hast deceiv'd so many with thy vows", "Return, return, and make thy love amends.", "For me,—by this pale queen of night I swear,", "I am so far from granting thy request,", "That I despise thee for thy wrongful suit;", "And by and by intend to chide myself,", "Even for this time I spend in talking to thee.", "Pro. I grant, sweet love, that I did love a lady", "but she is dead.", "Jul. 'Twere false, if I should speak it;", "For, I am sure, she is not buried.", "Sil. Say, that she be; yet Valentine, thy friend,\nSurvives; to whom, thyself art witness,", "I am betroth'd: And art thou not asham'd", "To wrong him with thy importunacy?", "Pro. I likewise hear, that Valentine is dead.", "Sil. And so suppose am I; for in his grave,", "Assure thyself, my love is buried.", "Pro. Sweet lady, let me rake it from the earth.", "Sil. Go to thy lady's grave, and call her's thence;\nOr, at the least, in her's sepulchre thine.", "Jul. He heard not that.", "Pro. Madam, if your heart be so obdurate,\nVouchsafe me yet your picture for my love,", "The picture that is hanging in your chamber;", "To that I'll speak, to that I'll sigh and weep.", "For, since the substance of your perfect self\nIs else devoted, I am but a shadow;", "And to your shadow will I make true love.", "Jul. If 'twere a substance, you would, sure, de-\nceive it,", "And make it but a shadow, as I am.", "Sil. I am very loth to be your idol, sir;", "But, since your falsehood shall become you well", "To worship shadows, and adore false shapes,", "Send to me in the morning and I'll send it:", "And so good rest.", "Pro. As wretches have o'ernight,\nThat wait for execution in the morn.", "[Exeunt PROTEUS; and SILVIA from above.", "Jul. Host, will you go?", "Host. By my halidom,³ I was fast asleep.", "2 i.e. Out of all reckoning or count; reckonings were\nkept upon nicked or notched sticks or tallies.", "³ Halidom, (says Minsheu,) an old word, used by old\ncountrywomen by manner of swearing.", "¹ Sudden quips, hasty, passionate reproaches.", "Act. IV.", {"bbox": [0, 153, 21, 182], "category": "

70

TWO GENTLEMEN

ACT IV.

Jul. Pray you, where lies Sir Proteus ?

Host. Marry, at my house: Trust me, I think 'tis almost day.

Jul. Not so; but it hath been the longest night That e'er I watch'd, and the most heaviest.¹

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE III. The same. Enter EGLAMOUR.

Egl. This is the hour that madam Silvia Entreated me to call and know her mind: There's some great matter she'd employ me in.—Madam, madam!

SILVIA appears above, at her window.

Sil. Who calls ?

Egl. Your servant, and your friend;

One that attends your ladyship's command.

Sil. Sir Eglamour, a thousand times good-morrow.

Egl. As many, worthy lady, to yourself. According to your ladyship's impose,² I am thus early come, to know what service It is your pleasure to command me in.

Sil. O Eglamour, thou art a gentleman, (Think not, I flatter, for I swear, I do not,) Valiant, wise, remorseful,³ well accomplish'd. Thou art not ignorant, what dear good-will I bear unto the banish'd Valentine;

Nor how my father would enforce me marry Vain Thurio, whom my very soul abhorr'd. Thyself hast lov'd; and I have heard thee say, No grief did ever come so near thy heart,

As when thy lady and thy true love died, Upon whose grave thou vow'dst pure chastity.⁴

Sir Eglamour, I would to Valentine, To Mantua, where, I hear, he makes abode; And, for the ways are dangerous to pass,

I do desire thy worthy company,

Upon whose faith and honour I repose. Urge not my father's anger, Eglamour,

But think upon my grief, a lady's grief; And on the justice of my flying hence,

To keep me from a most unholy match, Which heaven and fortune still reward with plagues.

I do desire thee, even from a heart As full of sorrows as the sea of sands,

To bear me company, and go with me: If not, to hide what I have said to thee,

That I may venture to depart alone.

Egl. Madam, I pity much your grievances;⁵ Which since I know they virtuously are placed, I give consent to go along with you;

Recking⁶ as little what betideth me, As much I wish all good befoUNT you.

When will you go ?

Sil. This evening coming.

Egl. Where shall I meet you ?

Sil. At friar Patrick's cell,

Where I intend holy confession.

Egl. I will not fail your ladyship:

Good-morrow, gentle lady.

Sil. Good-morrow, kind Sir Eglamour.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV. The same. Enter LAUNCE, with his Dog.

When a man's servant shall play the cur with him, look you, it goes hard: one that I brought up of a puppy; one that I saved from drowning, when three or four of his blind brothers and sisters went

1 The double superlative is very often used by the writers of Shakspeare's time.

2 *Impose* is *injunction, command*; a task set at college in consequence of a fault is still called an *imposition*.

3 *i. e.* *pitiful*.

4 It was common in former ages for widowers and widows to make vows of chastity in honour of their deceased wives or husbands. Besides observing the vow, the widow was, for life, to wear a veil, and a mourning habit. The same distinction may have been made in form the players how Sir Eglamour should be dressed; and will account for Silvia's having chosen him as a person in whom she could confide without injury to her character.

to it! I have taught him—even as one would say precisely, Thus I would teach a dog. I was sent to deliver him, as a present to mistress Silvia, from my master; and I came no sooner into the dining-chamber, but he steps me to her trencher, and steals her capon's leg. O, 'tis a foul thing, when a cur cannot keep⁷ himself in all companies! I would have, as one should say, one that takes upon him to be a dog indeed, to be, as it were, a dog at all things. If I had not had more witt than he, to take a fault upon me that he did, I think verily he had been hanged for't: sure as I live, he had suffer'd for't: you shall judge. He thrusts me himself into the company of three or four gentleman-like dogs, under the duke's table: he had not been there (bless the mark) a pissing while; but all the chamber smelt him. Out with the dogs, says one; What cur is that? says another; Whip him out, says the third; Hang him up, says the duke. I, having been acquainted with the smell before, knew it was Crab; and goes me to the fellow that whips the dogs: Friend, quoth I, you mean to whip the dog? Ay, marry, do I, quoth he. You do him the more wrong, quoth I; 'twas I did the thing you wot of. He makes me no more ado, but whips me out of the chamber. How many masters would do this for their servant? Nay, I'll be sworn, I have sat in the stocks for puddings he hath stolen, otherwise he had been executed: I have stood on the pillory for geese he hath killed, otherwise he had suffered for't: thou think'st not of this now!—Nay, I remember the trick you served me, when I took my leave of madame Silvia: did not I bid thee still mark me, and do as I do? When didst thou see me heave up my leg, and make water against a gentlewoman's farthingale? didst thou ever see me do such a trick?

### Enter PROTEUS and JULIA.

Pro. Sebastian is thy name ? I like thee well, And will employ thee in some service presently.

Jul. In what you please ;—I will do what I can.

Pro. I hope, thou wilt.—How now, you whoreson peasant! [To LAUNCE.

Where have you been these two days loitering?

Laun. Marry, sir, I carried mistress Silvia the dog you bade me.

Pro. And what says she to my little jewel?

Laun. Marry, she says, your dog was a cur; and tells you, currish thanks is good enough for such a present.

Pro. But she received my dog?

Laun. No, indeed, did she not: here have I brought him back again.

Pro. What, didst thou offer her this from me?

Laun. Ay, sir; the second squirrel was stolen from me by the hangman's boys in the market-place: and then I offered her mine own; who is a dog as big as ten of yours, and therefore the gift the greater.

Pro. Go, get thee hence, and find my dog again, Or ne'er return again into my sight.

Away, I say: Stay'st thou to vex me here?

A slave, that's, still an end⁸ turns me to shame.

[Exit LAUNCE.

Sebastian, I have entertained thee,

Partly, that I have need of such a youth, That can with some discretion do my business, For 'tis no trusting to yon foolish lowt;

But, chiefly for thy face and thy behaviour:

Which (if my augury deceive me not)

5 In Shakspeare's time *griefs* frequently signified grievances; and the present instance shows that in return *grievance* was sometimes used in the sense of *grief*.

6 *To reck* is to care for. So in Hamlet: "And reck not his own read."

7 *i. e.* *restrain*.

8 *Still an end*, and *most an end*, are vulgar expressions, and mean *perpetually, generally*. See Gifford's *Massinger*, iv, 282.

"Now help, good heaven! 'tis such an uncouth thing.

To be a widow out of Term-time! I

Do feel such anguish quals, and dumps, and fits,
And shakings *still an end*."

The *Ordinary*.

["## SCENE IV.", "## OF VERONA.", "71", "Witness good bringing up, fortune, and truth:\nTherefore know thou, for this I entertain thee.\nGo presently and take this ring with thee,\nDeliver it to mamá Silvia:\nShe loved me well deliver'd it to me.", "Jul. It seems you loved her not, to leave her token:\nShe's dead, belike.", "Pro. Not so; I think she lives.", "Jul. Alas!", "Pro. Why dost thou cry, alas?", "Jul. I cannot choose but pity her.", "Pro. Wherefore should'st thou pity her?", "Jul. Because, methinks, that she lov'd you as well\nAs you do love your lady Silvia.", "She dreams on him that has forgot her love;", "You dote on her that cares not for your love.", "'Tis pity, love should be so contrary :", "And thinking in it makes me cry, alas !", "Pro. Well, give her that ring, and therewithal\nThis letter — that's her chamber.—Tell my lady,\nI claim the promise for her heavenly picture.\nYour message done, hie home unto my chamber,\nWhere thou shalt find me sad and solitary.", "[Exit PROTEUS.", "Jul. How many women would do such a message ?\nAlas, poor Proteus ! thou hast entertained", "A fox, to be the shepherd of thy lambs :", "Alas, poor fool ! why do I pity him", "That with his very heart despiseth me ?", "Because he loves her, he despiseth me ;", "Because I love him, I must pity him.", "This ring I gave him, when he part'd from me,", "To bind him to remember my good-will :", "And now am I (unhappy messanger !)", "To plead for that, which I would not obtain ;", "To carry that which I would have refus'd ;", "To praise his faith which I would have disparisd.", "I am my master's true confirmed love ;", "But cannot be true servant to my master,", "Unless I prove false traitor to myself.", "Yet I will woo for him : but yet so coldly,", "Enter SILVIA, attended.", "Gentlewoman, good day ! I pray you be my mean\nTo bring me where to speak with madam Silvia.", "Jul. What would you with her, if I that be she ?", "Jul. If you be she, I do entreat your patience", "To hear me speak the message I am sent on :", "Jul. From whom ?", "Jul. From my master, Sir Proteus, madam.", "Jul. O !—he sends you for a picture ?", "Jul. Ay, madam.", "Jul. Ursula, bring my picture there.", "[Picture brought.", "Go, give your master this : tell him from me,\nOne Julia, that his changing thoughts forget,\nWould better fit his chamber than this shadow.", "Jul. Madam, please you peruse this letter.—", "Pardon me, madam ; I have unadvis'd", "Deliver'd you a paper that I should not ;", "This is the letter to your lADYship.", "Jul. I pray thee let me look on that again.", "Jul. It may not be ; good madam, pardon me.", "Jul. There, hold.", "I will not look upon your master's lines :", "I know they are stuff'd with protestations,", "And full of new-found oaths ; which he will break", "As easily as I do tear his paper.", "Jul. Madam, he sends your lADYship this ring.", "Jul. The more shame for him that he sends it me ;", "For, I have heard him say a thousand times,", "His Julia gave it him at his departure :", "Though his false finger hath profan'd the ring,\nMine shall not do his Julia so much wrong.", "Jul. She thanks you.", "Sil. What say'st thou ?", "Jul. I thank you, madam, that you tender her :\nPoor gentlewoman ! my master wrongs her much.", "Jul. Dost thou know her ?", "Jul. Almost as well as I do know myself:", "To think upon her woes, I do protest,", "That I have wept a hundred several times.", "Sil. Belike, she thinks that Proteus hath forsook\nher.", "Jul. I think she doth, and that's her cause of\nsorrow.", "Sil. Is she not passing fair ?", "Jul. She hath been fairer, madam, than she is :", "When she did think my master lov'd her well,", "She, in my judgment, was as fair as you ;", "But since she did neglect her looking-glass,", "And threw her sun-expelling mask away,", "The air hath starv'd the roses in her cheeks,", "And pinch'd the lily-tincture of her face,", "That now she is become as black as I.", "Sil. How tall was she ?", "Jul. About my stature : for, at Pentecost,\nWhen all our pageants of delight were play'd,\nOur youth got me to play the woman's part,\nAnd I was trimm'd in madam Julia's gown,\nWhich served me as fit, by all men's judgment,\nAs if the garment had been made for me ;", "Therefore, I know she is about my height.", "And, at that time, I made her weep a good,¹", "For I did play a lamentable part :", "Madam, 'twas Ariadne, passioning²", "For Theseus' perjury, and unjust flight ;", "Which I so lively acted with my tears,", "That my poor mistress, moved therewithal,", "Wep bitterly; and, would I might be dead,", "If I in thought felt not her very sorrow !", "Sil. She is beholden to thee, gentle youth !—", "Alas, poor lady ! desolate and left !—", "I weep myself, to think upon thy words.", "Here, youth, there is my purse ; I give thee this\nFor thy sweet mistress' sake, because thou lov'st\nher.", "Farewell.", "[Exit SILVIA.", "Jul. And she shall thank you for't, if e'er you\nknow her.—", "A virtuous gentlewoman, mild, and beautiful.", "I hope my master's suit will be but mild,", "Since she respects my mistress' love so much.", "Alas, how love can trifle with itself !", "Here is her picture : Let me see ; I think,", "If I had such a tire, this face of mine", "Were full as lovely as is this of hers ;", "And yet the painter flatter'd her a little,", "Unless I flatter with myself too much.", "Her hair is auburn, mine is perfect yellow :", "If that be all the difference in his love,", "I'll get me such a colour'd periwig.³", "Her eyes are grey as glass ;⁴ and so are mine :", "Ay, but her forehead's low, and mine's as high.⁵", "What should it be, that he respects in her,", "But I can make respective⁶ in myself,", "If this fond love were not a blinded god ?", "Come, shadow, come, and take this shadow up,", "For 'tis thy rival. O thou senseless form,", "Thou shall be worshipp'd, kiss'd, lov'd, and ador'd ;", "And, were there sense in this idolatry,", "My substance should be statue? in thy stead.", "1 i. e. in good earnest, tout de bon.", "2 To passion was used as a verb formerly.", "3 False hair was worn by the ladies long before wigs were in fashion. So, in 'Northward Hoe,' 1607, \"There is a new trade come up for cast gentlewomen of periwig making.\" Periwickes are mentioned by Churchyard in one of his earliest poems. And Barnabe Rich, in 'The Honesteste of This Age,' 1615, has a philippic against this folly.", "4 By grey eyes were meant what we now call blue eyes. Grey, when applied to the eyes is rendered by Coles, in his Dictionary, 1769, *Ceruleus, glaucus*.", "5 A high forehead was then accounted a feature eminently beautiful. Our author, in The Tempest, shows that low foreheads were in disesteem.\n\n— with foreheads villanous low.", "6 *Respective, i. e. considerative, regardful, v. Merchant of Venice, Act v. Sc. I.*", {"bbox": [473,

72

TWO GENTLEMEN

ACT V.

I'll use thee kindly for thy mistress sake,
That us'd me so; or else by Jove I vow,
I should have scratch'd out your unseene eyes,
To make my master out of love with thee.
[Exit.]

ACT V.

### SCENE I.—The same. An Abbey. Enter EGLAMOUR.

Egl. The sun begins to gild the western sky;
And now it is about the very hour
That Silvia, at friar Patrick's cell, should meet me.
She will not fail; for lovers break not hours,
Unless it be to come before their time;
So much they spur their expedition.

### Enter SILVIA.

See, where she comes; Lady, a happy evening!
Sil. Amen, amen! go on, good Eglamour!

Out at the postern by the abbey wall;
I fear I am attended by some spies.

Egl. Fear not: the forest is not three leagues off:
If we recover that, we are sure enough.
[Exeunt]

### SCENE II.—The same. A Room in the Duke's Palace. Enter THURIO, PROTEUS, and JULIA.

Thu. Sir Proteus, what says Silvia to my suit?

Pro. O, sir, I find her milder than she was;

And yet she takes exceptions at your person.

Thu. What, that my leg is too long?

Pro. No; that it is too little.

Thu. I'll wear a boot, to make it somewhat
rounder.

Pro. But love will not be spurr'd to what it
loaths.¹

Thu. What says she to my face?

Pro. She says it is a fair one.

Thu. Nay, then the wanton lies; my face is
black.

Pro. But pearls are fair; and the old saying is,
Black men are pearls in beauteous ladies' eyes.

Jul. 'Tis true; such pearls as put out ladies eyes.
For I had rather wink than look on them.
[Aside.]

Thu. How likes she my discourse?

Pro. Ill, when you talk of war.

Thu. But well, when I discourse of love and
peace?

Jul. But better indeed, when you hold your
peace.
[Aside.]

Thu. What says she to my valour?

Pro. O, sir, she makes no doubt of that.

Jul. She needs not, when she knows it cow-
ardice.
[Aside.]

Thu. What says she to my birth?

Pro. That you are well deriv'd.

Jul. True, from a gentleman to a fool.
[Aside.]

Thu. Considers she my possessions ?

Pro. O, ay; and pities them.

Thu. Wherefore?

Jul. That such an ass should owe² them.
[Aside.]

Pro. That they are out by lease.³

Jul. Here comes the Duke.

### Enter DUKE.

Duke. How now, Sir Proteus? how now, Thurio?
Which of you saw Sir Eglamour of late?

Thu. Not I.

Pro. Nor I.

Duke. Saw you my daughter?

sires that his daughters may take leave of their lovers'
statues, though he had previously described them as
pictures, which they evidently were.

1 Mr. Boswell thought that this line should be given to
Julia, as well as a subsequent one, and that they were
meant to be spoken aside. They are exactly in the style
of her other sarcastic speeches; and Proteus, who is
playing on Thurio's credulity, would hardly represent
him as an object of loathing to Silvia.

2 i. e. possess them, oven them.

3 By Thurio's possessions he himself understands his
lands. But Proteus chooses to take the word likewise in
a figurative sense, as signifying his mental endowments,
and when he says they are out by lease, he means, that
they are no longer enjoyed by their master (who is a

Pro. Neither.

Duke. Why, then she's fled unto that peasant
Valentine?

And Eglamour is in her company.

'Tis true; for friar Laurence met them both,

As he in penance wander'd through the forest;

Him he knew well, and guess'd that it was she:

But, being mask'd, he was not sure of it:

Besides, she did intend confession.

At Patrick's cell this even: and there she was not:
These likelihoods confirm her flight from hence.

Therefore, I pray you, stand not to discourse,
But mount you presently; and meet with me
Upon the rising of the mountain foot

That leads towards Mantua, whither they are fled:
Despatch, sweet gentlemen, and follow me.
[Exit.]

Thu. Why, this it is to be a peevish⁴ girl,

That flies her fortune when it follows her:

I'll after; more to be reveng'd on Eglamour,

Than for the love of reckless⁵ Silvia.

Pro. And I will follow, more for Silvia's love,
Than hate of Eglamour that goes with her.
[Exit.]

Jul. And I will follow more to cross that love.

Than hate for Silvia, that is gone for love.
[Exit.]

### SCENE III.—Frontiers of Mantua. The Forest. Enter SILVIA, and Out-laws.

Out. Come, come;

Be patient, we must bring you to our captain.

Sil. A thousand more mischances than this one
Have learn'd me how to brook this patiently.

2 Out. Come, bring her away.

1 Out. Where is the gentleman that was with
her?

3 Out. Being nimble-footed, he hath outrun us,
But Moyses and Valerius follow him.

Go thou with her to the west end of the wood,

There is our captain: we'll follow him that's fled:
The thicket is beset, he cannot 'scape.

1 Out. Come, I must bring you to our captain's
cave:

Fear not; he bears an honorable mind,

And will not use a woman lawlessly.

Sil. O Valentine, this I endure for thee!

[Exeunt]

### SCENE IV. Another part of the Forest. Enter VALENTINE.

Val. How use doth breed a habit in a man!

This shadowy desert, unfrequented woods,

I better brook than flourishing peopled towns:

Here can I sit alone, unseen of any,

And, to the nightingale's complaining notes,

Tune my distresses, and record⁶ my woes.

O thou that dost inhabit in my breast:

Leave not the mansion so long tenantless;

Lest, growing ruinous, the building fall,

And leave no memory of what it was!⁷

Repair me with thy presence, Silvia;

Thou gentle nymph, cherish thy forlorn swain!—

What halloing, and what stir, is this to-day?

These are my mates, that make their wills their law,

Have some unhappy passenger in chase:

They love me well; yet I have much to do

To keep them out of uncivil outrages.

Withdraw thee, Valentine; who's this comes here?

[Steps aside.]

Enter PROTEUS, SILVIA, and JULIA.

Pro. Madam, this service I have done for you,
(Though you respect not aught your servant doth)

fool,) but are leased out to another. Edinburgh Magazine, Nov. 1756.

4 Peevish in ancient language signified foolish.
i. e. careless, heedless.

5 To record, anciently signified to sing.

It is still used by bird fanciers to express the first essays of a bird to sing; and is evidently derived from the recorder or pipe with which they were formerly taught.

7 "O thou that dost inhabit in my breast,

Lest growing ruinous, the building fall,

And leave no memory of what it was."

It is hardly possible (says Steevens) to point out four
lines in Shakspear more remarkable for ease and ele-
gance than the preceding.

## SCENE IV

## OF VERONA.

73

To hazard life, and rescue you from him
That would have forced your honour and your love.
Vouchsafe me, for my meed, but one fair look;
A smaller loan than this I cannot beg,
And less than this, I'm sure you cannot give.
Val. How like a dream is this I see and hear!

Love, lend me patience to forbear a while. [Aside.
Sil. O miserable, unhappy that I am!

Pro. Unhappy were you, madam, ere I came;
But, by my coming, I have made you happy.

Sil. By thy approach thou mak'st me most un-
happy.

Jul. And me, when he approacheth to your pre-
sence. [Aside.

Sil. Had I been seized by a hungry lion,
I would have been a breakfast to the beast,
Rather than have false Proteus rescue me.
O, heaven be judge, how I love Valentine,
Whose life's as tender¹ to me as my soul;
And full as much (for more there cannot be)
I do detest false perjur'd Proteus :

And when women cannot love where they're beloved'.
Sil. When Proteus cannot love where he's be-
lov'd.

Pro. What dangerous action, stood it next to
death,
Would I not undergo for one calm look?

O, 'tis the curse in love, and still approv'd,²
Silence cannot love where they're beloved'.

Read over Julia's heart, thy first best love,
For whose dear sake thou didst then rend thy faith
Into a thousand oaths; and all those oaths
Descended into perjury, to love me.
Thou hast no faith left now,³ unless thou hadst two,
And that's far worse than none; better have none
Than plural faith, which is too much by one:
Thou counterfeit to thy true friend!

Pro. In love,

Who reserves friends? All men but Proteus.
Sil. Pro. Nay, if the gentle spirit of moving words
Can no way change you to a milder form,
I'll woo you like a soldier, at arms' end;
And love you 'gainst the nature of love, force you.
Sil. O heaven!

Pro. I'll force thee yield to my desire.
Val. Ruffian, let go that rude uncivil touch;
Thou friend of an ill fashion.

Pro. Valentine!

Val. Thou common friend, that's without faith or
love,

(For such is a friend now,) treacherous man!
Thou hast beguil'd my hopes; nought but mine eye
Could have persuaded me: Now I dare not say
I have one friend alive; thou would't disprove me,
Who should be trusted now, when one's right hand
Is perjur'd to the bosom? Proteus,
I am sorry I must never trust thee more,
But count the world a stranger for thy sake.

Pro. My shame and guilt confound me.—

Val. Valentine!

Pro. Valentine!

The private wound is deepest: O time most accurate!

'Mongst all foes, that a friend should be the worst!

Forgive me, Valentine: if hearty sorrow
Be a sufficient ransom for offence,
I tender it here; I do as truly suffer,
As e'er I did commit.

Val. Then I am paid;

And once again I do receive thee honest :—

Who by repentance is not satisfied,

Is nor of heaven, nor earth; for these are pleas'd;

By penitence th' Eternal's wrath's appeas'd :—

And, that my love may appear plain and free,

1 i. e. as dear.

2 approv'd is confirm'd by proof.

3 The word *now* was supplied in the folio of 1632.

4 Steevens confounded the phrases of *to cry aim* (Merry Wives of Windsor, Act iii. Sc. 2) and *to give aim*, both terms in archery. He who gave aim appears to have been called the *mark*, and was stationed near the butts, to inform the archers how near their arrows fell to the butt. We are indebted to Mr. Gifford for distinguishing the terms.—Vide *Massinger*, vol. ii. p. 27. Julia means to say that she was the *mark* that gave direction to his vows.

All that was mine in Silvia, I give thee.

Jul. O me, unhappy!

Pro. Look to the boy.

Val. Why, boy! why, wag! how now? what is
the matter? Look up; speak.

Jul. O good sir, my master charg'd me to deliver
a ring to Madam Silvia; which, out of my neglect
was never done.

Pro. Where is that ring, boy?

Jul. Here 'tis: this is it.

Pro. How! let me see: why this is the ring I gave to Julia.

Jul. O, cry you mercy, sir, I have mistook; this
is the ring you sent to Silvia. [Shows another ring.

Pro. But, how cam'st thou by this ring? at my
depart, I gave this unto Julia.

Jul. And Julia herself did give it me;

And Julia herself hath brought it hither.

Pro. How! Julia!

Jul. Behold her that gave aim⁴ to all thy oaths,
And entertain'd them deeply in her heart:

How oft hast thou with perjury cleft the root?

O Proteus, let this habit make thee blush!

Be thou ashamed, that I have took upon me
Such an immodest raiment; if shame live
In a disguise of love:

It is the lesser blot modesty finds,

Women to change their shapes, than men their
minds.

Pro. Than men their minds? 'tis true: O heaven! were man

But constant, he were perfect: that one error

Fills him with faults; makes him run through all
the sins;

Inconstancy falls off, ere it begins:

What is in Silvia's face, but I may spy

More fresh in Julia's, with a constant eye?

Val. Come, come, a hand from either :

Let me be blest to make this happy close?

'Twere pity two such friends should be long foes,

Pro. Bear witness, heaven, I have my wish for
ever.

Jul. And I mine.

Enter Out-laws, with DUKE and THURIO.

Out. A prize, a prize, a prize!

Val. Forbear, forbear, I say; it is my lord the
duke.

Your grace is welcome to a man disgrac'd,
Banished Valentine.

Duke. Sir Valentine!

Thu. Yonder is Silvia; and Silvia's mine.

Val. For thuroi, give back, or else embrace thy death;
Come not within the measure of my wrath:

Do not name Silvia thine: if once again,
Verona shall not hold thee.⁶ Here she stands,

Take but possession of her with a touch;—

I dare thee but to breathe upon my love.

Thu. Sir Valentine, I care not for her, I;

I hold him but a fool, that will endanger

His body for a girl that loves him not:

I claim her not, and therefore she is thine.

Duke. The more degenerate and base art thou,

To make such means? for her as thou hast done,

And leave her on such slight conditions.—

Now, by the honour of my ancestry,

I do applaud thy spirit, Valentine,

And think thee worthy of an empress' love.

Know then, I here forget all former griefs,

Cancel all grudge, repeal thee home again.—

Plead a new state in thy unrivall'd merit,

To which I thus subscribe,—Sir Valentine,

5 i. e. of her heart, the allusion to archery is continued, and to clearing the pin in shooting at the butts.

6 "Verona shall not hold thee," is the reading of the only authentic copy. Theobald proposed the reading, "Milan shall not behold thee," which has been adopted by all subsequent editors, but there is no authority for the change. If the reading is erroneous, Shakespeare must be held accountable for this as well as some other errors in his early productions.

7 "To make such means for her," to make such interest for, to take such disingenuous pains about her

10

["## ACT I.", "## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.", "75", "The bustle and variety of the incidents, the rich assemblage of characters, and the skilful conduct of the plot of this delightful comedy, are unrivalled in any drama, ancient or modern.", "Falstaff, the inimitable Falstaff, here again 'lards the lean earth—'a butt and a wit, a humourist, and a man of humour, a touchstone and a laughing-stock, a jester and a jest—the most perfect comic character that ever", "was exhibited.' The jealous Ford, the uxious Page, and their two joyous wives are admirably drawn.—Sir Hugh Evans and Doctor Caius no less so, and the duel scene between them irresistibly comic. The swaggering jolly Boniface mine host of the Garter; and last, though not least, Master Slender and his cousin Shallow, are such a group as were never yet equalled by the pen or pencil of genius.", "## PERSONS REPRESENTED.", "SIR JOHN FALSTAFF.\nFENTON.", "SHALLOW, a country Justice.", "SLENDER, Cousin to Shallow.", "MR. FORD, { two gentlemen dwelling at Windsor.", "MR. PAGE.", "WILLIAM PAGE, a Boy, Son to Mr. Page.", "SIR HUGH EVANS, a Welsh Parson.", "DR. CAIUS, a French Physician.", "Host of the Garter Inn.", "BARDOLPH,", "PISTOL,", "NYM,", "Followers of Falstaff.", "ROBIN, Page to Falstaff.", "SIMPLE, Servant to Slender.", "RUGBY, Servant to Dr. Caius.", "MRS. FORD.", "MRS. PAGE.", "MRS. ANNE PAGE, her Daughter, in love with\nFenton.", "MRS. QUICKLY, Servant to Dr. Caius.", "Servants to Page, Ford, &c.", "SCENE, Windsor, and the Parts adjacent.", "## ACT I.", "### SCENE I. Windsor. Before Page's House.\nEnter JUSTICE SHALLOW, SLENDER, and SIR HUGH EVANS.", "Shal. Sir Hugh, persuade me not; I will make a Star-chamber matter of it: if he were twenty Sir John Falstaffs, he shall not abuse Robert Shallow, esquire.", "Slen. In the county of Gloster, justice of peace, and coram .", "Shal. Ay, cousin Slender, and Cust-alorum,²", "Slen. Ay, and ratolorum too; and a gentleman born, master parson; who writes himself armigero; in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation, armigero.", "Shal. Ay, that I do; and have done³ any time these three hundred years.", "Slen. All his successors, gone before him, have done't; and all his ancestors, that come after him, may: they may give the dozen white luces in their coat.", "Shal. It is an old coat.", "Eva. The dozen white louses do become an old coat well; it agrees well, passant: it is a familiar beast to man, and signifies—love.", "Shal. The luce is the fresh fish; the salt fish is an old coat.⁴", "Slen. I may quarter, coz?", "Shal. You may, by marrying.", "Eva. It is marrying indeed, if he quarter it.", "Shal. Not a whit.", "Eva. Yes, pe'r-lady; if he has a quarter of your coat, there is but three skirts for yourself, in my simple conjectures: but that is all one: If Sir John Falstaff have committed disparagements unto you, I am of the church, and will be glad to do my benevolence, to make atonements and compromises between you.", "Shal. The Council⁵ shall hear it; it is a riot.", "Eva. It is not meet the Council hear a riot; there is no fear of Got in a riot: the Council, look you, shall desire to hear the fear of Got, and not to hear a riot; take your vizaments⁶ in that.", "1. Sir, was a title formerly applied to priests and curates generally. Dominus being the academic title of a Bachelor (bas chevalier) of Arts, was usually rendered by Sir in English, and as most clerical persons had taken that degree, it became usual to style them Sir.\n2. A corruption of Custos Rotulorum. It seems doubtful whether Shakspeare designed Shallow to make this mistake, for though he gives him folly enough, he makes him rather pedantic than illiterate. Unless we suppose, with Mr. Malone, that it might have been intended to ridicule the abbreviations used in writs, &c.", "", "Shal. Ha! o' my life, if I were young again, the sword should end it.", "Eva. It is petter that friends are the sword, and end it: and there is also another device in my pain, which, peradventure, prings goot discretions with it: There is Anne Page, which is daughter to master George Page, which is pretty virginity.", "Slen. Mistress Anne Page? She has brown hair, and speaks small' like a woman.", "Eva. It is that fery person for all the 'ord, as just as you will desire; and seven hundred pounds of moneys, and gold, and silver, is her grandsire, upon his death's bed (Got deliver to a joyful resurrections!) give, when she is able to overtake seven-teen years old: it were a goot motion, if we leave our pribbles and prabbles, and desire a marriage between master Abraham and mistress Anne Page.", "Shal. Did her grandsire leave her seven hundred pounds?", "Eva. Ay, and her father is make her a petter penny.", "Shal. I know the young gentlewoman; she has good gifts.", "Eva. Seven hundred pounds, and possibilities, is good gifts.", "Shal. Well, let us see honest master Page: Is Falstaff there?", "Eva. Shall I tell you a lie? I do despise a liar, as I do despise one that is false; or, as I despise one that is not true. The knight, Sir John, is there; and, I beseech you, be ruled by your well-willers. I will peat the door [knocks] for master Page. What, hoa! Got pless your house here!", "### Enter PAGE.", "Page. Who's there?", "Eva. Here is Got's plessing, and your friend, and justice Shallow: and here young master Slender; that, peradventures, shall tell you another tale, if matters grow to your likings.", "Page. I am glad to see your worships well: I thank you for my venison, master Shallow.", "Shal. Master Page, I am glad to see you; Much", "3. i. e. all the Shallows have done.", "4. It seems that the latter part of this speech should be given to Sir Hugh. Shallow has just before said the coat is an old one; and now, that it 's the luce, the fresh fish.' No, replies the parson, it cannot be old and fresh too—'the salt fish is an old coat.' Shakspeare is supposed to allude to the arms of Sir Thomas Lucy, who is said to have prosecuted him for a misdemeanor in his youth, and whom he now ridiculed under the character of Justice Shallow.", "5. The Court of Star-chamber is meant.", "6. Advisement.", "7. Soft.", "## ACT I.", "Knowledge verificat- and just; one inland isles the em- pire, after him, who con- tains the em- pire, after her pic- ture. The book is a good one.", "Shakespeare, I know, shall all the dis- cussion of the mind will be sometimes put to rest.", "In just, ex- ject of the mind; in the pic- ture of a person, in the per- haps, in the blunder who con- tains the em- pire, after had seen it, would form till unac- quaintness of the book.", "Portratures? [S]ON.", "dies. The book has been in the author's com- pany—was it collected?—in Hen- derson's?—in the House of the Com- mons?—in the House of the Com- mhouse?—in the House of the

76

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT I.

good do it your good heart! I wished your venison better; it was ill kill'd:—How doth good mistress Page?—and I love you always with my heart, la; with my heart.

Page. Sir, I thank you.

Shal. Sir, I thank you; by yea and no, I do.

Page. I am glad to see you, good master Slender.

Shal. How does your falley greyhound, sir? I heard say, he was out-run on Cotsale.²

Page. It could not be judg'd, sir.

Shal. You'll not confess, you'll not confess.

Shal. That he will not;—'tis your fault, 'tis your fault:—'Tis a good dog.

Page. A cur, sir.

Shal. Sir, he's a good dog, and a fair dog; Can there be more said? he is good, and fair.—Is Sir John Falstaffe here?

Page. Sir, he is within; and I would I could do a good office between you.

Eva. It is spoke as a christians ought to speak.

Shal. He hath wrong'd me, master Page.

Page. Sir, he doth in some sort confess it.

Shal. If it be confess'd, it is not redress'd; is not that so, master Page? He hath wrong'd me; indeed he hath;—at a word, he hath;—believe me;—Robert Shallow, esquire, saith he is wrong'd.

Page. Here comes Sir John.

Enter SIR JOHN FALSTAFF, BARDOLPH, NYM, and PISTOL.

Fal. Now, master Shallow; you'll complain of me to the king?

Shal. Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge.

Fal. But not kiss'd your keeper's daughter?

Shal. Tut, a pin! this shall be answer'd.

Fal. I will answer it straight;—I have done all this:—That is now answer'd.

Shal. The Council shall know this.

Fal. 'Twere better for you, if it were known in counsel: you'll be laugh'd at.

Eva. Pauca verba, Sir John, good worts.

Shal. Good worts.³ good cabbage.—Slender, I broke your head; What matter have you against me?

Shal. Marry, sir, I have matter in my head against you; and against your coney-catching⁴ rascals, Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol. They carried me to the tavern, and made me drunk, and afterwards picked my pocket.

Bar. You Banbury cheese!⁵

Shal. Ay, it is no matter.

Pist. How now, Mephostophilus?⁶

Shal. Ay, it is no matter.

Nym. Slice, I say! pauca, pauca;⁷ slice! that's my humour.

Shal. Where's Simple, my man? can you tell, cousin?

Page. Peace: I pray you! Now let us understand: There is three umpires in this matter, as I understand: that is—master Page, fidelicet, master Page; and there is myself, fidelicet, myself; and the three party is, lastly and finally, mine host of the Garter.

Page. We three, to hear it, and end it between them.

1 First folio. I thank. The reading in the text is from the 4to. 1619.

2 The Cotswold Hills in Gloucestershire, famous for their fine turf, and therefore excellent for coursing.
3 Worts was the ancient term for all the cabbage kind.

4 A common name for cheats and sharpers in the time of Elizabeth. 'By a metaphor taken from those that rob warrens and conie grounds?'—Minshew's *Dict.*

5 Said in allusion to the thin carcass of Slender. So, in Jack Drum's Entertainment, 1601. "Put off your clothes, and you are like a Banbury Cheese, nothing but paring."

6 The name of a spirit, or familiar in the old story book of Faustus: to whom there is another allusion Actii. Sc. 2. It was a cant phrase, probably, for an ugly fellow.

7 Few words.

8 King Sixpences were used as counters; and King Edward's shillings used in the game of shuffle-board.

Eva. Fery goot: I will make a prief of it in my note-book; and we will afterwards 'ork upon the cause with as great discreteness as we can.

Fal. Pistol, __________.

Pist. He hears with ears.

Eva. The tevil and his tam! what phrase is this, He hears with ear? Why, it is affectations.

Fal. Pistol, did you pick master Slender's purse? Slen. Ay, by these gloves, did he (or I would I might never come in mine own great chamber again else,) of seven groats in mill-sixpences, and two Edward shovel-boards,⁸ that cost me two shilling and twopence a-piece of Yead Miller, by these gloves.

Fal. Is this true, Pistol?

Eva. No; it is false, if it is a pick-purse.

Pist. Ha, thou mountain-foreigner!—Sir John, and master mine.

I combat challenge of this latten bilbo:⁹

Word of denial in thy labilities¹⁰ here;

Word of denial; froth and scum, thou liest.

Shal. By these gloves, then 'twas he.

Nym. Be abised, sir, and pass good humours: I will say, marry, trap, with you, if you run the nut-hook's¹¹ humour on me; that is the very note of it.

Slen. By this hat, then he in the red face had it; for though I cannot remember what I did when you made me drunk, yet I am not altogether an ass.

Fal. What say you, Scarlet and John?

Bard. Why, sir, for my part, I say, the gentleman had drunk himself out of his five sentences.

Eva. It is his five senses: fie, what the ignorance is!

Bard. And being fap,¹² sir, was, as they say, cashier'd; and so conclusions pass'd the concireis.¹³

Slen. Ay, you spake in Latin then too; but 'tis no matter: 'll ne'er be drunk whilst I live again, but in honest, civil, godly company, for this trick: If I be drunk, I'll be drunk with those that have the fear of God, and not with drunken knaves.

Eva. So Got 'dudge me, that is a virtuous mind.

Fal. You hear all these matters denied, gentlemen; you hear it.

Enter MISTRESS ANNE PAGE, with wine; MISTRESS FORD and MISTRESS PAGE following.

Page. Nay, daughter, carry the wine in; we'll drink within.

[Exit ANNE PAGE.

Slen. O heaven! this is mistress Anne Page.

Page. How now, mistress Ford?

Fal. Mistress Ford, by my troth, you are very well met: by your leave, good mistress.

Page. Wife, bid these gentlemen welcome:— Come, we have a hot venison patty to dinner; come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.

[Exeunt all but SHAL. SLENDER, and EVANS.

Slen. I had rather than forty shillings I had my book of Songs and Sonnets¹⁴ here:—

Enter SIMPLE.

How now, Simple! where have you been? I must wait on myself, must I? You have not The Book of Riddles about you, have you?

9 Latten, from the Fr. Laiton, Brass. Bilbo, from Bilboa in Spain where fine sword blades were made. Pistol therefore calls Slender a weak blade of base metal, as one of brass would be.

10 Lips.

11 Metaphorically a bailiff or constable, who hooks or seizes debtors or malefactors with a staff or otherwise. The meaning apparently is, 'if you try to bring me to justice.'

12 Fap was evidently a cant term for Foolish. It may have been derived from the Italian Vappa, which Flo-rio explains as 'any wine that hath lost his force: used also for a man or woman without wit or reason.' In Hutton's Dict. 1553, one of the meanings of the Latin Vappa is a Dissard or foolish man, &c.

13 A military phrase for running the charge in a tournament or attack; here used metaphorically.

14 Slender means a popular book of Shakspeare's time, "Songes and Sonnettes," written by the Earl of Surrey and others," and published by Tointel in 1557.

## SCENE III.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

77

*Sim. Book of Riddles!* why, did you not lend it to Alice Shortcake upon Allhallowmas last, a fortnight afore Michaelmas?"

*Shal.* Come, *coz*; come, *coz*; we stay for you. A word with you, *coz*: marry this, *coz*: There is, as 'were, a kind of tender, made offar aft
by Sir Hugh here;—Do you understand me?

*Shal.* Ay, sir, you shall find me reasonable; if it be so, I shall do that that is reason.

*Shal.* Nay, but understand me.

*Shal.* So I do, sir.

*Eva.* Give ear to his motions, master Slender: I will description the matter to you, if you be capacity of it.

*Slen.* Nay, I will do as my cousin Shallow says: I pray you, pardon me; he's a justice of peace in his country, simple though I stand here.

*Eva.* But this is not the question; the question is concerning your marriage.

*Shal.* Ay, there's the point, sir.

*Eva.* Marry, is it; the very point of it; toress Anne Page.

*Slen.* Why, if it be so, I will marry her upon any reasonable demands.

*Eva.* But can you affect the 'oman? Let us command to know that of your mouth, or of your lips; for divers scholars hold that the lips is parcel of the mouth;—Therefore, precisely, can you carry your good will to the maid?

*Shal.* Cousin Abraham Slender, can you love her?

*Slen.* I hope, sir,—I will do as it shall become one that would do reason.

*Eva.* Nay, Got's lords and his ladies, you must speak possible, if you can carry her your desires towards her.

*Shal.* That you must: Will you, upon good dower, marry her?

*Slen.* I will do a greater thing than that, upon your request, cousin, in any reason.

*Shal.* Nay, conceive me, conceive me, sweet *coz*; what I do is to pleasure you, *coz*: Can you love the maid?

*Slen.* I will marry her, sir, at your request; but if there be no great love in the beginning, yet heaven may decrease it upon better acquaintance, when we are married, and have more occasion to know one another: I hope upon familiarity will grow more contempt: but if you say, *marry her*, I will marry her, that I am freely dissolved, and *dissolutely*.

*Eva.* It is a fery discretion answer; save the *fau* is in the 'ort *dissolutely*: the 'ort *is*, according to our meaning, *resolutely*;—his *meaning* is good.

*Shal.* Ay, I think my cousin meant well.

*Slen.* Ay, or else I would I might be hanged, la.

### *Re-enter* ANNE PAGE.

*Shal.* Here comes fair mistress Anne:—Would I were young for your sake, mistress Anne!

*Eva.* The dinner is on the table; my father de-sires your worships' company.

*Shal.* I will wait on him, fair mistress Anne.

*Eva.* Od's plessed will! I will not be absence at the grace.

### *[Exeunt SHALLOW and SIR H. F.—ANS.*

*Anne.* Will't please your worship to come in, sir?

*Slen.* No, I thank you, forsooth, heartily; I am very well.

*Anne.* The dinner attends you, sir.

*Slen.* I am not a-hungry, I thank you, forsooth:

1. This is an intended blunder. Theobald would in sober sadness have corrected it to Martlemas.

2. i. e. part, a law term, often used in conjunction with its synonyme.

3. It was formerly the custom in England for persons to be attended at dinner by their own servants wherever they dined.

4. *Master of fence* here signifies not merely a fencing-master, but a person who had taken his master's degree in the science. There were three degrees, a master's, a provost's, and a scholar's. For each of these a prize was played with various weapons, in some open place or square. Tarlton the player 'was allowed a master' on the 23d of October, 1587, 'he being ordinary

grome of her majesty's chamber? The unfortunate Robert Greene played his master's prize at Leadenhall with three weapons, &c. The MS. from which this information is derived is a Register belonging to some of the Schools of the noble Science of Defence, among the Sloane MSS.—*Brit. Mus. No. 2530, xxvi. D.*

5. *Veney, or Venue, Fr.* a touch or hit in the body at fencing, &c.

6. The name of a bear exhibited at Paris Garden, in Southwark.

*Slen.* I'll eat nothing; I thank you, sir.

*Shal.* I had rather walk here, I thank you: I bruised my shin the other day with playing at sword and dagger with a master of fence,⁴ three venecs⁵ for a dish of stewed prunes; and, by my troth, I cannot abide the smell of hot meat since. Why do your dogs bark so? be there bears? I the town?

*Anne.* I think there are, sir; I heard them talked of.

*Slen.* I love the sport well; but I shall as soon quarrel at it as any man in England:—You are afraid if you see the bear loose, are you not?

*Anne.* Ay, indeed, sir.

*Slen.* That's meat and drink to me now: I have seen Sackerson⁶ loose twenty times; and have taken him by the chain; but, I warrant you, the women have so cried and shrik'd at it, that it pass'd:⁷—but women, indeed, cannot abide 'em; they are very ill-favour'd rough things.

### *Re-enter* PAGE.

*Page.* Come, gentle master Slender, come; we stay for you.

*Page.* By cock and pye,⁸ you shall not choose, sir: come, come.

*Slen.* Nay, pray you, lead the way.

*Page.* Come on, sir.

*Slen.* Mistress Anne, yourself shall go first.

*Anne.* Not I, sir; pray you, keep on.

*Slen.* Truly, I will not go first, truly, la: I will not do you that wrong.

*Anne.* I pray you, sir.

*Slen.* I'll rather be unmannerly than troublesome: you do yourself wrong, indeed, la.

*[Exeunt.]*

## SCENE II. The same. Enter SIR HUGH EVANS and SIMPLE.

*Eva.* Go your ways, and ask of Doctor Caius' house, which is the way: and there dwells one misress Quickly, which is in the manner of his nurse, or his dry nurse, or his cook, or his laundry,⁹ his washer, and his wringer.

*Simp.* Well, sir.

*Eva.* Nay, it is petter yet:—give her this letter; for it is a 'oman that altogether's acquaintance with mistress Anne Page; and the letter is, to desire and require her to solicit your master's desires to mistress Anne Page: I pray you, be gone. I will make an end of my dinner; there's pippins and cheese to come.

*[Exeunt.]*

## SCENE III. A Room in the Garter Inn. Enter FALSTAFF, HOST, BARDOLPH, NYM, PISTOL, and ROBIN.

*Fal.* Mine host of the Garter—

*Host.* What says my bully-rook? Speak schoolarly, and wisely.

*Fal.* Truly, mine host, I must turn away some of my followers.

7. i. e. passed all expression.

*Slen.* By cock and pye was a popular adjuration. See Note on Henry IV. P. 2, Act v. Sc. 1.

9. i. e. *launder*, from the *Fr. Lavandiere*

78

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT I,

Host. Discard, bully Hercules; cashier; let them wag; trot, trot.

Fal. I sit at ten pounds a week.

Host. Thou'rt an emperor, Cæsar, Keisar,¹ and Pheezar, I will entertain Bardolph; he shall draw, he shall tap: said I well, bully Hector?

Fal. Do so, good mine host.

Host. I have spoke; let him follow: Let me see thee froth, and lime:² I am at a word; follow.

[Exit Host.

Fal. Bardolph, follow him; a tapster is a good trade: an old cloak makes a new jerkin; a withered serving-man; a fresh tapster: Go; adieu.

Bard. It is a life that I have desired; I will thrive.

[Exit BARD.

Pist. O base Gongarian wight! wilt thou the spigot wield?

Nym. He was gotten in drink: Is not the humour conceited? His mind is not heroic, and there's the humour of it.

Fal. I am glad I am so acquit of this tinder-box; his thefts were too open: his filing was like an unskilful singer, he kept not time.

Nym. The good humour is, to steal at a minute's rest.

Pist. Convey, the wise it call: Steal! foh; a fico for the phrase!

Fal. Well, sirs, I am almost out at heels.

Pist. Why then let kibes ensue.

Fal. There is no remedy; I must coney-catch; I must shift.

Pist. Young ravens must have food.

Fal. Which of you know Ford of this town?

Pist. I ken the wight; he is of substance good.

Fal. My honest lads, I will tell you what I am about.

Pist. Two yards, and more.

Fal. No quips now, pistol; indeed I am in the waist two yards about; but I am now about no waste; I am about thrift. Briefly, I do mean to make love to Ford's wife; I spy entertainment in her; she discourses, she carves,⁴ she gives the leer of invitation: I can construe the action of her familiar style, and the hardest voice of her behaviour, to be English'd rightly, is, I am Sir John Falstaff's.

Pist. He hath studied her well, and translated her well; out of honesty into English.

Nym. The anchor is deep: will that humour pass?

Fal. Now, the report goes, she has all the rule of her husband's purse; she hath legions of angels.⁵

Pist. As many devils entertain; and, To her, boy, say I.

Nym. The humour rises; it is good; humour me the angels.

Fal. I have writ me here a letter to her: and here another to Page's wife; who even now gave me good eyes too, examined my parts with most judicious eyelids:⁶ sometimes the beam of her view gilded my foot, sometimes my portly belly.

1 *Keysar* old spelling for *Cæsar*, the general word for an emperor. Kings and Keysars is an old phrase in very common use, *Pheezar*, a made word from Pheeze, in the Induction to Taming of a Shrew.

2 To froth beer and to lime sack were tapster's tricks. Mr. Steevens says the first was done by putting soap in the bottom of the tankard; the other by mixing lime with the wine to make it sparkle in the glass.

3 'A fico for the phrase.' See K. Henry IV. Part 2.

A. S.

4 It seems to have been a mark of kindness when a lady carved to a gentleman. So, in Vittoria Comorbona: "Your husband is wondrous discontented. *Vit.* I did nothing to displease him, I *carved* to him at super time."

5 Gold coin.

6 *Oeillades.* French. *Ogles*, wanton looks of the eyes. *Cotgrave* translates it, 'to cast a sheep's eye.'

7 What distinguishes the languages of Nym from that of the other attendants on Falstaff is the constant repetition of this phrase. In the time of Shakspeare such an affection seems to have been sufficient to mark a character. Some modern dramatists have also thought so.

8 i. e. attention.

9 *Escheatour*, an officer in the Exchequer.

Pist. Then did the sun on dudghill shine.

Nym. I thank thee for that humour.

Fal. O, she did so course o'er my exteriors with such a greedy intention,⁸ that the appetite of her eye did seem to scorch me up like a burning glass! Here's another letter to her: she bears the purse too: she is a region in Guiana, all gold and bounty. I will be cheater⁹ to them both, and they shall be exchequers to me; they shall be my East and West Indies, and I will trade to them both. Go, bear thou this letter to mistress Page; and thou to mistress Ford: we will thrive, lads, we will thrive.

Pist. Shall I Sir Pandárus of Troy become, And by my side wear steel? then, Lucifer take all!

Nym. I will run no base humour; here, take the humour-letter; I will keep the 'haviour of reputation'.

Fal. Hold, sirrah [to ROB.,] bear you these letters tightly;¹⁰

Sail like my pinnace!¹¹ to these golden shores.—Rogues, hence avaunt! vanish like hailstones, go; Trudge, plod, away, o' the hoof; seek shelter, pack!

Falstaff will learn the humour of this age.

French thrift, you rogues; myself, and skirted page.

Pist. Let vultures gripe thy guts!¹² for gourd and fullam¹³ holds,

And high and low beguile the rich and poor: Teste²⁴ I'll have in pouch, when thou shall lack, Base Phrygian Turk?

Nym. I have operations in my head, which be humours of revenge.

Pist. Wilt thou revenge?

Nym. By welkin, and her star!

Pist. With wit, or steel?

Nym. With both the humours, I;

I will discuss the humour of this love to Page.

Pist. And I to Ford shall eke unfold,

How Falstaff, varlet vile,

His dove will prove, his gold will hold,

And his soft couch defile.

Nym. My humour shall not cool:¹ I will incense!¹⁵ Page to deal with poison; I will possess him with yellowness,¹⁶ for the revolt of mien is dangerous: that is my true humour.

Pist. Thou art the Mars of malcontents: I second thee; troop on.

### SCENE IV. A Room in Dr. Caius' House. Enter Mrs. QUICKLY, SIMPLE, and RUGBY.

Quick. What; John Rugby! —I pray thee, go to the casement, and see if you can see my master, master Doctor Caius, coming: if he do, i'faith, and find any body in the house, here will be an old abusing of God's patience, and the king's English.

Rug. I'll go part.

[Exit RUGBY.

Quick. Go; and we'll have a posset for't soon at night, in faith, at the latter end of a sea-coal fire.

10 Cleverly, adroitly.

11 *A pinnace* was a light vessel built for speed, and was also called a *Brigantine*. Under the words *Cata-scopium* and *Celox* in Hutton's Dictionary, 1583, we have 'a Brizantine or Pinnace,' a light ship that goeth to esple.¹ Hence the word is used for a go-between. In Ben Jonson's *Bartholomew Fair*, Justice Overdo says of the pig-woman, "She has been before me, punk, pinnace, and bawd, any time these two and twenty years."

12 A burlesque on a passage in Tamburlaine, or the Scythian Shepherd:

13 And now doth ghastly death

With greedy talons gripe my bleeding heart,

And like a harper tyers on my life."

Again, ibid.

"Griping our bowels with retorted thoughts."

13 In Decker's *Bellman* of London, 1640, among the false dice are enumerated 'a bale of fullams—' a bale of gordes, with as many high men as low men for passage.' The false dice were chiefly made for the name in which they were made is described in The Complete Gamester, 1676, 12mo.

14 Sixpence I'll have in pocket. 15 Intigate.

16 Jealousy.

## SCENE IV.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

79

An honest, willing, kind fellow, as ever servant shall come in house withal; and, I warrant you, no tale-tale, nor no breed-bate:¹ his worst fault is, that he is given to prayer; he is something peevish² that way: but nobody has his fault;—but let that pass.

Sim. Ay, for a fault of a better.

Quick. And master Slender's your master?

Sim. Ay, forsooth.

Quick. Does he not wear a great round beard,³ like a glover's paring knife?

Sim. No, forsooth: he hath but a little wee face, with a little yellow beard; a Cain-coloured beard.⁴

Quick. A softly-sprighted man, is he not?

Sim. Ay, forsooth: but he is as tall a man of his hands,⁵ as any is between this and his head; he hath fought with a warrener.⁶

Quick. How say you?—O, I should remember him; Does he not hold up his head, as it were; and strut in his gait?

Sim. Yes, indeed, does he.

Quick. Well, heaven send Anne Page no worse fortune? Tell master parson Evans, I will do what I can for your master: Anne is a good girl, and I wish—

### Re-enter RUGBY.

Rug. Out, alas! here comes my master.

Quick. We shall all be shent:⁷ Run in here, good young man; go into this closet. [Shuts Simple in the closet.] 'Tis not stay long.—What, John Rugby! John, what, John, I say!—Go, John, go inquire for my master; I doubt, he be not well, that he comes not home:—and down, down, adown-a, ¨c. [Sings.

### Enter Doctor Caius.⁸

Caius. Vat is you sing? I do not like dese toys; pray you, go and vetch me in my closet a haitier verd; a box, a green-a box; Do intend vat I speak? a-green-a box.

Quick. Ay, forsooth, I'll fetch it you. I am glad he went not in himself; if he had found the young man, he would have been horn-mad. [Aside.]

Caius. Fe, fe, fe, fe! mai foi, il fait fort chaud, Je m'en vais a la Cour,—la grande affaire.

Quick. Is it this, sir?

Caius. Ouy; mette le au mon pocket; Depeche, quickly:—Vere is dat knave Rugby?

Quick. What, John Rugby! John!

Rug. Here, sir.

Caius. You are John Rugby, and you are Jack Rugby; Come, take-a your rapier, and come after my heel to de court.

Rug. 'Tis ready, sir, here in the porch.

Caius. By my trot, I tarry too long:—Od's me! Quay-youble? dere is some simples in my closet, dat I will not for the vard I shall leave behind.

Quick. Ah me! he'll find the young man there, and be mad.

Caius. O diable, diable! vat is in my closet?—

1 i. e. breeder of debate, maker of contention.

2 Foolish. Mrs. Quickly possibly blunders, and would say *precise*.

3 See a Note on K. Henry V. Act iii. Sc. 6.

⁴ And what a beard of the general's cut.

4 It is said that Cain and Judas in old pictures and tapestry were constantly represented with yellow beards. In an age when but a small part of the nation could read, ideas were frequently borrowed from these representations. One of the copies reads a cane-coloured beard, i. e. of the colour of cane, and the reading of the 4to. a whey-coloured beard favours this reading.

5 This phrase has been very imperfectly explained by the commentators, though they have written ' about it, and about it.' Malone's quotation from Cotgrave was near the mark, but missed it: "Haut a la main, Homme a la main, Homme de main. A man of his hands; a man of execution or valour; a striker, like enough to lay about him; proud, surlie, sullen, stub-born." So says this truly valuable old dictionary: from which it is evident that a tall man of his hands was only a free version of the French *Homme haut a la main*. This equivocal use of the words *Haut* and

Villany? larron! [Pulling Simple out.] Rugby, my rapier.

Quick. Good master, he content.

Caius. Verefure I be content-a?

Quick. The young man is an honest man.

Caius. Vat shall de honest man do in my closet? dere is no honest man dat shall come in my closet.

Quick. I beseech you, be not so flegmatic; hear the truth of it: He came of an errand to me from parson Hugh.

Caius. Vell.

Sim. Ay, forsooth, to desire her to—

Quick. Peace, I pray you.

Sim. Peace-a-your tongue:—Speak-a your tale.

Quick. To desire this honest gentlewoman, your maid, to speak a good word to mistress Anne Page for my master, in the way of marriage.

Quick. This is all, indeed, la; but I'll ne'er put my finger in the fire, and need not.

Caius. Sir Hugh send-a you?—Rugby, bailleze me some paper:—Tarry you a little-awhile. [Writes.]

Quick. I am glad he is so quiet: if he had been thoroughly moved, you should have heard him so loud, and so melancholy;—But notwithstanding, man, I'll do your master what good I can: and the very yea and the no is, the French Doctor, my master,—I may call him my master, look you, for I keep his house; and I wash, wring, brew, bake, scour, dress meat and drink, make the beds, and do all myself;—

Sim. 'Tis a great charge, to come under one body's hand.

Quick. Are you avied o' that? you shall find it a great charge: and to be up early, and down late; —but notwithstanding (to tell you in your ear; I would have no words of it;) my master himself is in love with mistress Anne Page: but notwithstanding that,—I know Anne's mind,—that's neither here nor there.

Caius. You jack'nape; give-a dis letter to Sir Hugh; by gar, it is a challenge: I will cut his troot in de park; and I will teach a scurvy jack-a-nape priest to meddle or make:—you may be gone; it is not good you tarry here:—by gar, I vill cut all his two stones; by gar, he shall not have a stone to trow at his dog. [Exit SIMPLE.]

Quick. Alas, he speaks but for his friend.

Caius. It is no matter—a for dat:—do not you tell-a me dat I shall have Anne Page for myself? —by gar, I vill kill de Jack priest; and I have appointed mine host of de Jarterre to measure our weapon:—by gar, I vill myself have Anne Page.

Quick. Sir, the maid loves you, and all shall be well: we must give folks leave to prate: What, the good-jer!⁹

Caius. Rugby, come to the court vid me;—By gar, if I have-not Anne Page, I shall turn your head out of my door:—Follow my heels, Rugby.

### [Exeunt CAIUS and RUGY.]

Quick. You shall have-An fools-head of your own. No, I know Anne's mind for that: never a woman in Windsor knows more of Anne's mind

tall will also explain the expression a tall fellow, or a tall man, wherever it occurs. Mercutio ridicules it as one of the affected phrases of the fantasticos of his age, a very good blade,¹⁰ a very tall man?!—Romeo and Juliet, Act ii. Sc. 4.

6 The keeper of a warren.

7 Scolded, reprimanded.

8 It has been thought strange that Shakspeare should take the name of Caius for his Frenchman, as an eminent physician of that name, founder of Caius College, Oxford. Flourished in Elizabeth's reign. But Shakespeare was little acquainted with literary history, and without doubt, from this unusual name, supposed him to have been some foreign quack. The character might however be drawn from the life, for in Jack Do-ver's *Quest of Enquiry*, 1604, a story called 'the Foole of Windsor,' turns upon a simple outlandish Doctor of Physicke.

9 The goijere, i. e. morbus Gallicus. The good-jer and good yeare were common corruptions of this phrase.

## SCENE I.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

81

Mrs. Ford. Boarding, call you it? I'll be sure to keep him above deck.

Mrs. Page. So will I; if he come under my hatches, I'll never to sea again. Let's be revenged on him: let's appoint him a meeting; give him a show of comfort in his suit; and lead him on with a fine-baited delay, till he hath pawn'd his horses to mine Host of the Garter.

Mrs. Ford. Nay, I will consent to act any vil-
lany against him, that may not sully the chariness
of our honesty. O, that my husband saw this letter! it would give eternal food to his jealousy.

Mrs. Page. Why, look where he comes; and my good man too: he's as far from jealousy, as I am from giving him cause; and that, I hope, is an unmeasurable distance.

Mrs. Ford. You are the happier woman.

Mrs. Page. Let's consult together against this greasy knight: Come hither.

[They retire.

Enter FORD, PISTOL, PAGE, and NYM.

Ford. Well, I hope it be not so.

Pist. Hope is a curtail² dog in some affairs:

Sir John affects his wife.

Ford. Why, sir, my wife is not young.

Pist. He woos both high and low, both rich and poor,

Both young and old, one with another, Ford:
He loves the gally-mawfry;³ Ford, perpend.⁴

Ford. Love my wife?

Pist. With liver burning hot:⁵ Prevent or go thou, like Sir Actæon he, with Ring-wood at thy heels: O, odious is the name!

Ford. What name, sir?

Pist. The horn, I say: Farewell.

Take heed; have open eye; for thieves do foot by
night.

Take heed, ere summer comes, or cuckoo-birds do sing.—

Away, Sir corporal Nym.—

Believe it, Page; he speaks sense. [Exit PISTOL.
Ford. I will be patient; I will find out this.

Nym. And this is true. [To Page.] I like not the humour of lying. He hath wronged me in some humours; I should have borne the humoured letter to her; but I have a sword, and it shall bite upon my necessity. He loves your wife; there's the short and the long. My name is corporal Nym; I speak, and I avouch. 'Tis true: my name is Nym, and Falstaff loves your wife.—Adieu! I love not the humour of bread and cheese; and there's the humour of it. Adieu.

Page. The humour of it, quoth'a! here's a fellow frights humour⁶ out of his wits.
Ford. I will seek out Falstaff.
Page. I never heard such a drawing, affecting rogue.
Ford. If I do find it, well.
Page. I will not believe such a Cataian,⁷ though the priest of the town commended him for a true man.
Ford. 'Twas a good sensible fellow: Well.⁸
Page. How now, Meg?
Mrs. Page. Whither go you, George?—Hark you.

1. i. e. the caution which ought to attend on it.

2 A curtail dog was a common dog not meant for sport, part of the tails of such dogs being commonly cut off while they are puppies; it was a prevalent notion that the tail of a dog was necessary to him in running, hence a dog that missed his game was called a curtail, from which our cur is probably derived.

3 A medley.

4 Consider.

5 The *liver* was anciently supposed to be the inspirer of amorous passions. Thus in an old Latin distich: 'Cor ardet, pulmo loquitur, fel commovet iras Spenl ride re facit, coel amare fecur.'

6 The first folio reads—English. The abuse of this word *humour* by the coxcombs of the age had been admirably satirized by Ben Jonson. After a very pertinent disquisition on the real meaning and true application of the word, he concludes thus:

Mrs. Ford. How now, sweet Frank? why art thou melancholy?

Ford. I melancholy! I am not melancholy.—
Get you home, go.

Mrs. Ford. 'Faith thou hast some crotchets in thy head now.—Will you go, mistress Page?

Mrs. Page. Have with you.—You'll come to dinner, George?—Look, who comes yonder: she shall be our messenger to this paltry knight.

[Aside to Mrs. FORD.

Enter MISTRESS QUICKLY.

Mrs. Ford. Trust me, I thought on her: she'll fit it.

Mrs. Page. You are come to see my daughter Anne?

Quick. Ay, forsooth; And, I pray, how does good mistress Anne?

Mrs. Page. Go in with us, and see; we have an hour's talk with you.

[Exeunt MRS. PAGE, MRS. FORD, and MRS. QUICKLY.

Page. How now, master Ford?

Ford. You heard what this knave told me; did you not thy wife?

Page. Yes; and you heard what the other told me.

Ford. Do you think there is truth in them?

Page. Hang 'em, slaves! I do not think the knight would offer it: but these that accuse him in his intent towards our wives, are a yoke of his discarded men; very rogues, now they be out of service.

Ford. Were they his men?

Page. Marry, were they.

Ford. I like it never the better for that.—Does he lie at the Garter?

Page. Ay, marry, does he. If he should intend this voyage towards my wife, I would turn her loose to him; and what he gets more of her than sharp words, let it lie on my head.

Ford. I do not misdoubt my wife; but I would be loath to turn them together: A man may be too confident: I would have nothing lie on my head; I cannot be thus satisfied.

Page. Look, where my ranting host of the Garter comes: there is either aquor in his pate, or money in his purse, when he looks so merrily.—How now, mine host?

Enter Host and SHALLOW.

Host. How now, bully-rook? thou'rt a gentleman: cavalero-justice, I say.

Shal. I follow mine host, I follow.—Good even, and twenty, good master Page! Master Page, will you go with us? we have sport in hand.

Host. Tell him, cavalero-justice; tell him, bully-rook.

Shal. Sir, there is a fray to be fought, between Sir Hugh the Welsh priest, and Caius the French doctor.

Ford. Good mine host o' the Garter, a word with you.

Host. What say'st thou, bully-rook?

[They go aside.

Asp. But that a rook by wearing a pied feather, The cable hatband, or the three-piled ruff,

A yard of shoe-tie, or the Switzers knot On his French garters, should affect a humour, O'tis worse-than most ridiculous.

Cor. He speaks pure truth; and now if an idiot Have but an apish or fantastic strain, It is his *humour*.—

Induction to Every Man Out of his Humour.

Stevens quotes an Epigram from Humours Ordinarie, 1607, to the same effect.

7. i. e. a Chinese, *Cataia, Cathay*, being the name given to China by the old travellers, some of whom have mentioned the dexterous thiev-ing of the people there; hence a sharper or thief was sometimes called a *Cataian*.

8 This and the two preceding speeches are soliloquies of Ford, and have no connection with what Page says, who is also making comments on what had passed without attending to Ford.

11

82

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT. II.

Shal. Will you [*to PAGE*] go with us to behold it? My merry host hath had the measuring of their weapons; and, I think he hath appointed them contrariwise: for, believe me, I hear the parson is no jester. Hark, I will tell you what our sport shall be.

Host. Hast thou no suit against my knight, my guest-cavalier?

Ford. None, I protest: but I'll give you a potte of
of burnt sack to give me recourse to him, and tell
him, my name is Brook; only for a jest.

Host. My hand, bully: thou shall have egress and regress; said I well? and thy name shall be Brook: It is a merry knight.—Will you go, Caveliers?¹?

Shal. Have with you, mine host.

Page. I have heard, the Frenchman hath good skill in his rapier.

Shal. Tut, sir, I could have told you more: In these times you stand on distance, your passes, stoccadoes, and I know not what: 'tis the heart, master Page: 'tis here, 'tis here. I have seen the time, with my long sword,² I would have made you four tall fellows skip like rats.

Host. Here, boys, here, here! shall we wag ?

Page. Have with you:—I had rather hear them scold than fight. [*Escent. Host, SHAL. and PAGE.*

Ford. Though Page be a secure fool, and stands so firmly on his wife's frailty, yet I cannot put off my opinion so easily; She was in his company at Page's house; and, what they made³ there, I know not. Well, I will look further into't; and I have a disguise to sound Falstaff: If I find her honest, I lose not my labour; if she be otherwise, 'tis labour well bestowed.

[Exit.]

## SCENE II. A Room in the Garter Inn. Enter FALSTAFF and PISTOL.

Fal. I will not lend thee a penny.

Pist. Why, then the world's mine oyster,
Which I with sword will open.—

I will retort the sum in equipage,⁴

Fal. Not a penny. I have been content, sir, you should lay my countenance to pawn: I have grated upon my good friends for three reprieves for you and your coach-fellow⁵ Nym; or else you had looked through the grate like a geminy of baboons. I am damned in hell, for swearing to gentlemen my friends, you were good soldiers, and tall fellows: and when mistress Bridget lost the handle of her fan,⁶ I took't upon mine honour, thou hadst it not.

Pist. Didst thou not share ? hadst thou not fifteen pence?

Fal. Reason, you rogue, reason: Think'st thou, I'll endanger my soul gratis? At a word, hang no more about me, I am no gibbet for you:—go.—A short knife and a throng;—'to your manor of Pickthatch,⁷ go.—You'll not bear a letter for me, you rogue! you stand upon your honour!—Why, thou unconfinable baseness, it is as much as I can do to keep the terms of my honour precise. I, I, I my-

1. The folio of 1623 reads *an-heires*, which is unintelligible; the word in the text, the conjecture of Mr. Boaden, Malone considered the best that had been offered. *Caualeires* would have been the orthography of the old copy, and the host has the term frequently in his mouth. Mr. Steevens substituted *on hearts*.

2. Before the introduction of rapiers the swords in use were of an enormous length and sometimes used with both hands. Shallow, with an old man's vanity, censures the innovation, and ridicules the terms and use of the rapier. See note on K. Henry IV. P. 1, Act ii. Sc. 4.

3. An obsolete phrase, signifying—'what they did there.' In Act iv. Sc. 2. of this play we have again, what make you here; for what do you here?

4. *Epitape* appears to have been a cant term, which Warburton conjectured to mean stolen goods. Mr. Steevens thinks it means attendance; i. e. 'if you will lend me the money, I will pay you again in attendance,' but has failed to produce an example of the use of the word in that sense.

5. i. e. he who *draves* along with you, who is joined with you in all your knavery.

6. Fans were costly appendages of female dress in Shakspeare's time. They consisted of ostrich and other

self sometimes, leaving the fear of heaven on the left hand, and hiding mine honour in my necessity, am fain to shuffle, to hedge, and to lurch; and yet, you, rogue, will ensconce⁹ your rags, your cat-a-mountain looks, your red-lattice¹⁰ phrases, and your bold-beating oaths, under the shelter of your honour! You will not do it, you?

Pist. I do relent; what would'st thou more of man?

Enter ROBIN.

Rob. Sir, here's a woman would speak with you.
Fal. Let her approach.

Enter MISTRESS QUICKLY.

Quick. Give your worship good-morrow.

Fal. Good-morrow, good wife.

Quick. Not so, an't please your worship.

Fal. Good maid, then.

Quick. I'll be sworn; as my mother was, the first hour I was born.

Fal. I do believe the swearer: What with me?

Quick. Shall I vouchsafe your worship a word or two?

Fal. Two thousand, fair woman; and I'll vouchsafe thee the hearing.

Quick. There is one Mistress Ford, sir:—I pray, come a little nearer this way:—I myself dwell with master double Cains.

Fal. Well, on: Mistress Ford, you say,⁷

Quick. Your worship says very true: I pray your worship, come a little nearer this way.

Fal. I warrant thee, nobody hears;—mine own people, mine own people.

Quick. Are they so? Heaven bless them, and make them his servants!

Fal. Well: mistress Ford:—what of her?

Quick. Why, sir, she's a good creature. Lord, Lord! your worship's a wanton: Well, heaven forgive you, and all of us, I pray!

Fal. Mistress Ford:—come, mistress Ford,—

Quick. Marry, this is the short and the long of it; you have brought her into such a canaries¹¹ as 'tis wonderful. The best courtier of them all, when the court lay at Windsor, could never have brought her to such a canary. Yet there has been knights, and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches; I warrant you, coach after coach, letter after letter, gift after gift; smelling so sweetly (all musk,) and so rushing, I warrant you, in silk and gold; and in such alligant terms; and in such wine and sugar of the best, and the fairest, that would have won any man's heart; and, I warrant you, they could never get an eye-wink of her.—I had myself twenty an-gels given me this morning: but I defy all angels (in any such sort, as they say), but in the way of honesty:—and, I warrant you, they could never get her so much as sip on a cup with the proudest of them all: and yet there has been earls, nay, which is more, pensioners;¹² but I warrant you, all is one with her.

feathers, fixed into handles, some of which were made of gold, silver, or ivory of curious workmanship.

7. i. e. go and cut purses in a *crowd*. Purses being then worn hanging at the girdle.

8. *Pick't-hatch* was in Turnbull Street, Cow Cross, Clerkenwell, a haunt of the worst part of both sexes. The unseasonable and obstreperous interruptions of the swash-bucklers of that age rendered a *hatch* or half door with spikes upon it a necessary defence to a brothe-l, and hence the term became a cant phrase to denote a part of the town noted for brothels.

9. *A sconce* is a fortification; *to ensconce* is therefore to protect as with a fort.

10. *Alehouse language*. Red lattice windows formerly denoted an alehouse, as the chequers have done since.

11. A mistake of Mrs. Quickly's for *quandaries*. *Cary* was, however, a quick and lively dance mention-ed in All's Well that Ends well, Act ii. Sc. 1.

12. i. e. the band of pensioners. Their dress was remarkably splendid, and therefore likely to attract the notice of Mrs. Quickly. Hence, Shakspeare, in a Midsummer Night's Dream, has selected the gold- en-coated cowlslips to be pensioners to the Fairy Queen.

## SCENE II.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

83

Fal. But what says she to me? be brief, my good she, Mercury.

Quick. Marry, she hath received your letter; for which she thanks you a thousand times: and she gives you to notify, that her husband will be absence from his house between ten and eleven.

Fal. Ten and eleven?

Quick. Ay, forsooth; and then you may come and see the picture, she says, that you wot! of;—master Ford, her husband, will be from home. Alas! the sweet woman leads an ill life with him; he's a very jealous man; she leads a very framespold² life with him, good heart.

Fal. Ten and eleven: Woman, commend me to her; I will not fail her.

Quick. Why, you say well: But I have another messenger to your worship: Mrs. Page hath her hearty commendations to you too;—and let me tell you in your ear, she's as fartuous a civil modest wife, and one (I tell you) that will not miss you morning nor evening prayer, as any is in Windsor, who'er be the other: and she bade me tell your worship, that her husband is seldom from home; but she hopes, there will come a time. I never knew a woman so dote upon a man; surely, I think you have charms, la; yes, in truth.

Fal. Not I, I assure thee; setting the attraction of my good parts aside, I have no other charms.

Quick. Blessing on your heart for³t!

Fal. But, I pray thee, tell me this: has Ford's wife, and Page's wife, acquainted each other how they love me?

Quick. That were a jest, indeed!—they have not so little grace, I hope.—that were a trick, indeed! But mistress Page would desire you to send her your little page of all loves;³ her husband has a marvellous infection to the little page; and, truly, master Page is an honest man. Never a wife in Windsor leads a better life than she does; do what she will, say what she will, take all, pay all, go to bed when she list, rise when she list, all is as she will; and, truly, she deserves it: for if there be a kind woman in Windsor, she is one. You must send her your page; no remedy.

Fal. Why, I will.

Quick. Nay, but do so then: and, look you, he may come and go between you both; and, in any case, have a nay word,⁴ that you may know one another's mind, and the boy never need to understand any thing; for 'tis not good that children should know any wickedness; old folks, you know, have discretion, as they say, and know the world.

Fal. Fare thee well: commend me to them both: there's my purse; I am yet thy debtor.—Boy, go along with this woman.—This news distracts me!

Pist. This punk is one of Cupid's carriers:—
Clap on more sails; pursue, up with your fights;⁵
Give fire; she is my prize, or ocean whom them
all!

Fal. Say'st thou so, old Jack? go thy ways; I'll make more of thy old body than I have done. Will they yet look after thee? Wilt thou, after the expense of so much money, be now a gainer? Good body, I thank thee: Let them say, 'tis grossly done; so it be fairly done, no matter.

1 To *wot* is to know. So in K. Henry VIII. *wot* you what I found?

2 *Frampold* here means *fretful*, *peerish*, or *vexa- tious*. This obsolete word is of uncertain etymology.

3 Of *all loves*, is an adjunction only, and signifies no more than *by all means*, for the sake of all love. It is again used in *Othello* and in *A Midsummer Night's Dream*.

4 A *watchword*.

5 *Fights* are the waist cloths which hang round about the ship to hinder men from being seen in fight; or any place wherein men may cover themselves, and yet use their arms.—*Phillips' World of Words*.

6 It seems to have been a common custom in taverns in Shakspeare's time, to send presents of wine from one room to another either as a memorial of friendship, or (as in the present instance) by way of introduction to

### Enter BARDOLPH.

Bard. Sir John, there's one master Brook below would fain speak with you, and be acquainted with you: and hath sent your worship a morning's draught of sack.⁶

Fal. Brook is his name?

Bard. Ay, sir.

Fal. Call him in: [Exit BARDOLPH.] Such Brooks are welcome to me, that o'erflow such li- quor. Ah! ha! mistress Ford and Page, have I encompass'd you? go to, via!⁷

Re-enter BARDOLPH, with FORD disguised.

Ford. Bless you, sir.

Fal. And you, sir: Would you speak with me?

Ford. I make bold to press with so little preparation upon you.

Fal. You're welcome; What's your will? Give us leave, drawer.

Ford. Sir, I am a gentleman that have spent much; my name is Brook.

Fal. Good master Brook, I desire more acquaintance of you.

Ford. Good Sir John, I sue for yours: not to charge you; for I must let you understand, I think myself in better plight for a lender than you are: the which hath something embolden'd me to this unseason'd intrusion; for they say, if money go before, all ways do lie open.

Fal. Money is a good soldier, sir, and will on.

Ford. Troth, and I have a bag of money here troubles me: if you will help me to bear it, Sir John, take all, or half, for easing me of the carriage.

Fal. Sir, I know not how I may deserve to be your porter.

Ford. I will tell you, sir, if you will give me the hearing.

Fal. Speak, good master Brook; I shall be glad to be your servant.

Ford. Sir, I hear you are a scholar,—I will be brief with you;—and you have been a man long known to me, though I had never so good means, as desire, to make myself acquainted with you. I will discover a thing to you, wherein I must very much lay open mine own imperfection: but, good Sir John, as you have one eye upon my follies, as you hear them unfolded, turn another into the register of your own; that I may pass with a reproof the easier, sith⁹ you yourself know, how easy it is to be such an offender.

Fal. Very well, sir; proceed.

Ford. There is a gentlewoman in this town, her husband's name is Ford.

Fal. Well, sir.

Ford. I have long loved her, and, I protest to you, bestowed much on her; followed her with a doting observance;¹⁰ engrossed opportunities to meet her; fee'd every slight occasion, that could but niggardly give me sight of her; not only bought many presents to give her, but have given largely to many, to know what she would have given: briefly, I have pursued her, as love hath pursued me; which hath been on the wing of all occasions. But whatsoever I have merited, either in my mind or in my means, meed, I am sure, I have received none; unless experience be a jewel: that I have purchased

acquaintance. The practice was continued as late as the Restoration. In the Parliamentary History, vol. xxii. p. 114, we have the following passage from 'The Life of General Monk, by Dr. Price. "I came to the Three Tuns, before Guildhall, where the general had quartered two nights before. I entered the tavern with a servant and portmanteau, and asked for a room, which I had scarce got into but *wine followed me as a present from some citizens desiring leave to drink their morning's draught with me."

7 Via, an Italian word, which Florio explains:— "an adverb of encouragement, on away, go to, away forward, go on, despatch." It appears to have been a common exclamation in Shakspeare's time. Antonini renders it in Latin *eja*, *age*.

8 Since.

9 *Observance* is diligent heed, or attention.—Bul- *tokar*.

84

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT II.

at an infinite rate; and that hath taught me to say
this:

Love like a shadow flies, when substance love pursues;
Pursuing that that flies, and flying what pursues.

Fal. Have you received no promise of satisfaction at her hands?

Ford. Never.

Fal. Have you importuned her to such a purpose?

Ford. Never.

Fal. Of what quality was your love then?

Ford. Like a fair house, built upon another man's ground, so that I have lost my edifice, by mistaking the place where I erected it.

Fal. To what purpose have you unfolded this to me?

Ford. When I have told you that, I have told you all. Some say, that though she appear honest to me, yet, in other places, she enlargeth her mirth so far, that there is shrewd construction made of her. Now, Sir John, here is the heart of my purpose: You are a gentleman of excellent breeding, admirable discourse, of great admittance,¹ authentic in your place and person, generally allowed² for your many warlike, courtlike, and learned preparations.

Fal. O, sir!

Ford. Believe it, for you know it:—There is money; spend it, spend it, spend more; spend all I have; only give me so much of your time in exchange of it, as to lay an amiable siege to the honesty of this Ford's wife: use your art of wooing, win her consent to you; if any man may, you may as soon as any.

Fal. Would it apply well to the vehemency of your affection, that I should win what you would enjoy? Methinks you prescribe to yourself very preposterously.

Ford. O, understand my drift! she dwells so securely on the excellency of her honour, that the folly of my soul dares not present itself; she is too bright to be looked against. Now, could I come to her with any detection in my hand, my desires had instance and argument to commend themselves; I could drive her then from the ward³ of her purity, her reputation, her marriage-vow, and a thousand other her defences, which now are too strongly embattled against me: What say you to't, Sir John?

Fal. Master Brook, I will first make bold with your money; next give me your hand; and last, as I am a gentleman, you shall, if you will, enjoy Ford's wife.

Ford. O good sir!

Fal. Master Brook, I say you shall.

Ford. Want no money, Sir John, you shall want none.

Fal. Want no mistress Ford, Master Brook, you shall want none. I shall be with her (I may tell you), by her own appointment; even as you came in to me, her assistant, or go-between, parted from me: I say, I shall be with her between ten and eleven; for at that time the jealous rascally knave, her husband, will be forth. Come you to me at night; you shall know how I speed.

Ford. I am blest in your acquaintance. Do you know Ford, sir?

Fal. Hang him, poor, poor ³
him not:—yet I wrong him to call him poor; they say, the jealous wittolly knave hath masses of money; for the which his wife seems to me well-favoured, I will use her as the key of theluckily rogue's coffer; and there's my harvest-home.

1 i. e. admitted into all, or the greatest companies.

2 Allowed is approved. So in King Lear:
—"if your sweet sway
Allow obedience," &c.

3 i. e. defence.

4 This is a phrase from the Herald's Office. Falstaff means that he will add more titles to those Ford is already distinguished by.

5 Reginald Scott, in his Discovery of Witchcraft, may be consulted concerning these demons. "Amai-mon," he says, "was King of the East, and Barbatos

Ford. I would you knew Ford, sir; that you might avoid him, if you saw him.

Fal. Hang him, mechanical salt-butter rogue! I will stare him out of his wits; I will awe him with my cudgel; it shall hang like a meteor o'er the cuckold's horns: master Brook, thou shall know, I will predominate o'er the peasant, and thou shall lie with his wife.—Come to me soon at night:—Ford's a knave, and I will aggravate his stile;⁴ thou, master Brook, shall know him for a knave and cuckold:—come to me soon at night.

[Exit.]

Ford. What a damned Epicurean rascal is this! —My heart is ready to crack with impatience.—Who says this is improvident jealousy?—My wife hath sent to him, the hour is fixed, the match is made. Would any man have thought this?—See the hell of having a false woman! my bed shall be abused, my coffers ransacked, my reputation grawn at; and I shall not only receive this villanous wrong, but stand under the adoption of abominable terms, and by him that does me this wrong. Terms! names!—Amaimon sounds well; Lucifer, well; Barbason,⁵ well; yet they are devils' additions, the names of fiends: but cuckold! wittie⁶ cuckold! the devil himself hath not such a name. Page is an ass, a secure ass; he will trust his wife, he will not be jealous: I will rather trust a Fleming with my butter, parson Hugh the Welshman with my cheese, an Irishman with my aqua-vite⁷ bottle, or a thief to walk my ambling gelding, than my wife with herself; then she plots, then she ruminates, then she devises: and what they think in their hearts they may effect, they will break their hearts but they will effect. Heaven be praised for my jealousy!—Eleven o'clock the hour—I will prevent this, detect my wife, be re-venged on Falstaff, and laugh at Page. I will about it; better three hours too soon, than a minute too late. Fie, fie, fie! cuckold! cuckold! cuckold!

[Exit.]

### SCENE III. Windsor Park. Enter CAIUS and RUGBY.

Caius. Jack Rugby.

Rug. Sir.

Caius. Vat is de clock, Jack?

Rug. 'Tis past the hour, sir, that Sir Hugh promised to meet.

Caius. By gar, he has save his soul, dat he is no come: he has pray his Pible yell, dat he is no come: by gar, Jack Rugby, he is dead already, if he be come.

Rug. He is wise, sir; he knew your worship would kill him, if he came.

Caius. By gar, de herring is no dead, so as I vill kill him. Take your rapier, Jack; I vill tell you how I will kill him.

Rug. Alas, sir, I cannot fence.

Caius. Villany, take your rapier.

Rug. Forbear; here's company.

### Enter HOST, SHALLOW, SLENDER, and PAGE.

Host. 'Bless thee, bully doctor.

Shal. Save you, master doctor Caius.

Page. Now, good master doctor!

Slen. Give you good-morrow, sir.

Caius. Vat be all you, one, too, tree, four, come for?

Host. To see thee fight, to see thee foin,⁸ to see thee traverse, to see thee here, to see thee there; to see thee pass thy punto, thy stock, thy reverse, thy distance, thy montant.⁹ Is he dead, my Ethio-pian? is he dead, my Francisco? ha, bully!

a great countie or earle.” But Randle Holme, in his Academy of Armory, informs us that “Amai-mon is the chief whose dominion is on the north part of the infernal gulf; and that Barbatos is like a Sagittarius, and has thirty legions under him.”

6 A tame contented cuckold knowing himself to be one. From the Saxon wittan, to know.

7 Usquebaugh.

8 The ancient term for making a thrust in fencing.

9 Terms in fencing. The stoccado, the reverso, &c. from the Italian.

## SCENE III.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

85

What says my Æsculapius? my Galen? my heart of elder ?¹ ha! is he dead, bully Stale ?² is he dead?

*Caius.* By gar, he is de coward Jack priest of the world; he is not show his face.

*Host.* Thou art a Castilian, king-urinal! Hector of Greece, my boy!

*Caius.* I pray you, bear witness that me have stay six or seven, two, tree hours for him, and he is no come.

*Shal.* He is the wiser man, master doctor: he is a curer of souls, and you a curer of bodies; if you should fight, you go against the hair of your proffessions: is it not true, master Page?

*Page.* Master Shallow, you have yourself been a great fighter, though a man of peace.

*Shal.* Bodykins, master Page, though I now be old, and of the peace, if I see a sword out, my finger itches to make one: though we are justices, and doctors, and churchmen, master Page, we have some salt of our youth in us; we are the sons of women, master Page.

*Page.* 'Tis true, master Shallow.

*Shal.* It will be found so, master Page. Master doctor Caius, I am come to fetch you. I am sworn of the peace; you have showed yourself a wise physician, and Sir Hugh hath shown himself a wise and patient churchman: you must go with me, master doctor.

*Host.* Pardon, guest justice:—A word, monsieur Muck-water.³

*Caius.* Muck-vater; vat is vat?

*Host.* Muck-water, in our English tongue, is valour, bully.

*Caius.* By gar, then I have as much muck-vater as de Englishman:—Scurvy jack-dog priest; by gar, me vill cut his ears.

*Host.* He will clapper-claw vat tightly, bully.

*Caius.* Clapper-de-claw! vat is vat?

*Host.* That is, he will make thee amends.

*Caius.* By gar, me do look, he shall clapper-de-law me; for, by gar, me vill have it.

*Host.* And I will provoke him to't, or let him wag.

*Caius.* Me tank you for dat.

*Host.* And moreover, bully.—But first, master guest, and master Page, and kev cavalero Slender, go you through the town to Frogmore.

*Page.* Sir Hugh is there, is he?

*Host.* He is there: see what humour he is in; and I will bring the doctor about by the fields: will it do well?

*Shal.* We will do it.

*Page, Shal. and Slen. Adieu, good master doctor.* [Exeunt PAGE, SHALLOW, and SLENDER.

*Caius.* By gar, me vill kill de priest; for he speak for a jack-an-ape to Annie Page.

*Host.* Let him die: but, first, sheath thy impatience; throw cold water on thy choler: go about the fields with me through Frogmore; I will bring

theree where Mrs. Anne Page is, at a farmhouse a feasting; and thou shall woo her: 'Cry'd game,⁴ said I well?

*Caius.* By gar, me tank you for dat: by gar, I love you; and I shall procure-a you de good guest, de earl, de knight, de lords, de gentlemen, my patients.

*Host.* For the which, I will be thy adversary towards Anne Page; said I well?

*Caius.* By gar, 'tis good; vell said.

*Host.* Let us wag then.

*Caius.* Come at my heels, Jack Rugby. [Exeunt.

## ACT III.

### SCENE I. A Field near Frogmore. Enter SIR HUGH EVANS and SIMPLE.

*Eva.* I pray you now, good master Slender's serving-man, and friend Simple by your name, which way have you looked for master Caius, that calls himself Doctor of Physic?

*Sim.* Marry, sir, the pittie-ward, the park-ward, every way; old Windsor way, and every way but the town way.

*Eva.* I most fehemently desire you, you will also look that way.

*Sim.* I will, sir.

*Eva.* 'Pless my soul! how full of cholers I am, and trembling of mind!—I shall be glad, if he have deceived me:—how melancholies I am!—I will knog his urinals about his knave's costard,⁵ when I have good opportunities for the 'ork:—'pless my soul!

*To shallow rivers, to whose falls⁶.*

*Melodious birds sing madrigals;*

*There will we make our peds of roses,*

*And a thousand fragrant posies.*

*To shallow—*

'Mercy on me! I have a great dispositions to cry.

*Melodious birds sing madrigals;—*

*When as I sat in Pabylon,⁷.*

*And a thousand vagram posies.*

*To shallow—*

*Sim.* Yonder he is coming this way, Sir Hugh.

*Eva.* He's welcome:—

*To shallow rivers, to whose falls—*

Heaven prosper the right!—What weapons is he?

*Sim.* No weapons, sir: There comes my master, master Shallow, and another gentleman from Frogmore, over the stile, this way.

*Eva.* Pray you, give me my gown; or else keep it in your arms.

*Enter PAGE, SHALLOW, and SLENDER.*

*Shal.* How now, master parson? Good morrow, good Sir Hugh. Keep a gamester from the dice,

1 *Heart of elder.* The joke is that elder has a heart of pith.

2 *Bully-stale and king-urinal,* these epithets will be sufficiently obvious to those who recollect the prevalence of empirical water doctors. *Castilian,* a cant word (like Cataian and Ethiopian), appears to have been generally used as a term of reproach after the defeat of the Spanish Armada. The Host avails himself of the poor doctor's ignorance of English phraseology in applying to him these high-sounding opprobrious epithets; he here means to call him coward.

3 *Drain of a dunghole.*

4 *Steevens tried to give some kind of meaning to this passage.* "Cry'd game," says he, "might mean in those days a professed buck, who was well known by the report of his gallantry as he could have been by proclamation." Warburton conjectures that we should read *Cry'd lim,* that is, "Encourage me, do I not deserve it?" This suite the speaker and occasion, and is therefore very plausible. See the second scene of the third act of this play, where the phrase again occurs.

5 *Head.*

6 This is a part of a beautiful little pastoral, printed among Shakspeare's Sonnets in 1599: but in England's

Helicon, 1600, it is attributed to Christopher Marlowe, and to it is subjoined an answer, called 'The Nymph's Reply,' signed Ignoto, which is thought to be the signature of Sir Walter Raleigh. Walton has inserted them both in his Complete Angler, under the character of that smooth song which was made by Kit Marlowe, now at least fifty years ago; and an answer to it, which was made by Sir Walter Raleigh in his younger days.—'Old fashioned poetry but choicely good.' Sir Hugh miscretes the lines in his panic. The reader will be pleased to find them at the end of the play.

7 This line is from the old version of the 137th Psalm:

> "When we did sit in Babylon,
> The rivers round about,
> Then the remembrance of Sion,
> The tears for grief burst out."

The word *rivers* in the second line was probably brought to Sir Hugh's thoughts by the line of the madrigal he had just repeated; and in his fright he blends the sacred and profane songs together. The old quarto has—'There lived a man in Babylon,' which was the first line of an old song mentioned in Twelfth Night; but the other line is more in character

86

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT III.

and a good student from his book, and it is wonderfu.

Slen. Ah, sweet Anne Page !

Page. Save you, good Sir Hugh!

Eva. 'Pless you from his mercy sake, all of you !

Shal. What ! the sword and the word ! do you study them both, master parson ?

Page. And youthful still, in your doublet and hose, this raw rheumatic day ?

Eva. There is reasons and causes for it.

Page. We are come to you, to do a good office, master parson.

Eva. Fery well: What is it ?

Page. Yonder is a most reverend gentleman, who be like, having received wrong by some person, is at most odds with his own gravity and patience, that ever you saw.

Shal. I have lived fourscore years and upward; I never heard a man of his place, gravity, and learning, so wide of his own respect.

Eva. What is he ?

Page. I think you know him; master doctor Caius, the renowned French physician.

Eva. Got's will, and his passion of my heart! I had as lief you would tell me of a mess of porridge.

Page. Why?

Eva. He has no more knowledge in Hibocrates and Galen,—and he is a knave besides; a cowardly knave, as you would desires to be acquainted withal.

Page. I warrant you, he's the man should fight with him.

Slen. O, sweet Anne Page !

Shal. It appears so, by his weapons:—Keep them asunder; here comes doctor Caius.

Enter HOST, CAIUS, and RUGBY.

Page. Nay, good master parson, keep in your weapon.

Shal. So do you, good master doctor.

Host. Disarm them, and let them question; let them keep their limbs whole, and hack our English.

Caius. I pray you, let-a me speak a word vit your ear: Verefore vill you not meet a-me?

Eva. Pray you, use your patience: In good time.

Caius. By gar, you are de coward, de Jack dog, John ape.

Eva. Pray you, let us not be laughing-stogs to other men's humours; I desire you in friendship, and I will one way or other make you amends: —I will knog your urinals about your knave's cogstcomb, for missing your meetings and appointments.

Caius. Diable! —Jack Rugby,—mine Host de Jarterre, have I not stay for him; to kill him? have I not, at de place I did appoint?

Eva. As I am a Christians soul, now, look you, this is the place appointed; I'll be judgment by mine host of the Garter.

Host. Peace, I say Guallia and Gaul, French and Welsh; soul-curer and body-curer.

Caius. Auy, dat is very good! excellent!

Host. Peace, I say; hear mine host of the Garter. Am I politic? am I subtle? am I a Machia vel? Shall I lose my doctor? no; he gives me the potions, and the motions. Shall I lose my parson? my priest, my Sir Hugh? no; he gives me the proverbs and the no-verbs.—Give me thy hand, terrestrial; so:—Give me thy hand, celestial; so: —Boys of art, I have deceived you both; I have directed you to wrong places: your hearts are mighty, your skins are whole, and let burnt sack be the issue.—Come, lay their swords to pawn: —Follow me, lad of peace; follow, follow, follow.

Shal. Trust me, a mad host:—Follow, gentlemen, follow.

Slen. O, sweet Anne Page !

[Exeunt SHAL. SLEN. PAGE, and Host.

1. Fool.

2. Flouting-stock.

3. i. e. *scalld-head*, a term of reproach. Chaucer impreates on the scrivener who miswrites his verse—“Under thy long locks mayest thou have the *scalle*.”

Caius. Ha! do I perceive dat? have you make a de sot! of us? ha, ha!

Eva. This is well; he has made us his vloutling. ²—I desire you, that we may be friends; and let us knog our prains together, to be revenge on this same scall,³ scurvy, cogging companion, the host of the Garter.

Caius. By gar, vit all my heart; he promise to bring me vere is Anne Page: by gar, he deceive me too.

Eva. Well, I will smite his nodcles:—Pray you, follow.

[Exeunt.

### SCENE II. The street in Windsor. Enter MISTRESS PAGE and ROBIN.

Mrs. Page. Nay, keep your way, little gallant; you were wont to be a follower, but now you are a leader: Whether had you rather lead mine eyes, or eye your master's heels?

Rob. I had rather, forsooth, go before you like a man, than follow him like a dwarf.

Mrs. Page. O you are a flattering boy; now, I see you'll be a courtier.

Enter FORD.

Ford. Well met, mistress Page: Whither go you?

Mrs. Page. Truly, sir, to see your wife; Is she at home?

Ford. Ay; and as idle as she may hang together, for want of company: I think, if your husbands were dead, you two would marry.

Mrs. Page. Be sure of that,—two other husbands.

Ford. Where had you this pretty weather-cock?

Mrs. Page. I cannot tell what the dickens his name is my husband had him of: What do you call your knight's name, sirrah?

Rob, Sir John Falstaff.

Ford. Sir John Falstaff!

Mrs. Page. He, he; I can never hit on's name. There is such a league between my good man and he! —Is your wife at home, indeed?

Ford. Indeed she is.

Mrs. Page. By your leave, sir; —I am sick, till I see her.

[Exeunt MRS. PAGE and ROBIN.

Ford. Has Page any brains? hath he any eyes? hath he any thinking? Sure, they sleep; he hath no use of them. Why, this boy will carry a letter twenty miles, as easy as a cannon will shoot point blank twelve score. He pieces-out his wife's inclination; he gives her folly motion and advantage: and now she's going to my wife, and Falstaff's boy with her. A man may hear this shower sing in the wind! —and Falstaff's boy with her! —Good plots! —they are laid; and our revolted wives share damnation together. Well; I will take him; then torture my wife, pluck the borrowed veil of modesty from the so-seeming mistress Page, divulge Page himself for a secure and wilful Acteon; and to these violent proceedings all my neighbours shall cry aim.⁴ [Clock strikes.] The clock gives me my cue, and my assurance bids me search; there I shall find Falstaff: I shall be rather praised for this, than mocked; for it is as positive as the earth is firm, that Falstaff is there: I will go.

Enter PAGE, SHALLOW, SLENDER, HOST, SIR HUGH EVANS, CAIUS, and RUGBY.

Shal. Page, ³c. Well met, master Ford.

Ford. Trust me a good knot: I have good cheer at home; and, I pray you all, go with me.

Shal. I must excuse myself, master Ford.

4. To cry *aim*, in archery was *to encourage* the archers by crying out *aim* when they were about to shoot. Hence it came to be used for to applaud or encourage, in a general sense. It seems that the spectators in general cried *aim* occasionally, as a mere word of encouragement or applause. Thus, in K. John, *Act ii. Sc. 1*.

¹ It ill beseeches this presence to cry *aim*

To these ill tuned repetitions.³

## SCENE III.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

87

Slen. And so must I, sir; we have appointed to dine with mistress Anne, and I would not break with her for more money than I'll speak of.

Shal. We have lingered about a match between Anne Page and my cousin Slender, and this day we shall have our answer.

Slen. I hope, I have your good will, father Page.

Page. You have, master Sfender; I stand wholly for you:—but my wife, master doctor, is for you altogether.

Caius. Ay, by gar; and de maid is love a me; my harsh-a Quickly tell me so mush.

Host. What say you to young master Fenton? he capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holday,¹ he smells April and May: he will carry't, he will carry't; 'tis April in his buttons;² he will carry't.

Page. Not by my consent, I promise you. The gentleman is of no having:³ he kept company with the wild Prince and Poins; he is of too high a region, he knows too much. No, he shall not knit a knot in his fortunes with the finger of my substance: if he take her, let him take her simply; the wealth I have waits on my consent, and my consent goes not that way.

Ford. I beseech you, heartily, some of you go home with me to dinner: besides your cheer, you shall have sport; I will show you a monster.—Master doctor, you shall go;—so shall you, master Page;—And you, Sir Hugh.

Shal. Shall you well;—we shall have the freer wooing at master Fenton.

[Exeunt SHALLOW and SLENDER.

Caius. Go home, John Rugby; I come anon.

[Exit RUGBY.

Host. Farewell, my hearts: I will to my honest knight Falstaff, and drink canary with him.

[Exit Host.

Ford. [Aside.] I think, I shall drink in pipe-wine⁴ first with him; I'll make him dance. Will you go, gentles?

All. Have with you, to see this monster.

[Exeunt.

### SCENE III. A Room in Ford's House. Enter MRS. FORD and MRS. PAGE.

Mrs. Ford. What, John! what, Robert!

Mrs. Page. Quickly! quickly: Is the buck-basket—

Mrs. Ford. I warrant:—What, Robin, I say.

Enter Servants with a basket.

Mrs. Page. Come, come, come.

Mrs. Ford. Here, set it down.

Mrs. Page. Give your men the charge; we must be brief.

Mrs. Ford. Marry, as I told you before, John and Robert, be ready here hard by in the brew-house; and when I suddenly call you, come forth, and (without any pause, or staggering) take this

basket on your shoulders: that done, trudge with it in all haste, and carry it among the whitsters⁵ in Datchet mead, and there empty it in the muddy ditch, close by the Thames's side.

Mrs. Page. You will do it?

Mrs. Ford. I have told them over and over; they lack no direction: Be gone, and come when you are called.

Mrs. Page. Here comes little Robin.

Enter ROBIN.

Mrs. Ford. How now, my eyas-musket?⁶ what news with you?

Rob. My master Sir John has come in at your back door, mistress Ford; and requests your company.

Mrs. Page. You little Jack-a-lent,⁷ have you been true to us?

Rob. Ay, I'll be sworn: My master knows not of your being here; and hath threatened to put me into everlasting liberty, if I tell you of it; for, he swears, he'll turn me away.

Mrs. Page. Thou art a good boy; this secrecy of thine shall be a tailor to thee, and shall make thee a new doublet and hose.—I'll go hide me.

Mrs. Ford. Do so:—Go tell thy master, I am alone. Mistress Page, remember you your cue.

[Exit ROBIN.

Mrs. Page. I warrant thee; if I do not act it, hiss me.

[Exit MRS. PAGE.

Mrs. Ford. Go to then: we'll use this unwholesome humidity, this gross watery pumphion;—we'll teach him to know turtles from jays.⁸

Enter FALSTAFF.

Fal. Have I caught thee, my heavenly jewel?⁹ Why, now let me die, for I have lived long enough; this is the period of my ambition: O this blessed hour!

Mrs. Ford. O sweet Sir John!

Fal. Mistress Ford, I cannot cog, I cannot prate, mistress Ford. Now shall I sin in my wish: I would thy husband were dead: I'll speak it before the best lord, I would make thee my lady.

Mrs. Ford. I your lady, Sir John! alas, I should be a pitiful lady.

Fal. Let the court of France show me such another. I see how thine eye would emulate the diamond: Thou hast the right arched bent¹⁰ of the brow, that becomes the ship-tire, the tire-valiant, or any tire of Venetian admittance.¹¹

Mrs. Ford. A plain kerchief, Sir John: my brows become nothing else; nor that well neither.

Fal. By the Lord, thou art a traitor to say so: thou would'st make an absolute courtier; and the firm fixture of thy foot would give an excellent motion to thy gait, in a semi-circled farthingale. I see what thou wert, if fortune thy fate¹² were not: nature is thy friend: Come, thou canst not hide it.

Mrs. Ford. Believe me, there's no such thing in me.

1 To speak out of the common style, superior to the vulgar, in allusion to the better dress worn on holidays. So in K. Henry IV. P. I.

2 Alluding to an ancient custom among rustics, of trying whether they should succeed with their mistresses by carrying the flower called bachelor's buttons in their pockets. They judged of their good or bad success by their growing or not growing there. Hence, to wear bachelor's buttons, seems to have grown into a phrase for being unmarried.

3 i. e. Fortune or possessions. So, in Twelfth Night:

—'My having is not much;

I'll make division of my present with you:

Hold, there is half my coffer.³

4 Canary. Is the name of a dance as well as of a wine. Pipe-wine is wine, not from the bottle but the pipe or cask. The jest consists in the ambiguity of the word, which signifies both a cask of wine and a musical instrument.—'I'll give him pipe wine, which will make him dance.'

5 Bleachers of linen.

6 Young sparrow-hawk, here used as a jocular term for a small child.

7 A stuffed puppet thrown at throughout lent, as cocks were at shrovetide. So, in 'The Weakest goes to the Wall,' 1600.

'A mere anatomy a Jack of Lent.'

8 i. e. honest women from loose ones. The word Putta in Italian signifies both a Jay and a loose woman. So, in Cymbeline:

—'some Jay of Italy'

Whose mother was her painting,'&c.

9 This is the first line in the second song of Sidney's Astrophel and Stella.

10 First folio: —'beauty'.

11 That is, any fanciful head-dress worn by the celebrated beauties of Venice, or approved by them. In how much request the Venetian tire or head-dress was formerly held, appears from Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, 1624. 'Let her have the Spanish gait, the Venetian tire,' Italian compliments and endowments.

12 Fortune my Foe is the beginning of a popular old ballad enumerating all the misfortunes that fall on mankind through the caprice of Fortune. The tune was the same with that of 'Death and the Lady,' to which the metrical lamentations of extraordinary criminals were chanted for two hundred years and more.

88

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT III.

Ful. What made me love thee? let that persuade thee, there's something extraordinary in thee. Come, I cannot cog, and say thou art this and that, like a many of these lisping hawthorn buds, that come like women in men's apparel, and smell like Bucklers-bury¹ in simple-time; I cannot: but I love thee; none but thee; and thou deservest it.

Mrs. Ford. Do not betray me, sir; I fear you
love mistress Page.

Ful. Thou might'st as well say, I love to walk
by the Counter²-gate; which is as hateful to me
as the reek of a lime-kiln.³

Mrs. Ford. Well, heaven knows how I love you;
and you shall one day find it.

Ful. Keep in that mind; I'll deserve it.

Mrs. Ford. Nay, I must tell you, so you do; or
else I could not be in that mind.

Rob. [within.] Mistress Ford, mistress Ford! here's mistress Page at the door, sweating and blowing, and looking wildly, and would needs speak with you presently.

Ful. She shall not see me; I will ensonce me
behind the arras.⁴

Mrs. Ford. Pray you, do so; she's a very tattling
woman.—

[FALSTAFF hides himself.

What's the matter? how now?

Mrs. Page. O mistress Ford, what have you
done? You're ashamed, you are overthrown, you
are undone for ever.

Mrs. Ford. What's the matter, good mistress
Page?

Mrs. Page. O well-a-day, mistress Ford! having
an honest man to your husband, to give him such
cause of suspicion!

Mrs. Ford. What cause of suspicion?

Mrs. Page. What cause of suspicion?—Out upon
you! how am I mistook in you!

Mrs. Ford. Why, alas! what's the matter?

Mrs. Page. Your husband's coming hither, woe
man, with all the officers in Windsor, to search for
a gentleman, that, he says, is here now in the house,
by your consent, to take an ill advantage of his ab-
sence: You are undone.

Mrs. Ford. Speak louder.—[Aside.]—'Tis not so,
I hope.

Mrs. Page. Pray heaven it be not so, that you
have such a man here; but 'tis most certain your
husband's coming with half Windsor at his heels, to
search for such a one. I come before to tell you:
If you know yourself clear, why I am glad of it;
but if you have a friend here, convey, convey him
out. Be not amazed: call all your senses to you;
defend your reputation, or bid farewell to your good
life for ever.

Mrs. Ford. What shall I do?—There is a gen-
tleman, my dear friend; and I fear not mine own
shame, so much as his peril: I had rather than a
thousand pound, he were out of the house.

1 Formerly chiefly inhabited by druggists, who sold all kinds of herbs green as well as dry.

2 The *Counter* as a prison was odious to Falstaff.

3 So, in Coriolanus—

—'Whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens.'

The name of this prison was a frequent subject of jocularity with our ancestors. Shakspeare has availed himself of it in the Comedy of Errors. My old acquaintance Baret records one pleasantly enough in his Alveary, 1575.—"We sale Merrily of him who hath been in the Counter or such like places of prison: He can sing his counter-tenor very well. And in anger we say, I will make you sing a counter-tenor for this gear: meaning imprisonment."

"The spaces left between the walls and wooden frames on which the tapestry was hung, were not more commodious to our ancestors, than to the authors of ancient dramatic pieces.

5 Bleaching time.

6 These words, which are characteristic, and spoken to Mrs. Page aside, deserve to be restored from the old quarto. He had used the same words before to Mrs. Ford.

Mrs. Page. For shame, never stand, you had rather, and you had rather; your husband's here at hand, bethink you of some conveyance: in the house you cannot hide him.—O, how have you deceived me!—Look, here is a basket; if he be of any reasonable stature, he may creep in here; and throw foul linen upon him, as if it were going to bucking: Or, it is whiting-time⁵, send him by your two men to Datchet mead.

Mrs. Ford. He's too big to go in there: What
shall I do?

Re-enter FALSTAFF.

Ful. Let me see't; let me see't! O let me see't!
I'll in, I'll in;—follow your friend's counsel:—I'll in.

Mrs. Page. What! Sir John Falstaff! Are these
your letters, knight?

Ful. I love thee, and none but thee;⁶ help me
away: let me creep in here; I'll never.

[He goes into the basket; they cover him with foul linen.

Mrs. Page. Help to cover your master, boy:
Call your men, mistress Ford:—You dissembling
knight!

Mrs. Ford. What, John, Robert, John! [Exit Robin; Re-enter Servants.] Go take up these clothes here, quickly; where's the cowl-staff? look, how you drumble:⁷⁸ carry them to the laundress in Datchet mead;⁷⁹ quickly, come.

Enter FORD, PAGE, CAIUS, and SIR HUGH
EVANS.

Ford. Pray you, come near: if I suspect
without cause, why then make sport at me, then let me
be your jest; I deserve it.—How now? whither
bear you this?

Serv. To the laundress, forsooth.

Mrs. Ford. Why, what have you to do whither
they bear it? You were best meddle with buck-
washing.

Ford. Buck? I would I could wash myself of the
buck! Buck! buck? buck? Ay, buck? I warrant
you, buck; and of the season too, it shall appear.
[Exeunt Servants with the basket.] Gentlemen, I
have dreamed to-night; I'll tell you my dream.
Here, here, here my keys: ascend my chambers,
search, seek, find out: I'll warrant we'll unkennel
the fox:—'Let me stop this way first;—So, now
uncap.¹⁰

Page. Good master Ford, be contented: you
wrong yourself too much.

Ford. True, master Page,—Up, gentlemen; you
shall see sport anon: follow me, gentlemen. [Eva.

Eva. This is fery fantastical humours, and jeal-
ousies.

Caius. By gar, 'tis no de fashion of France: it is not jealous in France.

Page. Nay, follow him, gentlemen, see the issue
of his search. [Exeunt EVANS, PAGE, and CAIUS.

Mrs. Page. Is there not a double excellency in
this?

Mrs. Ford. I know not which pleases me better,
that my husband is deceived, or Sir John.

7 A staff used for carrying a coul or tub with two
handles to fetch water in. "Bicollo, a cowle-staffe to
carie behind and before with, as they use in Italy to
carie two buckets at once."—Florio's Dictionary, 1598.

8 To drumble and drone meant to move sluggishy.
To drumble, in Devonshire, means to mutter in a sullen
and inarticulate voice. A drumble drone, in the western
dialect signifies a drone or humble-bee. That master
genius of modern times, who knows so skilfully how to
adapt his language to the characters and manners of the
age in which his fable is laid, has adopted this word in
"The Fortimes of Nigel," vol. ii. p. 298:—"Why how
she drumbles—"I warrant she stops to take a sip on the
road."

9 Dennis observes that, 'it is not likely Falstaff
would suffer himself to be carried to Datchet mead,
which is half a mile from Windsor; and it is plain that
they could not carry him, if he made any resistance.'
10 Hamner proposed to read uncouple; but, perhaps,
uncape had the same signification. It means, at any
rate, to begin the hunt after him, when the holes for es-
cape had been stopped.

## SCENE IV.

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

89

Mrs. Page. What a taking was he in, when your husband asked who? was in the basket!

Mrs. Page. I am half afraid he will have need of washing; so throwing him into the water will do him a benefit.

Mrs. Page. Hang him, dishonest rascal! I would all of the same strain were in the same distress.

Mrs. Ford. I think my husband hath some special suspicion of Falstaff's being here; for I never saw him so gross in his jealousy till now.

Mrs. Page. I will lay a plot to try that: And we will yet have more tricks with Falstaff: his disloyal disease will scarce obey this medicine.

Mrs. Ford. Shall we send that foolish carrion, mistress Quickly, to him, and excuse his throwing into the water; and give him another hope, to betray him to another punishment?

Mrs. Page. We'll do it; let him be sent for tomorrow eight o'clock to have amends.

Re-enter FORD, PAGE, CAIUS, and SIR HUGH EVANS.

Ford. I cannot find him may be the knave bragged of that he could not compass.

Mrs. Page. Heard you that?

Mrs. Ford. Ay, ay; peace:—You use me well, master Ford, do you?

Ford. Ay, I do so.

Mrs. Ford. Heaven make you better than your thoughts?

Ford. Amen.

Mrs. Page. You do yourself mighty wrong, master Ford.

Ford. Ay, ay; I must bear it.

Eva. If there be any pody in the house, and in the chambers, and in the coffers, and in the presses, heaven forgive my sins at the day of judgment.

Caius. By gar, nor I too; dere are no bodies.

Page. Fie, fie, master Ford! are you not ashamed? What spirit, what devil suggests this imagination? I would not have your distemper in this kind for the wealth of Windsor Castle.

Ford. 'Tis my fault, master Page: I suffer for it.

Eva. You suffer for a pad conscience: your wife is as honest a 'omans as I will desires among five thousand, and five hundred too.

Caius. By gar, I see 'tis an honest woman.

Ford. Well;—I promised you a dinner:—Come, come, walk in the park: I pray you, pardon me; I will hereafter make known to you, why I have done this.—Come, wife;—Come, mistress Page; I pray you pardon me; pray heartily, pardon me.

Page. Let's go in, gentlemen; but, trust me, we'll mock him. I do invite you to-morrow morning to my house to breakfast; after, we'll be a birding together; I have a fine hawk for the bush: Shall it be so?

Ford. Any thing.

Eva. If there is one, I shall make two in the company.

Caius. If there be one or two, I shall make-a de turd.

Eva. In your teeth: for shame.

Ford. Pray you go, master Page.

Eva. I pray you now remembrance to-morrow, on the lousy knave, mine host.

Caius. Dat is good; by gar, vit all my heart.

Eva. A lousy knave; to have his gibes, and his mockeries.

[Exeunt]

1. Ritson thinks we should read what. This emendation is supported by a subsequent passage, where Falstaff says: "the jealous knave asked them once or twice what was in the basket." It is remarkable that Ford asked no such question.

2. Some light may be given to those who shall endea-vour to calculate the increase of English wealth, by ob-serving that Latymer, in the time of Edward VI. men-tions it as a proof of his father's prosperity, "that though but a yeoman, he gave his daughters five pounds each for their portion." At the latter end of Elizabeth, seven hundred pounds were such a temptation to court-ship, as made all other motives suspected. Congreve makes twelve thousand pounds more than counter-balance to the affection of Belinda. No poet will now fly his favourite character at less than fifty thousand. Below we have:

### SCENE IV. A Room in Page's House. Enter FENTON and MISTRESS ANNE PAGE.

Fent. I see, I cannot get thy father's love;

Therefore, no more turn me to him, sweet Nan.

Anne. Alas! how then?

Fent.

Why, thou must be thyself.

He doth object, I am too great of birth; And that, my state being gall'd with my expense, I seek to heal it only by his wealth:

Besides these, other bars he lays before me,

My riots past, my wild societies;

And tells me, 'tis a thing impossible

I should love thee, but as a property.

Anne. May be, he tells you true.

Fent. No, heaven so speed me in my time to come!

Albeit, I will confess, thy father's wealth?

Was the first motive that I woo'd thee, Anne;

Yet, wooing thee, I found thee of more value

Than stamps in gold, or sums in sealed bags;

And 'tis the very riches of thyself.

Anne. Now, master Fenton,

Yet seek my father's love: still seek it, sir:

If opportunity and humblest suit

Cannot attain it, why then—Hark you hither.

[They converse apart.]

### Enter SHALLOW, SLENDER, and MRS. QUICKLY.

Shal. Break their talk, mistress Quickly; my kinsman shall speak for himself.

Slen. I'll make a shaft or a bolt on't;³ slid, tis but venturing.

Shal. Be not dismay'd.

Slen. No, she shall not dismay me: I care not for that,—but that I am afeard.

Quick. Hark ye; master Slender would speak a word with you.

Anne. I come to him.—This is my father's choice. O, what a world of vile ill-favour'd faults

Looks handsome in three hundred pounds a year!

[Aside.]

Quick. And how does good master Fenton? Pray you, a word with you.

Shal. She's coming; to her, coz. O boy, thou

hadst a father!

Slen. I had a father, mistress Anne;—my uncle can tell you good jests of him:—Pray you, uncle, tell mistress Anne the jest, how my father stole two geese out of a pen, good uncle.

Shal. Mistress Anne, my cousin loves you.

Slen. Ay, that I do; as well as I love any woman in Gloucestershire.

Shal. He will maintain you like a gentlewoman.

Slen. Ay, that I will, come cut and long tail,⁴ under the degree of a 'squire.

Shal. He will make you a hundred and fifty pounds jointure.

Anne. Good master Shallow, let him woo for himself.

Shal. Marry, I thank you for it; I thank you for that good comfort. She calls you, coz: I'll leave you.

Anne. Now, master Slender.

Slen. Now, good mistress Anne.

Anne. What is your will?

Slen. My will? od's heartlings, that's a pretty jest, indeed! I ne'er made my will yet, I thank heaven; I am not such a sickly creature, I give heaven praise.

Anne. I mean, master Slender, what would you with me?

'O, what a world of vile ill-favour'd faults

3. A shaft was a long arrow, and a bolt a thick short one. The proverb probably means "I'll make something or other of it.—I will do it by some means or other."

4. The sense is obviously "Come who will to contend with me, under the degree of a squire." Cut and long-tail means all kinds of curtail curs, and sporting dogs, and all others. It is a phrase of frequent occurrence in writers of the period; every kind of dog being comprehended under cut and long-tail, every rank of people in the expression when metaphorically used.

12

90

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT III.

Slen. Truly, for mine own part, I would little or
nothing with you: Your father, and my uncle, have
made motions; if it be my luck, so: if not, happy
man be his dole!¹¹ They can tell you how things
go, better than I can: You may ask your father;
here he comes.

Enter PAGE and MISTRESS PAGE.

Page. Now, master Slender :—Love him, daugh-
ter Anne.—

Why, how now! what does master Fenton here ?
You wrong me, sir, thus still to haunt my house :
I told you, sir, master Page, be not impatient.

Fent. Nay, master Page, be not impatient.

Mrs. Page. Good master Fenton, come not to my
child.

Page. She is no match for you.

Fent. Sir, will you hear me?

Page.

No, good master Fenton.
Come, master Shallow ; come, son Slender ; in :—
Knowing my mind, you wrong me, master Fenton.

Quick. Speak to mistress Page.

Fent. Good mistress Page, for that I love your
daughter

In such a righteous fashion as I do,

Perforce, against all checks, rebukes, and manners,
I must advance the colours of my love,

And not retire : Let me have your good will.

Anne. Good mother, do not marry me to yond
fool.

Mrs. Page. I mean it not ; I seek you a better
husband.

Quick. That's my master, master doctor.

Anne. Alas, I had rather be set quick ! the earth,

And bowl'd to death with turnips.

Mrs. Page. Come, trouble not yourself: Good
master Fenton,

I will not be your friend, nor enemy.

My daughter will I question how she loves you,
And as I find her, so am I affected;

'Till then, farewell, sir :—she must needs go in ;

Her father will be angry.

[Exeunt MRS. PAGE and ANNE.

Fent. Farewell, gentle mistress ; farewell, Nan.

Quick. This is my doing, now :—Nay, said I,
will you cast away your child on a fool, and a physi-
cian? Look on master Fenton :—this is my doing.

Fent. I thank thee; and I pray thee, once² to
night.

Give my sweet Nan this ring : There's for thy pains.

[Exit.]

Quick. Now heaven send thee good fortune ! A
kind heart he hath: a woman would run through fire
and water for such a kind heart. But yet, I would
my master had mistress Anne ; or I would master
Slender had her ; or, in sooth, I would master Fen-
ton had her : I will do what I can for them all three;
for so I have promised, and I'll be as good as my
word; but speciously³ for master Fenton. Well,
I must of another errand to Sir John Falstaff from
my two mistresses: What a beast am I to slack⁴ it?

[Exit.]

### SCENE V. A Room in the Garter Inn. Enter
FALFSTAFF and BARDOLPH.

Ful. Bardolph, I say,—

Bard. Here, sir.

Ful. Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast
in't. [Exit BARD.] Have I lived to be carried in a
basket, like a barrow of butcher's offal ; and to be
thrown into the Thames? Well; if I be served such
another trick, I'll have my brains ta'en out, and
butter'd, and give them to a dog for a new year's
gift. The rogues slighted me into the river with as
little remorse,⁵ as they would have drowned a bitch's
blind puppies, fifteen ? the litter : and you may
know by my size, that I have a kind of alacrity in
sinking; if the bottom were as deep as hell, I should
down. I had been drowned, but that the shore was

1 This is a proverbial expression of frequent occurrence. The apparent signification here is: 'Happiness be his portion who succeeds best,' but the general meaning of the phrase may be interpreted: 'Let his portion

shelvy and shallow; a death that I abhor; for the
water swells a man; and what a thing should I
have been, when I had been swelled! I should have
been a mountain of mummy.

Re-enter BARDOLPH, with the wine.

Bard. Here's mistress Quickly, sir, to speak
with you.

Fd. Come, let me pour in some sack to the
Thames water; for my belly's as cold, as if I had
swallowed snow-balls for pills to cool the reins.
Call her in.

Bard. Come in, woman.

Enter MRS. QUICKLY.

Quick. By your leave; I cry you mercy: Give
your worship good-morrow.

Fd. Take away these chalices:⁶ Go brew me a
pottle of sack finely.

Bar. With eggs, sir?

Fd. Simple of itself; I'll no bullet-spealm in my
breast. [Exit BARDOLPH.]—How now?

Quick. Marry, sir, I come to your worship from
mistress Ford.

Fd. Mistress Ford! I have had ford enough: I
was thrown into the ford: I have my belly full of
ford.

Quick. Alas the day! good heart, that was not
her fault; she does so take on with her men; they
mistook their erection.

Fd. So did I mine, to build upon a foolish wo-
man's promise.

Quick. Well, she laments, sir, for it, that it would
yearn your heart to see it. Her husband goes this
morning a birding; she desires you once more to
come to her between eight and nine : I must carry
her word quickly: she'll make you amends, I war-
rant you.

Fd. Well, I will visit her: Tell her so; and bid
her think what a man is : let her consider his frail-
ty, and then judge of his credit.

Quick. I will tell her.

Fd. Do so. Between nine and ten say'st thou?

Quick. Eight and nine, sir.

Fd. Well, be gone : I will not miss her.

Quick. Peace be with you, sir! ...

[Exit.]

Fd. I marvel, I hear not of master Brook ; he
sent me word to stay within ; I like his money well.
O, here he comes.

Enter FORD.

Ford. Bless you, sir!

Fd. Now, master Brook ? you come to know
what hath passed between me and Ford's wife?

Ford. That, indeed, Sir John, is my business.

Fd. Master Brook, I will not lie to you; I was
at her house the hour she appointed me.

Ford. And how sped you, sir?

Fd. Very ill-favouredly, master Brook.

Ford. How so, sir? Did she change her determi-
nation?

Fd. No, master Brook ; but the peaking cornuto,
her husband, master Brook, dwelling in a continual
'larum of jealousy, comes me in the instant of our
encounter, after we had embraced, kissed, protested,
and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy;
and at his heels a rabble of his companions, thither
provoked and instigated by his distemper, and, for-
sooth, to search his house for his wife's love.

Ford. What, while you were there?

Fd. While I was there.

Ford. And did he search for you, and could not
find you?

Fd. You shall hear. As good luck would have
it, comes in one mistress Page ; gives intelligence of
Ford's approach ; and, by her invention, and Ford's
wife's distraction,⁷ they conveyed me into a buck-
basket.

or let be happy man.⁸ Dole is the past participle and
past tense of the A. S. verb Dølan, to deal, to divide, to
distribute.

2. i. some time to-night. 3. Specially. 4. Neglect.

5. Pity. 6. Cups.

7. M. Mason proposes to read direction, but perhaps
the change is not necessary

92

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT IV.

Mrs. Page. He is a better scholar than I thought he was.

Eva. He is a good sprag¹ memory. Farewell, mistress Page.

Mrs. Page. Adieu, good Sir Hugh. [Exit SIR HUGH.] Get you home, boy.—Come, we stay too long. [Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. A Room in Ford's House. Enter FALSTAFF and MRS. FORD.

Fal. Mistress Ford, your sorrow hath eaten up my sufferance: I see, you are obsequious² in your love, and I profess your requalit to a hair's breadth; not only, mistress Ford, in the simple office of love, but in all the accoutrement, complement, and ceremony of it. But are you sure of your husband now?

Mrs. Ford. He's a birding, sweet Sir John.

Mrs. Page. [within.] What hoa, gossip Ford! what hoa !

Mrs. Ford. Step into the chamber, Sir John.

[Exit FALSTAFF.]

### Enter MRS. PAGE.

Mrs. Page. How now, sweathear? who's at home beside yourself?

Mrs. Ford. Why, none but mine own people,

Mrs. Page. Indeed?

Mrs. Ford. No, certainly;—speak louder. [Aside.]

Mrs. Page. Truly, I am so glad you have nobody here.

Mrs. Ford. Why?

Mrs. Page. Why, woman, your husband is in his old lunes³ again: he so takes on yonder with my husband; so rails against all married mankind; so curses all Eve's daughters, of what complexion soever; and so buffets himself on the forehead, crying, Peer out, peer out!⁴ that any madness, I ever yet beheld, seemed but tameness, civility, and patience to this his distemper he is in now: I am glad the fat knight is not here.

Mrs. Ford. Why, he does he talk of him?

Mrs. Page. Of none but him; and swears, he was carried out, the last time he searched for him, in a basket: protests to my husband he is now here; and hath drawn him and the rest of their company from their sport, to make another experiment of his suspicion: but I am glad the knight is not here; now he shall see his own foolery.

Mrs. Ford. How near is he, mistress Page ?

Mrs. Page. Hard by; at street end; he will be here anon.

Mrs. Ford. I am undone!—the knight is here.

Mrs. Page. Why, then you are utterly shamed, and he's but a dead man. What a woman are you? —Away with him, away with him, better shame than murder.

Mrs. Ford. Which way should he go? how should I bestow him? Shall I put him into the basket again?

### Re-enter FALSTAFF.

Fal. No, I'll come no more i' the basket: May I not go out, ere he come?

Mrs. Page. Alas, three of master Ford's brothers watch the door with pistols,⁵ that none shall issue out; otherwise you might slip away ere he came. But what make⁶ you here?

Fal. What shall I do?—I'll creep up into the chimney.

1. Quick, alert. The word is *sprack*.

2. So, in Hamlet; 'To do *obsequious* sorrow.' The epithet *obsequious* refers, in both instances, to the seriousness with which *obsequies* are performed.

3. i. e. lunacy, frenzy.

4. Shakspeare refers to a sport of children, who thus call on a snail to push forth his horns:

“Peer out, peer out, peer out of your hole,
Or else I'll beat you as black as a coal.”

5. This is one of Shakspeare's anachronisms: he has also introduced pistols in Pericles, in the reign of Antiochus, two hundred years before Christ.

6. This phrase has been already noticed. It occurs again in As You Like It, in the sense of *do*:

“Now, sir, what *make* you here ?”

It also occurs in Hamlet, Othello, and Love's Labour's Lost.

Mrs. Ford. There they always used to discharge their birding-pieces: Creep into the kiln-hole.

Fal. Where is it?

Mrs. Ford. He will seek there on my word. Neither press, coffer, chest, trunk, well, vault, but he hath an abstracted' for the remembrance of such places, and goes to them by his note: There is no hiding you in the house.

Fal. I'll go out then.

Mrs. Page. If you go out in your own semblance, you die, Sir John. Unless you go out disguised,—

Mrs. Ford. How might he disguise him?

Mrs. Page. Alas the day, I know not. There is no woman's gown big enough for him; otherwise, he might put on a hat, a muffler, and a kerchief, and so escape.

Fal. Good hearts, devise something: any extremity, rather than a mischief.

Mrs. Ford. My maid's aunt, the fat woman of Brentford,⁷ has a gown above.

Mrs. Page. On my word, it will serve him; she's as big as he is: and there's her thrum'd hat,⁹ and her muffler too: Run up, Sir John.

Mrs. Ford. Go, go, sweet Sir John: mistress Page and I will look some linen for your head.

Mrs. Page. Quick, quick; we'll come dress you straight: put on the gown the while.

[Exit FALSTAFF.]

Mrs. Ford. I would my husband would meet him in this shape: he cannot abide the old woman of Brentford; he swears, she's a witch; forbade her my house, and hath threatened to beat her.

Mrs. Page. Heaven guide him to thy husband's cudgel; and the devil guide his cudgel afterwards!

Mrs. Ford. But is my husband coming?

Mrs. Page. Ay, in good sadness, he is; and talks of the basket too, howsoever he hath had intelligence.

Mrs. Ford. We'll try that; for I'll appoint my men to carry the basket again, to meet him at the door with it, as they did last time.

Mrs. Page. Nay, but he'll be here presently: let's go dress him like the witch of Brentford.¹⁰

Mrs. Ford. I'll first direct my men, what they shall do with the basket. Go up, I'll bring linen for him straight.

[Exit.]

Mrs. Page. Hang him, dishonest varlet! we cannot misuse him enough.

We'll leave a proof, by that which we will do,

Wives may be merry, and yet honest too:

We do not act that often jest and laugh;

'Tis old but true, *Still swine eat all the draft.*

[Exit.]

### Re-enter MRS. FORD, with two Servants.

Mrs. Ford. Go, sirs, take the basket again on your shoulders; your master is hard at door; if he bid you set it down, obey him, quickly despatch.

1. Serv. Come, come, take it up.

[Exit.]

2. Serv. Pray heaven, it be not full of the knight again.

1. Serv. I hope not; I had as lief bear so much lead.

### Enter FORD, PAGE, SHALLOW, CAIUS, and SIR HUGH EVANS.

Ford. Ay, but if it prove true, master Page, have you any way then to unfool me again?—Set down the basket, villain:—Somebody call my wife:—You, youth in a basket, come out here!—O, you

7. i. e. a list, an inventory, or short note of.

9. In the early 4to. it is: "My maid's aunt *Gillian* of Brentford."

9. A hat composed of the weaver's tufts or thorns, or of very coarse cloth. A muffler was a part of female attire which only covered the lower part of the face.

10. This old witch Jyl or Gillian of Brentford seems to have been a character well known in popular story at the time. 'Jyl of Brentford's Testament' was printed by Copland long before, and Laneham enumerates it as in the collection of Capt. Cox, the mason, now well known to all, from the mention of him in the romance of Kenilworth.

## SCENE IV.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

93

panderly rascals! there's a knot, a ging,¹ a pack, a conspiracy against me: Now, shall the devil be shamed. What! wife, I say! come, come forth; be-hold what honest clothes you send forth to bleaching.

*Page.* Why, this passes!² Master Ford, you are not to go loose any longer; you must be pinioned.

*Eva.* Why, this is lunatics! this is mad as a mad dog!

*Shal.* Indeed, master Ford, this is not well; indeed.

### Enter MRS. FORD.

*Ford.* So say I too, Sir.—Come hither, mistress Ford; mistress Ford, the honest woman, the modest wife, the virtuous creature, that hath the jealous fool to her husband!—I suspect without cause, mistress, do I?

*Mrs. Ford.* Heaven be my witness, you do, if you suspect me in any dishonesty.

*Ford.* Well said, brazen-face; hold it out.—
Come forth, sirrah. [Pulls the clothes out of the basket.

*Page.* This passes!

*Mrs. Ford.* Are you not ashamed? let the clothes alone.

*Ford.* I shall find you an-bom.

*Eva.* 'Tis unreasonable! Will you take up your wife's clothes? Come away.

*Ford.* Empty the basket, I say.

*Mrs. Ford.* Why, man, why?

*Ford.* Master Page, as I am a man, there was one conveyed out of my house yesterday in this basket: Why may not he be there again? In my house I am sure he is: my intelligence is true; my jealousy is reasonable: Pluck me out all the linen.

*Mrs. Ford.* If you find a man there, he shall die a flea's death.

*Page.* Here's no man.

*Mrs. Ford.* By my fidelity, this is not well, master Ford; this wrongs you.³

*Eva.* Master Ford, you must pray, and not follow the imaginations of your own heart: this is jealousies.

*Ford.* Well, he's not here I seek for.

*Page.* No, no, nor where else, but in your brain.

*Ford.* Help to search my house this one time; if I find not what I seek, show no colour for my extremity, let me for ever be your table-sport; let them say of me, As jealous as Ford, that searched a hollow walnut for his wife's leman.⁴ Satisfy me once more; once more search with me.

*Mrs. Ford.* What hoa, mistress Page! come you, and the old woman down; my husband will come into the chamber.

*Ford.* Old woman! What old woman is that?

*Mrs. Ford.* Why, it is my maid's aunt of Brentford.

*Ford.* A witch, a quean, an old cozening quean! Have I not forbid her my house? She comes of errands, does she? We are simple men; we do not know what's brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by the figure, and such daubery⁵ as this is; beyond our element; we know nothing.—Come down; you witch, you hag you; come down, I say.

*Mrs. Ford.* Nay, good, sweet husband;—good gentlemen, let him not strike the old woman.

### Enter FALSTAFF in women's clothes, led by Mrs. PAGE.

*Mrs. Page.* Come, mother Pratt, come, give me your hand.

*Ford.* I'll prat her:—Out of my door, you witch! [beats him] you rag, you baggage, you pole-

1 Gang. 2 Surpasses, or goes beyond all bounds.

3 i. e. 'This is below your character, unworthy of you.'

4 Lover.

5 Falsehood, imposition.

6 Means much the same as *scall* or *scab*, from *Rogneuse*, *Fr*.

7 Expressions taken from the chase. *Trail* is the scent left by the passage of the game. *To cry out* is to open, or bark.

8 Ritson remarks that Shakspeare 'had been long enough in an attorney's office to know that fee-simple is the largest estate, and fine and recovery the strongest assurance, known to English Law.' How Mrs. Page

cat, you ronyon!¹⁶ out! out! I'll conjure you, I'll fortune-tell you. [Exit FALSTAFF.

*Mrs. Page.* Are you not ashamed? I think you have killed the poor woman.

*Mrs. Ford.* Nay, he will do it;—'Tis a goodly credit for you.

*Ford.* Hang her, witch!

*Eva.* By yea and no, I think, the 'oman is a witch indeed: I like not when a 'oman has a great peard; I spy a great peard under her muffler.

*Ford.* Will you follow, gentlemen? I beseech you, follow; see but the issue of my jealousy; if I cry out thus upon no trail,' never trust me when I open again.

*Page.* Let's obey his humour a little further: Come, gentlemen.

[Exeunt PAGE, FORD, SHALLOW, and EVANS.

*Mrs. Page.* Trust me, he beat him most pitifully. *Mrs. Ford.* Nay, by the mass that he did not; he beat him most unpitifully, methought.

*Mrs. Page.* I'll have the cudgel hallowed, and hang o'er the altar; it hath done meritorious service.

*Mrs. Ford.* What think you? May we, with the warrant of woman-hood, and the witness of a good conscience, pursue him with any further revenge?

*Mrs. Page.* The spirit of wantonness is, sure, scared out of him; if the devil have him not in fec- simple, with fine and recovery,⁶ he will never, I think, in the way of waste,⁷ attempt us again.

*Mrs. Ford.* Shall we tell our husbands how we have served him?

*Mrs. Page.* Yes, by all means; if it be but to scrape the figures out of your husband's brains. If they can find in their hearts the poor unvirtuous fat knight shall be any further afflicted, we two will still be the ministers.

*Mrs. Page.* I'll warrant they'll have him publicly shamed: and, methinks, there would be no period¹⁰ to the jest, should he not be publicly shamed.

*Mrs. Page.* Come to the forge with it then, shape it: I would not have things cool. [Exeunt.

### SCENE III. A room in the Garter Inn. Enter HOST and BARDOLPH.

*Bard.* Sir, the Germans desire to have three of your horses: the duke himself will be to-morrow at court, and they are going to meet him.

*Host.* What duke should that be comes so secretly? I hear not of him in the court: Let me speak with the gentlemen; they speak English?

*Bard.* Ay, sir, I'll call them to you.

*Host.* They shall have my horses; but I'll make them pay, I'll sauce them: they have had my house a week at command; I have turned away my other guests: they must come off;¹¹ I'll sauce them; Come. [Exeunt.

### SCENE IV. A Room in Ford's House. Enter PAGE, FORD, MRS. PAGE, MRS. FORD, and SIR HUGH EVANS.

*Eva.* 'Tis one of the pest discretions of a 'oman as ever I did look upon.

*Page.* And did he send you both these letters at an instant?

*Mrs. Page.* Within a quarter of an hour.

*Ford.* Pardon me, wife: Henceforth do what thou wilt;

I rather will suspect the sun with cold,¹²

Than thee with wantonness: now doth thy honour stand.

In him that was of late an heretic, As firm as faith.

acquired her knowledge of these terms he has not informed us.

9 This is another forensic expression. Mr. Steevens says that the meaning of the passage is, "he will not make further attempts to ruin us by corrupting our virtue and destroying our reputation."

10 i. e. right period, or proper catastrophe.

11 To come off is to pay, to come down (as we now say.) with a sum of money. It is a phrase of frequent occurrence in old plays.

12 The reading in the text was Mr. Rowe's. The old copies read 'I rather will suspect the sun with gold.'

94

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT IV.

Page. 'Tis well, 'tis well; no more.

Be not as extreme in submission,
As in offence;

But let our plot go forward: let our wives

Yet once again, to make us public sport,
Appoint a meeting with this old fat fellow,

Where we may take him, and disgrace him for it.

Ford. There is no better way than that they
spoke of.

Page. How! to send him word they'll meet him
in the park at midnight! fie, fie; he'll never come.

Eva. You say, he has been thrown into the ri-
vers; and has been grievously peaten, as an old
'oman; methinks there should be terrors in him, that
he should not come; methinks, his flesh is punished,
he shall have no desires.

Page. So think I too.

Mrs. Ford. Devise how but you'll use him when
he comes,

And let us two devise to bring him thither.

Mrs. Page. There is an old tale goes, that Herne
the hunter,

Sometime a keeper here in Windsor forest,

Doth all the winter time, at still midnight,

Walk round about an oak, with great ragg'd horns;

And there he blasts the tree, and takes¹ the cattle;

And makes milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a
chain

In a most hideous and dreadful manner :

You have heard of such a spirit; and well you know,

The supers tious idle-headed eld²

Received, and did deliver to our age,

This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth.

Page. Why, yet there want not many, that do fear

In deep of night to walk by this Herne's oak;³

But what of this?

Mrs. Ford. Marry, this is our device ;

That Falstaff at that oak shall meet with us,

Disguised like Herne, with huge horns on his head.

Page. Well, let it not be doubted but he'll come,

And in this shape: When you have brought him
thither,

What shall be done with him? what is your plot?

Mrs. Page. That likewise have we thought upon,
and thus :

Nan Page my daughter, and my little son,

And three or four more of their growth, we'll dress

Like urchins, oupess,⁴ and fairies, green and white,

With rounds of waxen tapers on their heads,

And rattles in their hands; upon a sudden,

As Falstaff, she, and I, are newly met,

Let them from forth a saw-pit rush at once

With some diffused⁵ song; upon their sight,

We two in great amazedness will fly :

Then let them all encircle him about,

And, fairy-like, to-pinch⁶ the unclean knight ;

And ask him, why, that hour of fairy revel,

In their so sacred paths he dares to tread,

In shape profane.

Mrs. Ford. And till he tell the truth,

Let the supposed fairies pinch him sound,⁷

And burn him with their tapers.

1 *To take* signifies *to seize* or *strike with a disease, to blast*. So, in Lear, Act ii. Sc. 4:

'Strike her young bones, ye taking airs, with lame-
ness.'

And in Hamlet, Act. i. Sc. 1:

"No planets strike,
No fairy takes, no witch has power to charm."

"Of a horse that is taken. A horse that is bereft of
his feeling, moving, or stirring, is said to be taken, and
in sooth so he is, in that he is arrested by so villanous a
disease: yet some farriers, not well understanding the
ground of the disease, conster the word taken to be
stricken by some planet, or evil spirit, which is false."
—C. vii. *Markham on Horses*, 1595. Thus also in Hor-
man's *Vulgaria*, 1519. "He is taken, or benomed. At-
tonitus est."

2 Old age.

3 The tree which was by tradition shown as Herne's
oak; being totally decayed, was cut down by his late
majesty's order in 1795.

4 Elf, hobgoblin.

5 *Some diffused song*, appears to mean some *obscure
strange song*. In Cavendish's *Life of Wolsey* the word

Mrs. Page.

The truth being known,
We'll all present ourselves; dis-horn the spirit,
And mock him home to Windsor.

Ford.

The children must
be practised well to this, or they'll ne'er do't.

Eva. I will teach the children their behaviours;
and I will be like a Jack-an-apes also, to burn the
knight with my taber.

Ford. That will be excellent. I'll go buy them
vizards.

Mrs. Page. My Nan shall be the queen of all the
fairies.

Finely attired in a robe of white,

Page. That silk will I go buy;—and in that time

Shall master Slender steal my Nan away,

And marry her at Eton. [Aside.] Go, send to Fal-

staff straight,

Ford. Nay, I'll to him again in name of Brook:

He'll tell me all his purpose: Sure, he'll come.

Mrs. Page. Fear not you that: Go, get us pro-
PERTIES.

And tricking for our fairies.

Eva. Let us about it: It is admirable pleasures,
and fery honest knaveries.

[Exeunt PAGE, FORD, and EVANS.

Mrs. Page. Go, mistress Ford,

Send quickly to Sir John, to know his mind.

[Exit MRS. FORD.

I'll to the doctor; he hath my good will,

And none but he, to marry with Nan Page.

That Slender, though well landed, is an idiot;

And he my husband best of all affects :

The doctor is well money'd, and his friends

Potent at court; he, none but he, shall have her,

Though twenty thousand worthier come to crave her.

[Exit.]

### SCENE V. A Room in the Garter Inn. Enter Host and SIMPLE.

Host. What would'st thou have, boor? what,
thick-skin? speak, breathe, discuss; brief, short,
quick, snap,

Sim. Marry, sir, I come to speak with Sir John
Falstaff from master Slender.

Host. There's his chamber, his house, his castle,
his standing-bed, and truckle-bed;⁹ 'tis painted
about with the story of the prodigal, fresh and new:
Go, knock and call; he'll speak like a *Anthropo-
phaginian*¹⁰ unto thee: Knock, I say.

Sim. There's an old woman, a fat woman, gone
up into his chamber; I'll be so bold as stay, sir,
till she come down: I come to speak with her, in-
deed.

Host. Ha! a fat woman! the knight may be
robbed: I'll call.—Bully knight! Bully Sir John!
speak from thy lungs military: Art thou there? it
is thine host, thine Ephesian, calls.

Ful. [above.] How now, mine host?

Host. Here's a Bohemian-Tartar tarries the
coming down of thy fat woman: Let her descend,
bully, let her descend; my chambers are honour-
able: Fye! privacy? fye!

occurs in this sense: "speak you Welsh to him: I doubt
not but thy speech shall be more diffuse to him, than his
French shall be to thee." Cotgrave explains *diffused*
by the French *diffus, espars, obscure*, and in Cooper's
Dictionary, 1884, I find *obscum* interpreted *obscure*,
difficult, *diffuse*, hard to understand. Skelton uses
*diffuse* several times for strange or obscure; for instance
in the Crown of Laurel:

"Perseus pressed forth with problems diffuse."

6 *To-pinch:* to has here an augmentative sense, like
he has since had: *all* was generally prefixed, Spenser
has all *to-torn*, all *to-rent*, &c. and Milton in Comus all
*to-ruffled*.

7 *Sound, for soundly,* the adjective used as an adverb.

8 *Properties* are little incidental necessaries to a thea-
tre: *tricking* is dress or ornament.

9 The usual furniture of chambers, at that time, was
a *standing-bed*, under which was a *trochle*, *truckle*, or
*running bed*: from *trochlea*, a low wheel or caster. In
the standing bed lay the master, in the truckle the ser-
vant.

10 i. e. a cannibal; mine host uses these fustian words
to astonish Simple.

## SCENE VI.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

95

### Enter FALSTAFF.

Fal. There was, mine host, an old fat woman even now with me; but she's gone.

Sim. Pray you, sir, was't not the wise woman of Brentford?

Fal. Ay, marry, was it, muscle-shell;¹ What would you with her?

Sim. My master, sir, my master Slender, sent to her, seeing her go through the streets, to know, sir, whether one Nym, sir, that beguiled him of a chain, had the chain, or no.

Fal. I speak with the old woman about it.

Sim. And what says she, I pray, sir?

Fal. Marry, she says, that the very same man that beguiled master Slender of his chain, cozened him of it.

Sim. I would I could have spoken with the woman herself; I had other things to have spoken with her too, from him.

Fal. What are they? let us know.

Host. Ay, come; quick.

Sim. I may not conceal them, sir.

Fal. Conceal them, or thou diest.

Sim. Why, sir, they were nothing but about mistress Anne Page; to know if it were my master's fortune to have her, or no.

Fal. 'Tis, 'tis his fortune.

Sim. What, sir?

Fal. To have her, or—no: Go; say, the woman told me so.

Sim. May I be so bold to say so, sir?

Fal. Ay, Sir Tike; who more bold?

Sim. I thank your worship: I shall make my master glad with these tidings.

[Exit SIMPLE.

Host. Thou art clerky,² thou art clerky, Sir John: Was there a wise woman with thee?

Sim. Ay, that was, mine host; one that hath taught me more wit than ever I learned before in my life; and I paid nothing for it neither, but was paid³ for my learning

### Enter BARDOLPH.

Bard. Out, alas, sir! cozenage! mere cozenage!

Host. Where be my horses? speak well of them, varletto.

Bard. Run away with the cozeners: for so soon as I came beyond Eton, they threw me off, from behind one of them, in a slough of mire; and set spurs, and away, like three German devils, three Doctor Faustuses.

Host. They are gone but to meet the duke, vilen: do not say, they be fled; Germans are honest men.

### Enter SIR HUGH EVANS.

Eva. Where is mine host?

Host. What is the matter, sir?

Eva. Have a care of your entertainments: there is a friend of mine come to town, tells me, there is three cousin germdns, that has cozened all the hosts of Readings, of Maidenhead, of Colebrook, of horses and money. I tell you for good-will, look you: you are wise, and full of gibes and vlouting-stogs; and it is not convenient you should be cozened: Fare you well.

[Exit.]

### Enter DOCTOR CAIUS.

Caius. Vere is mine Host de Jarterre.

Host. Here, master doctor, in perplexity, and doubtful dilemma.

Caius. I cannot tell vat is dat: but it is tell-a-me, dat you make grand preparations for a duke de Jarmany: by my trot, dere is no duke, dat the court is know to come; I tell you for good vill: adieu.

[Exit.]

Host. Hue and cry, villain, go:—assist me, knight; I am undone:—fly, run, hue and cry, villain! I am undone! [Exeunt HOST and BARDOLPH.]

1. He calls poor Simple *muscle-shell*, because he stands with his mouth open.

2. i. e. Scholar-like.

3. *To pay*, in Shakspeare's time, signified *to beat*; in which sense it is still not uncommon in familiar language:

¹ Fal. I would all the world might be cozened; for I have been cozen'd and beaten too. If it should come to the ear of the court, how I have been transformed, and how my transformation hath been washed and cudgeled, they would melt me out of my fat, drop by drop, and liquor fishermen's boots with me; I warrant they would whip me with their fine wits, till I were as crest-fallen as a dried pear. I never prospered since I>forsowed myself at *Primero*.⁴ Well, if my wind were but long enough to say my prayers, I would repent.—

### Enter MRS. QUICKLY.

Now! whence come you?

Quick. From the two parties, forsooth.

Fal. The devil take one party, and his dam the other, and so they shall be both bestowed! I have suffered more for their sakes, more than the villanous inconstancy of man's disposition is able to bear.

Quick. And have not they suffered? Yes, I warrant, speciously one of them; mistress Ford, good heart, is beaten black and blue, that you cannot see a white spot about her.

Fal. What tell'st thou me of black and blue! I was beaten myself into all the colours of the rainbow, and I was like to be apprehended for the witch of Brentford; but that my admirable dexterity of wit, my counterfeiting the action of an old woman deliver'd me, the knave constable had set me i'the stocks, i'the common stocks, for a witch.

Quick. Sir, let me speak with you in your chamber; you shall hear how things go; and, I warrant, to your content. Here is a letter will say somewhat. Good hearts, what ado here is to bring you together! Sure, one of you does not serve heaven well, that you are so crossed.

Fal. Come up into my chamber.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE VI. Another Room in the Garter Inn.
Enter FENTON and HOST.

Host. Master Fenton, talk not to me; my mind is heavy, I will give over all.

Fent. Yet hear me speak: Assist me in my purpose, And, as I am a gentleman, I'll give thee a hundred pound in gold, more than your loss.

Host. From time to time I have acquainted you With the dear love I bear to fair Anne Page; Who, mutually, hath answer'd my affection (So far forth as herself might be her chooser,) Even to my wish: I have a letter from her Of such contents as you will wonder at; The thinn whereof so larded with my matter, That neither, singly, can be manifested, Without the show of both;—wherein fat Falstaffe Hath a great scene: the image of the jest.

Fent. I'll show you here at large. Hark, good mine host: To-night at Herne's oak, just 'twixt twelve and one, Must my sweet Nan present the fairy queen; The purpose why, is here ; in which disguise, While other jests are something rank on foot, Her father hath commanded her to slip Away with Slender, and with him at Eton Immediately to marry: she hath consented: Now, sir, Her mother, even strong against that match, And firm for doctor Caius, hath appointed That he shall likewise shuffle her away, While other sports are tasking of their minds, And at the deanery, where a priest attends, Straight marry her: to this her mother's plot She, seemingly obedient, likewise hath Made promise to the doctor:—Now, thus it rests: Her father means she shall be all in white; And in that habit, when Slender sees his time

[Showing the letter.]

guage: 'Seven of the eleven I paid,' says Falstaff, in Henry IV. Part 1.

4. *Primero* was the fashionable *game at cards* in Shakspeare's time.

5. In the letter

96

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT V

To take her by the hand, and bid her go,
She shall go with him:—her mother hath intended,
The better to denote her to the doctor

(For they must all be mask'd and vizarded.)
That, quain't in green she shall be loose enrob'd,
With ribands pendant, flaring 'bout her head;
And when the doctor spies his vantage ripe,
To pinch her by the hand, and, on that token,
The maid hath given consent to go with him.

Host. Which means she to deceive ? father or
mother?

Fent. Both, my good host, to go along with me :
And here it rests,—that you'll procure the vicar
To stay for me at church, 'twixt twelve and one,
And, in the lawful name of marrying,

To give our hearts united ceremony.

Host. Well, husband your device; I'll to the
vicar.

Bring you the maid, you shall not lack a priest.

Fent. So shall I ever more be bound to thee;

Besides, I'll make a present recompense. [Exeunt.

ACT V.

## SCENE I. A Room in the Garter Inn. Enter FALSTAFF and MRS. QUICKLY.

Fal. Pr'ythee, no more prattling;—go.—I'll
hold:² This is the third time; I hope, good luck
lies in odd numbers. Away, go; they say, there is
divinity in odd numbers, either in nativity, chance,
or death.—Away.

Quick. I'll provide you a chain; and I'll do what
I can to get you a pair of horns.

Fal. Away, I say; time wears: hold up your
head and mince.³ [Exit MRS. QUICKLY.

Enter FORD.

How now, master Brook? Master Brook, the matter will be known to-night, or never. Be you in the Park about midnight, at Herne's oak, and shall see wonders.

Ford. Went you not to her yesterday, sir, as you told me you had appointed?

Fal. I went to her, master Brook, as you see,
like a poor old man: but I came from her, master
Brook, like a poor old woman. That same knave,
Ford, her husband, hath the finest mad devil of jen-
lousy in him, master Brook, that ever governed
frenzy. I will tell you.—He beat me grievously,
in the shape of a woman; for in the shape of man,
master Brook, I fear not Goliath with a weaver's
beam; because I know also, life is a shuttle.⁴ I
am in haste; go along with me; I'll tell you all,
master Brook. Since I plucked geese,⁵ played
truant, and whipped top, I knew not what it was to
be beaten, till lately. Follow me: I'll tell you strange
things of this knave Ford: on whom to-night I will
be revenged, and I will deliver his wife into your
hand.—Follow: Strange things in hand, master
Brook! follow. [Exeunt.

## SCENE II. Windsor Park. Enter PAGE, SHALLOW, and SLENDER.

Page. Come, come; we'll couch i'the castle-ditch,
till we see the light of our fairies.—Remember, son
Sleender, my daughter.

Slen. Ay, forsooth; I have spoke with her, and
we have a may-word⁶ how to know one another. I
come to her in white, and cry, mum; she cries,
budget; and by that we know one another.

1 *Quaint*, here, may mean *neatly*, or *elegantly*, which were ancient acceptations of the word, and not *fantastically*: but either sense will suit.
2 Keep to the time.

3 i. e. *walk*: to mince signified to walk with affected delicacy.

4 An allusion to the Book of Job, c. vii. v. 6.

5 My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle.

6 Watchword.

Shal. That's good too: But what needs either
your mum, or her budget; the white will decipher
her well enough.—It hath struck ten o'clock.

Page. The night is dark; light and spirits will
become it well. Heaven prosper our sport! No
man means evil but the devil,⁷ and we shall know
him by his horns. Let's away; follow me. [Exeunt.

## SCENE III. The Street in Windsor. Enter MRS. PAGE, MRS. FORD, and Dr. CAIUS.

Mrs. Page. Master doctor, my daughter is in green; when you see your time, take her by the hand, away with her to the deanery, and despatch it quickly: Go before into the park; we two must go together.

Caius. I know vat I have to do; Adieu.

Mrs. Page. Fare you well, sir. [Exit CAIUS.] My husband will not rejoice so much at the abuse of Falstaff, as he will chafe at the doctor's marrying my daughter: but 'tis no matter; better a little chiding, than a great deal of heart-break.

Mrs. Ford. Where is Nan now, and her troop of fairies? and the Welsh devil, Hugh?

Mrs. Page. They are all couched in a pit hard
by Herne's oak, with obscured lights; which at the
very instant of Falstaff's and our meeting, they will
at once display to the night.

Mrs. Ford. That cannot choose but amaze him.

Mrs. Page. If he be not amazed, he will be
mocked; if he be amazed, he will every way be
mocked.

Mrs. Ford. We'll betray him finely.

Mrs. Page. Against such lewdsters, and their
lechery,

Those that betray them do no treachery.

Mrs. Ford. The hour draws on; To the oak, to the oak! [Exeunt.

## SCENE IV. Windsor Park. Enter SIR HUGH EVANS and Fairies.

Eva. Trib, trib, fairies; come; and remember
your parts: be pold, I pray you; follow me into
the pit; and when I give the watch-ords, do as I
pid you; Come, come; trib, trib.

## SCENE V. Another part of the Park. Enter FALSTAFF disguised, with a buck's head on.

Fal. The Windsor bell hath struck twelve; the
minute draws on; Now, the hot-blooded gods assist
me:—Remember, Jove, thou wast a bull for thy
Europa; love set on thy horns—O powerful love!
that, in some respects, makes a beast a man; in
some other, a man a beast.—You were also, Jupi-
ter, a swan, for the love of Ledra;—O, omnipo-
tent love! how near the god drew to the complexi-
ion of a goose?—A fault done first in the form of a
beast;—O Jove, a beastly fault! and then another
fault in the semblance of a fowl; think on't, Jove;
a foul fault.—When gods have hot backs, what
shall poor men do? For me, I am here a Windsor
stag; and the fattest, I think, i' the forest: send
me a cool rut-time, Jove, or who can blame me to
piss my tallow?⁸ Who comes here? my doe?

Mrs. Ford. Sir John? art thou there, my deer?
my male deer?

Fal. My doe with the black scut?—Let the sky
rain potatoes; let it thunder to the tune of Green
Sleeves; hail kissing-comfits, and snow eringoes;
let there come a tempest of provocation,⁹ I will
shelter me here. [Embracing her.

7 Page indirectly alludes to Falstaff, who was to have horns on his head.

8 This is technical. "During the time of their rut the harts live with small sustenance."—The red mushroome helpeth well to make them pyste their greace they are then in so vehement heat."—*Turberville's Book of Hunting*, 1575.

9 The sweet potato was used in England as a delicacy long before the introduction of the common potato by Sir Walter Raleigh in 1566. It was imported in considerable quantities from Spain and the Canaries, and

## SCENE V.

## MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

97

Mrs. Ford. Mistress Page is come with me,
sweetheart.

Fal. Divide me like a bride-buck,¹ each a haunch:
I will keep my sides to myself, my shoulders for the
fellow² of this walk, and my horns I bequeath you
husbands. Am I a woodman?³ ha! Speak I like
Herne the hunter? —Why, now is Cupid a child of
conscience; he makes restitution. As I am a true
spirit, welcome!

Mrs. Page. Alas! What noise?

Mrs. Ford. Heaven forgive our sins!

Fal. What should this be ?

Mrs. Ford.

Mrs. Page.

Away, away.

[They run off.]

Fal. I think, the devil will not have me damned,
lest the oil that is in me should set hell on fire; he
would never else cross me thus.

Enter SIR HUGH EVANS, like a satyr; Mrs.

QUICKLY, and PISTOL; ANNE PAGE, as the
Fairy Queen, attended by her brother and others,
dressed like fairies, with waxen tapers on their heads.

Quick. Fairies, black, grey, green, and white,

You moon-shine revellers, and shades of night,

You orphan-heirs⁵ of fixed destiny,

Attend your office, and your quality.⁸—

Crier Hobgobin, make the fairy o-yes.

Pist. Elves, list your names; silence, you airy toys.

Cricket, to Windsor chineaux shall thou leap!

Where fires thou find'st unrak'd, and hearths un-swept,

There pinch the maids as blue as bibbERRY :

Our radiant queen hates slats, and sluttery.

Ful. They are fairies; he, that speaks to them,
shall die:

I'll wink and couch : No man their works must eye.

[Lies down upon his face.]

Eva. Where's Pede? —Go you, and where you
find a maid,

That, ere she sleep, has thrice her prayers said,

Raise up the organs of her fantasy,⁶

Sleep she as sound as careless infancy;

But those as sleep, and think not on their sins,

Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides,
and shins.

Quick. About; about;

Search Windsor castle, elves, within and out:

Strew good luck, ourophes, on every sacred room;

That it may stand till the perpetual doom,

In state as wholesome, as in state 'tis fit ;

Worthy the owner, and the owner it.

The several chairs of order look you scour

With juice of balm, and every precious flower :"

Each fair instalment, coat, and several crest,

With loyal blazon, evermore be blest!

And nightly, meadow-fairies, look, you sing,

Like to the Garter's compass, in a ring:

The expressure that it bears, green let it be,

More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;

was supposed to possess the power of restoring decayed
vigour. The kissing-confits were principally made of
these and eringo roots, and were perfumed to make the
brenth sweet. Gerardo attributes the same virtues to
the common potato which he distinguishes as the Vir-
ginian sort.

1. i. e. like a buck sent as a bribe.

2. The keeper. The shoulders of the buck were
among his perquisites.

3. The woodman was an attendant on the forester. It
is here however used in a wanton sense, for one who
chooses female game for the object of his pursuit.

4. The old copy reads orphan-heirs. Warburton reads
ourophes, and not without plausibility; ourophes being
mentioned before and afterward. Malone thinks it
means mortals by birth, but adopted by the fairies: or-
phans in respect of their real parents, and now only de-
pendent on *destiny* herself.

5. Profession.

6. i. e. elevate her fancy, and amuse her tranquil mind
with some delightful vision, though she sleep as sound-
ly as an infant.

7. It was an article of ancient luxury to rub tables, &c.
with aromatic herbs. So, in the Baucis and Philemon
of Ovid, Met. viii.

—mensam—

—æquatam Mentha USBterserit virenti.

And, Honey soit qui mal y pense, write,

In emerald tufts, flowers purple, blue and white;

Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,

Buckled below fair knighthood's bending knee;

Fairies use flowers for their characten.

Away; disperse: But, 'till 'is one o'clock,

Our dance of custom, round about the oak

Of Herne the hunter, let us not forget.

Eva. Pray you, lock hand in hand; yourselves
in order set:

And twenty glow-worms shall our lanterns be,

To guide our measure round about the tree.

But, stay; I smell a man of middle earth.²

Fal. Heaven defend me from that Welsh fairy !

lest he transform me to a piece of cheese!

Pist. Vile worm, thou wast o'look'd¹⁰ even in
thy birth.

Quick. With trial fire touch me his finger-end :

If he be chaste, the flame will back descend,

And turn him to no pain; but if he start,

It is the flesh of a corrupted heart.

Pist. A trial, come.

Eva. Come, will this wood take fire?

[They burn him with their tapers.]

Fal. Oh, oh, oh!

Quick, Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire !

About him fairies; sing a scorvnful rhyme :

And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time.

Eva. It is right; indeed he is full of lecheries
and iniquity.

## SONG.

Eye on sinful fantasy !

Eye on lust and luxury !

Lust is but a bloody fire,

Kindled with unchaste desire.

Fed in heart; whose flames aspire,

As thoughts do blow them, higher and higher.

Pinch him, fairies, mutually;

Pinch him for his villany;

Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about,

Till candles, and star-light, and moonshine be out.

During this song, the fairies pinch Falstaff. Doctor
Caius comes one way, and steals away a fairy
in green; Slender another way, and takes off a
fairy in white; and Fenton comes, and steals away
Mrs. Anne Page. A noise of hunting is made
within. All the fairies run away. Falstaff pulls
off his buck's head, and rises.

Enter PAGE, FORD, Mrs. PAGE, and MRS. FORD.
They lay hold on him.

Page. Nay, do not fly : I think, we have watch'd
you now ;

Will none but Herne the hunter serve your turn?

Mrs. Page. I pray you, come; hold up the jest
no higher:—

Now, good Sir John, how like you Windsor wives ?

See you these, husband? do not these fair yokes!¹¹

Become the forest better than the town?

Pliny informs us that the Romans did so to drive away
evil spirits.

8: "Character," is a writing by characters, or by
strange marks."—Bullokar's English Expositor, 12
mo. 1656.

9. By this term is merely meant a mortal man, in
contradistinction to a spirit of the earth or of the air,
such as a fairy or gnome. It was in use in the north of
Scotland a century since, and appears borrowed from
the Saxon Middan Eard.

10. By *o'er-looked* is here meant *beveitched* by an evil
eye, the word is used in that sense in Glanvill. Saddu-
cismus Triumphatus, p. 95. Steevens erroneously inter-
prets it 'Slighted as soon as born.' See note on the
Merchant of Venice, Act iii. Sc. 2.

“Beshrew your eyes,”
They have o'er-looked me—

11. The extremities of yokes for oxen, as still used in
several counties of England, bent upwards, and rising
very high, in shape resemble horns. In Cotgrave's
Dictionary, *voce Juelles*, we have 'Arched or yoked
vines; vines so under propped or fashioned that one
may go under the middle of them.' See also Hutton's
Latin, Greek, and English Lexicon, 1889, in *voce ju-

13

98

MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR.

ACT V

Enter SLENDER.

**Ford.** Now, sir, who's a cuckold now? —Master
Brook, Falstaff's a knave, a cuckold knave; here
are his horns, master Brook: And, master Brook,
he hath enjoyed nothing of Ford's but his buck-
basket, his cudgel, and twenty pounds of money,
which must be paid to master Brook; his horses
are arrested for it, master Brook.

**Mrs. Ford.** Sir John, we have had ill luck, we could never meet. I will never take you for my love again, but I will always count you my deer.

**Fal.** I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass.

**Ford.** Ay, and an ox too; both the proofs are extant.

**Fal.** And these are not fairies? I was three or four times in the thought, they were not fairies: and yet the guiltiness of my mind, the sudden surprise of my powers, drove the grossness of the fop-pery into a received belief, in despite of the teeth of all rhyme and reason, that they were fairies. See now, how wit may be made a Jack-a-lent, when 'tis upon ill employment!

**Eva.** Sir John Falstaff, serve Got, and leave your desires, and fairies will not pinse you.

**Ford.** Well said, fairy Hugh.

**Eva.** And leave you your jealousies too, I pray you.

**Ford.** I will never mistrust my wife again, till thou art able to woo her in good English.

**Fal.** Have I laid my brain in the sun, and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o'er-reaching as this? Am I ridden with a Welsh goat too? Shall I have a coxcomb of frize? ! 'tis time I were choked with a piece of toasted cheese.

**Eva.** Seese is not good to give putter; your pelly is all putter.

**Fal.** Seese and putter! Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is enough to be the decay of lust and late walking through the realm.

**Mrs. Page.** Why, Sir John, do you think, though we would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and have given ourselves without scruple to hell, that ever the devil could have made us your delight?

**Ford.** What, a hollge-pudding? a bag of flax?

**Mrs. Page.** A puffed man?

**Page.** Old, cold, withered, and of intolerable en-trails?

**Ford.** And one that is as slanderous as Satan?

**Page.** And as poor as Job?

**Ford.** And as wicked as his wife?

**Eva.** And given to forifications and to taverns, and sack and wine, and metheglins, and to drinkings, and swearing and starings, pribbles and prables?

**Fal.** Well, I am your theme; you have the start of me; I am dejected; I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel;² ignorance itself is a plummet o'er me:³ use me as you will.

**Ford.** Marry, sir, we'll bring you to Windsor, to one master Brook, that you have cozened of money, to whom you should have been a pander: over and above that you have suffered, I think, to repay that money will be a biting affliction.

**Mrs. Ford.** Nay, husband, let that go to make amends;

Forgive that sum, and so we'll all be friends.

**Ford.** Well, here's my hand; all's forgiven at last.

**Page.** Yet be cheerful, knight: thou shall eat a posset to-night at my house; where I will desire thee to laugh at my wife, that now laughs at thee:⁴ Tell her, master Slender hath married her daughter.

**Mrs. Page.** Doctors doubt that: If Anne Page be my daughter, she is, by this, doctor Caius' wife.

[Aside.]

gum; 'a thing made with forkes, like a gallows, a frame whereon vines are joyned.'

1. I. e. a fool's cap made out of Welsh materials.

Wales was famous for this cloth.

2. The very word *flannel* is derived from a Welsh one, and it is almost unnecessary to add that it was originally the manufacture of Wales.

**Slen.** Whoo! ho! ho! father Page.

**Page.** Son! how now? how now, son? have you despatched?

**Slen.** Despatched! —I'll make the best in Gloucestershire know on't; would I were hanged, la, else.

**Page.** Of what, son?

**Slen.** I came yonder at Eton to marry mistress Anne Page, and she's a great lubberly boy. If it had not been 't the church, I would have swinged him, or he should have swinged me. If I did not think it had been Anne Page, would I might never stir, and 'tis a post-master's boy.

**Page.** Upon my life then you took the wrong.

**Slen.** What need you tell me that? I think so, when I took a boy for a girl: If I had been married to him, for all he was in woman's apparel, I would not have had him.

**Page.** Why this is your own folly. Did not I tell you, how you should know my daughter by her garments?

**Slen.** I went to her in white, and cry'd mum, and she cry'd budget, as Anne and I had appointed; and yet it was not Anne, but a post-master's boy.

**Eva.** Jeshu! Master Slender, cannot you see but marry boys?

**Page.** O, I am vexed at heart: What shall I do?

**Mrs. Page.** Good George, be not angry: I knew of your purpose; turned my daughter into green; and, indeed, she is now with the doctor at the deanery, and there married.

Enter CAIUS.

**Caius.** Vere is mistress Page? By gar, I am cozened: I ha' married un garcon, a boy; un pai-san, by gar, a boy; it is not Anne Page: by gar, I am cozened.

**Mrs. Page.** Why, did you take her in green?

**Caius.** Ay, be gar, and 'tis a boy; be gar, I'll raise all Windsor.

[Exit CAIUS.]

**Ford.** This is strange! Who hath got the right Anne?

**Page.** My heart misgives me: Here comes master Fenton.

Enter FENTON and ANNE PAGE.

How now, master Fenton?

**Anne.** Pardon, good father! good my mother, pardon!

**Page.** Now, mistress? how chance you went not with master Slender?

**Mrs. Page.** Why went you not with master doctor, maid?

**Fent.** You do amaze⁶ her: Hear the truth of it. You would have married her most shamefully, Where there was no proportion held in love. The truth is, she and I, long since contracted, Are now so sure that nothing can dissolve us. The offence is holy that she hath committed: And this deceit loses the name of craft, Of disobedience, or undutiful title; Since therein she doth evitate⁶ and shun A thousand irreligious cursed hours, Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.

**Ford.** Stand not amaz'd: here is no remedy:—In love, the heavens themselves do guide the state; Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.

**Fal.** I am glad, though you have ta'en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced.

**Page.** Well, what remedy? Fenton, heaven give thee joy!

What cannot be eschew'd, must be embrac'd.

³ Ignorance itself weighs me down, and oppresses me

⁴ Dr. Johnson remarks, that the two plots are excellently connected, and the transition very artfully made in this speech.

⁵ Confound her by your questions.

⁶ Avoid.

100

TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL.

ACT I.

feeling than all this, it is Viola's confession of her
love.

Duke. What's her history?

Viola. A blank, my lord: She never told her love,
But let concealment, like a worm i' the bud,
Feed on her damask cheek: she pin'd in thought;
And, with a green and yellow melancholy,
She sat like Patience on a monument,
Smiling at grief. Was not this love, indeed?
We men may say more, swear more; but, indeed,
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.

Duke. But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

Viola. I am all the daughters of my father's house,
And all the brothers too;—and yet I know not.

"Shakspere alone could describe the effect of his
own poetry:

"O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour."

"What we so much admire here is not the image of
Patience on a monument, which has been so generally
quoted, but the lines before and after it, "They give a
very echo to the seat where love is throned." How long
ago it is since we first learnt to repeat them; and still
they vibrate on the heart like the sounds which the pas-

sing wind draws from the trembling strings of a harp
left on some desert shore! There are other passages of
not less impassioned sweetness. Such is Olivia's ad-
dress to Sebastian, whom she supposed to have already
deceived her in a promise of marriage.

'Blame not this haste of mine;—

'Plight me the full assurance of your faith;
'Plight my most jealous and too doubtful soul
'May live at peace.'

"One of the most beautiful of Shakspeare's Songs
occurs in this play with a preface of his own to it.

'Duke. O fellow, come, the song we had last night:—
Mark it. Cesario; it is old, and plain;
The spinsters and the knitters in the sun,
And the free maids that weave their thread with bones
Do use to chaunt it; it is silly sooth,
And dallies with the innocence of love,
Like the old age."

"After reading other parts of this play, and particu-
larly the garden scene where Malvolio picks up the
letter, if we were to say that Shakspeare's genius for
comedy was less than his genius for tragedy, it would
perhaps only prove that our own taste in such matters
is more saturnine than mercurial."

* Hazlitt's Characters of Shakspeare's Plays, p. 256.

PERSONS REPRESENTED

ORSINO, *Duke of* Illyria.

SEBASTIAN, a young Gentleman, Brother to Viola.

ANTONIO, a Sea Captain, Friend to Sebastian.

A Sea Captain, Friend to Viola.

VALENTINE, Gentlemen attending on the Duke.

CURIO,

SIR TOBY BELCH, *Uncle of* Olivia.

SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHEEK.

MALVOLIO, Steward to Olivia.

FABIAN, } Servants to Olivia.

Clown, } *A rich Countess.*

OLIVIA, in love with the Duke.

MARIA, Olivia's *Woman*.

Lords, Priests, Sailors, Officers, Musicians, and other
Attendants.

SCENE, a City in Illyria; and the Sea Coast near it.

ACT I.

SCENE I. An Apartment in the Duke's Palace.
Enter DUKE, CURIO, Lords; Musicians attending.

Duke.

IF music be the food of love, play on,
Give me excess of it; that, surfacing,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.—
That strain again;—it hath a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,¹
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing, and giving odour.²—Enough; no more;
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love, how quick and fresh art thou !
That notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity³ and pitch soever,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute! so full of shapes is fancy,
That it alone is high-fantastical.⁴

1 The old copies read *sound*, the emendation is
Pope's. Rowe had changed it to wind. In Sidney's Ar-
cadia, 1590, we have—* more *sweet* than a gentle south-
west wind which comes creeping over *flowery* fields.*

2 Milton has very successfully introduced the same
image in Paradise Lost :

'Now gentle gales, Fanning their odoriferous wings, dispense

Native perfumes and whisper whence they stole
Those balmy spoils."

Shakspeare, in the Ninty-ninth Sonnet, has made the
violet the thief.

'The forward violet thus did I chide :

Sweet thief, whence didst thou steal thy sweet that
smells,

If not from my love's breath.'

Pope, in his Ode on St. Cecilia's Day; and Thomson,
in his Spring have availed themselves of the epithet
a dying fall.

Cur. Will you go hunt, my lord ?

Duke.

What, Curio?

Cur.

The hart.

Duke. Why, so I do, the noblest that I have:
O, when mine eyes did see Olivia first,
Methought she purg'd the air of pestilence;
That instant was I turn'd into a hart;
And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds,
E'er since pursue me.⁵—How now? what news
from her?

Enter VALENTINE.

Val. So please my lord, I might not be admitted,
But from her handmaid do return this answer:
The element itself, till seven years heat,⁶
Shall not behold her face at ample view;
But, like a cloistress, she will veiled walk,
And water once a day her chamber round
With eye-offending brine: all this, to season
A brother's dead love, which she would keep fresh,
And lasting, in her sad remembrance.

Duke. O, she, that hath a heart of that fine frame,
To pay this debt of love but to a brother,

3 Value.

4 Fantastical to the height.

5 Shakspeare seems to think men cautioned against
too great familiarity with forbidden beauty by the fable
of Acteon, who saw Diana naked, and was torn to
pieces by his hounds; as a man indulging his eyes or
his imagination with a view of a woman he cannot
gain, has his heart torn with incessant longing. An in-
terpretation far more elegant and natural than Lord
Bacon's, who, in his Wisdom of the Ancients, supposes
this story to warn us against inquiring into the secrets of
princes, by showing that those who know that which for
reasons of state ought to be concealed will be detected
and destroyed by their own servants. The thought
may have been suggested by Daniel's Fifth Sonnet, in
his Delia; or by Whitney's Emblems, 1586, p. 15;
and a passage in the Dedication to Aldington's trans-
lation of 'The Golden Ass of Apuleius,' 1566, may have
suggested these.

6 Heat for heated.

## SCENE III.

## TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL.

101

How will she love, when the rich golden shaft
Hath kill'd the flock¹ of all affections else
That live in her! when liver, brain, and heart,
These sovereign thrones, are all supplied, and fill'd
(Her sweet perfections) with one self³ king!—
Away before me to sweet beds of flowers;
Love-thoughts lie rich, when canopied with bowers.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE II. The Sea Coast. Enter VIOLA, Captain, and Sailors.

Vio. What country, friends, is this?

Cap.

Illyria, lady.

Vio. And what should I do in Illyria?

My brother he is in Elysium.

Perchance he is not drown'd:—What think you,
sailors?

Cap. It is perchance that you yourself were saved.

Vio. O my poor brother! and so, perchance, may
he be.

Cap. True, madam; and, to comfort you with
chance,

Assure yourself, after our ship did split,
When you, and that poor number saved with you,
Hung on our driving boat, I saw your brother,
Most provident in peril, bind himself
(Courage and hope both teaching him the practice)
To a strong mast, that lived upon the sea.
Where, like Arion on the dolphin's back,
I saw him hold acquaintance with the waves,
So long as I could see.

Vio. For saying so, there's gold:

Mine own escape unfoldeth to my hope,
Whereto thy speech serves for authority,
The like of him. Know'st thou this country?

Cap. Cap. Ay, madam, well; for I was bred and born

Not three hours travel from this very place.

Vio. Who governs here?

Cap.

A noble duke, in nature,

As in his name?

Vio.

What is his name?

Cap.

Orsino.

Vio. Orsino! I have heard my father name him:

He was a bachelor then.

Cap.

And so is now,

Or was so very late: for but a month
Ago I went from hence; and then 'twas fresh
In murmur (as you know, what great ones do,
The less will prattle of,) that he did seek
The love of fair Olivia.

Vio.

What's she?

Cap. A virtuous maid, the daughter of a count
That died some twelvemonth since; then leaving her
In the protection of his son, her brother,
Who shortly also died: for whose dear love
They say she hath ajbuj'd the company
And sight of men.

Cap.

O, that I serv'd that lady:

And might not be delivered to the world,
Till I had made mine own occasion mellow,
What my estate is.

Cap.

That were hard to compass;

Because she will admit no kind of suit,
No, not the duke's.

Vio. There is a fair behaviour in thee, captain;
And though that nature with a beauteous wall
Doth oft close in pollution, yet of thee
I will believe, thou hast a mind that suits
With this thy fair and outward character.
I pray thee, and I'll pay thee bounteously,
Conceal me what I am; and be my aid
For such disguise as, haply, shall become
The form of my intent. I'll serve this duke;
Thou shall present me as an eunuch to him,
It may be worth thy pains; for I can sing,
And speak to him in many sorts of music,
That will allow⁶ me very worth his service.
What else may hap, to time I will commit;
Only shape thou thy silence to my wit.

Cap. Be you his eunuch, and your mute I'll be:

When my tongue blabs, then let mine eyes not see!

Vio. I thank thee: Lead me on.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE III. A Room in Olivia's House. Enter SIR TOBY BELCH and MARIA.

Sir To. What a plague means my niece, to take
the death of her brother thus? I'm sure, care's an
enemy to life.

Mar. By my troth, Sir Toby, you must come in
earlier o'nights; your cousin, my lady, takes great
exceptions to your ill hours.

Sir To. Why, let her except before excepted.

Mar. Ay, but you must confine yourself within
the modest limits of order.

Sir To. Confine ? I'll confine myself no finer
than I am: these clothes are good enough to drink
in, and so be these boots too; and they be not, let
them hang themselves in their own straps.

Mar. That quaffing and drinking will undo you:
I heard my lady talk of it yesterday; and of a fool-
ish knight, that you brought in one night here, to be
her wooer.

Sir To. Who? Sir Andrew Ague-cheek?

Mar. Ay, he.

Sir To. He's as tall⁸ a man as any's in Illyria.

Mar. What's that to the purpose?

Sir To. Why, he has three thousand ducats a
year.

Mar. Ay, but he'll have but a year in all these
ducats; he's a very fool and a prodigal.

Sir To. Fye, that you'll say so! he plays o' the
viol-de-gambo, and speaks three or four languages
word for word without book, and hath all the good
gifts of nature.

Mar. He hath, indeed,—almost natural: for, be-
sides that he's a fool, he's a great quarreller; and,
but that he hath the gift of a coward to allay the
gust he hath in quarrelling, 'his thought among the
prudent, he would quickly have the gift of a grave.

Sir To. By this hand they are scoundrels, and
substraeters, that say so of him. Who are they?

Mar. They that add moreover, he's drunk nightly
in your company.

Sir To. With drinking healths to my niece; I'll
drink to her, as long as there is a passage in my
throat, and drink in Illyria: He's a coward, and a
coystril,⁹ that will not drink to my niece, till his
brains turn o' the toe like a parish-top.¹⁰ What,

1 So, in Sidney's Arcadia—“the flock of unspeakable virtues.”

2 The *liver*, *brain*, and *heart* were then considered the seats of *passion*, *judgment*, and *sentiments*. These are what Shakspeare calls *her sweet perfections*, though he has not very clearly expressed it.

3 *Self king* signifies *self same king*, i. e. one and the same king.

4 I. e. I wish I might not be made public to the world, with regard to the state of my birth and fortune, till I have gained a *ripe opportunity* for my design, Johnson remarks that 'Viola seems to have formed a deep design with very little premeditation.' In the novel upon which the play is founded, the Duke being driven upon the isle of Cyprus, by a tempest, *Silla*, the daughter of the governor, falls in love with him, and on his departure goes in pursuit of him. All this Shakespeare knew, and probably intended to tell in some future scene, but afterwards forgot it. Viola, in Act ii. Sc. 4, plainly alludes to her having been secretly in love

with the Duke, but it would have been inconsistent with her delicacy to have made an open confession of it to the Captain.

5 This plan of Viola's was not pursued, as it would have been inconsistent with the plot of the play. She was presented as a page not as an eunuch.

6 Approve.

7 A ludicrous use of a formal *law phrase*.

8 That is as *valiant* a man, as *tall* a man, is used here by Sir Toby with more than the usual licence of the word; he was pleased with the equivoque, and banzers upon the diminutive stature of poor Sir Andrew, and his utter want of courage.

9 A *coystril* is a low, mean, or worthless fellow.

10 A large top was formerly kept in every village, to be whipped in frosty weather, that the peasants might be kept warm by exercise, and out of mischief when they could not work. 'To sleep like a Town-top' is a proverbial expression.

102

ACT I.

wench? Castiliano volto;¹ for here comes Sir Andrew Ague-face.

*Enter SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHEEK.*

Sir And. Sir Toby Belech! how now, Sir Toby Belch.

Sir To. Sweet Sir Andrew !

Sir And. Bless you, fair shrew.

Mar. And you too, sir.

Sir To. Accost, Sir Andrew, accost.

Sir And. What's that ?

Sir To. My niece's chamber-maid.

Sir And. Good mistress Accost, I desire better acquaintance.

Mar. My name is Mary, sir.

Sir And. Good mistress Mary Accost,—

Sir To. You mistake, knight: accost, is, front her, board her, woo her, assail her.

Sir And. By my troth, I would not undertake her in this company. Is that the meaning of accost ?

Mar. Fare you well, gentlemen.

Sir To. An thou let part so, Sir Andrew, 'would thou might'st never draw sword again.

Sir And. An you part so, mistress, I would I might never draw sword again. Fair lady, do you think you have fools in hand ?

Mar. Sir, I have not you by the hand.

Sir And. Marry, but you shall have; and here's my hand.

Mar. Now, sir, thought is free: I pray you, bring your hand to the buttery-bar, and let me drink.

Sir And. Wherefore, sweetheart? what's your metaphor ?

Mar. It's dry, sir.

Sir And. Why, I think so; I am not such an ass, but I can keep my hand dry. But what's your jest ?

Mar. A dry jest, sir.

Sir And. Are you full of them ?

Mar. Ay, sir; I have them at my fingers' ends; marry, now I let go your hand, I am barren.

[Exit MARIA.]

Sir To. O knight, thou lack'st a cup of canary: When did I see thee so put down ?

Sir And. Never in your life, I think; unless you see canary put me down: Methinks, sometimes I have no more wit than a Christian, or an ordinary man by: but I am a great eater of beef, and, I believe, that does harm to my wit.

Sir To. No question.

Sir And. An I thought that, I'd forswear it. I'll ride home to-morrow, Sir Toby.

Sir To. Pourquoy, my dear knight ?

Sir And. What is *pourquoy*? do or not do? I would I had bestowed that time in the tongues, that I have in fencing, dancing, and bear-baiting: O, had I but followed the arts !

Sir To. Then hadst thou had an excellent head of hair.

Sir And. Why, would that have mended my hair?

Sir To. Past question; for thou seest it will not curl by nature.

Sir And. But it becomes me well enough, does't not?

1 The old copy reads Castiliano *vulgo*. Warburton proposed reading *Castiliano volto*. In English, put on your Castilian countenance, i. e. 'grave serious looks.' I have no doubt that Warburton was right, for that reading is required by the context, and Castiliano *vulgo* has no meaning. But I have met with a passage in Hall's *Satires*, B. iv. S. 2, which I think places it beyond a doubt:—

'he can kiss hand in gree,

And with good grace bow it below the knee,

Or make a *Spanish face* with fawning cheer,

With th' hand conge like a cavalier,

And shake his head, and cringe his neck and side,'&c.

The Spaniards were in high estimation for courtesy, though the natural gravity of the national countenance was thought to be a cloak for villany. The *Castiliano volto* was in direct opposition to the *viza sciolato* which the noble Roman told Sir Henry Wootton would go safe over the world. Castiliano *vulgo*, besides its want of connexion or meaning in this place, could hardly have been a proverbial phrase, when we remember that Castile is the *nobiest* part of Spain.

Sir To. Excellent; it hangs like flax on a distaff; and I hope to see a housewife take thee between her legs and spin it off.

Sir And. 'Faith, I'll home to-morrow, Sir Toby: your niece will not be seen; or, if she be, it's four to one she'll none of me: the count himself, here hard by, woos me.

Sir To. She'll none o' the count; she'll not match above her degree, neither in estate, years, nor wit; I have heard her swear it. Tut, there's life in't, man.

Sir And. I'll stay a month longer. I am a few- low o' the strangest mind i' the world; I delight in masques and revels sometimes altogether.

Sir To. Art thou good at these kickshaws, knight?

Sir And. As any man in Illyria, whatsoever he be, under the degree of my betters; and yet I will not compare with an old man.

Sir To. What is thy excellence in a galliard, knight?

Sir And. 'Faith, I can cut a caper.

Sir To. And I can cut the mutton to't.

Sir And. And, I think I have the back-trick, simply as strong as any man in Illyria.

Sir To. Wherefore are these things hid? where- fore have these gifts a curtain before them? are they like to take dust, like mistress Mall's picture?² why dost thou not go to church in a galliard, and come home in a coranto? My very walk should be a jig; I would not so much as make water, but in a sink-a-pace.³ What dost thou mean ? is it a world to hide virtues in? I did think, by the excellent constitution of thy leg, it was formed under the star of a galliard.

Sir And. Ay, 'tis strong, and it does indifferent well in a flame-coloured stock.⁴ Shall we set about some revels ?

Sir To. What shall we do else? were we not born under Taurus?

Sir And. Taurus? that's sides and heart.

Sir To. No, sir; it is legs and thighs.⁵ Let me see thee caper: ha! higher: ha, ha!—excellent!

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV. A Room in the Duke's palace.
*Enter VALENTINE, and VIOLA in man's attire.*

Val. If the Duke continues these favours towards you, Cesario, you are like to be much advanced; he hath known you but three days, and already you are no stranger.

Vio. You either fear his humour, or my negligence, that you call in question the continuance of his love: Is he inconstant, sir, in his favours?

Val. No, believe me.

*Enter DUKE, CURIO, and Attendants.*

Vio. I thank you. Here comes the count.

Duke. Who saw Cesario, ho ?

Vio. On your attendance, my lord; here.

Duke. Stand you awhile aloof.—Cesario,

Thou knowest no less but all; I have unclasp'd To thee the book even of my secret soul:

2 i. e. Mall Cutpurse, whose real name was Mary Frith. She was at once an *hermaphrodite*, a bawd, a prostitute, a bully, a thief, and a receiver of stolen goods. A book called ' The Madde Prankes of Merry Mall of the Bankside, with her Walks in Man's Apparel, and to what purpose, by John Dny,' was agitated on the Stationers' books in 1610. Middleton and Decker wrote a Comedy, of which she is the heroine, and a life of her was published in 1662, with her portrait in male attire. As this extraordinary personage partook of both sexes, the *curtain* which Sir Toby mentions would not have been unnecessarily drawn before such a picture of her as might have been exhibited in an age of which neither too much delicacy nor too much decency was the characteristic.

3 *Cinque-pace*, the name of a dance, the measures whereof are regulated by the number 5, also called a *Galliard*.

4 Stocking.

5 Alluding to the medical astrology of the almanacks. Both the knights are wrong, but their ignorance is perhaps intentional. *Taurus* is made to govern the *neck* and throat.

SCENE V.

103

Therefore, good youth, address thy gait¹ unto her;
Be not deny'd access, stand at her doors,
And tell them, there thy fixed foot shall grow,
Till thou have audience.

Vio.

Vio. Sure, my noble lord,
If she be so abandon'd to her sorrow

As it is spoke, she will not admit me.

Duke. Be clamorous, and leap all civil bounds,

Rather than make unprofited return.

Vio. Say, I do speak with her, my lord; what then?

Duke. O, then unfold the passion of my love,

Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith:

It shall become thee well to act my woes;

She will attend it better in thy youth,

Than in a nuncio of more grave aspect.

Vio. I think not so, my lord.

Duke.

Duke. Dear lad, believe it;

For they shall yet belie thy happy years

That say, thou art a man: Diana's lip

Is not more smooth and rubious; thy small pipe

Is as the maiden's organ, shrill and sound,

And all is semblative a woman's part.

I know thy constellation is right apt

For this affair:—Some four or five attend him?

All, if you will; for I myself am best,

When least in company:—Prosper well in this,

And thou shall live as freely as thy lord,

To call his fortunes thine.

Vio.

I'll do my best

To woo your lady: yet [Aside,] a barfish² strife!

Whoe'er I woo, myself would be his wife. [Exeunt]

### SCENE V.
A Room in Olivia's house. Enter MARIA and Clown.³

Mar. Nay, either tell me where thou hast been,
or I will not open my lips so wide as a bristle may
enter, in way of thy excuse: my lady will hang
thee for thy absence.

Clo. Let her hang me: he that is well hanged in
this world needs to fear no colours.

Mar. Make that good.

Clo. He shall see none to fear.

Mar. A good lenten⁴ answer: I can tell thee
where that saying was born, of, I fear no colours.

Clo. Where, good mistress Mary!

Mar. In the wars; and that may you be bold to
say in your foolery.

Clo. Well, God give them wisdom, that have it; and those that are fools, let them use their talents.

Mar. Yet you will be hanged for being so long
absent: or, to be turned away, is not that as good
as a hanging to you?

Clo. Many a good hanging prevents a bad mar-
riage; and, for turning away, let summer bear it out.

Mar. You are resolute then?

Clo. Not so neither; but I am resolved on two
points.

Mar. That, if one break,⁵ the other will hold; or,
if both break, your gaskins fall.

Clo. Apt, in good faith; very apt! Well, go thy
way; if Sir Toby would leave drinking, thou wert
as witty a piece of Eve's flesh as any in Illyria.

Mar. Peace, you rogue, no more o' that; here
comes my lady: make your excuse wisely, you
were best.

Enter OLIVIA and MALVOLIO.

[Exit.]

Clo. Wit, and't be thy will, put me into good
fooling! Those wits, that think they have thee, do
very oft prove fools; and I, that am sure I lack

1 Go thy way.

2 A contest full of impediments.

3 The clown in this play is a domestic fool in the ser-
vice of Olivia. He is specifically termed an allowed
fool, and 'Feste, the jester that the lady Olivia's father
took much delight in.' Malvolio speaks of him as 'a
set fool?' The dress of the domestic fool was of two
sorts, described by Mr. Douce in his Essay on the
Clowns and Fools' of Shakspeare, to which we must
refer the reader for full information. The dress some-
times appropriated to the character is thus described in
Tarleton's News out of Purgatory: 'I saw one attired
in russet, with a button'd cap upon his head, a bag by
his side, and a strong bat in his hand; so artificially at-

thee, may pass for a wise man: For what says
Quinapalus? Better a witty fool, than a foolish wit.

—God bless thee, lady!

Oli. Take the fool away.

Clo. Do you not hear, fellows? Take away the
lady.

Oli. Go to, you're a dry fool; I'll no more of
you: besides you grow dishonest.

Clo. Two faults, madonna,⁶ that drink and good
counsel will amend: for give the dry fool drink, then
is the fool not dry; bid the dishonest man mend
himself; if he mend, he is no longer dishonest; if
he cannot, let the botcher mend him: Any thing
that's mended, is but patched: virtue, that trans-
gresses, is but patched with sin: and sin, that
amends, is but patched with virtue: If that this
simple syllogism will serve, so; if it will not, what
remedy? As there is no true cuckold but calamity,
so beauty's a flower:—the lady bade take away the
fool; therefore, I say again, take her away.

Oli. Sir, I bade them take away you.

Clo. Misprision in the highest degree!—Lady,
Cucullus non facit monachum; that's as much as to
say, I wear not motley in my brain. Good madon-
na, give me leave to prove you a fool.

Oli. Can you do it?

Clo. Dexteroously, good madam.

Oli. Make your proof.

Clo. I must catechize you for it, madonna:
Good my mouse of virtue, answer me.

Oli. Well, sir, for want of other idleness, I'll
bide your proof.

Clo. Good madonna, why mourn'st thou?

Oli. Good fool, for my brother's death.

Oli. I think his soul is in hell, madonna.

Oli. I know his soul is in heaven, fool.

Clo. The more fool you, madonna, to mourn for
your brother's soul being in heaven.—Take away
the fool, gentlemen.

Oli. What think you of this fool, Malvolio? doth
thou not mend?

Mal. Yes, and shall do, till the pangs of death
shake him: Infirmity, that decays the wise, doth
ever make the better fool.

Clo. God send you, sir, a speedy infirmity, for
the better encreasing your folly! Sir Toby will be
sworn that I am no fox; but he will not pass his
word for twopence that you are no fool.

Oli. How say you to that, Malvolio?

Mal. I marvel your ladship takes delight in such
a barren rascal; I saw him put down the other day
with an ordinary fool that has no more brain than a
stone. Look you now, he's out of his guard alrea-
dy; unless you laugh and minister occasion to him,
he is gagged. I protest I take these wise men, that
crow so at these set of kind fools, no better than the
fools' zanies.

Oli. O, you are sick of self-love, Malvolio, and
taste with a distempered appetite. To be generous,
guiltless, and of free disposition, is to take those
things for bird-bolts,⁹ that you deem cannon-bullet:
There is no slander in an allowed fool, though he do
nothing but rail; nor no railing in a known discreet
man, though he do nothing but reprove.

Clo. Now Mercury endure thee with leasing,⁹ for
thou speakest well of fools!

Re-enter MARIA.

Mar. Madam, there is at the gate a young gen-
dleman, much desires to speak with you.

tired for a clovene as I began to call Tarleton's wonted
shape to remembrance.

4 Short and spare. 'Sparing, niggardly, insuffi-
cient, like the fare of old times in Lent. Metaphori-
cally, short, laconic. Says Steevens. I rather incline
to Johnson's explanation, 'a good dry answer.' Stee-
vens does not seem to have been aware that a dry fig
was called a lenten fig. In fact, lenten fare was dry fare.

5 Points were laces which fastened the hose or
breeches.

6 Italian, mistress, dame.

7 Fools' baubles.

8 Bird-bolts were short thick arrows with obtuse
ends, used for shooting young rooks and other birds.

9 Lying.

104

ACT I.

Oli. From the count Orsino, is it?

Mar. I know not, madam; 'tis a fair young man,
and well attended,

Oli. Who of my people hold him in delay ?

Mar. Sir Toby, madam, your kinsman.

Oli. Fetch him off, I pray you; he speaks no-
thing but madman: Fie on him! [Exit MARIA.]
Go you, Malvolio; if it be a suit from the count,
am sick, or not at home; what you will to dismiss
it. [Exit MALVOLIO.] Now you see, sir, how
your fooling grows old, and people dislike it.

Clo. Thou hast spoke for us, madonna, as if thy
eldest son should be a fool: whose skull Jove cram
with brains, for here he comes, one of thy kin, has
a most weak pia mater.¹

Enter SIR TOBY BELCH.

Oli. By mine honour, half drunk.—What is he
at the gate, cousin ?

Sir To. A gentleman.

Oli. A gentleman! what gentleman?

Sir To. 'Tis a gentleman here—A plague o'these
pickle-herrings !—How now, sot?

Clo. Good Sir Toby, —

Oli. Cousin, cousin, how have you come so early
by this lethargy ?

Sir To. Lechery ! I defy lechery: There's one
at the gate.

Oli. Ay, marry; what is he ?

Sir To. Let him be the devil, an he will, I care
not: give me faith, say I. Well, it's all one. [Exit.

Oli. What's a drunken man like, fool ?

Clo. Like a drown'd man, a fool, and a madman:
one draught above neat makes him a fool; the
second mads him; and a third drowns him.

Oli. Go thou and seek the coroner, and let him
sit o' my coz; for he's in the third degree of drink;
he's drown'd; go, look after him.

Clo. He is but mad yet, madonna; and the
fool shall count to the madman. [Exit Clown.

Re-enter MALVOLIO.

Mal. Madam, yond' young fellow swears he will
speak to you. I told him you were sick; he takes
on him to understand so much, and therefore comes
to speak with you: I told him you were asleep; he
seems to have a foreknowledge of that too, and
therefore comes to speak with you. What is to be
said to him, lady? he's fortified against any denial.

Oli. Tell him, he shall not speak with me.

Mal. He has been told so: and he says, he'll
stand at your door like a sheriff's post,² and be the
supporter of a bench, but he'll speak with you.

Oli. What kind of man is he ?

Mal. Why, of man kind.

Oli. What manner of man ?

Mal. Of very ill manner; he'll speak with you,
will you or no.

Oli. Of what personage and years is he ?

Mal. Not yet old enough for a man, nor young
enough for a boy; as a squash is before 'tis a peas-
cod, or a codling³ when 'tis almost an apple: 'tis
with him e'en standing water, between boy and
man. He is very well favoured, and he speaks
very shrewishly; one would think, his mother's milk
were scarce out of him.

Oli. Let him approach: Call in my gentle-
woman.

Mal. Gentlewoman, my lady calls.

[Exit.]

Re-enter MARIA.

Oli. Give me my veil; come, throw it o'er my face;
We'll once more hear Orsino's embassy.

Enter VIOLA.

Vio. The honourable lady of the house, which
is she?

Oli. Speak to me, I shall answer for her: Your
will?

Vio. Most radiant, exquisite, and unmatchable
beauty,—I pray you, tell me, if this be the lady of
the house, for I never saw her: I would be loath
to cast away my speech; for, besides that it is ex-
cellently well penn'd, I have taken great pains to
con it. Good beauties, let me sustain no scorn;
I am very comptible,⁴ even to the least sinister
usage.

Oli. Whence come you, sir?

Vio. I can say little more than I have studied,
and that question's out of my part. Good gentle
one, give me modest assurance, if you be the lady
of the house, that I may proceed in my speech.

Oli. Are you a comedian ?

Vio. No, my profound heart: and yet, by the
veryfangs of malice, I swear, I am not that I play.
Are you the lady of the house?

Oli. If I do not usurp myself, I am.

Vio. Most certain, if you are she, you do usurp
yourself; for what is yours to bestow, is not yours
to reserve. But this is from my commission: I
will on with my speech in your praise, and then
shew you the heart of my message.

Oli. Come to what is important in't: I forgive
you the praise.

Vio. Alas, I took great pains to study it, and 'tis
poetic.

Oli. It is the more like to be feigned; I pray you,
keep it in. I heard you were saucy at my gates;
and allowed your approach, rather to wonder at
you than to hear you. If you be not mad,⁵ be
gone; if you have reason, be brief; 'tis not that
time of moon with me, to make one in so skipping⁶
a dialogue.

Mar. Will you hoist sail, sir ? here lies your way.

Vio. No, good swabbet: I am to hull? here a
little longer.—Some mollification for your giant,⁸
sweet lady.

Oli. Tell me your mind.

Vio. I am a messenger.

Oli. Sure, you have some hideous matter to deli-
ver, when the courtesy of it is so fearful. Speak
your office.

Vio. It alone concerns your ear. I bring no
overture of war, no taxation of homage; I hold the
olive in my hand: my words are as full of peace as
matter.

Oli. Yet you began rudely. What are you ?
what would you?

Vio. The rudeness, that hath appear'd in me,
have I learn'd from my entertainment. What I am,
and what I would, are as secret as maidenhead: to
your ears, divinity; to any other's, profanation.

Oli. Give us the place alone; we will hear this
divinity. [Exit MARIA.] Now, sir, what is your
text?

Vio. Most sweet lady,—

Oli. A comfortable doctrine, and much may be
said of it. Where lies your text?

1 The membrane that covers the brain.

2 The sheriffs formerly had painted posts set up at
their doors, on which proclamations, &c. were affixed.

3 A codling (according to Mr. Gifford,) means an
involucrum or kelt, and was used by our old writers for
that early state of vegetation, when the fruit, after shak-
ing off the blossom, began to assume a globular and
determinate shape. Mr. Nares says, a codling was a
young raw apple, fit for nothing without dressing, and
that it is so named because it was chiefly eaten when
coddled or scalded; codlings being particularly so used
when unripe. Florio interprets 'Mele cotte, quodlings,
boiled apples.'

4 Accountable.

5 The sense seems to require that we should read—
'if you be mad, begone.' For the words *be mad* in the
first part of the sentence are opposed to *reason* in the
second.

6 I.e. wild, frolic, mad.

7 To hull means to drive to and fro upon the water
without sails or rudder.

8 Ladies in romance are guarded by giants. Viola
seeing the waiting-maid so eager to oppose her message,
entreats Olivia to pacify her giant. There is also a
pleasant allusion to the diminutive size of Maria, who
is subsequently called little villain, youngest wren of
nine, &c. It should be recollected that the female parts
were played by boys.

## SCENE IV.

105

Vio. In Orsino's bosom?

Oli. In his bosom? In what chapter of his bosom?

Vio. To answer by the method, in the first of his heart.

Oli. O, I have read it; it is heresy. Have you no more to say?

Vio. Good madam, let me see your face.

Oli. Have you any commission from your lord to negotiate with my bosom; are you now out of your text: but we will draw the curtain, and shew you the picture. Look you, sir, such an one as I was, this presents:¹—Is't not well done? [Unveiling.

Vio. Excellently done, if God did all.

Oh. 'Tis in grain, sir; 'twill endure wind and weather.

Vio. 'Tis beauty truly blent,² whose red and white Nature's own sweet and cunning hand laid on:

Lady, you are the cruelst she alive,
If you will lead these graces to the grave,
And leave the world no copy.³

Oli. O, sir, I will not be so hard-hearted; I will give out divers schedules of my beauty: It shall be inventoried; and every particle and utensil labelled to my will: as, item, two lips indifferent red; item, two gray eyes, with lids to them; item, one neck, one chin, and so forth. Were you sent higher to 'praise' me?

Vio. I see you what you are: you are too proud; But, if you were the devil, you are fair. My lord and master loves you; O, such love Could be but recompensed,¹¹ though you were crown'd The nonpareil of beauty!

Oli. How does he love me?

Vio. With adorations, with fertile tears,

With groans that thunder love, with sighs of fire.

Oli. Your lord does know my mind, I cannot love him:

Yet I suppose him virtuous, know him noble,
Of great estate, of fresh and stainless youth;
In voices well divulg'd,⁵ free, learn'd, and valiant,
And, in dimension, and the shape of nature,
A gracious person: but yet I cannot love him;
He might have took his answer long ago.

Vio. If I did love you in my master's flame,
With such a suffering, such a deadly life,
In your denial I would find no sense,
I would not understand it.

Oli. Why, what would you?

Vio. Make me a willow cabin at your gate,
And call upon my soul within the house;
Write loyal cantons⁶ of contemned love,
And sing them loud even in the dead of night;
Holla your name to the reverberate hills,
And make the babbling gossip of the air;
Cry out, Olivia! O, you should not rest
Between the elements of air and earth,
But you should pity me.

Oli. You might do much: What is your parentage?

Vio. Above my fortunes, yet my state is well:
I am a gentleman.

Oli. Get you to your lord;

I cannot love him: let him send no more;

Unless, perchance, you come to me again,

To tell me how he takes it. Fare you well:

I thank you for your pains: spend this for me.

Vio. I am no fee'd post,⁸ lady; keep your purse;

My master, not myself, lacks recompense.

1 The old copy reads, 'Look you, sir, such a one as I was this present.' M. Mason proposed to read: 'Look you, sir, such as once I was, this presents.' The simple emendation in the text, which I have ventured upon, makes it intelligible. We may by the slight transposition of a word make it explain itself: 'Look you, sir, such a one I was, as this presents.'

2 Blended, mixed together.

3 Shakspeare has a similar thought repeated in his third, ninth, eleventh, and thirteenth sonnets.

4 i. e. appraise.

5 Well spoken of by the world.

6 Cantos, verses.

7 A most beautiful expression for an *echo*.

8 Messenger.

Love make his heart of flint, that you shall love;
And let your fervour, like my master's, be
Plac'd in contempt! Farewell, fair cruelty. [Exit.

Oli. What is your parentage?

Oli. I am a gentleman.—I'll be sworn thou art,
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit,
Do give thee five-fold blazon;¹⁰—Not too fast:—

soft! soft!

Unless the master were the man.—How now?

Even so quickly may one catch the plague?

Methinks, I feel this youth's perfections,

With an invisible and subtle stealth,
To creep in at mine eyes. Well, let it be.—

What, ho, Malvolio!—

Re-enter MALVOLIO.

Mal. Here, madam, at your service.

Oli. Run after that same peevish messenger,
The county's¹⁰ man: he left this ring behind him,
Would I, or not; tell him, I'll none of it.

Desire him not to flatter with his lord;

Nor hold him up with hopes! I am not for him:

If that the youth will come this way to-morrow,
I'll give him reasons for't. Hie, thee, Malvolio.

Mal. Madam, I will.

[Exit.]

Oli. I do I know not what: and fear to find

Mine eye too great a flatterer for my mind.¹¹

Fate, show thy force: ourselves we do not owe;¹²

What is decreed, must be; and be this so! [Exit.]

## ACT II.

### SCENE I. The Sea Coast. Enter ANTONIO and SEBASTIAN.

Ant. Will you stay no longer? nor will you not, that I go with you?

Seb. By your patience, no: my stars shine darkly over me; the malignancy of my fate might, perhaps, distemper yours; therefore I shall crave of you your leave, that I may bear my evils alone: It were a bad recompense for your love, to lay any of them on you.

Ant. Let me yet know of you, whither you are bound.

Seb. No, 'sooth, sir; my determinate voyage is mere extravagancy. But I perceive in you so excellent a touch of modesty, that you will not extort from me what I am willing to keep in; therefore it charges me in manners the rather to express¹³ myself. You must know of me, then, Antonio, my name is Sebastian, which I called Rodorigo: my father was that Sebastian of Messaline,¹⁴ whom, I know, you have heard of: he left behind him myself, and a sister, both born in an hour. If the heats had been pleased,¹⁵ would we had so ended! but, you, sir, altered that; for, some hour before you took me from the breach of the sea, was my sister drowned.

Ant. Alas, the day!

Seb. A lady, sir, though it was said she much resembled me, was yet of many accounted beautiful: but, though I could not, with such estimable wonder,¹⁶ overfar believe that, yet thus far I will boldly publish her, she bore a mind that envy could not but call fair: she is drowned already, sir, with salt water, though I seem to drown her remembrance again with more.¹⁶

9 Proclamation of gentleness.

10 Count.

11 i. e. she fears that her eyes had formed so flattering an idea of the supposed youth. Cesario, that she should not have strength of mind sufficient to resist the impression.

12 i. e. we are not our own masters, we cannot govern ourselves; *owe for own, possess.*

13 Reveal.

14 Probably intended for Metelin, an island in the Archipelago.

15 i. e. esteeming wonder, or wonder and esteem.

16 There is a similar false thought in Hamlet:

'Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, And therefore I forbid my tears.⁹

14

### SCENE III.

107

*Sir And.* An you love me, let's do't: I am dog at a catch.

*Clo.* By'r lady, sir, and some dogs will catch well.

*Sir And.* Most certain: let our catch be, *Thou knave*.

*Clo.* Hold thy peace, thou knave, knight? I shall be constrain'd in't, to call thee knave, knight.

*Sir And.* 'Tis not the first time I have constrain'd one to call me knave. Begin, fool; it begins, *Hold thy peace*.¹

*Clo.* I shall never begin, if I hold my peace.

*Sir And.* Good, i'faith! Come, begin.

*[They sing a catch.]*

*Enter MARIA.*

*Mar.* What a caterwauling do you keep here! If my lady have not called up her steward, *Malvolio*, and bid him turn you out of doors, never trust me.

*Sir To.* My lady's a Cataian,² we are politicians; *Malvolio's* a Peg-a-Ramsey,³ and *Three merry men we be*. Am not I consanguineous? am I not of her blood? *Thalley-valley*,⁴ lady! *There dwelt a man in Babylon, lady, lady*?⁵

*[Singing.]*

*Clo.* Beshrew me, the knight's in admirable fooling.

*Sir And.* Ay, he does well enough, if he be disposed, and so do I too; he does it with a better grace, but I do it more natural.

*Sir To.* O, *the twelfth day of December*,⁶

*[Singing.]*

*Mar.* For the love o' God, peace.

*Enter MALVOLIO.*

*Mal.* My masters, are you mad? or what are you! Have you no wit, manners, nor honesty, but to gable like tinkers at this time of night? Do you make an alehouse of my lady's house, that ye squeak out your coziers⁸ catches without any mitigation or remorse of voice? Is there no respect of place, persons, nor time, in you?

*Sir To.* We did keep time, sir, in our catches. Sneck up!⁹

*Sir To.* Sir Toby, I must be round with you. My lady bade me tell you, that though she harbours you as her kinsman, she's nothing allied to your disorders. If you can separate yourself from your misdemeanors, you are welcome to the house; if not, an it would please you to take leave of her, she is very willing to bid you farewell.

*Sir To.* Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone.

*Mar.* Nay, good Sir Toby.

*Clo.* His eyes do show his days are almost done.

*Mal.* Is't even so?

*Sir To.* But I will never die.

*Clo.* Sir Toby, there you lie.

*Mal.* This is much credit to you.

*Sir To.* *Shall I bid him go?*

*[Singing.]*

*Clo.* What an if you do?

*Sir To.* *Shall I bid him go, and spare not?*

*Clo.* O no, no, no, no, you dare not.

*Sir To.* Out o' time? sir, ye lie,—Art any more than a steward? Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

*Clo.* Yes, by Saint Anne; and ginger shall be hot i'the mouth too.

*Sir To.* Thou'rt i'the right.—Go, sir, rub your chain⁹ with crums:—A stoop of wine, Maria!

to this division of souls was intended. Sir Toby rather meant that the catch should be so harmonious that it would hale the soul out of a weaver *thrice over*, a rhomontade way of expressing, that it would give this warm lover of song thrice more delight than it would give another man.

1. This catch is to be found in 'Pammelia, Musickie. Miscellaneous, 1618.' The words and music are in the *Variorum Shakspeare*.

2. This word generally signified a sharper. *Sir To-by* is too drunk for precision, and uses it merely as a term of reproach.

3. Name of an obscene old song.

4. An interjection of contempt equivalent to *fiddle-faddle*, possibly from the Latin *Titicillitium*.

5. *Sir Toby*, in his cups, is full of the fragments of old ballads: such as, 'There dwelt a man in Babylon.'

*Mal.* Mistress Mary, if you prized my lady's favour at any thing more than contempt, you would not give means for this uncivil rule;⁹ she shall know of it, by this hand.

*Mar.* Go shake your ears.

*Sir And.* 'Twere as good a deed as to drink when a man's a hungry, to challenge him to the field; and then to break promise with him, and make a fool of him.

*Sir To.* Do't knight; I'll write thee a challenge; or I'll deliver thy indignation to him by word of mouth.

*Mar.* Sweet Sir Toby, be patient for to-night; since the youth of the count's was to-day with my lady, she is much out of quiet. For monsieur *Malvolio*, let me alone with him; if I do not gull him into a nay-word,¹⁰ and make him a common recreation, do not think I have wit enough to lie straight in my bed: I know I can do it.

*Sir To.* Possess us,¹¹ possess us; tell us something of him.

*Mar.* Marry, sir, sometimes he is a kind of Puritan.

*Sir And.* O, if I thought that, I'd beat him like a dog.

*Sir To.* What, for being a Puritan? thy exquisite reason, dear knight?

*Sir And.* I have no exquisite reason for't, but I have reason good enough.

*Mar.* The devil a Puritan that he is, or any thing constantly but a time pleaser; an affectioned¹² ass, that cons state without book, and utters it by great swarths:¹³ the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his ground of faith, that all, that look on him, love him; and on that vice in him will my revenge find notable cause to work.

*Sir To.* What wilt thou do?

*Mar.* I will drop in his way some obscure episodes of love; wherein, by the colour of his beard, the shape of his leg, the manner of his gait, the expresse of his eye, forehead, and complexion, he shall find himself most feelingly personated. I can write very like my lady, your niece; on a forgotten matter we can hardly make distinction of our hands.

*Sir To.* Excellent! I smell a device.

*Sir And.* I have't in my nose too.

*Sir To.* He shall think, by the letters that thou wilt drop, that they come from my niece, and that she is in love with him.

*Mar.* My purpose is, indeed, a horse of that colour.

*Sir And.* And your horse now would make him an ass.

*Mar.* Ass, I doubt not.

*Sir And.* O,⁹ *twill be admirable.*

*Mar.* Sport royal, I warrant you: I know, my physic will work with him. I will plant you two, and let the fool make a third, where he shall find the letter; observe his construction of it. For this night, to bed; and dream on the event. Farewell.

*[Exit.]*

*Sir To.* Good night, Penthesilea.¹⁴

*Sir And.* Before me, she's a good wench.

*Sir To.* She's a beagle, true bred, and one that adores me; What o' that?

'Three merry men are we,' &c. The latter was composed by W. Lawes, and may be found in Playford's Musical Companion, 1673.

6. *Cobblers*, or *botchers*. Dr. Johnson interprets it *tailors*, but erroneously.

7. An interjection of contempt, signifying, *go hang yourself*, or *go and be hanged*.

8. Stewards anciently wore a chain of silver or gold, as a mark of superiority, as did other principal servants. Wolsey's chief cook is described by Cavendish as wearing 'velvet or satin with a chain of gold.' One of the methods used to clean gilt plate was *rubbing it with crums*.

9. Behaviour, or conduct. Hence gambols and frolicsome behaviour was called *mis-rule*.

10. By-word.

11. Inform us.

12. Affected.

13. i. e. by great parcels or heaps. *Swarths* are the rows of grass left there by the scythe of the mower.

14. Amazon.

108

ACT II.

Sir And. I was adored once too.

Sir To. Let's to bed, knight.—Thou hadst need send for more money.

Sir And. If I cannot recover your niece, I am a foul way out.

Sir To. Send for money, knight; if thou hast her not ? the end, call me Cut.¹

Sir And. If I do not, never trust me, take it how you will.

Sir To. Come, come; I'll go burn some sack, 'tis too late to go to bed now: come, knight; come, knight. [Exeunt.

### SCENE IV.—A Room in the Duke's Palace.

Enter DUKE, VIOLA, CURIO, and others.

Duke. Give me some music :—Now, good morrow, friends :—

Now, good Cesario, but that piece of song, That old and antique song we heard last night; Methought, it did relieve my passion much, More than light airs and recollected terms,² Of these most brisk and giddy-paced times :—

Come, but one verse.

Cur. He is not here, so please your lordship, that should sing it.

Duke. Who was it ?

Cur. Feste, the jester, my lord : a fool, that the lady Olivia's father took much delight in: he is about the house.

Duke. Seek him out, and play the tune the while.

[Exeunt.](Duke.)

Come hither, boy; if ever thou shalt love, In the sweet pangs of it, remember me For, such as I am, all true lovers are; Unstaid and skittish in all motions else, Save, in the constant image of the creature That is beloved.—How dost thou like this tune ?

Vio. It gives a very echo to the seat Where Love is thron'd.³

Duke. Thou dost speak masterly: My life upon't, young though thou art, thine eye Hath staid upon some favour that it loves; Hath it not, boy ?

Vio. A little, by your favour.⁴

Duke. What kind of woman is't ?

Vio. Of your complexion.

Duke. She is not worth thee then. What years, i'faith ?

Vio. About your years, my lord.

Duke. Too old,⁵ by heaven; Let still the woman take

An elder than herself; so wears she to him, So sways she level in her husband's heart, For, boy, however we do praise ourselves, Our fancies are more giddy and unfirm, More longing, wavering, sooner lost and worn,⁸

Than women's are.

Vio. I think it well, my lord.

Duke. Then let thy love be younger than thyself, Or thy affection cannot hold the bent :

For, women are as roses; whose fair flower, Being once display'd, doth fall that very hour.

Vio. And so they are: alas, that they are so; To die, even when they to perfection grow !

1. This term of contempt probably signified, call me gelding or horse. Falstaff, in Henry IV, Part I, says, ' Spit in my face, call me horse.' It is of common occurrence in old plays. Cut was a common contraction of curtail. One of the carriers' horses in the first part of Henry IV, is called Cut.

2. Recalled, repeated terms, alluding to the repetitions in songs.

3. i. e. to the heart.

4. The word favour is ambiguously used. In the preceding speech it signified countenance.

5. i. e. consumed, worn out.

6. i. e. chaste maids, employed in making lace. This passage has sadly puzzled the commentators; their conjectures are some of them highly amusing. Johnson says, 'free is perhaps vacant, unengaged, easy in mind.' Steevens once thought it meant unmarried; then that it might mean cheerful; and at last concludes that 'its precise meaning cannot easily be pointed out.' Warton mentions, in his notes on L'Allegro of Milton,

Re-enter CURIO and Clown.

Mark it, Cesario; it is old, and plain: The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, And the free⁶ maids that weave their thread with bones,

Do use to chaunt it; it is very sooth,⁷

And dailies with the innocence of love, Like the old age.⁸

Clo. Are you ready, sir ?

Duke. Ay; pr'ythee, sing.

[Music.]

### SONG.

Clo. Come away, come away, death, And in sad cypress⁹ let me be laid;

Fly away, fly away, breath; I am slain by a fair cruel maid,

My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,

O, prepare it;

My part of death no one so true

Did share it,

Not a flower, not a flower sweet,

On my black coffin let there be strown ;

Not a friend, not a friend greet

My poor corpse, where my bones shall be throned.

A thousand thousand sighs to save,

Lay me, O, where

Sad true-love never find my grave,

To weep there.

Duke. There's for thy pains.

Clo. No pains, sir; I take pleasure in singing, sir.

Duke. I'll pay thy pleasure then.

Clo. Truly, sir, and pleasure will be paid one time or another.

Duke. Give me now leave to leave thee.

Clo. Now, the melancholy god protect thee; and the tailor make thy doublet of changeable taffeta, for thy mind is a very opal¹⁰—I would have men of such constancy put to sea, that their business might be every thing and their intent every where; for that's it, that always makes a good voyage of nothing.—Farewell.

Duke. Let all the rest give place.

[Exeunt.](Duke.)

Enter ATTENDANTS. Once more, Cesario,

Get thee to yon' same sovereign cruelty:

Tell her, my love, more noble than the world, Prizes not quantity of dirty lands;

The parts that fortune hath bestow'd upon her,

Tell her, I hold as giddily as fortune ;

But 'tis that miracle, and queen of gems, That nature pranks¹¹ her in, attracts my soul.

Vio. But, if she cannot love you, sir ?

Duke. I cannot be so answer'd.

Vio. 'Sooth, but you must.

Say, that some lady, as, perhaps, there is,

Hath for your love as great a pang of heart

As you have for Olivia: you cannot love her;

You tell her so; Must she not then be answer'd ?

Duke. There is no woman's sides

Can bid the beating of so strong a passion

As love doth give my heart: no woman's heart

So big, to hold so much; they lack retention.

Alas, their love may be call'd appetite,—

that it was a common attribute of woman, coupled most-ly with fair, but he did not venture upon an explanation.

7. Silly sooth, or rather sely sooth, is simple truth.

8. The old age is the ages past, times of simplicity.

9. It is not clear whether a shroud of the stuff now called crape, anciently called cypress, is here meant, or whether a coffin of cypress wood was intended. The cypress was used for funeral purposes; and the epithet sad is inconsistent with a white shroud. It is even possible that branches of cypress only may be meant. We see the shroud was stuck all with yew, and cypress may have been used in the same manner. In Quarles's Argalus and Parthenia, a knight is introduced, whose

³ horse was black as jet,

His furniture was round about beset

With branches slitted from the sad cypress tree.

10. The opal is a gem which varies its hues, as it is viewed in different lights.

11. That beauty which nature decks her in.

SCENE V.

109

No motion of the liver, but the palate,—

That suffer surfeit, clement, and revolt;

But mine is all as hungry as the sea,

And can digest as much: make no compare

Between that love a woman can bear me,

And that I owe Olivia.

Vio. 'Ay, but I know,—

Duke. What dost thou know?

Vio. Too well what love women to men may owe:

In faith, they are as true of heart as we.

My father had a daughter lov'd a man,

As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,

I should your Lordship.

Duke.

And what's her history?

Vio. A blank, my lord: She never told her love,

But let concealment, like a worm i'the bud,¹

She sat like patience on a monument,

Smiling at grief.² Was not this love, indeed?

We men may say more, swear more: but, indeed,
Our shows are more than will; for still we prove
Much in our vows, but little in our love.

Vio. I am all the daughters of my father's house,

And all the brothers too;—and yet I know not:—

Shall I to this lady?

Duke.

Ay, that's the theme.

To her in haste ; give her this jewel; say,

My love can give no place, bide no denay.³

[Exeunt]

SCENE V.—Olivia's Garden. Enter SIR TOBY BELCH, SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHECK, and FABIAN.

Sir To. Come thy ways, signior Fabian.

Fab. Nay, I'll come; if I lose a scruple of this sport, let me be boiled to death with melancholy.

Sir To. Wouldst thou not be glad to have the niggardly rascally sheep-biter come by some notable shame ?

Fab. I would exult, man ; you know, he brought
me out of favour with my lady, about a bear-baiting
here.

Sir To. To anger him, we'll have the bear again;
and we will fool him black and blue:—Shall we
not, Sir Andrew?

Sir And. An we do not, it is pity of our lives.

Enter MARIA.

Sir To. Here comes the little villain :—How now,
my nettle of India?⁴

Mar. Get ye all three into the box-tree: Mal-
volio's coming down this walk ; he has been yon-

1 So in the fifth Sonnet of Shakspeare:—

'Which like a canker in the fragrant rose

Doth spot the beauty of thy budding name.'

And in the Rape of Lucrece :—

'Why should the worm intrude the maiden bud?'

Again in Richard II.—

'But now will canker sorrow eat my buds,'

And chase the native beauty from my cheek.

2 So Middleton in The Witch, Act iv. Sc. 3:—

'She does not love me now, but painfully

Like one that's fore'd to smile upon a grief.'

The commentators have overlaid this exquisite passage
with notes, and created difficulties where none existed.
Mr. Boswell says, the meaning is obviously this:—
'While she was smiling at grief, or in her grief, her pla-
cid resignation made her look like patience on a monu-
ment.'

3 Denial.

4 The first folio reads 'mettle of India.' By the net-
tle of India is meant a zophite, called Urtica Marina,
abounding in the Indian seas. 'Qua tacta totius cor-
poris pruritium quendam excitat, unde nomen Urtice-
est sortita.'—Franzii Hist. Animal, 1665, p. 620. In
Holland's translation of Pliny, Book ix. 'As for those
nettles, &c. their qualities is to raise an itching smart.'
So, Green in his 'Card of Fancie,' 'The flower of In-
dia, pleasant to be seen, but whose smelleth to it feeleth
present smart.' He refers to it again in his Mamilia,
1593. Maria has certainly excited a congenial sensa-
tion in Sir Toby. Mettle of India would signify my
girl of gold my precious girl.

der i'the sun, practising behaviour to his own shadow,
this half hour: observe him, for the love of
morcery; for I know, this letter will make a contem-
plative idiot of him. Close, in the name of jesting!
[The men hide themselves.] Lie thou there; [throws
down a letter] for here comes the trout that must
be caught with tickling.
[Exit MARIA.

Enter MALVOLIO.

Mal. 'Tis but fortune ; all is fortune. Maria once
told me, she did affect me : and I have heard her-
self come thus near, that, should she fancy,⁵ it
should be one of my complexion. Besides, she
uses me with a more exalted respect, than any one
else that follows her. What should I think on't?

Sir To. Here's an overweening rogue!

Fab. O, peace! Contemplation makes a rare
turkey-cock of him; how he jets⁶ under his ad-
vanced plumes!

Sir And. 'Slight I could so beat the rogue :—

Sir To. Peace, I say.

Mal. To be count Malvolio;—

Sir To. Ah, rogue!

Sir And. Pistol him, pistol him.

Sir To. Peace, peace!

Mal. There is example for't; the lady of the
Strachy married the yeoman of the wardrobe.

Sir And. Fie on him, Jezebel!

Fab. O, peace! now he's deeply in; look how
imagination blows⁸!

Mal. Having been three months married to her,
sitting in my state,⁹—

Sir To. O, for a stone bow, to hit him in the eye!

Mal. Calling my officers about me, in my branch-
ed velvet gown; having come from a day bed,¹⁰
where I left Olivia sleeping.

Sir To. Fire and brimstone!

Fab. O, peace, peace!

Mal. And then to have the humour of state: and
after a demure travel of regard,—telling them I
know my place, as I would they should do theirs
—to ask for my kinsman Toby:

Sir To. Bolts and shackles!

Fab. O, peace, peace, peace! now, now.

Mal. Seven of my people, with an obedient start,
make out for him: I frown the while; and, per-
chance, wind up my watch, or play with my some
rich jewel. Toby approaches; court'sies¹¹ there to
me:

Sir To. Shall this fellow live?

Fab. Though our silence be drawn from us with
cars,¹² yet peace.

Mal. I extend my hand to him, thus, quenching
my familiar smile with an austere regard of con-
trol:¹³

5 Love.

6 To jet was to strut. 'To jete lordly through the streets that men may see them.' Incedere magnificire per ora hominum.' Baret. So, in Bossy D'Ambois :—

'To jet in other's plumes so haughtily.'

7 Mr. R. P. Knight conjectures that this is a corruption of Stratiæci, a title anciently given to the Governors of Messina, and Illyria is not far from Messina. If so it will mean the Governor's lady. The word Strachy is printed with a capital and in Italics in the first folio.

8 Puffs him up.

9 State chair.

10 Couch.

11 It is probable that this word was used to express acts of civility and reverence, by either men or women indiscriminately.

12 Thus in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, the clown says :—" who that is, a team of horses shall not pluck from me."

13 It may be worthy of remark, that the leading ideas of Malvolio, in his *humour of state*, bear a strong resemblance to those of Alnaschar in 'The Arabian Nights.' Some of the expressions too are very similar. Many Arabian fictions had found their way into obscure Latin and French books, and from thence into obscure ones, long before any version of 'The Arabian Nights' had appeared. In 'The Dialogues of Creatures Moralized,' bl. l. printed early in the sixteenth century, a story similar to that of Alnaschar is related. See Dial, c. p. 122, *reprint* of 1816.

110

ACT II.

Sir To. And does not Toby take you a blow o'
the lips then?

Mal. Saying, Cousin Toby, my fortunes having
cast me on your niece, give me this prerogative of
speech :—

Sir To. What, what?

Mal. You must amend your drunkenness.

Sir To. Out, scab!

Fab. Nay, patience, or we break the sinews of
our plot.

Mal. Besides, you waste the treasure of your time
with a foolish knight :

Sir And. That's me, I warrant you.

Mal. One Sir Andrew :

Sir And. I knew, 'twas I; for many do call me
fool.

Mal. What employment have we here?

[Taking up the letter.

Fab. Now is the woodcock near the gin.

Sir To. O, peace! and the spirit of humours in-
timate reading aloud to him ?

Mal. By my life, this is my lady's hand: these
be her very C's, her U's, and her T's; and thus
makes she her great P's. It is, in contempt of
question, her hand.

Sir And. Her C's, her U's, and her T's: Why
that?

Mal. [reads] To the unknown beloved, this, and
my good wishes: her very phrases!—By your leave,
waх.—Soft!—and the impressure her Lucrece, with
which she uses to seal: 'tis my lady: To whom
should this be?

Fab. This wins him, liver and all.

Mal. [reads] Jove knows, I love :

But who ?

Lips do not move,

No man must know.

No man must know.—What follows? the numbers
altered!—No man must know :—If this should be
thee, Malvolio?

Sir To. Marry, hang thee, brock!!

Mal. I may command, where I adore :

But silence, like a Lucrece knife,

With bloodless stroke my heart doth gore ;

M, O, A, I, doth sway my life.

Fab. A fustian riddle !

Sir To. Excellent wench, say I.

Mal. M, O, A, I, doth sway my life.—Nay, but
first, let me see,—let me see,—let me see.

Fab. What a dish of poison has she dressed him !

Sir To. And with what wing the stanneyl² checks
at it!

Mal. I may command where I adore. Why, she
may command me; I serve her, she is my lady.
Why, this is evident to any formal capacity.³
There is no obstruction in this;—And the end,—
What should that alphabetical position portend ? if
I could make that resemble something in me,—
Softly!—M, O, A, I.—

Sir To. O, ay! make up that :—he is now at a
cold scent.

Fab. Sowter⁴ will cry upon't, for all this, though
it be as rank as a fox.

Mal. M,—Malvolio;—M,—why, that begins my
name.

Fab. Did not I say, he would work it out? the
cur is excellent at faults.

Mal. M, But then there is no consonancy in the
sequel; it suffers under probation: A should
follow, but O does.

Fab. And O shall end, I hope.

Sir To. Ay, or I'll cudgel him, and make him
cry, O.

Mal. And then I comes behind.

Fab. Ay, an you had any eye behind you, you
might see more detraction at your heels, than for-
tunes before you.

Mal. M, O, A, I;—This simulation is not as
the former:—and yet, to crush this a little, it would
bow to me, for every one of these letters are in my
name. Soft; here follows prose.—If this fall into
thy hand, revolve. In my stars I am above thee; but
be not afraid of greatness: Some are born great, some
achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust up-
on them. Thy fates open their hands; let thy blood
and spirit embrace them. And, to insure thyself to
what thou art like to be, cast thy humble slough,⁵ and
appear fresh. Be opposite⁶ with a kinsman, surly with
servants: let thy tongue tang arguments of state; put
thyself into the trick of singularity: She thus advises
th thee, that sighs for thee. Remember who commended
thy yellow stockings; and wished to see thee ever cross-
gartered:⁷ I say, remember. Go to; thou art made,
if thou destirest to be so; if not, let me see thee a steu-
ard still, the fellow of servants, and not worthy to touch
fortune's fingers. Farewell. She that would alter
services with thee,—The fortunate-unhappy.

Day-light and champian⁸ discovers not more: this
is open. I will be proud, I will read politic authors,
I will baffle Sir Toby, I will wash off gross acquin-
tance, I will be point-de-vice,⁹ the very man. I do
not now fool myself, to let imagination jade me;
for every reason excites to this, that my lady loves
me. She did commend my yellow stockings of late,
she did praise my leg being cross-gartered; and in
this she manifests herself to my love, and, with a
kind of injunction, drives me to these habits of her
liking. I thank my stars, I am happy. I will be
strange, stout, in yellow stockings, and cross-gar-
tered, even with the swiftness of putting on. Jove,
and my stars be praised!—Here is yet a postscript.
Thou cannot not choose but know who I am. If thou
entertainest my love, let it appear in thy smiling; thy
smiles become thee well: therefore in my presence still
smile, dear my sweet, I pr'ythee. Jove, I thank thee.
—I will smile; I will do every thing that thou wilt
have me.

[Exit.]

Fab. I will not give my part of this sport for a
pension of thousands to be paid from the Sophy.¹⁰
Sir To. I could marry this wench for this device.
Sir And. So could I marry.

Sir To. And ask no other dowry with her, but
such another jest.

Enter MARIA.

Sir And. Nor I neither.

Fab. Here comes my noble gull-catcher.

Sir To. Wilt thou set thy foot o' my neck?

Sir And. Or o' mine either?

Sir To. Shall I play my freedom at tray-trip,¹¹
and become thy bond-slave?

Sir And. P'faith, or I either.

1 i. e. badger, a term of contempt. So in the Merry
Conceited Jests of George Peele :—'This self-conceited
brock.'

2 The common stone-hawk, which inhabits old build-
ings and rocks. To check, says Latham in his Book of
Falconry, is, 'when crows, rocks, pies, or other birds
coming in view of the hawk, she forsaketh her natural
flight to fly at them.'

3 i. e. to any one in his senses, or whose capacity is
not out of form.

4 Sowter is here used as the name of a hound. Sow-
terly is often employed as a term of abuse: a Sowter
was a cobbler or botcher; quasi Sutor.

5 Skin of a snake.

6 i. e. adverse, hostile.

7 A fashion once prevailed for some time of wearing
the garters crossed on the leg. It should be remember-
ed that rich and expensive garters worn below the knee

were then in use. Olivia's detestation of these fashions
probably arose from thinking themcoxcomical.

8 Open country.

9 i. e. exactly the same in every particular. The
etymology of this phrase is very uncertain. The most
probable seems the French a point devise. 'à pointet,
says Nicot, 'adverbe. C'est en ordre et estat deu et
convenable.' We have also point blank, for direct,
from the same source.

10 Alluding to Sir Robert Shirley, who was just re-
turned in the character of ambassador from the Sophy.
He boasted of the great rewards he had received, and
lived in London with the urmost splendour.

11 An old game played with dice or tables. Thus in
Machiavel's Dog. Sig. B. 4to. 1617.

'But leaving cards, let's go to dice awhile,
To passage treitrippe, hazard, or mumchance.'

## SCENE I.

# TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL.

111

Sir To. Why, thou hast put him in such a dream,
that, when the image of it leaves him, he must run
mad.

Mar. Nay, but say true; does it work upon him?

Sir To. Like aqua-vitæ with a midwife.

Mar. If you will then see the fruits of the sport,
mark his first approach before my lady: he will
come to her in yellow stockings, and 'tis a colour
she abhors; and cross-gartered, a fashion she de-
tests; and he will smile upon her, which will now
be so unsuitable to her disposition, being addicted
to a melancholy as she is, that it cannot but turn
him into a notable contempt: if you will see it,
follow me.

Sir To. To the gates of Tartar, thou most excellent devil of wit!

Sir And. I'll make one too.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT III.

### SCENE I. Olivia's Garden. Enter VIOLA, and Clown with a tabor.

Vio. Save thee, friend, and thy music: Dost thou live by thy tabor?¹

Clo. No, sir, I live by the church.

Vio. Art thou a churchman?

Clo. No such matter, sir; I do live by the church:
for I do live at my house, and my house doth stand
by the church.

Vio. So thou may'st say, the king lies by a beggar, if a beggar dwell near him: or, the church stands by thy tabor, if thy tabor stand by the church.

Clo. You have said, sir.—To see this age!—A sentence is but a cheveril² glove to a good wit: How quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!

Vio. Nay, that's certain; they, that dally nicely
with words, may quickly make them wanton.

Clo. I would, therefore, my sister had had no
name, sir.

Vio. Why, man?

Clo. Why, sir, her name's a word; and to dally
with that word, might make my sister wanton: But,
indeed, words are very rascals, since bonds dis-
graced them.

Vio. Thy reason, man?

Clo. Troth, sir, I can yield you none without
words; and words are grown so false, I am loath
to prove reason with them.

Vio. I warrant, thou art a merry fellow, and
carest for nothing.

Clo. Not so, sir, I do care for something: but in
my conscience, sir, I do not care for you; if that
be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make
you invisible.

Vio. Art not thou the lady Olivia's fool?

Clo. No, indeed, sir; the lady Olivia has no folly: she will keep no fool, sir, till she be married; and fools are as like husbands, as pilchards are to herrings, the husband's the bigger; I am, indeed, not her fool, but her corrupter of words.

Vio. I saw thee late at the count Orsino's.

Clo. Foolery, sir, does walk about the orb, like
the sun; it shines every where. I would be sorry,
sir, but the fool should be as oft with your master,
as with my mistress: I think I saw your wisdom
there.

Vio. Nay, an thou pass upon me, I'll no more
with thee. Hold, there's expenses for thee.

1 Tarleton, in a print before his Jests, 4to. 1611, is represented with a *Tabor*. But the instrument is found in the hands of fools, long before the time of Shakspeare.

2 Kid. Ray has a proverb 'He hath a conscience like a cheverel's skin.' See note on K. Henry VIII. Act ii. Sc. 4.

3 See the play of *Troilus and Cressida*.

4 In Henryson's Testament of Cressid she is thus spoken of:—

—'great penury

Thou shall suffer, and as a beggar dye.'

And again,

'Thou shall go begging from houſes to houſes,
With cuppe and clapper like a Lazarous.'

Clo. Now Jove, in his next commodity of hair,
send thee a beard!

Vio. By my troth, I'll tell thee; I am almost
sick for one; though I would not have it grow on
my chin. Is thy lady within?

Clo. Would not a pair of these have bred, sir?

Vio. Yes, being kept together, and put to use.

Clo. I would play lord¹ Pandarus³ of Phrygia,
sir, to bring a Cressida to this Troilus.

Vio. I understand you, sir; 'tis well begg'd.

Clo. The matter, I hope, is not great¹, sir, begg-
ing but a beggar; Cressida was a beggar.⁴ My
lady is within, sir. I will construe to them whence
you come; who you are, and what you would, are
out of my welkin; I might say, element; but the
word is over-worn.

[Exit.]

Vio. This fellow's wise enough to play the fool; And, to do that well, craves a kind of wit:

He must observe their mood on whom he jests,

The quality of persons, and the time;

And, like the haggard,⁶ check at every feather

That comes before his eye. This is a practice,

As full of labour as a wise man's art:

For folly, that he wisely shows, is fit;

But wise men, folly-fallen, quite taint their wit.

### Enter SIR TOBY BELCH and SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHEEK.

Sir To. Save you, gentleman.

Vio. And you, sir.

Sir And. Dieu vous garde, monsieur.

Vio. Et vous aussi; votre serviteur.

Sir And. I hope, sir, you are; and I am yours.

Sir To. Will you encounter the house? my
niece is desirous you should enter, if your trade be
to her.

Vio. I am bound to your niece, sir: I mean, she is the list⁶ of my voyage.

Sir To. Taste⁷ your legs, sir, put them to motion.

Vio. My legs do better understand me, sir, than
I understand what you mean by bidding me taste
my legs.

Sir To. I mean, to go, sir, to enter.

Vio. I will answer you with gait and entrance: But we are prevented.⁸

### Enter OLIVIA and MARIA.

Most excellent accomplished lady, the heavens
rain odours on you!

Sir And. That youth's a rare courtier! *Rain odours! well.*

Vio. My matter hath no voice, lady, but to your
own most pregnant⁹ and vouchsafed ear.

Sir And. Odours, pregnant, and vouchsafed:—
I'll get 'em all three ready.

Oli. Let the garden door be shut, and leave me to my hearing.

[Exeunt SIR TONY, SIR ANDREW, and MARIA.
Give me your hand, sir.

Vio. My duty, madam, and most humble service.

Oli. What is your name?

Vio. Cesario is your servant's name, fair princess.

Oli. My servant, sir! 'Twas never merry world,
Since lowly feigning was call'd compliment;
You are a servant to the count Orsino, youth.

Vio. And he is yours, and his must needs be yours;

Your servant's servant is your servant, madam.

Oli. For him, I think not on him: for his thoughts,
'Would they were blanks, rather than fill'd with me!

Vio. Madam, I come to whet your gentle thoughts

On his behalf:—

Oli. O, by your leave, I pray you;

I bade you never speak again of him:

But, would you undertake another suit,

5 A wild hawk, or, hawk not well trained.

6 Bound, limit.

7 In the Frogs a similar expression occurs, v. 462.

8 i. e. our purpose is anticipated. So in the 119th Psalm, 'Mine eyes prevent the night-watches.'

9 i. e. ready, apprehensive; vouchsafed, for vouchsafing.

112

Act III.

I had rather hear you to solicit that,
Than music from the spheres.

Vio.

Dear lady,—

Oli. Give me leave, 'beseech you: I did send,
After the last enchantment you did here,¹
A ring in chase of you; so did I abuse
Myself, my servant, and, I fear me, you:
Under your hard construction must I sit,
To force that on you, in a shameful cunning,
Which you knew none of yours: What might you
think?

Have you not set mine honour at the stake,
And baited it with all the unmuzzled thoughts
That tyrannous heart can think? To one of your
receiving?

Enough is shown; a cyprus,³ not a bosom,
Hides my heart: So let me hear you speak.

Vio. I pity you.

Oli. That's a degree to love.

Vio. No, not a grise;⁴ for 'tis a vulgar⁵ proof,

That very oft we pity enemies.

Oli. Why, then, methinks, 'tis time to smile again;
O world, how apt the poor are to be proud!
If one should be a prey, how much the better
To fall before the lion, than the wolf?

[Clock strikes]

The clock upbraids me with the waste of time.—
Be not afraid, good youth, I will not have you:
And yet, when wit and youth is come to harvest,
Your wife is like to reap a proper man:

There lies your way, due west.

Vio.

Then westward-hoe:

Grace and good disposition 'tend your ladyship!
You'll nothing, madam, to my lord by me?

Oli. Stay:

I pr'ythee, tell me, what thou think'st of me.

Vio. That you do think, you are not what you are.

Oli. If I think so, I think the same of you.

Vio. Then think you right; I am not what I am.

Oli. I would you were as I would have you be!

Vio. Would it be better, madam, than I am,

I wish it might; for now I am your fool.

Oli. O, what a deal of scorn looks beautiful

In the contempt and anger of his lip!

A murd'rous guilt shows not itself more soon
Than love that would seem hid: love's night is noon.
Cesario, by the roses of the spring,

By maidshead, honour, truth, and every thing,
I love thee so, that, maugre⁶ all thy pride,
Nor wit, nor reason, can my passion hide.

Do not extort thy reasons from this clause,

For, that I woo, thou therefore hast no cause—

But, rather, reason thus with reason fetter:

Love sought is good, but given unsought, is better.

Vio. By innocence I swear, and by my youth,
I have one heart, one bosom, and one truth,

And that no woman has; nor never none

Shall mistress be of it, save I alone.

And so adieu, good madam; never more

Will I my master's tears to you deplore.

Oli. Yet come again: for thou, perhaps, mays't
move

That heart, which now abhors, to like his love.

[Exeunt]

### SCENE II. A Room in Olivia's House.
Enter
SIR TOBY BELCH, SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHECK,
and FABIAN.

Sir And. No, faith, I'll not stay a jot longer.

Sir To. Thy reason, dear venom, give thy reason.

Fab. You must needs yield your reason, Sir An-
drew.

Sir And. Marry, I saw your niece do more fa-

1 i. e. after the enchantment your presence worked in my affections.

2 Ready apprehension.

3 i. e. a thin veil of crape or cyprus.

4 Step.

5 Common.

6 In spite of: from the French malgre.

7 The Brownists were so called from Mr. Robert Browne, a noted separatist, in Queen Elizabeth's reign. They seem to have been the constant objects of popular satire.

vours to the count's serving man, than ever she be-
stowed upon me; I saw't if the orchard.

Sir To. Did she see thee the while, old boy? tell me that.

Sir And. As plain as I see you now.

Fab. This was a great argument of love in her toward you.

Sir And. 'Slight! will you make an ass o'me?

Fab. I will prove it legitimate, sir, upon the oaths of judgment and reason.

Sir To. And they have been grand jury-men,
since before Noah was a sailor.

Fab. She did show favour to the youth in your
sight, only to exasperate you, to awake your dor-
mouse valour, to put fire in your heart, and brim-
stone in your liver: You should then have accosted
her; and with some excellent jests, fire-new from
the mint, you should have banged the youth into
dumbness. This was looked for at your hand, and
this was baulked: the double gilt of this opportu-
nity you let time wash off, and you are now sailed
into the north of my lady's opinion; where you will
hang like an icicle on a Dutchman's beard, unless
you do redeem it by some laudable attempt, either
of valour, or policy.

Sir And. And't be any way, it must be with val-
our; for policy I hate: I had as lief be a Brown-
ist⁷ as a politician.

Sir To. Why then, build me thy fortunes upon the
basis of valour. Challenge me the count's youth to
fight with him; hurt him in eleven places; my niece
shall take note of it: and assure thyself, there is no
love-broker in the world can more prevail in man's
 commendation with woman, than report of valour.

Fab. There is no way but this, Sir Andrew.

Sir And. Will either of you bear me a challenge to him?

Sir To. Go, write it in a martial hand; be curst⁸
and brief; it is no matter how witty, so it be el-
quent, and full of invention: taunt him with the
licence of ink: if thou *thou'st*⁹ him some трice, it
shall not be amiss; and as many lies as will fill thy
sheet of paper, although the sheet were big enough
for the bed of Ware¹⁰ in England, set 'em down;
go, about it. Let there be gall enough in thy ink;
though thou write with a goose-pen, no matter:
About it.

Sir And. Where shall I find you?

Sir To. We'll call them at the *cubiculo*:¹¹ Go.

[Exait SIR ANDREW.

Fab. This is a dear manakin to you, Sir Toby.

Sir To. I have been dear to him, lad; some two thousand strong, or so.

Fab. We will have a rare letter from him: but
you'll not deliver it.

Sir To. Never trust me then! and by all means
stir on the youth to an answer. I think, oxen and
wainropes¹² cannot hale them together. For An-
drew, if he were opened, and you find so much blood
in his liver as will clog the foot of a flea, I'll eat the
rest of the anatomy.

Fab. And his opposite,¹³ the youth, bears in his
visage no great presage of cruelty.

Enter MARIA.

Sir To. Look, where the youngest wren of nine¹⁴
comes.

Mar. If you desire the spleen, and will laugh

8 'Be curst and brief.' *Curst* is cross, *froward*, *pe-
tulant*.

9 Shakspeare is thought to have had Lord Coke in his
mind, whose virulent abuse of Sir Walter Raleigh on
his trial was conveyed in a series of *thou's*. His resent-
ment against the flagrant conduct of the attorney general
on this occasion was probably heightened by the con-
temptuous manner in which he spoke of players in his
charge at Norwich, and the severity he was always
willing to exert against them.

10 This curious piece of furniture was a few years
since still in being at one of the inns in that town. It
was reported to be twelve feet square, and capable of
holding twenty-four persons.

11 Chamber. 12 Wagon ropes. 13 i. e. adversary.

14 The wren generally lays nine or ten eggs, and the

## SCENE IV.

113

yourselves into stitches follow me: yon' gull Mal-
volio is turned heathen, a very renegado; for there
is no Christian, that means to be saved by believing
rightly, can ever believe such impossible passages
of grossness. He's in yellow stockings.

*Sir To.* And cross-gartered?

*Mar.* Most villanously; like a pedant that keeps
a school 'the church.'—I have dogged him, like his
murderer: He does obey every point of the letter
that I dropped to betray him. He does smile his
face into more lines, than are in the new map, with
the augmentation of the Indies: 'you have not seen
such a thing as 'tis; I can hardly bearforbear
hurting things at him. I know, my lady will strike him; if
she do, he'll smile, and take't for a great favour.

*Sir To.* Come, bring us, bring us where he is.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE III. A Street. Enter ANTONIO and SEBASTIAN.

*Seb.* I would not, by my will, have troubled you;
But, since you make your pleasure of your pains,
I will no further chide you.

*Ant.* I could not stay behind you; my desire,

More sharp than filed steel, did spur me forth;

## SCENE IV.

115

*Enter OLIVIA and VIOLA.*

*Fab.* Here he comes with your niece: give them way, till he take leave, and presently after him.

*Sir To.* I will meditate the while upon some horrid message or a challenge.

*[Exeunt SIR TOBY, FABIAN, and MARIA]*

*Oli.* I have said too much unto a heart of stone, And laid mine honour too unchary¹¹ out :

There's something in me, that reproves my fault; But such a headstrong potent fault it is,

That it but mocks reproof.

*Vio.* With the same 'haviour that your passion bears,

Go on my master's griefs.

*Oli.* Here, wear this jewel²¹ for me, 'tis my picture;

Refuse it not, it hath no tongue to vex you :

And, I beseech you, come again to-morrow,

What shall you ask of me that I'll deny,

That, honour sav'd, may upon asking give?

*Vio.* Nothing but this, your true love for my master.

*Oli.* How with mine honour may I give him that Which I have given to you?

*Vio.* I will acquit you.

*Oli.* Well, come again to-morrow: Fare thee well ;

A fiend, like thee, might bear my soul to hell. [Exit.

*Re-enter SIR TOBY Belch and FABIAN.*

*Sir To.* Gentleman, God save thee.

*Vio.* And you, sir.

*Sir To.* That defence thou hast, betake thee to't: of what nature the wrongs are thou hast done him, I know not; but thy interceptor, full of despight, bloody as the hunter, attends thee at the orchard end; dismount thy tuck,³ be yare⁴ in thy preparation, for thy assailant is quick, skilful, and deadly.

*Vio.* You mistake, sir; I am sure no man hath any quarrel to me; my remembrance is very free and clear from any image of offence done to any man.

*Sir To.* You'll find it otherwise, I assure you: therefore, if you hold your life at any price, betake you to your guard; for your opposite hath in him what youth, strength, skill, and wrath, can furnish man within.

*Vio.* I pray you, sir, what is he?

*Sir To.* He is knight, dubbed with unhatched rapier, and on carpet consideration;⁵ but he is a devil in private brawl: souls and bodies hath he divorced three; and his incensement at this moment so is implacable, that satisfaction can be none but by pangs of death and sepulchre: hob, nob,⁶ is his word; give't, or take't.

*Vio.* I will return again into the house, and desire some conduct of the lady. I am no fighter. I have heard of some kind of men, that put quarrels purposely on others, to taste their valour: belike, this is a man of that quirk.⁷

*Sir To.* Sir, no; his indignation derives itself out of a very competent injury; therefore, get you on, and give him his desire. Back you shall not to the house, unless you undertake that with me, which with as much safety you might answer him: therefore on, or strip your sword stark naked; for meddle you must, that's certain, or forswear to wear iron about you.

*Vio.* This is as uncivil as strange. I beseech you, do me this courteous office, as to know of the knight what my offence to him is; it is something of my negligence, nothing of my purpose.

1 Uncautiously.

2 *Jewel* anciently signified any precious ornament of superfluity.

3 Rapier.

4 Ready, nimble.

5 i. e. he is a *carpet-knight* not dubbed in the field, but on some peaceable occasion; *unhatch'd* was probably used in the sense of *unhack'd*. But perhaps we should read *an unhatch'd rapier*, i. e. a rapier the hit of which was enriched with silver or gold.
6 A corruption most probably of *hab* or *nab*: have or have not, hit or miss at a venture. *Quasi*, have, or *wave*, i. e. have not, from the Saxon *habban*, to have;

*Sir To.* I will do so. Signior Fabian, stay you by this gentleman till my return. [Exit SIR TOBY.

*Vio.* Pray you, sir, do you know of this matter?

*Fab.* I know the knight is incensed against you, even to a mortal arbitrement;⁸ but nothing of the circumstance more.

*Vio.* I beseech you, what manner of man is he?

*Fab.* Nothing of that wonderful promise, to read him by his form, as you are like to find him in the proof of his valour. 'He is, indeed, sir, the most skilful, bloody, and fatal opposite⁹ that you could possibly have found in any part of Illyria: Will you walk towards him? I will make your peace with him, if I can.

*Vio.* I shall be much bound to you for't: I am one, that would rather go with sir priest, than sir knight: I care not who knows so much of my mettle. [Exeunt.

*Re-enter SIR TOBY, with SIR ANDREW.*

*Sir To.* Why, man, he's a very devil;¹⁰ I have not seen such a frago,¹¹ I had a pass with him, rapier, scabbard, and all, and he gives me the stuck-in,¹² with such a mortal motion, that it is inevitable; and on the answer, he pays you¹³ as surely as your feet hit the ground they step on: They say, he has been fencer to the Sophy.

*Sir And.* Pox on't, I'll not meddle with him.

*Sir To.* Ay, but he will not now be pacified; Fabian can scarce hold him yonder.

*Sir And.* Plague on't: an I thought he had been valiant and so cunning in fence, I'd have seen him damned ere I'd have challenged him. Let him let the matter slip, and I'll give him my horse, grey Capilet.

*Sir To.* I'll make the motion: stand here, make a good show on't; this shall end without the perdiction of souls: Marry, I'll ride your horse as well as I ride you.

*Aside.*

*Re-enter FABIAN and VIOLA.*

*I have his horse [to FAB.] to take up the quarrel; I have persuaded him, the youth's a devil.*

*Fab.* He is as horribly conceited¹⁴ of him; and pants, and looks pale, as if a bear were at his heels.

*Sir To.* There's no remedy, sir; he will fight with you for his oath's sake: marry, he hath better bethought him of his quarrel, and he finds that now scarce to be worth talking of: therefore draw, for the supportance of his vow; he protests, he will not hurt you.

*Vio.* Pray God defend me! A little thing would make me tell them how much I lack of a man.

*Aside.*

*Fab.* Give ground, if you see him furious.

*Sir To.* Come, Sir Andrew, there's no remedy; the gentleman will, for his honour's sake, have one bout with you; he cannot by the duello¹⁵ avoid it; but he has promised me, as he is a gentleman and a soldier, he will not hurt you. Come on: to't.

*Sir And.* Pray God, he keep his oath! [Draws.]*

*Enter ANTONIO.*

*Vio.* I do assure you, 'tis against my will.

*Draws.*

*Ant.* Put up your sword;—If this young gentleman have done offence, I take the fault on me;

If you offend him, I for him defy you. [Drawing.]*

*Sir To.* You, sir? why, what are you?

*Ant.* One sir, that for his love dares yet do more Than you have heard him brag to you he will.

*nabban*, not to have. So, in Holinshed's description of Ireland, 'The citizens in their rage shot *habbe* or *nabbe*.¹

7 Sort.

8 Decision.

9 Adversary.

10 Shakspere may have caught a hint for this scene from the behaviour of Sir John Dow and Sir A. La Foon in Jonson's Silent Woman, which was printed in 1609.

11 *Firago*, for virago. The meaning appears to be, I have never seen the most furious woman so obstreperous and violent as he is.

12 A corruption of *stoccata*, an Italian term in fencing.

13 i. e. hits you.

14 He has a horrid conception of him.

15 Laws of duel.

116

ACT IV.

Sir To. Nay, if you be an undertaker,¹ I am for you. [Draws.]

Enter Two Officers.

Fab. O good Sir Toby, hold; here come the officers.

Sir To. I'll be with you anon. [To ANTONIO.

Vio. Pray, sir, put up your sword, if you please. [To SIR ANDREW.

Sir And. Marry, will I, sir;—and for that I promised you, I'll be as good as my word: He will bear you easily; and reins well.

1 Off. This is the man; do thy office.

2 Off. Antonio, I arrest thee at the suit

Of count Orsino.

Ant. You do mistake me, sir.

1 Off. No, sir, no jot; I know your favour well.

Though now you have no sea-cap on your head.—
Take him away; he knows, I know him well.

Ant. I must obey.—This comes with seeking you;
But there's no remedy; I shall answer it.

What will you do? Now my necessity
Makes me to ask you for my purse: It grieves me
Much more, for what I cannot do for you,
Than what befalls myself. You stand amaz'd;
But be of comfort.

2 Off. Come, sir, away.

Ant. I must entreat of you some of that money.

Vio. What money, sir?

For the fair kindness you have show'd me here,

And, part, being prompted by your present trouble,
Out of my lean and low ability

I'll lend you something: my having² is not much;

I'll make division of my present with you;

Ant. Will you deny me now?

Is't possible, that my deserts to you

Can lack persuasion? Do not tempt my misery,

Lest that it make me so unsound a man,

As to upbraid you with those kindnesses

That I have done for you.

Vio. I know of none;

Nor know I you by voice, or any feature:

I hate ingratitude more in a man,

Than lying, vainness, babbling, drunkenness,

Or any taint of vice, whose strong corruption

Inhabits our frail blood.

Ant. O heavens themselves!

2 Off. Come, sir, I pray you go.

Ant. Let me speak a little. This youth that you see here,

I snatch'd one half out of the jaws of death;

Reliev'd him with such sanctity of love,

And to his image, which, methought did promise

Most venerable worth, did I devotion.

1 Off. What's that to us? The time goes by; away.

Ant. But, O, how vile an idol proves this god!—
Thou hast, Sebastian, done good feature shame.—

In nature there's no blemish, but the mind;

None can be call'd deform'd, but the unkind :

Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous-evil

Are empty trunks, o'erflourished³ by the devil.

1 Off. The man grows mad; away with him.

Come, come, sir.

Ant. Lead me on. [Exeunt Officers with ANT.

Vio. Methinks, his words do from such passion fly,

That he believes himself; so do not L⁴

Prove true, imagination, O, prove true,

That I, dear brother, be now ta'en for you!

Sir To. Come hither, knight; come hither, Fabian; we'll whisper o'er a couplet or two of most sage saws.

1 i. e. one who takes up or undertakes the quarrel of another.

2 i. e. fortune, possessions.

3 Trunks, being then part of the furniture of apartments, were ornamented with scroll-work or flourished devices.

4 i. e. I do not yet believe myself, when from this accident, I gather hope of my brother's life.

5 His resemblance survives in the reflection of my own figure.

Vio. He nam'd Sebastian; I my brother know
Yet living in my glass;⁵ even such, and so,
In favour was my brother; and he went
Still in this fashion, colour, ornament,
For him I imitate; O, if it prove,
Tempests are kind, and salt waves fresh in love!

Sir To. A very dishonest paltry boy, and more a coward than a hare: his dishonesty appears, in leaving his friend here in necessity, and denying him; and for his cowardice, ask Fabian.

Fab. A coward, a most devout coward, religious in it.

Sir And. 'Slid, I'll after him again, and beat him.

Sir To. Do, cuff him soundly, but never draw his sword.

Sir And. An I do not.

Fab. Come, let's see the event.

Sir To. I dare lay any money, 'twill be nothing yet.

ACT IV.—SCENE I. The Street before Olivia's House. Enter SEBASTIAN and Clown.

Clo. Will you make me believe that I am not sent for you?

Seb. Go to, go to, thou art a foolish fellow;

Let me be clear of thee.

Clo. Well held out, i'faith! No, I do not know you; nor am I not sent to you by my lady, to bid you come speak with her; nor your name is not master Cesario; nor this not my nose neither.—Nothing, that is so, is so.

Seb. I pr'ythee, vent thy folly somewhere else;
Thou know'st not me.

Clo. Vent my folly! He has heard that word of some great man, and now applies it to a fool. Vent my folly! I am afraid this great lubber, the world, will prove a cockney.—I pr'ythee now, ungird thy strangeness, and tell me what I shall vent to my lady; Shall I vent to her, that thou art coming?

Seb. I pr'ythee, foolish Greek,⁶ depart from me;
There's money for thee; if you tarry longer.
I shall give worse payment.

Clo. By my troth, thou hast an open hand:—
These wise men that give fools money, get themselves a good report after fourteen years' purchase.⁷

Enter SIR ANDREW, SIR TOBY, and FABIAN.

Sir And. Now, sir, have I met you again? there's for you. [Striking SEBASTIAN.

Seb. Why, there's for thee, and there, and there:
Are all the people mad! [Beating SIR ANDREW.

Sir To. Hold, sir, or I'll throw your dagger o'er the house.

Clo. This will I tell my lady straight; I would not be in some of your coats for two-pence.

Sir To. Come on, sir; hold.

[Holding SEBASTIAN.

Sir And. Nay, let him alone; I'll go another way to work with him; I'll have an action of battery against him, if there be any law in Iliyria: though I struck him first, yet its no matter for that.

Seb. Let go thy hand.

Sir To. Come, sir, I will not let you go. Come, my young soldier, put up your iron: you are well fleshed; come on.

Seb. I will be free from thee. What wouldst thou now?

If thou dar'st tempt me further, draw thy sword.

[Draws.]

Sir To. What, what! Nay, then I must have an ounce or two of this malapert blood from you.

[Draws.]

6 A merry Greek, or a foolish Greek were ancient proverbial expressions applied to boon companions, good fellows, as they were called who spent their time in riotous mirth. Whether the Latin *pergræari*, of the same import, furnished the phrase or not, it was in use in France and Italy as well as in England.

7 i. e. at a very extravagant price, twelve years' purchase being then the current price of estates.

## SCENE II.

117

### Enter OLIVIA.

Oli. Hold, Toby; on thy life, I charge thee, hold.
Sir To. Madam!

Oli. Will it be ever thus? Ungracious wretch,
Fit for the mountains and the barbarous caves,
Where manners ne'er were preach'd! out of my
sight!

Be not offended, dear Casario?—
Rudesby,¹ be gone?—I pr'ythee, gentle friend,
[Exeunt SIR TOBY, SIR ANDREW, and FABIAN.

Let thy fair wisdom, not thy passion, sway

In this uncivil and unjust extent².

Against thy peace. Go with me to my house;
And hear thou there how many fruitless pranks
This ruffian hath botch'd up,³ that thou thereby
May'st smile at this: thou shall not choose but go;
Do not deny: Beshrew⁴ his soul for me,
He started one poor heart⁵ of mine in thee.

Seb. What relish is in this?⁶ how runs the stream?

Or I am mad, or else this is a dream:—

Let fancy still my sense in Lethe steep;

If it be thus to dream, still let me sleep!

Oli. Nay, come, I pr'ythee: 'Would thou'dst be
rul'd by me!

Seb. Madam, I will.

Oli.

O, say so, and so be!

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE II.
### A Room in Olivia's House. Enter MARIA and Clown.

Mar. Nay, I pr'ythee, put on this gown, and this
beard; make him believe, thou art Sir Topas the
curate; do it quickly: I'll call Sir Toby the whistler.

[Exit MARIA.]

Clo. Well, I'll put it on, and I will dissemble
myself in't; and I would I were the first that ever
dissembled in such a gown. I am not tall⁸ enough
to become the function well; nor lean enough to be
thought a good student: but to be said, an honest
man, and a good housekeeper, goes as fairly as to
say, a careful man, and a great scholar. The com-
petitors⁹ enter.

### Enter SIR TOBY BELCH and MARIA.

Sir To. Jove bless thee, master parson.

Clo. Bonos dies, Sir Toby: for as the old hermit
of Prague, that never saw pen and ink, very witlessly
said to a niece of king Gorboduc, That, that is, is:
so I, being master parson, am master parson: For
what is that, but that? and is, but is?¹⁰

Sir To. To him, Sir Topas.

Clo. What, hoa, I say;—Peace in this prison!

Sir To. The knave counterfeits well: a good
knave.

Mal. [in an inner chamber.] Who calls there?

1 Rude fellow.

2 Violence.

3 Made up.

4 Ill betide.

5 An equivoque is here intended between hart and heart; they were formerly written alike.

6 i. e. how does this taste? what judgment am I to
make of it?

7 i. e. disguise. Shakspeare has here used a Latin-
ism. 'Dissimulo, to dissemble, to cloak, to hide, says
Hutton's Dictionary, 1583. And Ovid, speaking of
Achilles—

'Veste virum longa dissimulatus erat.'

8 The modern editors have changed this to fat with-
out any apparent reason.

9 Confederates.

10 A humorous banter upon the language of the
schools.

11 Bay windows were large projecting windows, pro-
bably so called because they occupied a whole bay or
space between two cross beams in a building. Minshew
says a bay-window, so called 'because it is builded in
manner of a bay or road for ships, i. e. round.'

12 Clear stories, in Gothic Architecture, denote the
row of windows running along the upper part of a lofty
hall or of a church, over the arches of the nave: o. d.
a clear story, a story without joists, rafters, or flooring.
'Over each side of the nave is a row of clere story
windows.'—Ormerod's Hist. of Cheshire, i. 450. The

Clo. Sir Topas the curate, who comes to visit
Malvolio the lunatic.

Mal. Sir Topas, Sir Topas, good Sir Topas, go
to my lady.

Clo. Out, hyperbolical fiend! how vexest thou
this man? 'talkest thou nothing but of ladies!'

Sir To. Well said, master parson.

Clo. Sir Topas, never was man thus wronged: good Sir Topas, do not think I am mad: they have laid me here in hideous darkness.

Clo. Fye, thou dishonest Sathan! I call thee by the most modest terms; for I am one of those gentle ones, that will use the devil himself with courtesy: Say'st thou, that house is dark?

Mal. As hell, Sir Topas.

Clo. Why, it hath bay-windows¹¹ transparent as
barricadoes, and the clear stories¹² towards the south-
north are as lustrous as ebony; and yet complainest
thou of obstruction?

Mal. I am not mad, Sir Topas: I say to you,
this house is dark.

Clo. Madman, thou errest: I say, there is no
darkness, but ignorance; in which thou art more
puzzled than the Egyptians in their fog.

Mal. I say, this house is as dark as ignorance,
though ignorance were as dark as hell; and I say,
there was never man thus abused: I am no more
mad than you are; make the trial of it in any con-
stant question.¹³

Clo. What is the opinion of Pythagoras concern-
ing wild-fowl?

Mal. That the soul of our grandam might haply
inhabit a bird.

Clo. What thinkest thou of his opinion?

Mal. I think nobly of the soul, and no way ap-
prove his opinion.

Clo. Fare thee well: Remain thou still in dark-
ness: thou shall hold the opinion of Pythagoras, ere
I will allow of thy wits; and fear to kill a wood-
cock,¹⁴ lest thou dispossess the soul of thy grandam.
Fare thee well.

Mal. Sir Topas, Sir Topas,—

Sir To. My most exquisite Sir Topas!

Clo. Nay, I am for all waters.¹⁵

Sir. Thou mightst have done this without thy
beard and gown; he sees thee not.

Sir. To. To him in thy own voice, and bring me
word how thou findest him; I would, we were well
rid of this knavery. If he may be conveniently de-
livered, I would he were; for I am now so far in
offence with my niece, that I cannot pursue with
any safety this sport to the upshot. Come by and
by to my chamber. [Exeunt SIR TOBY and MARIA.

Clo. Hey Robin, jolly Robin,¹⁶

Tell me how thy lady does.

[Singing.]

first folio reads clear stores, the second folio clear
stones, which was followed by all subsequent editors.
The emendation and explanation are Mr. Blakeway's.
Randle Holme, however, in his Academy of Armory;
says that ' clear story windows are such windows that
have no transum or cross-piece in the middle to break
the same into two lights.'

13 Regular conversation.

14 The clown mentions a woodcock because it was
proverbial as a foolish bird, and therefore a proper an-
cessor for a man out of his wits.

15 A proverbial phrase not yet satisfactorily explain-
ed. The meaning, however, appears to be 'I can turn
my hand to any thing, or assume any character.' Flo-
rio in his translation of Montaigne, speaking of Aris-
totle, says 'he hath an oar in every water, and med-
dleth with all things.' And in his Second Frutes, there
is an expression more resembling the import of that in
the text. 'I am a knight for all saddles.' Nash in
his Lenten Stuffe, 1599, has almost the language of the
clown.—' He is first broken to the sea in the Herring-
man's skiffe or cock-boate, where having learned to
brooke all waters, and drink as he can out of a tarrie
can.' Mason's conjecture, that the allusion is to the
water hue or colour of precious stones, is surely inad-
missible.

16 This ballad may be found in Percy's Reliques of
Ancient Poetry, Vol. i. p. 194, ed. 1794. Dr. Not has
also printed it among the poems of Sir Thomas Wiaut
the elder, p. 188.

118

ACT V.

Mal. Fool,—

Clo. My lady is unkind, perdy.

Mal. Fool,—

Clo. Alas, why is she so?

Mal. Fool, I say;—

Clo. She loves another—Who calls, ha?

Mal. Good fool, as ever thou wilt deserve well at my hand, help me to a candle, and pen, ink, and paper; as I am a gentleman, I will live to be thankful to thee for't.

Clo. Master in Malvolio!

Mal. Ay, god fool

Clo. Alas, sir, how fell you besides your five wits?²

Mal. Fool, there was never man so notoriously abused: I am as well in my wits, fool, as thou art.

Clo. But as well? then you are mad, indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a fool.

Mal. They have here propertied me;² keep me in darkness, send ministers to me, asses, and do all they can to face me out of my wits.

Clo. Advise you what you say: the minister is here,—Malvolio, Malvolio, thy wits the heavens restore! endeavour thyself to sleep, and leave thy vain bibble babble.

Mal. Sir Topas,—

Clo. Maintain no words with him, good fellow.³
—Who, I, sir? not I, sir. God b'wi'you, good Sir Topas.—Marry, 'amen.—I will, sir, I will.

Mal. Fool, fool, fool, I say.—

Clo. Alas, sir, be patient. What say you, sir? I am shent⁴ for speaking to you.

Mal. Good fool, help me to some light, and some paper; I tell thee, I am as well in my wits as any man in Illyria.

Clo. Well-a-day,—that you were, sir!

Mal. By this hand, I am: Good fool, some ink, paper, and light, and convey what I will set down to my lady; it shall advantage thee more than ever the bearing of letter did.

Clo. I will help you to't. But tell me true, are you not mad, indeed? or do you but counterfeit?

Mal. Believe me, I am not; I tell thee true.

Clo. Nay, I'll ne'er believe a madman till I see his brains. I will fetch you light, and paper, and ink.

Mal. Fool, I'll requite it in the highest degree: pr'ythee, begone.

Clo.

I am gone, sir,
And anon, sir,
I'll be with you again,
In a trice;

Like to the old vice,⁵
Your need to sustain;

Who with dagger of lath,
In his rage and his wrath,
Cries ah, ha! to the devil :

Like a mad lad,
Pare thy nails, dad,

Adieu, goodman devil.

[Exit.]

### SCENE III. Olivia's Garden. Enter SEBASTIAN.

Seb. This is the air; that is the glorious sun;

1 The five wits, in analogy to the five senses. It appears that the five wits were 'common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, memory.' Wit was then the general term for intellectual power.

2 Taken possession of:

3 The clown, in the dark, acts two persons, and counterfeits, by variation of voice, a dialogue between himself and Sir Topas.

4 Scolded, reprimanded.

5 The vice was the fool of the old moralities. He was grotesquely dressed in a cap with ass's ears, a long coat, and a dagger of lath. One of his chief employees was to make sport with the devil, leaping on his back and belabouring him with his dagger, till he made him roar. The devil, however, always carried him off in the end. The moral was, that sin, which has the courage to make very merry with the devil, and is allowed by him to take very great liberties, must finally become his prey. This used also to be the regular end of Punch in the puppet show (who was the legitimate successor of the old vice or iniquity.) until modern innovation, in these degenerate times, reversed

This pearl she gave me, I do feel't and see't:
And though 'tis wonder that enwraps me thus,
Yet 'tis not madness. Where's Antonio then?

I could not find him at the Elephant:

Yet there he was; and there I found this credit,⁶
That he did range the town to seek me out.

His counsel now might do me golden service:
For though my soul disputes well with my sense,
That this may be some error, but no madness,
Yet doth this accident and flood of fortune

So far exceed all instance, all discourse,⁷
That I am ready to distrust mine eyes,

And wrangle with my reason, that persuades me
To any other trust, but that I am mad,

Or else the lady's mad; yet, if 'twere so,
She could not sway her house, command her followers,⁸

Take, and give back affairs, and their despatch,
With such a smooth, discreet, and stable bearing,
As, I perceive, she does: there's something in't,
That is decivable.⁹ But here the lady comes.

Enter OLIVIA and a Priest.

Oli. Blame not this haste of mine: If you mean well,

Now, go with me, and with this holy man,

Into the chantry¹⁰ by: there, before him,

And underneath that consecrated roof,

That my most jealous and too doubtful soul

May live at peace: He shall conceal it,

Whiles¹¹ you are willing it shall come to note;

What time we will our celebration keep

According to my birth. What do you say?

Seb. I'll follow this good man, and go with you;

And, having sworn truth,¹² ever will be true.

Oli. Then lead the way, good father:—And
heavens so shine,

That they may fairly note this act of mine! [Exeunt.

## ACT V.

### SCENE I. The Street before Olivia's House.

Enter Clown and FABIAN.

Fab. Now, as thou lovest me, let me see his letter,

Clo. Good master Fabian, grant me another request.

Fab. Any thing.

Clo. Do not desire to see this letter.

Fab. That is, to give a dog, and, in recompense, desire my dog again.

Enter DUKE, VIOLA, and Attendants.

Duke. Belong you to the lady Olivia, friends?

Clo. Ay, sir; we are some of her trappings.

Duke. I know thee well: How dost thou, my good fellow?

Clo. Truly, sir, the better for my foes, and the worse for my friends.

Duke. Just the contrary; the better for thy friends.

Clo. No, sir, the worse.

Duke. How can that be?

Clo. Marry sir, they praise me, and make an ass

the catastrophe. See Note on K. Henry V. Act. iv. Sc. 4.

6 i. e. intelligence. Mr. Steevens has referred to several passages which seem to imply that this word was used for oral intelligence. I find it thus in a letter from Elizabeth to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton among the Conway Papers. 'This beror came from you with great spede—We have heard his credit and fynd your carefulness and diligence very great.'

7 i. e. reason.

8 Servants.

9 i. e. deceptious.

10 'Chantry,' a little chapel, or particular altar in some cathedral or parochial church, endowed for the purpose of having masses sung therein for the souls of the founders.

11 Until.

12 Troth or fidelity. It should be remarked that this was not an actual marriage, but a betrothing, affiancing, or solemn promise of future marriage; anciently distinguished by the name of espousals. This has been established by Mr. Douce in his very interesting tractions of Shakspeare, where the reader will find much curious matter on the subject, in a note on this passage.

## SCENE I.

119

of me; now my foes tell me plainly I am an ass: so that by my foes, sir, I profit in the knowledge of myself; and by my friends I am abused: so that, conclusions to be as kisses, if your four negatives make your two affirmatives,¹ why, then the worse for my friends, and the better for my foes.

Duke. Why, this is excellent.

Clo. By my troth, sir, no; though it please you to be one of my friends.

Duke. Thou shall not be the worse for me; there's gold.

Clo. But that it would be double-dealing, sir, I would you could make it another.

Duke. O, you give me ill counsel.

Clo. Put your grace in your pocket, sir, for this once, and let your flesh and blood obey it.

Duke. Well, I will be so much a sinner to be a double-dealer; there's another.

Clo. Primo, secundo, tertio, is a good play; and the old saying is, the third pays for all; the triplex, sir, is a good tripping measure; or the bells of St. Bennet, sir, may put you in mind; One, two, three.

Duke. You can fool no more money out of me at this throw: if you will let your lady know, I am here to speak with her, and bring her along with you, it may awake my bounty further.

Clo. Marry, sir, lullaby to your bounty, till I come again. I go, sir; but I would not have you to think, that my desire of having is the sin of covetousness; but, as you say, sir, let your bounty take a nap, I will awake it anon.

Enter ANTONIO and Officers.

Vio. Here comes the man, sir, that did rescue me.

Duke. That face of his I do remember well;

Yet, when I saw it last, it was besmeared.

As black as Vulcan, in the smoke of war:

A babbling vessel was he captain of,

For shallow draught, and bulk, unprizable:

With the most noble bottom of our fleet,

That very envy, and the tongue of loss,

Cry'd fame and honour on him.—What's the matter?

I Oft. Orsino, this is that Antonio

That took the Phoenix and her fraught,³ from Candy:

And this is he that did the Tiger board,

When your young nephew Titus lost his leg:

Here in the streets, desperate of shame and state,⁴

In private brabble did we apprehend him.

Vio. He did me kindness, sir; drew on my side;

But, in conclusion, put strange speech upon me,

I know not what 'twas, but distraction.

Duke. Notable pirate! thou salt-water thief!

What foolish boldness brought thee to their mercies,

Whom thou, in terms so bloody, and so dear,⁵

Hast made thine enemies?

Ant. Orsino, noble sir,

Be pleas'd that I shake off these names you give me;

Antonio never yet was thief, or pirate,

Though, I confess, on base and ground enough,

Orsino's enemy. A witchcraft drew me hither:

That most ingrateful boy there, by your side,

From the rude sea's enrag'd and foamy mouth

Did I redeem: a wreck past hope he was:

His life I gave him, and did thereto add

My love, without retention or restraint,

All his in dedication: for his sake,

1 So, in Marlowe's Lust's Dominion:—

Come let's kisse.

Moor. Away, away.

Queen. No, no, says I; and twice away says stay.

Sir Philip Sidney has enlarged upon the thought in the
Sixty-third Stanza of Astrophel and Stella.

2 Mischievous, destructive.

4 Inattentive to his character or condition, like a
desperate man.

5 Tooke has so admirably accounted for the application of the epithet *dear* by our ancient writers to any object which excites a sensation of *hurt*, *pain*, and consequence of *anxiety*, *solicitude*, *care*, *earnestness*, that I shall refer to it as the best comment upon the apparently opposite uses of the word in our great poet.

6 Dull, gross.

7 This *Egyptian Thief* was Thyamis. The story is related in the Aethiopics of Heliodorus. He was the

Did I expose myself, pure for his love,
Into the danger of this adverse town;
Drew to defend him, when he was beset;
Where being apprehended, his false cunning
(Not meaning to partake with me in danger.)
Taught him to face me out of his acquaintance,
And grew a twenty-years-removed thing,
While one would wink; denied me mine own purse,
Which I had recommended to his use
Not half an hour before.

Vio. How can this be?

Duke. When came he to this town?

Ant. To-day, my lord; and for three months before
(No interim, not a minute's vacancy),

Both day and night did we keep company.

Enter OLIVIA and Attendants.

Duke. Here comes the countess; now heaven
walks on earth._________

But for thee, fellow, fellow, thy words are madness:

Three months this youth hath tended upon me;

But more of that anon._________—Take him aside.

Oli. What would my lord, but that he may not
have,

Wherein Olivia may seem serviceable?—

Cesario, you do not keep promise with me.

Vio. Madam?

Duke. Gracious Olivia,

Oli. What do you say, Cesario?—Good my
lord,_________

Vio. My lord would speak, my duty hushes me.

Oli. If it be ought to the old tune, my lord,

It is as fat⁶ and fulsome to mine ear,

As howling after music.

Duke. Still so cruel?

Oli. Still so constant, lord.

Duke. What! to perverseness? you uncivil lady,

To whose ingrate and unauspicious altars

My soul the faithfull'st offerings hath breath'd out,

That e'er devotion tender'd! What shall I do?

Oli. Even what it please my lord, that shall become him.

Duke. Why should I not, had I the heart to do it,

Like the Egyptian thief,⁷ at point of death,

Kill what I love; a savage jealousy,

That sometimes savours nobly ¹—But hear me this:

Since you to non-regardance cast my faith,

And that I partly know the instrument

That screws me from my true place in your favour,

Live you, the marble-breasted tyrant, still;

But this your minion, whom, I know, you love,

And whom, by heaven, I swear, I tender dearly,

Him will I tear out of that cruel eye,

Where he sits crowned in his master's spite.—

Come boy with me; my thoughts are ripe in
mischief:

I'll sacrifice the lamb that I do love,

To spite a raven's heart within a dove. [Going.

Vio. And I, most jocund, apt, and willingly,

To do you rest, a thousand deaths would die.

Oli. Where goes Cesario?

Vio. After him I love,

More than I love these eyes, more than my life,

More, by all mores, than e'er I shall love wife:

If I do feign, you witnesses above,

Punish my life for tainting of my love!

Oli. Ah me, detested! how am I beguiled!

chief of a band of robbers. Theogenes and Chariclea falling into their hands, Thyamis falls in love with Chariclea, and would have married her. But, being attacked by a stronger band of robbers, he was in such fear for his mistress that he causes her to be shut into a cave with his treasure. It was customary with those barbarians, when they despaired of their own safety, first to make away with those whom they held most dear, and therefore, benetted round with enemies, raging with love, jealousy, and anger, went to his cave, and calling aloud in the Egyptian tongue, so soon as he heard himself answered towards the cave's mouth by a Grecian, making to the person by the direction of her voice, he caught her by the hair with his left hand, and (supposing her to be Chariclea) with his right hand plunged his sword into her breast.

120

ACT V.

Vio. Who does beguile you? who does do you
wrong?

Oli. Hast thou forgot thyself! Is it so long! —
Call forth the holy father.

Duke. Come away.

[To VIOLA.

Oli. Whither, my lord? —Cesario, husband, stay.

Duke. Husband!

Oli. Ay, husband; Can he that deny?

Duke. Her husband, sirrah?

Vio. No, my lord, not I.

Oli. Alas, it is the baseness of thy fear,

That makes thee strangle thy propriety!

Fear not, Cesario, take thy fortunes up;

Be that thou know'st thou art, and then thou art
As great as that thou fear'st.—O, welcome father!

Re-enter Attendant and Priest.

Father, I charge thee by thy reverence,
Here to unfold (though lately we intended
To keep in darkness, what occasion now

Reveals before 'tis ripe) what thou dost know,
Hath newly past between this youth and me.

Priest. A contract of eternal bond of love.

Confirm'd by mutual joinder of your hands,
Attested by the holy close of lips,

Strengthen'd by interchange of your rings;²

And all the ceremony of this compact

Seal'd in my function, by my testimony :

Since when, my watch hath told me, toward my
grave

I have travell'd but two hours.

Duke. O, thou dissembling cub! what wilt thou be,
When time hath sow'd a grizzle on thy case?³

Or will not else thy craft so quickly grow,

That thine own trip shall be thine overthrow?

Farewell, and take her; but direct thy feet,

Where thou and I henceforth may never meet.

Vio. My lord, I do protest,—

Oli.

O, do not swear;

Hold little faith, though thou hast too much fear.

Enter SIR ANDREW AGUE-CHEEK, with his head broke.

Sir And. For the love of God, a surgeon; send
one presently to Sir Toby.

Oli. What's the matter?

Sir And. He has broke my head across, and has
given Sir Toby a bloody coxcomb too: for the love
of God, your help: I had rather than forty pound,
I were at home.

Oli. Who has done this, Sir Andrew?

Sir And. The count's gentleman, one Cesario:
we took him for a coward, but he's the very devil
incarcerate.

Duke. My gentleman, Cesario?

Sir And. Od's lifelings, here he is :—You broke
my head for nothing; and that that I did, I was set
on to do't by Sir Toby.

Vio. Why do you speak to me? I never hurt you :
You drew your sword upon me, without cause ;
But I bespeak you fair, and hurt you not.

Sir And. If a bloody coxcomb be a hurt, you
have hurt me; I think you set nothing by a bloody
coxcomb.

Enter SIR TOBY BELCH, drunk, led by the Clown.

Here comes Sir Toby halting, you shall hear more:
but if he had not been in drink, he would have tickled
you othergates⁴ than he did.

Duke. How now, gentleman! how is't with you ?

Sir To. That's all one; he has hurt me, and
there's an end on't.—Sot, didst see Dick surgeon,
sot?

Clo. O he's drunk, Sir Toby, an hour agone;
his eyes were set at eight i'the morning.

Sir To. Then he's a rogue and a passy-measures
pavin;⁵ I hate a drunken rogue.

Oli. Away with him: Who hath made this ha-
rock with them?

Sir And. I'll help you, Sir Toby, because we'll
be dressed together.

Sir To. Will you help? —An ass-head, and a cox-
comb, and a knave? a thin-faced knave, a gull?

Oli. Get him to bed and let his hurt be look'd to.

[Exeunt Clown, SIR TOBY, and SIR ANDREW.

Enter SEBASTIAN.

Seb. I am sorry, madam, I have hurt your kinsman;

But, had it been the brother of my blood,
I must have done no less, with wit and safety,
You throw a strange regard upon me, and
By that I do perceive it hath offended you;
Pardon me, sweet one, even for the vows
We made each other but so late ago.

Duke. One face, one voice one habit, and two
persons;

A natural perspective,⁶ that is, and is not.

Seb. Antonio! O, my dear Antonio,
How have you rack'd and tortur'd me,
Since I have lost thee.

Ant. Sebastian are you?

Seb.

Fear'st thou that, Antonio?

Ant. How have you made division of yourself? —
An apple, cleft in two, is not more twin

Than these two creatures. Which is Sebastian?

Oli. Most wonderful!

Seb. Do I stand there? I never had a brother;

Nor can there be that deity in my nature,

Of here and every where. I had a sister,

Whom the blind waves and surges have devour'd:—

Of charity,⁷ what kin are you to me? [To VIOLA.

What countryman? what name? what parentage?

Vio. Of Messaline: Sebastian was my father;

Such a Sebastian was my brother too,

So went he suited to his watery tomb:

If spirits can assume both form and suit,
You come to fright us.

Seb.

A spirit I am, indeed;

But am in that dimension grossly clad,

Which from the womb I did participate.

Were you a woman, as the rest goes even,

I should my tears take fall upon your cheek,

And say—Thrice welcome, drowned Viola!

Vio. My father had a mole upon his brow.

Seb. And so had mine.

grave solemn coxcomb. In the first act of the play he
has shown himself well acquainted with the various
kinds of dance. Shakspeare's characters are always
consistent, and even in drunkenness preserve the traits
of character which distinguished them when sober.

6 A perspective formerly meant a glass that assisted
the sight in any way. The several kinds in use in
Shakspeare's time are enumerated in Scott's Discoverie
of Witchcraft, 1584, b. xiii. c. 19, where that alluded to
by the Duke is thus described: ' There be glasses also
wherein one man may see another man's image and
not his own—that optical illusion may be meant, which
is called anamorphosis:—' where that which is, is not,'

or appears, in a different position, another thing. This
may also explain a passage in Henry V. Act v. Sc. 2:
' Yes, my lord, you see them *perspectively*, the cities
turned into a maid.' Vide also K. Richard II. Act ii. Sc.
1, and note there:

'Like perspectives,' which rightly gazed upon
Show nothing, but confusion; ey'd awry
Distinguish form.'

7 Out of charity, tell me.

1 i. e., suppress, or disown thy property.

2 In ancient espousals the man received as well as gave a ring.

3 So, in Cary's Present State of England, 1626.
' Queen Elizabeth asked a knight named Young, how
he liked a company of brave ladies? He answered, as
I like my silver conies at home, the cases are
far better than the bodies.'

4 Otherways.

5 The *parvin* was a grave Spanish dance. Sir John
Hawkins derives it from *pavo* a peacock, and says that
every *parvin* had its *galliard*, a lighter kind of air form-
ed out of the former. Thus, in Middleton's More Dis-
semblers beside Women :

'I can dance nothing but I'll favour'dly.'

A strain or two of *passe measures galliard*.—
By which it appears that the *passe measure pavan*, and
the *passe measure galliard* were only two different
measures of one dance. Sir Toby therefore means by
this quaint expression that the surgeon is a rogue and a

["## SCENE L.", "TWELFTH NIGHT; OR, WHAT YOU WILL.", "121", "Vio. And died that day when Viola from her birth\nHad number'd thirteen years.", "Seb. O, that record is lively in my soul !\nHe finished, indeed, his mortal act,", "That day that made my sister thirteen years,", "Vio. If nothing lets' to make us happy both,\nBut do not embrace me, till each circumstance", "Do not embrace me, till each circumstance\nOf place, time, fortune, do cohere, and jump,", "That I am Viola : which to confirm,", "I'll bring you to a captain in this town,", "Where lie my maiden weeds ; by whose gentle help\nI was preserv'd, to serve this noble count :", "All the occurrence of my fortune since\nHath been between this lady, and this lord.", "Seb. So comes it, lady, you have been mistook :", "[To OLIVIA.", "But nature to her bias drew in that.", "You would have been contracted to a maid ;", "Nor are you therein, by my life, deceived,", "You are betroth'd both to a maid and man.", "Duke. Be not amaz'd ; right noble is his blood.—\nIf this be so, as yet the glass seems true,", "I shall have share in this most happy wreck :", "Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times,", "[To VIOLA.", "Thou never shouldst love woman like to me.", "Vio. And all those sayings will I over-swear;\nAnd all those... words of mine'st are true in soul,", "As doth that orb continent the fire", "That ever day from night.", "Duke.", "Give me thy hand ;\nAnd let me see thee in thy woman's weeds.", "Vio. The captain, that did bring me first on shore\nHath my maid's garments : he, upon some action,", "Is now in durance, at Malvolio's suit,\nA gentleman and follower of my lady's.", "Oli. He shall enlarge him :—Fetch Malvolio\nhither :", "And yet, alas, now I remember me,", "They say, poor gentleman, he's much distract.", "Re-enter Clown, with a letter.", "A most extracting² frenzy of mine own", "From my remembrance clearly banish'd his.—", "How does he, sirrah ?", "Clo. Truly, madam, he holds Belzebub at the\nstave's end, as well as a man in his case may do;\nhe has here writ a letter to you, I should have\ngiven it to you to-day morning; but as a madman's\nepistles are no gospels, so it skills not much when\nthey are delivered.", "Oli. Open it, and read it.", "Clo. Look then to be well edified, when the fool\ndelivers the madman :—By the lord, Madam,—", "Oli. How now ! art thou mad ?", "Clo. No, madam, I do but read madness: an\nhour ladyship will have it as it ought to be, you\nmust allow vox.³", "Oli. Pr'ythee, read i'thy right wits.", "Clo. So I do, madonna; but to read his right\nwits, is to read thus : therefore perpend,⁴ my prin-\ncess, and give ear.", "Oli. Read it you, sirrah.", "[To FABIAN.", "Fab. [Reads] By the Lord, madam, you wrong\nme, and the world shall know it: though you have\nput me into darkness, and given your drunken cousin\nrule over me, yet have I the benefit of my senses as\nwell as your ladyship. I have your own letter that\ninduced me to the semblance I put on; with the which\nI doubt not but to do myself much right, or you much\nshame. Think of me as you please. I leave my\nduty a little unthought of, and speak out of my in-\njury.\nThe madly-used Malvolio.", "1 Hinders.", "2. i. e. a frenzy that drew me away from every thing but its object.", "3 This may be explained: 'If you would have the letter read in character, you must allow me to assume the voice or tranolic tone of a madman.'", "4 Consider.", "5 Frame and constitution.", "6 Interior.", "16", "Oli. Did he write this ?", "Clo. Ay, madam.", "Duke. This savours not much of distraction.", "Oli. See him delivered, Fabian; bring him hither.", "[Exit FABIAN.", "My lord, so please you, these things further thought\non,", "To think me as well a sister as a wife,", "One day shall crown the alliance on't, so please you,", "Here at my house, and at my proper cost.", "Duke. Madam, I am most apt to embrace your\noffer.—", "Your master quits you [To VIOLA;] and, for your\nservice done him,", "So much against the mettle⁵ of your sex,", "So far beneath your soft and tender breeding,", "And since you call'd me master for so long,", "Here is my hand; you shall from this time be", "Your master's mistress.", "Oli.", "A sister ?—you are she.", "Re-enter FABIAN, with MALVOLIO.", "Duke. Is this the madman ?", "Oli.", "How now, Malvolio ?", "Mal.", "Madam, you have done me wrong,\nNotorious wrong.", "Oli.", "Have I, Malvolio ? no.", "Mal. Lady, you have. Pray you, peruse that\nletter :", "You must not now deny it is your hand,", "Write from it, if you can, in hand, or phrase;", "Or say 'tis not your seal, nor your invention :", "You can say none of this: Well, grant it then,", "And tell me, in the modesty of honour :", "Why you have given me such clear lights of favour ;", "Bade me come smiling, and cross-garter'd to you,", "To put on yellow stockings, and to frown", "Upon Sir Toby, and the lighter⁶ people :", "And, acting this in an obedient hope,", "Why have you suffer'd me to be imprisoned,", "Kept in a dark house, visited by the priest,", "And made the most notorious geck,⁷ and gull,", "That e'er invention played on ! tell me why.", "Oli. Alas, Malvolio, this is not my writing,\nThough, I confess, much like the character :", "But, out of question, 'tis Maria's hand.", "And now I do bethink me, it was she", "First told me, thou wast mad: then cam'st⁸ in", "And in such forms which here were presuppos'd", "Upon thee in the letter. Pr'ythee, be content :", "This practice⁹ hath most shrewdly pass'd upon thee ;", "But, when we know the grounds and authors of it,", "Thou shall be both the plaintiff and the judge", "Of thine own cause.", "Fab.", "Good madam, hear me speak ;", "And let no quarrel, nor no brawl to come,", "Taint the condition of this present hour,", "Which I have wonder'd at. In hope it shall not,", "Most freely I confess, myself, and Toby,", "Set this device against Malvolio here,", "Upon some stubborn and uncourteous parts", "We had conceiv'd against him: Maria writ", "The letter, at Sir Toby's great importance :¹⁰", "In recompense whereof, he hath married her.", "How with a sportful malice it was follow'd,", "May rather pluck on laughter than revenge ;", "If that the injuries be justly weigh'd,", "That have on both sides past.", "Oli. Alas, poor fool ! how have they baffled!¹¹ thee !", "Clo. Why, some are born great, some achieve great-\nness, and some have greatness thrown upon them. I", "7 Fool.", "8 *Thou* is here understood: 'then cam'st *thou* in smiling.'", "9 *Practice* is a decit, an insidious stratagem. So in the Induction to the Taming of the Shrew.", {"bbox": [488, 1237, 726, 1253], "category": "Footnote

122

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT I.

was one, sir, in this interlude; one Sir Topas, sir; but that's all one :—By the Lord, fool, I am not mad.—But do you remember? Madam, why laugh you at such a barren rascal? an you smile not, he's gagg'd: And thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges.

Mai. I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.

[Exit.]

Oli. He hath been most notoriously abus'd.

Duke. Pursue him, and entreat him to a peace :—
He hath not told us of the captain yet;
When that is known and golden time convents,¹
A solemn combination shall be made
Of our dear souls.—Mean time, sweet sister,
We will not part from hence—Cesario, come,
For so you shall be, while you are a man;
But, when in other habits you are seen,
Orsino's mistress, and his fancy's queen. [Exeunt]

SONG.

Clo. When that I was a little tiny boy,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

A foolish thing was but a toy,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came to man's estate,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

1 i. e. Shall serve, agree, be convenient.

'Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate,
For the rain it raineth every day.

But when I came, alas ! to wive,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
By swaggering could I never thrive,
For the rain it raineth every day,

But when I came unto my bed,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,
With toss-pots still had drunken head,
For the rain it raineth every day.

A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,

But that's all one, our play is done,
And we'll strive to please you every day.

[Exit.]

This play is in the graver part elegant and easy, and
in some of the lighter scenes exquisitely humorous
Ague-cheek is drawn with great propriety, but his char-
acter is, in a great measure, that of natural gravity, and
is therefore not the proper prey of a satirist. The soli-
quy of Malvius is truly comic; he is betrayed to ridi-
cule merely by his pride. The marriage of Olivia, and
the succeeding perplexity, though well enough contriv-
ed to divert on the stage, wants credibility, and falls to
produce the proper instruction required in the drama,
as it exhibits no just picture of life.

JOHNSON.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

SHAKSPEARE took the fable of this play from the
Promos and Cassandra of George Whetstone, pub-
lished, in 1578, of which this is ‘ The Argument.’

'In the city of Julio (sometimes under the dominion of Corvinus King of Hungary and Bohemia,) there was a law, that what man soever committed adultery should lose his head, and the woman offender should wear some disguised apparel, during her life, to make her infamously noted. This severe law, by the favour of some merciful magistrate, became little regarded, until the time of Lord Promos's authority; who convicting a young gentleman named Andrugio of incantiness, condemned both him and his minion to the execution of this statute. Andrugio had a very virtuous and beautiful gentlenwoman to his sister, named Cassandra. Cassandra, to enlarge her brother's life, submitted an humble petition to the Lord Promos. Promos regarding her good behaviour, and fantasying her great beauty, was much delighted with the sweet order of her talk; and doing good, that evil might come thereof, for a time he reprieved her brother: but, wicked man, turning his liking into unlawful lust; he set down the spoil of her honour, ransom for her brother's life: chaste Cassandra, abhorring both him and his suit, by no persuasion would yield to this ransom. But in fine, won by the importunity of her brother (pleading for life,) upon these conditions she agreed to Promos: First, that he should pardon her brother, and after marry her. Promos, as fearless in promise, as careless in performance, with solemn vow signed her conditions; but worse than any infidel, his will satisfied, he performed neither the one nor the other: for to keep his authority unspotted with favour, and to prevent Cassandra's clamours, he commanded the jailer secretly to present Cassandra with her brother's head. The jailer [touched] with the outcries of Andrugio (abhorring Promos's lewdness,) by the providence of God provided thus for his safety. He presented Cassandra with a felon's head newly executed; who knew it not, being mangled, from her brother's (who was set at liberty by the jailer.) [She] was so aggrieved at this treachery, that, at the point to kill herself, she spared that stroke to be avenged of Promos: and devising a way, she concluded, to make her fortunes known to the king. She, executing this resolution, was so highly favoured of the king, that

forthwith he hasted to do justice on Promos; whose
judgment was to marry Cassandra, to repair her crased
honour; which done, for his heinous offence, he should
lose his head. This marriage solemnized, Cassandra
tied in the greatest bonds of affection to her husband,
became an earnest suitor for his life: the king tender-
ing the general benefit of the commonweal before her
special case, although he favoured her much, would
not grant her suit. Andrugio (disguised among the
company,) sorrowing the grief of his sister, bewrayed
his safety, and craved pardon. The king to renown
the virtues of Cassandra, pardoned both him and Pro-
mos. The circumstances of this rare history, in action
lively followed.

When the time was come, however, has not afforded a very correct
analysis of his play, which contains a mixture of comic
scenes, between a nawd, a pimp, felons, &c. together
with some serious situations which are not described.
A hint, like a seed, is more or less prolific, according to
the qualities of the soil on which it is thrown. This
story, which in the hands of Whetstone produced little
more than barren insipidity, under the culture of Shak-
speare became fertile of entertainment. The curious
reader may see the old play of Promos and Cassandra
among 'Six old plays on which Shakspeare founded,
&c.' published by Mr. Steevens, printed for S. Leacroft,
Charing Cross. The piece exhibits an almost complete
embryo of Measure for Measure; yet the hints on
which it is based, are so slight, that it is nearly as im-
possible to detect them, as it is to point out in the acorn
the future ramifications of the oak. The story origi-
nally came from the 'Hecatommithi' of Cinthio. Decad
S, novel 5, and is repeated in the Tragic Histories of
Belleforest.

“ This play,” says Mr. Hazlit, “ is as full of genius
as it is of wisdom. Yet there is an original sin in the
nature of the subject, which prevents us from taking a
cordial interest in it. ‘ The height of moral argument,’
which the author has maintained in the intervals of
passion, or blended with the more powerful impulses of
nature, is hardly surpassed in any of his plays. But
there is a general want of passion, the affections are at
a stand; our sympathies are repulsed and defeated in
all directions.”

Isabella is a lovely example of female purity and vir-

124

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT I.

As time and our concernings shall importune,
How it goes with us; and do look to know
What doth befall you here. So, fare you well;
To the hopeful execution do I leave you
Of your commissions.

Ang. Yet, give leave, my lord,
That we may bring you something on the way.

Duke. My haste may not admit it;

Nor need you on mine honour have to do
With any scruple: your scope¹ is as mine own;

So to enforce or qualify the laws,

As to your soul seems good. Give me your hand;

I'll privily away; I love the people,

But do not like to stage me to their eyes;

Though it do well, I do not relish well

Their loud applause, and aves² vehement;

Nor do I think the man of safe discretion,

That does affect it. Once more, fare you well.

Ang. The heavens give safety to your purposes!

Escal. Lead forth, and bring you back in hap-
piness.

Duke. I thank you: Fare you well.

[Exit.]

Escal. I shall desire you, sir, to give me leave

To have free speech with you; and it concerns me

To look into the bottom of my place:

A power I have; but of what strength and nature

I am not yet instructed.

Ang. 'Tis so with me:—Let us withdraw to-
gether,

And we may soon our satisfaction have

Touching that point.

Escal.

I'll wait upon your honour.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. A Street. Enter Lucio and two Gentlemen.

Lucio. If the duke, with the other dukes, come not to composition with the king of Hungary, why, then all the dukes fall upon the king.

1. Gent. Heaven grant us its peace, but not the king of Hungary's!

2. Gent. Amen.

Lucio. Thou concludest like the sanctimonious pirate, that went to sea with the ten commandments, but scraped one out of the table.

2. Gent. Thou shall not steal?

Lucio. Ay, that he razed.

1. Gent. Why, 'twas a commandment to command the captain and all the rest from their functions; they put forth to steal: There's not a soldier of us all, that, in the thanksgiving before meat, doth relish the petition well that prays for peace.

2. Gent. I never heard any soldier dislike it.

Lucio. I believe thee; for I think, thou never wast where grace was said.

2. Gent. No? a dozen times at least.

1. Gent. What? in metre?

Lucio. In any proportion,³ or in any language.

1. Gent. I think, or in any religion.

Lucio. Ay! why not? Grace is grace, despite of all controversy: As for example; Thou thyself art a wicked villain, despite of all grace.

1. Gent. Well, there went but a pair of shears between us,⁴

Lucio. I grant; as there may between the lists and the velvet: Thou art the list.

1. Gent. And thou the velvet: thou art good velvet; thou art a three-pil'd piece, I warrant thee: I had as lief be a list of an English kersey, as be pil'd, as thou art pil'd, for a French velvet.⁵ Do I speak feelingly now?

Lucio. I think thou dost; and, indeed, with most painful feeling of thy speech: I will, out of thine

own confession, learn to begin thy health; but,
whilst I live, forget to drink after thee.

1. Gent. I think, I have done myself wrong; have I not?

2. Gent. Yes, that thou hast; whether thou art tainted or free.

Lucio. Behold, behold, where madam Mitigation comes! I have purchased as many diseases under her roof, as come to—

2. Gent. To what, I pray?

1. Gent. Judge.

2. Gent. To three thousand dollars a-year

1. Gent. Ay, and more.

Lucio. A French crown more.

1. Gent. Thou art always figuring diseases in me: but thou art full of error; I am sound.

Lucio. Nay, not as one would say, healthy; but so sound, as things that are hollow; thy bones are hollow: impiet has made a feast of thee.

Enter Bawd.

1. Gent. How now? Which of your hips has the most profound sciatica?

Bawd. Well, well; there's one yonder arrested, and carried to prison, was worth five thousand of you all.

1. Gent. Who's that, I pray thee?

Bawd. Marry, sir, that's Claudio, signior Claudio.

1. Gent. Claudio to prison! 'tis not so.

Bawd. Nay, but I know, 'tis so; I saw him arrested; saw him carried away; and which is more, within these three days his head's to be chopped off.

Lucio. But, after all this fooling, I would not have it so: art thou sure of this?

Bawd. I am too sure of it: and it is for getting madam Julietta with child.

Lucio. Believe me, this may be: he promised to meet me two hours since; and he was ever precise in promise-keeping.

2. Gent. Besides, you know, it draws something near to the speech we had to such a purpose.

1. Gent. But most of all, agreeing with the proclamation.

Lucio. Away; let's go learn the truth of it.

[Exeunt Lucio and Gentlemen.

Bawd. Thus, what with the war, what with the sweat,⁶ what with the gallows, and what with poverty, I am custom-shrunk. How now? what's the news with you?

Enter Clown.

Clo. Yonder man is carried to prison.

Bawd. Well; what has he done?

Clo. A woman.

Bawd. But what's his offence?

Clo. Groping for trouts in a peculiar river.

Bawd. What, is there a maid with child by him?
Clo. No; but there's a woman with maid by
him: You have not heard of the proclamation, have you?

Bawd. What proclamation, man?

Clo. All houses in the suburbs of Vienna must be plucked down.

Bawd. And what shall become of those in the city?

Clo. They shall stand for seed: they had gone down too, but that a wise burgher put in for them.

Bawd. But shall all our houses of resort in the suburbs be pulled down?

Clo. To the ground, mistress.

Bawd. Why, here's a change, indeed, in the commonwealth! What shall become of me?

1. Scope is extent of power.

2. Aves are hailings.

3. i. e. measure.

4. We are both of the same piece.

5. 'Pil'd, for a French velvet.'—Velvet was esteemed according to the richness of the pile; three-pil'd was the richest. But pil'd also means bald. The jest alludes to the loss of hair in the French disease. Lucio, finding the Gentleman understands the distemper so well, and mentions it so feelingly, promises to remember to drink his health, but to forget to drink after him.

In old times the cup of an infected person was thought to be contagious.

6. The sweat; the consequences of the curative process then used for a certain disease.

7. In one of the Scotch Laws of James it is ordered, 'that common women be put at the utmost ends of townes, require least peril of fire is.'—It is remarkable that the licensed houses of resort at Vienna, are at this time all in the suburbs, under the permission of the Committee of Chastity.

## SCENE IV.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

125

Claud. Come, fear not you; good counsellors lack no clients: though you change your place, you need not change your trade; I'll be your tapster still. Courage; there will be pity taken on you: you that have worn your eyes almost out in the service, you will be considered.

Bavd. What's to do here, Thomas Tapster? Let's withdraw.

Claud. Here comes signor Claudio, led by the provost to prison; and there's madam Juliet. [Exeunt.]

### SCENE III. The same. Enter Provost,¹ CLAUCIO, JULIET, and Officers; LUCIO and two Gentlemen.

Claud. Fellow, why dost thou show me thus to the world?

Bear me to prison where I am committed.

Prov. I do it not in evil disposition,

But from lord Angelo by special charge,

Claud. Thus can the special god, Authority, Make us pay down for our offence by weight.— The words of heaven;—on whom it will, it will; On whom it will not, so; yet still 'tis just.²

Lucio. Why, how now, Claudio? whence comes this restraint?

Claud. From too much liberty, my Lucio, liberty; As surfeit is the father of much fast,

So every scope by the immoderate use

Turns to restraint: Our natures do pursue,

(Like rats that ravin³ down their proper bane)

A thirsty evil; and when we drink, we die.⁴

Lucio. If I could speak so wisely under an arrest, I would send for certain of my creditors: And yet, to say the truth, I had as lief have the foppy of freedom, as the morality of imprisonment.—What's thy offence, Claudio?

Claud. What, but to speak of, would offend again.

Lucio. What is it? murder?

Claud. No.

Lucio. Lechery?

Claud. Call it so.

Prov. Away, sir; you must go.

Claud. One word, good friend:—Lucio, a word with you. [Takes him aside.

Lucio. A hundred if they'll do you any good.—

Is lechery so look'd after?

Claud. Thus stands it with me:—Upon a true contract,

I got possession of Julietta's bed;⁵

You know the lady; she is fast my wife,

Save that we do the denunciation lack

Of outward order: this we came not to,

Only for propagation⁶ of a dower

Remaining in the coffer of her friends;

From whom we thought it meet to hide our love,

Till time had made them for us. But it chances, The stealth of our most mutual entertainment,

With character too gross, is writ on Juliet.

Lucio. With child, perhaps?

Claud. Unhappy, even so.

And the new deputy now for the duke,—

Whether it be the fault and glimpse of newness;

Or whether that the body public be

A horse whereon the governor doth ride,

Who, newly in the seat, that it may know

I i. e. gaoler.

2 Authority being absolute in Angelo, is finely styled by Claudio, *the demigod*, whose decrees are as little to be questioned as the words of heaven. The poet alludes to a passage in St. Paul's Epist. to the Romans, ch. ix. v. 15–18: ‘I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy.’

3 To ravin² is to voraciously devour.

4 So, in Chapman's Revenge for Honour:

⁶ Like poison'd rats, which, when they've swallowed The pleasing bane, rest not until they *drink*, And can rest then much less, until they *burst*.

5 This speech is surely too indelicate to be spoken concerning Juliet before her face. Claudio may therefore be supposed to speak to Lucio apart.

6 This singular mode of expression has not been satisfactorily explained. The old sense of the word is ‘promoting, inlaging, increasing, spreading.’ It appears that Claudio would say: ‘for the sake of *promot-*

He can command, lets it straight feel the spur:

Whether the tyranny be in his place,
Or in his eminence that fills it up,

I stagger in:—But this new governor

Awakes me all the enrolled penalties,

Which have, like unscour'd armour, hung by the wall

So long, that nineteen zodiacks²⁰ have gone round,

And none of them been worn; and, for a name,

Now puts the drowsy and neglected act

Freshly on me:—'tis surely, for a name.

Lucio. I warrant, it is: and thy head stands so tickle⁶ on thy shoulders, that a milk-maid, if she be in love, may sigh it off. Send after the duke, and appeal to him.

Claud. I have done so, but he's not to be found. I pr'ythie, Lucio, do me this kind service:

This day my sister should the cloister enter,

And there receive her approbation:⁹

Acquaint her with the danger of my state;

Implore her, in my voice, that she make friends

To the strict deputy; bid herself assay him;

I have great hope in that: for in her youth

There is a prone¹⁰ and speechless dialect,

Such as moves men; besides, she hath prosperous art

When she will play with reason and discourse,

And well she can persuade.

Lucio. I pray, she may: as well for the encouragement of the like, which else would stand under grievous imposition; as for the enjoying of thy life, who I would be sorry should be thus foolishly lost at a game of tick-tack.¹¹ I'll to her.

Claud. I thank you, good friend Lucio.

Lucio. Within two hours,

Claud. Come, officer, away.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV. A Monastery. Enter DUKE and Friar Thomas.

Duke. No; holy Father; throw away that thought;

Believe not that the dribbling dart of love

Can pierce a complete bosom:¹² why I desire thee

To give me secret harbour, hath a purpose

More grave and wrinkled than the aims and ends

Of burning youth.

Fri.

Duke. My holy sir, none better knows than you

How I have ever loy'd the life remov'd:¹³

And held in idle price to haunt assemblies,

Where youth, and cost, and witless bravery keeps.¹⁴

I have delivered to lord Angelo

(A man of stricture¹⁵ and firm abstinence.)

My absolute power and place here in Vienna,

And he supposes me travel'd to Poland;

For so I have strew'd it in the common ear,

And so it is receiv'd: Now, pious sir,

You will demand of me, why I do this?

Fri. Gladly, my lord.

Duke. We have strict statutes and most biting laws,

(The needful bits and curbs for headstrong steeds.)

Which for these fourteen years we have let sleep;

Even like an o'ergrown lion in a cave,

That goes not out to prey: Now, as fond fathers,

Having bound up the threatning twigs of birch,

Only to stick it in their children's sight,

ing such a dower as her friends might hereafter bestow on her, when time had reconciled them to her clandestine marriage. The verb is as obscurely used by Chapman in the Sixteenth book of the Odyssey:

— “to try if we

Alone may *propagate* to victory

Our bold encounters.

Shakspeare uses ‘To propagate their states,’ for to *improve* or *promote* their conditions, in Timon of Athens, Act i. Sc. 1.

7 *Zodiacs*, yearly circles. 8 *Tickle*, for ticklish.

9 i. e. enter on her noviciate or probation.

10 *Prone*, is *prompt* or *ready*.

11 *Jouer au tric trac* is used in French in a wanton sense.

12 ‘A complete bosom’ is a bosom completely armed.

13 i. e. retired.

14 *Bravery* is showy dress. *Keeps*, i. e. resides.

15 *Stricture*: strictness.

["126", "MEASURE FOR MEASURE.", "Act I.", "For terror, not to use; in time the rod\nBecomes more mock'd than fear'd: so our decrees,\nDead to infliction, to themselves are dead;\nAnd liberty plucks justice by the nose;\nThe baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart\nGoes all decorum.", "Fri.", "It rested in your grace", "To unloose this tied-up justice, when you pleas'd: And it in you more dreadful would have seem'd,\nThan in Lord Angelo.", "Duke.", "I do fear, too dreadful :", "Sith 'twas my fault to give the people scope,\n'Twould be my tyranny to strike, and gall them\nFor what I bid them do: For we bid this be done,\nWhen evil deeds have their permissive pass,\nAnd not the punishment. Therefore, indeed, my\nfather,", "I have on Angelo impos'd the office;\nWho may, in the ambush of my name, strike home,\nAnd yet my nature never in the sight,\nTo do it slander: And to behold his sway,\nI will, as 'twere a brother of your order,\nVisit both prince and people: therefore, I pr'ythye,\nSupply me with the habit, and instruct me\nHow I may formally in person bear me", "Like a true friar. More reasons for this action,", "At our more leisure shall I render you;", "Only, this one :—Lord Angelo is precise;", "Stands at a guard¹ with envy; scarce confesses\nThat his blood flows, or that his appetite\nIs more to bread than stone: Hence shall we see,\nIf power change purpose, what our seemers be.", "[Exeunt.]", "### SCENE V.\nA Nunnery. Enter ISABELLA and FRANCISCA.", "Isab. And have you nuns no further privileges?", "Fran. Are not these large enough?", "Isab. Yes truly; I speak not as desiring more;", "But rather wishing a more strict restraint", "Upon the sisterhood, the votarists of Saint Clare.", "Lucio. Ho! Peace be in this place? [Within]\nIsab. Who's that which calls?", "Fran. It is a man's voice: Gentle Isabella,", "Turn you the key, and know his business of him;\nYou may, I may not; you are yet unsworn:", "When you have vow'd, you must not speak with men,\nBut in the presence of the priores:", "Then, if you speak, you must not show your face;\nOr, if you show your face, you must not speak.", "He calls again; I pray you, answer him.", "[Exit FRANCISCA.]", "Isab. Peace and prosperity! Who is't that calls?", "Enter LUCIO.", "Lucio. Hail, virgin, if you be; as those cheek-roses\nProclaim you are no less! Can you so stead me,\nAs bring me to the sight of Isabella,", "A novice of this place, and the fair sister", "To her unhappy brother Claudio?", "Isab. Why her unhappy brother ? let me ask;", "The rather, for I now must make you know", "I am that Isabella, and his sister.", "Lucio. Gentle and fair, your brother kindly greets\nyou:", "Not to be weary with you, he's in prison.", "Isab. Woe me! For what?", "Lucio. For that, which, if myself might be his\njudge,", "1 i. e. on his defence.", "2 The old copy reads:", "'Sir, make me not your story.'", "The emendation is Mr. Malone's.", "3 This bird is said to draw pursuers from her nest by crying in other places. This was formerly the subject of a proverb, 'The lapwing cries most, farthest from her nest,' i. e. tongue far from heart. So, in The Comedy of Errors:", "'Adr. Far from her nest the lapwing cries away;\nMy heart prays for him; though my tongue do curse.'", "4 Feerness and truth, in few and true words.", "5 i. e. his mistress.", "6 Teeming foison is abundant produce.", "7 Tith is tillage. So in Shakspeare's third Sonnet:", "He should receive his punishment in thanks:", "He hath got his friend with child.", "Isab. Sir, mock me not:—your story.²", "Lucio. 'Tis true, I would not,—though 'tis my\nfamiliar sin", "With maids to seem the lapwing,³ and to jest,\nTongue far from heart,—play with all virgins so:", "I hold you as a thing ensky'd, and sainted;", "By your renunciation, an immortal spirit;", "And to be talked with in sincerity,", "As with a saint.", "Isab. You do blaspheme the good, in mocking me.", "Lucio. Do not believe it. Fewness and truth,⁴\n'tis thus:", "Your brother and his lover⁵ have embrac'd:", "As those that feed grow full; as blossoming time,\nThat from the seedness the bare fallow brings", "To teeming foison;⁶ even so her plenteous womb", "Expresseth his full tith' and husbandry.", "Isab. Some one with child by him ?—My cousin\nJuliet?", "Lucio. Is she your cousin?", "Isab. Adoptedly; as school-maids change their\nnames,", "By vain though apt affection.", "Lucio.", "She it is.", "Isab. O let him marry her!", "This is the point.", "The duke is very strangely gone from hence;\nBore many gentlemen, myself being one,", "In hand, and hope of action: but we do learn", "By those that know the very nerves of state,\nHis givings out were of an infinite distance", "From his true-meant design. Upon his place,", "And with full line⁸ of his authority,", "Governs Lord Angelo; a man, whose blood", "Is very snow-broth; one who never feels", "The wanton stings and motions of the sense;", "But doth rebate⁹ and blunt his natural edge", "With profits of the mind, study and fast.", "He (to give fear to use¹⁰ and liberty,", "Which have, for long, run by the hideous law,", "As mice by lions,) hath pick'd out an act,", "Under whose heavy sense your brother's life", "Falls into forfeit: he arrests him on it;", "And follows close the rigour of the statute,", "To make him an example: all hope is gone,", "Unless you have the grace¹¹ by your fair prayer", "To soften Angelo: And that's my pith", "Of business 'twixt you and your poor brother.", "Isab. Doth he so seek his life?", "Lucio.", "Has censur'd¹² him", "Already; and, as I hear, the provost hath", "A warrant for his execution.", "Isab. Alas! what poor ability's in me", "To do him good?", "Lucio. Assay the power you have.", "Isab. My power! Alas! I doubt,—", "Lucio.", "Our doubts are traitors,", "And make us lose the good we oft might win,", "By fearing to attempt: Go to Lord Angelo,", "And let him learn to know, when maidens sue,", "Men give like gods; but when they weep and kneel,", "All their petitions are as freely theirs", "As they themselves would owe¹³ them.", "Isab. I'll see what I can do.", "Lucio.", "But speedily.", "Isab. I will about it straight;", "'For who is she so fair, whose unrear'd womb\nDisdains the tillage of thy husbandry ?'", "8 Full line, extent.", "9 To rebate is to make dull: Aciem ferri hebetame.—\nBaret.", "10 i. e. to intimidate use, or practices long countenanced by custom.", "11 i. e. power of gaining favour.", "12 To censure is to judge. This is the poet's general meaning for the word, but the editors have given him several others. Here they interpret it censured, sentenced. We have it again in the next scene:", "'When I that censure him do so offend.'", {"bbox": [666

## SCENE I.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

127

No longer staying but to give the mother¹

Notice of my affair. I humbly thank you :

Commend me to my brother : soon at night
I'll send him certain word of my success.

Lucio. I take my leave of you.

Isab.

Good sir, adieu.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT II.

### SCENE I. A Hall in Angelo's House. Enter ANGELO, ESCALUS, a Justice, Provost,² Officers, and other Attendants.

Ang. We must not make a scare-crow of the law,

Setting it up to fear³ the birds of prey,

And let it keep one shape, till custom make it

Their perch, and not their terror.

Escal.

Ay, but yet

Let us be keen, and rather cut a little,

Than fall,⁴ and bruise to death: Alas! this gentle-
man,

Whom I would save, had a most noble father.

Let but your honour know,⁵

(Whom I believe to be most strait in virtue.)

That, in the working of your own affections,

Had time coher⁶ with place, or place with wishing,
Or that the resolute acting of your blood

Could have attain'd the effect of your own purpose,

Whether you had not sometime in your life

Err'd in this point which now you censure him,⁷

And pull'd the law upon you.

Ang. 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,

Another thing to fall. I not deny,

The jury, passing on the prisoner's life,

May, in the sworn twelve, have a thief or two

Guiltier than they try: What's open made to
justice,

That justice seizes. What know the laws,

That thieves do pass⁸ on thieves? 'Tis very preg-
nant,⁹

The jewel that we find, we stoop and take it,

Because we see it; but what we do not see,

We tread upon, and never think of it.

You may not so extenuate his offence,

For¹⁰ I have had such faults; but rather tell me,
When I, that censure him, do so offend,

Let me own judgment pattern out my death,

And nothing come in partial. Sir, he must die.

Escal. Be it as your wisdom will.

Ang.

Where is the provost?

Prov. Here, if it like your honour.

Ang.

See that Claudio

Be executed by nine to-morrow morning:

Bring him his confessor, let him be prepared ;

For that's the utmost of his pilgrimage.

[Exit] Provost.

Escal. Well, heaven forgive him ; and forgive us all !

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall :¹¹

Some run from brakes¹² of vice, and answer none ;

And some condemned for a fault alone.

Enter ELBOW, FROTH, Clown, Officers, &c.

Elb. Come, bring them away; if these be good people in a common-weal, that do nothing but use

their abuses in common houses, I know no law;
bring them away.

Ang. How now, sir! What's your name? and
what's the matter?

Elb. If it please your honour, I am the poor duke's constable, and my name is Elbow; I do lean upon justice, sir, and do bring in here your good honour two notorious benefactors.

Ang. Benefactors! Well; what benefactors are they ? are they not malefactors ?

Elb. If it please your honour, I know not well what they are : but precise villains they are, that I am sure of; and void of all profanation in the world; that good christians ought to have.

Escal. This comes off well;¹³ here's a wise officer.

Ang. Go to: What quality are they of? Elbow is your name? Why dost thou not speak, Elbow?

Clo. He cannot, sir; he's out at elbow.

Ang. What are you, sir?

Elb. He, sir ? a tapster, sir; parcel-bawd; one that serves a bad woman; whose house, sir, was as they say, plucked down in the suburbs; and now she professes¹⁴ a hot-house, which, I think, is a very ill house too.

Escal. How know you that?

Elb. My wife, sir, whom I detest¹⁵ before hea-
ven and your honour,—

Escal. How ! thy wife?

Elb. Ay, sir; whom, I thank heaven, is an ho-
nest woman,—

Escal. Dost thou detest her therefore?

Elb. I say, sir, I will detest myself also, as well as she, that this house, if it be not a bawd's house, it is pity of her life, for it is a naughty house.

Escal. How dost thou know that constable ?

Elb. Marry, sir, by my wife; who, if she had been a woman cardinally given, might have been accused in fornication, adultery, and all uncleanli-
ness there.

Escal. By the woman's means?

Elb. Ay, sir, by mistress Over-done's means : but as she spit in his face, so she defied him.

Clo. Sir, if it please your honour, this is not so.

Elb. Prove it before these varlets here, thou ho-
nourable man, prove it.

Escal. Do you hear how he misplaces?

[To] ANGELO.

Clo. Sir, she came in great with child; and long-
ing (saving your honour's reverence,) for stew'd
prunes:¹⁶ sir, we had but two in the house, which
at that very distant time stood, as it were, in a fruit-
dish, a dish of some three pence; your honours
have seen such dishes; they are not China dishes,
but very good dishes.

Escal. Go to, go to: no matter for the dish, sir.

Clo. No indeed, sir, not of a pin; you are therein in the right: but to the point: As I say, this mis-
tress Elbow, being, as I say, with child, and being great belly'd, and longing, as I said, for prunes; and having but two in a dish, as I said, master Froth here, this very man having eaten the rest, as I said, and, as I say, paying for them very honest-
ly;—for, as you know, master Froth, I cou'd not give you three pence again.

Froth. No, indeed.

12 The first folio here reads—⁴ Some run from brakes of ice.⁵ The correction was made by Rowe. Brakes most probably here signify *thorny perplexities*; but a brake was also used to signify a *trap or snare*. Thus in Skelton's *Ellinour Rummin*:

'It was a stale to take—the devil in a *brake*. '

And in Holland's *Leaguer*, a Comedy, by Sh. Marmion.

—her I'll make

A stale to catch this courtier in a *brake*?

There can be no allusion to the instrument of torture mentioned by Steevens. A *brake* seems to have signified an engine or instrument in general.

13 i. e. *is well told*. The meaning of this phrase, when seriously applied to speech, is 'This is well delivered,' 'this story is well told.' But in the present instance it is used ironically.

14 *Professes a hot house*, i. e. keeps a bagnio.

15 *Delest*, for protest, or attest.

16 A favourite dish, anciently common in brothels

1 i. e. the *abbess*.

2 A kind of sheriff or jailer, so called in foreign countries.

3 To fear is to affright.

4 i. e. throw down; to fall a tree is still used for to fell it.

5 i. e. to examine.

6 i. e. suited.

7 To complete the sense of this line *for seems* to be required:—*which now you censure him for.* But Shakspeare frequently uses elliptical expressions.

8 An old forensic term, signifying to *pass judgment*, or *sentence*.

9 *Full of force or conviction, or full of proof in it- self.* So, in Othello, Act ii. Sc. 1, 'As it is a most preg- nant and unfore'd position.'

10 i. e. *cause I have had such faults*.

11 This line is printed in Italics as a quotation in the first folio.

128

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT II.

Clo. Very well: you being then, if you be re-
member'd, cracking the stones of the aforesaid
prunes.

Froth. Ay, so I did, indeed.

Clo. Why, very well: I telling you then, if you
be remember'd, that such a one, and such a one,
were past cure of the thing you wot of, unless they
kept very good diet, as I told you.

Froth. All this is true.

Clo. Why, very well then.

Escal. Come, you are a tedious fool: to the
purpose,—What was done to Elbow's wife, that
he hath cause to complain of? Come me to what
was done to her.

Clo. Sir, your honour cannot come to that yet.

Escal. No, sir, nor I mean it not.

Clo. Sir, but you shall come to it, by your ho-
nour's leave: And, I beseech you, look into master
Froth here, sir; a man of fourscore pound a year;
whose father died at Hallowmas:—Was't not at
Hallowmas, master Froth?

Froth. All-holland¹ eve.

Clo. Why, very well; I hope here be truths:
He, sir, sitting, as I say, in a lower² chair, sir; —
'twas in the *Bunch of Grapes*, where, indeed, you
have a delight to sit: Have you not?

Froth. I have so; because it is an open room,
and good for winter.

Clo. Why, very well then:—I hope here be
truths.

Ang. This will last out a night in Russia,
When nights are longest there: I'll take my leave,
And leave you to the hearing of the cause;
Hoping, you'll find good cause to whip them all.

Escal. I think no less; Good morrow to your
lordship.

Now, sir, come on: What was done to Elbow's
wife, once more?

Clo. Once, sir? there was nothing done to her
once.

Elb. I beseech you, sir, ask him what this man
did to my wife.

Clo. I beseech your honour, ask me.

Escal. Well, sir: What did this gentleman to
her?

Clo. I beseech you, sir, look in this gentleman's
face:—Good master Froth, look upon his honour;
'tis for a good purpose: Doth your honour mark
his face?

Escal. Ay, sir, very well.

Clo. Nay, I beseech you, mark it well.

Escal. Well, I do so.

Clo. Doth your honour see any harm in his face?

Escal. Why, no.

Clo. I'll be supposed upon a book, his face is the
worst thing about him: Good then; if his face be
the worst thing about him, how could master Froth
do the constable's wife any harm? I would know
that of your honour.

Escal. He's in the right: Constable, what say
you to it?

Elb. First, an it like you, the house is a respect-
ed house: next, this is a respected fellow; and
his mistress is a respected woman.

Clo. By this hand, sir, his wife is a more re-
spected person than any of us all.

Elb. Varlet, thou liest; thou liest, wicked varlet:
the time is yet to come, that she was ever respect-
ed with man, woman, or child.

Clo. Sir, she was respected with him before he
married with her.

Escal. Which is the wiser here? Justice, or Ini-
quity?³ Is this true?

Elb. O thou caitiff! O thou varlet! O thou
wicked Hannibal! I respected with her, before I
was married to her? If ever I was respected with
her, or she with me, let not your worship think me

the poor duke's officer:—Prove this, thou wicked
Hannibal, or I'll have mine action of battery on
thee.

Escal. If he took you a box o' th' ear, you might
have your action of slander too.

Elb. Marry, I thank your good worship for it:
What is't your worship's pleasure I should do with
this wicked caitiff?

Escal. Truly, officer, because he has some of-
fences in him, that thou wouldst discover if thou
couldst, let him continue in his courses till thou
know'st what they are.

Elb. Marry, I thank your worship for it:—Thou
see'st, thou wicked varlet now, what's come upon
thee; thou art to continue now, thou varlet; thou
art to continue.

Escal. Where were you born, friend?

[To FROTH.

Froth. Here in Vienna, sir.

Escal. Are you of fourscore pounds a year?

Froth. Yes, and't please you, sir.

Escal. So.—What trade are you of, sir?

[To the Clown.

Clo. A tapster; a poor widow's tapster.

Escal. Your mistress's name?

Clo. Mistress Over-done.

Escal. Hath she had any more than one husband?

Clo. Nine, sir; Over-done by the last.

Escal. Nine!—Come hither to me, master
Froth. Master Froth, I would not have you ac-
quainted with tapsters; they will draw you, master
Froth, and you will hang them: Get you gone,
and let me hear no more of you.

Froth. I thank your worship; for mine own part,
I never come into any room in a taphouse, but I
am drawn in.

Escal. Well; no more of it, master Froth: fare-
well. [Exit FROTH.]—Come you hither to me,
master tapster; what's your name, master tapster?

Clo. Pompey.

Escal. What else?

Clo. Bum, sir.

Escal. 'Tis Froth, and your bum is the greatest thing
about you: so that, in the beastliest sense, you are
Pompey the great. Pompey, you are partly a
bawd, Pompey, howsoever you colour it in being a
tapster. Are you not? come, tell me true; it shall
be the better for you.

Clo. Truly, sir, I am a poor fellow, that would
live.

Escal. How would you live, Pompey? by being
a bawd? What do you think of the trade, Pompey?
is it a lawful trade?

Clo. If the law would allow it, sir?

Escal. But the law will not allow it, Pompey;
nor it shall not be allowed in Vienna.

Clo. Does your worship mean to geld and spay
all the youth in the city?

Escal. No, Pompey.

Clo. Truly, sir, in my poor opinion, they will to't
then: If your worship will take order⁴ for the
drabs and the knaves, you need not to fear the
bawds.

Escal. There are pretty orders beginning, I can
tell you: It is but heading and hanging.

Clo. If you head and hang all that offend that
way but for ten year together, you'll be glad to give
out a commission for more heads. If this law hold
in Vienna ten year, I'll rent the fairest house in it,
after three pence a bay:⁵ if you live to see this
come to pass, say, Pompey told you so.

Escal. Thank you, good Pompey; and, in re-
quital of your prophecy, hark you,—I advise you,
let me not find you before me again upon any com-
plaint whatsoever, no, not for dwelling where you
do; if I do Pompey, I shall beat you to your tent,

¹ All-holland Eve, the Eve of All Saints' day.

² Every house had formerly what was called a low
chair, designed for the ease of sick people, and occa-
sionally occupied by lazy ones.

³ i. e. constable or clown

⁴ To take order is to take measures, or precautions.

⁵ A bay is a principal division in building, as a barn
of three bays is a barn twice crossed by beams. Coles
in his Latin Dictionary defines 'a bay of building, men-
sura 24 pedum.' Houses appear to have been estimated
by the number of bays.

["SCENE II.", "MEASURE FOR MEASURE.", "129", "and prove a shrewd Caesar to you; in plain dealing, Pompey, I shall have you whipt: so for this time, Pompey, fare you well.", "Clo. I thank your worship for your good counsel; but I shall follow it as the flesh and fortune shall better determine.", "Whip me? No, no; let carman whip his jade;", "The valiant heart's not whipt out of his remedy.", "Escal. Come hither to me, master Elbow; come hither, master Constable. How long have you been in this place of constable?", "Elb. Seven year and a half, sir.", "Escal. I thought, by your readiness in the office, you had continued in it some time: You say, seven years together?", "Elb. And a half, sir.", "Escal. Alas! it hath been great pains to you! They do you wrong to put you so oft upon't: Are there not men in your ward sufficient to serve it?", "Elb. Faith, sir, few of any wit in such matters: as they are chosen, they are glad to choose me for them: I do it for some piece of money, and go through with all.", "Escal. Look at your worship's house, sir?", "Elb. To your worship's house, sir?", "Escal. To my house: Fare you well. [Exit ELBOW.] What's o'clock, think you?", "Just. Eleven, sir.", "Escal. I pray you home to dinner with me.", "Just. I humbly thank you.", "Escal. It grieves me for the death of Claudio;", "But there's no remedy.", "Just. Lord Angelo is severe.", "Escal.", "It is but needful :", "Mercy is not itself that oft looks so;", "Pardon is still the nurse of second woe :", "But yet,—Poor Claudio! —There's no remedy.", "Come, sir.", "[Exeunt.]", "SCENE II. Another Room in the same. Enter Provest and a Servant.", "Serv. He's hearing of a cause; he will come straight.", "I'll tell him of you.", "Prov. Pray you, do. [Exit Servant.] I'll know His pleasure: may be, he will relent: Alas, He hath but as afforded in a dream!", "All sects, all ages smack of this vice; and he", "To die for it!—", "Enter ANGELO.", "Ang. Now, what's the matter, provost?", "Prov. Is it your will Claudio shall die to-morrow?", "Prov. Did I not tell thee, yea? hadst thou not order?", "Why dost thou ask again?", "Prov.", "Lest I might be too rash:", "Under your good correction, I have seen,", "When, after execution, judgment hath", "Repented o'er his doom.", "Ang.", "Go to; let that be mine:", "Do you your office, or give up your place,", "And you shall well be spar'd.", "Prov.", "What shall be done, sir, with the groaning Juliet?", "She's very near her hour.", "Ang.", "Dispose of her", "To some more fitter place; and that with speed.", "Re-enter Servant.", "Serv. Here is the sister of the man condemn'd, Desires access to you.", "Ang.", "Hath he a sister?", "Prov. Ay, my good lord; a very virtuous maid, And to be shortly of a sisterhood,", "If not already.", "Ang.", "Well, let her be admitted.", "[Exit Servant.", "1. I' e. let my brother's fault die or be extirpated, but let not him suffer.", "2. I. e. 'to pronounce the fine or sentence of the law upon the crime, and let the delinquent escape.'", "17", "See you the fornicatress be remov'd:", "Let her have needful, but not lavish, means;", "There shall be order for it.", "Enter LUCIO and ISABELLA.", "Prov. Save your honour? [Offering to retire.", "Ang. Stay a little while.—[To ISAB.] You are welcome: What's your will?", "Isa. I am a woful suitor to your honour,", "Please but your honour hear me.", "Ang.", "Well; what's your suit?", "Isab. There is a vice, that most I do abhor,", "And most desire should meet the blow of justice;", "For which I would not plead, but that I must;", "For which I must not plead, but that I am", "At war, 'twixt will, and will not.", "Ang.", "Well; the matter?", "Isab. I have a brother is condemn'd to die:", "I do beseech you, let it be his fault,", "And not my brother.¹", "Prov.", "Heaven give thee moving graces!", "Ang. Condemn the fault, and not the actor of it!", "Why, every fault's condemn'd, ere it be done:", "Mine were the very cipher of a function,", "To fine² the faults, whose fine stands in record,", "And let go by the actor.", "Isab.", "O just, but severe law!", "I had a brother then.—Heaven keep your honour!", "Lucio. [To ISAB.] Give't not o'er so: to him again, intreat him:", "Kneel down before him, hang upon his gown;", "You are too cold; if you should need a pin,", "You could not with more tame a tongue desire it:", "To him, I say.", "Isab. Must he needs die?", "Ang.", "Maiden, no remedy.", "Isab. Yes; I do think that you might pardon him,", "And neither heaven, nor man, grieve at the mercy.", "Ang. I will not do't.", "Isab.", "But can you, if you would?", "Ang. Look, what I will not, that I cannot do.", "Isab. But might you do't, and do the world no wrong,", "If so your heart were touch'd with that remorse", "As mine is to him?", "Ang.", "He's sentenc'd; 'tis too late.", "Lucio. You are too cold.", "[To ISABELLA.]", "Isab. Too late? why, no; I, that do speak a word,", "May call it back again: Well, believe³ this,", "No ceremony that to great ones 'longs,", "Not the king's crown, nor the deputed sword,", "The marshal's truncheon, nor the judge's robe,", "Become them with one half so good a grace,", "As mercy does. If he had been as you,", "And you as he, you would have slipt like him;", "But he, like you, would not have been so stern.", "Ang. Pray you, begone.", "Lucio. You are too cold.", "[To ISABELLA.]", "Isab. Too late? why, no; I, that do speak a word,", "May call it back again: Well, believe³ this,", "No: I would tell what 'twere to be a judge,", "And what a prisoner."

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

130

ACT II.

He's not prepar'd for death! Even for our kitchens
We kill the fowl of season:¹¹ shall we serve heaven
With less respect than we do minister
To our gross selves? Good, good my lord, bethink
you:

Who is it that hath died for this offence?

There's many have committed it.

Lucio.

Ay, well said.

Ang. The law hath not been dead, though it hath
slept:²

Those many had not dar'd to do that evil,
If the first man that did the edict infringe
Had answer'd for his deed: now, 'tis awake;
Takes note of what is done; and, like a prophet,
Looks in a glass,³ that shows what future evils,
(Either now, or by remissness new-conceiv'd,
And so in progress to be hatch'd and born),
Are now to have no successive degrees,
But, where they live, to end.

Isab.

Yet show some pity.

Ang. I show it most of all, when I show justice;
For then I pity those I do not know,⁴
Which a dismiss'd offence would after gall;
And do him right, that, answering one foul wrong,
Lives not to act another. Be satisfied:
Your brother dies to-morrow: be content.

Isab. So you must be the first, that gives this
sentence:

And he, that suffers: O, it is excellent
To have a giant's strength; but it is tyrannous
To use it like a giant.

Lucio.

That's well said.

Isab. Could great men thunder

As Jove himself does, Jove would ne'er be quiet,
For every pelting,⁵ petty officer,
Would use his heaven for thunder; nothing but
thunder.

Merciful heaven!
Thou rather, with thy sharp and sulphurous bolt,
Split'st the unwedgede and gnarled⁶ oak,
Than the soft myrtle:⁷—But man, proud man!
Drest in a little brief authority:
Most ignorant of what he's most assur'd,
His glassy essence,—like an angry ape,
Plays such fantastick tricks before high heaven.
As make the angels weep: who, with our spleens,
Would all themselves laugh mortal.⁸

Lucio. O, to him, to him, wench: he will relent;
He's coming, I perceive't.

Prov.

Pray heaven, she win him!

Isab. We cannot weigh our brother with ourself:
Great men may jest with saints: 'tis wit in them!

But, in the less, foul profanation.

Lucio. Thou'rt in the right, girl; more o' that.

Isab. That in the captain's but a cholerick word,
Which in the soldier is flat blasphemy.

Lucio. Art advis'd o' that? more on't.

Ang. Why do you put these sayings upon me?

Isab. Because authority, though it err like others,

1 i. e. when in season.

2 ' Dormiunt aliquando leges, moriuntur nun-
quam,' is a maxim of our law.

3 This alludes to the deceptions of the fortune-tellers,
who pretended to see future events in a beryl, or crys-
tal glass.

4 One of Judge Hale's 'Memorials' is of the same
tendency:—' When I find myself swayed to mercy, let
me remember that there is a mercy likewise due to the
country.'

5 Pelting for paltry.

6 Gnarled, knotted.

7 Mr. Douce has remarked the close 'affinity' between
this passage and one in the second satire of
Persius. Yet we have no translation of that poet of
Shakspeare's age.

'Ignovisse putaſs, quia, cum tonat, ocus ilex
Sulfure discutitur sacro, quam tuque domusque? '

8 The notion of angels weeping for the sins of men
is rabbinical. By *spleens* Shakspeare meant that pecu-
liar turn of the human mind, that always inclines it to a
spiteful and unseasonable mirth. Had the angels *that*,
they would laugh themselves ou: of their immortality,
by indulging a passion unworthy of that prerogative.

9 Shakspeare has used this indelicate metaphor
again in *Hamlet*:—' It will but skin and film the ul-
cerous place'

Hath yet a kind of medicine in itself,
That skins the vice o' the top:¹² Go to your bosom:
Knock there, and ask your heart, what it doth know
That's like my brother's fault: if it confess
A natural guiltiness, such as is his,
Let it not sound a thought upon your tongue
Against my brother's life.

Ang.

She speaks, and 'tis

Such sense, that my sense breeds with it.¹⁰—
Fare you well.

Isab. Gentle my lord, turn back.

Ang. I will think him:—Come again to-morrow.

Isab. Hark, how I'll bribe you: Good my lord,
turn back.

Ang. How! bribe me?

Isab. Ay, with such gifts, that heaven shall share
with you.

Lucio. You had marr'd all else.

Isab. Not with fond¹¹ shokels of the tested¹² gold,
Or stones, whose rates are either rich, or poor,
As fancy values them: but with true prayers,
That shall be up at heaven, and enter there,
Ere sun-rise; prayers from preserved¹³ souls,
From fasting maids, whose minds are dedicate
To nothing temporal.

Ang. Well: come to me

To-morrow.

Lucio. Go; to it is well away. [Aside to ISABEL,
Isab. Heaven keep your honour safe!

Ang.

Amen.¹⁴

For I am that way going to temptation,
Where prayers cross.¹⁵

Ang. At what hour to-morrow

Shall I attend your lordship?

Ang. At any time 'fore noon.

Isab. Save your honour!

[Exeunt] Lucio, ISABELLA, and PROVOST.
Ang. From thee; even from thy virtue.—
What's this? what's this? Is this her fault, or mine?
The tempter, or the tempted, who sins most? Ha!
Not she; nor doth she tempt: but it is I,
That lying by the violet, in the sun,
Do, as the carrion does, not as the flower,
Corrupt with virtuous season. Can it be,
That modesty may more betray our sense¹⁶
Than woman's lightness? Having waste ground

enough,

Shall we desire to raze the sanctuary,
And pitch our evils there ?¹⁷ O, fy, fy, fy!

What dost thou? or, what art thou, Angelo?

Dost thou desire her fouly, for those things

That make her good? O, let her brother live:

Thieves for their robbery have authority,
When judges steal themselves. What? do I love her,
That I desire to hear her speak again,

And feast upon her eyes? What is't I dream on?
O cunning enemy, that, to catch a saint,

With saints dost bait thy hook! Most dangerous

10 i. e. Such sense as breeds or produces a consequence in his mind. Malone thought that sense here meant sensual desire.

11 *Fond,* in its old signification sometimes meant
foolish. In its modern sense it evidently implied a do-
ting or extravagant affection; here it signifies over-
valued or *prized by folly*.

12 i. e. *tried, refined*.

13 Preserved from the corruption of the world.

14 Isabella prays that his honour may be safe, mean-
ing only to give him his title: his imagination is caught
by the word honour, he feels that it is in danger, and
therefore says amen to her benediction.

15 The petition of the Lord's Prayer, 'Lead us not into
temptation,'—is here considered as crossing or inter-
cepting the way in which Angelo was going: he was
exposing himself to temptation by the appointment for
the morrow's meeting.

16 *Sense for sensual appetite.*

17 No language could more forcibly express the aggrava-
ted proficity of Angelo's passion, which the purity
of Isabella but served the more to inflame. The dese-
cration of efficients devoted to religion, by converting
them to the most abject purposes of nature, was an
eastern method of expressing contempt. See 2 Kings,
x. 27.

## SCENE IV.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE

131

Is that temptation, that doth god us on
To sin in loving virtue; never could the strumpet,
With all her double vigour, art and nature,
Once stir my temper; but this virtuous maid
Subdues me quite;—Ever, till now,
When men were fond, I smile'd, and wonder'd how!¹¹

[Exit.]

### SCENE III. A Room in a Prison. Enter Duke, habited like a Friar, and Provost.

Duke. Hail to you, Provost! so, I think you are.

Prov. I am the provost: What's your will, good friar?

Duke. Bound by my charity, and my bless'd order,

I come to visit the afflicted spirits

Here in the prison: do me the common right

To let me see them; and to make me know

The nature of their crimes, that I may minister

To them accordingly.

Prov. I would do more than that, if more were needful.

Enter JULIET.

Look, here comes one; a gentlewoman of mine,
Who falling in the flames² of her own youth,
Hath blister'd her report: She is with child:
And he that got it, sentenc'd: a young man
More fit to do another such offence,
Than die for this.

Duke. When must he die?

Prov. As I do think, to-morrow.—

I have provided for you; stay a while, [To JULIET]

And you shall be conducted.

Duke. Repent you, fair one, of the sin you carry?

Juliet. I do; and bear the shame most patiently.

Duke. I'll teach you how you shall arraign your
conscience,

And try your penitence, if it be sound,

Or hollowly put on.

Juliet. I'll gladly learn.

Duke. Love you the man that wrong'd you?

Juliet. Yes, as I love the woman that wrong'd him.

Duke. So then, it seems, your most offenceful act

Was mutually committed?

Juliet. Mutually.

Duke. Then was your sin of heavier kind than his.

Juliet. I do confess it, and repent it, father.

Duke. 'Tis meet so, daughter: But lest you do
repent,

As that the sin hath brought you to this shame,—

Which sorrow is always towards ourselves, not
heaven;

Showing, we'd not spare² heaven as we love it,

But as we stand in fear,—

Juliet. I do repent me, as it is an evil;

And take the shame with joy.

Juliet. There rest.⁴

Your partner, as I hear, must die to-morrow,

And I am going with instruction to him.—

Grace go with you! Benedicite! [Exit.]

Juliet. Must die to-morrow! O, injurious love,⁵

That respires me a life, whose very comfort

Is still a dying horror!

Prov. 'Tis pity of him. [Exeunt.]

1 Dr. Johnson thinks the second act should end here.

2 The folio reads *flames*.

3 i. e. not spare to offend heaven.

4 i. e. keep yourself in this frame of mind.

5 O for injurious love.⁵ Sir Thomas Hanmer proposed to read law instead of love.

6 *Invention* for imagination. So, in Shakspeare's 103d Sonnet: a face,

That overgoes my blunt invention quite.

And in King Henry V.

'O for a muse of fire, that would ascend

The brightest heaven of invention.

7 *Boot* is profit. 8 i. e. outside.

9 Shakspeare judiciously distinguishes the different operations of high place upon different minds. Fools are frighted and wise men allured. Those who cannot judge but by the eye are easily awed by splendour; those who consider men as well as conditions, are easily ersuaded to love the appearance of virtue dignified with power.

### SCENE IV. A Room in Angelo's House. Enter ANGELO.

Ang. When I would pray and think, I think and pray

To several subjects: heaven hath my empty words;
Whilst my invention,⁶ hearing not my tongue,

Anchors on Isabel: Heaven in my mouth,

As if I did but only chew his name;

And in my heart, the strong and swelling evil

Of my conception: The state, wherein I studied,

Is like a good thing, being often read,

Grown fear'd and tedious; yea, my gravity,

Wherein (let no man hear me) I take pride,

Could I, with boot;⁷ change for an idle plume,

Which the air beats for vain. O place! O form!

How often dost thou with thy case,⁸ thy habit,

Wrench awe from fools, and tie the wiser souls

To thy false seeming?⁹ Blood, thou still art blood!

Let's write good angel on the devil's horn,

'Tis not the devil's crest.¹⁰

Enter Servant.

How now, who's there?

Serv.

One Isabel, a sister,

Desires access to you.

Ang. Teach her the way. [Exit Serv.

O heavens!

Why does my blood thus muster to my heart;

Making both it unable for itself,

And dispossessing all the other parts

Of necessary fitness?

So play the foolish throngs with one that swoons;

Come all to help him, and so stop the air

By which he should revive: and even so

The general,¹¹ subject to a well-wish'd king,

Quit their own part, and in obsequious fondness

Crowd to his presence, where their untaught love

Must needs require offence.

Enter ISABELLA.

How now, fair maid?

Isab. I am come to know your pleasure.

Ang. That you might know it, would much better please me,

Than to demand what 'tis. Your brother cannot
live.

Isab. Even so?—Heaven keep your honour!

[Retiring]

Ang. Yet may he live awhile; and it may be,

As long as you, or I: Yet he must die.

Isab. Under your sentence?

Ang. Yea.

Isab. When, I beseech you? that in his reprieve,

Longer, or shorter, he may be so fitted,

That his soul sicken not.

Ang. Ha! Fye, these filthy vices! It were as good

To pardon him, that hath from nature stolen

A man already made,¹² as to remit

Their saucy sweetness,¹³ that do coin heaven's image

In stamps that are forbid: 'tis all as easy

Falsely to take away a life true made,

As to put mettle in restrained means,

To make a false one.¹⁴

10 Though we should write good angel on the devil's horn, it will not change his nature, so as to give him a right to wear that crest.¹⁵ This explanation of Malone's is confirmed by a passage in Lylys Midas, 'Melancholy! is melancholy a word for barber's mouth? Thou shouldst say heavy, dull, and doltish; melancholy is the crest of courtiers.'

11 i. e. the people or multitude subject to a king. So, in Hamlet: 'the play pleased not the million; 'twas caviare to the general.' It is supposed that Shakspeare, in this passage, and in one before (Act i. Sc. 2.), intended to flatter the unkingly weakness of James I. which made him so impatient of the crowds which flocked to see him, at his first coming, that he restrained them by a proclamation.

12 i. e. that hath killed a man.

13 *Sweetness* has here probably the sense of *lickerishness*.

14 The thought is simply, that murder is as easy as

["132", "MEASURE FOR MEASURE.", "ACT II.", "Isab. 'Tis set down so in heaven, but not in earth.", "Ang. Say you so? then I shall pose you quickly.", "Which had you rather, That the most just law\nNow took your brother's life; or, to redeem him,\nGive up your body to such sweet uncleanness,\nAs she that he hath stain'd?", "Isab.", "Sir, believe this,", "I had rather give my body than my soul.¹", "Ang. I talk not of your soul: Our compell'd sins", "Stand more for number than account.²", "Isab.", "How say you?", "Ang. Nay, I'll not warrant that; for I can speak\nAgainst the thing I say. Answer to this;—", "I now the voice of the recorded law,", "Pronounce a sentence on your brother's life:", "Might there not be a charity in sin,", "To save this brother's life?", "Isab.", "Please you to do't,", "I'll take it as a peril to my soul,", "It is no sin at all, but charity.", "Ang. Pleas'd you to do't, at peril of your soul,", "Were equal poise of sin and charity.", "Isab. That I do beg his life, if it be sin,", "Heaven, let me bear it! you granting of my suit,", "If that be sin, I'll make it my morn prayer", "To have it added to the faults of mine,", "And nothing of your answer.", "Ang.", "Nay, but hear me :", "Your sense pursues not mine: either you are i̇g-\nnorant,", "Or seem so, craftily; and that's not good.", "Isab. Let me be ignorant, and in nothing good,", "But graciously to know I am no better.", "Ang. Thus wisdom wishes to appear most bright,", "When it doth tax itself: as these black masks³", "Proclaim an enshield⁴ beauty ten times louder", "That beauty could displayed.—But mark me;", "To be received plain, I'll speak more gross :", "Your brother is to die.", "Isab. So.", "Ang. And his offence is so, as it appears", "Accountant to the law upon that pain.⁵", "Isab. True.", "Ang. Admit no other way to save his life,", "(As I subscribe⁶ not that, nor any other,", "But in the loss of question,⁷) that you, his sister,", "Finding yourself desir'd of such a person,", "Whose credit with the judge, or own great place,", "Could fetch your brother from the manacles", "Of the all-binding law; and that there were", "No earthly mean to save him, but that either", "You must lay down the treasures of your body", "To this supposed, or else to let him suffer ;", "What would you do ?", "Isab. As much for my poor brother, as myself:", "That is, were I under the terms of death,", "The impression of keen whips I'd wear as rubies,", "And strip myself to death, as to a bed", "That longing I have been sick for, ere I'd yield", "My body up to shame.", "Ang.", "Then must your brother die.", "Isab. And 'twere the cheaper way :", "Better it were, a brother died at once,", "Than that a sister, by redeeming him,\nShould die for ever.", "Isab. Were not you then as cruel as the sentence\nThat you have slander'd so?", "Isab. Ignomy⁹ in ransom, and free pardon,", "Are of two houses: lawful mercy is", "Nothing akin to foul redemption.", "Isab. You seem'd of late to make the law a tyrant;\nAnd rather prov'd the sliding of your brother\nA merriment than a vice.", "Isab. O pardon me, my lord; it oft falls out,\nTo have what we'd have, we speak not what we\nmean :", "I something do excuse the thing I hate,", "For his advantage that I dearly love.", "Ang. We are all frail.", "Isab.", "Else let my brother die,", "If not a feodary, but only he,\nOwe, and succeed by weakness.⁹", "Ang.", "Nay, women are frail too,", "Isab. Ay, as the glasses where they view them-\nselves:", "Which are as easy broke as they make forms,", "Women!—Help heaven! men their creation mar", "In profiting by them.¹⁰ Nay, call us ten times frail ;", "For we are soft as our complexions are,⁹", "And credulous to false prints.¹¹", "Ang.", "I think it well :", "And from this testimony of your own sex,\n(Since, I suppose, we are made to be no stronger", "Than faults may shake our frames) let me be bold;—", "I do arrest your words; Be that you are,", "That is, a woman; if you be more, you're none ;", "If you be one (as you are well express'd)", "By all external warrants,¹² show it now,", "By putting on the destin'd livery.", "Isab. I have no tongue but one: gentle my lord,", "Let me entreat you speak the former language,", "Ang. Plainly conceive, I love you.", "Isab. My brother did love Juliet; and you tell me,\nThat he shall die for it.", "Ang. He shall not, Isabel, if you give me love.", "Isab. I know, your virtue hath a licence in't,", "Which seems a little falouer than it is,", "To pluck on others.¹²", "Ang.", "Believe me, on mine honour,", "My words express my purpose.", "Isab. Ha! I little honour to be much believ'd,", "And most pernicious purpose!—seeming, seem-\ning¹¹³—", "I will proclaim thee, Angelo; look for't:", "Sign me a present pardon for my brother,", "Or, with an outstretch'd throat, I'll tell the world", "Aloud, what man thou art.", "Ang.", "Who will believe thee, Isabel ?", "My unsoil'd name, the austereness of my life,", "My vouch¹⁴ against you, and my place i' the state,", "Will so your accustion overweigh,", "That you shall stifle in your own report,", "And smell of calumny.¹⁵ I have begun;", "And now I give my sensual race the rein :", "Fit thy consent to my sharp appetite ;", "Lay by all nicety, and prolixious blushes.¹⁶", "That banish what they sue for; redeem thy brother", "fornication; and the inference which Angelo would\ndraw is, that it is as improper to pardon the latter as the\nformer.", "1. Isabel appears to use the words 'give my body,' in a different sense to Angelo. Her meaning appears to be, 'I had rather die than forfeit my eternal happiness by the prostitution of my person.'", "2. i. e. actions that we are compelled to, however nu-\nmerous, are not imputed to us by heaven as crimes.", "3. The masks worn by female spectators of the play are here probably meant; however improperly, a compliment to them is put into the mouth of Angelo: unless the demonstrative pronoun is put for the prepositional article ? At the beginning of Romeo and Juliet, we have a passage of 'similar import :", "'These happy masks that kiss fair ladies' brows,", {"bbox": [342, 1249, 617, 12

## SCENE I.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

133

By yielding up thy body to my will;
Or else he must not only die the death,¹
But thy unkindness shall his death draw out
To lingering sufferance: answer me to-morrow,
Or, by the affection that now guides me more,
I'll prove a tyrant to him: As for you,
Say what you can, my false o'erweighs your true.

[Exit.]

Isab. To whom shall I complain ? Did I tell him,
Who would believe me ? O perilous mouths,
That bear in one and the selfsame mouth,
Either of condemnation or approof !
Bidding the law make court'sy to their will;
 Hooking both right and wrong to the appetite,
To follow as it draws ! I'll to my brother :
Though he hath fallen by prompture² of the blood,
Yet hath he in him such a mind of honour,
That had he twenty heads to tender down
On twenty bloody blocks, he'd yield them up,
Before his sister should her body stoop
To such abhorr'd pollution.
Then Isabel, live chaste, and, brother, die :
More than our brother is our chastity.
I'll tell him yet of Angelo's request,
And fit his mind to death, for his soul's rest.

[Exit.]

## ACT III.

### SCENE I.
A Room in the Prison. Enter Duke, Claudio, and Provost.

Duke. So, then you hope of pardon from lord Angelo?

Claud. The miserable have no other medicine,

But only hope :

I have hope to live, and am prepar'd to die.

Duke. Be absolute³ for death; either death or life,
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with
life.—

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep:⁴ a breath thou art,
(Servile to all the skiey influences,)
That dost this habitation, where thou keep'st,⁵
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death's fool;
For him thou labour'st by thy fight to shun,
And yet runn'st toward him still: Thou art not
noble;

For all the accommodations that thou bear'st,
Are nurses'd by baseness:⁶ Thou art by no means
valiant;

For thou dost fear the soft and tender fork
Of a poor worm:⁷ Thy best of rest is sleep,
And that thou oft provok'st; yet grossly fear'st;
Thy death, which is no more. Thou art not thyself;
For thou exist'st on many a thousand grains
That issue out of dust: Happy thou art not;
For what thou hast not, still thou striv'st to get ;

1 *The death.* This phrase seems originally to have
been a miswritten translation of the French *La mort*.
Chaucer uses it frequently, and it is common to all writ-
ers of Shakspeare's age.

2 i. e. temptation, instigation.

3 i. e. determined.

4 *Keep here means care for,* a common acceptance
of the word in Chaucer and later writers.

5 i. e. dwellest. So, in Henry IV. Part i:

‘Twas where the madcap duke his uncle kept.’

6 Shakspeare here meant to observe, that a minute
analysis of life at once destroys that splendour which
dazzles the imagination. Whatever grandeur can dis-
play, or luxury enjoy, is procured by baseness, by offi-
ces of which the mind shrinks from the contemplation.
All the delicacies of the table may be traced back to the
shambles and the dunghill, all magnificence of building
was hewn from the quarry, and all the pomp of orna-
ment from among the damps and darkness of the mine.

7 *Worm* is put for any creeping thing or *serpent*.
Shakspeare adopts the vulgar error, that a serpent
wounds with his tongue, and that his tongue is *forked*.
In old tapestries and paintings the tongues of serpents
and dragons always appear barbed like the point of an
arrow.

8 The old copy reads *effects*. We should read *affects*.
i. e. affections, passions of the mind. See Hamlet, Act
iii. Sc. 4.

And what thou hast, forget'st: Thou art not certain;

For thy complexion shifts to strange affects,⁸

After the moon: If thou art rich, thou art poor;

For, like an ass, whose back with ingots bows,
Thou bear'st thy heavy riches but a journey,

And death unloads thee: Friend, hast thou none;

For thine own bowels, which do call thee sire,

The mere effusion of thy proper loins,

Do curse the gout, serpigo,⁹ and the rheum,

For ending thee no sooner: Thou hast nor youth,
nor age;

But, as it were, an after-dinner's sleep,

Dreaming on both;¹⁰ for all thy blessed youth

Becomes as aged, and doth beg the alms.

Of palsied eld;¹¹ and when thou art old, and rich,

Thou hast neither heat, affection, limb, nor beauty,

To make thy riches pleasant. What's yet in this
That bears the name of life ? Yet in this life

Lie hid more thousand deaths; yet death we fear,

That makes these odds all even.

Claud.

I humbly thank you.

To sue to live, I find, I seek to die :

And seeking death, find life: Let it come on.

### Enter ISABELLA.

Isab. What, ho! Peace here; grace and good
company!

Prov. Who's there? come in; the wish deserves
a welcome.

Duke. Dear sir, ere long I'll visit you again.

Claud. Most holy sir, I thank you.

Isab. My business is a word or two with Claudio.

Prov. And very welcome. Look, signior, here's
your sister.

Duke. Provost, a word with you.

Prov.

As many as you please,

Duke. Bring me to hear them speak, where I
may be conceal'd,¹²

Yet hear them.

[Exeunt Duke and Provost.

Claud. Now, sister, what's the comfort ?

Isab. Why, as all comforts are, most good indeed :

Lord Angelo, having affairs to heaven,

Intends you for his swift ambassador,

Where you shall be an everlasting leiger:¹³

Therefore your best appointment¹⁴ make with speed;

To-morrow you set on.

Claud.

Is there no remedy ?

Isab. None, but such remedy, as to save a head,

To cleave a heart in twain.

Claud.

But is there any?

Isab. Yes, brother, you may live ;

There is a devilish mercy in the judge,

If you'll implore it, that will free your life,

But fetter you till death.

Claud.

Perpetual durance?

Isab. Ay, just, perpetual durance; a restraint,

Though all the world's vastidity¹⁵ you had,

To a determined scope.¹⁶

9 *Serpigo,* is a leprous eruption.

10 This is exquisitely imagined. When we are young,
we busy ourselves in forming schemes for succeeding
time, and miss the gratifications that are before us;
when we are old, we amuse the languor of age with the
recollection of youthful pleasures or performances, so
that our life, of which no part is filled with the business
of the present time, resembles our dreams after dinner,
when the events of the morning are mingled with the
designs of the evening.

11 *Old age.* In youth, which is or ought to be the *happiest* time, man commonly wants means to obtain what he could enjoy, he is dependent on *palsied eld*; must beg alms from the coffers of hoary avarice; and being very niggardly supplied, *becomes as aged*, looks like an old man on happiness beyond his reach. And when he is *old and rich*, when he has wealth enough for the purchase of all that formerly excited his desires, he has no longer the powers of enjoyment.

12 The first folio reads, ‘bring them to hear me speak,’
&c.; the second folio reads, ‘bring them to speak.’ The
emendation is by Steevens.

13 *A leiger* is a resident.

14 i. e. preparation.

15 i. e. vastness of extent.

16 ‘To a determin’d scope.’ A confinement of your

134

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT III.

Claud. But in what nature ?

Isab. In such a one as (you consenting to't)
Would bark your honour from that trunk you bear,
And leave you naked.¹

Claud. Let me know the point.

Isab. O, I do fear thee, Claudio; and I quake,
Lest thou a feverous life should'st entertain,
And six or seven winters more respect
Than a perpetual honour. Dar'st thou die ?
The sense of death is most in apprehension ;
And the poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.²

Claud. Why give you me this shame ?
Think you I can a resolution fetch
From flowery tenderness ? If I must die,
I will encounter darkness as a bride,
And hug it in mine arms.

Isab. There spake my brother; there my father's
grave

Did utter forth a voice ! Yes, thou must die :

Thou art too noble to conserve a life

In base appliances. This outward-sainted deputy,—
Whose settled visage and deliberate word
Nips youth i' the head, and follies doth enmew,³
As falcon doth the fowl,—is yet a devil ;

His filth within being cast, he would appear

A pond as deep as hell.

Claud. The princely Angelo?

Isab. O, 'tis the cunning livery of hell,

The damned'st body to invest and cover

In princely guards.¹⁴ Dost thou think, Claudio,
If I would yield him my virginity,

Thou might'st be freed ?

Claud. O, heavens ! it cannot be.

Isab. Yes, he would give it thee, from this rank
offence,

So to offend him still:⁵ This night's the time

That I should do what I abhor to name,

Or else thou diest to-morrow.

Claud. Thou shall not do't.

Isab. O, were it but my life,

I'd throw it down for your deliverance

As frankly⁶ as a pin.

Claud. Thanks, my dear Isabel.

Isab. Be ready, Claudio, for your death to-morrow.

Claud. Yes.—Has he affections in him,
That thus can make him bite the law by the nose,
When he would force it ?⁷ Sure it is not sin ;
Or of the deadly seven it is the least.

Isab. Which is the least ?

Claud. If it were damnable, he, being so wise,
Why, would he for the momentary trick,
Be perdurably fin'd ?—O Isabel!

Isab. What says my brother ?

Claud. Death is a fearful thing.

Isab. And shamed life a hateful.

Claud. Ay, but to die, and go we know not
where ;

mind to one painful idea: to ignominy, of which the
remembrance can neither be suppressed nor escaped.

1 A metaphor, from stripping trees of their bark.

2 'And the poor beetle that we tread upon

As when a giant dies.

This beautiful passage is in all our minds and memo-
ries, but it most frequently stands in quotation detached
from the antecedent line :—' The sense of death is most
in apprehension,' without which it is liable to an oppo-
site construction. The meaning is :—' fear is the prin-
cipal sensation in death, which has no pain ; and the
giant when he dies feels no greater pain than the beetle?'

3 'In whose presence the follies of youth are afraid
to show themselves, as the fowl is afraid to flutter while
the falcon hovers over it.' To enmee is a term in Fal-
cory, signifying to restrain, to keep in a mew or cage
either by force or terror.

4 Guards were trimmings, facings, or other orna-
ments applied upon a dress. It here stands, by syncne-
doche, for dress.

5 I.e. 'From the time of my committing this offence,
you might persist in sinning with safety.'

6 Frankly, freely.

A kneaded cloud; and the delighted⁸ spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling regions of thick-ribbed ice;⁹

To be imprisoned in the viewless¹⁰ winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

Of those, that lawless and uncertain thoughts

Imagine howling!—'tis too horrible !

That age, ach, penury, imprisonment

To what we fear of death.

Isab. Alas! alas !

Claud. Sweet sister, let me live.

What sin you do to save a brother's life,

Nature dispenses with the deed so far,

That it becomes a virtue.

Isab. O, you beast !

O, faithless coward ! O, dishonest wretch !

Wilt thou be made a man out of my vice ?

Is't not a kind of incest, to take life

From thine own sister's shame? What should I

Heaven shield, my mother play'd my father fair !

For such a warped slip of wilderness¹¹

Ne'er issu'd from his blood. Take my defiance:¹²

Die; perish ! might but my bending down

Reprieve thee from thy fate, it should proceed :

I'll pray a thousand prayers for thy death,

No word to save thee.

Claud. Nay, hear me, Isabel.

Isab. O, fye, fye, fye !

Thy sin's not accidental, but a trade:¹³

Mercy to thee would prove itself a bawd:

'Tis best that thou diest quickly.

Claud. [Going.]
O hear me, Isabella.

Re-enter Duke.

Duke. Vouchsafe a word, young sister, but one
word.

Isab. What is your will?

Duke. Might you dispense with your leisure, I
would by and by have some speech with you: the
satisfaction I would require, is likewise your own
benefit.

Isab. I have no superfluous leisure; my stay
must be stolen out of other affairs; but I will attend
you awhile.

Duke. [To Claudio, aside.] Son, I have over-
heard what hath passed between you and your sis-
ter. Angelo had never the purpose to corrupt her;
only he hath made an essay of her virtue, to prac-
tise his judgment with the disposition of natures:
she, having the truth of honour in her, hath made
him that gracious denial which he is most glad to
receive: I am confessor to Angelo, and I know this
to be true; therefore prepare yourself to death:

7 'Has he passions that impel him to transgress the
law at the very moment that he is enforcing it against
others? Surely then it cannot be a sin so very heinous,
since Angelo, who is so wise, will venture it? Shak-
speare shows his knowledge of human nature in the
conduct of Claudio.

8 Delighted, is occasionally used by Shakespeare for
delightful, or causing delight; delighted in. So, in
Othello, Act ii. Sc. 3:

'If virtue no delighted beauty lack.'

And Cymbeline, Act v. Sc. 4:

'Whom best I love, I cross, to make my gift

The more delayed, delighted.

9 Jonson, in his Cataline, Act ii. Sc. 4, has a simi-
lar expression :—' We're spirits bound in ribs of ice ?'
Shakespeare returns to the various destinations of the
disembodied Spirit, in that poetic speech of Othello in
the fifth Act. Milton seems to have had Shakespeare
before him when he wrote the second book of Paradise
Lost, v. 595–603.

10 Vievless, invisible, unseen.

11 Wilderness, for wildness.

12 I. e. my refusal.

13 Trade, an established habit, a custom, a practice.

### SCENE II.

### MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

135

Do not satisfy your resolution¹ with hopes that are fallible: to-morrow you must die; go to your knees, and make ready.

Claud. Let me ask my sister pardon. I am so out of love with life, that I will sue to be rid of it.

Duke.² Hold you there: Farewell.

[Exit CLAUDIO.

Re-enter Provost.

Provost, a word with you.

Prov. What's your will, father?

Duke. That now you are come, you will be gone: Leave me awhile with the maid; my mind promises with my habit, no loss shall touch her by my company.

Prov. In good time,³

[Exit Provost.

Duke. The hand that hath made you fair, hath made you good: the goodness, that is cheap in beauty, makes beauty brief in goodness; but grace, being the soul of your complexion, should keep the body of it ever fair. The assault that Angelo hath made to you, fortune hath convey'd to my understanding; and, but that frailty hath examples for his falling, I should wonder at Angelo. How would you do to contend this substitute, and to save your brother?

Isab. I am now going to resolve him: I had rather my brother die by the law, than my son should be unlawfully born. But O, how much is the good duke deceived in Angelo! If ever he return, and I can speak to him, I will open my lips in vain, or discover his government.

Duke. That shall not be much amiss: Yet, as the matter now stands, he will avoid your accusation; he made trial of you only;—Therefore fasten your ear on my advisings; to the love I have in doing good, a remedy presents itself. I do make myself believe, that you may most uprightly do a poor wronged lady a merited benefit; redeem your brother from the angry law; do no stain to your own gracious person; and much please the absent duke, if, peradventure, he shall ever return to have hearing of this business.

Isab. Let me hear you speak further; I have spirit to do any thing that appears not foul in the truth of my spirit.

Duke. Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful. Have you not heard speak⁴ of Mariana the sister of Frederick, the great soldier, who miscarried at sea?

Isab. I have heard of the lady, and good words went with her name.

Duke. Her should this Angelo have married: was affianced to her by oath, and the nuptial appointed: between which time of the contract, and limit⁵ of the solemnity, her brother Frederick was wrecked at sea, having in that perished vessel the dowry of his sister. But mark how heavily this befall to the poor gentlewoman: there she lost a noble and renowned brother, in his love toward her ever most kind and natural: with him the portion and sinew of her fortune, her marriage dowry; with both, her combine⁶ husband, this well-seeming Angelo.

Isab. Can this be so? Did Angelo so leave her?

Duke. Left her in her tears, and dry'd not one of

them with his comfort; swallowed his vows whole, pretending, in her, discoveries of dishonour in few, bestowed⁶ her on her own lamentation, which she yet wears for his sake; and he, a marble to her tears, is washed with them, but relents not.

Isab. What a merit were it in death, to take this poor maid from the world! What corruption in this life, that it will let this man live!—But how out of this can she avail?

Duke. It is a rupture that you may easily heal: and the cure of it not only saves your brother, but keeps you from dishonour in doing it.

Isab. Show me how, good father.

Duke. This forenamed maid hath yet in her the continuance of her first affection; his unjust unkindness, that in all reason should have quenched her love, hath, like an impediment in the current, made it more violent and unruly. Go you to Angelo: answer his requiring with a plausible obedience; agree with his demands to the point: only refer⁷ yourself to this advantage,—first, that your stay with him may not be long; that the time may have all shadow and silence in it; and the place answer to convenience: this being granted in course, now follows all. We shall advise this wronged maid to stead up your appointment, go in your place; if the encounter acknowledge itself hereafter, it may compel him to her recompense: and here, by this, is your brother saved, your honour untainted, the poor Mariana advantaged, and the corrupt deputy sealed.⁸ The maid will I frame, and make fit for his attempt. If you think well to carry this as you may, the doubleness of the benefit defends the de ceit from reproof. What think you of it?

Isab. The image of it gives me content already; and, I trust, it will grow to a most prosperous per fection.

Duke. It lies much in your holding up: Haste you speedily to Angelo; if for this night he entreat you to his bed give him promise of satisfaction. I will presently to St. Luke's; there at the moated grange,⁹ resides this dejected Mariana: At that place call upon me; and despatch with Angelo, that it may be quickly.

Isab. I thank you for this comfort: Fare you well, good father.

[Exeunt severally.

### SCENE II.
The street before the prison. Enter Duke, as a friar; to him ELBOW, Clown, and Officers.

Elb. Nay, if there be no remedy for it, but that you will needs buy and sell men and women like beasts, we shall have all the world drink brown and white bastinado.¹⁰

Duke. O, heavens! what stuff is here?

Clo. 'Twas never merry world, since, of two usuries, the merriest was put down, and the wanker allow'd, by order of law, a furr'd gown to keep him warm; and furr'd with fox and lamb-skins¹¹ too, to signify, that craft, being richer than innocency, stands for the facing.

Elb. Come your way, sir;—Bless you, good father friar.

Duke. And you, good brother father:¹² What offence hath this man made you, sir?

Elb. Marry, sir, he hath offended the law; and,

1 Do not satisfy your resolution, appears to signify do not quench or extinguish your resolution with fallible hopes. Satisfy was used by old writers in the sense of to stay, stop, quench, or stint: as in the phrase 'Sorrow is satisfied with tears: Dolor expletur lachrymans.'—To satisfy or stint hunger: Famem explore. To quench or satisfy thirst: Sitem explore!' A conjecture of the Hon. Charles Yorke's on this passage will be found in Warburton's Letters, p. 500, Svo. ed.

2 Hold you there: continue in that resolution.

3 i. e. a la bonne heure, so be it, very well.

4 i. e. appointed time.

5 i. e. betrothed.

6 Bestowed her on her own lamentation, gave her up to her sorrows.

7 Refer yourself, have recourse to.

8 i. e. stripped of his covering or disguise, his affection of virtue; desquamatus. A metaphor of a simi-

lar nature has before occurred in this play, taken from the barking, peeling, or stripping of trees. I cannot convince myself that it means weighed, unless we could imagine that counterpoised was intended.

9 Grange, a solitary farm-house.

10 Bastard. A sweet wine, Raisin wine, according to Minshew.

11 It is probable we should read 'fox on lamb-skins,' otherwise craft will not stand for the facing. Fox-skins and lamb-skins were both used as facings according to the statute of apparel, 24 Hen. 8. c. 13. So, in Characterismi, or Lenton's Leasures, &c. 1631:—'An usurer is an old fox clad in lamb-skin.'

12 The Duke humorously calls him brother father, because he had called him father friar, which is equivalent to father brother, friar being derived from frere. Fr.

136

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT III.

sir, we take him to be a thief, too, sir; for we have
found upon him, sir, a strange pick-lock,¹ which we
have sent to the deputy.

Duke. Fye, sirrah; a bawd, a wicked bawd!
The evil that thou causest to be done,
That is thy means to live: Do thou but think
What 'tis to cram a maw, or clothe a back,
From such a filthy vice: say to thyself,—
From their abominable and beastly touches
I drink, I eat, array myself, and live.
Canst thou believe thy living is a life,
So stinkingly depending? Go, mend, go, mend.

Clo. Indeed, it does stink in some sort, sir; but
yet, sir, I would prove—

Duke. Nay, if the devil have given thee proofs
for sin,
Thou wilt prove his. Take him to prison, officer;
Correction and instruction must both work,
Ere this rude beast will profit.

Elb. He must before the deputy, sir; he has given him warning; the deputy cannot abide a whoremaster: if he be a whoremonger, and comes before him, he were as good go a mile on his errand.

Duke. That we were all, as some would seem
to be
Free from our faults, as faults from seeming, free?²

Enter LUCIO.

Elb. His neck will come to your waist, a cord,³
sir.

Clo. I spy comfort; I cry, bail: Here's a gen-
tleman, and a friend of mine.

Lucio. How now, noble Pompey? What, at the
heels of Cæsar? Art thou led in triumph? What,
is there none of Pygmalion's images, newly made
woman,⁴ to be had now, for putting the hand in the
pocket and extracting it clutch'd? What reply?
Ha? What say'st thou to this tune, matter, and
method? Is't not drown'd i'the last rain? Ha?
What say'st thou, trot? Is the world as it was,
man? Which is the way? Is it sad, and few words?
Or how? The trick of it?

Duke. Still thus, and thus! still worse!

Clo. How doth my dear morsel, thy mistress?
Procures she still? Ha?

Clo. Troth, sir; she hath eaten up all her beef,
and she is herself in the tub.⁵

Lucio. Why, 'tis good; it is the right of it; it
must be so: Ever your fresh whore, and your pow-
der'd bawd: An unshun'd⁶ consequence; it must
be so: Art going to prison, Pompey?

Clo. Yes, faith, sir.

Lucio. Why, 'tis not amiss, Pompey: Farewell:
Go; say, I sent thee thither. For debt, Pompey?
Or how?

Elb. For being a bawd, for being a bawd.

Lucio. Well, then imprisonment: If imprisonment be the due of a bawd, why, 'tis his right: Bawd is he, doubtless, and of antiquity too; bawdborn. Farewell, good Pompey: Commend me to the prison, Pompey; You will turn good husband now, Pompey; you will keep the house.⁷

Clo. I hope, sir, your good worship will be my
bail.

Lucio. No, indeed, will I not, Pompey; it is not
the wear.⁸ I will pray, Pompey, to increase your

1 It is not necessary to take honest Pompey for a housebreaker, the locks he had occasion to pick were Spanish padlocks. In Jonson's Volpone, Corvino threatens to make his wife wear one of these strange contrivances.

2 i. e. 'As faults are free from or destitute of all comeliness or seeming.'

3 His neck will be tied, like your waist, with a cord.
The friar wore a rope for a girdle.

4 i. e. Have you no new courtesans to recommend to your customers.

5 The method of cure for a certain disease was grossly called the *powdering tub*. See the notes on the tub fast and the diet, in Timon of Athens, Act iv. in the Variorum of Shakspeare.

6 i. e. inevitable.

7 i. e. stay at home, alluding to the etymology of *husband*

bondage: if you take it not patiently, why your
mettle is the more: Adieu, trusty Pompey.—Bless
you, friar.

Duke. And you.

Lucio. Does Bridget paint still, Pompey? Ha?

Elb. Come your ways, sir; come.

Clo. You will not bail me then, sir?

Lucio. Then, Pompey? nor now.—What news abroad, friar? What news?

Lucio. Go,—to kennel, Pompey, go;

[Exeunt ELBOW, Clown, and Officers.
What news, friar, of the duke?

Duke. I know none: Can you tell me of any?

Lucio. Some say, he is with the emperor of Rus-
sia; other some, he is in Rome: But where is he,
think you?

Duke. I know not where: But wheresoever, I
wish him well.

Lucio. It was a mad fantastical trick of him, to
steal from the state, and usurp the beggary he was
never born to. Lord Angelo dukes it well in his
absence; he puts transgression to't.

Duke. He does well in't.

Lucio. A little more lenity to lechery would do no
harm in him: something too crabbed that way, friar.

Duke. It is too general a vice, and severity must
curge it.

Lucio. Yes, in good sooth, the vice is of a great
kindred; it is well ally'd: but it is impossible to
extirp it quite, friar, till eating and drinking be put
down. They say, this Angelo was not made by
man and woman, after the downright way of crea-
tion: Is it true think you?

Duke. How should he be made then?

Lucio. Some report a sea-maid spawn'd him:—
Some that he was begot between two stock-fishes:
—But it is certain, that when he makes water, his
urine is congeal'd ice; that I know to be true: and
he is a motion⁹ ungerenerative, that's infallible.

Duke. You are pleasant, sir; and speak apace.

Lucio. Why, what a ruthless thing is this in him,
for the rebellion of a cod-piece, to take away the
life of a man? Would the duke, that is absent, have
done this? Ere he would have hang'd a man for
the getting a hundred bastards, he would have paid
for the nursing of a thousand: He had some feeling
of the sport; he knew the service, and that instruct-
ed him to mercy.

Duke. I never heard the absent duke muči de-
tected¹⁰ for women; he was not inclined that way.

Lucio. O, sir, you are deceived.

Duke. 'Tis not possible.

Lucio. Who? not the duke? yes, your beggar of
fifty;—and his use was, to put a ducat in her clack-
dish:¹¹ the duke had crotchets in him: He would
be drunk too; and let me inform you.

Duke. You do him wrong, surely.

Lucio. Sir, I was an inward¹² of his: A shy fel-
low was the duke: and, I believe, I know the cause
of his withdrawing.

Duke. What, I pr'y'theee, might be the cause?

Lucio. No,—pardon;—'tis a secret must be
lock'd within the teeth and the lips: but this I can
let you understand.—The greater file¹³ of the sub-
ject held the duke to be wise.

Duke. Wise? why, no question but he was.

8 i. e. fashion.

9 i. e. a puppet, or moving body, without the power of generation.

10 Detected for suspected.

11 A wooden dish with a moveable cover, formerly
carried by beggars, which they clacked and clattered to
show that it was empty. In this they received the alms.
It was one mode of attracting attention. Lepers and
other paupers deemed infectious, originally used it, that
the sound might give warning not to approach too near,
and alms be given without touching the object. The
custom of clacking at Easter is not yet quite disused in
some counties. Lucio's meaning is too evident, to want
explanation.

12 i. e. intimate.

13 'The greater file,' the majority of his subjects.

SCENE H.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

137

Lucio. A very superficial, ignorant, unweighing¹ fellow.

Duke. Either this is envy in you, folly, or mistaking; the very stream of his life, and the business he hath helmed,² must, upon a warranted need, give him a better proclamation. Let him be but testimonied in his own bringsings forth, and he shall appear to the envious, a scholar, a statesman, and a soldier: Therefore, you speak unskilfully; or, if your knowledge be more, it is much darkened in your malice.

Lucio. Sir, I know him, and I love him.

Duke. Love talks with better knowledge, and knowledge with dearer love.

Lucio. Come, sir, I know what I know.

Duke. I can hardly believe that, since you know not what you speak. But, if ever the duke return (as our prayers are he may,) let me desire you to make your answer before him: If it be honest you have spoke, you have courage to maintain it: I am bound to call upon you; and, I pray you, your name?

Lucio. Sir, my name is Lucio; well known to the duke.

Duke. He shall know you better, sir, if I may live to report you.

Lucio. I fear you not.

Duke. O, you hope the duke will return no more; or you imagine me too unhurtful an opposite.³ But, indeed, I can do you little harm; you'll forswear this again.

Lucio. I'll be hang'd first: thou art deceived in me, friar. But no more of this; Canst thou tell if Claudio die to-morrow, or no?

Duke. Why should he die, sir?

Lucio. Why? for filling a bottle with a tun-dish. I would, the duke, we talk of, were return'd again: this ungenitur⁴ agent will unpeople the province with continency; sparrows must not build in his house-eaves, because they are lecherous. The duke yet would have dark deeds darkly answered; he would never bring them to light: would he were return'd! Marry, this Claudio is condemn'd for untrussing. Farewell, good friar; I pry'thee, pray for me. The duke, I say to thee again, would eat mutton⁵ on Fridays. He's now past it; yet, and I say to thee, he would mouth with a beggar, though she smelt⁶ brown bread and garlick: say, that I said so. Farewell.

Duke. No might nor greatness in mortality Can censure'scape; back-wounding calumny The whitest virtue strikes: What kind so strong, Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? But who comes here?

Enter ESCALUS, Provost, Bawd, and Officers.

Escal. Go, away with her to prison.

Bawd. Good my lord, be good to me; your honour is accounted a merciful man: good my lord.

Escal. Double and treble admonition, and still forfeit⁷ in the same kind? This would make mercy swear, and play the tyrant.

Prov. A bawd of eleven years continuance, may it please your honour.

Bawd. My lord, this is one Lucio's information against me: mistress Kate Keep-down was with child by him in the duke's time, he promised her marriage; his child is a year and a quarter old, come Philip and Jacob: I have kept it myself; and see how he goes about to abuse me.

1 i. e. inconsiderate.

2 Guided, steered through, a metaphor from navigation.

3 *Opposite*, opponent.

4 *Ungenitur'd.* This word seems to be formed from *genitores*, a word which occurs several times in Holland's Pliny, vol. ii. p. 321, 560, 589, and comes from the French *genitores*.

5 A wench was called a *laced mutton*. In Doctor Faustus, 1604, Lechery says, 'I am one that loves an inch of raw mutton better than an ell of stock-fish.'

6 Smelt, for smelt of.

7 *Forfeit*, transgress, offend, from *forfaire*. Fr.

Escal. That fellow is a fellow of much licence:— let him be called before us.—Away with her to prisoners: Go to; no more words. [Exeunt Bawd and Officers.] Provost, my brother Angelo will not be alter'd, Claudio must die to-morrow: let him be furnished with divines, and have all charitable preparation: if my brother wrought by my pity, it should not be so with him.

Prov. So please you, this friar hath been with him, and advised him for the entertainment of death.

Escal. Good even, good father.

Duke. Bliss and goodness on you?

Escal. Of whence are you?

Duke. Not of this country, though my chance is now

To use it for my time: I am a brother

Of gracious order, late come from the see,
In special business from his holiness.

Escal. What news abroad i' the world?

Duke. None, but that there is so great a fever on goodness, that the dissolution of it must cure it: novelty is only in request; and it is as dangerous to be aged in any kind of course, as it is virtuous to be constant in any undertaking. There is scarce truth enough alive, to make societies secure; but security enough, to make fellowships accrues:⁸ much upon this riddle runs the wisdom of the world. This news is old enough, yet it is every day's news. I pray you, sir, of what disposition was the duke?

Escal. One, that, above all other strifes, contended especially to know himself.

Duke. What pleasure was he given to?

Escal. Rather rejoicing to see another merry, than merry at any thing which professed to make him rejoice: a gentleman of all temperance. But leave us him to his events, with a prayer they may prove prosperous; and let me desire to know how you find Claudio prepared. I have made a stand, that you have lent him visitation.

Duke. He professes to have received no sinister measure from his judge, but most willingly humbles himself to the determination of justice: yet had he framed to himself, by the instruction of his frailty, many deceiving promises of life; which I, by my good leisure, have discredited to him, and now is he resolved⁹ to die.

Escal. You have paid the heavens your function, and the prisoner the very debt of your calling. I have labour'd for the poor gentleman, to the extremest shore of my modesty; but my brother justice have I found so severe, that he hath forced me to tell him, he is indeed—justice.¹⁰

Duke. If his own life answer the straitness of his proceeding, it shall become him well; wherein, if he chance to fail, he hath sentenced himself.

Escal. I am going to visit the prisoner: Fare you well.

Duke. Peace be with you!

[Exeunt ESCALUS and Provost.

He, who the sword of heaven will bear,
Should be as holy as severe;

Pattern in himself to know,

Grace to stand, and virtue go;¹¹

More nor less to others paying,

Than by self-offences weighing.

Shame to him, whose cruel striking

Kills for faults of his own liking!

Twice treble shame on Angelo,

8 The allusion is to those legal *securities* into which fellowship leads men to enter for each other. For this quibble Shakespeare has high authority, 'He that hath *suretiship is sure.* Prov. xi. 15.

9 i. e. satisfied; probably because conviction leads to decision or resolution.

10 *Summum jus, summa injuria.*

11 This passage is very obscure, nor can it be cleared without a more licentious paraphrase than the reader may be willing to allow. 'He that bears the sword of heaven should be not less holy than severe; should be able to discover in himself a pattern of such grace as can avoid temptation, and such virtue as may go abroad into the world without danger of seduction.'

18

138

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

Act IV.

To weed my vice,¹ and let his grow!
O, what may man within him hide,
Though angel on the outward side!
How may likeness, made in crimes,
Mocking,² practice on the times,
To draw with idle spiders' stings
Most pond'rous and substantial things!
Craft against vice I must apply:
With Angelo to-night shall lie
His old betrothed, but despised ;
So disguise shall, by the disguise,
Pay with falsehood false exacting,
And perform an old contracting.

Exit.

ACT IV.

### SCENE I. A Room in Mariana's House. MARIANA discovered sitting; a Boy singing.

### SONG:³

Take, oh take those lips away,
That so sweetly were forsworn;
And those eyes, the break of day,
Lights that do mislead the morn :
But my kisses bring again,
bring again,
Seals of love, but seal'd in vain,
seal'd in vain.

Mari. Break off thy song, and haste thee quick away;
Here comes a man of comfort, whose advice
Hath often still'd my brawling discontent.—

[Exit Boy.

Enter DUKE.

I cry you mercy, sir; and well could wish
You had not found me here so musical ;
Let me excuse me, and believe me so,—
My mirth is much displeas'd, but pleas'd my woe.⁴

Duke. 'Tis good: though music oft hath such a
charm,
To make bad, good, and good provoke to harm.
I pray you, tell me, hath any body inquired for me
here to-day? much upon this time have I promis'd
here to meet.

Mari. You have not been inquired after. I have sat here all day.

Enter ISABELLA.

Duke. I do constantly believe you:—The time
is come, even now. I shall crave your forbearance
a little; may be, I will call upon you anon, for some
advantage to yourself.

Mari. I am always bound to you.

[Exit.]

Duke. Very well met, and welcome.

What is the news from this good deputy ?

Isab. He hath a garden circummur'd⁵ with brick,
Whose western side is with a vineyard back'd;
And to that vineyard is a planched⁶ gate,
That makes his opening with this bigger key:
This other doth command a little door,
Which from the vineyard to the garden leads ;
There have I made my promise to call on him,
Upon the heavy middle of the night.

Duke. But shall you on your knowledge find this
way?

1 The duke's vice may be explained by what he says himself, Act. i. Sc. 4.

—'twas my fault to give the people scope.⁷

Angelo's vice requires no explanation.

2 'How may likeness, made in crimes,
Mocking, practice on the times?'

The old copies read *making*. The emendation is Mr. Malone's. The sense of this obscure passage appears to be:—' How may persons assuming the likeness or semblance of virtue, while they are in fact guilty of the grossest crimes, impose with this counterfeit sanctity upon the world, in order to draw to themselves by the filmsiest pretensions the most solid advantages; such as pleasure, honour, reputation, &c.'

3 It does not appear certain to whom this beautiful little song rightly belongs. It is found with an additional stanza in Fletcher's *Bloody Brother*. Mr. Malone prints it as Shakspeare's, Mr. Boswell thinks Fletcher has the best claim to it; Mr. Webster that Shakspeare may have written the first stanza, and Fletcher the se-

Isab. I have ta'en a due and wary note upon't;
With whispering and most guilty diligence,
In action all of precept, he did show me
The way twice o'er.

Duke. Are there no other tokens

Between you 'greed, concerning her observance?

Isab. No, none, but only a repair 'the dark ;

And that I have possess'd' him, my most stay

Can be but brief; for I have made him know,

I have a servant comes with me along,

That stays⁹ upon me; whose persuasion is,

I come about my brother.

Duke. 'Tis well born up.

I have not yet made known to Mariana.

A word of this:—What, ho! within! come forth!

Re-enter MARIANA.

I pray you, be acquainted with this maid;

She comes to do you good.

Isab. I do desire the like.

Duke. Do you persuade yourself that I respect you?

Mari. Good friar, I know you do; and have found it.

Duke. Take then this your companion by the hand,

Who hath a story ready for your ear:

I shall attend your leisure; but make haste;

The vaporous night approaches.

Mari. Will't please you walk aside?

[Exeunt MARIANA and ISABELLA.

Duke. O place and greatness, millions of false eyes

Are stuck upon thee! volumes of report

Run with these false and most contrarious quests⁹

Upon thy doings? thousand 'scapes¹⁰ of wit

Make the ye father of their idle dream,

And rack them in their fancies!—Welcome!—How agreed?

Re-enter MARIANA and ISABELLA.

Isab. She'll take the enterprise upon her, father,
If you advise it.

Duke. It is not my consent,

But my entreaty too.

Isab. Little have you to say,

When you depart from him, but, soft and low,

Remember now my brother.

Mari. Fear me not.

Duke. Nor, gentle daughter, fear you not at all:
He is your husband on a pre-contract:

To bring you thus together, 'tis no sin ;

Sith that the justice of your title to him

Doth flourish¹¹ the deceit. Come, let us go;

Our corn's to reap, for yet our tilth's¹² to sow.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. A Room in the Prison. Enter Pro-
vost and Clown.

Prov. Come hither, sirrah: Can you cut off a man's head?

Clo. If the man be a bachelor, sir, I can; but if he be a married man, he is his wife's head, and I can never cut off a woman's head.

cond. It may indeed be the property of some unknown or forgotten author. Be this as it may, the reader will be pleased to have the second stanza.

'Hide, oh hide those hills of snow

Which thy frozen bosom bears,

On whose tops the pinks that glow

Are of those that April wears.

But first set my poor heart free,

Bound in those icy chains by thee.⁴

4 Though the music soothed my sorrows, it had no tendency to produce light merriment.

5 Circummur'd, walled round.

6 Planch'd, planked, wooden.

7 I, e. informed. Thus Shylock says—

'I have possess'd' your grace of what I purpose.'

8 Stays, waits. 9 Quests, inquisitions, inquiries.

10 'Scapes, sallies, sportive wiles.

11 i. e. ornament, embellish an action that would otherwise seem ugly.

12 Tilth here means land prepared for sowing. The old copy reads *tithe*; the emendation is Warburton's

## SCENE II.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

159

Prov. Come, sir, leave me your snatches, and
yield me a direct answer. To-morrow morning are
to die Claudio and Barnardine: Here is in our pri-
son a common executioner, who in his office lacks
a helper: if you will take it on you to assist him, it
shall redeem you from your gyves;¹ if not, you
shall have your full time of imprisonment, and your
deliverance with an unpitied² whipping; for you
have been a notorious bawd.

Clo. Sir, I have been an unlawful bawd, time out of mind; but yet I will be content to be a lawful hangman. I would be glad to receive some instruction from my fellow partner.

Prov. What ho, Abhorson! Where's Abhorson,
there?

### Enter ABHORSON.

Abhor. Do you call, sir?

Prov. Sirrah, here's a fellow will help you to-morrow in your execution: If you think it meet, compound with him by the year, and let him abide here with you; if not, use him for the present, and dismiss him: He cannot plead his estimation with you; he hath been a bawd.

Abhor. A bawd, sir? Fye upon him, he will dis-credit our mystery.

Prov. Go to, sir; you weigh equally; a feather will turn the scale.

### [Exit]

Clo. Pray, sir, by your good favour (for, surely, sir, a good favour³ you have, but that you have a hanging look,) do you call, sir, your occupation a mystery?

Abhor. Ay, sir, a mystery.

Clo. Painting, sir, I have heard say, is a mystery; and your whores, sir, being members of my occupation, using painting, do prove my occupation a mystery: but what mystery there should be in hanging, if I should be hang'd, I cannot imagine.

Abhor. Sir, it is a mystery.

Clo. Proof.

Abhor. Every true⁴ man's apparel fits your thief: If it be too little for your thief, your true man thinks it big enough; if it be too big for your thief, your thief thinks it little enough: so every true man's apparel fits your thief.⁵

### Re-enter Provost.

Prov. Are you agreed?

Clo. Sir, I will serve him; for I do find, your hangman is a more penitent trade than your bawd: he doth oftener ask forgiveness.

Prov. You, sirrah, provide your block and your axe, to-morrow four o'clock.

Abhor. Come on, bawd; I will instruct thee in my trade; follow.

Clo. I do desire to learn, sir; and, I hope, if you have occasion to use me for your own turn, you shall find me yare;⁶ for, truly, sir, for your kindness, I owe you a good day.

Prov. Call hither Barnardine and Claudio:

### [Evenest Clown and ABHORSON]

One has my pity; not a jot the other,
Being a murderer, though he were my brother.

### Enter CLAUDIO.

Look, here's the warrant, Claudio, for thy death;

⁷Tis now dead midnight, and by eight to-morrow
Thou must be made immortal. Where's Barnardine?

1 i. e. feters.

2 i. e. a whipping that none shall pitty.

3 Favour is contemnance.

4 i. e. honest.

5 Warburton says, 'this proves the *thief's* trade a mystery, not the hangman's,' and therefore supposes that a speech in which the hangman proved his trade a mystery is lost, part of this last speech being in the old editions given to the clown. But Heath observes, 'The argument of the hangman is exactly similar to that of the clown.' As the latter puts in his claim to the whores as members of his occupation, and in virtue of their painting would enroll his own fraternity in the mystery of painters; so the former equally lays claim to the thieves as members of his occupation, and in their right endeavours to rank his brethren the hangmen under the mystery of fitters of apparel, or tailors.'

6 i. e. ready.

7 i. e. strongly.

Claud. As fast lock'd up in sleep, as guiltless labour.

When it lies starkly⁷ in the traveller's bones:

He will not wake.

Prov. Who can do good on him?

Well, go, prepare yourself. But hark, what noise?

### [Knocking within.]

Heaven give your spirits comfort! [Exit CLAUDIO.

By and by:—

I hope it is some pardon, or reprieve,

For the most gentle Claudio.—Welcome, father.

### Enter Duke.

Duke. The best and wholesome spirits of the
night

Envelope you, good Provost! Who call'd here of late?

Prov. None, since the curfew rung.

Duke.

Not Isabel?

Prov. No.

Duke.

They will then, ere't be long.

Prov. What comfort is for Claudio?

Duke.

There's some in hope.

Prov. It is a bitter deputy.

Duke. Not so, not so; his life is parallel?

Even with the stroke⁸ and line of his great justice;

He doth with holy abstinence subdue.

That in himself, which he spurs on his power

To qualify⁹ in others: were he meal⁹¹⁰

With that which he corrects, then were he tyrannous;

But this being so, he's just.—Now are they come.—

### [Knocking within.]—Provost goes out.

This is a gentle provost: Seldom when¹¹¹

The steeled gaoler is the friend of men.—

How now? What noise? That spirit's possess'd with haste,

That wounds the unsisting¹² postern with these strokes.

Provost returns, speaking to one at the door.

Prov. There he must stay, until the officer

Arise to let him in; he is call'd up.

Duke. Have you no countermand for Claudio yet,
but he must die to-morrow?

Prov.

None, sir, none.

Duke. As near the dawning, Provost, as it is,

You shall hear more ere morning.

Prov.

Happily,¹³

You something know; yet, I believe, there comes

No countermand; no such example have we:

Besides, upon the very siege¹⁴ of justice,

Lord Angelo hath to the public ear

Profess'd the contrary.

### Enter a Messenger.

Duke. This is his lordship's man.

Prov. And here comes Claudio's pardon.

Mess. My lord hath sent you this note; and by me this further charge, that you swerve not from the smallest article of it, neither in time, matter, or other circumstance. Good-morrow; for, as I take it, it is almost day.

Prov. I shall obey him.

### [Exit] Messenger.

Duke. This is his pardon; purchases'd by such sin.

### [Aside]

For which the pardoner himself is in:

Hence hath offence his quick celerity,

When it is borne in high authority:

When vice makes mercy, mercy's so extended,

8 Stroke is here put for the stroke of a pen, or a line.

9 To qualify is to temper, to moderate.

10 Meal'd appears to mean here sprinkled, o'erdusted,
defiled; I cannot think that in this instance it has any
relation to the verb *to mell*, meddle or mix with

11 This is absurdly printed Seldom, when, &c. in all the late editions. 'Seldom-when (i. e. rarely, not often) is the steeled gaoler the friend of men.' Thus in old phraseology we have *seldom-time*, *any-when*, &c. The comma between seldom and when is not in the old copy, but an arbitrary addition of some editor.

12 The old copies read thus.—Monck Mason proposed, unlisting, i. e. unheeding, which is intelligible. But I prefer Sir W. Blackstone's suggestion, that *unsisting* may signify 'never at rest,' always opening.

13 Happily, haply, perhaps the old orthography of the word.

14 i. e. seat.

140

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT IV.

That for the fault's love, is the offender friended.—
Now, sir, what news?

Prov. I told you: Lord Angelo, be-like, thinking
me remiss in mine office, awakens me with this un-
wanted putting on:¹ methinks, strangely; for he
hath not used it before.

Duke. Pray you, let's hear.

Prov. [Reads.] Whatever you may hear to the
contrary, let Claudio be executed by four of the clock;
and, in the afternoon, Barnardine; for my better sa-
tisfaction, let me have Claudio's head sent me by five.
Let this be duly performed; with a thought, that more
depends on it than we must yet deliver. Thus fail not
to do your office, as you will answer it at your peril.
What say you to this, sir?

Duke. What is that Barnardine, who is to be ex-
ecuted in the afternoon?

Prov. A Bohemian born; but here nursed up and
bred; one that is a prisoner nine years old.²

Duke. How came it that the absent duke had not
either deliver'd him to his liberty, or executed him?
I have heard, it was ever his manner to do so.

Prov. His friends still wrought reprieves for him:
And, indeed, his fact, till now in the government of
Lord Angelo, came not to an undoubtful proof.

Duke. Is it now apparent?

Prov. Most manifest, and not denied by himself.

Duke. Hath he borne himself penitently in pri-
son? How seems he to be touched?

Prov. A man that apprehends death no more
dreadfully, but as a drunken sleep: careless, reck-
less, and fearless of what's past, present, or to come;
insensibility of mortality, and desperately mortal.³

Duke. He wants advice.

Prov. He will hear none: he hath evermore had
the liberty of the prison; give him leave to escape
hence, he would not: drunk many times a day, if
not many days entirely drunk. We have very often
awaked him, as if to carry him to execution, and
show'd him a seeming warrant for it: it hath not
moved him at all.

Duke. More of him anon. There is written in
your brow, Provost, honesty and constancy: if I
read it not truly, my ancient skill beguiles me: but
in the boldness of my cunning,⁴ I will lay myself
in hazard. Claudio, whom here you have a war-
rant to execute, is no greater forfeit to the law than
Angelo who hath sentenced him: To make you
understand this in a manifested effect, I crave but
four days' respite; for the which you are to do me
both a present and a dangerous courtesy.

Prov. Pray, sir, in what?

Duke. In the delaying death.

Prov. Alack! how may I do it? having the hour
limited; and an express command, under penalty,
to deliver his head in the view of Angelo? I may
make my case as Claudio's, to cross this in the
smallest.

Duke. By the vow of mine order, I warrant you,
if my instructions may be your guide. Let this
Barnardine be this morning executed, and his head
borne to Angelo.

Prov. Angelo hath seen them both, and will dis-
cover the favour.⁵

Duke. O, death's a great disguiser: and you may
add to it. Shave the head, and tie the beard; and

say, it was the desire of the penitent to be so bared
before his death: You know, the course is com-
mon.⁶ If any thing fall to you upon this, more
than thanks and good fortune, by the saint whom I
profess, I will plead against it with my life.

Prov. Pardon me, good father; it is against my
oath.
Duke. Were you sworn to the duke, or to the
d deputy?

Prov. To him, and to his substitutes.

Duke. You will think you have made no offence,
if the duke avouch the justice of your dealing?

Prov. But what likelihood is in that?

Duke. Not a resemblance, but a certainty. Yet
since I see you fearful, that neither my coat, in-
tegrity, nor my persuasion, can with ease attempt
you, I will go further than I meant, to pluck all
fears out of you. Look you, sir, here is the hand
and seal of the duke. You know the character, I
doubt not; and the signet is not strange to you.

Prov. I know them both.

Duke. The contents of this is the return of the
duke; you shall anon overread it at your pleasure;
where you shall find, within these two days he will
be here. This is a thing that Angelo knows not:
for he this very day receives letters of strange
tenor; perchance, of the duke's death; perchance,
entering into some monastery; but, by chance, no-
thing of what is writ.⁷ Look, the unfolding star
calls up the shepherd.⁸ Put not yourself into
amazement, how these things should be: all diffi-
culties are but easy when they are known. Call
your executioner, and off with Barnardine's head:
I will give him a present shrift, and advise him for a
better place. Yet you are amazed; but this shall
absolutely resolve⁹ you. Come away; it is almost clear dawn.
[Exeunt.]

SCENE III. Another Room in the same. Enter
Clown.

Clo. I am as well acquainted here, as I was in
our house of profession: one would think it were
mistress Overdone's own house, for here be many
of her old customers. First, here's young master
Rash;¹⁰ he's in for a commodity of brown paper
and old ginger, ninescore and seventeen pounds; of
which he made five marks, ready money:¹¹I marry,
then, ginger was not much in request, for the old
women were all dead. Then is there here one master
Caper, at the suit of master Three-pile the mer-
cer, for some four suits of peach-colour'd satin,
which now peaches him a beggar. Then have we
here young Dizy, and young master Deep-vow, and
master Copper-spur, and master Starve-lackey the
rapier and dagger man, and young Drop-heir that
kill'd lusty Pudding, and master Forthright the til-
ter, and brave master Shoe-tie the great traveller,
and wild Half-can that stabb'd Pots, and, I think,
forty more; all great doers in our trade, and are
now for the Lord's sake.¹²

Enter ABHORSON.

Abhor. Sirrah, bring Barnardine hither.

Clo. Master Barnardine! you must rise and be
hang'd, master Barnardine!

10 This enumeration of the inhabitants of the prison,
affords a very striking view of the practices predomi-
nant in Shakspeare's age. Besides those whose follies
are common to all times, we have four fighting men and
a traveller. It is not unlikely that the originals of the
pictures were then known. Rash was a silken stuff for-
merly worn in coats: all the names are characteristic.

11 It was the practice of money lenders in Shak-
speare's time, as well as more recently, to make advan-
ces partly in goods and partly in cash. The goods were
to be resold generally at an enormous loss upon the cost
price, and of these commodities it appears that brown
paper and ginger often formed a part.

12 It appears from Davies's Epigrams, 1611, that this
was the language in which prisoners who were con-
fined for debt addressed passengers:—

'Good gentle writers, for the Lord's sake, for the
Lord's sake.'

Like Ludgate prisoners, lo, I, begging, make
My mone.³

1 *Putting on* is spur, incitement.

2 i. e. nine years in prison.

3 Perhaps we should read *mortally desperate*. As
we have harmonious charmingly for charmingly har-
monious, in the Tempest.

4 i. e. in confidence of my sagacity.

5 Countenance.

6 'Shave the head and tie the beard—the course is common.' This probably alludes to a practice among Roman Catholics of desiring to receive the tonsure of the monks before they died.

7 'What is writ;' we should read 'here writ;' the Duke pointing to the letter in his hand.

8 So Milton in Comus:—

'The star that bids the shepherd fold
Now the top of heaven doth hold.'

9 i. e. convince you.

## SCENE II.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

141

Abhor. What, ho, Barnardine!

Barnar. [Within.] A pox o' your throats! Who makes that noise there? What are you?

Clo. Your friends, sir; the hangman! You must be so good, sir, to rise and be put to death.

Barnar. [Within.] Away, you rogue, away; I am sleepy.

Abhor. Tell him, he must awake, and that quickly too.

Clo. Pray, master Barnardine, awake till you are executed, and sleep afterwards.

Abhor. Go in to him, and fetch him out.

Clo. He is coming, sir, he is coming; I hear his straw rustle.

### Enter BARNARDINE.

Abhor. Is the axe upon the block, sirrah?

Clo. Very ready, sir.

Barnar. How now, Abhorson? what's the news with you?

Abhor. Truly, sir, I would desire you to clap into your prayers; for, look you, the warrant's come.

Barnar. You rogue, I have been drinking all night, I am not fitted for't.

Clo. O, the better, sir; for he that drinks all night, and is hanged betimes in the morning, may sleep the sounder all the next day.

### Enter Duke.

Abhor. Look you, sir, here comes your ghostly father; Do we jest now, think you?

Duke. Sir, induced by my charity, and hearing how hastily you are to depart, I am come to advise you, comfort you, and pray with you.

Barnar. Friar, not I; I have been drinking hard all night, and I will have more time to prepare me, or they shall beat out my brains with billets: I will not consent to die this day, that's certain.

Duke. O, you, sir, you must, and therefore, I beseech you,

Look forward on the journey you shall go.

Barnar. I swear, I will not die to-day for any man's persuasion.

Duke. But hear you.—

Barnar. Not a word; if you have any thing to say to me, come to my ward; for thence will not I to-day.

### Enter Provost.

Duke. Unfit to live, or die: O, gravel heart! —
After him, fellows; bring him to the block.

[Ezeunt ABHORSON and Claudio.

Prov. Now, sir, how do you find the prisoner?

Duke. A creature unprepared, unmeet for death; And, to transport¹ him in the mind he is,

Were damnable.

Prov.

Here in the prison, father,

There died this morning of a cruel fever One Ragozine, a most notorious pirate,

A man of Claudio's years; his beard and head, Just of his colour: What if we do omit

This reprobate, much he were well inclined; And satisfy the deputy with the visage Of Ragozine, more like to Claudio?

Duke. O, this is an accident that heaven provides! Despatch it presently; the hour draws on Prefix'd by Angelo; See, this be done,

And sent according to command; whiles I Persuade this rude wretch willingly to die.

Prov. This shall be done, good father, presently. But Barnardine must die this afternoon:

And how shall we continue Claudio,
To save me from the danger that might come,
If he were known alive?

Duke. Let this be done: —Put them in secret holds, Both Barnardine and Claudio; Ere twice

The sun hath made his journal greeting to

The under generation,² you shall find Your safety manifested.

Prov. I am your free dependant.

Duke. Quick, despatch,

[Quick, despatch,

And send the head to Angelo.

[Exit Provost.

Now will I write letters to Angelo,— whose contents The provost he shall bear them,—

Shall witness to him I am near at home;

And that by great injunctions, I am bound

To enter publicly: him I'll desire

To meet me at the consecrated font,

A league below the city; and from thence,

By cold gradation and weal-balanced form,

We shall proceed with Angelo.

### Re-enter Provost.

Prov. Here is the head; I'll carry it myself.

Duke. Convenient is it: Make a swift return; For I would commune with you of such things, That want no ear but yours.

Prov.

I'll make all speed.

[Exit.]

Isab. [Within] Peace, ho, be here!

Duke. The tongue of Isabel;—She's come to know,

If yet her brother's pardon be come hither;

But I will keep her ignorant of her good,

To make her heavenly comforts of despair,

When it is least expected.

### Enter ISABELLA.

Isab. Ho, by your leave.

Duke. Good morning to you fair and gracious daughter.

Isab. The better given me by so holy a man.

Hath yet the deputy sent my brother's pardon?

Duke. He hath releas'd him, Isabel, from the world;

His head is off, and sent to Angelo

Isab. Nay, but it is not so.

Duke.

It is no other :

Show your wisdom, daughter, in your close patience.

Isab. O, I will to him, and pluck out his eyes.

Duke. You shall not be admitted to his sight.

Isab. Unhappy Claudio! Wretched Isabel!

Injurious world! Most damned Angelo!

Duke. This nor hurts him, nor profits you a jot: Forbear it therefore; give your cause to heaven.

Mark what I say, which you shall find

By every syllable a faithful verity:

The duke comes home to-morrow;—nay, dry your eyes;

One of our convent and his confessor,

Gives me this instance: Already he hath carried Notice to Escalus and Angelo;

Who do prepare to meet him at the gates,

There to give up their power. If you can, pace your wisdom

In that good path that I would wish to go;

And you shall have your bosom³ on this wretch,

Grace of the duke, revenges to your heart,

And general honour.

Isab.

I am directed by you.

Duke. This letter then to friar Peter give; 'Tis that he sent me of the duke's return:

Say, by this token, I desire his company

At Mariana's house to-night. Her cause and yours, I'll perfect him withal; and he shall bring you

Before the duke; and to the head of Angelo

Accuse him home, and home. For my poor self,

I am combined⁴ by a sacred vow,

And shall be absent. Wend⁵ you with this letter;

Command these fretting waters from your eyes

With a light heart; trust not my holy order,

If I pervert your course.—Who's here?

### Enter LUCIO.

Lucio.

Good even!

Friar, where is the Provost?

agreement; so he calls Angelo the combinate husband of Mariana.

5 L. e. Go.

1 L. e. to remove him from one world to another. The French *trepas* affords a kindred sense.

2 The under generation, the antipodes.

3 Your bosom, is your heart's desire, your wish.

4 Shakespeare uses *combine* for *to bind by a pact* or

142

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT V.

Duke.

Not within, sir.

Lucio. O, pretty Isabella, I am pale at mine heart,
to see thine eyes so red: thou must be patient: I
am fain to dine and sup with water and bran; I
dare not for my head fill my belly; one fruitful
meal would set me to't: But they say the duke
will be here to-morrow. By my troth, Isabel,
lov'd thy brother: if the old fantastical duke of dark
corners had been at home, he had lived.

[Exit ISABELLA.

Duke. Sir, the duke is marvellous little beholden
to your reports; but the best is he lives not in them.¹

Lucio. Friar, thou knowest not the duke so well
as I do: he's a better woodman² than thou takest
him for.

Duke. Well, you'll answer this one day. Fare
ye well.

Lucio. Nay, tarry; I'll go along with thee; I
can tell thee pretty tales of the duke.

Duke. You have told me too many of him already,
sir, if they be true; if not true, none were enough.

Lucio. I was once before him for getting a wench
with child.

Duke. Did you such a thing?

Lucio. Yes, marry, did I; but was fain to for-
swear it; they would else have married me to the
rotten meddler.

Duke. Sir, your company is fairer than honest:
Rest you well.

Lucio. By my troth, I'll go with thee to the lane's
end: If bawd talk offend you, we'll have very little
of it: Nay, friar I am a kind of burr, I shall stick.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV. A Room in Angelo's House. Enter ANGELO and ESCALUS.

Escal. Every letter he hath writ hath disvouch'd³
other.

Escal. In most uneven and distracted manner.
His actions show much like to madness: pray hea-
ven, his wisdom be not tainted! And why meet him
at the gates, and redeliver our authorities there?

Escal. I guess not.

Escal. And why should we proclaim it in an hour
before his entering, that, if any crave redress of
injustice, they should exhibit their petitions in the
street?

Escal. He shows his reason for that: to have a
despatch of complaints; and to deliver us from
devices hereafter, which shall then have no power to
stand against us.

Escal. Well, I beseech you, let it be proclaim'd:
Betimes i' the morn, I'll call you at your house:
Give notice to such men of sort and suit,⁴

As are to meet him.

Escal.

I shall, sir: fare you well.

[Exit.]

Escal. Good night.—

This deed unshapes me quite, makes me unpregnant,⁵

And dull to all proceeding. A deflower'd maid!

And by an eminent body, that enforce'd

The law against it!—But that her tender shame

Will not proclaim against her maiden loss,

How might she tongue me? Yet reason dares⁶
her?—no:

1 i. e. he depends not on them.

2 A woodman was an attendant on the forester; his great employment was hunting. It is here used in a wanton sense for a hunter of a different sort of game. So, Falstaff asks his mistresses in the Merry Wives of Windsor:—

3 Divouched is contradicted.

4 Figure and rank.

5 Unready, unprepared; the contrary to pregnant in its sense of ready, apprehensive.

6 To dare has two significations; to terrify, as in The Maid's Tragedy:—

'—those mad mischiefs
'—Would dare a woman.'

And to challenge or call forth, as in K. Henry IV. p. 1.
'Unless a brother should a brother dare

To gentle exercise,' &c.

For my authority bears a credent⁷ bulk,

That no particular⁸ scandal once can touch,

But it confounds the breather.⁹ He should have liv'd,
Save that his riotous youth, with dangerous sense,
Might in the times to come, have ta'en revenge,
By so receiving a dishonour'd life,

With ransom of such shame.¹⁰ Would yet he had
liv'd!

Alack, when once our grace we have forgot,
Nothing goes right; we would and we would not.

[Exit,¹⁰]

### SCENE V. Fields without the Town. Enter Duke in his own habit, and Friar PETER.

Duke. These letters at fit time deliver me.

[Giving letters.]

The Provost knows our purpose, and our plot.

The matter being afoot, keep your instruction,

And hold you ever to our special drift;

Though sometimes you do blench¹¹ from this to that,

As cause doth minister. Go, call at Flavius' house,

And tell him where I stay: give the like notice

To Valentinus, Rowland, and to Crassus,

And bid them bring the trumpets to the gates;

But send me Flavius first.

F. Peter.

It shall be speeded well.

[Exit. Friar

Enter VARRIUS.

Duke. I thank thee, Varrius; thou hast made
good haste:

Come we will walk: There's other of our friends
Will greet us here anon, my gentle Varrius.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE VI. Street near the City Gate. Enter ISABELLA and MARIANA.

Isab. To speak so indirectly, I am loath;

I would say the truth; but to accuse him so,

That is your part: Yet I'm advis'd to do it;

He says, to 'vailous¹² purpose.

Mari.

Be rul'd by him.

Isab. Besides, he tells me, that, if peradventure

He speak against me on the adverse side,

I should not think it strange; for 'tis a physic,

That's bitter to sweet end.

Mari. I would, friar Peter—

Isab.

O, peace; the friar is come.

Enter Friar PETER.¹³

F. Peter. Come, I have found you out a stand
most fit,

Where you may have such vantage on the duke,
He shall not pass you; Twice have the trumpets
sounded;

The generous¹⁴ and the gravest citizens,

Have hent¹⁵ the gates, and very near upon

The Duke is entr'ing; therefore, hence, away.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT V.

### SCENE I. A public Place near the City Gate.

MARIANA (veil'd,) ISABELLA, and PETER, at a distance. Enter at opposite doors, Duke, VARRIUS, Lords; ANGELO, ESCALUS, LUCIO, Provost, Officers, and Citizens.

This passage will therefore bear two interpretations,
between which the reader must choose.

7 Credent, creditable, not questionable of the word.

8 Particular is private: a French sense of the word.

9 i. e. utterer.

10 Dr. Johnson thought the fourth Act should end here,
'for here is properly a cessation of action, a night inter-
venes, and the place is changed between the passages
of this scene and those of the next. The fifth Act, be-
ginning with the following scene, would proceed with-
out any interruption of time or place.'

11 To blench, to start off, to fly off.

12 Aavailful.

13 He is called friar Thomas in the first Act.

14 Generous, for most noble, or those of rank. Generosi, Lat.

15 i. e. seized, laid hold on.

## SCENE I.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

143

Duke. My very worthy cousin, fairly met:—
Our old and faithful friend, we are glad to see you.
Ang. and Escal. Happy return to be your royal
grace!

Duke. Many and hearty thanks to you both.
We have made inquiry of you; and we hear
Such goodness of your justice, that our soul
Cannot but yield you forth to public thanks,
Forerunning more requalit.

Ang. You make my bonds still greater.
Duke. O, your desert speaks loud; and I should
wrong it,

To lock it in the wards of covert bosom,
When it deserves of characters of brass
A forted residence,'gainst the tooth of time,
And razure of oblivion: Give me your hand,
And let the subject see, to make them know
That outward courtesies would fain proclaim
Favours that keep within.—Come, Escalus;
You must walk by us on our other hand;—
And good supporters are you.

PETER and ISABELLA come forward.

F. Peter. Now is your time; speak loud, and
kneel before him.

Isab. Justice, O royal Duke ! Vail! your regard,
Upon a wrong'd, I'd fain have said, a maid !
O worthy prince, dishonour not your eye
By throwing it on any other object,
Till you have heard me in my true complaint,
And given me, justice, justice, justice, justice !

Duke. Relate your wrongs: In what ? by whom ?

Be brief.

Here is Lord Angelo shall give you justice!
Reveal yourself to him.

Isab. O, worthy duke,

You bid me seek redemption of the devil:
Hear me yourself; for that which I must speak
Must either punish me, not being believ'd,
Or wring redress from you; hear me, O, hear me,
here.

Ang. My lord, her wits, I fear me, are not firm:
She hath been a suitor to me for her brother,
Cut off by course of justice.

Isab. By course of justice!

Ang. And she will speak most bitterly and
strange; [speak:
Isab. Most strange, but yet most truly, will I
That Angelo's forsworn, is it not strange ?

That Angelo's a murderer; is't not strange ?

That Angelo is an adulterous thief,

An hypocrite, a virgin-violator;

Is it not strange, and strange ?

Duke. Nay, ten times strange.

Isab. It is not truer he is Angelo,
Than this is all as true as it is strange:

Nay, it is ten times true; for truth is truth

To the end of reckoning.

Duke. Away with her :—Poor soul.
She speaks this in the infirmity of sense.

Isab. O prince, I conjure thee, as thou believ'st
There is another comfort than this world,
That thou neglect me not, with that opinion
That I am touch'd with madness: make not im-
possible

That which but seems unlike: 'tis not impossible
But one the wicked'st catiff on the ground,
May seem as shy, as grave, as just, as absolute,

As Angelo; even so may Angelo,
In all his dressings,² characts,³ titles, forms,
Be an arch villain: believe it, royal prince,
If he be less, he's nothing; but he's more,
Had I more name for badness.

Duke. By mine honesty,
If she be mad (as I believe no other),
My madness hath the oddest frame of sense,
Such a dependency of thing on thing,
As e'er I heard in madness.

Isab. O, gracious duke,
Harp not on that; nor do not banish reason
For inequality:⁴ but let your reason serve
To make the truth appear, where it seems hid;
And hide the false, seems true.⁵

Duke. Many that are not mad,
Have, sure, more lack of reason.—What would
you say ?

Isab. I am the sister of one Claudio,
Condemn'd upon the act of fornication
To lose his head; condemn'd by Angelo:
I, in probation of a sisterhood,

Was sent to by my brother: One Lucio

As then the messenger :—

Lucio. That's I, an't like your grace:
I came to her from Claudio, and desir'd her
To try her gracious fortune with Lord Angelo.
For her poor brother's pardon.

Isab. That's he, indeed.

Duke. You were not bid to peace.

Lucio. No, my good lord ;

Nor wish'd to hold my peace.

Duke. I wish you now then ;
Pray you, take note of it: and when you have
A business for yourself, pray heaven you then
Be perfect.

Lucio. I warrant your honour.

Duke. The warrant's for yourself; take heed to it.

Isab. This gentleman told somewhat of my tale.

Lucio. Right.

Duke. It may be right; but you are in the wrong

To speak before your time.—Proceed.

Isab. I went

To this pernicious caitiff deputy.

Duke. That's somewhat madly spoken.

Isab. Pardon it.

The phrase is to the matter.⁶

Duke. Mended again: the matter ;—Proceed.

Isab. In brief,—to set the needless process by,

How I persuaded, how I pray'd, and kneel'd,

How he repell'd me, and how I reply'd;

(For this was of much length,) the vile conclusion

I now begin with grief and shame to utter ;

He would not, but by gift of my chaste body

To his concupiscible intemperate lust,

Release my brother; and, after much debatement,

My sisterly remorse⁸ confutes mine honour,

And I did yield to him. But the next morn betimes,

His purpose surfeiting, he sends a warrant

For my poor brother's head.

Duke. This is most likely !

Isab. O, that it were as like as it is true !⁹

Duke. By heaven, fond¹⁰ wretch, thou know'st
not what thou speak'st;

Or else thou art suborn'd against his honour,

In hateful practice :¹¹ First, his integrity

Stands without blemish :—next, it imports no reason

That with such vehemency he should pursue

Faults proper to himself: if he had so offended,

He would have weigh'd thy brother by himself,

And not have cut him off: Some one hath set you on,

1 To *vail* is to lower, to *let fall*, to cast down.

2 i. e. habiliments of office.

3 *Characts* are *distinctive marks* or characters. A
statute of Edward VI. directs the seals of office of every
bishop to have 'certain *characts* under the king's arms
for the knowledge of the diocess.'

4 The meaning appears to be 'do not suppose me
mad because I speak inconsistently or unequally.'

5 I must say with Mr. Stevens that 'I do not profess
to understand these words.' Mr. Phelps proposes to
read 'And *hid*, the false seems true.' i. e. 'The truth
being hid, not discovered or made known, what is false
seems true.'

6 i. e. *suited* to the matter; as in Hamlet: 'the phrase
would be more german to the matter.'

7 *Refell'd* is refuted.

8 *Remorse* is pity.

9 The meaning appears to be 'O, that it had as much
of the likeness or appearance, as it has of the reality of
truth.'

10 i. e. foolish.

11 *Practice* was used by the old writers for any insi-
dious stratagem or treachery.

["144", "MEASURE FOR MEASURE.", "Act V,", "Confess the truth, and say by whose advice\nThou cam't here to complain.", "Isab.", "And is this all?", "Then, oh, you blessed ministers above,", "Keep me in patience; and, with ripen'd time,", "Unfold the evil which is here wrapt up", "In countenance!¹—Heaven shield your grace from\nwoe,", "As I, thus wrong'd, hence unbelievable go!", "Duke. I know, you'd fain be gone:—An officer!", "To prison with her:—Shall we thus permit", "A blasting and a scandalous breath to fall", "On him so near us? This needs must be a practice.", "—Who knew of your intent, and coming hither?", "Isab. One that I would were here, friar Lodowick.", "Duke. A ghostly father, belike:—Who knows\nthat Lodowick?", "Lucio. My lord, I know him; 'tis a meddling friar; I do not like the man: had he been lay, my lord, For certain words he spake against your grace In your retirement, I had swing'd him soundly.", "Duke. Words against me? This a good friar be-\nlike!", "And to set on this wretched woman here", "Against our substitute!—Let this friar be found.", "Lucio. But yesternight, my lord, she and that friar I saw them at the prison: a saucy friar,", "A very scurvy fellow.", "F. Peter.", "Blessed be your royal grace!", "I have stood by, my lord, and I have heard", "Your royal ear abus'd: First, hath this woman,", "Most wrongfully accus'd your substitute;", "Who is as free from touch or soil with her,", "As she from one ungot.", "Duke.", "We did believe no less.", "Know you that friar Lodowick that she speaks of?", "F. Peter. I know him for a mandivine and holy;", "Not scurvy nor a temporary meddler,²", "As he's reported by this gentleman:", "And, on my trust, a man that never yet", "Did, as he vouches, misreport your grace.", "Lucio. My lord, most villanously; believe it.", "F. Peter. Well, he in time may come to clear\nhimself;", "But at this instant he is sick, my lord,", "Of a strange fever: Upon his mere³ request (Being come to knowledge that there was complaint Intended 'gainst lord Angelo) came I hither, To speak, as from his mouth, what he doth know Is true, and false; and what he with his oath, And all probation, will make up full clear,", "Whensever he's convened.⁴ First, for this woman (To justify this worthy nobleman, So vulgarly⁵ and personally accused;) Her shall you hear disproved to her eyes, Till she herself confess it.", "Duke.", "Good friar, let's hear it.", "[ISABELLA is carried off, guarded; and\nMARIANA comes forward.", "Do you not smile at this, lord Angelo!—", "O heaven! the vanity of wretched fools!—", "Give us some seats.—Come, cousin Angelo!", "In this I'll be impartial;⁶ be you judge", "Of your own cause.—Is this the witness, friar?", "First, let her show her face; and, after, speak.", "1 i. e. false appearance.", "2 It is hard to know what is meant by a temporary meddler, perhaps it was intended to signify 'one who introduced himself as often as he could find opportunity into other men's concerns.'", "3 Mere here means absolute.", "4 Convented, cited, summoned.", "5 i. e. publicly.", "6 Impartial was used sometimes in the sense of partial; and that appears to be the sense here. In the language of the time, *in* was frequently used as an intensive or augmentative particle. Unpartial was sometimes used in the modern sense of impartial. Shakspeare uses the word in its proper sense in Richard II. Act i. Sc. 2.", "'Moybray, impartial' are our eyes and ears,' &c.", "Should nothing privilege him nor partialize.?", "Until my husband bid me.", "Duke. What, are you married?", "Mari. No, my lord.", "Duke.", "Are you a maid?", "Mari.", "No, my lord.", "Duke. A widow then?", "Mari.", "Neither, my lord?", "Duke.", "Are nothing then:—Neither maid, widow, nor wife?\nLucio. My lord, she may be a punk; for many", "of them are neither maid, widow, nor wife.", "Duke. Silence that fellow; I would he had some\ncause", "To prattle for himself.", "Lucio. Well, my lord.", "Mari. My lord, I do confess I ne'er was married;", "And, I confess, besides, I am no maid:", "I have known my husband; yet my husband knows\nnot,", "That ever he knew me.", "Lucio. He was drunk then, my lord; it can be no better.", "Duke. For the benefit of silence, 'would thou wert so too.", "Lucio. Well, my lord.", "Duke. This is no witness for lord Angelo.", "Mari. Now I come to't, my lord:", "She, that accuses him of fornication,", "In selfsame manner doth accuse my husband;", "And charges him, my lord, with such a time,", "When I'll depose I had him in mine arms,", "With all the effect of love.", "Ang.", "Charges she more than me?", "Mari. Not that I know.", "Duke.", "No? you say, your husband,", "Mari. Why, just, my lord, and that is Angelo,", "Who thinks, he knows, that he ne'er knew my\nbody,", "But knows, he thinks, that he knew Isabel's.", "Ang. This is a strange abuse:—'Let's see thy\nface.", "Mari. My husband bids me; now I will unmask.", "[Unveiling-", "This is that face, thou cruel Angelo,", "Which, once thou swor'st, was worth the looking on:", "This is the hand, which, with a vow'd contract,", "Was fast belock'd in thine: this is the body", "That took away the match from Isabel,", "And did supply thee at thy garden-house,⁸", "In her imagin'd person.", "Duke.", "Know you this woman?", "Lucio. Carnally, she says.", "Duke.", "Sirrah, no more.", "Lucio. Enough, my lord.", "Ang. My lord, I must confess, I know this woman:", "And, five years since, there was some speech of\nmarriage", "Betwixt myself and her; which was broke off,", "Partly, for that her promised proportions", "Came short of composition;⁹ but, in chief,", "For that her reputation was disvalued", "In levity: since which time of five years,", "I never spake with her, saw her, nor heard from her,", "Upon my faith and honour.", "Mari.", "Noble prince,", "As there comes light from heaven, and words from\nbreath,", "7. Abuse stands in this place for deception or puzzle.\nSo in Macbeth:—'My strange and self abuse,'", {"bbox": [657, 1158, 901, 1186], "category

## SCENE I.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

145

As there is sense in truth, and truth in virtue,
I am affian'd this man's wife, as strongly

As words could make up vows: and, my good lord,
But Tuesday night last gone, in his garden-house,
He knew me as a wife: As this is true

Let me in safety raise me from my knees;

Or else for ever be confixed here,
A marble monument!

Ang.

I did but smile till now;

Now, good my lord, give me the scope of justice;
My patience here is touch'd: I do perceive,
These poor informal? women are no more

But instruments of some more mightier member,
That sets them on: Let me have way, my lord,

To find this practice out.

Duke.

And punish them unto your height of pleasure.—
Thou foolish friar; and thou pernicious woman,
Compact with her that's gone! think'st thou, thy
oaths,

Though they would swear down each particular
saint,

Were testimonies against his worth and credit,
That's seal'd in approbation?—You, lord Escalus,
Sit with my cousin; lend him your kind pains
To find out this abuse, whence 'tis deriv'd.—
There are another friar that sets them on;

Let him be sent for.

F. Peter. Would he were here, my lord; for he,
indeed,

Hath set the women on to this complaint:
Your provost knows the place where he abides,
And he may fetch him.

Duke. Go, do it instantly.—[Exit] Provost.

And you, my noble and well-warranted cousin,
Whom it concerns to hear this matter forth,³

Do with your injuries as seems your own word,
In any chastisement: I for a while
Will leave you; but stir not you, till you have well
Determined upon these slanderers.

Escal. My lord, we'll do it thoroughly.—[Exit]
Duke.] Signior Lucio, did not you say, you knew
that friar Lodowick to be a dishonest person ?

Lucio. Cucullus non factit monachum: honest in
nothing, but in his clothes; and one that hath spoke
most villanous speeches of the duke.

Escal. We shall entreat him to abide here till he
come, and enforce them against him: we shall find
this friar a notable fellow.

Lucio. As any in Vienna, on my word.

Escal. Call that same Isabel here once again;
[To an Attendant.] I would speak with her: Pray
you, my lord, give me leave to question; you shall
see how I'll handle her.

Lucio. Not better than he, by her own report.

Escal. Say you?

Lucio. Marry, sir, I think, if you handled her
privately, she would sooner confess; perchance,
publicly, she'll be ashamed.

Re-enter Officers, with ISABELLA, the Duke, in the
Fria's habit, and Provost.

Escal. I will go darkly to work with her.

Lucio. That's the way; for women are light⁴ at
midnight.

Escal. Come on, mistress: [To ISABELLA.]
here's a gentlewoman denies all that you have said.

Lucio. My lord, here comes the rascal I spoke of; here with the provost.

Escal. In very good time: —speak not you to him,
till we call upon you.

Lucio. Mum.

Escal. Come, sir: Did you set these women on
to slander lord Angelo? they have confess'd you did?

Duke. 'Tis false.

Escal. How! know you where you are ?

Duke. Respect to your great place! and let the
devil

Be sometimes honour'd for his burning throne: —
Where is the duke? 'tis he should hear me speak.

Escal. The duke's in us; and he will hear you
speak;

Look, you speak justly.

Duke. Boldly, at least: —But, O, poor souls,

Come you to seek the lamb here of the fox?

Good night to your redress. Is the duke gone?

Then is your cause gone too. The duke's unjust,

Thus to retort⁵ your manifest appeal,
And put your trial in the villain's mouth,
Which here you come to accuse.

Lucio. This is the rascal: this is he I spoke of.

Escal. Why, thou unreverend and unhallow'd
friar?

Is't not enough, thou hast suborn'd these women
To accuse this worthy man; but, in foul mouth,
And in the witness of his proper ear,

To call him villain?

And then to glance from him to the duke himself;

To tax him with injustice?—Take him hence;

To the rack with him: —We'll touze you joint by
joint,

But we will know this purpose: —What! unjust?

Duke. Be not so hot; the duke

Dare no more stretch this finger of mine, than he

Dare rack his own; his subject am I not,

Nor here provincial:⁶ My business in this state

Made me a looker-on here in Vienna,

Where I have seen corruption boil and bubble,

Till it o'errun the stew: laws, for all faults;

But faults so countenanced, that the strong statutes
Stand like the forfeits in a barber's shop,

As much in mock as mark.

Escal. Slander to the state! Away with him to
prison.

Ang. What can you vouch against him, signior
Lucio?

Is this the man that you did tell us of?

Lucio. 'Tis he, my lord. Come hither, good-
man bald-pate: Do you know me?

Duke. I remember, you, sir, by the sound of your
voice: I met you at the prison in the absence of the
duke.

Lucio. O, did you so? And do you remember
what you said of the duke?

Duke. Most notably, sir.

Lucio. Do you so, sir? And was the duke a
flesh-monger, a fool, and a coward, as you then re-
ported him to be?

Duke. You must, sir, change persons with me,
ere you make that my report: you, indeed spoke so
of him; and much more, much worse.

Lucio. O thou damnable fellow! Did not I pluck
thee by the nose, for thy speeches?

Duke. I protest, I love the duke, as I love my-
self.

Ang. Hark! how the villain would close now,
after his treasonable abuses.

Escal. Such a fellow is not to be talk'd withal: —
Away with him to prison: —Where is the provost?

1 Informal signifies *out of their senses*. So in the
Comedy of Errors, Act. v. Sc. 1.

'To make of him a *formal* man again.'

The speaker had just before said that she would keep
Antipholis of Syracuse, who is behaving like a mad-
man, till she had brought him to his right wits again.

2 Stamped or sealed. I as tried and approved.

3. e. e. out, to the end.

4 This is one of the words on which Shakspeare de-
lights to quibble. Thus Portia, in the Merchant of
Venice,

'Let me give light, but let me not be light.'

5 To *retort* is to refer back.

6 His subject am I not; nor here provincial. Pro-
vincial is pertaining to a province; most usually taken
for the circuit of an ecclesiastical jurisdiction. The
chief or head of any religious order in such a province
was called the provincial, to whom alone the members
of that order were accountable.

7 Barbers' shops were anciently places of great ra-
sort for passing away time in an idle manner. By way
of enforcing some kind of regularity, and perhaps, at
least as much to promote drinking, certain laws were
usually hung up, the transgression of which was to be
punished by specific *forfeits*; which were as much in-
mock as mark, because the barber had no authority of
himself to enforce them, and also because they were of
a ludicrous nature.

146

MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

ACT V.

—Away with him to prison; lay bolts enough upon him:—Let him speak no more:—Away with those giglots¹¹ too, and with the other confederate companion. [The Provost lays hands on the Duke.

Duke. Stay, sir; stay a while.

Ang. What! resists he? Help him, Lucio.

Lucio. Come, sir; come, sir; come, sir; foh, sir! Why, you bald-pated, lying rascal! you must be hooded, must you? Show your knave's visage, with a pox to you! show your sheep-biting face, and be hang'd an hour!¹² Wilt not off?

[Pulls off the Friar's hood, and discovers the Duke.

Duke. Thou art the first knave that e'er made a duke.

First, Provost, let me bail these gentle three:—
Sneak not away, sir; [To Lucio.] for the friar and you

Must have a word anon:—lay hold on him.

Lucio. This may prove worse than hanging.

Duke. What you have spoke, I pardon; sit you down.

[To ESCALUS.

We'll borrow place of him:—Sir, by your leave: [To ANGELO.

Hast thou or word, or wit, or impudence,
That yet can do thee office?³ If thou hast,
Rely upon it till my tale be heard,
And hold no longer out.

Ang. O my dread lord,

I should be guiltier than my guiltiness,
To think I can be undiscernible,

When I perceive, your grace, like power divine,
Hath look'd upon my passes:⁴ Then, good prince,
No longer session hold upon my shame,
But let my trial be mine own confession;

Immediate sentence then, and sequent death,

Is all the grace I beg.

Duke. Come hither, Mariana;—

Say, wast thou e'er contracted to this woman?

Ang. I was, my lord.

Duke. Go take her hence, and marry her instantly.—

Do you the office, friar; which consummate,

Return him here again:—Go with him, Provost.

[Exeunt ANGELO, MARIANA, PETER, and Provost.

Escal. My lord, I am more amaz'd at his dis-honour,

Than at the strangeness of it.

Duke. Come hither, Isabel:—

Your friar is now your prince: As I was then
Advertising, and holy⁵ to your business,

Not changing heart with habit, I am still

Attorney'd at your service.

Isab. O, give me pardon,

That I, your vassal, have employed and pain'd
Your unknown sovereignty.

Duke. You are pardon'd, Isabel;

And now, dear maid, be you as free⁶ to us.

Your brother's death, I know, sits at your heart;

And you may marvel, why I obseur'd myself,

Labouring to save his life; and would not rather
Make rash remonstrance of my hidden power,

Than let him so be lost: O, most kind maid,

It was the swift celerity of his death,

Which I did think with slower foot came on,

That brain'd my purpose:⁸ But, peace be with him!

That life is better life, past fearing death,

Than that which lives to fear: make it your comfort,
So happy is your brother.

Re-enter ANGELO, MARIANA, PETER, and
Provost.

Isab. I do, my lord.

Duke. For this new-married man, approaching here,

Whose salt imagination yet hath wrong'd

Your well-defended honour, you must pardon

For Mariana's sake: but as he adjudg'd your brother
(Being criminal, in double violation

Of sacred chastity, and of promise-breach,⁹

Thereon dependent for your brother's life.)

The very mercy of the law cries out

Most audible, even from his proper¹⁰ tongue,
An Angelo for Claudio, death for death,

Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure;

Like doth quit like, and Measure still for Measure!¹¹

Then, Angelo, thy fault's thus manifested;

Which though thou would'st deny, denies thee van-tage:¹²

We do condemn thee to the very block

Where Claudio stoop'd to death, and with like haste;—

Away with him.

Mari. O, my most gracious lord,

I hope you will not mock me with a husband!

Duke. It is your husband mock'd you with a husband:

Consenting to the safeguard of your honour,

I thought your marriage fit; else imputation,

For that he knew you, might reproach your life,

And choke your good to come: for his possessions,

Although by confiscation they are ours,

We do instate and widow you withal,

To buy you a better husband.

Mari. O, my dear lord,

I crave no other, nor no better man.

Duke. Never crave him; we are definitive.

Mari. Gentle, my liege,— [Kneeling.]

Duke. You do but lose your labour;

Away with him to death.—Now, sir, [To Lucio.] to you.

Mari. O, my good lord!—Sweet Isabel, take my part;

Lend me your knees, and, all my life to come,

I'll lend you all my life to do you service.

Duke. Against all sense¹³ you do importune her:

Should she kneel down, in mercy of this fact,

Her brother's ghost his paved bed would break,
And take her hence in horror.

Mari. Isabel,

Sweet Isabel, do yet but kneel by me;

Hold up your hands, say nothing, I'll speak all.

They say, best men are moulded out of faults;

And, for the most, become much more the better

For being a little bad: so may my husband.

O, Isabel! will you not lend a knee?

Duke. He dies for Claudio's death.

Isab. Most bounteous sir,

[Kneeling.]

Look, if it please you, on this man condemn'd,

6 i. e. generous;—pardon us as we have pardoned you.

7 Rash remonstrance; that is, a premature display of it, perhaps we should read demonstrance, out the word may be formed from remonstrer, French—to show again.

8 That brain'd my purpose. We still use in conversation a like phrase.—that knocked my design on the head.

9 Promise-breach. It should be promise, breach is superfluous.

10 i. e. Angelo's own tongue.

11 Measure still for Measure. This appears to have been a current expression for retributive justice. Equivalent to like for like. So, in the 3d part of Henry VI

'Measure for measure' must be answered.'

12 i. e.' to deny which will avail thee nothing?

13 i. e. against reason and affection.

1 Giglots are wantons.—

'—young Talbot was not born
To be the pillage of a giglot wench.'

K. Henry VI. P. i.

2 Dr. Johnson goes seriously to work to prove that he did not understand this piece of vulgar humour; and Henley thinks the colistrigium, or original pillory, was alluded to! 'What Piper ho!' be hang'd avhile,' is a line in an old madrigal. And in Ben Jonson's Bartholomew Fair, we have

'Leave the bottle behind you, and be curst avchile.'
In short, they are petty and familiar maledictions, rightly explained, 'a plague or a mischief. on you.'
3 i. e. do thee service.

4 Passes, probably put for trespasses; or it may mean courses, from passes, Fr.

5 Advertising and holy, attentive and faithful.

## SCENE I.

## MEASURE FOR MEASURE.

147

As if my brother liv'd: I partly think,
A due sincerity govern'd his deeds,
Till he did look on me: since it is so,
Let him not die: My brother had but justice,
In that he did the thing for which he died:
For Angelo,

His act did not o'ertake his bad intent.

And must be buried but as an intent

That perish'd by the way:¹ thoughts are no subjects;

Intents but merely thoughts.

Mari.

Duke. Merely, my lord.

Intents but merely thoughts.

Mari.

Duke. Your suit's unprofitable; stand up, I say.—

I have bethought me of another fault:—

Provost, how came it Claudio was beheaded

At an unusual hour?

Prov.

It was commanded so.

Duke. Had you a special warrant for the deed?

Prov. No, my good lord; it was by private message.

Duke. For which I do discharge you of your office:

Give up your keys.

Prov.

Pardon me, noble lord:

I thought it was a fault, but knew it not;

Yet did repent me, after more advice:²

For testimony whereof, one in the prison

That should by private order else have died,

I have reserv'd alive.

Duke.

What's he?

Prov. His name is Barnardine.

Duke. I would thou had'st done so by Claudio.

Go, fetch him hither; let me look upon him.

*Exit* Provost.

*Escal.* I am sorry, one so learned and so wise
As you, lord Angelo, have still appeared,
Should slip so grossly, both in the heat of Blood,
And lack of temper'd judgment, afterward.

*Ang.* I am sorry, that such sorrow I procure:
And so deep sticks it in my penitent heart,
That I crave death more willingly than mercy;
'Tis my deserving, and I do entreat it.

Re-enter Provost, BARNARDINE, CLAUDIO, and JULIET.

Duke. Which is that Barnardine?

Prov.

This, my lord,

Duke. There was a friar told me of this man:—

Sirrah, thou art said to have a stubborn soul,

That apprehends no further than this world,

And squar'st thy life according. Thou'rt condemn'd;

But, for those earthy³ faults, I quit them all;

And pray thee, take this mercy to provide

For better times to come:—Friar, advise him?

I leave him to your hand. What muffled fellow's that?

Prov. This is another prisoner, that I say'd,
That should have died when Claudio lost his head;
As like almost to Claudio, as himself.

*[Unmffles CLAUDIO.]*

Duke. If he be like your brother, [*To ISABELLA*] for his sake

Is he the pardon'd; And, for your lovely sake,
Give me your hand, and say you will be mine,
He is my brother too: But fitter time for that.
By this, lord Angelo perceives he's safe;
Methinks, I see a quick'ning in his eye:—
Well, Angelo, your evil quits⁴ you well:
Look that you love your wife; her worth, worth yours.⁵—

I find an apt remission in myself:

And yet here's one in place I cannot pardon;—

You, sirrah, [*To LUCIO*] that knew me for a fool,
a coward,

1. e. like the traveller, who dies on his journey, is obscurely interred, and thought of no more:

⁶ Illume expirantem—

⁷ Oblii ignoto camponum in pulvere linquunt.

2. i. e. better consideration. K. Henry V. Act ii. Sc. 2.

3. i. e. so far as they are punishable on earth.

4. Requites.

5. 'Her worth worth yours;' that is, 'her value is equal to yours, the match is not unworthy of you.'

6. Inconscience

7. Thoughtless practice.

One all of luxury,⁶ an ass, a madman;
Wherein have I so deserved of you,
That you extol me thus?

Lucio. 'Faith, my lord, I spoke it but according to the trick:' If you will hang me for it, you may, but I had rather it would please you, I might be whipp'd.

Duke. Whipp'd first, sir, and hang'd after.—
Proclaim it, provost, round about the city;
If any woman's wrong'd by this lewd fellow,
(As I have heard him swear himself, there's one
Whom he begot with child,) let her appear,
And he shall marry her: the nuptial finished,
Let him be whipp'd and hang'd.

Lucio. I beseech your highness, do not marry me to a whole! Your highness said even now, I made you a duke; good my lord, do not recompense me in making me a cuckold.

Duke. Upon mine honour thou shall marry her.
Thy slanders I forgive: and therewithal
Remit thy other forfeits:—Take him to prison:
And see our pleasure herein executed.

Lucio. Marrying a punk, my lord, is pressing to death, whipping, and hanging.

Duke. Sland'ring a prince deserves it.—
She, Claudio, that you wrong'd, look you restore,
Joy to you, Mariana!—love her, Angelo;
I have confess'd her, and I know her virtue.—

Thanks, good friend Escalus, for thy much goodness:

There's more behind, that is more gratulate.⁹

Thanks, Provost, for thy care and secrecy;

We shall employ thee in a worthier place:—

Forgive him, Angelo, that brought you home

The head of Ragozine for Claudio's;

The offence pardons itself.—Dear Isabel,

I have a motion much imports your good;

Whereeto if you'll a willing ear incline,

What's mine is yours, and what is yours is mine:

So, bring us to our palace; where we'll show
What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know.

*[Exeunt.]*

[The novel of Giraldi Cinthio, from which Shakspeare is supposed to have borrowed this fable, may be read in *Shakspeare Illustrated*, elegantly translated, with remarks, which will assist the inquirer to discover how much absurdity Shakspeare has admitted or avoided.

I cannot but suspect that some other had new-moded the novel of Cinthio, or written a story which in some particulars resembled it, and that Cinthio was not the author whom Shakspeare immediately followed. The Emperor in Cinthio is named Maximine: the Duke, in Shakspeare's enumeration of the persons of the drama, is called Vincentio. This appears a very slight remark; but since the Duke has no name in the play, nor is ever mentioned but by his title, why should he be called Vincentio among the persons, but because the name was copied from the story, and placed superfluously at the head of the list, by the mere habit of transcription? It is therefore likely that there was then a story of Vincentio, Duke of Vienna, different from that of Maximine, Emperor of the Romans.

Of this play, the light or comic part is very natural and pleasing, but the grave scenes, if a few passages be excepted, have more labour than elegance. The plot is rather intricate than artful. The time of the action is indefinite; some time, we know not how much, must have elapsed between the recess of the Duke and the imprisonment of Claudio; for he must have learned the story of Mariana in his disguise, or he delegated his power to a man already known to be corrupted.⁹ The unities of action and place are sufficiently preserved.¹⁰

Johnson

⁸ Remit thy other forfeits.¹¹ Dr. Johnson says, forfeits mean punishments, but is it not more likely to signify misdoings, transgressions, from the French forfait? Steevens's Note affords instances of the word in this sense.

9. i. e. more to be rejoiced in. As Steevens rightly explained it.

* The Duke probably had learnt the story of Mariana in some of his former retirements, 'having ever loved the life removed.' And he had a suspicion that Angelo was but a semer, and therefore says to watch him.

Blackstone

## SCENE I.

## MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

149

*Mess.* He hath done good service, lady, in these wars.

*Beat.* You had musty victual, and he hath hopp to eat it: he is a very valiant trencher-man, he hath an excellent stomach.

*Mess.* And a good soldier too, lady.

*Beat.* And a good soldier to a lady;—But what is he to a lord?

*Mess.* A lord to a lord, a man to a man; stuffed¹ with all honourable virtues.

*Beat.* It is so, indeed; he is no less than a stuffed man: but for the stuffing,—Well, we are all mortal.

*Leon.* You must not, sir, mistake my niece: there is a kind of merry war betwixt signior Benedick and her: they never meet, but there is a skirmish of wit between them.

*Beat.* Alas, he gets nothing by that. In our last conflict, four of his five wits² went halting off, and now is the whole man governed with one: so that if he have wit enough to keep himself warm, let him bear it for a difference³ between himself and his horse: for it is all the wealth that he hath left, to be known a reasonable creature.—Who is his companion now? He hath every month a new sworn brother.

*Mess.* Is it possible?

*Beat.* Very easily possible: he wears his faith but as the fashion of his hat, it ever changes with the next block.⁴

*Mess.* I see, lady, the gentleman is not in your books.⁵

*Beat.* No: an he were, I would burn my study. But, I pray you, who is his companion? Is there no young squarer⁶ now, that will make a voyage with him to the devil?

*Mess.* He is most in the company of the right noble Claudio.

*Beat.* O Lord! he will hang upon him like a disease: he is sooner caught than the pestilence, and the taker runs presently mad. God help the noble Claudio! if he have caught the Benedick, it will cost him a thousand pound ere he be cured.

*Mess.* I will hold friends with you, lady.

*Beat.* Do, good friend.

*Leon.* You will never run mad, niece.

*Beat.* No, not till a hot January.

*Mess.* Don Pedro is approached.

*Enter DON PEDRO, attended by BALTHAZAR and others, DON JOHN, CLAUDIO, and BENEDICK.*

*D. Pedro.* Good signior Leonato, you are come to meet your trouble: the fashion of the world is to avoid cost, and you encounter it.

*Leon.* Never came trouble to my house in the likeness of your grace: for trouble being gone, comfort should remain; but, when you depart from me, sorrow abides, and happiness takes his leave.

*D. Pedro.* You embrace your charge⁹ too willying.—I think, this is your daughter.

*Leon.* Her mother hath many times told me she.

*Bene.* Were you in doubt, sir, that you asked her?

*Leon.* Signior Benedick, no; for then were you a child.

¹ *Stuffed*, in this first instance, has no ridiculous meaning. Mede, in his discourses on Scripture, quoted by Edwards, speaking of Adam, says, 'he whom God had stuffed with so many excellent qualities.' And in the Winter's Tale:

² *Of stuff'd sufficiency.*

³ Beatrice starts an idea at the words *stuffed man*, and prudently checks herself in the pursuit of it. A stuffed man appears to have been one of the many cant phrases for a Planck.

⁴ In Shakspeare's time *wit* was the general term for intellectual power. The *wits* seem to have been reckoned *five* by analogy to the five senses. So in *Lear*, Act III, Sc. 4: 'Bless thy five wits.'

⁵ This is an heraldic term. So, in Hamlet, Ophelia says, 'You may wear your rue with a difference.'

*Bene.* If signior Leonato be her father, she would not have his head on her shoulders, for all Messina, as like him as she is.

*Beat.* I wonder, that you will still be talking, signior Benedick; no body marks you.

*Bene.* What, my dear lady Disdain! are you yet living?

*Beat.* Is it possible disdain should die, while she hath such meet food to feed it, as signior Benedick? Courtesy itself must convert to disdain, if you come in her presence.

*Bene.* Then is courtesy a turn-coat:—But it is certain, I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted: and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart; for, truly, I love none.

*Beat.* A dear happiness to women; they would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God, and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that; I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow, than a man swear he loves me.

*Bene.* God keep your ladyship still in that mind! so some gentleman or other shall 'scape a predestinate scratched face.

*Beat.* Scratching could not make it worse, an 'twere such a face as yours were.

*Bene.* Well, you are a rare parrot-teacher.

*Beat.* A bird of my tongue is better than a beast of yours.

*Bene.* I would my horse had the speed of your tongue; and so good a continuer: But keep your way o'God's name; I have done.

*Beat.* You always end with a jade's trick; I know you of old.

*D. Pedro.* This is the sum of all: Leonato,—signior Claudio, and signior Benedick,—my dear friend Leonato hath invited you all. I tell him, we shall stay here at the least a month; and he heartily prays, some occasion may detain us longer: I dare swear he is no hypocrite, but prays from his heart.

*Leon.* If you swear, my lord, you shall not be forsworn.—Let me bid you welcome, my lord, being reconciled to the prince your brother, I owe you all duty.

*D. John.* I thank you: I am not of many words, but I thank you.

*Leon.* Please it your grace lead on?

*D. Pedro.* Your hand, Leonato; we will go together. [Exeunt all but BENEDICK and CLAUDIO.]

*Claud.* Benedick, didst thou note the daughter of signior Leonato?

*Bene.* I noted her not; but I looked on her.

*Claud.* Is she not a modest young lady?

*Bene.* Do you question me, as an honest man should do, for my simple true judgment; or would you have me speak after my custom, as being a professed tyrant to their sex?

*Claud.* No, I pray thee, speak in sober judgment.

*Bene.* Why, if faith, methinks she is too low for a high praise, too brown for a fair praise, and too little for a great praise: only this commendation I can afford her; that were she other than she is, she were unhandsome; and being no other but as she is, I do not like her.

*Claud.* Thou thinkest, I am in sport; I pray thee, tell me truly how thou likest her.

*Bene.* Would you buy her, that you inquire after her.

⁴ The mould on which a hat is formed. It is here used for *shape* or *fashion*. See note on Lear, Act iv Sc. 6.

⁵ The origin of this phrase, which is still in common use, has not been clearly explained, though the sense of it is pretty generally understood. The most probable account derives it from the circumstance of servants and retainers being entered in the books of those to whom they were attached. To be in one's books was to be in favour. That this was the ancient sense of the phrase, and its origin, appears from Florio, in V.—'Casso. Cashier'd, crossed, cancelled, or put out of booke and checke roulle.'

⁶ Quarreller.

⁷ Burthen, incumbrance.

⁸ This phrase is common in Dorsetshire. 'Jack fathers himself,' is like his father

150

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT I.

Claud. Can the world buy such a jewel?

Bene. Yea, and a case to put it into. But speak you this with a sad brow? or do you play the flouting Jack; to tell us Cupid is a good hare-finder, and Vulcan a rare carpenter?¹¹ Come, in what key shall a man take you to go in the song?¹²

Claud. In mine eye, she is the sweetest lady that ever I looked on.

Bene. I can see yet without spectacles, and I see no such matter: there's her cousin, an she were not possessed with a fury, exceeds her as much in beauty, as the first of May does the last of December. But I hope, you have no intent to turn husband; have you?

Claud. I would scarce trust myself, though I had sworn the contrary, if Hero would be my wife.

Bene. Is it come to this, i'faith? Hath not the world one man, but he will wear his cap with suspicion?³ Shall I never see a bachelor of threescore again? Go to, i'faith; an thou wilt needs thrust thy neck into a yoke, wear the print of it, and sigh away Sundays.⁴ Look, Don Pedro is returned to seek you.

Re-enter DON PEDRO.

D. Pedro. What secret hath held you here, that you followed not to Leonato's?

Bene. I would, your grace would constrain me to tell.

D. Pedro. I charge thee on thy allegiance.

Bene. You hear, Count Claudio: I can be secret as a dumb man, I would have you think so; but on my allegiance,—mark you this, on my allegiance: —He is in love. With who?—now that is your grace's part.—Mark, how short his answer is: —With Hero, Leonato's short daughter.

Claud. If this were so, so were it uttered.

Bene. Like the old tale, my lord: it is not so, nor 'twas not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so.⁵

D. Pedro. If my passion change not shortly, God forbid it should be otherwise.

D. Pedro. Amen, if you love her; for the lady is very well worthy.

Claud. You speak this to fetch me in, my lord.

D. Pedro. By my troth, I speak my thought.

Claud. And, in faith, my lord, I spoke mine.

Bene. And, by my two faiths and troths, my lord, I spoke mine.

Claud. That I'love her, I feel.

D. Pedro. That she is worthy, I know.

Bene. That I neither feel how she should be loved, nor know how she should be worthy, is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me; I will die in it at the stake.

D. Pedro. Thou wast ever an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty.

Bene. And never could maintain his part, but in the force of his will.⁶

Bene. That a woman conceived me I thank her; that she brought me up, I likewise give her most

1 Do you scoff and mock in telling us that Cupid, who is blind, is a good hare-finder; and that Vulcan, a blacksmith, is a good carpenter? Do you mean to amuse us with improbable stories?

2 i. e. to join in the song.

3 i. e. subject his head to the disquiet of jealousy.

4 i. e. become sad and serious. Alluding to the maner in which the Puritans usually spent the Sabbath, with sighs and gruttings, and other hypocritical marks of devotion.

5 The old tale, of which this is the burthen, has been traditionally preserved and recovered by Mr. Blake-way, and is perhaps one of the most happy illustrations of Shakespeare that has ever appeared.

6 Alluding to the definition of a heretic in the schools.

7 That is, wear a horn on my forehead, which the huntsman may blow. A recheat is the sound by which the dogs are called back.

8 i. e. bugle-horn.

9 A belt. The meaning seems to be ‘or that I should be compelled to carry a horn on my forehead where there is nothing visible to support it.’

humble thanks: but that I will have a recheat⁷ winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle⁸ in an invisible baldrick,⁹ all women shall pardon me: Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust any, I will do myself the right to trust none: and the fine?⁹ is, (for the which I may go the finer,) I will live a bachelor.

D. Pedro. I shall see thee, ere I die, look pale with love.

Bene. With anger, with sickness, or with hunger, my lord; not with love: prove, that ever I lose more blood with love, than I will get again with drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker's pen, and hang me up at the door of a brothel-house, for the sign of blind Cupid.

D. Pedro. Well, if ever thou dost fall from this faith, thou wilt prove a notable argument.¹¹

Bene. If I do, hang me in a bottle like a cat,¹² and shoot at me; and he that hits me, let him be clapped on the shoulder, and called Adam.¹³

D. Pedro. Well, as time shall try:

In time, the savage bull doth bear the yoke.¹⁴

Bene. The savage bull may; but if ever the sensible Benedick bear it, pluck off the bull's horns, and set them in my forehead; and let me be vilely painted; and in such great letters as they write, Here is good horse to hire, let them signify under my sign—Here you may see Benedick the married man.

Claud. If this should ever happen, thou wouldst be horn-mad.

D. Pedro. Nay, if Cupid have not spent all his quiver in Venice,¹⁵ thou wilt quake for this shortly.

Bene. I look for an earthquake too then.

D. Pedro. Well, you will temporize with the hours. In the mean time, good signior Benedick, repair to Leonato's; commend me to him, and tell him, I will not fail him at supper; for, indeed, he hath made great preparation.

Bene. I have almost matter enough in me for such an embassade: and so I commit you—

Claud. To the tuition of God: From my house. (if I had it)—

D. Pedro. The sixth of July: Your loving friend, Benedick.

Bene. Nay, mock not, mock not: The body of your discourse is sometime guardied¹⁶ with fragments, and the guards are but slightly basted on neither; ere you flout old ends any further, examine your conscience,¹⁷ and so I leave you.

[Exit BENEDICK.
Claud. My liege, your highness now may do me good.

D. Pedro. My love is thine to teach; teach it but how,

And thou shall see how apt it is to learn

Any hard lesson that may do thee good.

Claud. Hath Leonato any son, my lord!

D. Pedro. No child but Hero, she's his only heir;

Dost thou affect her, Claudio?

Claud.

O my lord,

When you went onward on this ended action, I look'd upon her with a soldier's eye,

10 The fine is the conclusion.

11 A capital subject for satire.

12 It seems to have been one of the inhuman sports of the time, to enclose a cat in a wooden tub or bottle suspended aloft to be shot at.

13 i. e. Adam Bell, ‘a passing good archer,’ who, with Clym of the Clougie and William of Cloudeslie, were outlaws as famous in the north of England, as Robin Hood and his fellows were in the midland counties.

14 This line is from The Spanish Tragedy, or Hieronimo, &c.; and occurs, with a slight variation, in Watsonon's Sonnets, 1581.

15 Venice is represented in the same light as Cyprus among the ancients, and it is this character of the people that is here alluded to.

16 Trimmed, ornamented.

17 ‘Examine if your sarcasms do not touch yourself?’ Old ends probably means the conclusions of letters, which were frequently couched in the quaint forms used above.

## SCENE III.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

151

That lik'd, but had a rougher task in hand
Than to drive like talking to the name of love:
But now I am return'd, and that war-thoughts
Have left their places vacant, in their rooms
Come thronging soft and delicate desires,
All prompting me how fair young Hero is,
Saying, I lik'd her ere I went to wars.

D. Pedro. Thou wilt be like a lover presently,
And tire the hearer with a book of words;
If thou dost love fair Hero, cherish it;
And I will break with her, and with her father,
And thou shall have her: Was't not to this end,
That thou beganst to twist so fine a story?

Claus. How sweetly do you minister to love,
That know love's grief and your complexion!
But lest my liking might too sudden seem,
I would have salved it with a longer treatise.

D. Pedro. What need the bridge much broader
than the flood?
The fairest grant is the necessity:¹
Look, what will serve, is fit: 'tis once², thou lov'st;⁳
And I will fit thee with the remedy.

I know we shall have revelling to-night;
I will assume thy part in some disguise,
And tell fair Hero I am Claudio;
And in her bosom I'll unclasp my heart,
And take her hearing prisoner with the force
And strong encounter of my amorous tale:
Then, after, to her father, will I break;
And the conclusion is, she shall be thine:

In practice let us put it presently.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE II. A Room in Leonato's House. Enter LEONATO and ANTONIO.

Leon. How now, brother? Where is my cousin,
your son? Hath he provided this musick?

Ant. He is very busy about it. But, brother, I
can tell you strange news that you yet dreamed
not of.

Leon. Are they good?

Ant. As the event stamps them; but they have
a good cover, they show well outward. The prince
and Count Claudio, walking in a thick-pleashed⁴
alley in my orchard, were thus much overheard by
a man of mine: The prince discovered to Claudio,
that he loved my niece your daughter, and meant
to acknowledge it this night in a dance; and, if he
found her accordant, he meant to take the present
time by the top, and instantly break with you of it.

Leon. Hath the fellow any wit, that told you this?

Ant. A good sharp fellow: I will send for him,
and question him yourself.

Leon. No, no; we will hold it as a dream, till it
appear itself:—but I will acquaint my daughter
withal, that she may be the better prepared for an
answer, if peradventure this be true. Go you, and
tell her of it. [Several persons cross the stage.] Cousins,⁵ you know what you have to do.—O, I cry
you mercy, friend; you go with me, and I will use
your skill:—Good cousins, have a care this busy
time.
[Exeunt.]

## SCENE III. Another Room in Leonato's House. Enter DON JOHN and CONRADE.

Con. What the good year,⁶ my lord! why are
you thus out of measure sad?

1 Mr. Hayley, with great acuteness, proposed to read 'The fairest grant is to necessity'; i. e., 'necessitas quod cogit defendit.' The meaning may however be—'The fairest or most equitable concession is that which is needful only.'

2 i. e. once for all. So, in Coriolanus: ' Once if he
do require our voices, we ought not to deny him.' See
Comedy of Errors, Act iii. Sc. 1.

3 Thickly interwoven.

4 Cousins were formerly enrolled among the dependants, if not the domestics of great families, such as that of Leonato.—Petruchio, while intent on the subjection of Katharine, calls out in terms imperative for his cousin Ferdinand.

5 The commentators say, that the original form of
this exclamation was the gougere, i. e. morbus gallicus;

D. John. There is no measure in the occasion
that breeds it, therefore the sadness is without limit.

Con. You should hear reason.

D. John. And when I have heard it, what blessing
bringeth it?

Con. If not a present remedy, yet a patient sufferance.

D. John. I wonder, that thou being (as thou say'st
thou art) born under Saturn, goest about to apply
a moral medicine to a mortifying mischief. I can-
not hide what I am:⁶ I must be sad when I have
cause, and smile at no man's jests; eat when I have
stomach, and wait for no man's leisure; sleep when
I am drowsy, and tend to no man's business; laugh
when I am merry, and claw⁷ no man in his humour.

Con. Yea, but you must not make the full show
of this, till you may do it without controlment. You
have of late stood out against your brother, and he
hath ta'en you newly into his grace; where it is im-
possible you should take true root, but by the fair
weather that you make yourself: it is needful that
you frame the season for your own harvest.

D. John. I had rather be a canker⁸ in a hedge,
than a rose in his grace; and it better fits my blood
to be disdained of all, than to fashion a carriage to
rob love from any; in this, though I cannot be said
to be a flattering honest man, it must not be denied
that I am a plain-dealing villain. I am trusted with
a muzzle, and enfranchised with a clog; therefore
I have decreed not to sing in my cage: If I had my
mouth, I would bite; if I had my liberty, I would do
my liking: in the mean time, let me be that I am,
and seek not to alter me.

Con. Can you make no use of your discontent?

D. John. I make all use of it, for I use it only.⁹
Who comes here? What news, Borachio?

### Enter BORACHIO.

Bora. I came yonder from a great supper; the
prince, your brother, is royally entertained by Leo-
nato; and I can give you intelligence of an intended
marriage.

D. John. Will it serve for any model¹⁰ to build
mischief on? What is he for a fool, that betroths
himself to unquietness?

Bora. Marry, it is your brother's right hand.

D. John. Who? the most exquisite Claudio?

Bora. Even he.

D. John. A proper squire! And who, and who?
which way looks he?

Bora. Marry, on Hero, the daughter and heir of
Leonato.

D. John. A very forward March chick! How
came you to this?

Bora. Being entertained for a perfumer, as I was
smoking a musty room,¹¹ comes me the prince and
Claudio, hand in hand, in sad¹² conference: I whipt
me behind the arras; and there heard it agreed up-
on, that the prince should woo Hero for himself, and
having obtained her, give her to count Claudio.

D. John. Come, come, let us thither; this may
prove food to my displeasure: that young start-up
hath all the glory of my overthrow; if I can cross
him any way, I bless myself every way: You are
both sure,¹³ and will assist me?

which ultimately became obscure, and was corrupted
into the good year, a very opposite form of expression.

6 This is one of Shakespeare's natural touches. An
envious and unsocial mind, too proud to give pleasure,
and too sullen to receive it, always endeavours to hide
its malignity from the world and from itself, under the
plaineess of simple honesty, or the dignity of haughty
independence.

7 Flatter.

8 A canker is the canker-rose, or dog-rose. 'I had
rather be a neglected dog-rose in a hedge, than a gar-
den-rose if it profited by his culture.'

9 i. e. 'for I make nothing else my counsellor.'

10 Model is here used in an unusual sense, but Bullo-
kar explains it, 'Model, the platforme, or form of any
thing.'

11 The neglect of cleanliness among our ancestors
rendered such precautions too often necessary.

12 Serious.

13 i. e. to be depended on.

152

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Act II.

Con. To the death, my lord.

D. John. Let us to the great supper; their cheer
is the greater, that I am subdued: 'Would the cook
were of my mind!—Shall we go prove what's to be
done?

Bora. We'll wait upon your lordship. [Exeunt.

## ACT II.

### SCENE I. A Hall in Leonato's House. Enter
LEONATO, ANTONIO, HERO, BEATRICE, and
others.

Leon. Was not count John here at supper?

Ant. I saw him not.

Beat. How tartly that gentleman looks! I never
can see him, but I am heart-burned an hour after.

Hero. He is of a very melancholy disposition.

Beat. He were an excellent man, that were made
just in the mid-way between him and Benedick;
the one is too like an image, and says nothing;
and the other, too like my lady's eldest son, ever-
more tattling.

Leon. Then half signior Benedick's tongue in
count John's mouth, and half count John's melan-
choly in signior Benedick's face.—

Beat. With a good leg, and a good foot, uncle,
and money enough in his purse, such a man would
win any woman in the world,—if he could get her
good will.

Leon. By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get
thou a husband, if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue.

Ant. In faith, she is too curst.

Beat. Too curst is more than curst: I shall les-
sen God's sending that way: for it is said, God
sends a curst cow short horns; but to a cow too curst
he sends none.

Leon. So, by being too curst, God will send you
no horns.

Beat. Just, if he send me no husband: for the
which blessing, I am at him upon my knees every
morning and evening: Lord! I could not endure a
husband with a beard on his face; I had rather lie
in the woollen.

Leon. You may light upon a husband, that hath
no beard.

Beat. What should I do with him? dress him in
my apparel, and make him my waitingtlew-
man? He that hath a beard, is more than a youth;
and he that hath no beard, is less than a man: and
he that is more than a youth, is not for me; and
he that is less than a man, I am not for him. There-
fore I will even take sixpence in earnest of the bear-
herd, and lead his apes into hell.

Leon. Well then, go you into hell?

Beat. No; but to the gate; and there will the
devil meet me, like an old cuckold, with horns on
his head, and say, *Get you to heaven, Beatrice, get
you to heaven; here's no place for you maids: so de-
liver I up my apes, and away to Saint Peter for the
heavens; he shows me where the bachelors sit, and
there live we as merry as the day is long.*

Ant. Well, niece, [To HERO.] I trust, you will
be ruled by your father.

Beat. Yes, faith; it is my cousin's duty to make
courtesy, and say, *Father, as it please you* :—but
yet for all that, cousin, let him be a handsome fel-
low, or else make another courtesy, and say, *Fa-
ther, as it please me.*

Leon. Well, niece, I hope to see you one day
fitted with a husband.

Beat. Not till God make men of some other me-
tal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be
over-mastered with a piece of valiant dust? to make
an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl?
No, uncle, I'll none: Adam's sons are my brethren;
and truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred.

1 Importunate.

2 A measure, in old language, besides its ordinary
meaning, signified also a dance.

3 Lov儿.

4 That is, 'God forbid that your face should be as
homely and coarse as your mask.'

Leon. Daughter, remember what I told you; if
the prince do solicit you in that kind, you know
your answer.

Beat. The fault will be in the musick, cousin, if
you be not woo'd in good time: if the prince be too
important,¹ tell him, there is measure² in every
thing, and so dance out the answer. For hear me,
Hero; Wooing, wedding, and repenting, is as a
Scotch jig, a measure, and a cinque-pace; the first
suit is hot and hasty, like a Scotch jig, and full as
fantastical; the wedding, mannerly-modest; as a
measure full of state and ancientry; and then
comes repentance; and, with his bad legs, falls into
the cinque-pace faster and faster, till he sink into
his grave.

Leon. Cousin, you apprehend passing shrewdly.

Beat. I have a good eye, uncle; I can see a
church by day-light.

Leon. The revellers are entering; brother, make
good room.

Enter DON PEDRO, CLAUDIO, BENEDICK, BAL-
THAZAR; DON JOHN, BORACHIO, MARGARET,
URSULA, and others, masked.

D. Pedro. Lady, will you walk about with your
friend?

Hero. So you walk softly, and look sweetly, and
say nothing, I am yours for the walk; and, espe-
cially, when I walk away.

D. Pedro. With me in your company?

Hero. I may say so, when I please.

D. Pedro. And when please you to say so?

Hero. When I like your favour; for God de-
fend, the lute should be like the case!

D. Pedro. My visor is Philemon's roof; within
the house is Jove.

Hero. Why then your visor should be thatch'd.

D. Pedro. Speak low, if you speak love.

[Takes her aside.]

Bene. Well, I would you did like me.

Marg. So would not I, for your own sake; for
I have many ill qualities.

Bene. Which is one?

Marg. I say my prayers aloud.

Bene. I love you the better; the hearers may
cry, Amen.

Marg. God match me with a good dancer!

Balth. Amen.

Marg. And God keep him out of my sight, when
the dance is done!—Answer, clerk.

Balth. No more words; the clerk is answered.

Urs. I know you well enough; you are signior
Antonio.

Ant. At a word, I am not.

Urs. I know you by the waggling of your head.

Ant. To tell you true, I counterfeit him.

Urs. You could never do him so ill-well, unless
you were the very man: Here's his dry hand up
and down; you are he, you are he.

Ant. At a word I am not.

Urs. Come, come; do you think I do not know
you by your excellent wit? Can virtue hide itself?
Go to, mum, you are he; graces will appear, and
there's an end.

Beat. Will you not tell me who told you so?

Bene. No, you shall pardon me.

Beat. Nor will you not tell me who you are?

Bene. Not now.

Beat. That I was disdainful,—and that I had
my good wit out of the Hundred merry Tales;—
Well, this was signior Benedick that said so.

Bene. What's he?

Beat. I am sure, you know him well enough.

5 Alluding to the fable of Baucis and Philemon in
Ovid, who describes the old couple as living in a thatch-
ed cottage.

'—Stipulis et canna tecta palustri,' which Golding renders:

'The roofe thereof was thatched all with straw and
fennish reede.'

6 This was the term for a jest-book in Shakspeare's
time, from a popular collection of that name, about which
the commentators were much puzzled, until a large frag-

SCENE I.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

153

Bene. Not I, believe me.

Bene. Did he never make you laugh ?

Bene. I pray you, what is he ?

Bene. Beat. Why, he is the prince's jester ; a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible! slap! ders: none but libertines delight in him; and the commendation is not in his wit, but in his villany; for he both pleaseth men, and angers them, and then they laugh at him, and beat him : I am sure he is in the fleet: I would he had boarded² me.

Bene. When I know the gentleman, I'll tell him what you say.

Bene. Beat. Do; do: he'll but break a comparison or two on me; which, peradventure, not marked, or not laughed at, strikes him into melancholy; and then there's a partridge wing saved, for the fool will eat no supper that night. [Music within.]
We must follow the leaders.

Bene. In every good thing.

Bene. Nay, if they lead to any ill, I will leave them at the next turning.

[Dance. Then exect all but DON JOHN,
BORACHIO, and CLAUDIO.

D. John. Sure my brother is amorous on Hero, and hath withdrawn her father to break with him about it: The ladies follow her, and but one visor remains.

Bora. And that is Claudio: I know him by his bearing.³

D. John. Are not you signior Benedick?

Claud. You know me well; I am he.

D. John. Signior, you are very near my brother in his love: he is enamoured on Hero; I pray you, dissuade him from her, she is no equal for his birth: you may do the part of an honest man in it.

Claud. How know you he loves her ?

D. John. I heard him swear his affection.

Bora. So did I too; and he swore he would marry her to-night.

D. John. Come let us to the banquet.

[Exeunt DON JOHN, and BORACHIO.

Claud. This answer I in name of Benedick,
But hear these ill news with the ears of Claudio.—
'Tis certain so ⁵;—the prince woos for himself.

Friendship is constant in all other things,

Save in the office and affairs of love:

Therefore,⁴ all hearts in love use their own tongues;

Let every eye negotiate for itself,

And trust no agent: for beauty is a witch,

Against whose charms faith melteth into blood.⁵

This is an accident of hourly proof,

Which I mistrusted not: Farewell, therefore, Hero!

Re-enter BENEDICK.

Bene. Count Claudio ?

Claud. Yea, the same.

Bene. Come, will you go with me ?

Claud. Whither ?

Bene. Even to the next willow, about your own business, count. What fashion will you wear the

ment was discovered in 1815, by my late lamented friend the Rev. J. Conybeare, Professor of Poetry in Oxford. I had the gratification of printing a few copies at the Chiswick press, under the title of 'Shakspeare's Jest Book.' It was printed by Rabelais, and therefore must have been published previous to 1538. Another collection of the same kind, called, 'Tales and Quicke Answeres,' printed by Berthelette, and of nearly equal antiquity, was also reprinted at the same time; and it is remarkable that this collection is cited by Sir John Harrington under the title of 'the hundred merry tales.' It continued for a long period to be the popular name for collections of this sort, for in the London Chaunticlere, 1659, it is mentioned as being cried for sale by a ballad man.

1. Incredible, or inconceivable.

2. Boarded, besides its usual meaning, signified ac-costed.

3. Marriage, demeanour.

4. Let, which is found in the next line, is understood here.

5. Blood signifies amorous heat or passion. So, in All's Well that Ends Well, Act. iii. Sc. 7.

'Now his important blood will nought deny, That she'll demand.'

20

garland of? About your neck, like an userer's
chain?⁶⁰ or under your arm, like a lieutenant's
scarf? You must wear it one way, for the prince
hath got your Hero.

Claud. I wish him joy of her.

Bene. Why, that's spoken like an honest drover; so they sell bullocks. But did you think the prince would have served you thus ?

Claud. I pray you, leave me.

Bene. Ho! now you strike like the blind man: 'twas the boy that stole your meat, and you'll beat the post.

Claud. If it will not be, I'll leave you. [Exit.]

Bene. Alas, poor hurt fowl! Now will he creep into sedges.—But, that my lady Beatrice should know me, and not know me! The Prince's fool!—Ha! it may be, I go under that title, because I am merry.—Yea; but so; I am apt to do myself wrong: I am not so reputed: it is the base, the bitter disposition of Beatrice, that puts the world into her person, and so gives me out.' Well, I'll be revenged as I may.

Re-enter DON PEDRO.

D. Pedro. Now, signior, where's the count. Did you see him ?

D. Pedro. Troth, my lord, I have play'd the part of lady Fame. I found him here as melancholy as a lodge in a warren;⁶¹ I told him, and, I think, I told him true, that your grace had got the good will of this young lady; and I offered him my company to a willow tree, either to make him a garland, as being forsaken, or to bind him up a rod, as being worthy to be whipped.

D. Pedro. To be whipped? What's his fault?

Bene. The flat transgression of a schoolboy; who, being overjoyed with finding a bird's nest, shows it his companion, and he steals it.

D. Pedro. Wilt thou make a trust a transgres-
sion? The transgression is in the stealer.

Bene. Yet it had not been amiss, the rod had been made, and the garland too; for the garland he might have worn himself; and the rod he might have bestowed on you, who, as I take it, have stol'n his bird's nest.

D. Pedro. I will but teach them to sing, and re-
store them to the owner.

Bene. If their singing answer your saying, by my faith you say honestly.

D. Pedro. The lady Beatrice hath a quarrel to you; the gentleman, that danced with her, told her, she is much wronged by you.

Bene. O, she misused me past the endurance of a block; an oak, but with one green leaf on it, would have answered her; my very visor began to assume life, and scold with her:⁶³ She told me, not thinking I had been myself, that I was the prince's jester: that I was duller than a great thaw: huddling jest upon jest, with such impossible¹⁰ convey-

6 Chains of gold of considerable value were, in Shakspeare's time, worn by wealthy citizens, and others, in the same manner as they are now on public occasions by the aldermen of London. Usury was then a common topic of invective. So, in 'The Choice of Change,' 1598, 'Three sortes of people, in respect of necessity, may be accounted good:—Merchants, for they may play the usurers, instead of the Jews, &c.' Again, 'There is a scarcity of Jews, because Christians make an occupation of usurie.'

7 'It is the disposition of Beatrice, who takes upon herself to personate the world, and therefore represents the world as saying what she only says herself.'

8 A parallel thought occurs in Isaiah, c. i, where the prophet, in describing the desolation of Judah, says: 'The daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers,' &c. It appears that these lonely buildings were necessary, as the cucumbers, &c. were obliged to be constantly watched and watered, and that as soon as the crop was gathered they were forsaken.

9 It is singular that a similar thought should be found in the tenth Thebaid of Statius, v. 658.

'— ipsa insanire videtur

Sphynx galea custos.'

10 i. e. 'with a rapidity equal to that of jugglers

154

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT II.

ance upon me, that I stood like a man at a mark,
with a whole army shooting at me: She speaks
poniards, and every word stabs: if her breath were
as terrible as her terminations, there were no liv-
ing near her, she would infect to the north star. I
would not marry her, though she were endowed
with all that Adam had left him before he trans-
gressed; she would have made Hercules have
turned spit; yea, and have cleft his club to make
the fire too. Come, talk not of her; you shall find
her the infernal Ate¹ in good apparel. I would to
God, no one scholar would conjure her; for, certain-
ly, while she is here, a man may live as quiet in
hell, as in a sanctuary; and people sin upon pur-
pose, because they would go thither: so, indeed,
all disquiet, horror, and perturbation follow her.

Re-enter CLAUDIO, BEATRICE, HERO, and
LEONATO.

D. Pedro. Look, here she comes.

Bene. Will your grace command me any service
to the world's end? I will go on the slightest errand
now to the Antipodes, that you can devise to send
me on; I will fetch you a toothpicker now from the
farthest inch of Asia; bring you the length of
Prester John's foot; fetch you a hair off the great
Cham's beard: do you any embassage to the Pig-
mies, rather than hold three words conference with
this happy: You have no employment for me?

D. Pedro. None, but to desire your good com-
pany.

Bene. O God, sir, here's a dish I love not; I
cannot endure my lady Tongue. [Exit].

D. Pedro. Come, lady, come; you have lost the
heart of signior Benedick.

Beat. Indeed, my lord, he lent it me a while;
and I give him use² for it, a double heart for his
single one: marry, once before, he won it of me
with false dice, therefore your grace may well say,
I have lost it.

D. Pedro. You have put him down, lady, you
have put him down.

Beat. So I would not he should do me, my lord,
lest I should prove the mother of fools. I have
brought count Claudio, whom you sent me to seek.

D. Pedro. Why, how now, count? wherefore are
you sad?

Claud. Not sad, my lord.

D. Pedro. How then? Sick.

Claud. Neither, my lord.

Beat. The count is neither sad, nor sick, nor
merry, nor well: but civil, count; civil as an
orange, and something of that jealous complexion.

D. Pedro. I'faith, lady, I think your blazon to be
true, though, I'll be sworn, if he be so, his conceit
is false. Here, Claudio, I have wooed in thy name,
and fair Hero is won; I have broke with her father,
and his good will obtained: name the day of mar-
riage, and God give thee joy!

Leon. Count, take of me my daughter, and with
her my fortunes: his grace hath made the match,
and all grace say Amen to it!

Beat. Speak, count, 'tis your cue.³

Claud. Silence is the perfectest herald of joy; I
were but little happy, if I could say how much.—
Lady, as you are mine, I am yours; I give away
myself for you, and dote upon the exchange.

Beat. Speak, cousin, or, if you cannot, stop his
mouth with a kiss, and let him not speak neither.

D. Pedro. In faith, lady, you have a merry heart.

Beat. Yea, my lord: I thank it, poor fool, it
keeps on the windy side of care:—My cousin tells
him in his ear, that he is in her heart.

whose conveyances or tricks appear impossibilities.
Impossible may, however, be used in the sense of in-
credible or inconceivable, both here and in the begin-
ning of the scene, where Beatrice speaks of 'impossible
slanders.'

1 The goddess of discord.

2 Interest.

3 i. e. your part or turn; a phrase among the play-
ers. V. Note on Hamlet, Act ii. Sc. 2.

Claud. And so she doth, cousin.

Beat. Good lord, for alliance!—Thus goes every
one to the world but I,⁴ and I am sun-burned; I
may sit in the corner, and cry, heigh ho! for a
husband.

D. Pedro. Lady Beatrice, I will get you one.

Beat. I would rather have one of your father's
getting: Hath your grace ne'er a brother like you?
Your father got excellent husbands; if a maid could
come by them.

D. Pedro. Will you have me, lady?

Beat. No, my lord, unless I might have another
for working-days; your grace is too costly to wear
every day:—But, I beseech your grace, pardon
me: I was born to speak all mirth, and no matter.

D. Pedro. Your silence most offends me, and to
be merry best becomes you; for, out of question,
you were born in a merry hour.

Beat. No, sure, my lord, my mother cri'd; but
then there was a star danced, and under that was
I born.—Cousins, God give you joy!

Leon. Niece, will you look to those things I told
you of?

Beat. I cry you mercy, uncle.—By your grace's
pardon. [Exit BEATRICE.

D. Pedro. By my troth, a pleasant-spirited lady.

Leon. There's little of the melancholy element
in her; my lord: she is never sad, but when she
sleeps; and not ever sad then; for I have heard
my daughter say, she hath often dreamed of un-
happiness,⁵ and waked herself with laughing.

D. Pedro. She cannot endure to hear tell of a
husband.

Leon. O, by no means; she mocks all her wooers
out of suit.

D. Pedro. She were an excellent wife for Bene-
dick.

Leon. O, lord, my lord, if they were but a week
married, they would talk themselves mad.

D. Pedro. Count Claudio, when you mean to go
to church?

Claud. To-morrow, my lord: Time goes on
crutches, till love have all his rites.

Leon. Not till Monday, my dear son, which is
hence a just seven-night: and a time too brief too,
to have all things answer my mind.

D. Pedro. Come, you shake the head at so long
a breathing; but, I warrant thee, Claudio, the time
shall not go dully by us; I will, in the interim, un-
dertake one of Hercules' labours; which is, to bring
signior Benedick and the lady Beatrice into a moun-
tain of affection,⁶ the one with the other. I would
fain have it a match; and I doubt not but to fashion
it, if you three will but minister such assistance as
I shall give you direction.

Leon. My lord, I am for you, though it cost me
ten nights' watching.

Claud. And I, my lord.

D. Pedro. And you, too, gentle Hero.

Hero. I will do any modest office, my lord, to
help my cousin to a good husband.

D. Pedro. And Benedick is not the unhopefullest
husband that I know: thus far can I praise him;
he is of a noble strain,⁷ of approved valour, and
confirmed honesty. I will teach you how to hu-
mour your cousin, that she shall fall in love with
Benedick:—and I, with your two helps, will so
practice on Benedick, that, in despite of his quick
wit and his queasy⁸ stomach, he shall fall in love
with Beatrice. If we can do this, Cupid is no
longer an archer; his glory shall be ours, for we

4 i. e. good lord, how many alliances are forming!
Every one is likely to be married but I. I am sun-
burned means 'I have lost my beauty, and am conse-
quently no longer an object to tempt a man to marry.'

5 i. e. mischief. Unhappy was often used for mis-
chievous, as we now say an unlucky boy for a mis-
chievous boy.

6 'A mountain of affection with one another' is, as
Johnson observes, a strange expression; yet all that is
meant appears to be 'a great deal of affection.'

7 The same as strene, descent, lineage

8 Squeamish.

## SCENE III.

## MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

155

are the only love-gods. Go in with me, and I will tell you me thy drift. [Exeunt.

### SCENE II. Another Room in Leonato's House.
Enter DON JOHN and BORACHIO.

D. John. It is so: the count Claudio shall marry the daughter of Leonato.

Bora. Yea, my lord; but I can cross it.

D. John. Any bar; any cross, any impediment will be medicinable to me: I am sick in displeasure to him; and whatsoever comes athwart his affections, ranges evenly with mine. How canst thou cross this marriage?

Bora. Not honestly, my lord; but so covertly that no dishonesty shall appear in me.

D. John. Show me briefly how.

Bora. I think, I told your lordship, a year since, how much I am in the favour of Margaret, the waiting-gentlewoman to Hero.

D. John. I remember.

Bora. I can, at any unseasonable instant of the night, appoint her to look out at her lady's chamber-window.

D. John. What life is in that to be the death of this marriage?

Bora. The poison of that lies in you to temper. Go you to the prince, your brother; spare not to tell him, that he hath wronged his honour in marrying the renowned Claudio (whose estimation do you mightily hold up) to a contaminated stale,¹ such a one as Hero.

D. John. What proof shall I make of that?

Bora. Proof enough to misuse the prince, to vex Claudio, to undo Hero, and kill Leonato: Look you for any other issue?

D. John. Only to despite them, I will endeavour any thing.

Bora. Go then, find me a meet hour to draw Don Pedro and the count Claudio alone: tell them, that you know that Hero loves me; intend² a kind of zeal both to the prince and Claudio, as—in love of your brother's honour, who hath made this match; and his friend's reputation, who is thus like to be cozened with the semblance of a maid,—that you have discovered thus. They will scarcely believe this without trial: offer them instances; which shall bear no less likelihood, than to see me at her chamber-window; hear me call Margaret, Hero; hear Margaret term me Claudio;³ and bring them to see this, the very night before the intended wedding; for, in the mean time I will so fashion the matter, that Hero shall be absent; and there shall appear such seeming truth of Hero's disloyalty, that jealousy shall be call'd assurance, and all the preparation overthrown.

D. John. Grow this to what adverse issue it can, I will put it in practice: Be cunning in the working this, and thy fee is a thousand ducats.

Bora. Be you constant in the accusation, and my cunning not shame me.

D. John. I will presently go learn their day of marriage. [Exeunt.

### SCENE III. Leonato's Garden.
Enter BENEDICK and a Boy.

Bene. Boy,—

Boy. Signior.

1 Shakspeare uses stale here, and in a subsequent scene, for an abandoned woman. A stale also meant a decoy or lure, but the two words had different origins. It is obvious why the term was applied to prostitutes.

2 Pretend.

3 The old copies read Claudio here. Theobald altered it to Borachio; yet if Claudio be wrong, it is most probably the poet's oversight. Claudio might conceive that the supposed Hero, called Borachio by the name of Claudio in consequence of a secret agreement between them, as a cover in case she were overheard; and he would know without a possibility of error that it was not Claudio with whom in fact she conversed. For the other arguments pro and con we must refer to the vauriorum Shakspeare.

4 *Orchard* in Shakspeare's time signified a garden. So, in Romeo and Juliet:

Bene. In my chamber-window lies a book; bring it hither to me in the orchard.⁴

Boy. I am here, already, sir.

Bene. I know that;—but I would have thee hence, and here again. [Exit Boy.]—I do much wonder, that one man, seeing what another man is a fool when he dedicates his behaviours to love, will, after he hath laughed at such shallow follies in others, become the argument of his own scorn, by falling in love: And such a man is Claudio. I have known when there was no music with him but the drum and fife; and now have he rather hear the tabor and the pipe: I have known, when he would have walked ten mile afoot, to see a good armour; and now will he lie ten nights awake, carving the fashion of a new doublet.⁵ He was wont to speak plain, and to the purpose, like an honest man, and a soldier; and now is he turn'd orthographer; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes. May I be so converted, and see with these eyes? I cannot tell; I think not: I will not be sworn, but love may transform me to an oyster; but I'll take my oath on it, till he have made an oyster of me, he shall never make me such a fool. One woman is fair; yet I am well: another is wise; yet I am well: another virtuous; yet I am well: but till all the graces be in one woman, one woman shall not come in my grace. Rich she shall be, that's certain; wise, or I'll none; virtuous, or I'll never cheapen her; fair, or I'll never look on her; mild, or come not near me; notable, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what colour it please God.⁶ Ha! the prince and monsieur Love! I will hide me in the arbour.

['Withdraws.'

Enter DON PEDRO, LEONATO, and CLAUDIO.

D. Pedro. Come, shall we hear this music?

Claud. Yea, my good lord:—How still the evening is,

As hush'd on purpose to grace harmony!

D. Pedro. See you where Benedick hath hid himself?

Claud. O, very well, my lord: the music ended, We'll fit the kid-fox⁷ with a penny-worth.

Enter BALTHAZAR, with music.

D. Pedro. Come, Balthazar, we'll hear that song again.

Balth. O good my lord, tax not so bad a voice To slander music any more than once.

D. Pedro. It is the witness still of excellency, To put a strange face on his own perfection:— I pray thee, sing, and let me woo no more.

Balth. Because you talk of wooing, I will sing: Since many a wooer doth commence his suit To her he thinks not worthy; yet he woos; Yet will he swear, he loves.

D. Pedro. Nay, pray thee, come: Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument, Do it in notes.

Balth. Note this before my notes,

There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting.

D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks:

Note, notes, forsoth, and noting!

[Music.]

Bene. Now, Divine air? now is his soul ravished!

'The orchard walls are high and hard to climb.'

This word was first written *hort-yard*, then by corruption *hort-chard*, and hence orchard.

5 This folly is the theme of all comic satire.

6 Benedick may allude to the fashion of dyeing the hair, very common in Shakspeare's time. Or to that of wearing false hair, which also then prevailed. So, in a subsequent scene: "I like the new tire within excellently, if the hair were a thought browner."

7 Kid-fox has been supposed to mean *discovered* or *detected* fox; Kid certainly meant known or discovered in Chaucer's time. It may have been a technical term in the game of *hide-fox*; old terms are sometimes longer preserved in jocular sports than in common usage. Some editors have printed it *hid-fox*; and others explained it *young* or *cub-fox*.

## SCENE I.

# MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

157

Claud. Never tell him, my lord; let her wear it out with good counsel.

Leon. Nay, that's impossible; she may wear her heart out first.

D. Pedro. Well, we'll hear further of it by your daughter; let it cool the while. I love Benedick well; and I could wish he would modestly examine himself, to see how much he is unworthy to have so good a lady.

Leon. My lord, will you walk? dinner is ready.

Claud. If he do not dote on her upon this, I will never trust my expectation. [Aside.

D. Pedro. Let there be the same net spread for her; and that must your daughter and her gentlewoman carry. The sport will be, when they hold one an opinion of another's dotage, and no such matter; that's the scene that I would see, which will be merely a dumb show. Let us send her to call him in to dinner. [Aside.

Exeunt DON PEDRO, CLAUDIO, and LEONATO.

BENEDICK advances from the arbour.

Bene. This can be no trick: The conference was sadly borne.¹—They have the truth of this from Hero. They seem to pity the lady; it seems, her affections have their full bent.² Love me! why, it must be requited. I hear how I am censured: they say, I will bear myself proudly, if I perceive the love come from her; they say too, that she will rather die than give any sign of affection.—I did never think to marry: —I must not seem proud: —Happy are they that hear their detractions, and can put them to mending. They say the lady is fair; †is a truth, I can bear them witness: and virtuous; ‡—is't so, I cannot reprove it; and wise, but for loving me: —By my troth, it is no addition to her wit; —nor great argument of her folly, for I will be horribly in love with her. I may chance have some odd quirks and remnants of wit broken on me, because I have railed so long against marriage: —But doth not the appetite alter? A man loves the meat in his youth that he cannot endure in his age: Shall quips, and sentences, and these paper bullets of the brain, awe a man from the career of his honour? No: The world must be peopled. When I said, I would die a bachelor, I did not think I should live till I was married.—Here comes Beatrice: By this day, she's a fair lady: I do spy some marks of love in her.

Enter BEATRICE.

Beat. Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner.

Bene. Fair Beatrice, I thank you for your pains.

Beat. I took no more pains for those thanks than you take pains to thank me; if it had been painful, I would not have come.

Bene. You take pleasure then in the message?

Beat. Yea, just so much as you may take upon a knife's point, and choke a draw with: —You have no stomach, signior; fare you well. [Exit.

Bene. Ha! *Against my will I am sent to bid you come to dinner*—there's a double meaning in that. I took no more pains for those thanks than you took pains to thank me—that's as much as to say, Any pains that I take for you is as easy as thanks: —If I do not take pity of her, I am a villain; if I do not love her, I am a Jew: I will go get her picture.

[Erit.]

1. Seriously carried on.

2. Steevens and Malone assert that this is a metaphor from archery, saying that the *full bent* is the utmost extremity of exertion. Surely there is no ground for the assertion! It was one of the most common forms of expression in the language for *inclination, tendency*; and was used where it is impossible there could have been any allusion to the bending of a bow, as in these phrases, from a writer of Elizabeth's age: 'The day inclining or bending to the evening.' —Bending to a yellow colour.

3. *Proposing* is conversing, from the French *Propos*, discourse, talk.

4. The folio reads *purpose*. The quarto *propose*, which appears to be right. See the preceding note.

## ACT III.

### SCENE I. Leonato's Garden. Enter HERO, MARGARET, and URSULA.

Hero. Good Margaret, run thee into the parlour;

There shall thou find my cousin Beatrice
Proposing³ with the Prince and Claudio:
Whisper her ear, and tell her, I and Ursula
Walk in the orchard, and our whole discourse
Is all of her; say, that thou overheard'st us;
And bid her steal into the pleached bower,
Where honey-suckles, ripen'd by the sun,
Forbid the sun to enter;—like favourites,
Made proud by princes, that advance their pride
Against that power that bred it :—there will she
hide her,

To listen our propose:⁴ This is thy office,
Bear thee well in it, and leave us alone.

Marg. I'll make her come, I warrant you, presently. [Exit.]

Hero. Now, Ursula, when Beatrice doth come,
As we do trace this alley up and down,

Our talk must only be of Benedick:
When I do name him, let it be thy part
To praise him more than ever man did merit:
My talk to thee must be, how Benedick
Is sick in love with Beatrice: Of this matter
Is little Cupid's crafty arrow made,
That only wounds by hearsay. Now begin;

Enter BEATRICE, behind.

For look where Beatrice, like a lapwing, runs
Close by the ground, to hear our conference.

Urs. The pleasantest angling is to see the fish
Cut with their golden oars the silver stream,
And greedily devour the treacherous bait:
So angle we for Beatrice; who even now
Is couched not in the woodbine coverture;
Fear you not my part of the dialogue.

Hero. Then go we near her, that her ear lose nothing

Of the false sweet bait, that we lay for it.—

[They advance to the bower.]

No, truly, Ursula, she is too disdainful;
I know her spirits are as coy and wild

As haggards of the rock.⁵

Urs. But are you sure, That Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely?

Hero. So says the prince, and my new-trothed lord.

Urs. And did they bid you tell her of it, madam?

Hero. They did entreat me to acquaint her of it;

But I persuaded them, if they loy'd Benedick,
To wish him⁶ wrestle with affection,
And never to let Beatrice know of it.

Urs. Why did you so? Doth not the gentleman Deserve as full,⁷ as fortunate a bed,

As ever Beatrice shall couch upon?

Hero. O God of love! I know, he doth deserve

As much as may be yielded to a man:

But nature never fram'd a woman's heart

Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice:

Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
Misprising⁸ what they look on; and her wit
Values itself so highly, that to her

All matter else seems weak: she cannot love,

Nor take no shape nor project of affection,

She is so self-endeard.

Though Mr. Reed has shown that purpose was sometimes used in the same sense.

5. A hawk not manned, or trained to obedience; a wild hawk. *Hagard, Fr.* Latham, in his Book of Falconry, says: 'Such is the greatness of her spirit, *she will not admit of any society* until such a time as nature worketh,' &c. So, in *The Tragical History of Didaco and Volentia*, 1576:

'Perchance she's not of haggard's kind,
Nor heart so hard to bend,' &c.

6. *Wish him, that is, recommend or desire him.* So, in *The Honest Whore*, 1604:

'Go wish the surgeon to have great respect,' &c.

7. So, in Othello:

'What a full fortune does the thick lips owe?'

What Ursula means to say is, 'that he is as deserving of complete happiness as Beatrice herself.'

8. Undervaluing.

158

MUCH ADØ ABOUT NOTHING.

Act III.

Urs. Sure, I think so;

And therefore, certainly, it were not good

She knew his love, lest she make sport at it.

Hero. Why, you speak truth: I never yet saw man,

How wise, how noble, young, how rarely featur'd,
But she would spell him backward:¹ if fair-faced,
She'd swear the gentleman should be her sister;
If black, why, nature, drawing of an antic,

Made a foul blot:² if tall, a lance ill-headed;
If low, an agate very vilely cut:³
If speaking, why a vane blown with all winds:

If silent, why a block moved with none.
So turns she every man the wrong side out;
And never gives to truth and virtue that

Which simpleness and merit purchased.
Urs. Sure, sure, such carping is not commendable.
Hero. No: nor to be so odd, and from all fashions,

As Beatrice is, cannot be commendable:
But who dare tell her so? If I should speak,
She'd mock me into air; O, she would laugh me
Out of myself, press me to death with wit.⁴

Therefore let Benedick, like cover'd fire,
Consume away in sighs, waste inwardly:
It were a better death than die with mocks;
Which is as bad as die with tickling.⁵

Urs. Yet tell her of it; hear what she will say.
Hero. No; rather I will go to Benedick,

And counsel him to fight against his passion:
And, truly, I'll devise some honest slanders

To stain my cousin with: One doth not know,
How much an ill word may empoison liking.

Urs. O, do not do your cousin such a wrong.
She cannot be so much without true judgment,
(Having so swift⁶ and excellent a wit,

As she is priz'd to have,) as to refuse
So rare a gentleman as signior Benedick.

Hero. He is the only man of Italy,
Always excepted my dear Claudio.

Urs. I pray you, be not angry with me, madam,
Speaking my fancy; signior Benedick,

For shape, for bearing, argument,' and valour,
Goes foremost in report through Italy.

Hero. Indeed, he hath an excellent good name.

Urs. His excellency did earn it, ere he had it.—
When are you married, madam?

Hero. Why, every day;—to-morrow: Come, go in;
I'll place thee some attires; and have thy counsel,
Which is the best to furnish me to-morrow.

Urs. She's lim'd⁸ I warrant you; we have caught her, madam.

Hero. If it prove so, then loving goes by hops:
Some Cupid kills with arrows, some with traps.

[Exeunt HERO and URSULA.

BEATRICE advances.

Beat. What fire is in mine ears?⁹ Can this be
true?

1 Alluding to the practice of witches in uttering pray-
ers, i. e. misinterpret them. Several passages, contain-
ing a similar train of thought, are cited by Mr. Steevens
from Hely's Euphues.

2 A *black* man here means a man with a dark or thick
beard, which is the *blot* in nature's drawing.

3 An *agate* is often used metaphorically for a very
diminutive person, in allusion to the figures cut in agate
for rings, &c. Queen Mab is described, ‘In shape no
bigger than an *agate stone* on the forefinger of an alder-
man.’ See note on K. Henry IV. Part 2.

4 The allusion is to an ancient punishment inflicted on
those who refused to plead to an indictment. If they
continued silent, they were pressed to death by heavy
weights laid on their stomach. This species of torture
is now abolished.

5 This word is intended to be pronounced as a trisyl-
lable, it was sometimes written *tickeling*.

6 Quick, ready.

7 Conversation.

8 I. e. ensnared and entangled, as a sparrow with
bird-lime.

9 Alluding to the proverbial saying, which is as old
as Pliny's time: 'That when our *ears do glow and
tingle*, some there be that in our absence do talke of us.'
Holland's Translation, B. xxxiii. p. 297.

10 This image is taken from Falconry. She has been
charged with being as wild as *haggards of the rock*;

Stand I condemn'd for pride and scorn so much?

Contempt, farewell! and maiden pride, adieu!
No glory lives behind the back of such.

And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee;

Taming my wild heart to thy loving heart;¹⁰
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee

To bind our loves up in a holy band:

For others say, thou dost deserve; and I
Believe it better than reporting.

[Exit.]

### SCENE II. A Room in Leonato's House. Enter DON PEDRO, CLAUDIO, BENEDICK, and LEONATO.

D. Pedro. I do but stay till your marriage be con-
summate, and then I go toward Arragon.

Claud. I'll bring you thither, my lord, if you'll
vouchsafe me.

D. Pedro. Nay, that would be as great a soil in
the new gloss of your marriage, as to show a child
his new coat, and forbid him to wear it. I will only
be bold with Benedick for his company: for, from
the crown of his head to the sole of his foot, he is
all mirth; he hath twice or thrice cut Cupid's bow-
string, and the little hangman¹¹ dare not shoot at
him: he hath a heart as sound as a bell, and his
tongue is the clapper; for what his heart thinks, his
tongue speaks,¹²

Bene. Gallants, I am not as I have been.
Leon. So say I; methinks you are sadder.

Claud. I hope, he be in love.

D. Pedro. Hang him, truant; there's no true drop
of blood in him, to be truly touch'd with love: if he
be sad, he wants money.

Bene. I have the tooth-ach.¹³

D. Pedro. Draw it.

Bene. Hang it!

Claud. You must hang it first, and draw it afterwards.

D. Pedro. What, sigh for the tooth-ach?

Leon. Where is but a humour, or a worm?

Bene. Well, every one can master a grief, but he
that has it.

Claud. Yet say I, he is in love.

D. Pedro. There is no appearance of fancy¹⁴ in
him, unless it be a fancy that he hath to strange dis-
guises; as, to be a Dutchman to-day; a French-
man to-morrow; or in the shape of two countries at
once;¹⁵ as, a German from the waist downward, all
slops;¹⁶ and a Spaniard from the hip upward, no
doublet: Unless he have a fancy to this foolery, as
it appears he hath, he is no fool for fancy, as you
would have it appear he is.

Claud. If he be not in love with some woman,

she therefore says, that wild as her heart is, she will
tame it to the hand.

11 Dr. Farmer has illustrated this term by citing a pas-
sage from Sidney's Arcadia, B. H. C. xiv.; but it seems
probable that no more is meant by *hangman* than expe-
cutioner, slayer of hearts.

12 A covert allusion to the old proverb:

'As the fool thinketh
The bell clinketh.'

13 So, in The False One, by Beaumont and Fletcher:

'Of this sounds mangily,

Poorly and scurvy in a soldier's mouth;

You had best be troubled with the toothach too,

For lovers ever are.

14 A play upon the word *fancy*, which Shakspeare
uses for *love*, as well as for *humour*, *caprice*, or *affec-
tation*.

15 So, in The Seven deadly Sinnes of London, by Decker, 1606, 'For an Englishman's suite is like a trai-
tor's body that hath beene hanged, drawne, and quar-
tered, and is set up in several places: his copdiece, in
Denmark; the collar of his dublet and the belly, in
France; the wing and narrow sleeve, in Italy; the short
waste hangs over a botcher's stall in Utrecht; his huge
sloppes speaks Spanish; Polonia gives him the bootes,
&c.—and thus we mocke everie nation for keeping one
fashion, yet steale patches from everie of them to piece
out our pride; and are now laughing-stocks to them, be-
cause their cut so scurvily becomes us.

16 Large loose breaches or trowsers. Hence a slop-
seller for one who furnishes seamen, &c. with clothes.

## SCENE III.

## MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

159

there is no believing old signs: he brushes his hat o' mornings; What should that bode?

D. Pedro. Hath any man seen him at the barber's?

Claud. No, but the barber's man hath been seen with him; and the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls.

Leon. Indeed, he looks younger than he did, by the loss of a beard.

D. Pedro. Nay, he rubs himself with civet: Can you smell him out by that?

Claud. That's as much as to say, The sweet youth's in love.

D. Pedro. The greatest note of it is his melancholy.

Claud. And when was he wont to wash his face?

D. Pedro. Yea, or to paint himself? for the which, I hear what they say of him.

Claud. Nay, but his jesting spirit; which is now crept into a lutestring¹ and now governed by stops.

D. Pedro. Indeed, that tells a heavy tale for him: Conclude, conclude, he is in love.

Claud. Nay, but I know who loves him.

D. Pedro. That would I know too; I warrant, one that knows him not.

Claud. Yes, and his ill conditions; and, in despite of all, dies for him.

D. Pedro. She shall be buried with her face upwards.²

Bene. Yet is this no charm for the tooth-ach.— Old signior, walk aside with me: I have studied eight or nine horse-words to speak to you, which these hobby-horses must not hear.

[Exeunt BENEDICK and LEONATO.

D. Pedro. For my life, to break with him about Beatrice.

Claud. "Tis even so: Hero and Margaret have by this played their parts with Beatrice; and then the two bears will not bite one another when they meet.

Enter DON JOHN.

D. John. My lord and brother, God save you.

D. Pedro. Good den, brother.

D. John. If your leisure served, I would speak with you.

D. Pedro. In private?

D. John. If it please you :—yet Count Claudio may hear; for what I would speak of concerns him.

D. Pedro. What's the matter?

D. John. Means your lordship to be married to-morrow?

D. Pedro. You know, he does.

D. John. I know not that, when he knows what I know.

Claud. If there be any impediment, I pray you, discover it.

D. John. You may think, I love you not; let that appear hereafter, and aim better at me by that I now will manifest: For my brother, I think, he holds you well; and in clearness of heart hath holt to effect your ensuing marriage; surely, suit ill spent, and labour ill bestowed!¹

D. Pedro. Why, what's the matter?

D. John. I came hither to tell you; and, circumstances shortened, (for she hath been too long a talking of,) the lady is disloyal.

Claud. Who? Hero?

D. John. Even she; Leonato's Hero, your Hero, every man's Hero.

Claud. Disloyal?

D. John. The word is too good, to paint out her wickedness; I could say, she were worse; think you of a worse title, and I will fit her to it. Wonder not till further warrant: go but with me to-night,

you shall see her chamber-window entered; even the night before her wedding-day: if you love her then, to-morrow wed her: but it would better fit your honour to change your mind.

Claud. May this be so?

D. Pedro. I will not think it.

D. John. If you dare not trust that you see, confess not that you know: if you will follow me, I will show you enough; and when you have seen more, and heard more, proceed accordingly.

Claud. If I see any thing to-night why I should not marry her to-morrow; in the congregation, where I should wed, there will I shame her.

D. Pedro. And as I wooed for thee to obtain her, I will join with thee to disgrace her.

D. John. I will disparage her no farther, till you are my witnesses: bear it coldly but till midnight, and let the issue show itself.

D. Pedro. O day untowardly turned!

Claud. O mischief strangely thwarting!

D. John. O plague right well prevented!

So will you say, when you have seen the sequel.

[Exeunt.

## SCENE III. A Street. Enter DOGBERRY and VERGES,⁵ with the Watch.

Dogb. Are you good men and true?

Verg. Yea, or else it were pity but they should suffer salvation, body and soul.

Dogb. Nay, that were a punishment too good for them, if they should have any allegiance in them, being chosen for the prince's watch.

Verg. Well, give them their charge,⁴ neighbour Dogberry.

Dogb. First, who think you the most desartless man to be constable?

1 Watch. Hugh Oatcake, sir, or George Seacoal; for they can write and read.

Dogb. Come hither, neighbour Seacoal. God hath blessed you with a good name: to be a well favoured man is the gift of fortune; but to write and read comes by nature.

2 Watch. Both which, master constable,—

Dogb. You have; I knew it would be your answer. Well, for your favour, sir, why, give God thanks, and make no boast of it; and for your writing and reading, let that appear when there is no need of such vanity. You are thought here to be the most senseless and fit man for the constable of the watch; therefore bear you the lantern: This is your charge: You shall comprehend all vagromen: you are to bid any man stand, in the prince's name.

2 Watch. How if he will not stand?

Dogb. Why then, take no note of him, but let him go; and presently call the rest of the watch together, and thank God you are rid of a knave.

Verg. If he will not stand when he is forbidden, he is none of the prince's subjects.

Dogb. True, and they are to meddle with none but the prince's subjects:—You shall also make no noise in the streets; for, for the watch to babble and talk, is most tolerable and not to be endured.

2 Watch. We will rather sleep than talk; we know what belongs to a watch.

Dogb. Why, you speak like an ancient and most quiet watchman; for I cannot see how sleeping should offend; only, have a care that your bills be not stolen:—Well, you are to call at all the ale-houses, and bid those that are drunk get them to bed.

2 Watch. How if they will not?

Dogb. Why then, let them alone till they are sober; if they make you not then the better answer, you may say, they are not the men you took them for.

¹ *Love-songs*, in Shakspeare's time, were sung to the lute. So, in Henry VI. Part I.

² *As melancholy as an old lion or a lover's tute.*

³ i. e. 'in her lover's arms.' So in The Winter's

Tale:

Flor. What? like a corse?

Per. No, like a bank for love to lie and play on;

Not like a corse:—or if,—not to be buried,

But quick and in my arms.

³ The first of these worthies is named from the *Dogberry* or female cornel, a shrub that grows in every county in England. *Verges* is only the provincial pronunciation of *verjuice*.

⁴ To charge his fellows seems to have been a regular part of the duty of the constable.

## SCENE V.

## MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

161

Marg. By my troth, it's not so good; and I war-
rant, your cousin will say so.

Hero. My cousin's a fool, and thou art another;
I'll wear none but this.

Marg. I like the new tire¹ within excellently, if
the hair were a thought browner: and your gown's
a most rare fashion, i'faith. I saw the duchess of
Milan's gown, that they praise so.

Hero. O, that exceeds, they say.

Marg. By my troth it's, but a night-gown in respect of yours: 'Cloth of gold, and cuts, and laced with silver; set with pearls, down-sleeves, side-sleeves,² and skirts round, underborne with a blueish tinsel: but for a fine, quaint, graceful, and excellent fashion, yours is worth ten on't.

Hero. God give me joy to wear it, for my heart
is exceeding heavy!

Marg. 'Twill be heavier soon by the weight of a
man.

Hero. Eye upon thee! art not ashamed?

Marg. Of what, lady? of speaking honourably? Is not marriage honourable in a beggar? Is not your lord honourable without marriage? I think, you would have me say, saving your reverence,—a husband: an bad thinking do not wrest true speaking, I'll offend nobody: Is there any harm in—the heavier for a husband? None, I think, an it be the right husband, and the right wife; otherwise 'tis light, and not heavy: Ask my lady Beatrice else, here she comes.

### Enter BEATRICE.

Hero. Good morrow, coz.

Beat. Good morrow, sweet Hero.

Hero. Why, how now! do you speak in the sick tune?

Beat. I am out of all other tune, methinks.

Marg. Clap us into—*Light o' love*; that goes
without burden; do you sing it, and I'll dance it.

Beat. Yea, *Light o' love*,³ with your heels?—
then if your husband have stables enough, you'll
see he shall lack no barns.⁴

Marg. O illegitimate construction! I scorn that
with my heels.

Beat. 'Tis almost five o'clock, cousin; 'tis time
you were ready. By my troth I am exceeding ill:
—hey ho!

Marg. For a hawk, a horse, or a husband?

Beat. For the letter that begins them all, H.⁵

Marg. Well, an you be not turned Turk, there's
no more sailing by the star.

Beat. What means the fool, trow?⁶

Marg. Nothing I; but God send every one their
heart's desire!

Hero. These gloves the count sent me, they are
an excellent perfume.

Beat. I am stuffed, cousin, I cannot smell.

Marg. A maid, and stuffed! there's goodly catching of cold.

1 Head-dress.

2 i. e. long sleeves. *Side or syde* in North Britain is
used for long when applied to the garment. It has the
same signification in Anglo-Saxon and Danish.

3 The name of a popular old dance tune, mentioned
again in the Two Gentlemen of Verona, and in several
of our old dramas. The notes are given in the Vario-
rum Shakspeare.

4 A quibble between *barns* repositories for corn, and *bairns* children, formerly pronounced barns. So, in The Winter's Tale:

'Mercy on us, a barn! a very pretty barn!'

5 That is for an *ach* or pain, pronounced *aitch*. See note on Tempest, Act. I. Sc. 2. Heywood has an epigram which best elucidates this:

'H is worst among letters in the cross-row,
For if thou find him either in thine elbow,
In thine arm or leg, in any degree;
In thine head, or teeth, or toe, or knee;'
Into what place soever H may pike him,

Wherever thou find him *ache* thou shall not like him.

6 So in The Merry Wives of Windsor:—'Who's there, trow?' This obsolete exclamation of inquiry is a contraction of *trow ye?* think you? believe you? Steevens was mistaken in saying, that To trow is to imagine, to conceive.

Beat. O, God help me! God help me! how long
have you profess'd apprehension?

Marg. Ever since you left it: doth not my wit
become me rarely?

Beat. It is not seen enough, you should wear it
in your cap.—By my troth, I am sick.

Marg. Get you some of this distilled Carduus
Benedictus,' and lay it to your heart; it is the only
thing for a qualm.

Hero. There thou prick'st her with a thistle.

Beat. Benedictus! why Benedictus? you have some moral⁸ in this Benedictus.

Marg. Moral? no, by my troth, I have no moral
meaning; I meant, plain holy-thistle. You may
think, perchance, that I think you are in love: nay,
by'r lady, I am not such a fool to think what I list;
nor I list not to think what I can; nor, indeed, I
cannot think, if I would think my heart out of think-
ing, that you are in love, or that you will be in love,
or that you can be in love: yet Benedick was such
another, and now is he become a man: he swore he
would never marry; and yet now, in despite of his
heart, he eats his meat without grudging:⁹ and how
you may be converted, I know not; but methinks,
you look with your eyes as other women would.

Beat. What pace is this that thy tongue keeps?

Marg. Not a false gallop.

### Re-enter URSULA.

Urs. Madam, withdraw; the prince, the count,
signior Benedick, Don John, and all the gallants of
the town, are come to fetch you to church.

Hero. Help to dress me, good coz, good Meg,
good Ursula.
[Exeunt.]

### SCENE V. Another Room in Leonato's House.
Enter LEONATO, with DOGBERRY and VERGES.

Urs. What would you with me, honest neighbour?

Dogb. Marry, sir, I would have some confidence
with you, that decerns you nearly.

Leon. Brief, I pray you; for you see, 'tis a busy
time with me.

Dogb. Marry, this it is, sir.

Verg. Yes, in truth it is, sir.

Leon. What is it, my good friends?

Dogb. Goodman Verges, sir, speaks a little off
the matter: an old man, sir, and his wits are not so
blunt, as, God help, I would desire they were; but
in faith, honest as the skin between his brows.

Verg. Yes, I thank God, I am as honest as any
man living, that is an old man and no honester
than I.

Dogb. Comparisons are odorous: *palabras*,¹⁰
neighbour Verges.

Leon. Neighbours, you are tedious.

Dogb. It pleases your worship to say so, but we
are the poor¹¹ duke's officers; but, truly, for mine
own part, if I were as tedious as a king, I could
find in my heart to bestow it all of your worship.

Leon. All thy tediousness on me! ha!

7 'Carduus Benedictus', or blessed thistle (says Co-
gan in his Haven of Health, 1595), so worthily named
for the singular virtues that it hath:⁷—'This herbe may
worthily be called *Benedictus*, or *Omnimorbia*, that it
is a salve for every sore, not known to physicians of old
time, but lately revealed by the speciall providence of
Almighty God.

8 'You have some moral in this Benedictus,' i. e.
some hidden meaning, like the moral of a fable. Thus
in the Rape of Lucrece:

'Nor could she moralize his wanton sight.'
And in the Taming of the Shrew, to expound the mean-
ing or moral of his signs and tokens.

9 i. e. 'feeds on love, and likes his food.'

10 i. e. *words*, in Spanish. It seems to have been cur-
rent here for a time, even among the vulgar; it was
probably introduced by our sailors, as well as the cor-
rupted form *pala'ver*. We have it again in the mouth
of Sly the Tinker, 'Therefore *paucas pallabris* : let
the world slide, Sessa.'

11 This stroke of pleasantry, arising from the trans-
position of the epithet *poor*, has already occurred in
Measure for Measure. Elbow says: 'If it please your
honour, I am the poor duke's constable.'

21

162

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT IV.

Dogb. Yea, and 'twere a thousand times more
than 'tis; for I hear as good exclamation on your
worship, as of any man in the city; and though I
be but a poor man, I am glad to hear it.

Verg. And so am I.

Leon. I would fain know what you have to say.

Verg. Marry, sir, our watch to-night, excepting
your worship's presence, have ta'en a couple of as
arrant knaves as any in Messina.

Dogb. A good old man, sir; he will be talking
as they say, When the age is in, the wit is out;
God help us! it is a world to see!¹—Well said,
i'faith, neighbour Verges:—well, God's a good
man; an two men ride of a horse, one must ride
behind:—An honest soul, i'faith, sir: by my troth
he is, as ever broke bread: but, God is to be wor-
shipped: All men are not alike; alas! good neigh-
bour!

Leon. Indeed, neighbour, he comes too short of
you.

Dogb. Gifts, that God gives.

Leon. I must leave you.

Dogb. One word, sir: our watch, sir, have, in-
deed, comprehended two aspicious persons, and
we would have them this morning examined before
your worship.

Leon. Take their examination yourself, and bring
it me; I am now in great haste, as it may appear
unto you.

Dogb. It shall be sufficiency.

Leon. Drink some wine ere you go; fare you well.

Enter a Messenger.

Mess. My lord, they stay for you to give your
daughter to her husband.

Leon. I will wait upon them; I am ready.

[Exeunt LEONATO and Messenger.

Dogb. Go, good partner, go, get you to Francis
Seacoal, bid him bring his pen and inkhorn to the
gaol; we are now to examination these men.

Verg. And we must do it wisely.

Dogb. We will spare for no wif, I warrant you;
here's that, [Touching his forehead,] shall drive
some of them to a non com: only, get the learned
writer to set down our excommunication, and meet
me at the gaol.

[Exeunt.

ACT IV.

### SCENE I. The Inside of a Church. Enter DON PEDRO, DON JOHN, LEONATO, Friar, CLAUDIO, BENEDICK, HERO, and BEATRICE, &c.

Leon. Come, Friar Francis, be brief; only to
the plain form of marriage, and you shall recount
their particular duties afterwards.

Friar. You come hither, my lord, to marry this
lady?

Claud. No.

Leon. To be married to her, friar; you come to
marry her.

Friar. Lady, you come hither to be married to
this count.

Hero. I do.

Friar. If either of you know any inward imped-
iment why you should not be conjoint, I charge
you, on your souls, to utter it.²

Claud. Know you any, Hero ?

Hero. None, my lord.

Friar. Know you any, count?

Leon. I dare make his answer, none.

Claud. O, what men dare do! what men may do!
what men daily do! not knowing what they do !

Bene. How now! Interjections? Why, then
some be of laughing, as, ha! ha! he !

1 This was a common apostrophe of admiration equivalent to 'it is wonderful,' or 'it is admirable.'

2 This is borrowed from our marriage ceremony, which, (with a few changes in phraseology,) is the same as was used in Shakspeare's time.

3 Lascivious.

4 i. e. 'if in your own trial.'

Claud. Stand thee by, friar:—Father, by your
leave!

Will you with free and unconstrained soul

Give me this maid, your daughter?

Leon. As freely, son, as God did give her me.

Claud. And what have I to give you back, whose
worth

May counterpoint this rich and precious gift?

D. Pedro. Nothing, unless you render her again.

Claud. Sweet prince, you learn me noble thank-
fulness.—

There Leonato, take her back again.

Give not this rotten orange to your friend;

She's but the sign and semblance of her honour:—

Behold, how like a maid she blushes here:

O, what authority and show of truth

Can cunning sin cover itself withal!

Comes not that blood, as modest evidence,

To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear,

All you that see her that she were a maid,

By these exterior shows?—But she is none:

She knows the heat of a luxurious³ bed:

Her blush is guillotine, not modesty.

Leon. What do you mean, my lord?

Claud.

Not to be married,

Not to knit my soul to an approved wanton.

Leon. Dear my lord, if you, in your own proof⁴
Have vanquish'd the resistance of her youth,

And made defeat of her virginity,—

Claud. I know what you would say; If I have
known her,

You'll say she did embrace me as a husband,
And so extenuate the 'forehand sin:

No, Leonato.

I never tempted her with word too large;⁵

But, as a brother to his sister, show'd

Bashful sincerity, and comely power.

Hero. And seem'd I ever otherwise to you?

Claud. Out on thy seeming! I will write against it:

You seem to me as Dian in her orb;

As chaste as is the bud ere it be blown;

But you are more intemperate in your blood

Than Venus or those pamper'd animals

That rage in savage sensuality.

Hero. Is my lord well, that he doth speak so
wide?⁶

Leon. Sweet prince, why speak not you?

D. Pedro.

What should I speak?

I stand dishonour'd, that have gone about

To link my dear friend to a common stale,

Leon. Are these things spoken ? or do I but dream?

D. John. Sir, they are spoken, and these things
are true.

Bene. This looks not like a nuptial.

Hero.

True, O God!

Claud. Leonato stand here?

Is this the prince? Is this the prince's brother?

Is this face Hero's? Are our eyes our own?

Leon. All this is so; but what of this my lord?

Claud. Let me but move one question to your
daughter;

And by that fatherly and kindly power?

That you have in her, bid her answer truly.

Leon. I charge thee do so, as thou art my child.

Hero. O God, defend me! how am I beset!—

What kind of catechizing call you this?

Claud. To make you answer truly to your name.

Hero. Is it not Hero? Who can blot that name

With any just reproach?

Claud.

Marry, that can can Hero;

Hero itself can blot out Hero's virtue.

What man was he talk'd with you yesternight

Out at your window, betwixt twelve and one?

Now, if you are a maid, answer to this.

5 Licentious.

6 i. e. 'So remotely from the present business.' 'You are wide of the matter,' is a familiar phrase still in use
7 i. e. 'natural power.' 'Kind' is used for nature
So in The Induction to The Taming of the Shrew—

8 'This do, and do it kindly, gentle sirs.'

which here also signifies naturally.

["## SCENE I.", "MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.", "163", "Hero. I talk'd with no man at that hour, my lord.", "D. Pedro. Why then are you no maiden.—Leonato,\nI am sorry you must hear; upon my honour,\nMyself, my brother, and this griev'd count,\nDid see her, hear her, at that hour last night,\nTalk with a ruffian at her chamber-window;\nWho hath, indeed, most like a liberal! villain,\nConfess'd the vile encounters they have had\nA thousand times in secret.", "D. John. ...Fie! Fie! they are\nNot to be nam'd, my lord, not to be spoke of;\nThere is not chastity enough in language,\nWithout offence to utter them: Thus, pretty lady,\nI am sorry for thy much misgovernment.", "Claud. O Hero! what a Hero hadst thou been,\nIf half thy outward graces had been placed\nAbout thy thoughts, and counsels of thy heart!\nBut fare thee well, most foul, most fair! farewell,\nThou pure impiety, and impious purity!\nFor thee I'll lock up all the gates of love,\nAnd on my eyelids shall conjecture hang,\nTo turn all beauty into thoughts of harm,\nAnd never shall it more be gracious.²", "Leon. Hath no man's dagger here a point for me?", "[HERO swoons.", "Beat. Why, how now, cousin? wherefore sink\nyou down?", "D. John. Come, let us go: these things, come\nthus to light,", "Smother your spirits up.", "[Ezekue DON PEDRO, DON JOHN, and CLAUDIO.", "Bene. How doth the lady?", "Beat. Dead, I think;—help, uncle;—", "Hero! why, Hero!—Uncle!—Signior Benedict!—\nfriar?", "Leon. O fate take not away thy heavy hand!", "Death is the fairest cover for her shame,", "That may be wish'd for.", "How now, cousin Hero?", "Beat.", "Friar. Have comfort, lady.", "Leon. Dost thou look up?", "Friar. Yea; Wherefore should she not?", "Leon. Wherefore? Why, doth not every earthly\nthing", "Cry shame upon her? Could she here deny", "The story that is printed in her blood?³—\nDo not live, Hero; do not ope thine eyes:\nFor did I think thou wouldst not quickly die,", "Thought I thy spirits were stronger than thy shames,", "Myself would, on the rearward of reproaches,", "Strike at thy life. Griev'd I, I had but one?", "Chid I for that to frugal nature's frame?⁴", "O, one too much by thee! Why had I one?", "Why ever wast thou lovely in my eyes?", "Why had I not with charitable hand,", "Took up a beggar's issue at my gates;", "Who smirched? thus, and mired with infamy,", "I might have said, *No. part of it is mine,*", "*This shame derives itself from unknown loins*", "But mine, and mine I lov'd, and mine I prais'd,", "And mine that I was proud on; mine so much,", "That I myself was to myself not mine,", "Valuing of her: why, she—O, she is fallen", "Into a pit of ink! that the wide sea", "Hath drops too few to wash her clean again;⁵", "And salt too little, which may season give", "To her foul tainted flesh!", "Bene. Sir, sir, be patient:\nFor my part, I am so attir'd in wonder,", "I know not what to say.", "Beat. O, on my soul, my cousin is belied:", "Bene. Lady, were you her bedfellow last night?", "Beat. No, truly, not: although, until last night,\nI have this twelvemonth been her bedfellow.", "Leon. Confirm'd, confirm'd! O, that is stronger\nmade,", "Which was before barr'd up with ribs of iron!", "Would the two princes lie? and Claudio lie?", "Who lov'd her so, that, speaking of her foulness,", "Wash'd it with tears? Hence from her; let her die.", "Friar. Hear me a little!", "For I have only been silent so long,", "And given way unto this course of fortune,", "By noting of the lady: I have mark'd", "A thousand blushing apparitions start", "Into her face; a thousand innocent shames", "In angel whiteness bear away those blushes;", "And in her eye there hath appear'd a fire,", "To burn the errors that these princes hold", "Against her maiden truth:—Call me a fool;", "Trust not my reading nor my observations,", "Which with experimental zeal doth warrant", "The tenour of my book; trust not my age,", "My reverence, calling, nor divinity,", "If this sweet lady lie not guiltless here", "Under some biting error.", "Leon.", "Friar, it cannot be:", "Thou seest, that all the grace that she hath left,", "Is, that she will not add to her damnation", "A sin of perjury; she not denies it;", "Why seek'st thou then to cover with excuse", "That which appears in proper nakedness?", "Friar. Lady, what man is he you are accus'd of?", "Hero. They know, that do accuse me; I know\nnone", "If I know more of any man alive,", "Than that which maiden modesty doth warrant,", "Let all my sins lack mercy!—O my father,", "Prove you that any man with me convers'd", "At hours unmeet, or that I yesternight", "Maintain'd the change of words with any creature,\nRefuse me, hate me, torture me to death.", "Friar. There is some strange misprision? in the\nprinces.", "Bene. Two of them have the very bent? of honour;", "And if their wisdoms be misled in this,", "The practice of it lives in John the bastard,", "Yea, whose spirits toil in frame of villanies.", "Leon. I know not; If they speak but truth of her,\nThese hands shall tear her; if they wrong her honour,", "The proudest of them shall well hear of it.", "Time hath not yet so dried this blood of mine,", "Nor age so eat up my invention,", "Nor fortune made such Havock of my means,", "Nor my bad life reft me so much of friends,", "But they shall find, awak'd in such a kind,", "Both strength of limb, and policy of mind,", "Ability in means, and choice of friends,", "To quit me of them throughly.", "Friar.", "Pause a while,\nAnd let my counsel sway you in this case.", "Your daughter here the princes left for dead;", "Let her awhile be secretly kept in,", "And publish it, that she is dead indeed:", "Maintain a mourning ostentation;⁶", "And on your family's old monument", "Hang mournful epitaphs, and do all rites", "That appertain unto a burial.\nLeon. What shall become of this? What will\nthis do?", "Friar. Marry, this well carried, shall on her behalf\nChange slander to remorse; that is some good:\nBut not for that, dream I on this strange course,", "She dying, as it must be so maintain'd,", "Upon the instant that she was accus'd,", "Shall be lamented, pitied and excus'd;", "Of every hearer: For it so falls out,", "1. *Liberal* here, as in many places of these plays,\nmeans *licentious beyond honesty or decency*. This\nsense of the word is not peculiar to Shakspeare.\n2. i. e. *graced, favoured, countenanced*. See As You\nLike It, Act i. Sc. 2.", "", "", "3. That is, 'which her *blushes* discovered to be true.'\n4. *Frame* is order, contrivance, disposition of things.", "5. See note 5, p. 160, ante.", "6. The same thought is repeated in Macbeth:", "'Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood\nClean from my hand?'", "7. *Misconception.*", "8. *Bent* is here used for the utmost degree of, or ten

164

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT IV.

That what we have we prize not to the worth,
Whiles we enjoy it; but being lack'd and lost,
Why, then we rack¹ the value; then we find
The virtue, that possession would not show us
Whys it was ours:—So will it fare with Claudio:
When he shall hear she died upon² his words,
The idea of her life shall sweetly creep

Into his study of imagination;

And every lovely organ of her life

Shall come apparel'd in more precious habit,

More moving-delicate, and full of life,

Into the eye and prospect of his soul,

Than when she liv'd indeed:—then shall he mourn,
(If ever love had interest in his liver,³)

And wish he had not so accused her;

No, though he thought his accusation true.

Let this be so, and doubt not but success

Will fashion the event in better shape

Than I can lay it down in likelihood.

But if all aim but this be level'd false,

The supposition of the lady's death

Will quench the wonder of her infamy:

And, if it sort not well, you may conceal her
(As best befits her wounded reputation.)

In some reclusive and religious life,

Out of all eyes, tongues, minds, and injuries.

Bene. Signior Leonato, let the friar advise you:

And though, you know, my inwardness⁴ and love

Is very much unto the prince and Claudio,

Yet, by mine honour, I will deal in this

As secretly, and justly, as your soul

Should with your body.

Leon.

Being that I flow in grief,

The smallest twine may lead me.⁵

Friar. 'Tis well consented; presently away;
For to strange sores they strangely strain the
cure.—

Come, lady, die to live: this wedding day,

Perhaps is but prolong'd; have patience, and
endure.

[Exeunt Friar, HERO, and LEONATO.

Bene. Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?

Bene. Yea, and I will weep a while longer.

Bene. I will not desire that.

Bene. You have no reason, I do it freely.

Bene. Surely, I do believe your fair cousin is
wrong'd.

Bene. Ah, how much might the man deserve of
me, that would right her!

Bene. Is there any way to show such friendship?

Bene. A very even way, but no such friend.

Bene. May a man do it?

Bene. It is a man's office, but not yours.

Bene. I do love nothing in the world so well as
you; is not that strange?

Bene. As strange as the thing I know not: It
were as possible for me to say, I loved nothing so
well as you : but believe me not; and yet I lie not;
I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing:—I am sorry
for my cousin.

Bene. By my sword, Beatrice, thou lovest me.

Bene. Do not swear by it, and eat it.

Bene. I will swear by it that you love me; and

I will make him eat it, that says I love not you.

Bene. Will you not eat your word?

Bene. With no sauce that can be devised to it:

I protest I love thee.

Bene. Why then, God forgive me!

Bene. What offence, sweet Beatrice?

1 i. e. raise to the highest pitch.

2 Upon the occasion of his words she died: his words
were the cause of her death.

3 The liver was anciently supposed to be the seat of love.

4 Intimacy.

5 This is one of Shakspeare's subtle observations
upon life. Men, overpowered with distress, eagerly
listen to the first offers of relief, close with every scheme,
and believe every promise. He that has no longer any
confidence in himself is glad to repose his trust in any
other that will undertake to guide him.

6 i. e. 'I am in reality absent, for my heart is gone
from you, I remain in person before you.'

7 So, in K. Henry VIII.: 'He's a traitor to the height?
In principi vitium stetit.—JUV. i. 149.

Bene. You have staid me in a happy hour; I was
about to protest, I loved you.

Bene. And do it with all thy heart.

Bene. I love you with so much of my heart, that
none is left to protest.

Bene. Come, bid me do any thing for thee.

Bene. Kill Claudio.

Bene. Ha! not for the wide world.

Bene. You kill me to deny it: Farewell.

Bene. Tarry, sweet Beatrice.

Bene. I am gone, though I am here:—There is
no love in you:—Nay, I pray you, let me go.

Bene. Beatrice.—

Bene. In faith, I will go.

Bene. We'll be friends first.

Bene. You dare easier be friends with me, than
fight with mine enemy.

Bene. Is Claudio thine enemy?

Bene. Is he not approved in the height a villain,⁶
that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kins-
woman?—O, that I were a man!—What! bear her
in hand⁷ until they come to take hands; and then
with public affection, uncovered slander, unmiti-
gated rancour,—O God, that I were a man! I
would eat his heart in the market-place.

Bene. Hear me, Beatrice;—

Bene. Talk with a man out at a window?—a pro-
per saying.

Bene. Nay, but, Beatrice;—

Bene. Sweet Hero!—she is wronged, she is slan-
dered, she is undone.

Bene. Beat—

Bene. Princes, and counties!¹⁹ Surely a princely
testimony, a goodly count-confect;¹⁰ a sweet gal-
lant, surely! O that I were a man for his sake! or
that I had any friend would be a man for my sake! But
manhood is melted into courtesies;¹¹ valour into
compliment, and men are only turned into tongue,
and trim;¹² ones too: he is now as valiant as Her-
cules, that only tells a lie, and swears it:—I can-
not be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a
woman with grieving.

Bene. Tarry, good Beatrice: By this hand I love
thee.

Bene. Use it for my love some other way than
swearing by it.

Bene. Think you in your soul the count Claudio
hath wronged Hero?

Bene. Yea, as sure as I have a thought, or a soul.

Bene. Enough, I am engaged, I will challenge
him; I will kiss your hand, and so leave you: By
this hand Claudio shall render me a dear account:
As you hear of me, so think of me. Go; comfort
your cousin; I must say she is dead; and so fare-
well.

[Exeunt.

### SCENE II. A Prison. Enter DOGBERRY, VEGES,¹³ and Sexton, in gowns: and the Watch, with CONRADE and BORACHIO.

Dogb. Is our whole disassembly appeared?

Verg. O, a stool and a cushion for the sexton!

Sexton. Which be the malefactors?

Dogb. Marry, that am I and my partner.

Verg. Nay, that's certain; we have the exhibi-
tion to examine.¹⁴

Sexton. But which are the offenders that are to
be examined? let them come before master con-
stable.

Dogb. Yea, marry, let them come before me.—
What is your name, friend?

8 Delude her with false expectations.

9 Countie was the ancient term for a *count* or *earl*.

10 A spurious nobleman made out of sugar.

11 Ceremonies.

12 Trim seems here to signify *apt*, *fair spoken*.
*Tongue* used in the singular, and *trim ones* in the plural,
is a mode of construction not uncommon in Shakspeare.

13 Throughout this scene the names of Kenpe and
Cawley, two celebrated actors of the time, are put for
Dogberry and Verges in the old editions.

14 This is a blunder of the constable's, for 'examination to exhibit.' In the last scene of the third act Leonato says: 'Take their examination yourself and bring it me.'

166

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT V.

If it should give your age such cause of fear;

In faith, my hand meant nothing to my sword.

Leon. Tush, tush, man, never fleer and jest at me:
I speak not like a dotard, nor a fool;

As, under privilege of age, to brag

What I have done being young, or what would do,

Were I not old: Know, Claudio, to thy head,
Thou hast so wrong'd mine innocent child and me,
That I am fore'd to lay my reverence by;
And, with grey hairs, and bruise of many days,

Do challenge thee to trial of a man.

I say, thou hast belied mine innocent child;

Thy slander hath gone through and through her
heart,

And she lies buried with her ancestors:

O! in a tomb where never scandal slept,

Save this of her's fram'd by thy villany.

Claud. My villany!

Leon. Thine, Claudio; thine I say,

D. Pedro. You say not right, old man.

Leon. My lord, my lord.

I'll prove it on his body, if he dare;

Despite his nice fence, and his active practice,¹

His May of youth, and bloom of lustyhood.

Claud. Away, I will not have to do with you.

Leon. Canst thou so daff² me? Thou hast kill'd
my child;

If thou kill'st me, boy, thou shallt kill a man.

Ant. He shall kill two of us, and men indeed:

But that's no matter; let him kill one first;—

Win me and wear me,—let him answer me,—

Come, follow me, boy; come, boy, follow me:³

Sir boy, I'll whip you from your foining⁴ fence;

Nay, as I am a gentleman, I will.

Leon. Brother,—

Ant. Content yourself: God knows, I lov'd my
niece;

And she is dead, slander'd to death by villains;

That dare as well answer a man, indeed,

As I dare take a serpent by the tongue;

Boys, apes, braggarts, jacks, milksops!—

Leon. Brother Antony,—

Ant. Hold you content; What, man! I know
them, yea,

And what they weigh, even to the utmost scruple:

Scambling,⁵ out-facing, fashion-mong'ring boys,

That lie, and cog, and flout, deprave and slander,
Go antickly, and show outward hideousness,⁶

And speak off half a dozen dangerous words,

How they might hurt their enemies, if they durst,

And this is all.

Leon. But, brother Antony,—

Ant. Come, 'tis no matter;

Do not you meddle, let me deal in this.

D. Pedro. Gentlemen both, we will not wake
your patience.

My heart is sorry for your daughter's death;

But, on my honour, she was charg'd with nothing

But what was true, and very full of proof.

Leon. My lord, my lord,—

D. Pedro. I will not hear you.

Leon. No?

Come, brother, away:—I will be heard;—

Ant. And shall,

Or some of us will smart for it.

[Exeunt LEONATO and ANTONIO.

Enter BENEDICK.

D. Pedro. See, see; here comes the man we
went to seek.

1 Skill in fencing.

2 This is only a corrupt form of *doff*, to do off or put off.

3 The folio reads:—

—Come, *sir* boy, come follow me.

4 Thrusting.

5 *Scambling* appears to have been much the same as *scrambling*; shifting or shuffling.

6 i. e. what in King Henry V. Act iii. Sc. 6, is called—‘*a horrid suit* of the camp.”

7 i. e. rouse, stir up, convert your patience into anger, by remaining longer in your presence.

8 ‘I will bid thee draw thy sword, as we bid the min-

Claud. Now, signior! what news?

Bene. Good day, my lord.

D. Pedro. Welcome, signior! You are almost
come to part almost a fray.

Claud. We had like to have had our two noses
snapped off with two old men without teeth.

D. Pedro. Leonato and his brother: What think'st
thou? Had we fought, I doubt, we should have been
too young for them.

Bene. In a false quarrel there is no true valour.
I came to seek you both.

Claud. We have been up and down to seek thee;
for we are high-proof melancholy, and would fain
have it beaten away: Wilt thou use thy wit?

Bene. It is in my scabbard; Shall I draw it?

D. Pedro. Dost thou wear thy wit by thy side?

Claud. Never any did so, though very many have
been beside their wit.—I will bid thee draw, as we do
the minstrels; draw, to pleasure us.⁸

D. Pedro. As I am an honest man, he looks
pale:—Art thou sick, or angry?

Claud. What! courage, man! What though care
killed a cat, thou hast mettle enough in thee to kill
care.

Bene. Sir, I shall meet your wit in the career, an
you charge it against me:—I pray you, choose
another subject.

Claud. Nay, then give him another staff; this
last was broke cross.⁹

D. Pedro. By this light, he changes more and
more; I think, he be angry indeed.

Claud. If he be, he knows how to turn his girdle.¹⁰

Bene. Shall I speak a word in your ear?

Claud. God bless me from a challenge!

Bene. You are a villain;—I jest not;—I will
make it good how you dare, with what you dare, and
when you dare:—Do me right, or I will protest
your cowardice. You have killed a sweet lady, and
her death shall fall heavy on you: Let me hear
from you.

Claud. Well, I will meet you, so I may have good
cheer.

D. Pedro. What, a feast? a feast?

Claud. I'faith, I thank him; he hath bid¹¹ me to
a calf's head and a capon; the which if I do not
carve most curiously, say, my knife's naught.—
Shall I not find a woodcock¹² too?

Bene. Sir, your wit ambles well; it goes easily.

D. Pedro. I'll tell thee how Beatrice praised thy
wit the other day: I said thou hadst a fine wit:
True, says she, a fine little one: No, said I, a great
wit; Right, says she, a great gross one: Nay, said I,
a good wit: Just; said she, it hurts nobody: Nay,
said I, the gentleman is wise; Certain, said she,
a wise gentleman.¹³ Nay, said I, he hath the tongues:
That I believe, said she, for he swore a thing to me
on Monday night, which he foresore on Tuesday
morning; there's a double tongue; there's two tongues.
Thus, did she, an hour together, transshape thy
particular virtues; yet, at last, he concluded with
a sigh, thou wast the properest man in Italy.

Claud. For the which she wept heartily, and
said, she cared not.

D. Pedro. Yea, that she did; but yet, for all
that, and if she did not hate him deadly, she would
love him dearly: the old man's daughter told us all.

strels draw the bows of their fiddles, merely to please
us.⁹

9 The allusion is to tilting. See note, As You Like
It, Act iii. Sc. 4.

10 There is a proverbial phrase, 'If he be angry let
him turn the buckle of his girdle.' Mr. Holt White says,
'Large belts were worn with the buckle before, but for
wrestling the buckle was turned behind, to give the ad-
versary a fairer grasp at the girdle. To turn the buckle
behind was therefore a challenge.'

11 Invited.

12 A woodcock, being supposed to have no brains,
was a common phrase for a foolish fellow. It means
here one caught in a springe or trap, alluding to the plot
against Benedick.

13 *Wise gentleman* was probably used ironically for
a silly fellow; as we still say a *wise-acre*.

SCENE I.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

167

*Claud.* All, all; and moreover, God saw him when he was hid in the garden.

*D. Pedro.* But when shall we set the savage bull's horns on the sensible Benedick's head?

*Claud.* Yea, and text underneath, Here dwells Benedick the married man?

*Bene.* Fare you well, boy; you know my mind; I will leave you now to your gossip-like humour; you break jests as braggars do their blades, which, God be thanked, hurt you not. 'My lord, for your many courtesies I thank you: I must discontinue your company: your brother, the bastard, is fled from Messina: you have, among you, killed a sweet and innocent lady: For my lord 'Lack-beard, there, he and I shall meet; and till then, peace be with him.

[Exit BENEDICK.

*D. Pedro.* He is in earnest.

*Claud.* In most profound earnest; And I'll warrant you, for the love of Beatrice.

*D. Pedro.* And hath challenged thee?

*Claud.* Most sincerely.

*D. Pedro.* What a pretty thing man is, when he goes in his doublet and hose, and leaves off his wit!

*Claud.* He is then a giant to an ape; but then is an ape a doctor to such a man.

*D. Pedro.* But, soft you, let be;² pluck up my heart, and be sad!³ Did he not say, my brother was fled.

*Enter DOGBERRY, VERGES, and the Watch, with CONRADE and BORACHIO.*

*Dogb.* Come, you, sir; if justice cannot tame you, she shall ne'er weigh more reasons in her balance: nay, and be a cursing hypocrite once, you must be looked to.

*D. Pedro.* How now, two of my brother's men bound! Borachio, one!

*Claud.* Hearnken after their offence, my lord!

*D. Pedro.* Officers, what offence have these men done?

*Dogb.* Marry, sir, they have committed false report; moreover, they have spoken untruths; secondly, they are slanders: sixth and lastly, they have belied a lady; thirdly, they have veried unjust things; and, to conclude, they are lying knaves.

*D. Pedro.* First, I ask thee what they have done; thirdly, I ask thee what their offence; sixth and lastly, why they are committed; and, to conclude, what you lay to their charge?

*Claud.* Rightly reasoned, and in his own division; and, by my troth, there's one meaning well suited.⁴

*D. Pedro.* Whom have you offended, masters, that you are thus bound to your answer? this learned constable is too cunning to be understood: What's your offence?

*Bora.* Sweet prince, let me go no further to mine answer; do you hear me, and let this count kill me. I have deceived even your very eyes: what your wisdoms could not discover, these shallow fools have brought to light; who, in the night, overheard me confessing to this man, how Don John, your brother, incensed⁵ me to slander the lady Hero; how you were brought into the orchard, and saw me court Margaret in Hero's garment; how you disgraced her, when you should marry her: my vilany they have upon record; which I had rather seal with my death, than repeat over to my shame: the lady is dead upon mine and my master's false accusation; and, briefly, I desire nothing but the reward of a villain.

1 These words are probably meant to express what Rosaline, in As You Like It, calls the 'careless desolation' of a lover.

2 The old copies read 'let me be,' the emendation is Malone's. Let be appears here to signify hold, rest there. It has the same signification in Saint Matthew, ch. xxvii. v. 49.

3 i. e. 'rouse thyself my heart and be prepared for serious consequences.'

4 That is, one meaning put into many different dresses; the Prince having asked the same question in four modes of speech.

*D. Pedro.* Runs not this speech like iron through your blood?

*Claud.* I have drunk poison, whiles he utter'd it.

*D. Pedro.* But did my brother set thee on to this?

*Bora.* Yea, and paid me richly for the practice of it.

*D. Pedro.* He is compos'd and fram'd of treachery:—

And fled he is upon this villany.

*Claud.* Sweet Hero! now thy image doth appear in the rare semblance that I loved it first.

*Dogb.* Come, bring away the plaintiffs; by this time our Sexton hath reformed signior Leonato of the matter: And masters, do not forget to specify, when time and place shall serve, that I am an ass.

*Verg.* Here, here comes master signior Leonato, and the Sexton too.

*Re-enter LEONATO and ANTONIO, with the Sexton.*

*Leon.* Which is the villain? Let me see his eyes; That when I note another man like him, I may avoid him: Which of these is he?

*Bora.* If you would know your wronger, look on me.

*Leon.* Art thou the slave, that with thy breath hast kill'd

Mine innocent child?

*Bora.*

Yea, even I alone.

*Leon.* No, not so, villain; thou bely'st thyself; Here stand a pair of honourable men,

A third is fled, that had a hand in it:—

I thank you, princes, for my daughter's death;

Record it with your high and worthy deeds;

'Twas bravely done, if you bethink you of it.

*Claud.* You know not how to pray your patience, Yet I must speak: Choose your revenge yourself; Impose⁶ me to what penance your invention

Can lay upon my sin: yet sinn'd I not,

But in mistaking.

*D. Pedro.*

By my soul, nor I;

And yet, to satisfy this good old man,

I would bend under any heavy weight That he'll enjoin me to.

*Leon.* I cannot bid you bid my daughter live, That were impossible; but, I pray you both, Possess⁷ the people in Messina here

How innocent she died; and, if your love Can labour aught in sad invention,

Hang her an epitaph upon her tomb,⁸

And sing it to her bones; sing it to-night:—

To-morrow morning come you to my house;

And since you could not be my son-in-law,

Be yet my nephew: my brother hath a daughter

Almost the copy of my child that's dead,

And she alone is heir to both of us;⁹

Give her the right you should have given her cousin, And so dies my revenge.

*Claud.*

O, noble sir,

Your over-kindness doth wring tears from me!

I do embrace your offer; and dispose for henceforth of poor Claudio.

*Leon.* To-morrow then I will expect your coming;

To-night I take my leave.—This naughty man

Shall face to face be brought to Margaret,

Who, I believe, was pack'd¹⁰ in all this wrong,

Hir'd to it by your brother.

*Bora.*

No, by my soul, she was not;

Nor knew not what she did, when she spoke to me;

But always hath been just and virtuous,

In any thing that I do know by her.

5 Incited, instigated.

6 i. e. 'inflict upon me whatever penance, &c.'

7 To possess anciently signified to inform, to make acquainted with. So in the Merchant of Venice:

8 I have possess'd your grace of what I purpose.

9 It was the custom among Catholics to attach, upon or near the tomb of celebrated persons, a written inscription either in prose or verse generally in praise of the deceased.

10 Yet Shakspeare makes Leonato say to Antonio, Act i. Sc. 5, 'How now, brother; where is my cousin your son,' &c.

10 i. e. combined; an accomplice.

163

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

ACT V.

Dogb. Moreover, sir (which, indeed, is not under white and black,) this plaintiff here, the offender, did call me ass: I beseech you, let it be remembered in his punishment: And also, the watch heard them talk of one Deformed: they say, he wears a key in his ear, and a lock hanging by it;¹ and borrows money in God's name; the which he hath used so long, and never paid, that now men grow hard-hearted, and will lend nothing for God's sake: Pray you, examine him upon that point.

Leon. I thank thee for thy care and honest pains.

Dogb. Your worship speaks like a most thankful and reverend youth: and I praise God for you.

Leon. There's for thy pains.

Dogb. God save the foundation.²

Leon. Go, I discharge thee of thy prisoner, and I thank thee.

Dogb. I leave an errant knave with your worship; which, I beseech your worship, to correct yourself, for the example of others. God keep your worship; I wish your worship well; God restore you to health: I humbly give you leave to depart; and if a merry meeting may be wished, God prohibit it.—Come, neighbour.

[Exeunt DOGBERRY, VERGES, and Watch.

Leon. Until to-morrow morning, lords, farewell.

Ant. Farewell, my lords; we look for you to-morrow.

D. Pedro. We will not fail.

Claud.

To-night I'll mourn with Hero.

[Exeunt DON PEDRO and CLAUDIO.

Leon. Bring you these fellows on; we'll talk with Margaret,

How her acquaintance grew with this lewd³ fellow.

[Exeunt.

### SCENE II. Leonato's Garden. Enter BENEDICK and MARGARET, meeting.

Bene. Pray thee, sweet mistress Margaret, deserve well at my hands, by helping me to the speech of Beatrice.

Marg. Will you then write me a sonnet in praise of my beauty?

Bene. In so high a style, Margaret, that no man living shall come over it; for, in most comely truth, thou deservest it.

Marg. To have no man come over me? why, shall I always keep below stairs?⁴

Bene. Thy wit is as quick as the greyhound's mouth, it catches.

Marg. And your's as blunt as the fencer's foils, which hit, but hurt not.

Bene. A most manly wit, Margaret, it will not hurt a woman; and so, I pray thee, call Beatrice: I give thee the bucklers.⁵

Marg. Give us the swords, we have bucklers of our own.

Bene. If you use them, Margaret, you must put in the pickes with a vice; and they are dangerous weapons for maids.

Marg. Well, I will call Beatrice to you, who, I think hath legs.

[Exit MARGARET.

Bene. And therefore will come.

The god of love,

That sits above,

And knows me, and knows me,

How pitiful I deserve,—

[Singing.

I mean, in singing; but in loving,—Leander the

1 It was one of the fantastic fashions of Shakspeare's time to wear a long hanging *lock of hair* dangling by the ear; it is often mentioned by coterporary writers, and may be observed in some ancient portraits. The humour of this passage is in Dogberry's supposing the *lock* to have a key to it.

2 A phrase used by those who received alms at the gates of religious houses. Dogberry probably designed to say, 'God save the founder.'

3 Here *lewd* has not the common meaning; nor do I think it can be used in the more uncommon sense of *ignorant*; but rather means *knavish*, *ungracious*, *naughty*, which are the synonyms used with it in explaining the latin *pravus* in dictionaries of the sixteenth century.

good swimmer, Troilus the first employer of panders, and a whole book full of these quondam carbontongers, whose names yet run smoothly in the even road of a blank verse, why, they were never so truly turned over and over as my poor self, in love: Marry, I cannot show it in rhyme; I have tried; I can find out no rhyme to *lady but baby*, an innocent rhyme; for *scarn*, *horn*, a hard rhyme; for *school*, *fool*, a babbling rhyme; very ominous endings: No, I was not born under a rhyming planet, nor I cannot woo in festival terms.⁶—

Enter BEATRICE.

Sweet Beatrice, would'st thou come when I called thee?

Beat. Yea, signior, and depart when you bid me.

Bene. O, stay but till then!

Beat. Then, is spoken; fare you well now,— and yet, ere I go, let me go with that I came for, which is, with knowing what hath passed between you and Claudio.

Bene. Only foul words; and thereupon I will kiss thee.

Beat. Foul words is but foul wind, and foul wind is but foul breath, and foul breath is noisome; therefore I will depart unkissed.

Bene. Thou hast frighted the word out of his right sense, so forcible is thy wit: But, I must tell thee plainly, Claudio undergoes my challenge; and either I must shortly hear from him, or I will subscribe him a coward. And, I pray thee now, tell me, for which of my bad parts didst thou first fall in love with me?

Beat. For them all together; which maintained so politic a state of evil, that they will not admit any good part to intermingle with them. But for which of my good parts did you first suffer love for me?

Bene. Suffer love; a good epithet! I do suffer love, indeed, for I love thee against my will.

Beat. In spite of your heart, I think; alas! poor heart! If you spite it for my sake, I will spite it for yours; for I will never love that which my friend hates.

Bene. Thou and I are too wise to woo peaceably.

Beat. It appears not in this confession: there's not one wise man among twenty that will praise himself.

Bene. An old, an old instance, Beatrice, that lived in the time of good neighbours:⁸ if a man do not erect in this age his own tomb ere he dies, he shall live no longer in his own tomb, than the bell rings, and the widow weeps.

Beat. And how long is that, think you?

Bene. Question ¹²—Why, an hour in clamour, and a quarter in rheum: Therefore it is most ex-pedient for the wise (if Don Worm, his conscience, find no impediments to the contrary,) to be the trumet of his own virtues, as I am to myself: So much for praising myself, (who, I myself will hear witness, is praise-worthy;) and now tell me, How doth your cousin?

Beat. Very ill.

Bene. And how do you?

Beat. Very ill too,

Bene. Serve God, love me, and mend: there will I leave you too, for here comes one in haste.

Enter URSULA.

Urs. Madam, you must come to your uncle;

4 Theobald proposed to read, *above stairs*: and the sense of the passage seems to require some such alteration: perhaps a word has been lost, and we may read 'why, shall I always keep them below stairs?' Of this passage Dr. Johnson says, 'I suppose every reader will find the meaning.'

5 i. e. 'I yield.'

6 i. e. 'in choice phraseology.'

7 Is under challenge, or now stands challenged, by me.

8 i. e. 'when men were not envious, but every one gave another his due.'

9 This phrase appears to be equivalent to—'You ask a question indeed?'—or 'that is the question?'

["## SCENE IV.", "## MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.", "169", "yonder's old coil¹ at home: it is proved, my lady\nHero hath been falsely accused, the Prince and\nClaudio mightily abused; and Don John is the\nauthor of all, who is fled and gone: Will you come\npresently?", "Beat. Will you go hear this news, signior?", "Bene. I will live in thy heart, die in thy lap, and\nbe buried in thy eyes; and moreover, I will go with\nthee to thy uncle's.\n[Exeunt.", "### SCENE III. The Inside of a Church. Enter\nDON PEDRO, CLAUDIO, and Attendants, with\nMusic, and Tapers.", "Claud. Is this the monument of Leonato?", "Atten. It is, my lord.", "Claud. [Reads from a scrol]", "Done to death² by slanderous tongues", "Was the Hero that here lies :⁴", "Death, in the guerdon⁵ of her wrongs,", "Gives her fame which never dies:", "So the life, that died with shame,", "Lives in death with glorious fame.", "Hang thou there upon the tomb, [affixing it.", "Praising when I am dumb.—", "Now, music, sound, and sing your solemn hymn.", "### SONG.", "Pardon, Goddess of the night,", "Those that slew thy virgin knight :⁴", "For the which, with songs of woe,", "Round about her tomb they go.", "Midnight, assist our moan;", "Help us to sigh and groan,", "Heavily, heavily.", "Graves yawn and yield your dead,", "Till death be utterèd,⁵", "Heavily, heavily.", "Claud. Now, unto thy bones good night!", "Yearly will I do this rite.", "D. Pedro. Good morrow, masters; put your\ntorches out:", "The wolves have prey'd; and look, the gentle day,", "Before the wheels of Phœbus, round about", "Dapples the drowsy east with spots of gray:", "Thanks to you all, and leave us; fare you well.", "Claud. Good morrow, masters; each his several way.", "D. Pedro. Come, let us hence, and put on other\nweeds;", "And then to Leonato's we will go.", "Claud. And, Hymen, now with luckier issue speeds,", "Than this, for whom we render'd up this woe!", "[Exeunt.", "### SCENE IV. A Room in Leonato's House. Enter\nLEONATO, ANTONIO, BENEDICK, BEATRICE,\nURSULA, Friar, and HERO.", "Friar. Did not you tell you she was innocent?", "Leon. So are the prince and Claudio, who accused her", "Upon the error that you heard debated:", "But Margaret was in some fault for this;", "Although against her will, as it appears", "In the true course of all the question.", "Ant. Well, I am glad that all things sort so well.", "Bene. And so am I, being else by faith enforced", "To call young Claudio to a reckoning for it.", "Leon Well, daughter, and you gentlewoman all,\nWithdraw into a chamber by yourselves;", "And when I send for you come hither mask'd;", "The prince and Claudio promis'd by this hour", "To visit me:—You know your office, brother;", "You must be father to your brother's daughter,", "And give her to young Claudio.", "[Exeunt Ladies.", "1 Old coil is great or abundant bustle. Old was a common augmentative in ancient familiar language.", "2 This phrase occurs frequently in writers of Shakespeare's time, it appears to be derived from the French phrase, faire mourir. See note on K. Henry VI. Part III. Act ii. Sc. 1.", "Ant. Which I will do with confirm'd countenance.", "Bene. Friar, I must entreat your pains I think.", "Friar. To do what, signior?", "Bene. To bind me, or undo me, one of them.—", "Signior Leonato, truth it is, good signior,", "Your niece regards me with an eye of favour.", "Leon. That eye my daughter lent her: 'Tis most\ntrue.", "Bene. And I do with an eye of love requite her.", "Leon. The sight whereof, I think, you had from me,\nFrom Claudio and the prince: But what's your will?", "Bene. Your answer, sir, is enigmatical:", "May stand with ours, this day to be conjoin'd", "In the estate of honourable marriage;—", "In which, good friar, I shall desire your help.", "Leon. My heart is with your liking.", "Friar. And my help. And here comes the prince, and Claudio.", "Enter DON PEDRO and CLAUDIO, with Attendants.", "D. Pedro. Good morrow to this fair assembly.", "Leon. Good morrow, prince; good morrow,\nClaudio.", "We here attend you; are you yet determin'd", "To-day to marry with my brother's daughter?", "Claud. I'll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope.", "Leon. Call her forth, brother, here's the friar ready.", "[Exit ANTONIO.", "D. Pedro. Good morrow, Benedick: Why, what's the matter,", "That you have such a February face,", "So full of frost, of rain, and cloudlessness?", "Claud. I think, he thinks upon the savage bull.⁶", "Tush, fear not, man, we'll tip thy horns with gold.", "And all Europa shall rejoice at thee;", "As once Europa did at lusty Jove,", "When he would play the noble beast in love.", "Bene. Bull Jove, sir, had an amiable low:", "And some such strange bull leap'd your father's cow,", "And got a calf in that same noble feat,", "Much like to you, for you have just his bleat.", "Re-enter ANTONIO, with the Ladies masked.", "Claud. For this I owe you: here comes other\nreckonings.", "Which is the lady I must seize upon?", "Ant. This same is she, and I do give you her.", "Claud. Why, then she's mine: Sweet, let me\nsee your face.", "Leon. No, that you shall not till you take her hand", "Before this friar, and swear to marry her.", "Claud. Give me your hand before this holy friar;", "I am your husband if you like of me.", "Hero. And when I lived, I was your other wife:", "[Unmasking.", "And when you loved, you were my other husband.", "Claud. Another Hero!", "Hero. Nothing certainer:", "One Hero died defil'd; but I do live,", "And surely as I live I am a maid.", "D. Pedro. The former Hero! Hero that is dead!", "Leon. She died, my lord, but whiles her slander\nlived.", "Friar. All this amazement can I qualify;", "When, after that the holy rites are ended,", "I'll tell you largely of fair Hero's death:", "Mean time, let wonder seem familiar,", "And to the chapel let us presently.", "Bene. Soft and fair, Friar.—Which is Beatrice?", "Beat. I answer to that name;", "[Unmasking]", "What is your will?", "Bene. Do not you love me?", "Beat. Why, no, no more than reason.", "Bene. Why, then your uncle, and the prince, and\nClaudio,", "3 Reward.", "4 Diana's knight, or virgin knight, was the common\npoetical appellation of virgins in Shakespeare's time.", {"bbox": [45

170

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT.

Have been deceived; for they swore you did.

Beat. Do not you love me?

Bene. 'Troth, no, no more than reason.'

Beat. Why, then my cousin, Margaret, and Ursula,

Are much deceiv'd; for they did swear you did.

Bene. They swore that you were almost sick for me.

Beat. They swore that you were well-nigh dead for me.

Bene. 'Tis no such matter:—Then you do not love me?

Beat. No, truly, but in friendly recompense.

Leon. Come, cousin, I am sure you love the gentleman.

Claud. And I'll be sworn upon't, that he loves her;

For here's a paper, written in his hand,
A halting sonnet of his own pure brain,
Fashion'd to Beatrice.

Hero

And here's another,
Writ in my cousin's hand, stolen from her pocket,
Containing her affection unto Benedick.

Bene. A miracle! here's our own hands against our hearts!—Come, I will have thee; but, by this light, I take thee for pity.

Beat. I would not deny you; but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion; and, partly, to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.

Bene. Peace, I will stop your mouth. [Kissing her,

D. Pedro. How dost thou, Benedick that the married man?

Bene. I'll tell thee what, prince; a college of wit-crackers cannot flout me out of my humour: Dost thou think, I care for a satire, or an epigram? No: if a man will be beaten with brains, he shall wear nothing handsome about him: In brief, since I do propose to marry, I will think nothing to any purpose that the world can say against it; and therefore never flout at me for what I have said against it; for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion.—For thy part, Claudio, I did think to have beaten thee; but in that thou art like to be my kinsman, live unbruised and love my cousin.

Claud. I had well hoped, thou wouldst have de-

nied Beatrice, that I might have cudgelled thee out of thy single life, to make thee a double dealer; which, out of question, thou wilt be, if my cousin do not look exceeding narrowly to thee.

Bene. Come, come, we are friends:—let's have a dance ere we are married, that we may lighten our own hearts, and our wives' heels.

Leon. We'll have dancing afterwards.

Bene. First o'my word: therefore play, music—Prince, thou art sad; get thee a wife, get thee a wife: there is no staff more reverend than one tipped with horn.²

Enter a Messenger.

Mess. My lord, your brother John is ta'en in flight,
And brought with armed men back to Messina.

Bene. Think not on him till to-morrow; I'll devote thee brave punishments for him.—Strike up, pipers.

[Dance. Exeunt.]

THIS play may be justly said to contain two of the most sprightly characters that Shakspeare ever drew. The wit, the humourist, the gentleman, and the soldier are combined in Benedick. It is to be lamented, indeed, that the first and most splendid of these distinctions is disgraced by unnecessary profaneness; for the goodness of his heart is hardly sufficient to alone for the licence of his tongue. The too sarcastic levity, which flashes out in the conversation of Beatrice, may be excused on account of the steadfastness and friendship so apparent in her behaviour, when she urges her lover to risk his life by a challenge to Claudio. In the conduct of the fable, however, there is an imperfection similar to that which Dr. Johnson has pointed out in *The Merry Wives of Windsor* :—the second contrivance is less ingenious than the first:—or, to speak more plainly, the same incident is become stale by repetition. I wish some other method had been found to entrap Beatrice, than that very one which before had been successfully practised on Benedick.³

Much. Ado about Nothing, (as I understand from one of Mr. Vertue's MSS.) formerly passed under the title of Benedick and Beatrix. Heming the player received, on the 20th of May, 1618, the sum of forty pounds, and twenty pounds more as his Majesty's gratuity, for exhibiting six plays at Hampton Court, among which was this comedy.
STEEVENS.

1 Because.

2 Steevens, Malone, and Reed, conceive that there is an allusion here to the staff used in the ancient trial by wager of battle; but Mr. Douce thinks it is more probable the walking stick or staff of elderly persons was intended, such sticks were often tipped or headed with horn, sometimes crosswise, in imitation of the crutched sticks or potences of the friars, which were borrowed from the celebrated tau of St. Anthony.

3 Mr. Pye thus answers the objection of Steevens. 'The intention of the poet was to show that persons of either sex might be made in love with each other by supposing themselves beloved, though they were before enemies; and how he could have done this by any other means I do not know. He wanted to show the sexes were alike in this case, and to have employed different motives would have counteracted his own design.'

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.

WE may presume the plot of this play to have been the invention of Shakspeare, as the diligence of his commentators has failed to trace the sources from whence it is derived. Steevens says that the hint for it was probably received from Chaucer's Knight's Tale.

'In the Midsummer Night's Dream,' says Schlegel, 'there flows a luxuriant vein of the boldest and most fantastical invention; the most extraordinary combination of the most dissimilar ingredients seems to have arisen without effort by some ingenious and lucky accident, and the colours are of such clear transparency that we think that the whole of the variegated fabric may be blown away with a breath. The fairy world here described resembles those elegant pieces of Arabesque, where little Genii, with butterfly wings, rise half embodied above the flower cups. Twilight, moonshine,

dew, and spring-perfumes are the element of these tender spirits; they assist nature in embedding her character; and in the embedding her flowers, and dazling insects; in the human world they merely sport in a childish and wayward manner with their beneficent or noxious influences. Their most violent rage dissolves in good-natured railway; their passions, stripped of all earthly matter, are merely an ideal dream. To correspond with this, the loves of mortals are painted as a poetical enchantment, which, by a contrary enchantment, may be immediately suspended, and then renewed again. The different parts of the plot; the wedding of Theseus, the disagreement of Oberon and Titania, the flight of the two pair of lovers, and the theatrical operations of the mechanics, are so lightly and happily interwoven, that they seem necessary to each other for

SCENE I.

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

171

the formation of a whole. Oberon is desirous of relieving the lovers from their perplexities, and greatly adds to them through the misapprehension of his servant, till he at last comes to the aid of their fruitless amorous pain, their inconstancy and jealousy, and restores fidelity to its old rights. The extremes of fanciful and vulgar are united when the enchanted Titania awakes and falls in love with a coarse mechanic with an ass's head, who represents, or rather disfigures the part of a tragical lover. The droll wonder of the transmutation of Bottom is merely the transmutation of a metaphor in its literal sense; but, in his behaviour during the tender homage of the Fairy Queen, we have a most amusing proof how much the consciousness of such a head-dress heightens the effect of his usual folly. Theseus and

Hippolita are, as it were, a splendid frame for the picture; they take no part in the action, but appear with a stately pomp. The discourse of the hero and his Amazon, as they course through the forest with their noisy hunting train, works upon the imagination like the fresh breath of morning, before which the shapes of night disappear.*

This is a production of the youthful and vigourous imagination of the poet. Malone places the date of its composition in 1594. There are two quarto editions, both printed in 1600: one by Thomas Fisher, the other by James Roberts.

* Lectures on Dramatic Literature, vol. ii. p. 176.

## PERSONS REPRESENTED.

THESEUS, Duke of Athens.
EGEUS, Father to Hermia.

LYSANDER, in love with Hermia.
DEMETRIUS, Master of the Revels to Theseus.

QUINCE, the Carpenter.

SNUG, the Joiner.

BOTTOM, the Weaver.

FLUTE the Bellows-mender.

SNOUT, the Tinker.

STARVELING, the Tailor.

HIPPOLYTIA, Queen of the Amazons, betrothed to Theseus.

HERMIA, Daughter of Egeus, in love with Lysander.

HELENA, in love with Demetrius.

OBERON, King of the Fairies.

TITANIA, Queen of the Fairies.

PUCK, or ROBIN-GOODFELLOW, a Fairy.

PEAS-BLOSSOM,

COBWEB,

MOTH,

MUSTARD-SEED,

PYRAMUS,

THISEE,

WALL,

MOONSHINE.

LION.

Fairies.

Characters in the Interlude performed by the Clowns.

Other Fairies attending their King and Queen.
Attendants on Theseus and Hippolyta.

SCENE, Athens, and a Wood not far from it.

## ACT I.

### SCENE I. Athens. A Room in the Palace of Theseus. Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTIA, PHILOSTRATE, and ATTENDANTS.

Theseus.

Now, fair Hippolyta, our nuptial hour

Draws on apace; four happy days bring in

Another moon: but, oh, methinks how slow
This old moon wanes! she lingers my desires,
Like to a step-dame, or a dowager,

Long withering out a young man's revenue.

Hep. Four days will quickly steep themselves in
nights.

Four nights will quickly dream away the time;

And then the moon, like to a silver bow
Now bent in heaven, shall behold the night
Of our solemnities.

The. Go, Philostrate,

Stir up the Athenian youth to merriments;

Awake the pert and nimble spirit of birth;

Turn melancholy forth to funerals,

The pale companion is not for our pomp.—

[Exit PHILOSTRATE.

Hippolyta, I woo'd thee with my sword,

And won thy love, doing thee injuries;

But I will wed thee in another key,

With pomp, with triumph,¹ and with revelling.

Enter EGEUS, HERMIA, LYSANDER, and DEMETRIUS.

Ege. Happy be Theseus, our renowned duke ! ²

The. Thanks, good Egeus: What's the news
with thee?

Ege. Full of vexation come I, with complaint

Against my child, my daughter Hermia—

Stand forth, Demetrius;—My noble lord,

This man hath my consent to marry her :—

Stand forth, Lysander;—and, my gracious duke,

This hath bewitch'd³ the bosom of my child :

Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,

And interchang'd love tokens with my child :

Thou hast by moon-light at her window sung,

With feigning voice, verses of feigning love ;

And stol'n the impression of her fantasy

With bracelets of thy hair, rings, gawds,⁴ conceits,

Knacks, trifles, nosegays, sweet-meats; messengers

Of strong prevailment in unharden'd youth :

With cunning hast thou flich'd my daughter's heart;

Turn'd her obedience, which is due to me,

To stubborn harshness:—And, my gracious duke,

Be it so she will not here before your grace

Consent to marry with Demetrius,

I heg the ancient privilege of Athens;

As she is mine, I may dispose of her :

Or to her death; according to our law,

Immediately provided in that case.⁵

The. What say you, Hermia? be advis'd, fair
maid:

To you your father should be as a god;

One that compos'd your beauties; yea, and one

To whom you are but as a form in wax,

By him imprinted, and within his power

To leave the figure, or disfigure it.

Demetrius is a worthy gentleman.

Her. So is Lysander.

The. In himself he is:

But, in this kind, wanting your father's voice,

The other must be held the worthier.

Her. I would my father look'd but with my eyes.

The. Rather your eyes must with his judgment
look.

¹ A triumph was a public show, such as a mask, pageant, procession, &c.

2 Duke, in our old language, was used for a leader or chief, as the Latin Dux.

3 The old copies read, ‘This man hath bewitched.’ The alteration was made in the second folio for the sake of the metre; but a redundant syllable at the commencement of a verse perpetually occurs in our old dramas.

4 Baubles, toys, trifles.

5 This line has a smack of legal common place. Shakspear is supposed to have been placed while a boy in an attorney's office; at least he often displays that he was well acquainted with the phraseology of lawyers.

172

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT I.

Her. I do entreat your grace to pardon me.
I know not by what power I am made bold;
Nor how it may concern my modesty,
In such a presence here, to plead my thoughts:
But I beseech your grace that I may know
The worst that may befall me in this case,
If I refuse to wed Demetrius.
The. Either to die the death, or to abjure
For ever the society of men.
Therefore, fair Hermia, question your desires,
Know of your youth, examine well your blood,
Whether, if you yield not to your father's choice,
You can endure the livery of a nun;
For aye!¹ to be in shady cloister mew'd,
To live a barren sister all your life,
Chanting faint hymns to the cold fruitless moon,
Thrice blessed they, that master so their blood,
To undergo such maiden pilgrimage:
But earthlier happy² is the rose distill'd,
Than that, which, withering on the virgin thorn,
Grows, lives, and dies, in single blessedness.
Her. So will I grow, so live, so die, my lord,
Ere I will yield my virgin patent up
Unto his lordship, whose unwished yoke
My soul consents not to give sovereignty.

The. Take time to pause: and, by the next new moon,
(The sealing-day betwixt my love and me,
For everlasting bond of fellowship,)
Upon that day either prepare to die,
For disobedience to your father's will;
Or else to wed Demetrius, as he would:
Or on Diana's altar to protest,
For aye, austerity and single life.
Dem. Relent, sweet Hermia;—And, Lysander,
yield
Thy crazed title to my certain right.

Lys. You have her father's love, Demetrius;
Let me have Hermia's: do you marry him.

Ege. Scornful Lysander! true, he hath my love,
And what is mine my love shall render him;
And she is mine; and all my right of her
I do estate unto Demetrius.

Lys. I am, my lord, as well deriv'd as he,
As well possess'd; my love is more than his;
My fortunes every way as fairly rank'd,
If not with vantage, as Demetrius';
And, which is more than all these boasts can be,
I am belov'd of beauteous Hermia:
Why should not I then prosecute my right?
Demetrius, I'll avouch it to his head,
Made love to Nedar's daughter, Helena,
And won her soul; and she, sweet lady, dotes,
Devoutly dotes, dotes in idolatry,
Upon this spotted³ and inconstant man.

The. I must confess, that I have heard so much,
And with Demetrius thought to have spoke thereof;
But, being over-full of self-affairs,
My mind did lose it. But, Demetrius, come:
And come, Egeus; you shall go with me,
I have some private schooling for you both.—
For you, fair Hermia, look you arm yourself
To fit your fancies to your father's will;
Or else the law of Athens yields you up
(Which by no means we may extenuate)
To death, or to a vow of single life.—
Come, my Hippolyta: What cheer, my love?—
Demetrius, and Egeus, go along:
I must employ you in some business
Against our nuptial; and confer with you
Of something nearly that concerns yourselves.

Ege. With duty and desire we follow you.

[Exeunt THESEUS, HIPPOLYTÆ, EGEUS,
DEMETRIUS, and Train.

Lys. How now, my love? Why is your cheek
so pale?

How chance the roses there do fade so fast?

Her. Belike, for want of rain; which I could well
Beteem⁴ them from the tempest of mine eyes.

Lys. Ah me! for aught that ever I could read,
Could ever hear by tale or history,
The course of true love never did run smooth:
But, either it was different in blood;

Her. O cross! too high to be enthralled to low!

Lys. Or else misgraff'd, in respect of years;

Her. O spite! too old to be engaged to young!

Lys. Or else it stood upon the choice of friends:

Her. O hell! to choose love by another's eye!

Lys. Or, if there were a sympathy in choice,

War, death, or sickness did lay siege to it;

Making it momentary? as a sound,

Swift as a shadow, short as any dream;

Brief as the lightning in the collied⁵ night,
That, in a spleen, unfolds both heaven and earth,
And ere a man hath power to say,—Behold!

The jaws of darkness do devour it up;

So quick bright things come to confusion.

Her. If then true lovers have been ever cross'd,
It stands as an edict in destiny:
Then let us teach our trial patience,
Because it is a customary cross;
As due to love, as thoughts, and dreams, and sighs,
Wishes, and tears, poor fancy's⁶ followers.
Lys. A good persuasion; therefore, hear me,
Hermia.

I have a widow aunt, a dowager

Of great revenue, and she hath no child:

From Athens is her house remote seven leagues;

And she respects me as her only son.

There, gentle Hermia, may I marry thee;

And to that place the sharp Athenian law
Cannot pursue us: If thou lov'st me then,

Steal forth thy father's house to-morrow night;

And in the wood, a league without the town

Where I did meet thee once with Helena,

To do observance to a morn of May,

There will I stay for thee

Her. My good Lysander!

I swear to thee, by Cupid's strongest bow;

By his best arrow with the golden head;

By the simplicity of Venus' doves;

By that which knitteth souls, and prospers loves;

And by that fire which burn'd the Carthage queen,⁷

When the false Trojan under sail was seen;

By all the vows that ever men have broke,

In number more than women ever spoke;—

In that same place thou hast appointed me,
To-morrow truly will I meet with thee.

Lys. Keep promise, love: Look, here comes
Helen.

Enter HELENA.

Her. God speed fair Helena! Whither away?

Hel. Call you me fair? that fair again unsay.

Demetrius loves your fair:⁹ O happy fair!

Your eyes are lode-stars;¹⁰ and your tongue's
sweet air

More tuneable than lark to shepherd's ear,

When wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear.

Sickness is catching; O, were favour¹¹ so!

Yours would I catch, fair Hermia, ere I go;

My ear should catch your voice, my eye your eye,

My tongue should catch your tongue's sweet me-
lody.

Were the world mine, Demetrius being bated,
The rest I'll give to be to you translated.¹²

1 Ever.

2 Earthlier happy for earthly happier, which Capel proposed to substitute.

3 As spotless is innocent, so spotted is wicked.

4 Bestow, give, afford, or deign to allow.

5 Momentary.

6 Blackened, as with smut, coal, &c.; figuratively, darkened. See Othello, Act ii. Sc. 3.

7 *Fancy is love.* So afterwards in this play:
*Fair Helena in fancy following me.*

8 Shakspeare forgot that Theseus performed his ex-
ploits before the Trojan war, and consequently long be-
fore the death of Dido.

9 *Fair for fairness, beauty.* Very common in writers of Shakspeare's age.

10 The lode-star is the leading or guiding star, that is the polar star. The magnet is for the same reason called the lode-stone.

11 Countenance, feature.

12 i. e. changed, transformed

## SCENE II.

## MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

173

O, teach me how you look; and with what art
You sway the motion of Demetrius' heart.

Her. I frown upon him, yet he loves me still.

Hel. O, that your frowns would teach my smiles
such skill!

Her. I give him curses, yet he gives me love,—

Hel. O, that my prayers could such affection
move!

Her. The more I hate, the more he follows me.

Hel. The more I love, the more he hateth me.

Her. His folly, Helena, is no fault of mine.

Hel. None, but your beauty; 'Would that fault
were mine!

Her. Take comfort; he no more shall see my
face.

Lysander and myself will fly this place.—

Before the time I did Lysander see,

Seem'd Athens as a paradise to me:

O then, what graces in my love do dwell,

That he hath turn'd a heaven unto hell!

Lys. Helen, to you our minds we will unfold:

To-morrow night when Phœbe doth behold

Her silver visage in the wat'ry glass,

Decking with liquid pearl the bladed grass

(A time that lovers' flights doth still conceal,)—
Through Athens' gates have we devis'd to steal.

Her. And in the wood, where often you and I

Upon faint primrose beds were wont to lie,

Emptying our bosoms of their counsel sweet,

There my Lysander and myself shall meet:

And thence, from Athens, turn away our eyes,

To seek new friends and stranger companies.

Farewell, Sweet playfellow; pray thou for us,

And good luck grant thee thy Demetrius!

Keep word, Lysander: we must strew our sight

From lovers' food, till morrow deep midnight.

[Exit HERM.

Lys. I will, my Hermia.—Helena, adieu:

As you on him, Demetrius dote on you!

[Exit LYSANDER.

Hel. How happy some, o'er other some can be!

Through Athens I am thought as fair as she.

But what of that? Demetrius thinks not so;

He will not know what all but he do know.

And as he errs, doting on Hermia's eyes,

So I, admiring of his qualities.

Things base and vile, holding no quantity,

Love can transpose to form and dignity.

Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind;

And therefore is winged Cupid painted blind;

Nor hath love's mind of any judgment taste;

Wings, and no eyes, figure uneuly haste :

And therefore is love said to be a child,

Because in choice he is so oft beguil'd.

As waggish boys in game¹ themselves forswear,

So the boy love is perjur'd every where:

For ere Demetrius look'd on Hermia's cyne,²

He hail'd down oaths, that he was only mine:

And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt,

So he dissolv'd, and showers of oaths did melt.

I will go tell him of fair Hermia's flight;

Then to the wood will he, to-morrow night,

Pursue her; and for this intelligence

If I have thanks, it is a dear expense :

But herein mean I to enrich my pain,

[Exit.]

### SCENE II. The same. A Room in a Cottage.—Enter SNUG, BOTTOM, FLUTE, SNOUT, QUINCE, and STARVELING.³

Quin. Is all our company here?

Bot. You were best to call them generally, man
by man, according to the scrip.

1. Sport.

2. Eyes.

3. In this scene Shakspeare takes advantage of his knowledge of the theatre, to ridicule the prejudices and competitions of the players. Bottom, who is generally acknowledged the principal actor, declares his inclination to be for a tyrant, for a part of fury, tumult, and noise, such as every young man pants to perform when he first appears upon the stage. The same Bottom, who seems bred in a tiring-room, has another histrionic passion. He is for engrossing every part, and would

Quin. Here is the scroll of every man's name,
which is thought fit, through all Athens, to play in
our interlade before the duke and duchess, on his
wedding-day at night.

Bot. First, good Peter Quince, say what the
play treats on; then read the names of the actors;
and so grow to a point.

Quin. Marry, our play is—The most lamentable comedy, and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisby.⁴

Bot. A very good piece of work, I assure you,
and a merry.—Now, good Peter Quince, call forth
your actors by the scroll: Masters, spread your-
elves.

Quin. Answer, as I call you.—Nick Bottom,
the weaver.

Bot. Ready: Name what part I am for, and
proceed.

Quin. You, Nick Bottom, are set down for Py-
ramus.

Bot. What is Pyramus? a lover, or a tyrant?

Quin. A lover, that kills himself most gallantly
for love.

Bot. That will ask some tears in the true performing of it: If I do it, let the audience look to their eyes; I will move storms, I will condole in some measure. To the rest:—Yet my chief honour is for a tyrant: I could play Ercles rarely, or a part to tear a cat in, to make all split.

"The raging rocks,
With shivering shocks, and
Shall break the locks

Of prison gates:

And Phibbus' car
Shall shine from far,

And make and mar

The foolish fates."

This was lofty!—Now name the rest of the players.
—This is Ercles' vein, a tyrant's vein; a lover is
more condoling.

Quin. Francis Flute, the bellows-mender.

Flu. Here, Peter Quince.

Quin. You must take Thisby on you.

Flu. What is Thisby? a wandering knight?

Quin. It is the lady that Pyramus must love.

Flu. Nay, faith, let me not play a woman; I
have a beard coming.

Quin. That's all one; you must play it in a
mask, and you may speak as small as you will.⁵

Bot. An I may hide my face, let me play Thisby
too: I'll speak in a monstrous little voice;—Thisne,
Thisne—Ah, Pyramus, my lover dear; thy Thisby
dear ! and lady dear !

Quin. No, no; you must play Pyramus; and,
Flute, you Thisby.

Bot. Well, proceed.

Quin. Robin Starveling, the tailor.

Star. Here, Peter Quince.

Quin. Robin Starveling, you must play Thisby's
mother.—Tom Snout, the tinker.

Snout. Here, Peter Quince.

Quin. You, Pyramus's father; myself, Thisby's
father;—Snug, the joiner, you, the lion's part :—
and, I hope, here is a play fitted.

Snug. Have you the lion's part written? pray
you, if it be, give it me, for I am slow of study.

Quin. You may do it extempore, for it is nothing
but roaring.

Bot. Let me play the lion too: I will roar, that
I will do any man's heart good to hear me; I will

exclude his inferiors from all possibility of distinction.
He is therefore desirous to play Pyramus, Thisbe, and
the Lion, at the same time.

4. Probably a burlesque upon the titles of some of our old Dramas.

5. This passage shows how the want of women on the old stage was supplied. If they had not a young man who could perform the part with a face that might pass for feminine, the character was acted in a mask, which was at that time a part of a lady's dress, and so much in use that it did not give any unusual appearance to the scene; and he that could modulate his voice to a female tone might play the woman very successfully.

174

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT II.

roar, that I will make the duke say, *Let him roar again, Let him roar again.*

*Quin.* An you should do it too terribly, you would fright the duchess and the ladies, that they would shriek; and that were enough to hang us all.

*All.* That would hang us every mother's son.

*Bot.* I grant you, friends, if that you should fright the ladies out of their wits, they would have no more discretion but to hang us: but I will aggravate my voice so, that I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove; I will roar you an?¹⁹ were any nightingale.

*Quin.* You can play no part but Pyramus: for Pyramus is a sweet-faced man; a proper man, as one shall see in a summer's day; a most lovely, gentleman-like man; therefore you must needs play Pyramus.

*Bot.* Well, I will undertake it. What beard were I best to play it in?

*Quin.* Why, what you will.

*Bot.* I will discharge it in either your straw-coloured beard, your orange-tawny beard, your purple-in-grain beard, or your French-crown-colour beard, your perfect yellow.²

*Quin.* Some of your French crowns have no hair at all, and then you will play bare-faced.³ But, masters, here are your parts: and I am to entreat you, request you, and desire you, to con them by to-morrow night; and meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town, by moon-light; there will we rehearse: for if we meet in the city, we shall be dogg'd with company, and our devices known. In the mean time I will draw a bill of properties,⁴ such as our play wants. I pray you, fail me not.

*Bot.* We will meet; and there we may rehearse more obscenely, and courageously. Take pains; be perfect, adieu.

*Quin.* At the duke's oak we meet.

*Bot.* Enough; Hold, or cut bow-strings,⁵

[Exeunt.]

## ACT II.

### SCENE I. A Wood near Athens. Enter a Fairy at one door; and PUCK at another.

*Puck.* How now, spirit! whither wander you?

*Fai.* Over hill, over dale,

Thorough bush, thorough briar,⁶

Over park, over pale,⁷

Thorough flood, thorough fire.

I do wander every where,

Swifter than the moones sphere;

And I serve the fairy queen,

To dew her orbs⁸ upon the green;

The cowslips tall her pensioners⁹ be;

1 As if.

2 It seems to have been a custom to stain or dye the beard.

3 This allusion to the *Corona Veneris*, or baldness attendant upon a particular stage of, what was then termed, the *French* disease, is too frequent in Shakespeare, and is here explained once for all.

4 Articles required in performing a play.

5 To meet *whether boestrings hold or are cut* is to meet in all events. But the origin of the phrase has not been satisfactorily explained.

6 So Drayton, in his *Nymphidia*, or Court of Fairy:

*Thorough brake, thorough briar,*

Thorough muck, thorough mire,

Thorough water, thorough fire.

7 The *orbs* here mentioned are those circles in the herbage commonly called *fairy-rings*, the cause of which is not yet certainly known.

8 The allusion is to Elizabeth's band of gentlemen *pensioners*, who were chosen from among the handomest and tallest young men of family and fortune; they were dressed in habits richly garnished with *gold lace*.

9 In the old comedy of Doctor Dodyroll, 1600, an English chanter says,

*Twas I that led you through the painted meads*

Where the light fairies danc'd upon the flowers,

*Hanging on every leaf an orient pearl.*

10 Lubber or clown. *Lob, lobcock, loobie, and lubber, all denote inactivity of body and dulness of mind.*

In their gold coats spots you see;

Those be rubies, fairy favours,

In those freckles live their savours;

I must go seek some dewdrops here,

And hang a pearl in every cowlslip's ear.⁹

Farewell, thou lob¹⁰ of spirits, I'll be gone;

Our queen and all her elves come here anon.

*Puck.* The king doth keep his revels here to-night;

Take heed the queen come not within his sight.

For Oberon is passing fell and wrath,

Because that she, as her attendant, hath

A lovely boy, sto'n from an Indian king;

She never had so sweet a changeling:¹¹

And jealous Oberon would have the child

Knight of his train, to trace the forest wild.

But she, perforce, withholds the loved boy,

Crowns him with flowers, and makes him all her

joy.

And now they never meet in grove, or green,

By fountain clear, or spangled star-light sheen.¹²

But they do square;¹³ that all their elves, for fear,

Creep into acorn cups, and hide them there.

*Fai.* Either I mistake your shape and making

quite,

Or else you are that shrewd and knavish sprit,

Call'd Robin Good-fellow: are you not he,

That fright the maidsens of the villagery:

Skim milk; and sometimes labour in the quern.¹⁴

And bootless labour the breathless housewife churn;

And sometime make the drink to bear no barn;¹⁵

Mislead night-wanderers, laughing at their harm?

Those that Hobgoblin call you, and sweet Puck,

You do their work;¹⁶ and they shall have good luck.

Are not you he?

*Puck.* Thou speak'st rightely;

I am that merry wanderer of the night,

I jest to Oberon, and make him smile,

When I a fat and bean-fed horse beguile,

Neighing in likeness of a filly foal:

And sometime lurk I in a gossipy bowl,

In very likeness of a roasted crab;¹⁷

And, when she drinks, against her lips I bob,

And on her wither'd dew-lap pour the ale.

The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,

Sometime for three-foot stool mistake me;

Then slip I from her bum, down topples she,

And *tailor* cries,¹⁸ and falls into a cough;

And then the whole quire hold their hips, and loffe:

And yexen¹⁹ in their birth, and neeze, and swear

A merrier hour was never wasted there.

But room, Faery, here comes Oberon.

*Fai.* And here my mistress:—'Would that he were gone!

11 A *changeling* was a child changed by a fairy; it here means one stolen or got in exchange.

12 Shining.

13 Quarrel, For the probable cause of the use of *square* for *doure*, see Mr. Doure's Illustrations, vol. i. p. 182.

14 A *quern* was a handmill.

15 'And if that the bowle of curds and creame were not duly set out for Robin Goodfellow, the frier, and Sisse the dairy-maid, why then either the pottage was burnt next day in the pot, or the cheeses would not curdle, or the butter would not come, or the ale in the fat never would have good head. But if a Peeterpeny, or an houste-egg were behind, or a patch of tythe unpaid,—then ware of bull-beggars, spirits,' &c.

16 Milton refers to these traditions in *L'Allegro*.

17 Wild apple.

18 Dr. Johnson thought he remembered to have heard this ludicrous exclamation upon a person's seat slipping from under him. He that slips from his chair falls as a tailor squats upon his board. Hanmer thought the passage corrupt, and proposed to read 'rails or cries.'

19 The old copy reads: 'And *wexen* in their birth, &c.' Though a glimmering of sense may be extracted from this passage as it stands in the old copy, it seems most probable that we should read, as Dr. Farmer proposed, *yexen*. To *yex* is to huccup, and is so explained in all the old dictionaries. The meaning of the passage will then be, that the objects of Puck's waggery laughed till their laughter ended in a *yex* or huccup. Puck is speaking with an affectation of ancient phraseology.

["## SCENE II.", "# MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.", "175", "### SCENE II.\n*Enter OBERON, at one door, with his Train, and Titania, at another, with hers.*", "*Obe.* Ill met by moon-light, proud Titania.", "*Tita.* What, jealous Oberon? Fairy, skip hence;", "I have forsworn his bed and company.", "*Obe.* Tarry, rash wanton: Am not I thy lord?", "*Tita.* Then I must be thy lady: But I know", "When thou hast stol'n away from fairy land,\nAnd in the shape of Corin sat all day,", "Playing on pipes of corn;¹ and versing love", "To amorous Phillida. Why art thou here,\nCome from the farthest steep of India?", "But that, forsooth, the bouncing Amazon,", "Your buskin'd mistress, and your warrior love,", "To Theseus must be wedded; and you come\nTo give their bed joy and prosperity.", "*Obe.* How, canst thou thus, for shame, Titania,", "Glance at my credit with Hippolyta,", "Knowing I know thy love to Theseus?", "Didst thou not lead him through the glimmering\nnight?\n\n*From Perigenia, whom he ravished?*", "And make him with fair Ægle break his faith,\nWith Ariadne, and Antiope?²", "*Tita.* These are the forgeries of jealousy:", "And never, since the middle summer's spring,³", "Met we on hill, in dale, forest, or mead,", "By paved fountain, or by rushy brook,", "Or on the beached margent of the sea,", "To dance our ringlets to the whistling wind,", "But with thy brawls thou hast disturb'd our sport.", "Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,", "As in revenge, have suck'd up the sea.", "Contagious fogs; which falling in the land,\nHave every pelting⁴ river made so proud,", "That they have overborne their continents:⁵", "The ox hath therefore stretch'd his yoke in vain,\nThe ploughman lost his sweat; and the green corn", "Hath rotted, ere his youth attain'd a beard:", "The fold stands empty in the drowned field,\nAnd crows are fattened with the murrain flock;", "The nine men's morris⁶ is fill'd up with mud;", "And the quaint mazes in the wanton green,", "For lack of tread, are undistinguishable:", "The human mortals⁷ want their winter here;⁸", "No night is now with hymn or carol blest:", "Therefore the moon, the governance of floods,", "Pale in her anger, washes all the air,", "That rheumatic diseases do abound:", "And thorough this distemperature, we see\nThe seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts", "Fall in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;", "1 The shepherd boys of Chaucer's time had", "'Many a flote and liting horne\nAnd pipes made of grene corne.'", "2 See the Life of Theseus in North's Translation of Plutarch. Ægle, Ariadne, and Antiope were all at different times mistresses to Theseus. The name of Pe'rigrune is translated by North Perigouna.", "3 Spring seems to be here used for beginning. The spring of day is used for the dawn of day in K. Henry IV. Part II.", "4 A very common epithet with our old writers, to signify paltry; palting appears to have been its original orthography.", "5 i. e. borne down the banks which contain them.", "6 A rural game, played by making holes in the ground in the angles and sides of a square, and placing stones or other things upon them, according to certain rules. These figures are called nine men's morris, or merrils, because each party playing has nine men; they were generally cut upon turf, and were consequently choked up with mud in rainy seasons.", "7 Human mortals is a mere pleonasm; and is neither put in opposition to fairy mortals nor to human immortals, according to Stevens and Ritson. It is simply the language of a fairy speaking of men. See Mr. Douce's Illustrations, vol. i. p. 185.", "8 Theobald proposed to read 'their winter cheer.'", "9 This singular image was probably suggested to the poet by Golding's translation of Ovid, B. ii.:", "'And lastly quaking for the colde, stoo'd Winter all forlorn.'", "With rugged head as white as dove, and garments all to-torne,", "And on old Hyems⁹ chin, and icy crown,¹⁰", "An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds", "Is, as in mockery, set: The spring, the summer,", "The childing autumn,¹⁰ angry winter, change¹¹", "The wonted liversies; and the 'mazed world,", "By their increase,¹² now knows not which is which:", "And this same progeny of evils comes", "From our debate, from our dissension;", "We are their parents and original.", "*Obe.* Do you amend it then; it lies in you:", "Why should Titania cross her Oberon?", "I do but beg a little changeling boy,", "To be my henchman.¹³", "*Tita.*", "Set your heart at rest,", "The fairy land buys not the child of me.", "His mother was a vot'ress of my order:", "And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,", "Full often hath he gossip'd by my side", "And sat with me on Neptune's yellow sands,", "Marking the embarked traders on the flood;", "When we have laugh'd to see the sails conceive,", "And grow big-bellied, with the wanton wind;", "Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait", "Following (her womb, then rich with my young squire),", "Would imitate; and sail upon the land,", "To fetch me trifles, and return again,", "As from a voyage, rich with merchandise.", "But she, being mortal, of that boy did die;", "And, for her sake, I do rear up her boy;", "And, for her sake, I will not part with him.", "*Obe.* How long within this wood intend you stay?", "*Tita.* Perchance, till after Theseus' wedding-day.", "If you will patiently dance in our round,", "And see our moon-light revels, go with us;", "If not, shun me, and I will spare your haunts.", "*Obe.* Give me that boy, and I will go with thee.", "*Tita.* Not for thy fairy kingdom.—Fairies, away;", "We shall chide down-right, if I longer stay.", "*(Exeunt* TITANIA and her Train.", "*Obe.* Well, go thy way: thou shall not from this grove.", "Till I torment thee for this injury.—", "My gentle Puck, come hither: Thou remember'st", "Since once I sat upon a promontory,", "And heard a mermaid, on a dolphin's back,", "Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath,", "That the rude sea grew civil at her song;", "And certain stars shot madly from their spheres,", "To hear the sea-maid's musick.", "*Puck.*", "I remember.", "*Obe.* That very time I saw (but thou could'st not,)", "Flying between the cold moon and the earth,", "Cupid all arm'd: a certain aim he took", "At a fair vestal,¹⁴ throned by the west;", "Forladen with the isles, that dangled up and downe,\nUpon his gray and hourie beard, and snowie frozen crowne.'", "10 Autumn producing flowers unseasonably upon those of Summer.", "11 The confusion of seasons here described is no more than a poetical account of the weather which happened in England about the time when the Midsummer-Night's Dream was written. The date of the piece may be determined by Churchyard's description of the same kind of weather in his 'Charlit,' 1595. Shakspeare fanci-\nfully ascribes this distemperature of seasons to a quar-\nrel between the playful rulers of the fairy world;\nChurchyard, broken down by age and misfortunes, is seriously disposed to represent it as a judgment from the Almighty on the offences of mankind.", "12 Produce. So in Shakspeare's 97th Sonnet;", "'The teeming Autumn, big with rich increase,", "Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime.'", "13 Page of honour.", "14 It is well known that a compliment to Queen Elizabeth was intended in this very beautiful passage. Warburton has attempted to show, that by the mermaid in the preceding lines, Mary Queen of Scots was intended. It is argued with his usual fanciful ingenuity, but will not bear the test of examination, and has been satisfactorily rebutted. It appears to have been no uncommon practice to introduce a compliment to Elizabeth in the body of a play.", "", "", {"bbox": [444, 1152, 764, 1172

176

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT II.

And loos'd his love-shaft smartly from his bow,
As it should pierce a hundred thousand hearts:
But I might see young Cupid's fiery shaft
Chench'd in the chaste beams of the wat'ry moon;
And the imperial vot'ress passed on,
In maiden meditation, fancy-free.¹

Yet mark'd I where the bolt of Cupid fell:

It fell upon a little western flower,—
Before, milk-white; now purple with love's wound,
And maidens call it, love-in-idleness.²
Fetch me that flower: the herb I show'd thee once:
The juice of it on sleeping eye-lids laid,
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb: and be thou here again,

Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

Puck. I'll put a girdle round about the earth

In forty minutes. [Exit PUCK.
Obe. Having once this juice,

I'll watch Titania when she is asleep,
And drop the liquor of it in her eyes:
The next thing then she waking looks upon,
(Be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull,
On meddling monkey, or on busy ape.)
She shall pursue it with the soul of love.

And ere I take this charm off from her sight
(As I can take it with another herb),

I'll make her render up her page to me.

But who comes here? I am invisible;

And I will overhear their conference.

Enter DEMETRIUS, HELENA following him.

Dem. I love thee not, therefore pursue me not.
Where is Lysander, and fair Hermia?

The one I'll slay; the other slayeth me.

Thou toldst me they were sto'n into this wood,

And here am I, and wood³ within this wood,

Because I cannot meet with Hermia.

Hence, get thee gone, and follow me no more.

Hel. You draw me, you hard-hearted adamant;⁴
But yet you draw not iron, for my heart

Is true as steel; Leave you your power to draw,

And I shall have no power to follow you.

Dem. Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?

Or, rather, do I not in plainest truth

Tell you—I do not, nor I cannot love you?

Hel. And even for that do I love you the more.

I am your spaniel; and, Demetrius,

The more you beat me, I will fawn on you:

Use me but as your spaniel, spurn me, strike me,

Neglect me, lose me; only give me leave,

Unworthy as I am, to follow you.

What worser place can I beg in your love,

(And yet a place of high respect with me,

Than to be used as you do your dog?

Dem. Tempt not too much the hatred of my
spirit;

For I am sick, when I do look on thee.

Hel. And I am sick, when I look not on you.

Dem. You do impeach⁵ your modesty too much

To leave the city, and commit yourself

Into the hands of one that loves you not;

To trust the opportunity of night,

And the ill counsel of a desert place,

With the rich worth of your virginity.

Hel. Your virtue is my privilege for that.

It is not night when I do see your face,

Therefore I think I am not in the night:

Nor doth this wood lack worlds of company

For you, in my respect, are all the world:

Then how can it be said, I am alone,

When all the world is here to look on me?

Dem. I'll run from thee, and hide me in the brakes,

And leave thee to the mercy of wild beasts.

Hel. The wildest hath not such a heart as you.

Run when you will, the story shall be chang'd;

Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase;

The dove pursues the griffen; the mild hind

Makes speed to catch the tiger. Bootless speed!

When cowardice pursues, and valour leaves

Dem. I will not stay thy questions; let me go:
Or, if thou follow me, do not believe

But I shall do the mischief in the wood.

Hel. Ay, in the temple, in the town, the field,
You do me mischief. Eye, Demetrius!

Your wrongs do set a scandal on my sex

We cannot fight for love, as men may do

We should be woo'd, and were not made to woo.

I'll follow thee, and make a heaven of hell,

To die upon⁶ the hand I love so well.

[Exeunt DEM. and HEL.
Obe. Fare thee well, nymph: ere he do leave

this grove,

Thou shall fly him, and he shall seek thy love.

Re-enter PUCK.

Hast thou the flower there? Welcome, wanderer.

Puck. Ay, there it is.

Obe. I pray thee, give it me.

I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows,

Where ox-lips⁷ and the nodding violet grows;

Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,

With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine;

There sleeps Titania, some time of the night,

Lull'd in these flowers with dances and delight,

And there the snake throws her enamel'd skin,

Weed wide enough to wrap a fairy in:

And with the juice of this I'll streak her eyes,

And make her full of hateful fantasies.

Take thou some of it, and seek through this grove:

A sweet Athlenian lady is in love

With a disdainful youth: anoint his eyes;

But do it, when the next thing he espies

May be the lady: Thou shall know the man

By the Athlenian garments he hath on.⁸

Effect it with some care, that he may prove

More fond on her, than she upon her love:

And look thou meet me ere the first cock crow.

Puck. Fear not, my lord, your servant shall do so.

[Exeunt.

### SCENE III. Another part of the Wood. Enter TITANIA, with her train.

Tita. Come, now a roundell,⁹ and a fairy song;
Then, for the third part of a minute, hence,

Some, to kill cankers in the musk-rose buds;

Some, war with rear-mice¹⁰ for their leathern wings,

To make my small elves coats; and some, keep
back

The clamorous owl, that nightly hoots, and wonders
At our quaint spirits:¹¹ Sing me now asleep;

Then to your offices, and let me rest.

### SONG.

1 Fai. You spotted snakes, with double tongue,
Thorny hedge-hogs, be not seen;
News,¹² and blindworms,¹³ do no wrong;
Come not near our fairy queen:

5 i. e. bring it into question.

6 To die upon, &c. appears to have been used for 'to die by the hand.'

7 The greater cullip.

8 Steevens thinks this rhyme of man and on a sufficient proof that the broad Scotch pronunciation once prevailed in England. But our ancient poets were not particular in making their rhymes correspond in sound, and I very much doubt a conclusion made upon such slender grounds.

9 The roundell, or round, as its name implies, was a dance of a circular kind.

10 Bats.

11 Sports

12 Efts.

13 Slow-worms.

1 Exempt from the power of love.

2 The tricolored violet, commonly called pansies, or heartsease, is here meant; one or two of its petals are of a purple colour. It has other fanciful and expressive names, such as—Cuddle me to you; Three faces under a hood; Herb trinity, &c.

3 Mad, raving.

4 There is now a day's a kind of adamant which draweth unto it fleshe, and the same so strongly; that it hath power to knit and tie together two mouths of contrary persons, and draw the heart of a man out of his bodie without offending any part of him.' Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature, by Edward Fenton, 1569.

["## SCENE III.", "## MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.", "177", "**CHORUS.** *Philomel, with melody,*\n*Sing in our sweet lullaby;*\n*Lulla, lulla, lullaby; lulla, lulla, lullaby;*\n*Never harm, nor spell nor charm,*\n*Come our lovely lady nigh;*\n*So, good night, with lullaby.*", "## II.", "2 Fai. *Weaving spiders, come not here;*\n*Hence, you long-legg'd spinners, hence;*\n*Beetles black, approach not near;*\n*Worm, nor snail, do no offence.*", "**CHORUS.** *Philomel, with melody, &c.*", "1 Fai. Hence, away; now all is well;\nOne, aloof, stand sentinel.", "*[Exeunt Fairies. TITANIA sleeps.*", "### Enter OBERON.", "Obe. What thou seest when thou dost wake,\n[Squeezes the flower on TITANIA'S eyelids.*", "Do it for thy true love take;\nLove, and languish for his sake:", "Be it ounce,¹ or cat, or bear,", "Pard, or boar with bristled hair,", "In thy eye that shall appear", "When thou wak'st, it is thy dear;\nWake, when some eve thing is near.", "*[Exit.]*", "", "### Enter LYSANDER and HERMIA.", "Lys. Fair love, you faint with wandering in the wood;", "And to speak troth, I have forgot our way;", "We'll rest us, Hermia, if you think it good,", "And tarry for the comfort of the day.", "Her. Be it so, Lysander; find you out a bed,", "For I upon this bank will rest my head.", "Lys. One turf shall serve as pillow for us both;", "One heart, one bed, two bosoms, and one troth.", "Her. Nay, good Lysander; for my sake, my dear,", "Lie further off yet, do not lie so near.", "Lys. O, take the sense, sweet, of my innocence;", "Love takes the meaning, in love's conference.", "I mean, that my heart unto yours is knit;", "So that but one heart we can make of it:", "Two bosoms interchained with an oath;", "So then, two bosoms, and a single troth.", "Then, by your side no bed-room me deny;", "For, lying so, Hermia, I do not lie.", "Her. Lysander riddles very prettily:—", "Now much beshrew³ my manners and my pride,", "If Hermia meant to say, Lysander lied.", "But, gentle friend, for love and courtesy", "Lie further off; in human modesty", "Such separation, as, may well be said,", "Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid,", "So far be distant; and good night, sweet friend!", "Thy love ne'er alter, till thy sweet life end!", "Lys. Amen, amen, to that fair prayer, say I;", "And then end life, when I end loyalty!", "Here is my bed: Sleep give thee all my rest!", "Her. With half that wish the wisher's eyes be press'd! [They sleep.", "", "### Enter PUCK.", "Puck. Through the forest have I gone,\nBut Athenian found I none,\nOn whose eyes I might approve\nThis flower's force in stirring love.\nNight and silence! who is here?\nWeeds of Athens he doth wear:\nThis is he, my master said,\nDespised the Athenian maid;\nAnd here the maiden, sleeping sound,\nOn the dank and dirty ground.", "1 The small tiger, or tiger-cat.", "2 i. e. 'understand the meaning of my innocence, or my innocent meaning.' Let no suspicion of ill enter thy mind.' In the conversation of those who are assured of each other's kindness, not suspicion but love takes the meaning.", "3 This word implies a sinister wish, and here means the same as if she had said, 'now ill befall my maners,' &c.", "Pretty soul! she durst not lie", "Near this lack-love, this kill-courtesy.", "Churl, upon thy eyes I throw", "All the power this charm doth owe:⁴", "When thou wak'st, let love forbid", "Sleep his seat on thy eye-lid.⁵", "So awake, when I am gone.", "For I must now to Oberon.", "*[Exit.]*", "### Enter DEMETRIUS and HELENA, running.", "Hel. Stay, though thou kill me, sweet Demetrius.", "Dem. I charge thee, hence, and do not haunt me thus.", "Hel. O, wilt thou darkling leave me? do not so.", "Dem. Stay, on thy peril; I alone will go.", "*[Exit DEMETRIUS.*", "Hel. O, I am out of breath in this fond chase!", "The more my prayer, the lesser is my grace.⁶", "Happy is Hermia, wheresoe'er she lies;", "For she hath blessed and attractive eyes.", "How came her eyes so bright? Not with salt tears:", "If so, my eyes are oftener wash'd than hers.", "No, no, I am as ugly as a bear;", "For beasts that meet me, run away for fear.", "Therefore, no marvel, though Demetrius", "Do, as a monster, fly my presence thus.", "What wicked and dissembling glass of mine", "Made me compare with Hermia's spherify cyne?", "But who is here?—Lysander! on the ground!", "Dead? or asleep? I see no blood, no wound:", "Lysander, if you live, good sir, awake.", "Lys. And run through fire I will, for thy sweet sake.", "*[Waking.]*", "Transparent Helena; Nature shows her art,⁷", "That through thy bosom makes me see thy heart.", "Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word", "Is that vile name to perish on my sword!", "Hel. Do not say so, Lysander; say not so:", "What though he love your Hermia? Lord, what though?", "Yet Hermia still loves you: then be content.", "Lys. Content with Hermia? No: I do repent", "The tedious minutes I with her have spent.", "Not Hermia, but Helena I love:", "Who will not change a raven for a dove?", "The will of man is by his reason sway'd;", "And reason says you are the worthier maid,", "Things growing are not ripe until their season:", "So I, being young, till now ripe⁸ not to reason;", "And touching now the point of human skill,", "Reason becomes the marshal to my will,", "And leads me to your eyes; where I o'erlook", "Love's stories written in love's richest book.", "Hel. Wherefore was I to this kind mockery born?", "When, at your hands, did I deserve this scorn?", "Is't not enough, is't not enough, young man,", "That I did never, no, nor never can,", "Deserve a sweet look from Demetrius' eye,", "But you must flout my insufficiency?", "Good troth, you do me wrong, good sooth, you do,", "In such disdainful manner me to woo.", "But fare you well: perforce I must confess,", "I thought you lord of more true gentleness.", "Of a lady, of one man refus'd,", "Should of another, therefore be abus'd! [Exit.", "Lys. She sees not Hermia!—Hermia, sleep thou there;", "And never mayst thou come Lysander near!", "For, as a surfeit of the sweetest things", "The deepest loathing to the stomach brings;", "Or, as the heresies, that men do leave,", "Are hated most of those they did deceive;", "4 Possess.", "5 So in Macbeth:", "'Sleep shall neither night nor day",

178

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT III.

So thou, my surfeit, and my heresy,
Of all be hated; but the most of me!
And all my powers, address your love and might,
To honour Helen, and to be her knight! [Exit.

Her. [starting.] Help me, Lysander, help me! do thy best,

To pluck this crawling serpent from my breast!

Ah me, for pity!—what a dream was here?

Lysander, look, how I do quake with fear:

Methought a serpent eat my heart away,

And you sat smiling at his cruel prey:—
Lysander! what, remov'd? Lysander! lord!

What, out of hearing? gone? no sound, no word?

Alack, where are you? speak, an if you hear;

Speak, of all loves; I swoon almost with fear.

No?—then I well perceive you are not nigh:

Either death, or you, I'll find immediately. [Exit.

ACT III.

SCENE I. The same. The Queen of Fairies lying asleep. Enter QUINCE, SNUG, BOTTOM, FLUTE, SNOUT, and STARVELING.

Bot. Are we all met?

Quin. Pat, pat; and here's a marvellous convenient place for our rehearsal: This green plot shall be our stage, this hawthorn brake out tyring house; and we will do it in action, as we will do it before the duke.

Bot. Peter Quince,—

Quin. What say'st thou, bully Bottom?

Bot. There are things in this comedy of Pyramus and Thisby, that will never please. First, Pyramus must draw a sword to kill himself; which the ladies cannot abide. How answer you that?

Snout. By'rlain,² a parlour³ fear.

Star. I believe, we must leave the killing out, when all is done.

Bot. Not a whit; I have a device to make all well. Write me a prologue: and let the prologue seem to say, we will do no harm with our swords; and that Pyramus is not killed indeed: and for the more better assurance, tell them, that I Pyramus am not Pyramus, but Bottom the weaver: This will put them out of fear.

Quin. Well, we will have such a prologue; and it shall be written in eight and six.⁴

Bot. No, make it two more; let it be written in eight and eight.

Snout. Will not the ladies be afeard of the lion?

Star. I fear it, I promise you.

Bot. Masters, you ought to consider with yourselves: to bring in, God shield us! a lion among ladies, is a most dreadful thing; for there is not a more fearful⁵ wild-fowl than your lion, living; and we ought to look to it.

Snout. Therefore, another prologue must tell, he is not a lion.

Bot. Nay, you must name his name, and half his face must be seen through the lion's neck; and he himself must speak through, saying thus, or to the same defect,—Ladies, or fair ladies, I would wish you, or, I would request you, or, I would entreat you, not to fear, not to tremble: my life for yours. If you think I come hither as a lion, it were pity of my life: No, I am no such thing; I am a man as other men are:—and there, indeed, let him name his name; and tell them plainly he is Snug the joiner.⁶

1. By all that is dear,

2. i. e. by our ladykin or little lady, as ifakins, is a corruption of *by my faith*.

3. Corrupted from perilous; but used for alarming, amazing.

4. That is, in alternative verses of eight and six syllables.

5. Terrible.

6. Shakespeare may here allude to an incident said to have occurred in his time, which is recorded in a collection of anecdotes, stories, &c. entitled 'Merry Passages and Jeasts,' MS. Harl. 6355. 'There was a spectacle presented to Queen Elizabeth upon the water, and

Quin. Well, it shall be so. But there is two hard things; that is, to bring the moon-light into a chamber: for you know, Pyramus and Thisby meet by moon-light.

Snug. Doth the moon shine that night we play our play?

Bot. A calendar, a calendar! look in the almack; find out moon-shine, find out moonshine.

Quin. Yes. Yes, it doth shine that night.

Bot. Why, then you may leave a casement of the great chamber window, where we play, open; and the moon may shine in at the casement.

Quin. Ay; or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lanthorn, and say, he comes to disfigure, or to present, the person of moon-shine. Then, there is another thing: we must have a wall in the great chamber; for Pyramus and Thisby, says the story, did talk through the chink of a wall.

Snug. You never can bring in a wall.—What say you, Bottom?

Bot. Some man or other must present wall: and let him have some plaster, or some loam, or some rough-east about him, to signify wall; or let him hold his fingers thus, and through that cranny shall Pyramus and Thisby whisper.

Quin. If that may be, then all is well. Come, sit down, every mother's son, and rehearse your parts. Pyramus, you begin: when you have spoken your speech, enter into that brake,⁷ and so every one according to his cue.

Enter PUCK behind.

Puck. What hempen home-spuns have we swagging here,

So near the cradle of the fairy queen?

What, a play toward? I'll be an auditor.

An actor, too, perhaps, if I see cause.

Quin. Speak, Pyramus:—Thisby, stand forth.

Pyr. Thisby, the flowers of odious savours sweet,—

Quin. Odours, odours.

Pyr. —odours savours sweet:

So hath thy breath, my dearest Thisby dear.—

But, hark, a voice! stay thou but here a while,

And by and by I will to thee appear.

[Exit.]

Puck. A stanger Pyramus than e'er play'd here!

[Aside.—Exit.]

This. Must I speak now?

Quin. Ay, marry, must you: for you must understand, he goes but to see a noise that he heard, and is to come again.

This. Most radiant Pyramus, most lilly-white of hue,

Of colour like the red rose on triumphant brier,

Most brisky Juvenal,⁸ and eke most lovely Jew,

As true as truest horse, that yet would never tire,

I'll meet thee, Pyramus, at Ninny's tomb.

Quin. Ninus' tomb, man: Why you must not speak that yet; that you answer for Pyramus: you speak all your part at once, cues⁹ and all.—Pyramus, enter; your cue is past; it is, never tire.

Re-enter PUCK, and BOTTOM with an ass's head.

This. O,—As true as truest horse, that yet would never tire.

Pyr. If I were fair, Thisby, I were only thine.—

Quin. O monstrous! O strange! we are haunted. Pray, masters! fly, masters! help!

[Exeunt Clowns.]

Puck. I'll follow you, I'll lead you about a round, Through beg, through bush, through brake, through brier;

among others Harry Goldingham was to represent Arion upon the Dolphin's backe; but finding his voice to be very hoarse and unpleasant when he came to perform it, he tears off his disguise, and swears he was none of Arion, not he, but even honest Harry Goldingham; which blunt discoverie pleased the queen better than if he had gone through in the right way:—yet he could order his voice to an instrument exceeding well?

7. Thicket.

8. Young man.

9. The cues were the last words of the preceding speech, which serve as a hint to him who was to speak next; and generally written out with that which was to be learnt by rote.

## SCENE II.

# MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

179

Sometime a horse I'll be, sometime a hound,

A hog, a headless bear, sometime a fire;

And neigh, and bark, and grunt, and roar, and burn,
Like horse, hound, hog, bear, fire, at every turn.

[Exit.]

Bot. Why do they run away? this is a knavery of them, to make me afeard.

Re-enter SNOUT.

Snout. O Bottom, thou art changed! what do I see on thee?

Bot. What do you see? you see an ass's head of your own; Do you?

Re-enter QUINCE.

Quin. Bless thee, Bottom! bless thee! thou art translated.

[Exit.]

Bot. I see their kavery! this is to make an ass of me; to fright me, if they could. But I will not stir from this place, do what they can: I will walk up and down here, and I will sing, that they shall hear I am not afraid.

[Sings.]

The ouzel-cocks, so black of hue,

With orange-tawney bill,

The throstle with his note so true,

The wren with little quill.

Tita. What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?

[Waking.]

Bot. The finch, the sparrow, and the lark,

The plain-song cuckoo¹ gray,

Whose note full many a man doth mark,

And dares not answer, nay;—

for, indeed, who would set his wit to so foolish a bird? who would give a bird the lie, though he cry, cuckoo, never so?

Tita. I pray thee, gentle mortal, sing again;

Mine ear is much enamour'd of thy note,

So is mine eye enamoured to thy shape;

And thy fair virtue's force enforce doth move me,
On the first view, to say, to swear, I love thee.

Bot. Methinks, mistress, you should have little reason for that: And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays: The more the pity, that some honest neighbours will not make them friends. Nay, I can gleek² upon occasion.

Tita. Thou art as wise as thou art beautiful.

Bot. Not so, neither; but if I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have enough to serve mine own turn.

Tita. Out of this wood do not desire to go;

Thou shall remain here, whether thou wilt or no.

I am a spirit of no common rate;

The summer still doth tend upon my state,

And I do love thee: therefore, go with me;

I'll give thee fairies to attend on thee;

And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep:

And sing, while thou on pressed flowers dost sleep:

And I will purge their mortal grossness so

That thou shall like an airy spirit go.—

Peas-blossom! Cobweb! Moth! and Mustard-seed!

Enter four Fairies.

1 Fai. Ready.

2 Fai. And I.

3 Fai. And I.

4 Fai. And I.

All. Where shall we go?

1 The cuckoo, having no variety of note, sings in plain song (plano cantu), by which expression the uniform modulation or simplicity of the chaunt was anciently distinguished in opposition to prick-song, or violated music sung by note.

2 i. e. lest or scoff.

3 The fruit of a bramble called *Rubus cæsius*: sometimes called also the blue-berry.

4 'I shall desire you of more acquaintance.' This kind of phraseology was not uncommon.

5 A squash is an immature peacod. So in Twelfth Night, Act. I, Sc. 5:

> 'As a squash is before 'tis a peacod.'

6 Mason proposes to read 'passing well,' which is plausible if change be necessary. The words are spo-

Tita. Be kind and courteous to this gentleman;

Hop in his walks, and gambol in his eyes;

Feed him with apricocks and dawberries;

With purple grapes, green figs, and mulberries;

The honey bags steal from the humble-bees,

And, for night tapers, crop their waxen thighs,

And light them at the fiery glow-worm's eyes,

To have my love to bed, and to arise;

And pluck the wings from painted butterflies,

To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes;

Nod to him, elves, and do him courtesies.

1 Fai. Hail, mortal!

2 Fai. Hail!

3 Fai. Hail!

4 Fai. Hail!

Bot. I cry your worship's mercy, heartily.—I beseech, your worship's name?

Cob. Cobweb.

Bot. I shall desire you of more acquaintance,⁴ good master Cobweb: If I cut my finger, I shall make bold with you.—Your name, honest gentleman?

Peas. Peas-blossom.

Bot. I pray you, commend me to mistress Squash,⁵ your mother, and to master Peascod, your father. Good master Peas-blossom, I shall desire you of more acquaintance too.—Your name, I beseech you, sir?

Mus. Mustard-seed.

Bot. Good master Mustard-seed, I know your patience⁶ well: that same cowardly, giant-like oxbeef hath devoured many a gentleman of your house: I promise you, your kindred hath made my eyes water ere now. I desire you more acquaintance, good master Mustard-seed.

Tita. Come, wait upon him; lead me to my hower.

The moon methinks looks with a watery eye;

And when she weeps, weeps every little flower,

Lamenting some enforced chastity.

Tie up my lover's tongue, bring him silently.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE II
Another part of the Wood. Enter OBERON.

Obe. I wonder if Titania be awak'd;

Then, what it was that next came in her eye,
Which she must dote on in extremity.

Enter PUCK.

Here comes my messenger.—How now, mad spirit?

What night-rule⁷ now about this haunted grove?

Puck. My mistress with a monster is in love.

Near to her close and consecrated bower,
While she was in her dull and sleeping hour,

A crew of patches,⁸ rude mechanicals,

That work for bread upon Athenian stalls,

Were met together to rehearse a play,

Intended for great Theseus⁹ nuptial day.

The shallowest thick-skin of that barren sort,⁹

Who Pyramus presented, in their sport

Forsook his scene, and entered in a brake:

When I did him at this advantage take,

An ass's now!¹⁰ I fixed on his head;

Anon, his Thisbe must be answered,

And forth my mimic¹¹ comes: When they him spy,

As wild geese that the creeping fowler eye,

Or russet-pated choughs,¹² many in sort,¹³

ken ironically, as it was the prevailing opinion in Shakespeare's time, that mustard excited choler.

7 Reveiry.

8 A patch sometimes means a fool, or simpleton; but it was a common contemptuous term, and may be either a corruption of the Italian *pazzo* or derived from the *patch'd* clothes sometimes worn by persons of low condition. Tooke gives a different origin from the Saxon verb pæcan, to deceive by false appearances.

9 *Barren* is dull, unpregnant. *Sort* is company.

10 A head. The metamorphosis of Bottom might have been suggested by a similar trick played by Dr. Fausus. See his History, c. xlii.

11 Actor.

12 The chough is a bird of the daw kind.

13 *Sort* is company, as above.

180

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

ACT III.

Rising and cawing at the gun's report,
Sever themselves, and madly sweep the sky;
So, at his sight, away his fellows fly:
And, at our stamp, here o'er and o'er one falls;
He murder cries, and help from Athens calls.
Their sense, thus weak, lost with their fears, thus
strong,

Made senseless things begin to do them wrong:
For briars and thorns at their apparel snatch;
Some sleeves; some, hats; from yielders all things
catch.

I led them on in this distracted fear,
And left sweet Pyramus translated there:
When in that moment (so it came to pass),
Titania wak'd, and straightway lov'd an ass.
Obe. This falls out better than I could devise.

But hast thou yet latch'd¹ the Athenian's eyes
With the love-juice, as I did bid thee do?

Puck. I took him sleeping,—that is finish'd too,—
And the Athenian woman by his side;
That, when he wak'd, of force she must be ey'd.

### Enter DEMETRIUS and HERMIA.

Obe. Stand close; this is the same Athenian.

Puck. This is the woman, but not this the man.

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

Her. 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 bor'd; and that the moon
May through the centre creep, and so displease
Her brother's noon-tide with the Antipodes.
It cannot be, but thou hast murder'd him;

So should a murderer look; so dead, so grim.
Dem. So should the murder'd look; and so should I,
Pierc'd through the heart with your stern cruelty:
Yet you, the murderer, look as bright as clear,
As yonder Venus in her glimmering sphere.

Her. What's this to my Lysander? Where is he?
Ah, good Demetrius, wilt thou give him me?
Dem. I had rather give his carcass to my hounds.
Her. Out, dog! out, cur! thou driv'st¹ me past
the bounds

Of maiden's patience. Hast thou slain him then?
Henceforth be never number'd among men!
O! once tell true, tell true, even for my sake;
Durst thou have look'd upon him, being awake,
And hast thou kill'd him sleeping? O brave touch !
Could not a worm, an adder, do so much ?
An adder did it; for with doubler tongue
Than thine, thou serpent, never adder stung.

Dem. You spend your passion on a mispris'd¹
mood:

I am not guilty of Lysander's blood;

Nor is he dead, for aught that I can tell.

Her. I pray thee, tell me then that he is well.

Dem. An if I could, what should I get therefore?

Her. A privilege, never to see me more.;

And from thy hated presence part I so:

See me no more, whether he be dead or no. [Exit]
Dem. There is no following her in this fierce vein:
Here, therefore, for a while I will remain.

So sorrow's heaviness doth heavier grow

For debt that bankrupt sleep doth sorrow owe;
Which now, in some slight measure it will pay,

If for his tender here I make some stay.

[Lies down.]

Obe. What hast thou done? thou hast mistaken
quite,

And laid the love-juice on some true-love's sight:
Of thy misprision must perforce ensue

Some true-love turn'd, and a false turn'd true.

Puck. Then fate o'er-rules; that, one man holding troth,

A million fail, confounding oath on oath.

Obe. About the wood go swifter than the wind,
And Helena of Athens look you find;

All fancy-sick⁴ she is, and pale of cheer!

With sighs of love, that cost the fresh blood dear:⁵
By some illusion see thou bring her here;

I'll charm his eyes, against she do appear.

Puck. I go, I go; look, how I go;

Swifter than arrow from the Tartar's bow. [Exit]
Obe. Flower of this purple die,

Hit with Cupid's archery,

Sink in apple of his eye!

When his love he doth espy,

Let her shine as gloriously

As the Venus of the sky.—

When thou wak'st, if she be by,

Beg of her for remedy.

### Re-enter PUCK.

Puck. Captain of our fairy band,

Helen is here at hand;

And the youth, mistook by me,
Pleading for a lover's face;

Shall we their fond pageant see ?

Lord, what fools these mortals be !

Obe. Stand aside: the noise they make,
Will cause Demetrius to awake.

Puck. Then will two at once woo one;

That must needs be sport alone;

And those things do best please me,

That befall preposterously.

### Enter LYSANDER and HELENA.

Lys. Why should you think, that I should woo
in scorn?

Scorn and derision never come in tears:

Look, when I vow, I weep; and vows so born
In their nativity all truth appears.

How can these things in me seem scorn to you,
Bearing the badge of faith, to prove them true?

Hel. You do advance your cunning more and more.

When truth kills truth, O devilish holy fray !

These vows are Hermia's; Will you give her o'er?

Weigh oath with oath, and you will nothing weigh:
Your vows to her and me, put in two scales,

Will even weigh; and both as light as tales.

Lys. I had no judgment when to her I swore.

Hel. Nor none, in my mind, now you give her o'er.

Lys. Demetrius loves her, and he loves not you.

Dem. [awaking.] O Helen, goddess, nymph, perfect divine!

To what, my love, shall I compare thine eyne?

Crystal is muddy. O, how ripe in show

Thy lips, those kissing cherries, tempting grow!

That pure congealed white, high Taurus's snow,

Fann'd with the eastern wind, turns to a crow,

When thou hold'st up thy hand: O let me kiss
This princess of pure white, this seal⁶ of bliss!

Hel. O spite! O hell! I see you all are bent

To set against me, for your merriment.

If you were civil, and knew courtesy,

You would not do me thus much injury.

Can you not hate me, as I know you do,

But you must join in souls,⁷ to mock me too?

If you were men, as men you are in show,

signifying 'the face, visage, sight, or countenance, look or cheere' of a man or woman.' The old French chere had the same meaning.

6 So in K. Henry VI. we have 'blood-consuming,' 'blood-drinking,' and 'blood-sucking sighs.' All alluding to the ancient supposition, that every sigh was induced at the expense of a drop of blood.

7 So in Antony and Cleopatra:

'My playfellow, your hand; this kingly seal,'

And plightner of high hearts.'

S i. e. join heartily, unite in the same mind.

2 A touch anciently signified a trick. Ascham has 'the shrewd touches' of many curst boys.' And in the old story of Howlegias, 'for at all times he did some mad touch.'

3 'On a mispris'd mood,' i. e. in a mistaken manner. On was sometimes used licentiously for in.

4 Love-sick.

5 Cheer here signifies countenance, from cers, Ital.

## SCENE II.

MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM.

181

You would not use a gentle lady so;
To vow, and swear, and superpraise my parts,
When, I am sure, you hate me with your hearts.
You both are rivals, and love Hermia;
And now both rivals to mock Helena:
A trim exploit, a manly enterprise,
To conjure tears up in a poor maid's eyes,
With your derision! none of noble sort¹
Would so offend a virgin; and extort
A poor soul's patience, all to make you sport.

Lys. You are unkind, Demetrius; be not so;
For you love Hermia: this, you know, I know:
And here, with all good will, with all my heart,
In Hermia's love I yield you up my part;
And yours of Helena to me bequeath,
Whom I do love, and will do to my death.

Hel. Never did mockers waste more idle breath.
Lysander, keep thy Hermia; I will none:
If e'er I lov'd her, all that love is gone.
My heart with her but, as guest-wise, sojourn'd;
And now to Helen is it home return'd,
There to remain.

Lys. Helen, it is not so.

Dem. Disparage not the faith thou dost not know,
Lest, to thy peril, thou abide it dear.²—
Look where thy love comes; yonder is thy dear.

### Enter HERMIA.

Her. Dark night, that from the eye his function
takes,

The ear more quick of apprehension makes;

Wherein it doth impair the seeing sense,

It pays the hearing double compense:—

Thou art not by mine eye, Lysander, found;

Mine ear I thank it, brought me to thy sound.

But why unkindly didst thou leave me so ?

Lys. Why should he stay, whom love doth press
to go?

Her. What love could press Lysander from my
side?

Lysander's love, that would not let him bide.

Fair Helena, who more enginds the night

Than all yon fiery oes³ and eyes of light.

Why seek'st thou me? could not this make thee
know?

The hate I bare thee made me leave thee so.

Her. You speak not as you think ; it cannot be,

Hel. Lo, she is one of this confederacy!

Now I perceive they have comjoin'd all three,

To fashion this false sport in spite of me.

Injurious Hermia! most ungrateful maid !

Have you conspir'd, have you with these contriv'd
To hate me with this foul derision?

Is all the counsel that we two have shar'd,⁴

The sisters' vows, the hours that we have spent,

When we have chid the hasty-footed time

For parting us,—O, and is all forgot?

All school-days' friendship, childhood innocence ?

We, Hermia, like two artificial⁵ gods,

Have with our needs⁶ created both one flower,

Both on one sampler, sitting on one cushion,

Both warbling of one song, both in one key;

As if our hands, our sides, voices, and minds,

Had been incorporate. So we grew together,

Like to a double cherry, seeming parted ;

But yet a union in partition,

Two lovely berries moulded on one stem :

So, with two seeming bodies, but one heart;

Two of the first,' like coats in heraldry,
Due but to one, and crowned with one crest.

And will you rent our ancient love asunder,
To join with men in scorning your poor friend ?

It is not friendly, 'tis not maidenly.

Our sex, as well as I may choose for it ;

Though I alone do feel the injury.

Her. I am amazed at your passionate words :

I scorn you not; it seems that you scorn me.

Hel. Have you not set Lysander, as in scorn,
To follow me, and praise my eyes and face ?

And made your other love, Demetrius,

(Who even but now did spurn me with his foot),

To call me goddess, nymph, divine, and rare,

Precious, celestial? Wherefore speaks he this

To her he hates ? and wherefore doth Lysander

Deny your love, so rich within his soul,

And tender me, forsooth, affection;

But by your setting on, by your consent?

What though I be not so in grace as you,

So hung upon with love, so fortunate ;

But miserable most, to love unlovd?

This you should pity, rather than despise.

Her. I understand not what you mean by this.

Hel. Ay, do, persever, counterfeit sad looks,

Make mows⁸ upon me when I turn my back ;

Wink at each other ; hold the sweet jest up :

This sport, well carried, shall be chronicled.

If you have any pity, grace, or manners,

You would not make me such an argument.⁹

But, fare ye well: 'tis partly mine own fault ;

Which death, or absence, soon shall remedy.

Lys. Stay, gentle Helena; hear my excuse;

My love, my life, my soul, fair Helena!

Hel. O excellent !

Her. Sweet, do not scorn her so.

Dem. If she cannot entreat, I can compel.

Lys. Thou canst compel no more than I entreat;

Thy threats have no more strength, than her weak
prayers.—

Helen I love thee; by my life I do :

I swear by that which I will lose for thee,

To prove him false, that says I love thee not.

Dem. I say I love thee more than he can do.

Lys. If thou say so, withdraw and prove it too.

Dem. Quick, come,—

Her. Lysander, whereto tends all this ?

Lys. Away, you Ethioth !

Dem. No, no, he'll—Sir,¹⁰

Seek to break loose ; take on as you would follow ;

But yet come not: You are a tame man, go !

Lys. Hang off, thou cat, thou burr: vile thing,
let loose;

Or I will shake thee from me like a serpent.

Her. Why are you grown so rude ? what change
is this,

Sweet love ?

Lys. Thy love ! out, tawny Tartar, out !

Out, loathed medicine ! hated potion, hence !

Her. Do you not jest ?

Hel. Yes, 'sooth: and so do you.

Lys. Demetrius, I will keep your word with thee.

Dem. I would, I had your bond; for, I perceive,

A weak bond holds you; I'll not trust your word.

Lys. What, should I hurt her, strike her, kill her
dead?

Although I hate her, I'll not harm her so.

1 Degree, or quality.

2 Pay dearly for it, rue it.

3 i. e. circles.

4 'Is all the counsel that we two have shared,' &c.

5 Gregory of Nazianz's poem on his own life con-
tains some beautiful lines (resembling these) which burst
from the heart and speak the pangs of injured and lost
friendship. Shakespeare had never read the poems of
Gregory; he was ignorant of the Greek language; but
his mother tongue, the language of nature, is the same
in Cappadocia as in Britain.'—Gibbon's *Hist.* vol. v. p.
17, 8vo. ed.

6 i. e. ingenious, artful. *Artificioscise.* Lat.

7 i. e. needles

7 Mr. Douce thus explains this passage: Helen says,
' I had two seeming bodies, but only one heart.' She
then exemplifies the position by a simile—' I had *two
of the first*, i. e. *bodies*, like the double coats in heraldry
that belong to man and wife as one person, but which
like our *single heart*, have but *one crest*. ' Malone ex-
plains the heraldric allusion differently, but not so clearly
nor satisfactorily.

8 Make mouths.

9 i. e. such a subject of light merriment.

10 This arrangement of the text is Malone's, who thus
explains it. The words *he'll* are not in the folio, and
sir is not in the quarto. Demetrius I suppose would say,
*no, no, he'll* not have the resolution to disengage himself
from Hermia. But turning to Lysander, he addresses
him ironically: ' Sir, seem to break loose ? ' &c.

["182", "MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.", "ACT III.", "Her. What, can you do me greater harm than hate?", "Hate me! wherefore? O me! what news, my love?", "Am not I Hermia? Are not you Lysander?", "I am as fair now as I was ereughile.", "Since night you lov'd me; yet since night you left me:", "Why, then you left me,—O, the gods forbid!—\nIn earnest shall I say?", "Lys.", "Ay, by my life;", "And never did desire to see thee more.", "Therefore, be out of hope, of question, doubt,", "Be certain nothing truer; 'tis no jest,", "That I do hate thee, and love Helena.", "Her. O me, you juggler! you canker-blossom!\nYou thief of love! what, have you come by night,\nAnd stol'n my love's heart from him?", "Hel.", "Fine, i'faith!", "Have you no modesty, no maiden shame,", "No touch of bashfulness? What, will you tear", "Impatient answers from my gentle tongue?", "Fie, fie! you counterfeit, you puppet you!", "Her. Puppet! why so ? Ay, that way goes the game.", "Now I perceive that she hath made compare\nBetween our statures, she hath urg'd her height;", "And with her personage, her tall personage,\nHer height, forsooth, she hath prevail'd with him—", "And are you grown so high in his esteem,", "Because I am so dwarfish, and so low?", "How low am I, thou painted maypole? speak;", "How low am I? I am not yet so low,", "But that my nails can reach unto thine eyes.", "Hel. I pray you, though you mock me, gentlemen,\nLet her not hurt me: I was never curst;²", "I have no gift at all in shrewishness;", "I am a right maid for my cowardice;", "Let her not strike me: You, perhaps, may think,", "Because she's something lower than myself,", "That I can match her.", "Her.", "Lower! hark, again.", "Hel. Good Hermia, do not be so bitter with me.", "I evermore did love you, Hermia,", "Did ever keep your counsels, never wrong'd you;", "Save that, in love unto Demetrius,", "I told him of your stealth unto this wood:", "He follow'd you; for love, I follow'd him.", "But he hath chid me hence: and threaten'd me", "To strike me, spurn me, nay, to kill me too:", "And now, so you will let me quiet go,", "To Athens will I bear my folly back,", "And follow you no further: Let me go:", "You see how simple and how fond³ I am.", "Her. Why, get you gone: Who is't that hinders\nyou?", "Hel. A foolish heart that I leave here behind.", "Her. What! with Lysander?", "With Demetrius.", "Hel.", "Lys. Be not afraid: she shall not harm thee, Helena.", "Dem. No, sir; she shall not, though you take her part.", "Hel. O, when she's angry, she is keen and shrewd:", "She was a vixen, when she went to school;", "And, though she be but little, she is fierce.", "Her. Little again? nothing but low and little?—\nWhy will you suffer her to flout me thus?", "Let me come to her.", "Lys.", "Get you gone, you dwarf;", "You minimus of hind'ring knot-grass⁴ made;", "You bead, you acorn.", "Dem. You are too officious,", "In her behalf that scorns your services:", "Let her alone; speak not of Helena;", "Take not her part: for if thou dost intend³", "Never so little show of love to her,", "Thou shalt aby it⁴.", "Lys.", "Now she holds me not;", "Now follow if thou dar'st, to try whose right,\nOr thine, or mine, is most in Helena;", "Dem. Follow? nay, I'll go with thee cheek by cheek.", "Jole.", "[Exeunt. Lys. and Dem.", "Her. You, mistress, all this coil is long of you:\nNay, go not back.", "Hel.", "I will not trust you, I;", "Nor longer stay in your curst company.", "Your hands, than mine, are quicker for a fray;", "My legs are longer though, to run away.", "[Exit.]", "Her. I am amaz'd, and know not what to say.", "[Exit, pursuing HELENA.]", "Obe. This is thy negligence: still thou mistak'st,\nOr else committ'st thy knaveries wilfully.", "Puck. Believe me, king of shadows, I mistook.", "Did not you tell me, I should know the man", "By the Athenian garments he had on?", "And so far blameless proves my enterprise,", "That I have 'pointed an Athenian's eyes:", "And so far am I glad it so did sort,", "As this come jangling I esteem a sport.", "Obe. Thou seest, these lovers seek a place to fight:\nHie, therefore, Robin, overcast the night;", "The starry welkin cover thy anon", "With drooping fog, as black as Acheron;", "And lead these testy rivals so astray,", "As one come not within another's way.", "Like to Lysander sometime frame thy tongue,\nThen stir Demetrius up with bitter wrong;", "And sometime rail thou like Demetrius:", "And from each other look thou lead them thus,", "Till O'er their brows death-counterfeiting sleep", "With leaden legs and batty wings doth creep;", "Then crush this herb into Lysander's eye:", "Whose liquor hath this virtuous property,", "To take from thence all error with his might,", "And make his eye-balls roll with wonted sight.", "When they next wake, all this derision", "Shall seem a dream, and fruitless vision;", "And back to Athens shall the lovers wend⁵", "With league whose date till death shall never end.", "Whiles I in this affair doth they employ,", "Pll to my queen, and beg her Indian boy;", "And then I will her charmed eye release", "From monster's view, and all things shall be peace.", "Puck. My fairy lord, this must be done with haste;", "For night's swift dragons⁶ cut the clouds full fast,", "And yonder shines Aurora's harbinger;", "At whose approach, ghosts, wandering here and\nthere,", "Tropo home to church-yards: damned spirits all,", "That in cross-ways and floods have burial,¹⁰", "Already to their wormy beds¹¹ are gone;", "For fear lest day should look their shames upon,", "They wilfully themselves exile from light,", "And must for aye consort with black-brow'd night.", "Obe. But we are spirits of another sort:", "I with the Morning's love¹² have oft made sport:", "And, like a forester, the groves may tread,", {"bbox": [655, 1078, 891, 1094], "category": "

## SCENE II.

## MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

183

Puck. Up and down, up and down,

I will lead them up and down:

I am fear'd in field and town ;

Goblin, lead them up and down.

Here comes one.

### Enter LYSANDER.

Lys. Where art thou, proud Demetrius ? speak
you now.

Puck. Here, villain ; drawn and ready. Where
art thou?

Lys. I will be with thee straight.

Puck.

Follow me then
To plainer ground. [Exit LYS. as following the voice.

### Enter DEMETRIUS.

Dem.

Lysander ! speak again.

Thou runaway, thou coward, art thou fled ?

Speak. In some bush ? Where dost thou hide thy
head?

Puck. Thou coward, art thou bragging to the stars,
Telling the bushes that thou look'st for wars,
And wilt not come ? Come, recreant ; come, thou
child,

I'll whip thee with a rod : He is defil'd,

That draws a sword on thee.

Manum.

Yea; art thou there?

Puck. Follow my voice ; we'll try no manum
Here. [Exeunt.

### Re-enter LYSANDER.

Lys. He goes before me, and still dares me on ;

When I come where he calls, then he is gone.

The villain is much lighter heel'd than I :

I follow'd fast, but faster he did fly ;

That fallen am I in dark uneven way,

And here will rest me. Come, thou gentle day !

[Lies down.

For if but once thou show me thy gray light,

I'll find Demetrius, and revenge this spite. [Sleeps.

### Re-enter PUCK and DEMETRIUS.

Puck. Ho, ho ! ho, ho ! ! Coward, why com'st
thou not?

Dem. Abide me, if thou dar'st ; for well I wot,
Thou runn'st before me, shifting every place ;
And dar'st not stand, nor look me in the face.

Where art thou ?

Puck.

Come hither ; I am here,

Dem. Nay, then thou mock'st me. Thou shall
buy this dear.²

If ever I thy face by day-light see :

Now, go thy way. Faintness constraineth me

To measure out my length on this cold bed.—

By day's approach look to be visited.

[Lies down and sleeps.

### Enter HELENA.

Hel. O weary night, O long and tedious night,
Abate thy hours : shine, comforts from the east;
That I may back to Athens by day-light,

From these that my poor company detest :—

And, sleep, that sometimes shuts up sorrow's eye,
Steal me awhile from mine own company. [Sleeps.

Puck. Yet but three ? Come one more ;

Two of both kinds makes up four.

Here she comes, curst and sad :—

Cupid is a knavish lad,

Thus to make poor females mad.

### Enter HERMIA.

Her. Never so weary, never so in woe,

Bedabbled with the dew, and torn with briars ;

1 This exclamation would have been uttered with more propriety by Puck, if he were not now playing an assumed character, which he seems to forget. In the old song printed by Percy, in which all his gambols are related, he concludes every stanza with ho ! ho ! ho ! It was also the established dramatic exclamation given to the devil whenever he appeared on the stage, and attributed to him whenever he appeared in reality.

2 Johnson says, the poet perhaps wrote, 'thou shall by this dear ;' as in another place, 'thou shall aby it.'

3 These three last lines are to be found in Hay-

I can no further crawl, no further go ;

My legs can keep no pace with my desires.

Here will I rest me, till the break of day,
Heaven shield Lysander, if they mean a fray!

[Lies down

Puck.

On the ground

Sleep sound :

I'll apply

To your eye,

Gentle lover, remedy.

[Squeezing the juice on LYSANDER'S eye

When thou wak'st, thou tak'st

True delight

In the sight

Of thy former lady's eye

And the country proverb known,

That every man should take his own,

In your waking shall be shown :

Jack shall have Jill ;

Nought shall go ill ;

The man shall have his mare again, and all shall be
well.³

[Exit PUCK.—DEM. HEL. &c. sleep.

## ACT IV.

### SCENE I. The same. Enter TITANIA and BOT-
TOM, Fairies attending ; OBERON behind unseen.

Tita. Come, sit thee down upon this flowery bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,⁴

And stick musk-roses in thy sleek smooth head,

And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

Bot. Where's Peas-blossom ?

Peas. Ready.

Bot. Scratch my head, Peas-blossom.—Where's
monsieur Cobweb?

Cob. Ready.

Bot. Monsieur Cobweb ; good monsieur, get your weapons in your hand, and kill me a red-hipped humble-bee on the top of a thistle ; and, good monsieur, bring me the honey-bag. Do not fret yourself too much in the action, monsieur ; and, good monsieur, have a care the honey-bag break not ; I would be loath to have you overflown with the honey-bag, signior. Where's monsieur Mustard-seed ?

Must. Ready.

Bot. Give me your neif,⁵ monsieur Mustard-seed.
Pray you, leave your courtesy, good monsieur.

Must. What's your will ?

Bot. Nothing, good monsieur, but to help cav-
valero Cobweb to scratch. I must to the barber's,
monsieur ; for, methinks, I am marvellous hairy
about the face : and I am such a tender ass, if my
hair do but tickle me, I must scratch.

Tita. What, wilt thou hear some music, my
sweet love ?

Bot. I have a reasonable good ear in music : let us have the tongs and the bones.⁶

Tita. Or say, sweet love, what thou desir'st to eat.

Bot. Truly, a peck of provender ; I could munch
your good dry oats. Methinks, I have a great de-
sire to a bottle of hay : good hay, sweet hay, hath
no fellow.

Tita. I have a venturous fairy that shall seek
The squirrel's hoard, and fetch thee new nuts.

Bot. I had rather have a handful, or two, of dried peas. But, I pray you, let none of your people stir me ; I have an exposition of sleep come upon me.

Tita. Sleep thou, and I will wind thee in my arms.
Fairies, be gone, and be all ways away.

So doth the woodbine, the sweet honeysuckle,
Gently entwist,—the female ivy so

wood's Epigrams, or Three Hundred Proverbs. Stee-
vens thinks we should read *still* instead of *well*, for the
sake of the rhyme.

4 To coy, is to stroke or soothe with the hand. The
behaviour of Titania on this occasion seems copied from
that of the lady in Apuleius, lib. viii.

5 That is *fist*. So in K. Henry IV. Part II. Pistol says : ' Sweet knight, I kiss thy neif.'

6 The old rough rustic music of the *tongs*. The folio
has this stage direction : ' Musicke Tongs, Rural Music.'

["184", "MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.", "Act IV.", "Enrings the barky fingers of the elm.¹", "O, how I love thee! how I dote on thee!", "[They sleep.]", "OBERON advances. Enter PUCK.", "Ob. Welcome, good Robin. See'st thou this\nsweet sight?", "Her dotation now I do begin to pity.", "For meeting her of late behind the wood,", "Seeking sweet savours for this hateful fool,", "I did upbraid her, and fall out with her:", "For she his hairy temples then had rounded", "With coronet of fresh and fragrant flowers;", "And that same dew, which sometime on the buds", "Was wont to swell, like round and orient pearls,", "Stood now within the pretty flourets' eyes,", "Like tears, that did their own disgrace bewail.", "When I had, at my pleasure, taunted her,", "And she, in mild terms, begg'd my patience,", "I then did ask of her her changeling child;", "Which straight she gave me, and her fairy sent", "To bear him to my bower in fairy land.", "And now I have the boy, I will undo", "This hateful imperfection of her eyes.", "And, gentle Puck, take this transformed scalp", "From off the head of this Athenian swain;", "That he awaking when the other² do,", "May all to Athens back again repair;", "And think no more of this night's accidents,", "But as the fierce vexation of a dream.", "But first I will release the fairy queen.", "Be, as thou wast wont to be,", "[Touching her eyes with an herb.]", "See, as thou wast wont to see :", "Dian's bud³ o'er Cupid's flower", "Hath such force and blessed power.", "Now, my Titania; wake you, my sweet queen.", "Tita. My Oberon! what visions have I seen!", "Methought I was enamour'd of an ass.", "Ob. There lies your love.", "Tita. How came these things to pass?", "O, how mine eyes do loathe his visage now!", "Ob. Silence, awhile.—Robin, take off this head.—", "Titania, music call; and strike more dead", "Than common sleep, of all these five the sense.", "Tita. Music, ho! music; such as charmeth\nsleep.", "Puck. Now, when thou wak'st, with thine own\nfool's eyes peep.", "Ob. Sound, music. [Still music.] Come, my\nqueen, take hands with me,", "And rock the ground whereon these sleepers be.", "Now thou and I are new in amity;", "And will, to-morrow midnight, solemnly,", "Dance in Duke Theseus' house triumphantly,", "And bless it to all fair posterity:", "There shall the pairs of faithful lovers be", "Wedded, with Theseus, all in jollity.", "Puck. Fairy king, attend and mark;", "I do hear the morning lark.", "Ob. Then, my queen, in silence sad,⁴", "Trip we after the night's shade :", "We the globe can compass soon,", "Swifter than the wand'ring moon.", "Tita. Come, my lord; and in our flight,", "Tell me how it came this night,", "That I sleeping here was found,", "With these mortals on the ground. [Exeunt.]", "[Horns sound within.]", "Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTÆ, EGEUS, and Train.", "The. Go, one of you, find out the forester;—", "For now our observation is perform'd:⁵", "And since we have the vaward⁶ of the day,", "My love shall hear the music of my hounds.—\nUncouple in the western valley; go:", "Despatch, I say, and find the forester.", "We will, fair queen, up to the mountain's top,\nAnd mark the musical confusion", "Of hounds and echo in conjunction.", "Hip. I was with Hercules, and Cadmus, once,", "When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear", "With hounds of Sparta: never did I hear", "Such gallant chiding;⁷ for, besides the groves,", "The skies, the fountains, every region near", "Seem'd all one mutual cry: I never heard", "So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.", "The. My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind,\nSo flew'd,⁸ so sanded;⁹ and their heats are hung", "With ears that sweep away the morning dew;", "Crook-knee'd, and dew-lapp'd like Thessalian bulls;", "Slow in pursuit, but match'd in mouth like bells,", "Each under each. A cry more tuneful", "Was never holla'd to, nor cheer'd with horn,", "In Crete, in Sparta, nor in Thessaly:", "Judge, when you hear.—But, soft; what nymphs\nare these?", "Ege. My lord, this is my daughter here asleep:", "And this, Lysander; of this Demetrius is;", "This Helena, old Nédar's Helena:", "I wonder of their being here together.", "The. No doubt, they rose up early, to observe", "The rite of May; and, hearing our intent,", "Came here in grace of our solemnity.—", "But, speak, Egeus: is not this the day", "That Hermia should give answer of her choice?", "Ege. It is, my lord.", "The. Go, bid the huntsmen wake them with their\nhorns.", "Horns, and shout within. DEMETRIUS, LYSANDER,", "HERMIA, and HELENA, wake and start up.", "The. Good-morrow, friends. Saint Valentine is\npast;", "Begin these wood-birds to couple now?", "Lys. Pardon, my lord.", "[He and the rest kneel to THESEUS.]", "The. I pray you all, stand up.", "I know you are two rival enemies;", "How comes this gentle concord in the world,", "That hatred is so far from jealousy,", "To sleep by hate, and fear no enmity?", "Ege. My lord, I shall reply amazedly,", "Half 'sleep, half waking: But as yet, I swear,", "I cannot truly say how I came here:", "But, as I think, (for truly would I speak,—", "And now I do bethink me, so is it;)", "I came with Hermia hither: our intent", "Was to be gone from Athens, where we might be\nWithout the peril of the Athenian law.", "Ege. Enough, enough, my lord; you have enough:", "I beg the law, the law, upon his head.—", "They would have stol'n away, they would, Demetrius,\nThereby to have defeated you and me:", "You, of your wife; and me, of my consent;", "Of my consent that she should be your wife.", "Dem. My lord, fair Helen told me of their stealth,", "Of this their purpose hither, to this wood;", "And I in fury hither followed them;", "Fair Helena in fancy¹⁰ following me.", "But, my good lord, I wot not by what power", "(But by some power it is), my love to Hermia,", {"bbox": [617, 11

## SCENE II.

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

185

And all the faith, the virtue of my heart,
The object, and the pleasure of mine eye,
Is only Helena. To her, my lord,
Was I betroth'd ere I saw Hermia :

But, like in sickness, did I loathe this food:
But, as in health, come to my natural taste,
Now do I wish it, love it, long for it,
And will for evermore be true to it.

**The.** Fair lovers, you are fortunately met:
Of this discourse we more will hear anon.—
Egeus, I will overbear your will;
For in the temple, by and by with us,
These couples shall eternally be knit.
And, for the morning now is something worn,
Our purposes'd hunting shall be set aside.—
Away, with us, to Athens: Three and three,
We'll hold a feast in great solemnity.
Come, Hypolyta.

[Exeunt THE. HIP. EGE. and Train.

**Dem.** These things seem small and undistinguishable.

Like far-off mountains turned into clouds.

**Her.** Methinks, I see these things with parted eye,
When every thing seems double.

Hel.

So methinks :

And I have found Demetrius like a jewel,
Mine own, and not mine own.¹

Dem.

Are you sure

That we are awake? It seems to me,
That yet we sleep, we dream.—Do not you think,
The duke was here, and bid us follow him?

Her. Yea; and my father.

Hel.

And Hypolyta.

Lys.

And he did bid us follow to the temple.

**Dem.** Why then, we are awake: let's follow him;
And, by the way, let us recount our dreams.

[Exeunt.

As they go out, BOTTOM awakes.

**Bot.** When my cue comes, call me, and I will answer:—my next is, *Most fair Pyramus*.—Hey, ho!—Peter Quince! Flute, the bellows-mender! Snout, the tinker! Starveling! God's my life! stolen hence, and left me asleep! I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream,—past the wit of man to say what dream it was: Man is but an ass, if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had,—But man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report, what my dream was. I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream; it shall be called Bottom's Dream, because it hath no bottom; and I will sing it in the latter end of a play, before the duke: Peradventure, to make it the more gracious, I shall sing it at her death.²

[Exit.]

### SCENE II. Athens.
*A Room in Quince's House. Enter QUINCE, FLUTE, SNOUT, and STARVELING.*

**Quin.** Have you sent to Bottom's house ? is he come home yet?

**Star.** He cannot be heard of. Out of doubt, he is transported.

**Flu.** If he come not, then the play is marred; It goes not forward, doth it ?

**Quin.** It is not possible: you have not a man in all Athens able to discharge Pyramus but he.

**Flu.** No; he hath simply the best wit of any handicraft man in Athens.

1 Helena, perhaps, means to say, that having found Demetrius *unexpectedly*, she considered her property in him as insecure as that which a person has in a jewel that he has found by accident, which he knows not whether he shall retain, and which therefore may properly enough be called his own and not his own. Warburton proposed to read *gemell*, i. e. double; and it has also been proposed to read *gimmal*, which signifies a double ring.

2 Theobald conjectured, happily enough, that we should read 'after death.'

**Quin.** Yea, and the best person too: and he is a very paramount, for a sweet voice.

**Flu.** You must say, paragon: a paramour is, God bless us, a thing of nought.

Enter SNUG.

**Snug.** Masters, the duke is coming from the temple, and there is two or three lords and ladies more married: if our sport had gone forward, we had all been made men.

**Flu.** O sweet bully Bottom! Thus hath he lost sixpence a-day during his life; he could not have 'scaped sixpence a-day: an the duke had not given him sixpence a-day for playing Pyramus, I'll be hang'd; he would have deserved it: sixpence a-day, in Pyramus, or nothing.³

Enter BOTTOM.

**Bot.** Where are these lads? where are these hearts?

**Quin.** Bottom! —O most courageous day! O most happy hour!

**Bot.** Masters, I am to discourse wonders: but ask me not what; for, if I tell you, I am no true Athenian. I will tell you every thing, right as it fell out.

**Quin.** Let us hear, sweet Bottom.

**Bot.** Not a word of me. All that I will tell you, is, that the Duke hath dined: Get your apparel together; good strings to your beards, new ribbons to your pumps; meet presently at the palace; every man look o'er his part; for, the short and the long is, our play is preferred. In any case, let Thisby have clean linen; and let not him, that plays the lion, pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion's claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onions; nor garlick, for we are to utter sweet breath; and I do not doubt, but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy. No more words; away; go, away.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT V.

### SCENE I. The same. APARTMENT in the Palace

**Theseus.** Enter THESEUS, HIPPOLYTAE, PHILOSTRATE, Lords, and Attendants.

**Hip.** 'Tis strange, my Theseus, that these lovers speak of.

**Thee.** More strange than true. I never may believe these antique fables, nor these fairy toys.
Lovers, and madmen, have such seething brains,⁴
Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend
More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover, and the poet,
Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold;
That is, the madman: the lover, all asfrantick,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And, as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation, and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination;

That, if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or, in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush suppos'd a bear?

**Hip.** But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigur'd so together,

More witnesseth than fancy's images,

And grows to something of great constancy;⁶

But, howsoever, strange and admirable.

3 Steevens says that Preston, the actor and author of Cambyses, was meant to be ridiculed here. The queen having bestowed a pension on him of twenty pounds a year for the pleasure she received from his acting in the play of Dido, at Cambridge, in 1564.

4 So in the Tempest:

'thy brains,'

Now useless, *boild* within thy skull.'

5 i. e. are made of mère imagination.

6 i. e. consistency, stability, certainty.

24

## SCENE I.

MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM.

187

"To meet at Ninus' tomb, there, there to woo."

"This grisly beast, which by name lion hight,"

"The trusty Thisby, coming first by night,

"Did scare away, or rather did affright;"

"And, as she fled, her mantle she did fall;

"Which lion vile with bloody mouth did stain!

"Anon comes Pyramus, sweet youth, and tall,

"And finds his trusty Thisby's mantle slain;

"Whereat with blade, with bloody blameful blade,

"He bravely broach'd his boiling bloody breast;

"And, Thisby, tarrying in mulberry shade,

"His dagger drew, and died. For all the rest,

"Let lion, moon-shine, wall, and lovers twain,

"At large discourse, while here they do remain."

[Exeunt Prol. THISBE, Lion, and Moonshine.

Thee. I wonder, if the lion be to speak.

Dem. No wonder, my lord: one lion may, when many asses do.

Wall. " In this same interlude, it doth befall,

"That I, one Snout by name, present a wall :

"And such a wall, as I would have you think,

"That had in it a cranny'd hole, or chink,

"Through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisby,

"Didbidder often very secretly.

"This loam, this rough-east, and this stone, doth show

"That I am that same wall; the truth is so;

"And this the cranny is, right and sinister,

"Through which the fearful lovers are to whisper."

The. Would you desire lime and hair to speak better?

Dem. It is the wittiest partition that ever I heard discourse, my lord.

Thee. Pyramus draws near the wall: silence!

Enter PYRAMUS.

Pyr. " O grim-look'd night! O night with hue so black;

"O night, which ever art, when day is not!"

"O night, O night, alack, alack, alack,

"I fear my trusty hiss's promise is forgot!—

"And thou, O wall, O sweet, O lovely wall,

"That stand'll between her father's ground and mine;

"Thou wall, O wall, O sweet, and lovely wall,

"Show me thy chink, to blink through with mine cyne.

[Wall holds up his Fingers.

“Thanks, courteous wall: Jove shield thee well for this!

"But what see I? No Thisby do I see.

"O wicked wall, through whom I see no bliss:

"Curst be thy stones for thus deceiving me!"

Thee. The wall, methinks, being sensible, should curse again.

Pyr. No, in truth, sir, he should not. Deceiving me, is Thisby's cue: she is to enter now, and I am to spy her through the wall. You shall see, it will fall nat as I told you :—Yonder she comes.

Enter THISBE.

This. " O wall, full often hast thou heard my moans,

"For parting my fair Pyramus and me :

"My cherry lips have often kiss'd thy stones:

"Thy stones with lime and hair knit up in thee."

Pyr. " I see a voice: now will I to the chink,

"To spy an I can hear my Thisby's face.

"Thisby!"

This. " My love! thou art my love, I think."

Pyr. "Think what thou wilt, I am thy lover's grace;

"And like Limander² am I trusty still."

This. " And I like Helen, till the fates mg kill."

Pyr. "Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true."

This. " As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you."

Pyr. " O, kiss me through the hole of this vile wall."

This. "I kiss the wall's hole, not your lips at all."

Pyr. "Wilt thou at Ninny's tomb meet me straightway?"

This. "Tide life, tide death, I come without delay."

Wall. "Thus have I, wall, my part discharged so;

“And, being done, thus wall away doth go.”

[Exeunt Wall, PYRAMUS, and THISBE.

Thee. Now is the mural down between the two neighbours.

Dem. No remedy, my lord, when walls are so wilful to hear without warning.

Hip. This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard.

Thee. The best in this kind are but shadows: and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.

Hip. It must be your imagination then, and not theirs.

Thee. If we imagine no worse of them, than they of themselves, they may pass for excellent men. Here come two noble beasts in, a moon⁴ and a lion.

Enter Lion and Moonshine.

Lion. "You, ladies, you, whose gentle hearts do fear

"The smallest monstrous mouse that creeps on floor,

"May now, perchance, both quake and tremble here,

"When lion rough in wildest rage doth roar.

"Then know, that I, one Snug the joiner, am

"No lion fell, nor else no lion's dam :"

"For if I should as lion come in strife.

“Into this place, ’twere pity in my life.”

Thee. A very gentle beast, and of a good science.

Dem. The very best at a beast, my lord, that e’er I saw.

Lys. This lion is a very fox for his valour.

Thee. True; and a goose for his discretion.

Dem. Not so, my lord: for his valour cannot carry his discretion; and the fox carries the goose.

Thee. His discretion, I am sure, cannot carry his valour; for the goose carries not the fox. It is well: leave it to his discretion, and let us listen to the moon:

Moon. "This lantern doth the horned moon present :"

Dem. He should have worn the horns on his head.

Thee. He is no crescent, and his horns are invisible within the circumference.

Moon. "This lantern doth the horned moon present ;"

"Myself the man i’the moon do seem to be."

Thee. This is the greatest error of all the rest: the man should be put into the lantern: How is it else the man i’the moon?

Dem. He dares not come there for the candle; for, you see, it is already in snuff.³

Hip. I am aweary of this moon: Would he would change!

Thee. It appears, by his small light of discretion, that he is in the wane: but yet, in courtesy, in all reason, we must stay the time.

Lys. Proceed, moon.

Moon. All that I have to say, is, to tell you, that the lantern is the moon; I, the man in the moon; this thorn bush, my thorn bush; and this dog my dog.

Dem. Why, all these should be in the lantern; for they are in the moon. But silence; here comes Thisbe.

Enter THISBE.

This. " This is old Ninny’s tomb: Where is my love ?"

Lion. " Oh—."

[The Lion roars.—THISBE runs off.

down, were it to exercise this faculty without previous warning.

4 The old copies read, a man, &c. The emendation is by Theobald.

5 An equivoque. Snuff signifies both the cinder of a candle and hasty anger.

1 Called.

2 Limander and Helen, blunderingly for Leander and Hero, as Shafalus and Procrus for Cephalus and Procris.

3 This alludes to the proverb, ‘Walls have ears.’ A wall between almost any two neighbours would soon be

["188", "MIDSUMMER-NIGHT'S DREAM", "ACT V.", "Dem. Well roared, lion.", "Thee. Well run, Thisbe.", "Hip. Well shone moon.—Truly, the moon shines with a good grace.", "Thee. Well moused,¹ lion.", "[The Lion tears THISBE's Mantle, and exet.", "Dem. And so comes Pyramus.", "Lys. And then the moon vanishes.", "### Enter PYRAMUS.", "Pyr. \"Sweet moon, I thank thee for thy sunny beams:\"", "\"I thank thee, moon, for shining now so bright.\"", "\"For, by thy gracious, golden, glittering streams, \"\n\"I trust to taste of truest Thisby's sight.\"", "\"But stay;—O spite!\"", "\"But mark;—Poor knight,", "\"What dreadful dole is here!\"", "\"Eyes do you see?\"", "\"How can it be?\"", "\"O dainty duck! O dear!\"", "\"Thy mantle good,", "\"What, stain'd with blood?\"", "\"Approach, ye furies fell!\"", "\"O fates! come, come;²\"", "\"Cut thread and thrum;³\"", "\"Quail, crush, conclude, and quell!⁴\"", "Thee. This passion, and the death of a dear friend, would go near to make a man look sad.", "Hip. Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man.", "Pyr. \"O, wherefore, nature, didst thou lions frame?\"", "\"Since lion vile hath here deflour'd my dear:\"", "\"Which is—no, no—which was the fairest dame,", "\"That liv'd, that lov'd, that lik'd, that look'd with cheer.⁵\"", "\"Come, tears, confound;\"", "\"Out, sword, and wound\"", "\"The pap of Pyramus:\"", "\"Ay, that left pap,\"", "\"Where heart doth hop:\"", "\"Thus die I, thus, thus, thus.\"", "\"Now am I dead,", "\"Now am I fled;", "\"My soul is in the sky:\"", "\"Tongue, lose thy light!\"", "\"Moon take thy flight!\"", "\"Now die, die, die, die, die.\"", "[Dies.—Exit Moonshine.", "Dem. No die, but an ace, for him; for he is but one.", "Lys. Less than an ace, man; for he is dead; he is nothing.", "Thee. With the help of a surgeon, he might yet recover, and prove an ass.⁶", "Hip. How chance moonshine is gone, before Thisbe comes back and finds her lover?", "Thee. She will find him by star-light.—Here she comes; and her passion ends the play.", "### Enter THISBE.", "Hip. Methinks, she should not use a long one, for such a Pyramus: I hope, she will be brief.", "Dem. A mote will turn the balance, which Pyramus, which Thisbe, is the better.", "Lys. She hath spied him already with those sweet eyes.", "1 To mouse, according to Malone, signified to mam-mock, to tear in pieces, as a cat tears a mouse.", "2 Dr. Farmer thought this was written in ridicule of a passage in Damon and Pythias, by Richard Edwards, 1552:", "“Ye furies, all at once", "On me your torments tire.", "Gripe me you greedy griefs", "And present pangues of death;", "“You sisters three, with cruel hands,", "“With speed come stop my breath!”", "3 Thrum is the end or extremity of a weaver's warp.", "It is used for any collection or tuft of short thread.", "4 Destroy.", "5 Countenance.", "6 The character of Theseus throughout this play is more exalted in its humanity than in its greatness. Though some sensible observations on life and anima-ted descriptions fall from him, as it is said of Iago,", "Dem. And thus she moans,⁷ videlicet.—\nThis. \"Asleep, my love?", "\"What, dead, my dove?\"", "\"O Pyramus, arise,", "\"Speak, speak. Quite dumb?", "\"Dead, dead? A tomb", "\"Must cover thy sweet eyes.", "\"These lily brows,⁸", "\"This cherry nose,", "\"These yellow cowslip cheeks,", "\"Are gone, are gone:", "\"Lovers, make moan!", "\"His eyes were green as leeks.", "\"O Sisters three,", "\"Come, come, to me,", "\"With hands as pale as milk;", "\"Lay them in gore,", "\"Since you have shore", "\"With shears his thread of silk.", "\"Tongue, not a word:—", "\"Come, trusty sword;", "\"Come, blade, my breast imbrue:", "\"And farewell, friends;—", "\"Thus Thisby ends:", "\"Adieu, adieu, adieu.\"", "[Dies.", "Thee. Moonshine and lion are left to bury the dead.", "Dem. Ay, and wall too.", "Bot. No, I assure you: the wall is down that parted their fathers. Will it please you to see the epilogue, or to hear a Burgomask dance,⁹ between two of our company?¹⁰", "Thee. No epilogue, I pray you: for your play needs no excuse.—Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there need none to be blamed.", "Marry, if he that writ it, had play'd Pyramus, and hanged himself with Thisbe's garter, it would have been a fine tragedy: and so it is, truly; and very notably discharged. But come, your Bergomask:", "let your epilogue alone. [Here a dance of Clowns.", "The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve:—", "Lovers, to bed; 'tis almost fairy time.", "I fear we shall outsleep the coming morn.", "As much as we this night have overwatch'd.", "This palpable-gross play hath well beguiled", "The heavy gait¹⁰ of night.—Sweet friends, to bed.", "A fortnight hold we this solemnity.", "In nightly revels, and new jollity.", "[Exeunt.]", "### SCENE II. Enter PUCK.", "Puck. Now the hungry lion roars,", "And the wolf beholds the moon;", "Whilst the heavy ploughman snores,", "All with weary task fordone,¹¹", "Now the wasted brands do glow,", "Whilst the scritch-owl, scritchling, scritchling,", "Pats the wretch that lies in woe,", "In remembrance of a shroud.", "Now it is the time of night,", "That the graves all gaping wide,", "Every one lets forth his sprit,", "In the church-way paths to glide:", "And we fairies, that do run,", "By the triple Hecat's team,", "From the presence of the sun,", "Following darkness like a dream,", "Now are frolic; not a mouse", "Shall disturb this hallow'd house:", "'You shall taste him more as a soldier than as a wit', which is a distinction he is here striving to deserve, though with little success; as in support of his preten-sions he never rises higher than a pun, and frequently sinks as low as a quibble.", "7 The old copies read means, which had anciently the same signification as moans. Theobald made the alteration.", "8 The old copies read tips instead of brows. The alteration was made for the sake of the rhyme by Theo-bald.", {"bbox": [63

190

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT. I.

PERSONS REPRESENTED.

FERDIAND, King of Navarre.

BIRON,

LONGAVILLE, Lords, attending on the King

DUMAIN,

BOYET, Lords, attending on the Princess of France.

MERCADE, France.

DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO, a fantastical Spaniard.

SIR NATHANIEL, a Curate.

HOLOFERNES, a Schoolmaster.

DULL, a Constable.

COSTARD, a Clown.

MOTH, Page to Armado.

Princess of France.

ROSALINE,

MARIA,

KATHARINE,

JAQUENETTA, a country Wench.

Officers and others, attendants on the King and Princess.

SCENE, Navarre.

This enumeration of Persons was made by Rowe.

ACT I.

## SCENE I. Navarre.
A Park with a Palace in it.
—Enter the King, BIRON, LONGAVILLE, and DUMAIN.

King.

Let fame, that all hunt after in their lives,
Live register'd upon our brazen tombs,
And then grace us in the disgrace of death;
When, spite of cormorant devouring time,
The endeavour of this present breath may buy
That honour, which shall bate his scythe's keen edge,
And make us heirs of all eternity.

Therefore, brave conquerors!—for so you are,
That war against your own affections,
And the huge army of the world's desires,—

Our late edict shall strongly stand in force:

Navarre shall be the wonder of the world;

Our court shall be a little Academe,

Still and contemplative in living art.

You three, Biron, Dumain, and Longaville,
Have sworn for three years' term to live with me,
My fellow-scholars, and to keep those statutes,
That are recorded in this schedule here:

Your oaths are past, and now subscribe your names:
That his own hand may strike his honour down;
That violates the smallest branch herein:
If you are arm'd to do, as sworn to do,

Subscribe to your deep oath, and keep it too.
Long.

I. I am resolv'd: 'tis but a three years' fast;
The mind shall banquet, though the body pine:
Fat paunches have lean pates; and dainty bits
Make rich the ribs, but bank'rout quite the wits.

Dum. My loving lord, Dumain is mortified;
The grosser manner of these world's delights
He throws upon the gross world's baser slaves:

To love, to wealth, to pomp, I pine and die;

With all these² living in philosophy.
Biron.

I can but say their protestation over,
So much, dear liege, I have already sworn,
That is, To live and study here three years.
But there are other strict observances:

As, not to see a woman in that term;

Which, I hope well, is not enrolled there:

And, one day in a week to touch no food;

And but one meal on every day beside;

The which, I hope, is not enrolled there:

And then, to sleep but three hours in the night,
And not be seen to wink of all the day;

(When I was wont to think no harm all night,
And make a dark night too of half the day;)

O, these are barren tasks, too hard to keep;
Not to see ladies—study—fast—not sleep.

King. Your oath is pass'd to pass away from
these.

Biron. Let me say no, my liege, an if you please;
I only swore, to study with your grace,

And stay here in your court for three years' space.

Long. You swore to that, Biron, and to the rest.

Biron. By yea and nay, sir, then I swore in jest.
What is the end of study? let me know.

King. Why, that to know, which else we should
not know.

Biron. Things hid and barr'd, you mean, from
common sense?

King. Ay, that is study's god-like recompense.

Biron. Come on then, I will swear to study so,

To know the thing I am forbid to know:

As thus.—To study where I well may dine,

When I to feast expressly am forbidden;

Or, study where to meet some mistress fine,

When mistresses from common sense are hid;

Or, having sworn too hard-a-keeping oath,

Study to break it, and not break my troth.

If study's gain be thus, and this be so,

Study knows that, which yet it doth not know:

Swear me to this, and I will ne'er say, no.

King. These be the stops that hinder study quite,
And train our intellects to vain delight.

Biron. Why, all delights are vain; but that most
vain,

Which, with pain purchases'd, doth inherit pain:

As, painfully to pore upon a book,

To seek the light of truth: while truth the while
Doth falsely² blind the eyesight of his look:

Light, seeking light, doth light of light beguile:

So, ere you know where light in darkness lies,

Your light grows dark by losing of your eyes.⁴

Study me how to please the eye indeed,

By fixing it upon a fairer eye;

Who dazzling so, that eye shall be his heed,

And give him light that it was blinded by.⁵

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun,

That will not be deep-search'd with saucy looks;

Small have continual plodders ever won,

Save base authority from others' books.

These earthly godfathers of heaven's lights,

That give a name to every fixed star,

Have no more profit of their shining nights,

That those that walk, and wet not what they are.

Too much to know, is, to know nought but fame;

And every godfather can give a name.⁶

King. How well he's read, to reason against
reading!

Dum. Proceeded well, to stop all good proceed-
ing!

1. *Beratene* in all the old editions.

2. i. e. with all these companions. He may be supposed to point to the king, Biron, &c.

3. Dishonestly, treacherously.

4. The whole sense of this gingling declamation is only this, that a man by too close study may read himself blind.

5. The meaning is: that when he dazzles, that is, has his eye made weak, by fixing his eye upon a fairer eye, that fairer eye shall be his heed or guide, his lode-star, and give him light that was blinded by it.

6. That is, too much knowledge gives no real solution of doubts, but merely fame, or a name, a thing which every godfather can give.

## SCENE I.

# LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

191

*Long.* He weeds the corn, and still lets grow the weeding.

*Biron.* The spring is near, when green geese are a breeding.

*Dum.* How follows that ?

*Dum.* Fit in his place and time.

*Dum.* In reason nothing.

*Biron.* Something then in rhyme.

*Long.* Biron is like an envious sneaking¹ frost, That bites the first-born infants of the spring.

*Biron.* Well, say I am; why should proud summer boast,

Before the birds have any cause to sing ?

Why should I joy in an abortive birth ?

At Christmas I no more desire a rose

Than wish a snow in May's new-fangled shows²;

But like of each thing that in season grows.

So you, to study now it is too late,

Climb o'er the house to unlock the little gate.

*King.* Well, sit you out: go home, Biron, adieu!

*Biron.* No, my good lord; I have sworn to stay with you:

And, though I have for barbarism spoke more,

Than for that angel knowledge you can say,

Yet confident I'll keep very what I have sworn,

And bide the penance of each three years' day.

Give me the paper, let me read the same;

And to the strict'st decrees I'll write my name.

*King.* How well this yielding rescues thee from shame!

*Biron.* [Reads.] Item, That no woman shall come within a mile of my court.—Hath this been pro-claim'd?

*Long.* Four days ago.

*Biron.* Let's see the penalty. [Reads.] On pain of losing her tongue.—Who devis'd this penalty?

*Long.* Lame, Marry, that did it.

*Biron.* Sweet lord, and why?

*Long.* To fright them hence with that dread penalty.

*Biron.* A dangerous law against gentility.³

*[Reads.] Item, If any man be seen to talk with a woman within the term of three years, he shall endure such public shame as the rest of the court can possibly devise.—

This article, my liege, yourself must break;

For, well you know, here comes in embassy

The French king's daughter, with yourself to speak, A maid of grace, and complete majesty,—

About surrender-up of Aquitain

To her decrepit, sick, and bed-rid father:

Therefore this article is made in vain,

Or vainly comes the admired princess hither.

*King.* What say you, lords ? why, this was quite forgot.

*Biron.* So study evermore is overshot;

While it doth study to have what it would,

It doth forget to do the thing it should:

And when it hath the thing it hunteth most,

'Tis won, as towns with fire; so won, so lost.

*King.* We must, of force, dispense with this decree;

She must lie⁴ here on mere necessity.

*Biron.* Necessity will make us all forsworn

Three thousand times within this three years' space:

For every man with his affects is born;

Not by any master'd, but by special grace:

1 i. e. nipping.

2 By these *shows* the poet means May-games, at which a snow would be very unwelcome and unexpected. It is only a periphrasis for May.

3 The word *gentility* here does not signify that rank of people called *gentry*; but what the French express by *gentillesse*, i. e. *elegantia*, *urbanitas*.

4 That is, *reside here*. So in Sir Henry Wotton's equivocal definition: 'An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie (i. e. reside) abroad for the good of his country.'

5 Temptations.

6 Lively, sprightly.

7 *Complements* is here used in its ancient sense of *accomplishments*. Vide Note on K. Henry V. Act II. Sc 2.

If I break faith, this word shall speak for me,
I am forsworn on mere necessity.—

So to the laws at large I write my name: [Subscribers. And he, that breaks them in the least degree, Stands in attainder of eternal shame;

Suggestions⁵ are to others, as to me;

But, I believe, although I seem so loath,

I am the last that will last keep his oath.

But, is there no quick⁶ recreation granted?

*King.* Ay, that there is: our court, you know, is haunted

With a refined traveller of Spain;

A man in all the world's new fashion planted,

That hath a mint of phrases in his brain:

One, whom the music of his own vain tongue

Doth ravish, like enchanting harmony;

A man of complements,⁷ whom right and wrong

Have chose as umpire of their mutiny:

This child of fancy, that Armado hight,

For interim to our studies, shall relate,

In high-born words, the worth of many a knight

From tawny Spain, lost in the world's debate.

How you delight, my lords, I know not, I;

But, I protest, I love to hear him lie,

And I will use him for my minstrelsy.⁹

*Biron.* Armado is a most illustrious wight,

A man of fire-new¹⁰ words, fashion's own knight.

*Long.* Costard the swain, and he, shall be our sport;

And, so to study, three years is but short.

Enter DULL, with a Letter, and COSTARD.

*Dull.* Which is the duke's own person?

*Biron.* This, fellow; What would'st?

*Dull.* I myself reprehend his own person, for I am his grace's tharborough:¹¹ but I would see his own person in flesh and blood.

*Biron.* This is he.

*Dull.* Signior Arme—Arme—commends you. There's villany abroad; this letter will tell you more.

*Cost.* Sir, the contempts thereof are as touching me.

*King.* A letter from the magnificent Armado.

*Biron.* How low soever the matter, I hope in God for high words.

*Long.* A high hope for a low having: God grant us patience!

*Biron.* To hear? or forbear hearing?¹²

*Long.* To hear meekly, sir, and to laugh moderately; or to forbear both.

*Biron.* Well, sir, be it as the style¹³ shall give us cause to climb in the merriness.

*Cost.* The matter is to me, sir, as concerning Jaquenetta. The manner of it is, I was taken with the manner.¹⁴

*Biron.* In what manner?

*Cost.* In manner and form following, sir; all those three: I was seen with her in the manor house, sitting with her upon the form, and taken following her into the park; which, put together, is, in manner and form following. Now, sir, for the manner,—it is the manner of a man to speak to a woman: for the form,—in some form.

*Biron.* For the following, sir?

*Cost.* As it shall follow in my correction; And God defend the right!

*King.* Will you hear this letter with attention?

*Biron.* As we would hear an oracle.

8 i. e. who is called Armado.

9 I will make use of him instead of a *minstrel*, whose occupation was to relate fabulous stories.

10 i. e. new from the forge; we have still retained a similar mode of speech in the colloquial phrase *brand-new*.

11 i. e. third-borough, a peace-officer.

12 'To hear? or forbear laughing?' is possibly the true reading.

13 A quibble is here intended between a *stile* and *style*.
14 That is, *in the fact*. A thief is said to be taken with the manner (mainour) when he is taken with the thing stolen about him. The thing stolen was called *mainour*, *manour*, or *meinour*, from the French *manier*, manu tractare.

## SCENE II.

## LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

193

**Moth.** Why, sir, is this such a piece of study? Now here is three studied, ere you'll thrice wince: and how easy it is to put years to the word three, and study three years in two words, the dancing horse¹ will tell you.

**Arm.** A most fine figure!

**Moth.** To prove you a cypher.

[Aside.

**Moth.** I will hereupon confess, I am, in love: and, as it is base for a soldier to love, so am I in love with a base wench. If drawing my sword against the humour of affection would deliver me from the reprobate thought of it, I would take desire prisoner, and ransom him to any French courtier for a new devised courtesy. I think, scorn to sigh; methinks, I should out-swear Cupid. Comfort me, boy: What great men have been in love?

**Moth.** Hercules, master.

**Arm.** Most sweet Hercules!—More authority, dear boy, name more; and, sweet my child, let them be men of good repute and carriage.

**Moth.** Samson, master: he was a man of good carriage, great carriage! for he carried the town-gates on his back, like a porter: and he was in love.

**Arm.** O well-knit Samson! strong-jointed Samson! I do excel thee in my rapier, as much as thou didst me in carrying gates. I am in love too,—Who was Samson's love, my dear Moth?

**Moth.** A woman, master.

**Arm.** Of what complexion?

**Moth.** Of all the four, or the three, or the two; or one of the four.

**Arm.** Tell me precisely of what complexion?

**Moth.** Of the sea-water green, sir.

**Arm.** Is that one of the four complexions?

**Moth.** As I have read, sir; and the best of them too.

**Arm.** Green, indeed, is the colour of lovers:²² but to have a love of that colour, methinks, Samson had small reason for it. He, surely, affected her for her wit.

**Arm.** It was so, sir; for she had a green wit.

**Moth.** My love is most immaculate white and red.

**Moth.** Most maculate thoughts, master, are masked under such colours.

**Arm.** Define, define, well-educated infant.

**Moth.** My father's wit, and my mother's tongue, assist me!

**Arm.** Sweet invocation of a child; most pretty, and pathetical!

**Moth.** If she be made of white and red,

Her faults will ne'er be known;

For blushing cheeks by faults are bred,

And fears by pale white shown;

Then, if she fear, or be to blame,

By this you shall not know;

For still her cheeks possess the same,

Which native she doth owe.

A dangerous rhyme, master, against the reason of white and red.

**Arm.** Is there not a ballad, boy, of the King and the Beggar?⁴

**Moth.** The world was very guilty of such a ballad some three ages since: but, I think, now 'tis not to be found; or, if it were, it would neither serve for the writing, nor the tune.

1 This alludes to the celebrated bay horse Morocco, belonging to one Bankes, who exhibited his docile and sagacious animal through Europe. Many of his remarkable pranks are mentioned by cotermporary writers, and he is alluded to by numbers besides Shakespeare. The fate of man and horse is not known with certainty, but it has been asserted that they were both burnt at Rome, as magicians, by order of the Pope. The best account of Bankes and his horse is to be found in the notes to a French translation of Apuleius's Golden Asse, by Jean de Montyard, 1602.

2 The allusion probably is to the *willow*, the supposed ornament of unsuccessful lovers.

3 Of which she is naturally possessed.

4 See Percy's *Reliques of Antient Poetry*, fourth edition, vol. i. p. 199.

5 *Digression* is here used for the act of going out of the right way, *transgression*.

6 Armado applies this epithet ironically to Costard.

**Arm.** I will have the subject newly writ o'er, that I may example my digression⁵ by some mighty precedent. Boy, I do love that country girl, that I took in the park with the rational hind⁶ Costard: she deserves well.

**Moth.** To be whipped; and yet a better love than my master.

[Aside.

**Arm.** Sing, boy; my spirit grows heavy in love.
**Moth.** And that's great marvel, loving a light wench.

**Arm.** I say, sing.

**Moth.** Forbear till this company be past.

### Enter DULL, COSTARD, and JAQUENETTA.

**Dull.** Sir, the duke's pleasure is, that you keep Costard safe: and you must let him take no delight, nor no penance; but a'must fast three days a-week: for this damsel, I must keep her at the park; she is allowed for the day-woman.⁷ Fare you well.

**Arm.** I do betray myself with blushing.—Maid.

**Jaq.** Man.

**Arm.** I will visit thee at the lodge.

**Jaq.** That's hereby.

**Arm.** I know where it is situate.

**Jaq.** Lord, how wise you are!

**Arm.** I will tell thee wonders.

**Jaq.** With that face?⁹

**Arm.** I love thee.

**Jaq.** So I heard you say.

**Arm.** And so farewell.

**Jaq.** Fair weather after you!

**Dull.** Come, Jaquenetta, away.

[Exeunt DULL and JAQUENETTA.

**Arm.** Villain, thou shallt fast for thy offences, ere thou be pardoned.

**Cost.** Well, sir, I hope, when I do it, I shall do it on a full stomach.

**Arm.** Thou shall be heavily punished.

**Cost.** I am more bound to you, than your fellows, for they are but lightly rewarded.

**Arm.** Take away this villain; shut him up.

**Moth.** Come, you transgressing slave; away.

**Cost.** Let me not be pent up, sir; I will fast, being loose.

**Moth.** No, sir; that were fast and loose: thou shallt to prison.

**Cost.** Well, if ever I do see the merry days of desolation that I have seen, some shall see—

**Moth.** What shall some see?

**Cost.** Nay, nothing, master Moth, but what they look upon. It is not for prisoners to be too silent in their words; and, therefore, I will say nothing: I thank God, I have as little patience as another man; and, therefore, I can be quiet.

[Exeunt MOTH and COSTARD.

**Arm.** I do affect¹⁰ the very ground, which is base, where her shoe, which is baser, guided by her foot, which is basest, doth tread. I shall be forsworn, (which is a great argument of falsehood,) if I love: And how can that be true love, which is falsely attempted? Love is a familiar: love is a devil: there is no evil angel but love. Yet Samson was so tempted: and he had an excellent strength: yet was Solomon so seduced; and he had a very good wit. Cupid's butt-shaft¹¹ is too hard for Hercules' club, and therefore too much odds for

7 *Tuberna Casearia* is interpreted in the old Dictionaries a *daye* house, where cheese is made. A *day-woman* is therefore a *dairy-woman*. Johnson says *day* is an old word for milk. A *dairy-maid* is still called a *dey* or *day* in the northern parts of Scotland.

8 *Jaquenetta* and *Armado* are at cross-purposes. *Hereby* is used by her, (as among the common people of some counties,) in the sense of *as it may happen*. He takes it in the sense of *just by*.

9 This odd phrase was still in use in Fielding's time, who, putting it into the mouth of Beau Didapper, thinks it necessary to apologize (in a note) for its want of sense, by adding that it was taken verbatim from very polite conversation.

10 *Love.*

11 A kind of arrow used for shooting at butts with. The butt was the place on which the mark to be shot at was placed.

25

194

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT II.

a Spaniard's rapier. The first and second cause
will not serve my turn;¹ the passado he respects
not, the duello he regards not: his disgrace is to
be called boy; but his glory is to subdue men.
Adieu, valour! rust, rapier! be still, drum! for
your manager is in love; yea, he loveth. Assist
me, some extemporal god of rhyme, for, I am sure,
I shall turn sonneteer. Devise, wit; write, pen;
for I am for whole volumes in folio.
[Exit.

ACT II.

### SCENE I.
Another part of the same. A Pavilion and Tents at a distance. Enter the Princess of France, ROSALINE, MARIA, KATHARINE, BOYET, Lords, and other Attendants.

Boyet. Now, madam, summon up your dearest² spirits:

Consider who the king your father sends;
To whom he sends; and what's his embassy:
Yourself, held precious in the world's esteem;
To parley with the sole inheritor
Of all perfections that a man may owe,
Matchless Navarre; the plea of no less weight
Than Aquitain; a dowry for a queen.
Be now as prodigal of all dear grace,
As nature was in making graces dear,
When she did starve the general world beside,
And prodigally gave them all to you.

Prin. Good lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean,

Needs not the painted flourish of your praise;
Beauty is bought by judgment of the eye,
Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues;
I am less proud to hear you tell my worth,
Than you much willing to be counted wise
In spending your wit in the praise of mine.
But now to task the tasker,—Good Boyet,
You are not ignorant, all-telling fame
Doth noise abroad, Navarre hath made a vow,
Till painful study shall out-wear three years,
No woman may approach his silent court:
Therefore to us seemeth it a needful course,
Before we enter his forbidden gates,
To know his pleasure; and in that behalf,
Bold³ of your worthiness, we single you
As our best moving fair solicitor:
Tell him the daughter of the king of France,
On serious business, craving quick despatch,
Importunes personal conference with his grace.
Haste, signify so much; while we attend,
Like humbly-visag'd suitors, his high will.

Boyet. Proud of employment, willingly I go. [Exit.

Prin. All pride is willing pride, and yours is so,—

Who are the votaries, my loving lords,
That are vow-fellows with this virtuous duke?

1. Lord. Longaville is one.

Prin.

Know you the man?

Mar. I know him madam; at a marriage feast,
Between lord Perigort and the beauteous heir

Of Jaques Falconbridge, solemnized
In Normandy, saw I this Longaville:
A man of sovereign parts he is esteem'd;
Well fitted⁴ in the arts, glorious in arms:
Nothing becomes him ill, that he would well.
The only soil of his fair virtue's gloss
(If virtue's gloss will stain with any soil,)
Is a sharp wit match'd with too blunt a will;

Whose edge hath power to cut, whose will still wills
It should none spare that come within his power.

Prin. Some merry mocking lord, belike; is't so?

Mar. They say so most, that most his humours know.

Prin. Such short-liv'd wits do wither as they grow.
Who are the rest?

Kath. The young Dumain, a well accomplish'd youth,

Of all that virtue love for virtue lov'd;

1. See Notes on the last Act of As You Like It.

2. Best.

3. i. e. confident of it.

4. Well fitted is well qualified.

Most power to do most harm, least knowing ill;
For he hath wit to make an ill shape good,
And shape to win grace though he had no wit.
I saw him at the duke Alengon's once:
And much too little of that good I saw,
Is my report, to his great worthiness.

Ros. Another of these students at that time
Was there with him: if I have heard a truth,

Biron they call him; but a merrier man,
Within the limit of becoming birth,
I never spent an hour's talk withal:
His eye begets occasion for his wit;
For every object that the one doth catch,
The other turns to a mirth-moving jest;
Which his fair tongue (conceit's expositor,)
Delivers in such apt and gracious words,
That aged ears play truant at his tales,
And younger hearings are quite ravished:
So sweet and voluble is his discourse.

Prin. God bless my ladies; are they all in love;
That every one her own hath garnish'd
With such bedecking ornaments of praise?

Mar. Here comes Boyet.

Re-enter BOYET.

Prin.

Now, what admittance, lord?

Boyet. Navarre had notice of your fair approach;
And he, and his competitors⁵ in oath,
Were all address'd⁶ to meet you, gentle lady,
Before I came. Marry, thus much have I learnt,
He rather means to lodge you in the field
(Like one that comes here to besiege his court,)
Than seek a dispensation for his oath,
To let you enter his unpeopled house.
Here comes Navarre. [The Ladies mask.

Enter KING, LONGAVILLE, DUMAIN, BIRON, and Attendants.

King. Fair princess, welcome to the court of Navarre.

Prin. Fair, I give you back again: and, welcome
I have not yet: the roof of this court is too high
to be yours; and welcome to the wild fields too base
to be mine.

King. You shall be welcome, madam, to my court.

Prin. I will be welcome then; conduct me thither.

King. Hear me, dear lady; I have sworn an oath.

Prin. Our lady help my lord! he'll be forsworn.

King. Not for the world, fair madam, by my will.

Prin. Why, will shall break it; will, and nothing else.

King. Your ladyship is ignorant what it is.

Prin. Where my lord so, his ignorance were wise,
Where² now his knowledge must prove ignorance.
I hear your grace has sworn-out house-keeping:
'Tis deadly sin to keep that oath, my lord,
And sin to break it:
But pardon me, I am too sudden-bold;
To teach a teacher ill beeseeth me.
Vouchsafe to read the purpose of my coming,
And suddenly resolve me in my suit.

King. Madam, I will, if suddenly I may.

Prin. You will the sooner, that I were away;

For you'll prove perjur'd, if you make me stay.

Biron. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

Ros. Did not I dance with you in Brabant once?

Biron. I know you did.

Ros.

How needless was it then

To ask the question !

Biron.

You must not be so quick.

Ros. 'Tis 'long of you that spur me with such questions.

Biron. Your wit's too hot, it speeds too fast, 'twill tire.

Ros. Not till it leave the rider in the mire.

Biron. What time o' day?

Ros. The hour that fools should ask.

Biron. Now fair befall your mask!

5. Confederates.

6. Prepared.

7. Where is here used for whereas.

SCENE I.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

195

Ros. Fair fall the face it covers!
Biron. And send you many lovers!
Ros. Amen, so you be none.
Biron. Nay, then will I be gone.
King. Madam, your father here doth intimate
The payment of a hundred thousand crowns;
Being but the one half of an entire sum,
Disbursed by my father in his wars.
But say, that he, or we (as neither have,)
Receiv'd that sum; yet there remains unpaid
A hundred thousand more; in surety of the which,
One part of Aquitain is bound to us,
Although not valued to the money's worth.
If then the king your father will restore
But that one half which is unsatisfied,
We will give up our right to Aquitain,
And hold fair friendship with his majesty.
But that, it seems, he little purporteth,
For here he doth demand to have repaid
A hundred thousand crowns; and not demands,
On payment of a hundred thousand crowns,
To have his title live in Aquitain;
Which we much rather had depart¹ withal,
And have the money by our father lent,
Than Aquitain so gelded² as it is.
Dear princess, were not his requests so far
From reason's yielding, your fair self should make
A yielding' against some reason, in my breast,
And go well satisfied to France again.
Prin. You do the king my father too much wrong,
And wrong the reputation of your name,
In so unseeming to confess receipt
Of that which hath so faithfully been paid.
King. I do protest, I never heard of it;
And, if you prove it, I'll repay it back,
Or yield up Aquitain.
Prin. We arrest your word:—
Boyet, you can produce acquittances,
For such a sum, from special officers
Of Charles his father.
King. Satisfy me so.
Boyet. So please your grace, the packet is not
come,
Where that and other specialties are bound;
To-morrow you will have a sight of them.
King. It shall suffice me: at which interview,
All liberal reason I will yield unto.
Mean time, receive such welcome at my hand,
As honour, without breach of honour, may
Make tender of to thy true worthiness:
You may not come, fair princess, in my gates;
But here without you shall be so receiv'd,
As you shall deem yourself lodg'd in my heart,
Though so denied fair harbour in my house.
Your own good thoughts excuse me, and farewell:
To-morrow shall we visit you again.
Prin. Sweet health and fair desires consort your
grace!
King. Thy own wish I thee in every place!
[Ezekiel King and his Train.
Biron. Lady, I will commend you to my own heart.
Ros. 'Pray you, do my commendations; I would
be glad to see it.
Biron. I would, you heard it groan.
Ros. Is the fool sick?
Biron. Sick at heart.
Ros. Alack, let it blood.
Biron. Would that do it good?
Ros. My Physick says, I.³

1 *To depart* and *to part* were anciently synonymous.

2 This phrase appears to us unseemly to a princess, but it was a common metaphorical expression then much used. Perhaps it was no more considered offensive than it would be now to talk of the *castrations* of Holinsbed. It was not peculiar to Shakspeare.

3 The old spelling of the affirmative particle *ay* is here retained for the sake of the rhyme.

4 *Point*, in French, is an adverb of negation, but, if properly spoken, is not sounded like the *point* of a knife. A quibble was however intended. Perhaps Shakspeare was not well acquainted with the pronunciation of French.

5 A quibble is here intended upon the word *several*,

Biron. Will you prick't with your eye?

Ros. No point,⁴ with my knife.

Biron. Now, God save thy life!

Ros. And yours from long living!

Biron. I cannot stay thanksgiving.

[Retiring.

Dum. Sir, I pray you, a word: What lady is that same?

Boyet. The heir of Alengon, Rosaline her name.

Dum. A gallant lady! Monsieur, fare you well.

[Exit.
Long. I beseech you a word; What is she in the white?

Boyet. A woman sometimes, an you saw her in the light.

Long. Perchance, light in the light: I desire her name.

Boyet. She hath but one for herself; to desire that, were a shame.

Long. Pray you, sir, whose daughter?

Boyet. Her mother's, I have heard.

Long. God's blessing on your beard!

Boyet. Good sir, be not offended:

She is an heir of Falconbridge.

Long. Nay, my choler is ended.

She is a most sweet lady.

Boyet. Not unlike, sir; that may be.

[Exit LONG.

Biron. What's her name, in the cap?

Boyet. Katharine, by good hap.

Biron. Is she wedded, or no?

Boyet. To her will, sir, or so.

Biron. You are welcome, sir; adieu!

Boyet. Farewell to me, sir, and welcome to you.

[Exit BIRON.—Ladies unmask.

Mar. That last is Biron, the merry mad-cap lord;

Not a word with him but a jest.

Boyet. And every jest but a word.

Prin. It was well done of you to take him at his word.

Boyet. I was as willing to grapple, as he was to board.

Mar. Two hot sheeps, marry!

Boyet. And wherefore not ships?

No sheep, sweet lamb, unless we feed on your lips.

Mar. You sheep, and I pasture; Shall that finish the jest?

Boyet. So you grant pasture for me.

[Offering to kiss her.

Mar. Not so, gentle beast;

My lips are no common, though several³ they be.

Boyet. Belonging to whom?

Mar. To my fortunes and me.

Prin. Good wits will be jangling; but, gentles,
agree:

The civil war of wits were much better used

On Navarre and his book-men; for here⁴ 'tis abused.

Boyet. If my observation (which very seldomlies,)

By the heart's still rhetoricick, disclosed with eyes,

Deceive me not now. Navarre is infected.

Prin. With what?

Boyet. With that which we lovers entitle, affected.

Prin. Your reason?

Boyet. Why, all his behaviours did make their retire,

To the court of his eye, peeping thorough desire;

His heart, like an agate, with your print impressed,

Proud with his form, in his eye pride expressed:

His tongue, all impatient to speak and not see,

Did stumble with haste in his eye-sight to be;

All senses to that sense did make their repair,

To feel only looking on fairest of fair;

which besides its ordinary signification of separate, distinct, signified also an enclosed pasture, as opposed to an open field or common. Bacon and others used it in this sense.

6 So in Daniel's Complaint of Rosamond, 1594:

⁴ Sweet silent rhetoric of persuading eyes.

7 Although the expression in the text is extremely odd, yet the sense appears to be, that his tongue envied the quickness of his eyes, and strove to be as rapid in its utterance, as they in their perception.

196

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT III.

Methought: all his senses were lock'd in his eye,
As jewels in crystal for some prince to buy;
Who tending their own worth, from where they
were glass'd

Did point you to buy them along as you pass'd.
His face's own margent¹ did quote such amazes,
That all eyes saw his eyes enchanted with gazes;
I'll give you Aquitain, and all that is his,
An you give him for my sake but one loving kiss.

Prin. Come, to our pavilion : Boyet is dispos'd—
Boyet. But to speak that in words, which his eye
hath disclos'd :

I only have made a mouth of his eye,

By adding a tongue which I know will not lie.

Ros. Thou art an old love-monger, and speak'st
skilfully.

Mar. He is Cupid's grandfather, and learns news
of him.

Ros. Then was Venus like her mother; for her
father is but grim.

Boyet. Do you hear, my mad wenches?

Mar. No.

Boyet. What then, do you see ?

Ros. Ay, our way to be gone.

Boyet. You are too hard for me.

[Exeunt.]

ACT III.

### SCENE I.
Another part of the same. Enter ARMADO and MOTH.

Arm. Marble, child, make passionate my sense of hearing.

Moth. Conoline!²—

[Singing.]

Arm. Sweet air! —Go, tenderness of years; take
this key, give enlargement to the swain, bring him
festinately³ hither; I must employ him in a letter to
my love.

Moth. Master, will you win your love with a
French brawl?⁴

Arm. How mean'st thou ? brawling in French ?

Moth. No, my complete master: but to jig off a
tune at the tongue's end, canary⁵ to it with your feet,
humour it with turning up your eye-lids; sigh a note,
and sing a note; sometime through the throat, as if
you swallowed love with singing love; sometime
through the nose, as if you snuffed up love by smell-
ing love; with your hat penthouselike o'er the shop
of your eyes; with your arms crossed on your thin
belly-doublet, like a rabbit on a spit; or your hands
in your pocket, like a man after the old painting;
and keep not too long in one tune, but a snip and
away. These are complements,⁶ these are humours;
these betray nice wenches—that would be betrayed
without these; and make them men of note, (do
you note, men ?) that most are affected to these.

Arm. How hast thou purchased this experience?

Moth. By my penny of observation.⁸

Arm. But O,—but O,—

Moth. —The hobby-horse is forgot.

Arm. Callest thou my love, hobby-horse?⁹

Moth. No, master; the hobby-horse is but a colt,

1 In Shakspeare's time, notes, quotations, &c. were
usually printed in the exterior margin of books.

2 A song is apparently lost here. In old comedies the
songs are frequently omitted. On this occasion the stage
direction is generally Here they sing—or Cantant.

3 i. e. hastily.

4 A kind of dance; spelt bransle by some authors:
being the French name for the same dance.

5 Canary was the name of a sprightly dance, some-
times accompanied by the castanets.

6 i. e. accomplishments.

7 One of the modern editors, with great plausibility,
proposes to read ‘ do you note me ?

8 The allusion is probably to the old popular pamph-
let, ‘ A Pennyworth of Wit.'

9 The Hobby-horse was a personage belonging to the
ancient Morris dance, when complete. It was the figure
of a horse fastened round the waist of a man, his own
legs going through the body of the horse, and enabling
him to walk, but concealed by a long footcloth: while
false legs appeared where those of the man should be at

and your love perhaps a hackney. But have you
forgot your love?

Arm. Almost I had.

Moth. Negligent student? learn her by heart.

Arm. By heart, and in heart, boy.

Moth. And out of heart, master: all those three
I will prove.

Arm. What wilt thou prove?

Moth. A man, if I live; and this, by, in, and
without, upon the instant: By heart you love her,
because your heart cannot come by her: in heart
you love her, because your heart is in love with her;
and out of heart you love her, being out of heart that
you cannot enjoy her.

Arm. I am all these three.

Moth. And three times as much more, and yet
nothing at all.

Arm. Fetch hither the swain; he must carry me
a letter.

Moth. A message well sympathised; a horse to
be an ambassador for an ass !

Arm. Ha, ha! what sayest thou ?

Moth. Marry, sir, you must send the ass upon the
horse, for he is very slow-gaited: But I go.

Arm. The way is but short; away.

Moth. As swift as lead, sir,

Arm. Thy meaning, pretty ingenious?

Is not lead a metal heavy, dull, and slow?

Moth. Minime, honest master; or rather, mas-
ter, no.

Arm. I say, lead is slow

Moth. You are too swift,¹⁰ sir, to say so:
Is that lead slow which is fir'd from a gun?

Arm. Sweet smoke of rhetoric !

He reputes me a cannon; and the bullet, that's he;—
I shoot thee at the swain.

Moth. Thump then, and I flee.
[Exit.]

Arm. A most acute juvenal: voluble and free of
grace !

By thy favour, sweet welkin, I must sigh in thy face:
Most rude melancholy, valour gives thee place.

My herald is return'd.

### Re-enter MOTH and COSTARD.

Moth. A wonder, master; here's a Costard¹¹
broken in a shin.

Arm. Some enigma, some riddle; —come,—thy
l'envoy;¹²—begin.

Cost. No egma, no riddle, no l'envoy: no salve in
the mail,¹³ sir: O, sir, plantain; a plain plantain; no
l'envoy, no l'envoy, no salve, sir, but a plantain !

Arm. By virtue, thou enforcest laughter; thy
silly thought, my spleen; the heaving of my lungs
provokes me to ridiculous smiling; O, pardon me,
my stars! Doth the inconsiderate take salve for
l'envoy, and the word, l'envoy, for a salve ?

Moth. Do the wise think them other? is not
l'envoy a salve ?

Arm. No, page; it is an epilogue or discourse,
to make plain

Some obscure precedence that hath tofore been sain.
I will example it:

The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee,

Were still at odds, being but three.

There's the moral: Now the l'envoy.

The sides of the horse. Latterly the Hobby-horse was
frequently omitted, which appears to have occasioned a
popular ballad, in which was this line, or burden

10 Quick, ready.

11 i. e. a head; a name adopted from an apple shaped
like a man's head. It must have been a common sort
of apple, as it gave a name to the dealers in apples
who were called costar-mongers.

12 An old French term for concluding verses, which
served either to convey the moral, or to address the
poem to some person.

13 A mail or male was a budget, wallet, or portman-
teau. Costard, mistaking enigma, riddle, and l'envoy
for names of salves, objects to the application of any
salve in the budget, and cries out for a plantain leaf.
There is a quibble upon salve and salve, a word with
which it was not unusual to conclude epistles, &c. and
which therefore was a kind of l'envoy.

## SCENE I.

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

197

Moth. I will add the *l'envoi*: Say the moral again.

Arm. The fox, the ape, and the humble-bee,
Were still at odds, being but three :

Moth. Until the goose came out of door,
And stay'd the odds by adding four.

Now will I begin your moral, and do you follow
with my *l'envoi*.

Arm. Until the goose came out of door,
Staying the odds by adding four.

Moth. A good *l'envoi*, ending in the goose,

Would you desire more ?

Cost. The boy hath sold him a bargain, a goose;
that's flat :—

Sir, your pennyworth is good, an your goose be
fat.—

To sell a bargain well, is as cunning as fast and loose:
Let me see a fat *l'envoi*; ay, that's a fat goose.

Arm. Come hither, come hither: How did this
argument begin ?

Moth. By saying that a *Costard* was broken in
a shin,

Then call'd you for the *l'envoi*.

Cost. True, and I for a plantain; Thus came your
argument in;

Then the boy's fat *l'envoi*, the goose that you bought;
And he ended the market.¹

Arm. But tell me; how was there a *Costard*²
broken in a shin?

Moth. I will tell you sensibly.

Cost. Thou hast no feeling of it, Moth; I will
speak that *l'envoi*.

I, Costard, running out, that was safely within,
Fell over the threshold, and broke my shin.

Arm. We will talk no more of this matter.

Cost. Till there be more matter in the shin.

Arm. Sirrah Costard, I will enfranchise thee.

Cost. O, marry me to one¹ Frances :—I smell
some *l'envoi*, some goose, in this.

Arm. By my sweet soul, I mean, setting thee at
liberty, enfreeding my person; thou wert im-
mured, restrained, captivated, bound.

Cost. True, true; and now you will be my pur-
gation, and let me loose.

Arm. I give thee thy liberty, set thee from du-
rance; and, in lieu thereof, impose on thee nothing
but this: Bear this significant³ to the country, maid
Jaquenetta: there is remuneration; *[Giving him money.]*
for the best ward of mine honour, is, re-
warding my dependants. Moth, follow. *[Exit.]*

Moth. Like the sequel, I.—Signior Costard, adieu.

Cost. My sweet ounce of man's flesh! my in-
cony⁴ Jew! *—[Exit] Moth.*

Now will I look to this remuneration. Remunera-
tion! O, that's the Latin word for three farthings:
three farthings—remuneration.—*What's the price of
this inkie? a penny?* —No, *I'll give you a remunera-
tion: why, it carries it.*—Remuneration! —*why, it
is a fairer name than French crown.* I will never
buy and sell out of this word.

### Enter BIRON.

Biron, O, my good knave Costard! exceedingly
well met.

Cost. Pray you, sir, how much carnation ribbon
may a man buy for a remuneration.⁵

Biron. What is a remuneration ?

Cost. Marry, sir, half-penny farthing.

Biron. O, why then, three-farthings-worth of silk.

Cost. I thank your worship: God be with you!

Biron. O, stay, slave; I must employ thee:

As thou wilt win my favour, good my knave,
Do one thing for me that I shall entreat.

Cost. When would you have it done, sir ?

Biron. O, this afternoon.

Cost. Well, I will do it, sir: Fare you well.

Biron. O, thou knowest not what it is.

Cost. I shall know, sir, when I have done it.

Biron. Why, villain, thou must know first.

Cost. I will come to your worship to-morrow
morning.

Biron. It must be done this afternoon. Hark,
slave, it is but this :—

The princess comes to hunt here in the park,
And in her train there is a gentle lady;

When tongues speak sweetly, then they name her
name,

And Rosaline they call her: ask for her;

And to her white hand see thou do commend

This seal'd-up counsel. There's thy guerdon;⁶

go.

*—[Gives him money.]*

Cost. Guerdon,—O sweet guerdon! better than
remuneration; eleven-pence farthing better: Most
sweet guerdon!—I will do it, sir, in print.⁶—
Guerdon—remuneration.

Biron. O!—And I, forsooth in love! I, that
have been her's whip:

A very beadle to a humorous sigh;

A critic; nay, a knight-watch constable;

A domineering pedant o'er the boy,

Than whom no mortal so magnificent!⁷

This wimpled,⁸ whining, purblind, wayward boy;

This senior-junior, giant-dwarf, Dan Cupid;

Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms,

The anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,

Liege of all loiterers and malcontents,

Dread prince of parkets,⁹ king of copdies,

Sole imperator, and great general

Of trotting paritors¹⁰—O like my little heart!—

And I to be a corporal of his field,¹¹

And wear his colours¹²—like a tumbler's hoop!

What? I! I love! I sue! I seek a wife!

A woman, that is like a German clock,¹³

Still a-repairing; ever out of frame;

And never going aright, being a watch,

But being watch'd that it may still go right?

Nay, to be perjur'd, which is worst of all;

And, among three, to love the worst of all;

A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,

With two pitch balls stuck in her face for eyes;

Ay, and, by heaven, one that will do the deed,

Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard:

And I to sigh for her! to watch for her!

To pray for her! Go to; it is a plague

That Cupid will impose for my neglect

Of his al mighty dreadful little might.

Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, and groan,
Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.

*—[Exit.]*

1 Alluding to the proverb, 'Three women and a goose make a market.'

2 See p. 196, note 11.

3 Armado sustains his character well; he will not give any thing its vulgar name, he calls the letter he would send to Jaquenetta, a significant.

4 *Incony.* The meaning and etymology of this phrase is not clearly defined, though numerous instances of its use are adduced. *Sweet, pretty, delicate* seem to be the best words to use in defining *incony*.

5 *Guerdon, Fr.* is reward.

6 With the utmost nicety.

7 *Magnificent* here means glorying, boasting.

8 *To wimple* is to *veil*, from *guimple*, Fr. which i.e. the cloth going from the hood round the neck. Kersey explains it, 'The muffler or plaited linen cloth

which nuns wear about their neck.' Shakspeare means no more than that Cupid was *hood-winked*.

9 *Plackets* were stomachers. See Note on Winter's Tale, Act iv. Sc. 3.

10 The officers of the spiritual courts who serve citations.

11 It appears from Lord Stafford's Letters, vol. ii. p. 199, that a corporal of the field was employed, as an aid-de-camp is now, 'in taking and carrying to and fro the directions of the general, or other higher officers of the field.'

12 It was once a mark of gallantry to wear a lady's colours. So in Cynthia's Revels by Jonson, 'despatches his lacquey to her chamber early, to know what her colours are for the day.' It appears that a tumbler's hoop was usually dressed out with coloured ribands.

13 Clocks, which were usually imported from Germany at this time, were intricate and clumsy pieces of mechanism, soon deranged, and frequently 'out of frame.'

198

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT IV.

### SCENE I. Another part of the same. Enter the Princess, ROSALINE, MARIA, KATHARINE, BOYET, Lords, Attendants, and a Forester.

Prin. Was that the king, that spurr'd the horse so hard?

Against the steep uprising of the hill?

Boyet. I know not; but, I think, it was not he.

Prin. Whoe'er he was, he show'd a mounting mind.

Well, lords, to-day we shall have our despatch;

On Saturday we will return to France.—

Then, forester, my friend, where is the bush?

That we must stand and play the murderer in?

For. Here by, upon the edge of yonder coppice;

A stand, where you may make the fairest shoot.

Prin. I thank my beauty, I am fair that shoot,

And thereupon thou speak'st, the fairest shoot.

For. Pardon me, madam, for I meant so, no.

Prin. What, what? first praise me, and again say, no?

O short-liv'd pride! Not fair? alack for woe!

For. Yes, madam, fair.

Prin.

Nay, never paint me now;

Where fair is not, praise cannot mend the brow.

Here, good my glass,¹ take this for telling true;

[Giving him money.

Fair payment for foul words is more than due.

For. Nothing but fair is that which you inherit.

Prin. See, see, my beauty will be sav'd by merit.

O heresy in fair, fit for these days!

A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise.—

But come, the bow:—Now mercy goes to kill,

And shooting well is then accounted ill.

Thus will I save my credit in the shoot:

Not wounding; pity would not let me do't;

If wounding, then it was to shew my skill,

That more for praise, than purpose, meant to kill.

And, out of question, so it is sometimes;

Glory grows guilty of detested crimes;

When, for fame's sake, for praise, an outward work;

We bend to that the working of the heart:

As I, for praise alone, now seek to spill

The poor deer's blood, that my heart means no ill.

Boyet. Do not curst wives hold that self-sove-

reignty

Only for praise? sake, when they strive to be

Lords o'er their lords?

To any lady that subdues a lord.

Enter COSTARD.

Here comes a member of the commonwealth.²

Cost. God dig-you-den³ all! Pray you, which is the head lady?

Prin. Thou shall know her, fellow, by the rest that have no heads.

Cost. Which is the greatest lady, the highest?

Prin. The thickest, and the tallest.

Cost. The thickest, and the tallest! it is so; truth is truth.

An your waist, mistress, were as slender as my wit,
One of these maids' girdles for your waist should be fit.

Are not you the chief woman? you are the thickest here.

ACT IV.

Prin. What's your will, sir? what's your will
Cost. I have a letter from monsieur Biron, to one lady Rosaline.

Prin. O, thy letter, thy letter; he's a good friend of mine:

Stand aside, good bearer.—Boyet, you can carve;
Break up this capon.⁴

Boyet.

I am bound to serve.—

This letter is mistook, it importeth none here;

It is writ to Jaquenetta.

Prin.

We will read it, I swear:

Break the neck of the wax, and every one give ear,

Boyet. [Reads.] By heaven, that thou art fair, is most infallible; true, that thou art beauteous: truth itself, that thou art lovely: More fairer than far, beautiful than beauteous; truer than truth itself, have commiseration on thy heroical vassal! The magnanimous and most illustrate⁵ king Cophetua⁶ set eyes upon the pernicious and indubitable beggar Zenelophon; and he it was that might rightly say, veni, vidi, vici; which to anatomize in the vulgar, (O base and obscure vulgar!) videlicet, he came, saw, and overcame: he came, one; saw, two; overcame, three.

Who came? the king; Why did he come? to see;
Why did he see? to overcome; To whom came he
To the beggar; What saw he? the beggar; What over-
came he? the beggar: The conclusion is victory;
On whose side? the king's: the captive is enrich'd; On
whose side? the beggar's; The catastrophe is a nup-
tial; On whose side? the king's? no, on both in one,
or one in both. I am the king; for so stands the
comparison: thou the beggar; for so witnesseth thy
loueliness.

Shall I command thy love? I may: Shall I enforce thy love? I could: Shall I entreat thy love? I will. What shall thou exchange for rags? robes?

For titles, titles; For thyself, me. Thus, expecting thy reply, I profane my lips on thy foot, my eyes on thy picture, and on thy every part.

Thine, in the dearest design of industry,

DON ADRIANO DE ARMADO.

Thus dost thou hear the Nemean lion roar

*'Gainst thee, thou lamb, that standest as his prey;

Submissive fall his princely feet before,

And he from forage will incline to play:

But if thou strive, poor soul, what art thou then?

Food for his rage, repasture for his den.

Prin. What plume of feathers is he, that indited this letter?

What vane? what weathercock? did you ever hear better?

Boyet. I am much deceived, but I remember the style.

Prin. Else your memory is bad, going o'er it
crewhite.⁷

Boyet. This Armado is a Spaniard, that keeps here in court;

A phantasm, a Monarcho,⁸ and one that makes sport to the prince, and his book-mates.

Prin.

Thou, fellow, a word: who gave thee this letter?

Cost.

I told you; my lord.

Prin. To whom shouldst thou give it?

Cost.

From my lord to my lady.

Prin. From which lord, to which lady?

Cost. From my lord Biron, a good master of mine,

To a lady of France, that he call'd Rosaline.

1 Here Drs. Johnson and Farmer have each a note too long and too absurd to quote, to show it was the fashion for ladies to wear mirrors at their girdles. Steevens says justly (though he qualifies his assertion with perhaps) that Dr. Johnson is mistaken, and that the forester is the mirror. It is impossible for common sense to suppose otherwise.—Pye.

2 The princess calls Costard a member of the commonwealth, because he is one of the attendants on the king and his associates in their new modelled society.

3 A corruption of God give you good even. See Romeo and Juliet, Act ii. Sc. 4.

4 i. e. open this letter. The poet uses this metaphor as the French do their *poulet*; which signifies both a young fowl and a love letter. To *break up* was a phrase for *to carve*.

5 Illustrious.

6 The ballad of King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid may be seen in the Reliques of Ancient Poetry, vol. i. The beggar's name was Penelophon. Shakespeare alludes to the ballad assin in Romeo and Juliet: Henry IV. Part ii.; and in Richard II.

7 i. e. lately.

*'I who erewhile the happy garden sung.'*

*Milton, Par. Reg*

A pun is intended upon the word *stile*.

8 The allusion is to a fantastical character of the time. 'Popular applause (says Meres in Wit's Treasurie, p. 178.) doth nourish some, neither do they gape after any other thing but vaine praise and glorie,—as in our age Peter Shakerlye of Paules, and *Monarcho* that lived about the court.⁹

["## SCENE. II.", "LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.", "199", "Prin. Thou hast mistaken his letter. Come, lords, away.", "Here, sweet, put up this; 'twill be thine another day.\n[Exit Princess and Train.", "Boyet. Who is the suitor? who is the suitor? †", "Ros. Shall I teach you to know? †", "Boyet. Ay, my continent of beauty.", "Ros. Why, she that bears the bow.", "Finely put off!", "Boyet. My lady goes to kill horns; but, if thou\nmarry,", "Hang me by the neck, if horns that year miscarry.", "Finely put on!", "Ros. Well then, I am the shooter.", "Boyet. And who is your deer?", "Ros. If we choose by the horns, yourself: come\nnear.", "Finely put on, indeed!", "Mar. You still wrangle with her, Boyet, and she\nstrikes at the brow.", "Boyet. But she herself is hit lower: Have I hit\nher now?", "Ros. Shall I come upon thee with an old saying,\nthat was a man when king Pepin of France was a\nlittle boy, as touching the hit it?", "Boyet. So I may answer thee with one as old,\nthat was a woman when queen Guinever of Britain\nwas a little wench, as touching the hit it.", "Ros. *Thou cannot not hit it, hit it, hit it,* [Singing,\n*Thou cannot not hit it, my good man.*", "Mar. cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot, cannot,

200

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT IV.

The allusion holds in the exchange.¹

Dull. 'Tis true indeed; the collusion holds in the exchange.

Hol. God comfort thy capacity! I say, the allusion holds in the exchange.

Dull. And I say the pollution holds in the exchange; for the moon is never but a month old: and I say beside, that 'twas a pricket that the princess kill'd.

Hol. Sir Nathaniel, will you hear an extemporal epitaph on the death of the deer? and, to humour the ignorant, I have called the deer the princess kill'd, a pricket.

Nath. Perge, good master Holofernes, perge; so it shall please you to abrogate scurrility.

Hol. I will something affect the letter;² for it argues facility.

The praiseful princess pierc'd and prick'd a pretty pleasing pricket;

Some say, a sore; but not a sore, till now made sore with shooting.

The dogs did yell! put l to sore, then sorel jumps from thicket;

Or pricket, sore, or else sorel;³ the people fall a hooting.

If sore be sore, then L to sore makes fifty sores: O sore L!

Of one sore I a hundred make, by adding but one more L.

Nath. A rare talent!

Dull. If a talent be a claw, look how he claws him with a talent.⁴

Hol. This is a gift that I have, simple, simple; a foolish extravagant spirit, full of forms, figures, shapes, objects, ideas, apprehensions, motions, resolutions: these are begot in the ventricle of memory, nourished in the womb of pia mater; and deliver'd upon the mellowing of occasion: But the gift is good in those in whom it is acute, and I am thankful for it.

Nath. Sir, I praise the Lord for you; and so may my parishioners; for their sons are well tutored'd by you, and their daughters profit very greatly under you: you are a good member of the commonwealth.

Hol. Mehercle, if their sons be ingenious, they shall want no instruction: if their daughters be capable, I will put it to them: But, vir sapit, qui pauca loquitur: a soul feminine saluteth us.

Enter JAQUENETTA and COSTARD.

Jaq. God give you good morrow, master person.

Hol. Master person,—quasi pers>on. And if one should be pierced, which is the one?

Cost. Marry; master schoolmaster, he that is likest to a hogshead.

Hol. Of piercing a hogshead! a good lustre of conceit in a turf of earth; fire enough for a flint, pearl enough for a swine: 'his pretty; it is well.

Jaq. Good master parson, be so good as read me this letter; it was given me by Costard, and sent me from Don Armatho: I beseech you, read it.

Hol. Fauste, precor gelida quando pecus omne sub umbra

Ruminaț, —and so forth. Ah, good old Mantuan! I may speak of thee as the traveller doth of Venice:

—Vinegia, Vinegia,

Chi non te vede, ei non te pregia.⁶

Old Mantuan! old Mantuan! Who understandeth

1 i. e. the riddle is as good when I use the name of Adam, as when I use the name of Cain.

2 i. e. I will use or practise alliteration. To affect is thus used by Ben Jonson in his Discoveries: 'Spenser, in affecting the ancients, writ no language; yet I would have him read for his matter, but as Virgil read Ennius.'

3 For the explanation of the terms *pricket, sore* or *soar*, and *sorel* in this quibbling rhyme, the reader is prepared, by the extract from *The Return from Parliament*, in a note at the beginning of the scene.

4 Talon was often written talent in Shakspeare's time. Honest Dull quibbles. One of the senses of *clan* is to *flatter*.

5 The Eclogues of Mantuanus were translated before the time of Shakspeare, and the Latin printed on

thee not, loves thee not.—Ut, re, sol, la, mi, fa.— Under pardon, sir, what are the contents? or, rather, as Horace says in his—What, my soul, verses?

Nath. Ay, sir, and very learned.

Hol. Let me hear a staff, a stanza, a verse:

Lege, domine.

Nath. If love make me forsworn, how shall I

swear to love?

Ah, never faith could hold, if not to beauty vowed! Though to myself forsworn, to thee I'll faithful prove;

Those thoughts to me were oaks, to thee like osiers bowed.

Study his bias leaves, and makes his book thine eyes;

Where all those pleasures live that art would comprehend:

If knowledge be the mark, to know thee shall suffice;

Well learned is that tongue, that well can thee commend:

All ignorant that soul, that sees thee without wonder;

(Which is to me some praise, that I thy parts admire;)

Thy eye Jove's lightning bears, thy voice his dreadful thunder,

Which, not to anger bent, is musick and sweet fire.

Celestial, as thou art, oh pardon, love, this wrong, That sings heaven's praise with such an earthly tongue!¹⁰

Hol. You find not the apostrophes, and so miss the accent; let me supervise the canzonet. Here are only numbers ratified; but, for the elegance, facility, and golden cadence of poesy, caret. Ovidius Naso was the man: and why, indeed, Naso; but for smelling out the odoriferous flowers of fancy, the jerks of invention? *Imitatur*, is nothing: so doth the hound his master, the ape his keeper, the tired horse⁹ his rider. But damosella virgin, was this directed to you?

Jaq. Ay, sir, from one Monsieur Biron,¹⁰ one of the strange queen's lords.

Hol. I will overglance the superscript. To the snow white hand of the most beauteous lady Rosaline. I will look again on the intellect of the letter, for the nomination of the party writing to the person written unto:

Your ladyship's in all desired employment, BIRON. Sir Nathaniel, this Biron is one of the votaries with the king; and here he hath framed a letter to a sequence of the stranger queen's, which, accidentally, or by the way of progression, hath miscarried.—Trip and go, my sweet; deliver this paper into the royal hand of the king; it may concern much: Stay not thy compliment; I forgive thy duty; adieu.

Jaq. Good Costard, go with me.—Sir, God save your life!¹¹

Cost. Have with thee, my girl.

[Exeunt COST. and JAQ.

Nath. Sir, you have done this in the fear of God, very religiously; and, as a certain father saith—

Hol. Sir, tell me not of the father, I do fear co-

the opposite side of the page for the use of schools. In 1567 they were also versified by Tuberville.

6 This proverb occurs in Florio's Second Frutes, 1591, where it stands thus:

'Venetia, chi non ti vede non ti pretia'

Ma chi ti vede, ben gli costa.³

7 He hums the notes of the gamut, as Edmund does in King Lear, Act. I, Se. 2.

8 These verses are printed, with some variations, in The Passionate Pilgrim, 1599.

9 i. e. The horse adorned with ribands; Bankes's horse is here probably alluded to. Lyly, in his Mother Bombie, brings in a hackneyman and Mr. Halfpenny at cross-purposes with this word: 'Why didst thou bore the horse through the ears ?—' It was for tiring.?:—'He would never tire,⁴ replies the other.

10 Shakspeare forgot that Jaquenetta knew nothing of Biron, and had said just before that the letter had been 'sent to her from Don Armatho, and given to her by Costard.³

## SCENE III.

## LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

201

lurable colours.¹ But to return to the verses;
Did they please you, sir Nathaniel?

Nath. Marvellous well for the pen.

Hol. I do dine to-day at the father's of a certain pupil of mine; where if, before repast, it shall please you to gratify the table with a grace, I will, on my privilege I have with the parents of the foresaid child or pupil, undertake your ben venuto; where I will prove those verses to be very unlearned, neither savouring of poetry, wit, nor invention: I beseech your society.

Nath. And thank you too: for society, (saith the text,) is the happiness of life.

Hol. And, certes,² the text most infallibly concludes it.—Sir, [To DULL.] I do invite you too; you shall not say me, nay: pauca verba. Away; the gentles are at their game, and we will to our recreation. [Exeunt.]

### SCENE III. Another part of the same. Enter BIRON, with a Paper.

Biron. The king he is hunting the deer: I am courting myself: they have pitch'd a toil; I am toiling in a pitch;³ pitch that defiles; defile! a foul word. Well, set thee down, sorrow! for so, they say, the fool said, and so say I, and I the fool. Well proved, wit! by the lord, this love is as mad as Ajax: it kills sheep; it kills me.⁴ I a sheep: Well proved again on my side! I will not love: if I do, hang me! i'faith, I will not. O, but her eye,— by this light, but for her eye, I would not love her: yes, for her two eyes. Well, I do nothing in the world but lie, and lie in my throat. By heaven, I do love: and it hath taught me to rhyme, and to be melancholy; and here is part of my rhyme, and here my melancholy. Well, she hath one o'my sonnets already; the clown bore it, the fool sent it, and the lady hath it: sweet clown, sweeter fool, sweetest lady! By the world, I would not care a pin if the other three were in: Here comes one with a paper; God give him grace to groan!

[Gets up into a tree.]

### Enter the King, with a Paper.

King. Ah me!

Biron. [Aside.] Shot, by heaven!—Proceed, sweet Cupid; thou hast thump'd him with thy bird-bolt under the left pap:—I'faith, secrets.

King. [Reads.] So sweet a kiss the golden sun gives not

To those fresh morning drops upon the rose,

As thy eye-beams, when their fresh rays have smote

The night of dew that on my cheeks down flows:

Nor shines the silver moon one half so bright

Through the transparent bosom of the deep,

As doth thy face through tears of mine give light;

Thou shin'st in every tear that I do weep:

No drop but as a coach doth carry thee,

Soridest thou triumphing in my woe;

Do but behold the tears that swell in me,

And they thy glory through thy grief will show:

But do not love thyself; then thou wilt keep,

My tears for glasses, and still make me weep.

O queen of queens, how far dost thou excel!

No thought can think, no tongue of mortal tell,—

How shall she know my griefs? I'll drop the paper;
Sweet leaves, shade folly. Who is he comes here?

[Steps aside.]

### Enter LONGAVILLE, with a Paper.

What, Longaville! and reading! listen ear.

Biron. Now, in thy likeness, one more fool, appear!

[Aside.]

Long. Ah me! I am forsworn.

1 That is, specious or fair seeming appearances.

2 Certainly, in truth.

3 Alluding to Rosaline's complexion, who is represented as a black beauty.

4 This is given as a proverb in Fuller's *Gnomologia*.

5 The ancient punishment of a perjured person was to wear on the breast a paper expressing the crime.

6 By *triumviry* and the shape of *love's Tyburn*, Shakespeare alludes to the gallows of the time, which was occasionally triangular.

Biron. Why, he comes in like a perjure,⁵ wearing papers. [Aside.]

King. In love, I hope; Sweet fellowship in shame!

Biron. One drunkard loves another of the name.

Long. Am I the first that have been perjur'd so?

Biron. [Aside.] I could put thee in comfort; not by two, that I know:

Thou mak'st the triumviry, the corner-cap of society,
The shape of love's Tyburn⁶ that hangs up simpli-
city.

Long. I fear, these stubborn lines lack power to
move;

O sweet Maria, empress of my love!

These 'numbers will I tear, and write in prose.

Biron. [Aside.] O, rhymes are guards on wanton

Cupid's hose:

Disfigure not his slop.⁷

Long.

This same shall go—

[He reads the Sonnet.]

Did not the heavenly rhetorick of thine eye

(Gainst whom the world cannot hold as gument.)

Persuade my heart to this false perjury?

Vows for thee broke, deserve not punishment.

A woman I foresaw; but, I will prove,

Thou being a goddess, I foresaw not thee,

My vow was earthly, what a heavenly love?

Thy grace being gain'd, cures all disgrace in me.

Vows are but broken, and breath a vapour is:

Then, thou, fair sun, which on my earth dost shine,

Echast this vapour vow; in thee it is:

If broken then, it is no fault of mine;

If by me broke, what fool is not so wise,

To lose an oath to win a paradise?

Biron. [Aside.] This is the liver vein,⁸ which makes flesh a deity;

A green goose, a goddess: pure, pure idolatry.

God amend us, God amend! we are much out o'
the way.

### Enter DUMAIN, with a Paper.

Long. By whom shall I send this?—Company! stay. [Stepping aside.]

Biron. [Aside.] All hid, all hid, an old infant play:

Like a demi-god here sit I in the sky,

And wretched fools' secrets heedfully o'er-eye.

More sacks to the mill! O heavens, I have my
wish;

Dumain transform'd: four woodcocks⁹ in a dish!

Dum. O most divine Kate!

Biron. O most profane cocxcomb!

Dum. By heaven, the wonder of a mortal eye!
Biron. By earth she is but corporal; there you

lie. [Aside.]

Dum. Her amber hairs for foul have amber
coted.¹⁰

Biron. An amber-colour'd raven was well noted.

[Aside.]

Dum. As upright as the cedar.
Biron. Stoop, I say;

Her shoulder is with child. [Aside.]

Dum. As fair as day.

Biron. Ay, as some days; but then no sun must
shine. [Aside.]

Dum. O that I had my wish!

Long. And I had mine!

[Aside.]

King. And I mine too, good Lord!

[Aside.]

Biron. Amen, so I had mine: Is not that a good
word?

[Aside.]

Dum. I would forget her; but a fever she
Reigns in my blood, and will remember'd be.

7 *Slops* were wide kneed breeches, the garb in fashion in Shakespeare's time.

8 It has been already remarked that the *liver* was anciently supposed to be the seat of love.

9 A woodcock means a foolish fellow; that bird being supposed to have no brains.

10 Coted signifies *marked* or *noted*. The word is from the *coter* to *quote*. The construction of this pass sage will therefore be, 'her amber hairs have marked or shown that real amber is (oul in comparison with themselves.}'

26

202

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT IV.

Biron. A fever in your blood, why, then incision
Would let her out in saucers; Sweet misprision!

[Aside.]

Dum. Once more I'll read the ode that I have writ.

Biron. Once more I'll mark how love can vary wit.

[Aside.]

Dum. On a day, (alack the day !)
Love, whose month is ever May,
Spied a blossom, passing fair,
Playing in the wanton air :
Through the velvet leaves the wind,
All unseen, 'gan passage find;
That the lover, sick to death,
Wish'd himself the heaven's breath,
Air, quoth he, thy cheeks may blow;
Air, would I might triumph so !
But alack, my hand is sworn,
Ne'er to pluck thee from thy thorn
Vow, alack, for youth unmeet;
Youth so apt to pluck a sweet,
Do not call it sin in me,
That I am forsworn for thee;—
Thee—for whom Jove would swear,¹
Juno but an Ethiop were;
And deny himself for Jove,
Turning mortal for thy love.—

This will I send: and something else more plain,
That shall express my true love's fasting² pain.
O, would the King, Biron, and Longaville,
Were lovers too! Ill, to example ill,
Would from my forehead wipe a perjur'd note;
For none offend, where all alike do dote.

Long. Dumain, [advancing.] thy love is far from charity,
That in love's grief desir'dst society:
You may look pale, but I should blush, I know,
To be o'erheard, and taken napping so.

King. Come, sir, [advancing.] you blush; as his
your case is such;

You chide at him, offending twice as much :

You do not love Maria; Longaville

Did never sonnet for her sake compile ;

Nor never lay his wreathed arms athwart

His loving bosom, to keep down his heart;

I have been closely shrouded in this bush.

And mark'd you both, and for you both did blush.

I heard your guilty rhymes, observ'd your fashion:

Saw sighs reek from you, noted well your passion :

Ah me! says one; O Jove ! the other cries;

One, her hairs were gold, crystal the other's eyes:

You would for paradise break faith and troth ;

[To LONG.]

And Jove, for your love, would infringe an oath.

[To DUMAIN.]

What will Biron say, when that he shall hear

Faith infringed, which such zeal did swear ?

How will he scorn? how will he spend his wit?

How will he triumph, leap, and laugh at it ?

For all the wealth that ever I did see,

I would not have him know so much by me.

Biron. Now step I forth to whip hypocrisy.—

Ah, good my liege, I pray thee pardon me:

[Descends from the Tree.]

Good heart, what grace hast thou, thus to reprove
These worms for loving, that art most in love ?

Your eyes do make no coaches ;³ in your tears,

There is no certain princess that appears :

You'll not be perjur'd, 'tis a hateful thing ;

Tush, none but minstrels like of sonneting.

¹ 'Thee—for whom Jove would swear,
Juno but an Ethiop were.'

The old copy reads—

'Thou for whom Jove would swear.'

Pope thought this line defective, and altered it to—
'Thou for whom even Jove would swear.'

2 Fasting is longing, hungry, wanting.

3 Alluding to a passage in the King's Sonnet :

'No drop but as a coach doth carry thee.'

4 Grief.

5 Gnat is the reading of the old copy, and there seems
no necessity for changing it to *knot* or any other word,
as some of the editors have been desirous of doing.

But are you not asham'd? nay, are you not,
All three of you, to be thus much o'ershot?

You found his mote; the king your mote did see ;

But I a beam do find in each of three.

O, what a scene of folly I have seen,

Of sighs, of groans, of sorrow, and of teen!

O me, with what strict patience have I sat,

To see a king transformed to a gnat!

To see great Hercules whipping a gigg,
And profound Solomon to tune a gigg,

And Nestor play at push-pin with the boys,

And criticke⁶ Timon laugh at idle toys ?

Where lies thy grief, O'tell me, good Dumain?

And gentle Longaville, where lies thy pain ?

And where my liege's? all about the breast :—
A caudle, ho !

King. Too bitter is thy jest.

Are we betray'd thus to thy over-view?

Biron. Not you by me, but I betray'd to you;
I, that am honest; I, that hold in sin

To break the vow I am engaged in;

I am betray'd, by keeping company

With moon-like men, of strange inconstancy.

When shall you see me write a thing in rhyme?

Or groan for Joan? or spend a minute's time

In pruning? me? When shall you hear that I

Will praise a hand, a foot, a face, an eye,

A gait, a state, a brow, a breast, a waist,

A leg, a limb ?—

King. Soft; Whither away so fast?

A true man, or a thief, that gallops so?

Biron. I post from love: good lover, let me go.

Enter JAQUENETTA and COSTARD.

Jaq. God bless the king!

King. What present hast thou there?

Cost. Some certain treason.

King. What makes treason here?⁹

Cost. Nay, it makes nothing, sir,

King. If it mar nothing neither,

The treason, and you, go in peace away together.

Jaq. I beseech your grace, let this letter be read;
Our parson misdoubts it; 'twas treason, he said.

Biron. Biron, read it over. [Giving him the letter.

Where hadst thou it?

Jaq. Of Costard.

King. Where hadst thou it?

Cost. Of Dun Adramadio, Dun Adramadio.

King. How now! what is in you ? why dost thou
tear it?

Biron. A toy, my liege, a toy; your grace needs
not fear it.

Long. It did move him to passion, and therefore
let's hear it.

Dum. It is Biron's writing, and here is his name.

[Picks up the pieces.]

Biron. Ah, you whoreson loggerhead. [To Costard.] you were born to do me shame.—

Guilty, my lord, guilty; I confess, I confess.

King. What?

Biron. That you three fools lack'd me fool to
make up the mess:

He, he, and you, my liege, and I,

Are pick-purses in love, and we deserve to die.

O, dismiss this audience, and I shall tell you more.

Dum. Now the number is even.

Biron. True, true; we are four:—

Will these turtles be gone?

King. Hence, sirs; away.

Cost. Walk aside the true folk, and let the trai-
tors stay.

[Exeunt COST. and JAQ.]

Neither do I think there is any allusion to the *singing* of the gnat, as others have supposed; but it is merely put as an insignificant insect, just as he calls the others *worms above*.

6 Cynic.

7 A bird is said to be *pruning* himself when he picks and sleeks his feathers.

⁹ That is—what does treason here? What *makest* thou there? or, what hast thou there to do? Quid istic tibi negotii est?—Baret. Shakspeare plays on this phrase in the same manner in *As You Like It*, Act i. Sc. 1. and in King Richard III. Act i. Sc. 3.

204

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

ACT V.

ACT V.

### SCENE I. Another part of the same. Enter Holofernes, Sir Nathaniel, and Dull.

Hol. Satis quod sufficit.⁶

Nath. I praise God for you, sir: your reasons' at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. I did converse this quaram day with a companion of the king's, who is initiated, nominated, or called, Don Adriano de Armado.

Hol. Novi hominem tanquam te: His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed,⁹ his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thronasical.¹⁰ He is too picked,¹¹ too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.

Nath. A most singular and choice epithet.

[Takes out his Table-book.]

Hol. He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fantastical phantasmata, such insociable and point-devise¹¹ companions; such rackers of orthography, as to speak, doubt, fine, when he should say, doubt; det, when he should pronounce, debt: d, e, b, t; not d, e, t: he clepeth a calf, cauf; half, hauf; neighbour, abocatur, nebour, neigh, abbreviated, ne: This is abominable, (which he would call abominable,) it insinuateth me of insaïnje; Ne intelligis, domine ? to make frantic, lunatic.

Nath. Laus deo, bone intelligo.

Hol. Bone ?—bone, for bene: Priscian a little scratch'd; 'twill serve.

### Enter Armado, Moth, and Costard.

Nath. Videsne quis venit?

Hol. Video, et gaudeo.

Arm. Chirra.

[To Moth.]

Hol. Quare Chirra, not sirra?

Arm. Men of peace, well encounter'd.

Hol. Most military sir, salutation.

Moth. They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scrops. [To Costard aside.]

Cost, O, they have lived long in the alms-hank¹² of words ! I marvel, thy master hath not eaten thee for a word: for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitibus:¹³ thou art easier swallowed than a flap-dragon.¹⁴

Moth. Peace; the peal begins.

Arm. Monsieur, [To Hor.] are you not letter'd?

Moth. Yes, yes; he teaches boys the horn-book: What is a, b, spelt backward with a horn on his head?

Hol. Ba, pueritza, with a horn added.

Moth. Ba, most silly sheep, with a horn:—You hear his learning.

Shakspeare intends to obtain for his vicar, but he has here put into his mouth a finish'd representation of colloquial excellence. It is very difficult to add anything to his character of the school-master's table talk, and perhaps all the precepts of Castiglione will scarcely be found to comprehend a rule for conversation so justly delineated, so widely dilated, and so nicely limited.¹⁵

Reason, here signifies *discourse*; audacious is used in a good sense for *spirited, and animated, confident; affection is affectation*; opinion is obstinacy, opinionate.

8. *Filed* is polished.

9. *Thrasological* is vainglorious, boastful.

10. *Picked, piked, or picket, neat, spruce, over nice; that is, too nice in his dress.* The substantive is used by Ben Johnson in his Discoveries: *Pickedness for nicety in dress.*

11. A common expression for *exact, precise, or finical*.

12. i. e. that the refuse of words. The refuse meat of families was put into a *basket*, and given to the poor, in Shakspeare's time.

13. This word, whenceever it comes, is often mentioned as the longest word known.

14. A flap-dragon was some small combustible body set on fire and put afloat in a glass of liquor. It was an act of dexterity in the toper to swallow it without burning his mouth.

But, with the motion of all elements,
Courses as swift as thought in every power;
And gives to every power a double power,
Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye;

A lover's eyes will gaze an eagle blind;

A lover's ear will hear the lowest sound,

When the suspicious head of theft is stopp'd;

Love's feeling is more soft, and sensible.

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails;

Love's tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste:

For valour, is not love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

Subtle as sphinx; as sweet, and musical,

As bright Apollo's lute, strung with his hair;

And, when love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.²

Never durst poet touch a pen to write,

Until his ink were temper'd with love's sighs;

O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility.

From woman's eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire;

They are the books, the arts, the academies,

That show, contain, and nourish all the world;

Else, none at all in aught proves excellent:

Then fools you were these women to forswear;

Or, keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.

For wisdom's sake, a word that all men love;

Or for love's sake, a word that loves all men;

Or for men's sake, the authors of these women;

Or for women's sake, by whom we men are men;

Let us once lose our paths to find ourselves,

Or else we lose ourselves to keep our paths:

It is religion to be thus forsworn:

For charity itself fulfills the law;

And who can sever love from charity?

King. Saint Cupid, then! and, soldiers, to the field!

Biron. Advance your standards, and upon them, lords;

Pell-mell, down with them! but be first advis'd,
In conflict that you get the sun of them.⁴

Long. Now to plain-dealing; lay these glozes by;

Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France?

King. And win them too: therefore let us devise

Some entertainment for them in their tents.

Biron. First, from the park let us conduct them
thither;

Then, homeward, every man attach the hand
Of his fair mistress: in the afternoon

We will with some strange pastime solace them,
Such as the shortness of the time can shape;

For revels, dances, masks, and merry hours,

Flower-run fair Love,⁵ strewing her way with flowers.

King. Away, away! no time shall be omitted,

That will be time, and may by us be fitted.

Biron. *Al CONS! Al CONS!* —Sow'd cockle reap'd no corn;

And justice always whirls in equal measure:
Light wenches may prove guaches to men forsworn,
If so, our copper buys no better treasure.

[Exeunt.]

1. Shakspeare had read of 'the gardens of the Hesperides,' and thought the latter word was the name of the garden. Some of his contemporaries have made the same mistake.

2. Few passages have been more discussed than this. The most plausible interpretation of it is, 'Whenever love speaks, all the gods join their voices in harmonious concert.'

3. i. e. that is pleasing to all men. So in the language of the time—it likes me well, for it pleases me. Shakespeare uses the word licentiously for the sake of the antithesis.

4. In the days of archery, it was of consequence to have the sun at the back of the bowmen, and in the face of the enemy. This circumstance was of great advantage to our Henry V. at the Battle of Agincourt. Shakespeare had, perhaps, an equivoque in his thoughts.

5. *Fair love is Venus.* So in Antony and Cleopatra:

*Now for the love of love, and her soft hours.*

6. i. e. enough's as good as a feast.

* *I know not (says Johnson) what degree of respect*

["206", "LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.", "ACT V.", "But Rosaline, you have a favour too:", "Who sent it? and what is it?", "Ros.", "And if my face were but as fair as yours,", "My favour were as great: be witness this,", "Nay, I have verses too, I thank Biron:", "The numbers true: and, were the numb'ring too,", "I were the fairest goddess on the ground :", "I am compared to twenty thousand fairs.", "O, he hath drawn my picture in his letter !", "Prin. Any thing like?", "Ros. Much, in the letters ; nothing in the praise.", "Prin. Beauteous as ink; a good conclusion.", "Kath. Fair as a text B in a copy-book.", "Ros. 'Ware pencils !¹ How ! let me not die your debtor,", "My red dominical, my golden letter :", "O, that your face were not so full of O's!", "Kath. A pox² of that jest! and beshrew all shrows!", "Prin. But what was sent to you from fair Dumain?", "Kath. Madam, this glove.", "Prin.", "Kath. Yes, madam ; and moreover,", "Some thousand verses of a faithful lover :", "A huge translation of hypocrisy,", "Vilely compil'd, profound simplicity.", "Mar. This, and these pearls, to me sent Longavaile;", "The letter is too long by half a mile.", "Prin. I think no less: Dost thou not wish in heart,", "The chain were longer, and the letter short?", "Mar. Ay, or I would these hands might never part.", "Prin. We are wise girls, to mock our lovers so.", "Ros. They are worse fools to purchase mocking so.", "That same Biron I'll torture ere I go.", "O, that I knew he were but in by the week !³", "How I would make him fawn, and beg and seek ;", "And wait the season, and observe the times,", "And spend his prodigal wits in bootless rhymes ;", "And shape his service wholly to my behests ;", "And make him proud to make me proud that jests!⁴", "So potent-like⁵ would I o'ersway his state,", "That he should be my fool, and I his fate.", "Prin. None are so surely caught, when they are catch'd,", "As wit turn'd fool; folly, in wisdom hatch'd,", "Hath wisdom's warrant, and the help of school;", "And wit's own grace to grace a learned fool.⁶", "Ros. The blood of youth burns not with such excess,", "As gravity's revolt to wantonness.", "Mar. Folly in fools bears not so strong a note,", "As foolery in the wise, when wit doth dote ;", "Since all the power thereof it doth apply,", "To prove, by wit, worth in simplicity.", "Enter BOYET.", "Prin. Here comes Boyet, and mirth is in his face.", "Boyet. O, I am stabb'd with laughter ! Where's her grace ?", "Prin. Thy news, Boyet?", "Boyet.", "Prepare, madam, prepare !—", "Arm, wenches, arm! encounters mounted are", "1 She advises Katharine to *beware* of drawing like-nesses, lest she should retaliate.", "2 Theobald is scandalized at this language from a princess. But Dr. Farmer observes 'there need no alarm —the small-pox only is alluded to; with which it seems Katharine was pitted; or as it is quaintly expressed \" her face was full of O's,\" Davison has a canzonet on his lady's sicknesses of the poxe;\" and Dr. Donne writes to his sister, \"At my return from Kent, I found Pegge had the poxe.\" Such a plague was the small-pox formerly, that its name might well be used as an imprecatio.", "3 This is an expression taken from the hiring of servants; meaning, 'I wish I knew that he was in love with me, or my servant,' as the phrase is.", "4 The meaning of this obscure line seems to be, —I would make him proud to flatter me, who make a mock of his flattery.", "5 The old copies read *pertauunt-like*. The modern editions read with Sir T. Hanmer, *portentlike*; of", "Against your peace: Love doth approach undisguised,\nAmed in arguments; you'll be surpris'd:", "Muster your wits; stand in your own defence;", "Or hide your heads like cowards, and fly hence.", "Prin. Saint Dennis to saint Cupid! What are they?", "That charge their breath against us? say, scout, say.", "Boyet. Under the cool shade of a sycamore,\nI thought to close mine eyes some half an hour:", "When lo! to interrupt my purpose'd rest,", "Toward that shade I might behold address", "The king and his companions: warily", "I stole into a neighbour thicket by,", "And overheard what you shall overhear;", "That, by and by, undisguised they will be here.", "Their herald is a pretty knavish page,", "That well by heart hath conn'd his embassade:", "Action, and accent, did they teach him there;", "Thus must thou speak, and thus thy body bear;", "And ever and anon they made a doubt,", "Presence majestical would put him out;", "For, quoth the king, an angel shall thou see;", "Yet fear not thou, but speak audaciously.", "The boy reply'd, *An angel is not evil*.", "I should have fear'd her, had she been a devil,", "With that all laugh'd, and clapp'd him on the shoulder;", "Making the bold wag by their praises bolder.", "One rubb'd his elbow, thus; and fleer'd, and swore,", "A better speech was never spoke before :", "Another, with his finger and his thumb,", "Cry'd, *Via!*¹⁷ we will do't, come what will come :", "The third he caper'd, and cried, *All goes well*;", "The fourth turn'd on the toe, and down he fell.", "With that they all did tumble on the ground,", "With such a zealous laughter, so profound,", "That in the spleen ridiculous⁸ appears,", "To check their folly, passion's solemn tears.", "Prin. But what, but what, come they to visit us?", "Boyet. They do, they do; and are apparel'd thus,", "Like Muscovites, or Russians:⁹ as I guess,", "The purpose is, to parle, to court, and dance:", "And every one his love-feat will advance", "Unto his several mistress; which they'll know", "By favours several, which they did bestow.", "Prin. And will they so? the gallants shall be task'd:", "For, ladies, we will every one be mask'd;", "And not a man of them shall have the grace,", "Despite of suit, to see a lady's face.—", "Hold, Rosaline, this favour thou shall wear;", "And then the king will court thee for his dear;", "Hold, take this, my sweet, and give me thine;", "So shall Biron take me for Rosaline.—", "And change your favours too; so shall your loves", "Woo contrary, deceiv'd by these removes.", "Ros. Come on, then; wear the favours most in sight.", "Koth. But, in this changing, what is your intent?", "Prin. The effect of my intent is to cross theirs:", "They do it but in mocking merriment;", "And mock for mock is only my intent.", "Their several counsels my unbolesom shall", "To loves mistook; and so be mock'd withal,", "Upon the next occasion that we meet,", "which Warburton has given an ingenious but unfounded explanation.", {"bbox": [

["## SCENE II.", "LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.", "207", "With visages display'd, to talk and greet.", "Ros. But shall we dance, if they desire us to't?", "Prin. No; to the death, we will not move a foot :", "Nor to their penn'd speech render we no grace ;", "But, while 'tis spoke, each turn away her face.", "Boyet. Why, that contempt will kill the speaker's\nheart,", "And quite divorce his memory from his part.", "Prin. Therefore I do it: and, I make no doubt,", "The rest will ne'er come in, if he be true.", "There's no such sport, as sport as sport o'erthrown ;", "To make theirs ours, and ours none but our own :", "So shall we stay, mocking intended game ;", "And they, well mock'd, depart away with shame.", "[Trumpets sound within.", "Boyet. The trumpet sounds; be mask'd, the\nmaskers come. [The Ladies mask.", "Enter the King, BIRON, LONGAVILLE, and DU-\nMAIX, in Russian habits, and masked; MOTH,\nMusicians, and Attendants.", "Moth. All hail, the richest beauties on the earth !", "Boyet. Beauties no richer than rich taffata.¹", "Moth. A holy parcel of the fairest dames,", "[The ladies turn their backs to him.", "That ever turn'd their—backs—to mortal views!", "Biron. Their eyes, villain, their eyes.", "Moth. That ever turn'd their eyes to mortal views !", "Out—", "Boyet. True; out, indeed.", "Moth. Out of your favours heavenly spirits, vouch-\nsafe", "Not to behold—", "Biron. Once to behold, rogue.", "Moth. Once to behold with your sun-beamed eyes.", "with your sun-beamed eyes—", "Boyet. They will not answer to that epithet;", "You were best call her daughter-beamed eyes.", "Moth. They do not mark me, and that brings\nme out.", "Biron. Is this your perfectness? begone, you\nrogue.", "Ros. What would these strangers? know their\nminds, Boyet :", "If they do speak our language, 'tis our will", "That some plain man recount their purposes :", "Know what they would.", "Boyet. What would you with the princess?", "Biron. Nothing but peace and gentle visitation.", "Ros. What would they, say they ?", "Boyet. Nothing but peace and gentle visitation.", "Ros. Why, that you have; and bid them so\nbe gone.", "Boyet. She says, you have it, and you may be\ngone.", "King. Say to her we have measur'd many miles,\nTo tread a measure with her on this grass.", "Boyet. They say that they have measur'd many\na mile,", "To tread a measure² with you on this grass.", "Ros. It is not so: ask them how many inches", "Is in one mile: if they have measur'd many,", "The measure then of one is easily told.", "Boyet. If, to come hither you have measur'd miles,\nAnd many miles, the princess bids you tell,", "How many inches do fill up one mile.", "Biron. Tell her we measure them by weary steps.", "Boyet. She hears herself.", "Ros.", "How many weary steps,", "Of many weary miles you have o'ergone,", "Are number'd in the travel of one mile ?", "Biron. We number nothing that we spend for you;", "Our duty is so rich, so infinite,", "That we may do it still without accompt.", "Vouchsafe to show the sunshine of your face,\nThat we, like savages, may worship it.", "Ros. My face is but a moon, and clouded too.", "King. Blessed are clouds, to do as such clouds do!", "Vouchsafe, bright moon, and these thy stars, to shine³", "(Those clouds remov'd) upon our wat'ry eyne.", "Ros. O vain petitioner! beg a greater matter ;", "Thou now request'st but moonshine in the water.", "King. Then in our measure vouchsafe but one\nchange;", "Thou bid'st me beg; this begging is not strange.", "Ros. Play, music, then: nay, you must do it\nsoon. [Music plays.", "Not yet:—no dance:—thus change I like the moon.", "King. Will you not dance? How come you thus\nestrang'd?", "Ros. You took the moon at full; but now she's\nchang'd.", "King. Yet still she is the moon, and I the man.", "The music plays; vouchsafe some motion to it.", "Ros. Our ears vouchsafe it.", "King.", "But your legs should do it.", "Ros. Since you are strangers and come here by\nchance,", "We'll not be nice: take hands;—We will not dance.", "King. Why take we hands, then?", "Ros.", "Only to part friends:—", "Court'sy, sweet hearts; and so the measure ends.", "King. More measure of this measure; be not nice.", "Ros. We can afford no more at such a price.", "King. Prize you yourselves; What buys your\ncompany ?", "Ros. Your absence only.", "King.", "That can never be.", "Ros. Then cannot we be bought: and so adieue;", "Twice to your visor, and half once to you !", "King. If you deny to dance, let's hold more chat.", "Ros. In private then.", "King.", "I am best pleas'd with that.", "[They converse apart.", "Biron. White-handed mistress, one sweet word\nwith thee.", "Prin. Honey, and milk, and sugar; there is three.", "Biron. Nay then, two treys (an if you grow so\nnice.)", "Metheglin, wort, and malmsey;—Well run, dice !", "There's half a dozen sweets.", "Prin.", "Seventh sweet, adieu !", "Since you can cog⁴ I'll play no more with you.", "Biron. One word in secret.", "Prin.", "Let it not be sweet.", "Biron. Thou griev'st my gall.", "Prin.", "Gall? bitter.", "Biron.", "Therefore meet.", "[They converse apart.", "Dum. Will you vouchsafe with me to change a\nword?", "Mar. Name it.", "Dum.", "Fair lady,—", "Mar.", "Say you so? Fair lord,—", "Take that for your fair lady.", "Dum.", "Please it you,", "As much in private, and I'll bid adieu.", "[They converse apart.", "Kath. What, was your visor made without a\ntongue?", "Long. I know the reason, lady, why you ask.", "Kath. O, for your reason! quickly, sir; I long.", "Long. You have a double tongue within your mask,", {"bbox": [443, 1120, 714, 1

208

LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

Act V.

Kath. Na, I'll not be your half:

Take all, and wean it; it may prove an ox.

Long. Look how you butt yourself in these sharp
mocks!

Will you give horns, chaste lady? do not so.

Kath. Then die a calf, before your horns do grow.

Long. One word in private with you, ere I die.

Kath. Bleat softly, then, the butcher hears you
cry.

Boyet. The tongues of mocking wenches are as
keen

As is the razor's edge invisible,

Cutting a smaller hair than may be seen;

Above the sense of sense: so sensible

Seemeth their conference; their conceits have wings,

Fleeter than arrows, bullets, wind, thought, swifter
things.

Ros. Not one word more, my ma ds; break off,
break off.

Biron. By heaven, all dry-beaten with pure scoff!

King. Farewell, mad wenches; you have simple wits.

[Exeunt King, Lords, MOTH, Music, and Attendants.

Prin. Twenty adieus, my frozen Muscovites.—

Are these the breed of wits so wonder'd at?

Boyet. Tapers they are, with your sweet breaths
puff'd out.

Ros. Well-liking! wits they have; gross; gross;
fat, fat.

Prin. O poverty in wit, kingly-poor flout !

Will they not, think you, hang themselves to-night?

Or ever, but in visors, show their faces?

This pert Biron was out of countenance quite.

Ros. O ! they were all in lamentable cases !

The king was weeping-ripe for a good word.

Prin. Biron did swear himself out of all suit.

Mar. Dumain was at my service, and his sword !

No point,² quoth I; my servant straight was mute.

Kath. Lord Longaville said, I came o'er his heart,
And trow you what he call'd me?

Prin. Qualm, perhaps.

Kath. Yes, in good faith.

Prin. Go, sickness, as thou art!

Ros. Well, better wits have worn plain statute-caps.³

But will you hear? the king is my love sworn.

Prin. And quick Biron hath plighted faith to me.

Kath. And Longaville was for my service born.

Mar. Dumain is mine, as sure as bark on tree.

Boyet. Madam, and pretty mistresses, give ear:

Immediately they will again be here

In their own shapes; for it can never be,

They will digest this harsh indignity.

Prin. Will they return?

Boyet. They will, they will, God knows;

And leap for joy, though they are lame with blows:

Therefore, change favours;⁴ and, when they repair,
Blow like sweet roses in this summer air.

Prin. How blow ? how blow ? speak to be understood.

Boyet. Fair ladies, mask'd, are roses in their bud:
Dismask'd, their damask sweet commixture shown,
Are angels vailing clouds,⁵ or roses blown.

Prin. Avaura, perplexity ! What shall we do,
If they return in their own shapes to woo?

Ros. Good madam, if by me you'll be advis'd,

Let's mock them still, as well known, as disguised;

Let us complain to them what fools were here,
Disguis'd like Muscovites, in shapeless' gear;
And wonder, what they were; and to what end
Their shallow shows, and prologue vilely penn'd,
And their rough carriage so ridiculous,
Should be presented at our tent to us.

Boyet. Ladies, withdraw; the gallants are at hand.

Prin. Whip to our tents, as roes run over land.

[Exeunt Princess, Ros. KATH., and MARIA.

Enter the King, BIRON, LONGAVILLE, and DUMAIN, in their proper habits.

King. Fair sir, God save you ! Where is the princess?

Boyet. Gone to her tent: Please it your majesty,
Command me any service to her thither?

King. That she vouchsafe me audience for one
word.

Boyet. I will; and so will she, I know, my lord.

Biron. This fellow pecks up wit, as pigeons peas;

And utters it again when Jove doth please :

He is wit's pedler: and retails his wares

At wakes and wassels,⁷ meetings, markets, fairs;

And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know,

Have not the grace to grace it with such show.

This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve;

Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve;

He can carve too, and lisp: Why this is he,

That kiss'd away his hand in courtesy;

This is the ape of form, monsieur the nice,

That, when he plays at tables, chides the dice

In honourable terms; nay, he can sing

A mean² most mainly; and, in ushering,

Mend him who can: the ladies call him, sweet;

The stairs, as he treads on them, kiss his feet;

This is the flower that smiles on every one,

To show his teeth as white as whales' bone:⁹

And consciences, that will not die in debt,

Pay him the due of honey-tongued Boyet.

King. A blister on his sweet tongue with my heart,

That put Armado's page out of his hand!

Enter the Princess, ush'er'd by BOYET; ROSALINE, MARIA, KATHARINE, and Attendants.

Biron. See where it comes !—Behaviour, what wert thou,

Till this man show'd thee? and what art thou now?

King. All hail, sweet madam, and fair time of day!

Prin. Fair, in all hail, is foul, as I conceive.

King. Construe my speeches better, if you may.

Prin. Then wish me better, I will give you leave.

King. We came to visit you; and purpose now
To lead you to our court: vouchsafe it then.

Prin. This field shall hold me; and so hold your
vow:

Nor God, nor I, delight in perjur'd men.

King. Rebuke me not for that which you provoke;

The virtue of your eye must break my oath.

Prin. You nick-name virtue: vice you should
have spoke;

For virtue's office never breaks men's troth.

Now, by my maiden honour, yet as pure

As the unsullied lily, I protest,

A world of torments though I should endure,

I would not yield to be your house's guest:

4 Features, countenances.

5 Ladies unmask'd are like angels vailing clouds,
or letting those clouds which obscured their brightness
sink before them. So in The Merchant of Venice, Act
i. Sc. 1.

6 Vailing her high top lower than her ribs.⁴

7 Uncouth.

8 Wassels. Festive meetings, drinking-bouts: from
the Saxon *was-hæl*, be in health, which was the form of
drinking a health; the customary answer to which was
*drine-hæl*, I drink your health. The *wassel-cup*, *wassel-bowl*, *wassel-bread*, *wassel-candle*, were all aids or
accompaniments to festivity.

9 The tenor in music.

9 Whales bone: the Saxon genitive case. It is a
common comparison in the old poets. This bone was
the tooth of the *Horse-whale*, *morse*, or *walrus*, now
superseded by ivory.

1 *Well-liking* is the same as *well-conditioned*, *fat*.
So in Job, xxxix. 4. Their young ones are in good-
liking.

2 *No point.* A quibble on the French adverb of ne-
gation, as before, Act ii. Sc. 1.

3 An act was passed the 13th of Elizabeth (1571.) 'For
the continuance of making and wearing woollen caps,
in behalf of the trade of cappers, providing that all
above the age of six years (except the nobility and some
others,) should on Sabbath days and holidays, wear caps
of wool, knit, thicked, and dressed in England, upon
penalty of ten groats.'

The term flat cap for a citizen will now be familiar to
most readers from the use made of it by the author of
The Fortunes of Nigel. The meaning of this passage
probably is, 'better wits may be found among citizens.'

["## SCENE II.", "## LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.", "209", "So much I hate a breaking-cause to be\nOf heavenly oaths, vow'd with integrity.", "King. O, you have lived in desolation here,\nUnseen, unvisited, much to our shame.", "Prin. Not so, my lord; it is not so, I swear;\nWe have had pastimes here, and pleasant game;\nA mess of Russians left us but of late.", "King. How, madam? Russians?", "Prin. Ay, in truth, my lord;\nTrim gallants, full of courtship, and of state.", "Ros. Madam, speak true:—It is not so, my lord;\nMy lady, (to the manner of the days,¹)", "In courtesy, gives undeserving praise:", "We four, indeed, confronted here with four\nIn Russian habit: here they stay'd an hour,\nAnd talk'd apace; and in that hour, my lord,\nThey did not bless us with one happy word.\nI dare not call them fools; but this I think,\nWhen they are thirsty, fools would fain have drink.", "Biron. This jest is dry to me.—Fair, gentle sweet,\nYour wit makes wise things foolish; when we greet\nWith eyes best seeing heaven's fiery eye,", "By light we lose light: Your capacity", "Is of that nature, that to your huge store", "Wise things seem foolish, and rich things but poor.", "Ros. This proves you wise and rich; for in my\neye,—", "Biron. I am a fool, and full of poverty.", "Ros. But that you take what doth to you belong,\nIt were a fault to scratch words from my tongue.", "Biron. O, I am yours, and all that I possess.", "Ros. All the fool mine?", "Biron. I cannot give you less.", "Ros. Which of the visors was it, that you were ?", "Biron. Where? when? what visor? why demand\nyou this?", "Ros. There, then, that visor; that superfluous\ncase,", "That hid the worse, and show'd the better face.", "King. We are described; they'll mock us now\nnowdownright.", "Dum. Let us confess, and turn it to a jest.", "Prin. Amaz'd, my lord? Why looks your high-\nness sad?", "Ros. Help, hold his brows! he'll swoon! Why\nlook you pale ?—", "Sea-sick, I think, coming from Muscovy.", "Biron. Thus pour the stars down plagues for\nperjury.", "Can any face of brass hold longer out ?—", "Here stand I, lady; dart thy skill at me;", "Bruise me with scorn, confound me with a float!", "Thrust thy sharp wit quite through my ignorance;\nCut me to pieces with thy keen conceit;", "And I will wish thee never more to dance,\nNor more in Russian habit wait.", "O! never will I trust to speeches penn'd,", "Nor to the motion of a schoolboy's tongue ;", "Nor never come in visor to my friend;²", "Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper's song ;", "Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,", "Three-pil'd³ hyperboles, spruce affectation,", "Figures pedantical; these summer-flies", "Have blown me full of maggot ostentation :", "I do forswear them, and I here protest,", "By this white glove, (how white the hand, God\nknows!)", "Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express'd", "In russet yeas, and honest kersey noes :", "And, to begin, wench,—so God help me, la!—", "My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.", "Ros. Sans SANS, I pray you.⁴", "Biron. Yet I have a trick", "Of the old rage:—bear with me, I am sick;", "I'll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see:—", "Write, *Lord have mercy on us*,⁵ on those three;", "They are infected, in their hearts it lies.", "They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes :", "These lords are visited; you are not free,", "For the Lord's tokens in you I see.", "Prin. No, they are free, that gave these tokens\nto us.", "Biron. Our states are forfeit, seek not to undo us.", "Ros. It is not so; For how can this be true,", "That you stand forfeit, being those that sue ?⁶", "Biron. Peace; for I will not have to do with you.", "Ros. Nor shall not, if I do as I intend.", "Biron. Speak for yourselves, my wit is at an end.", "King. Teach us, sweet madam, for our rude\ntransgression,", "Some fair excuse.", "Prin. The fairest is confession.", "Were you not here, but even now, disguised?", "King. Madam, I was.", "Prin. And were you well advis'd ?", "King. I was, fair madam.", "Prin. When you then were here,", "What did you whisper in your lady's ear?", "King. That more than all the world I did respect\nher.", "Prin. When she shall challenge this, you will\nreject her.", "King. Upon mine honour, no.", "Prin. Peace, peace, forbear,", "Your oath once broke, you force⁷ not to forswear.", "King. Despise me, when I break this oath of mine.", "Prin. I will; and therefore keep it:—Rosaline,", "What did the Russian whisper in your ear ?", "Ros. Madam, he swore, that he did hold me dear", "As precious eye-sight; and did value me", "Above this world: adding thereto, moreover,", "That he would wed me, or else die my lover.", "Prin. God give thee joy of him! the noble lord", "Most honourably doth uphold his word.", "King. What mean you, madam? by my life, my\ntroth,", "I never swore this lady such an oath.", "Ros. By heaven, you did; and to confirm it plam,", "You gave me this: but take it, sir, again.", "King. My faith, and this, the princess I did give;", "I knew her by this jewel on her sleeve.", "Prin. Pardon, me, sir, this jewel did she wear;", "And lord Biron, I thank him, is my dear:—", "That will; we have me, or your pearl again?", "Biron. Neither of either; I remit both twain.—", "I see the trick on't:—Here was a consent,⁸", "(Knowing beforehand of our merriment;)", "To dash it like a Christmas comedy:\nSome carry-tale, some please-man, some slight\nzany,⁹", "Some mumble-news, some trencher-knight, some\nDick,—", "That smiles his cheek in jeers;¹⁰ and knows the\ntrick", "To make my lady laugh, when she's dispos'd,—", "Told our intents before; which once disclos'd,", "The ladies did change favours; and then we,", "Following the signs, woo'd but the sign of she.", "Now, to our perjury to add more terror,", "We are again forsworn; in will and error.¹¹", "Much upon this it is:—And might not you,", "[To BOYET.", "Forestall our sport, to make us thus untrue ?", "Do not you know my lady's foot by the squire,¹²", "And laugh upon the apple of her eye ?", "1 After the fashion of the times.", "2 Mistress.", "3 A metaphor from the pile of velvet.", "4 i. e. without French words, I pray you.", "5 This was the inscription put upon the doors of houses\ninfected with the plague. The tokens of the plague\nwere the first spots or discolorations of the skin.", "6 That is, how can those be liable to forfeiture that\nbegin the process? The quibble lies in the ambiguity\nof the word sue, which signifies to proceed to law, and\nto petition.", "7 i. e. you care not, or do not regard forswearing.", "8 An agreement, a conspiracy. See as You Like It,\nAct ii. Sc. 2.\n9 Buffoon.", {"bbox": [439

## SCENE II.

## LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.

211

Nath. When in the world I liv'd, I was the world's commander;—

Boyet. Most true, 'tis right; you were so, Alisander.

Biron. Pompey the great,—

Cost. Your servant, and Costard.
Biron. Take away the conqueror, take away Alisander.

Cost. O, sir, [To NATH.] you have overthrown Alisander the conqueror! You will be scraped out of the painted cloth for this: your lion, that holds his poll-ax sitting on a close-stool,¹ will be given to A-jax: he will be the ninth worthy. A conqueror, and afeard to speak! run away for shame, Alisander. [NATH. retires.] There, an't shall please you; a foolish mild man; an honest man, look you, and soon dash'd! He is a marvellous good neighbour, in sooth; and a very good bowler: but, for Alisander, alas, you see how 'tis;—a little o'erparted:—But there are worthies a coming will speak their mind in some other sort.

Prin. Stand aside, good Pompey.

Enter HOLOFERNES arm'd, for Judas, and MOTH arm'd, for Hercules.

Hol. Great Hercules is presented by this imp,

Whose club kill'd Cerberus, that three-headed canus,

And, when he was a babe, a child, a shrimp,
Thus did he strangle serpents in his manus :

Quoniam, he seemeth in minority;

Ergo, I come with this apology.—

Keep some state in thy exit, and vanish.

[Exit MOTH.

Hol. Judas I am,—

Dum. A Judas !

Hol. Not Iscariot, sir.—

Judas I am, ycleped Machabæus.

Dum. Judas Machabæus clipt, is plain Judas.

Biron. A kissing traitor:—How art thou prov'd Judas?

Hol. Judas I am,—

Dum. The more shame for you, Judas.

Hol. What mean you, sir ?

Boyet. To make Judas hang himself.

Hol. Begin, sir; you are my elder.

Biron. Well arm'd! Judas was hang'd on an elder.

Hol. I will not be put out of countenance.

Biron. Because thou hast no face.

Hol. What is this ?

Boyet. A cittern head.²

Dum. The head of a bodkin.

Biron. A death's face in a ring.

Long. The face of an old Roman coin, scarce seen.

Boyet. The pummel of Cæsar's faulchion.

Dum. The carv'd-bone face on a flask.³

Biron. St. George's half-cheek in a brooch.⁴

Dum. Ay, and in a brooch of lead.

Biron. Ay, and worn in the cap of a tooth-drawer:

And now, forward; for we have put thee in countenance.

Hol. You have put me out of countenance.

Biron. False; we have given thee faces.

Hol. But you have out-fac'd them all.

Biron. An thou wert a lion, we would do so.

Boyet. Therefore, as he is, an ass, let him go.

And so adieu, sweet Jude ! nay, why dost thou stay?

Dum. For the latter end of his name.

Biron. For the ass to the Jude ? give it him :—
Jud-as, away.

Hol. This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.

Boyet. A light for monsieur Judas: it grows dark,
he may stumble.

Prin. Alas, poor Machabæus, how hath he been
baited!—

Enter ARMADO arm'd, for Hector.

Biron. Hide thy head, Achilles; here comes Hector in arms.

Dum. Though my mocks come home by me, I will now be merry.

King. Hector was but a Trojan³ in respect of this.

Boyet. But is this Hector?

Dum. I think, Hector was not so clean-timber'd.

Long. His leg is too big for Hector.

Dum. More calf, certain.

Boyet. No; he is best indued in the small.

Biron. This cannot be Hector.

Dum. He's a god or a painter; for he makes faces.

Arm. The armipotent Mars, of lances⁶ the almighty,

Gave Hector a gift,—

Dum. A gilt nutmeg.

Biron. A lemon.

Long. Stuck with cloves.

Dum. No, cloven.

Arm. Peace.

The armipotent Mars, of lances the almighty,
Gave Hector a gift, the heir of Ilion;

A man so breath'd, that certain he would fight, yea

From morn till night, out of his pavilion.

I am that flower,—

That mint.

Dum. Long.

That columbine.

Arm. Sweet lord Longaville, rein thy tongue.

Long. I must rather give it the rein; for it runs against Hector.

Dum. Ay, and Hector's a greyhound.

Arm. The sweet war-man is dead and rotten;
sweet chucks, beat not the bones of the buried:
when he breath'd, he was a man—But I will for-
ward with my device: Sweet royalty, [to the Princ-
cess] bestow on me the sense of hearing.

[BIRON whispers COSTARD.]

Prin. Speak, brave Hector; we are much delighted.

Arm. I do adore thy sweet grace's slipper.

Boyet. Loves her by the foot.

Dum. He may not by the yard.

Arm. This Hector far surmounted Hannibal,—

Cost. The party is gone, fellow Hector, she is gone; she is two months on her way.

Arm. What meanest thou ?

Cost. Faith, unless you play the honest Trojan,
the poor wench is cast away: she's quick; the child
brags in her belly already; 'tis yours.

Arm. Dost thou infamonize me among potentates?
thou shall die.

Cost. Then shall Hector be whipp'd, for Jaque-
netta that is quick by him; and hang'd, for Pompey
that is dead by him.

Dum. Most rare Pompey!

Boyet. Renowned Pompey!

Biron. Greater than great, great, great, great

Pompey! Pompey the huge!

Dum. Hector trembles.

Biron. Pompey is moved:—More Ates,⁷ more

Ates; stir them on! stir them on!

Dum. Hector will challenge him.

Biron. Ay, if he have no more man's blood in's
belly than will sup a flea.

Arm. By the north pole, I do challenge thee.

Cost. I will not fight with a pole, like a northern man;⁸ I'll slash; I'll do it by the sword:—I pray you, let me borrow my arms again.

1 This alludes to the arms given, in the old history of the Nine Worthies, to Alexander, 'the which did bear geules a lion or, seiante in a chayer, holding a battle-axe argent.'

2 The cittern, a musical instrument like a guitar, had usually a head grotesquely carved at the extremity of the neck and finger-board: hence these jests.

3 i. e. a soldier's powder-horn.

4 A brooch was an ornamental clasp for fastening

hat-bands, girdles, mantles, &c. a brooch of lead, because of his pale and wan complexion, his leaden hue.

5 Trojan is supposed to have been a cant term for a thief. It was, however, a famihar name for any equal or inferior.

6 i. e. lance-men.

7 i. e. more instigation. Ate was the goddess of dis-

cord.

8 Vir Borealis, a clown. See 'An Optick Glasse of Humours, by T. W. 1663.' The reference may be, however, to the particular use of the quarter-staff in the northern counties.

["212", "LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST.", "ACT V.", "*Dum.* Room for the incensed worthies.", "*Cost.* I'll do it in my shirt.", "*Dum.* Most resolute Pompey !", "*Moth.* Master, let me take you a buttonhole lower.\nDo you not see, Pompey is uncasing for the combat?\nWhat mean you? you will lose your reputation.", "*Arm.* Gentlemen, and soldiers, pardon me; I will not combat in my shirt.", "*Dum.* You may not deny it; Pompey hath made the challenge.", "*Arm.* Sweet bloods, I both may and will.", "*Biron.* What reasons have you for't?", "*Arm.* The naked truth of it is, I have no shirt; I go woolward¹ for penance.", "*Boyet.* True, and it was enjoin'd him in Rome for want of linen: since when, I'll be sworn, he wore none, but a dish-clout of Jaquenetta's; and that a' wears next his heart for a favour.", "*Enter a Messenger MONSIEUR MERCADE.*", "*Mer.* God save you, Madam.", "*Prin.* Welcome, Mercade;", "But that thou interrupt'st our merriment.", "*Mer.* I am sorry, madam; for the news I bring, Is heavy in my tongue. The king your father—\n*Prin.* Dead, for my life.", "*Mer.* Even so; my tale is told.", "*Biron.* Worthies, away; the scene begins to cloud.", "*Arm.* For mine own part, I breathe free breath: I have seen the day of wrong through the little hole of discretion,² and I will right myself like a soldier.", "*[Exeunt Worthies.*", "*King.* How fares your majesty?", "*Prin.* Boyet, prepare; I will away to-night.", "*King.* Madam, not so; I do beseech you, stay.", "*Prin.* Prepare, I say.—I thank you, gracious lords,", "For all your fair endeavours; and entreat,", "Out of a new-sad soul, that you vouchsafe", "In your rich wisdom, to excuse, or hide,", "The liberal³ opposition of our spirits:", "If over-boldly we have borne ourselves", "In the converse of breath, your gentleness", "Was guilty of it.—Farewell, worthy lord!", "A heavy heart bears not an humble⁴ tongue:", "Excuse me so, coming so short of thanks", "For my great suit so easily obtain'd.", "*King.* The extreme parts of time extremely form All causes to the purpose of his speed;", "And often, at his very loose,⁵ decides", "That which long process could not arbitrate:", "And though the mourning brow of progeny", "Forbid the smiling courtesy of love,", "The holy suit which fain it would convince;⁶", "Yet, since love's argument was first on foot,", "Let not the cloud of sorrow justle it", "From what it purpos'd; since, to wail friends lost,", "Is not by much so wholesome, profitable;", "As to rejoice at friends but newly found.", "*Prin.* I understand you not; my griefs are double.", "*Biron.* Honest plain words best pierce the ear of", "grief; and by these badges understand the king.", "For your fair sakes have we neglected time,", "Play'd foul play with our oaths; your beauty, ladies,", "Hath much deform'd us, fashioning our humours", "Even to the opposed end of our intents;", "And what in us hath seem'd ridiculous,—", "As love is full of unbefitting strains;", "All wanton as a child, skipping, and vain;", "Form'd by the eye, and therefore, like the eye,", "Full of strange shapes, of habits, and of forms,", "Varying in subjects as the eye doth roll", "To every varied object in his glance:", "Which party-coated presence of loose love", "Put on by us, if, in your heavenly eyes,\nHave misbecom'd our oaths and gravities,", "Those heavenly eyes, that look into these faults,\nSuggested' us to make: Therefore, ladies,", "Our love being yours, the error that love makes", "Is likewise yours: we to ourselves prove false,", "By being once false for ever to be true", "To those that make us both,—fair ladies, you:", "And even that falsehood, in itself a sin,", "Thus purifies itself, and turns to grace.", "*Prin.* We have receiv'd your letters, full of love;", "Your favours, the ambassadors of love;", "And, in our maiden council, rated them", "At courtship, pleasant jest, and courtesy,", "As bombast,⁸ and as lining to the time;", "But more devout than this, in our respects,", "Have we not been; and therefore met your loves\nIn their own fashion, like a merriment,", "*Dum.* Our letters, madam, show'd much more\nthan jest.", "*Ros.*", "*King.* Now, at the latest minute of the hour,", "Grant us your loves.", "*Prin.*", "A time, methinks, too short", "To make a world-without-end bargain in:", "No, no, my lord, your grace is perjur'd much,", "Full of dear guiltiness; and, therefore this,—", "If for-my love (as there is no such cause)", "You will do aught, this shall you do for me:", "Your oath I will not trust; but go with speed", "To some forlorn and hermeted, her", "Remote from all the pleasures of the world;", "There stay, until the twelve celestial signs\nHave brought about their annual reckoning:", "If this austere insociable life", "Change not your offer made in heat of blood;", "If frosts, and fasts, hard lodging, and thin weeds,¹⁹", "Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love,", "But that it bear this trial, and last this love;", "Then at the expiration of the year,", "Come challenge, challenge me by these deserts,", "And, by this virgin palm, now kissing thine,", "I will be thine; and, till that instant, shut", "My woful self up in a mourning house;", "Raining the tears of lamentation,", "For the remembrance of my father's death.", "If this thou do deny, let our hands part;", "Neither intitled in the other's heart.", "*King.* If this, or more than this, I would deny,", "To flatter up these powers of mine with rest,", "The sudden hand of death close up mine eye!", "*Biron.* And what to me, my love? and what to me?", "*Ros.* You must be purged too, your sins are rank;", "You are attaint with faults and perjury;", "Therefore, if you my favour mean to get,", "A twelvemonth shall you spend, and never rest,", "But seek the weary beds of people sick.", "*Dum.* But what to me, my love? but what to me?", "*Kath.* A wife!—A beard, fair health, and hon-\nesty;", "With three-fold love I wish you all these three.", "*Dum.* O, shall I say, I thank you, gentle wife?", "*Kath.* Not so, my love!—a twelvemonth and a\nday", "I'll mark no words that smooth-fac'd wooers say:", "Come when the king doth to my lady come,", "Then, if I have much love, I'll give you some.", "*Dum.* I'll serve thee true and faithfully till then.", "*Kath.* Yet swear not, lest you be forsworn again.", "*Long.* What says Maria?", "*Mar.*", {"bbox": [663, 1181, 943, 1196

SCENE I.

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

215

PERSONS REPRESENTED.¹

DUKE of Venice.
Prince of Morocco, { *Suitors to Portia.*
Prince of Ragarron,
ANTONIO, *the Merchant of Venice.*
BASSANIO, *his Friend.*
SALANIO,
SALARINO, { *Friends to Antonio and Bassanio.*
GRATIANO,
LORENZO, *in love with Jessica.*
SHYLOCK, *a Jew.*
TUBAL, *a Jew, his Friend.*
LAUNCELOT GOBBO, *a Clown, Servant to Shylock.*
OLD GOBBO, *Father to Launcelot.*

SALERIO, *a Messenger from Venice.*
LEONARDO, *Servant to Bassanio.*
BALTHAZAR, { *Servants to Portia.*
STEPHANO,
PORTIA, *a rich Heiress.*
NERISSA, *her Waiting-Maid.*
JESSICA, *Daughter to Shylock.*

Magnificoes of Venice, Officers of the Court of Justice, Jailer, Servants, and other Attendants.

**SCENE, partly at Venice, and partly at Belmont,**
**the Seat of Portia, on the Continent.**

ACT I.

SCENE I. Venice. *A Street. Enter ANTONIO, SALARINO, and SALANIO.*

*Antonio.*

IN sooth, I know not why I am so sad;
It wearies me ; you say, it wearies you ;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff't is made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn ;

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me,
That I have much ado to know myself.

*Salar.* Your mind is tossing on the ocean ;
There, where your argosies⁵ with portly sail,—
Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood,
Or, as it were the pageants of the sea,—
Do overpeer the petty traffickers,
That curt'sy to them, do they reverence,
As they fly by them with their woven wings.
*Salar.* Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth,
The better part of my affections would
Be with my hopes abroad. I should be still
Plucking the grass, to know where sits the wind ;
Peering in maps, for ports, and piers, and roads ;
And every object that might make me fear
Misfortune to my ventures, out of doubt,
Would make me sad.

*Salar.* My wind, cooling my broth,
Would blow me to an ague, when I thought,
What harm a wind too great might do at sea.
I should not see the sandy hour-glass run,
But I should think of shallow's and of flats ;
And see my wealthy Andrew dock'd in sand,
Vailing³ her high-top lower than her ribs,
To kiss her burial. Should I go to church,
And see the holy edifice of stone,
And notbethink me bleight of dangerous rocks ;
Which touching but my gentle vessel's side,
Would scatter all her spices on the stream ;
Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks ;
And, in a word, but even now worth this,
And now worth nothing ? Shall I have the thought
To think on this; and shall I lack the thought,
That such a thing, bechanc'd, would make me sad ?
But, tell not me ; I know, Antonio
Is sad to think upon his merchandise.

*Ant.* Believe me, no : I thank my fortune for it,
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place ; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year :
Therefore, my merchandise makes me not sad.
*Salar.* Why, then you are in love.
*Ant.* Fye, fye !
*Salar.* Not in love neither ? Then let's say, you
are sad,

*Ant.* My fortune for it,
My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place ; nor is my whole estate
Upon the fortune of this present year :
Therefore, my merchandise makes me not sad.
*Salar.* Why, then you are in love.
*Ant.* Fye, fye !
*Salar.* Not in love neither ? Then let's say, you
are sad,

Because you are not merry : and 'twere as easy
For you, to laugh, and leap, and say, you are merry,
Because you are not sad. Now, by two-headed
Janus,

Nature hath fram'd strange fellows in her time :
Some that will evermore peep through their eyes,
And laugh, like parrots, at a bag-piper ;
And other of such vinegar aspect,

That they'll not show their teeth in way of smile,
Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.

*Enter BASSANIO, LORENZO, and GRATIANO.*

*Salar.* Here comes Bassanio, your most noble
kinsman,

Gratiano, and Lorenzo : Fare you well ;

We leave you now with better company.

*Salar.* I would have staid till I had made you
merry,

If worthier friends had not prevented me.

*Ant.* Your worth is very dear in my regard,

I take it, your own business calls on you,
And you embrace the occasion to depart.

*Salar.* Good morrow, my good lords.

*Bass.* Good signiors both, when shall we laugh ?
say, when?

You grow exceeding strange : Must it be so ?

*Salar.* We'll make our leisures to attend on yours.

*[Exeunt SALAR. and SALAN.*

*Lor.* My lord Bassanio, since you have found
Antonio,

We two will leave you : but, at dinner time,
I pray you, have in mind where we must meet.

*Bass.* I will not fail you.

*Gra.* You look not well, signior Antonio ;

You have too much respect upon the world ?

They lose it, that do buy it with much care.
Believe me, you are marvellously chang'd.

*Ant.* I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano ;

A stage, where every man must play a part,
And mine a sad one.

*Gra.* Let me play the fool :

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come ;

And let my liver rather heat with wine,

Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.

Why should a man, whose blood is warm within,
Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster ?

Sleep when he wakes ? and creep into the jaundice

By being peevish ? I tell thee what, Antonio,—

I love thee, and it is my love that speaks ;—

There are a sort of men, whose visages

Do cream and mantle, like a standing pond ;

And do a wilful⁴ stillness entertain,

With purpose to be dress'd in an opinion

Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit ;

As who should say, *I am Sir Oracle,*

1 This enumeration of the Dramatis Personæ is by Mr. Rowe.

2 *Argosies* are large ships either for merchandise or war. The word has been supposed to be derived from the classical ship *Argo*, as a vessel eminently famous ;

and this seems the more probable from *Argis* being used for a ship in low Latin.

3 To *vail* is to *lower*, to *let fall*. From the French *avaler*.

4 i. e. an obstinate silence.

216

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

ACT I

*And, when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!*

O, my Antonio, I do know of these,

That therefore only are reputed wise,

For saying nothing; who, I am very sure,

If they should speak, would almost damn those ears,
Which, hearing them, would call their brothers
fools.

I'll tell thee more of this another time:

But fish not, with this melancholy bait,

For this fool's gudgeon, this opinion.—

Come, good Lorenzo:—Fare ye well, awhile;
I'll end my exhortation after dinner.

*Lor. Well, we will leave you then till dinner-time:*
I must be one of these same dumb wise men,
For Gratiano never lets me speak.

*Gra. Well, keep me company but two years more,*
*Thou shall not know the sound of thine own tongue.*

*Ant. Farewell: I'll grow a talker for this gear!*

*Gra. Thanks, i'faith; for silence is only commendable*

In a neat's tongue dried, and a maid not vendible.

*[Exeunt GRA. and LOR.]*

*Ant. Is that any thing now?*

*Bass. Gratiano speaks an infinite deal of nothing,*
*more than any man in all Venice: His reasons are*
*as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff;*
*you shall seek all day ere you find them; and, when*
*you have them, they are not worth the search.*

*Ant. Well; tell me now, what lady is this same*
*To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage,*
*That you to-day promis'd to tell me of?*

*Bass. 'Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,*
*How much I have disabled mine estate,*

By something showing a more swelling port²

Than my faint means would grant continuance :

Nor do I now make moan to be abrid'd

From such a noble rate; but my chief care

Is, to come fairly off from the great debts,

Wherein my time, something too prodigal,

Hath left me gaged: To you, Antonio,

I owe the most in money, and in love ;

And from your love I have a warranty

To unburthen all my plots, and purposes,

How to get clear of all the debts I owe.

*Ant. I pray you, good Bassanio, let me know it;*
*And, if it stand, as you yourself still do,*
*Within the eye of honour, be assur'd,*
*My purse, my person, my extremest means,*
*Lie all unlock'd to your occasions.*

*Bass. In my school-days, when I had lost one shaft,*
*I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight³*

The selfsame way, with more advised watch,

*To find the other forth; and, by advent'ring both,*

*I oft found both: I urge this childhood proof,*
*Because what follows is pure innocence.*

*I owe you much: and, like a wilful youth,*
*That which I owe is lost: but if you please*

*To shoot another arrow that self way*

*Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,*

*As I will watch the aim, or to find both,*

*Or bring your latter hazard back again,*

*And thankfully rest debtor for the first.*

*Ant. You know me well; and herein spend but time,*

*To wind about my love with circumstance;*

*And out of doubt, you do me now more wrong,*

*In making question of my uttermost,*

*Than if you had made waste of all I have:*

*Then do but say to me what I should do,*

*That in your knowledge may by me be done,*

*And I am prest⁴ unto it: therefore, speak.*

*Bass. In Belmont is a lady richly left,*

1 *Gear* usually signifies *matter, subject, or business* in general. It is here, perhaps, a colloquial expression of no very determined import. It occurs again in this play, Act ii. Sc. 3: 'If Fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.'

2 *Port is state or equipage.* So in the Taming of a Shrew, Act i. Sc. 1.

³ *Thou shall be master, Tranio, in my stead,*
*Keep house, and port, and servants, as I should.*

⁴ This method of finding a lost arrow is prescribed by P. Crescentius in his treatise *De Agricultura, lib. x.*

*And she is fair, and, fairer than that word,*
*Of wondrous virtues; sometimes⁵ from her eyes*

*I did receive fair speechless messages:*

*Her name is Portia; nothing undervalued*

*To Cato's daughter, Brutus⁶ Portia.*

*Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth;*

*For the four winds blow in from every coast*

*Renowned suitors: and her sunny locks*

*Hang on her temples like a golden fleece;*

*Which makes her seat of Belmont, Colchos' strand,*

*And many Jasons come in quest of her.*

*O my Antonio, had I but the means*

*To hold a rival place with one of them,*

*I have a mind presages me such thrift,*

*That I should questionless be fortunate.*

*Ant. Thou know'st, that all my fortunes are at sea;*

*Neither have I money, nor commodity*

*To raise a present sum: therefore go forth,*

*Try what my credit can in Venice do;*

*That shall be rack'd, even to the uttermost,*

*To furnish thee to Belmont, to fair Portia.*

*Go, presently inquire, and so will I.*

*Where money is; and I no question make,*

*To have it of my trust, or for my sake.*

### SCENE II. Belmont. A Room in Portia's House. Enter PORTIA and NERISSA.

*Por. By my troth, Nerissa, my little body is a-weak of this great world.*

*Ner. You would be, sweet madam, if your miseries were in the same abundance as your good fortunes are: And yet, for aught I see, they are as sick, that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing: It is no mean happiness therefore, to be seated in the mean; superfluity comes sooner by white hairs,⁶ but competency lives longer.*

*Por. Good sentences, and well pronounced.*

*Ner. They would be better if well followed.*

*Por. If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men's cottages princes' palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching. The brain may devise laws for the blood; but a hot temper leaps over a cold degree; such a hare is madness the youth, to skip o'er the meshes of good counsel the cripple. But this reasoning is not in the fashion to choose me a husband:—O me, the word choose! I may neither choose whom I would, nor refuse whom I dislike; so is the will of a living daughter cur'd by the will of a dead father: Is it not hard, Nerissa, that I cannot choose one, nor refuse none?*

*Ner. Your father was ever virtuous; and holy men, at their death, have good inspirations; therefore, the lottery, that he hath devised in these three chests, of gold, silver, and lead (whereof who chooses his meaning, chooses you,) will, no doubt, never be chosen by any rightly, but one who you shall rightly love. But what warmth is there in your affection towards any of these princely suitors that are already come?*

*Por. I pray thee over-name them; and as thou namest them, I will describe them; and, according to my description level at my affection.*

*Ner. First, there is the Neapolitan prince.*

*Por. Ay, that's a colt,⁸ indeed, for he doth nothing but talk of his horse; and he makes it a great appropriation to his own good parts, that he*

c. xxviii. and is also mentioned in Howell's *Letters, vol.* i. p. 183, edit. 1655, 12mo.

⁴ *Prest, that is, ready;* from the old French word of the same orthography, *now pret.*

⁵ Formerly.

⁶ i. e. superfluity sooner acquires white hairs; becomes old. We still say, how did he *come by it?*

⁷ The Neapolitans, in the time of Shakespeare, were eminently skilled in all that belongs to hoardsmanship.

⁸ *Colt* is used for a witless heady gay youngster; whence the phrase used for an old man too juvenile, that he still retains his *colt's tooth.*

## SCENE III.

## MERCHANT OF VENICE.

217

can shoe him himself: I am much afraid, my lady his mother played false with a smith.

Ner. Then, is there the county? Palatine.

Por. He doth nothing but frown; as who should say, *An if you will not have me, choose*: he hears merry tales, and smiles not: I fear, he will prove the weeping philosopher when he grows old, being so full of unmannerly sadness in his youth. I had rather be married to a death's head with a bone in his mouth, than to either of these. God defend me from these two!

Ner. How say you by the French lord, Monsieur Le Bon?

Por. God made him, and therefore let him pass for a man. In truth, I know it is a sin to be a الموcker; But, he! why, he hath a horse better than the Neapolitan's; a better bad habit of frowning than the count Palatine: he is every man in no man: if a throttle² sing, he falls straight a capering; he will fence with his own shadow: If I should marry him, I should marry twenty husbands: if he would despise me, I would forgive him; for if he love me to madness, I shall never requite him.

Ner. What say you then to Faulconbridge, the young baron of England?

Por. You know, I say nothing to him; for he understands not me, nor I him: he hath neither Latin, French, nor Italian;³ and you will come into the court and swear, that I have a poor penny-worth in the English. He is a proper man's⁴ picture; But, alas! who can converse with a dumb show? How oddly he is suited! I think, he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour every where.

Ner. What think you of the Scottish lord, his neighbour?

Por. That he hath a neighbourly charity in him; for he borrowed a box of the ear of the Englishman, and swore he would pay him again, when he was lable: I think, the Frenchman became his surety, and sealed under for another.

Ner. How like you the young German,⁵ the Duke of Saxony's nephew?

Por. Very vilely in the morning, when he is sober; and most vilely in the afternoon, when he is drunk: when he is best, he is little worse than a man; and when he is worst, he is little better than a beast: and the worst fall that ever fell, I hope, I shall make shift to go without him.

Ner. If he should offer to choose, and choose the right casket, you should refuse to perform his father's will, if you should refuse to accept him.

Por. Therefore, for fear of the worst, I pray thee, set a deep glass of Rhenish wine on the contrary casket: for, if the devil be within, and that temptation without, I know he will choose it. I will do any thing, Nerissa, ere I will be married to a spunge.

Ner. You need not fear, lady, the having any of these lords; they have acquainted me with their determination: which is indeed, to return to their home, and to trouble you with no more suit; unless you may be won by some other sort than your father's imposition, depending on the caskets.

Por. If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtained by the manner of my father's will; I am glad this parcel of woors are so reasonable; for there is not one among them but I dote on his very absence, and I pray God grant them a fair departure.

Ner. Do you not remember, lady, in your father's time, a Venetian, a scholar, and a soldier, that came hither in company of the Marquis of Montferrat?

Por. Yes, yes, it was Bassanio; as I think, so was he called.

Ner. True, madam; he, of all the men that ever my foolish eyes looked upon, was the best deserving a fair lady.

Por. I remember him well; and I remember him worthy of thy praise.—How now! what news?

Enter a Servant.

Serv. The four strangers seek for you, madam, to take their leave: and there is a fore-runner come from a fifth, the Prince of Morocco; who brings word, the prince, his master, will be here to-night.

Por. If I could bid the fifth welcome with so good heart as I can bid the other four farewell, I should be glad of his approach: if he have the condition⁶ of a saint, and the complexion of a devil, I had rather he should shrive me than wive me. Come, Nerissa.—Sirrah, go before.—Whiles we shut the gate upon one wooer, another knocks at the door.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE III. Venice. A public Place. Enter BASSANIO and SHYLOCK.

Shy. Three thousand ducats,—well.

Bass. Ay, sir, for three months.

Shy. For three months,—well.

Bass. For the which, as I told you, Antonio shall be bound.

Shy. Antonio shall become bound,—well.

Bass. May you stead me? Will you pleasure me?

Shall I know your answer?

Shy. Three thousand ducats, for three months, and Antonio bound.

Bass. Your answer to that.

Shy. Antonio is a good man.

Bass. Have you heard any imputation to the contrary?

Shy. Ho, no, no, no, no;—my meaning, in saying he is a good man, is to have you understand me, that he is sufficient: yet his means are in supposition: he hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand moreover upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England,—and other ventures he hath, squander'd abroad: But ships are but boards, sailors but men: there be land-rats, and water-rats, water-thieves, and land-thieves; I mean, pirates; and then, there is the peril of waters, winds, and rocks: The man is, notwithstanding, sufficient;—three thousand ducats;—I think, I may take his bond.

Bass. Be assured you may.

Shy. I will be assured I may; and that I may be assured, I will bethink me: May I speak with Antonio?

Bass. If it please you to dine with us.

Shy. Yes, to smell pork; to eat of the habitation which your prophet, the Nazarite, conjured the devil into: I will buy with you, sell with you, talk with you, walk with you, and so following; but I will not eat with you, drink with you, nor pray with you. What news on the Rialto?—Who is he comes here?

Enter ANTONIO.

Bass. This is signior Antonio.

Shy. [Aside.] How like a fawning publican he looks!

I hate him for he is a Christian.

But more, for that, in low simplicity,

He lends out money gratis, and brings down

The rate of usance⁷ here with us in Venice.

Perhaps, in this enumeration of Portia's suitors, there may be some covert allusion to those of Queen Elizabeth.

6 i. e. the nature, disposition. So in Othello: '— and then of so gentle a condition!?

7 It is almost incredible what gain the Venetians receive by the usury of the Jews, both privately and in common. For in every city the Jews keep open shops of usury, taking gages of ordinary for xv. in the hundred by the year; and if at the year's end the gage be not redeemed, it is forfeit, or at least done away to a

1 This is an allusion to the Count Albertus Alasco, a Polish Palatine, who was in London in 1553.

2 A *thrush*; properly the missel-thrush.

3 A satire on the ignorance of young English travelers in Shakspeare's time.

4 A proper man is a handsome man.

5 The Duke of Bavaria visited London, and was made a Knight of the Garter, in Shakspeare's time.

M

28

218

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

Act I.

If I can catch him once upon the hip,¹
I will feed fat the ancient grudge I bear him.
He hates our sacred nation; and he rails,
Everwhere where merchants most do congregate,
On me, my bargains, and my well-won thrift,
Which he calls interest: Cursed be my tribe,
If I forgive him.

Bass. Shylock, do you hear ?

Shy. I am debating of my present store ;

And, by the near guess of my memory,
I cannot instantly raise up the gross
Of full three thousand ducats: What of that ?
Tubal, a wealthy Hebrew of my tribe,
Will furnish me: But soft; how many months
Do you desire?—Rest you fair, good signior ;

[To ANTONIO.

Your worship was the last man in our mouths.

Ant. Shylock, albeit I neither lend nor borrow,
By taking, nor by giving of excess,

Yet, to supply the ripe wants² of my friend,

I'll break a custom :—Is he yet possess'd,³

How much you would?

Shy. Ay, ay, three thousand ducats.

Ant. And for three months.

Shy. I had forgot,—three months, you told me so.

Well then, your bond; and, let me see,—But
hear you;

Methought, you said, you neither lend nor borrow,
Upon advantage.

Ant. I do never use it.

Shy. When Jacob graz'd his uncle Laban's sheep,
This Jacob from our holy Abraham was

(As his wise mother wrought in his behalf.)

The third possessor; ay, he was the third.

Ant. And what of him? did he interest?

Shy. No, not take interest; not, as you would
say,

Directly interest: mark what Jacob did.

When Laban and himself were compromis'd,
That all the earlings⁴ which were streak'd, and pied,
Should fall as Jacob's hire; the ewes, being rank,
In the end of autumn turned to the rams:

And when the work of generation was
Between these woolly breeders in the act,
The skilful shepherd peel'd me certain wands,
And in the doing of the deed of kind,⁵

He stuck them up before the fulsome⁶ ewes;

Who, then conceiving, did in eating time

Fall party-colour'd lambs, and those were Jacob's.

This was a way to thrive, and he was blest;

And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not.

Ant. This was a venture, sir, that Jacob serv'd for;

A thing not in his power to bring to pass,
But sway'd, and fashion'd, by the hand of heaven.

Was this inserted to make interest good?

Or is your gold and silver, ewes and rams?

Shy. I cannot tell; I make it breed as fast :—

But note me, signior.

Ant. Mark you this, Bassano,

The devil can cite scripture for his purpose.

An evil soul, producing holy witness,

Is like a villain with a smiling cheek;

A goodly apple rotten at the heart;

O, what a goodly outside falsehood? hath !

Shy. Three thousand ducats,—'tis a good round sum.

Three months from twelve, then let me see the rate,

Ant. Well, Shylock, shall we be beholden to you?

Shy. Signior Antonio, many a time and oft,
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my monies, and my usances:⁸
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug;
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe:
You call me—misbeliever, cut-throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of that which is mine own.
Well then, it now appears, you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say,
Shylock, we would have monies; You say so;
You, that void your rheum upon my heard,
And foot me, as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold; monies is your suit.
What shall I say to you? Should I not say,
Hath a dog money? is it possible,

A cur can lend three thousand ducats? or

Shall I bend low, and in a bondman's key
With 'bated breath, and whispering humbleness,
Say this,—

Fair sir, you spit on me on Wednesday last;

You spurn'd me such a day; another time

You call'd me—dogs and for these courtesies

I'll lend you this much monies?

Ant. I am as like to call thee so again,

To spit on thee again, to spurn thee too.
If thou wilt lend this money, lend it not

As to thy friends; (for when did friendship take
A breed⁹ for barren metal of his friend ?)

But lend it rather to thine enemy;

Who, if he break, thou mayst with better face
Exact the penalty.

Shy. Why, look you, how you storm!
I would be friends with you, and have your love,
Forget the shames that you have stain'd me with,
Supply your present wants, and take no doit

Of usance for my monies, and you'll not hear me:
This is kind I offer.

Ant. This were kindness.

Shy. This kindness will I show :—
Go with me to a rotary, seal me there
Your single bond; and, in a merry sport,
If you repay me not on such a day,
In such a place, such sum, or sums, as are
Express'd in the condition, let the forfeit
Be nominated for an equal pound
Of your fair flesh, to be cut off and taken
In what part of your body pleaseth me.

Ant. Content, in faith; I'll seal to such a bond,
And say, there is much kindness in the Jew.

Bass. You shall not seal to such a bond for me,
I'll rather dwell¹⁰ in my necessity,

Ant. Why, fear not, man; I will not forfeit it;
Within these two months, that's a return before
This bond expires, I do expect you
Of thrice three times the value of this bond.

Shy. O father Abraham, what these Christians
are!

Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect
The thoughts of others! Pray you, tell me this;
If he should break his day, what should I gain
By the exaction of the forfeiture?

A pound of man's flesh, taken from a man,
Is not so estimable, profitable neither,
As flesh of muttons, beefes, or goats. I say,
To buy his favour, I extend this friendship:

If he will take it, so; if not, adieu;

And, for my love, I pray you wrong me not.

Ant. Yes, Shylock, I will seal unto this bond.

⁶ Fulsome,¹⁰ says Mr. Douce, ¹⁰ has, doubtless, the same significance with the preceding epithet rank: ¹¹ It is true that rank has sometimes the interpretation affixed to it of rammish in old Dictionaries, but there is also another meaning of the word which may be found in Baret's Alvearie, 1573, viz. Fruitefull, ranck, battle, Lat. fertilis. This sense would also, I think, better accord with fulsome, if it could be shown to be a synonymy.

⁷ Falsehood here means knavery, treachery, as truth
is sometimes used for honesty.

⁸ Interest.

⁹ 10 i. e. interest, money bred from the principal.

¹⁰ i. e. continue; to abide has both the senses of habitation and continuance.

great disadvantage; by reason whereof the Jews are
out of measure wealthy in those parts. ²—Thomas's His-
torye of Italye, 1561, 4to. f. 77.

1 To catch, or have, on the hip, means to have at an
entire advantage. The phrase seems to have origina-
ted from hunting, because, when the animal pursued is
seized upon the hip, it is finally disabled from flight.

2 Wants come to the height, which admit no longer
delay.

3 Informed.

4 Young lambs just dropt, or ean'd. This word is
usually spelt yean, but the Saxon etymology demands
ean. It is applied particularly to ewes.

5 i. e. of nature.

## SCENE I.

## MERCHANT OF VENICE.

219

Shy. Then meet me forthwith at the notary's;
Give him direction for this merry bond,
And I will go and purse the ducats straight;
See to my house, left in the fearful guard
Of an untruly knave; and presently
I will be with you.
[Exit.]

Ant. Hee thee, gentle Jew.

This Hebrew will turn Christian; he grows kind.

Bass. I like not fair terms, and a villain's mind.

Ant. Come on: in this there can be no dismay,
My ships come home a month before the day.
[Exeunt.]

## ACT II.

### SCENE I. Belmont. A Room in Portia's House.
Flourish of Cornets. Enter the Prince of Morroco, and his Train; PORTIA, NERISSA, and other of her Attendants.

Mor. Mislike me not for my complexion,
The shadow'd livery of the burnish'd sun,
To whom I am a neighbour, and near bred.
Bring me the fairest creature northward born,
Where Phoebus' fire scarce thaws the icicles,
And let us make incision² for your love,
To prove whose blood is reddest, his or mine.
I tell thee, lady, this aspect of mine
Hath fear'd³ the valiant; by my love, I swear,
The best-regarded virgins of our clime
Have lov'd it too: I would not change this hue,
Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen.
Por. In terms of choice I am not solely led
By nice direction of a maiden's eyes:
Besides, the lottery of my destiny
Bars me the right of voluntary choosing:
But, if my father had not scanted me,
And hedg'd me by his wit, to yield myself
His wife, who wins me by that means I told you,
Yourself, renowned prince, then stood as fair,
As any comer I have looked on yet,
For my affection.

Por. Even for that I thank you;
Therefore, I pray you, lead me to the caskets,
To try my fortune. By this scimitar,
That slew the Sophy, and a Persian prince,
That won three fields of Sultan Solyman,—
I would out-stare the sternest eyes that look,
Out-brave the heart most daring on the earth,
Pluck the young suckling cubs from the she bear,
Yea, mock the lion when he roars for prey,
To win thee, lady: But, alas the while!
If Hercules, and Lichas, play at dice
Which is the better man, the greater throw
May turn fortune from the weaker hand:
So is Alcides beaten by his page:
And so may I, blind fortune leading me,
Miss that which one unworthier may attain,
And die with grieving.

Por. You must take your chance;
And either not attempt to choose at all,
Or swear, before you choose,—if you choose wrong,
Never to speak to lady afterward
In way of marriage; therefore be advis'd.⁴
Mor. Nor will not; come, bring me unto my chance.

1 *Fearful guard.* A guard is a guard that is not to be trusted, but gives cause of fear. To *fear* was anciently to give as well as *feel* terrors. So in K. Henry IV. Part I.,

² 'A mighty and a fearful head they are.'

3 To understand how the tawny prince, whose savage
dignity is well supported, means to recommend himself
by this challenge, it must be remembered that red blood
is a traditionary sign of courage.

⁴ I. e. terrified.

5 The old copies read—*Enter the Clown alone*; and
throughout the play this character is called the *Clown*
at most of his entrances or exits.

⁶ 'Scorn running with thy heels.' Mr. Steevens calls
this *absurdity*, and introduces a brother critic, Sir Hugh
Evans, to prove it. He inclines to the emendation of
an arch-botcher of Shakspeare's text, who has pro-
posed that we should read 'with the heels,' i. e. 'bind

Por. First, forward to the temple; after dinner
Your hazard shall be made.

Mor. Good fortune then! [Cornets.
To make me blest, or cursed'st among men.]
[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. Venice. A Street.—Enter LAUNCELLOT GOBBO.⁵

Laun. Certainly my conscience will serve me to
run from this Jew, my master: The fiend is at mine
elbow; and tempts me, saying to me, *Gobbo, Laun-
celot Gobbo, good Launcelot, or good Gobbo, or good
Launcelot Gobbo, use your legs, take the start, run
away: My conscience says, —no; take heed, honest
Launcelot; take heed, honest Gobbo; or, as afore-
said, honest Launcelot Gobbo; do not run; scorn run-
ning with thy heels:⁶ Well, the most courageous
fiend bids me pack; via! says the fiend; away!
says the fiend, for the heavens;⁷ rouse up a brave
mind, says the fiend, and run. Well, my conscience,
hanging about the neck of my heart, says very
wisely to me,—my honest friend Launcelot, being an
honest man's son,—or rather an honest woman's son;
for, indeed, my father did something smack, some-
thing grow to, he had a kind of taste;—well, my
conscience says, Launcelot, budge not; budge, says
the fiend; budge not, says my conscience: Con-
science, say I, you counsel well; fiend, say I, you
counsel well: to be ruled by my conscience, I
should stay with the Jew my master, who, (God
bless the mark!) is a kind of devil; and, to run
away from the Jew, I should be ruled by the fiend,
who, saving your reverence, is the devil himself:
Certainly, the Jew is the very devil incarnation;
and, in my conscience, my conscience is but a kind
of hard conscience, to offer to counsel me to stay
with the Jew: The fiend gives the more friendly
counsel: I will run, fiend; my heels are at your
commandment, I will run.

Enter old GOBBO,⁸ with a Basket.

Gob. Master, young man, you, I pray you; which
is the way to master Jew's?

Laun. [Aside.] O heavens, this is my true be-
gotten father! who, being more than sand-blind,⁹
high-gravel blind, knows me not:—I will try con-
clusions¹⁰ with him.

Gob. Master young gentleman, I pray you, which
is the way to master Jew's?

Laun. Turn up on your right hand, at the next
turning, but, at the next turning of all, on your left;
marry, at the very next turning, turn of no hand,
but turn down indirectly to the Jew's house.

Gob. By God's sonties,¹¹ 'twill be a hard way to
hit. Can you tell me whether one Launcelot, that
dwells with him, dwell with him, or no?

Laun. Talk you of young master Launcelot?—
Mark me now; [aside.] now will I raise the wa-
ters:—Talk you of young master Launcelot?

Gob. No master, sir, but a poor man's son: his
father, though I say it, is an honest exceeding poor
man, and, God be thanked, well to live.

Laun. Well, let his father be what he will, we
talk of young master Launcelot.

Gob. Your worship's friend, and Launcelot, sir.

Laun. But I pray you ergo, old man, ergo, I be-
seech you; Talk you of young master Launcelot?

Gob. Of Launcelot, an't please your mastership.

them.' The poet's own authority ought to have taught
Steevens better. In Much Ado about Nothing, we have
'O illegitimate construction! I scorn that with my heels.'

7 *For the heavens* was merely a petty oath. To make
the fiend conjure Launcelot to do a thing for *heaven's*
sake is a specimen of that 'acute nonsense' which Bar-
row makes one of the species of wit, and which Shak-
speare was sometimes very fond of.

8 It has been inferred from the name of Gobbo, that
Shakspeare designed this character to be represented
with a *hump-back*.

9 'Sand-blind.' Having an imperfect sight, as if
there was sand in the eye, *Myops*.—Holyoke's *Dictio-
nary*.

¹⁰ To try conclusions, was to put to the proof, in other
words to try experiments.

11 God's sonties was probably a corruption of God's
saints, in old language *saunctes*: *sante* and *sanctity*

220

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

ACT II.

Laun. Ergo, master Launcelot; talk not of master Launcelot, father; for the young gentleman (according to fates and destinies, and such odd sayings, the sisters three, and such branches of learning) is, indeed, deceased; or, as you would say, in plain terms, gone to heaven.

Gob. Merry, God forbid! the boy was the very staff of my age, my very prop.

Laun. Do I look like a cudgel, or a hovel-post, a staff, or a prop?—Do you know me, father?

Gob. Alack the day, I know you not, young gentleman: but, I pray you, tell me, is my boy (God rest his soul!) alive, or dead?

Laun. Do you not know me, father?

Gob. Alack, sir, I am sand-blind, I know you not.

Laun. Nay, indeed, if you had your eyes, you might fail of the knowing me: it is a wise father, that knows his own child. Well, old man, I will tell you news of your son: Give me your blessing: truth will come to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man's son may; but, in the end, truth will out.

Gob. Pray you, sir, stand up; I am sure, you are not Launcelot, my boy.

Laun. Pray you, let's have no more fooling about it, but give me your blessing; I am Launcelot, your boy that was, your son that is, your child that shall be.

Gob. I cannot think you are my son.

Laun. I know not what I shall think of that: but I am Launcelot, the Jew's man; and, I am sure, Margery, your wife, is my mother.

Gob. Her name is Margery, indeed: I'll be sworn, if thou be Launcelot, thou art mine own flesh and blood. Lord worship'd might he be! what a beard hast thou! thou hast got more hair on thy chin, than Dobbin my thill-horse¹ has on his tail.

Laun. It should seem then, that Dobbin's tail grows backward; I am sure he had more hair on his tail, than I have on my face, when I last saw him.

Gob. Lord, how art thou changed! How dost thou and thy master agree? I have brought him a present; How 'gree you now?

Laun. Well, well; but, for mine own part, as I have set up my rest² to run away, so I will not rest till I have run some ground: my master's a very Jew: Give him a present! give him a halter: I am famish'd in his service; you may tell every finger I have with my ribs. Father, I am glad you are come; give me your present to one master Bassanio, who, indeed, gives rare new liversies; if I serve not him, I will run as far as God has any ground. —O rare fortune! here comes the man; —to him, father; for I am a Jew, if I serve the Jew any longer.

Enter BASSANIO, with LEONARDO, and other
Followers.

Bass. You may do so; —but let it be so hasted, that supper be ready at the farthest by five of the clock: See these letters delivered; put the liversies to making; and desire Gratiano to come anon to my lodging.

Laun. To him, father.

Gob. God bless your worship!

Bass. Gramercy! Would'st thou aught with me?

Gob. Here's my son, sir, a poor boy,

Laun. Not a poor boy, sir, but the rich Jew's man; that would, sir, as my father shall specify,

have been proposed but apparently with less probabi-
lity. Oaths of this kind are not unfrequent among our
ancient writers. To avoid the crime of profane swear-
ing, they sought to disguise the words by abbreviations,
which ultimately lost even their similarity to the origi-
nal phrase.

1. e. the *shaft-horse*, sometimes called the *thill-horse*.

2. 'Set up my rest,' i. e. determined. See note on
All's Well that Ends Well, Act ii. Sc. 2. Romeo and
Juliet, Act iv. Sc. 5. Where it may be remarked that
Shakspeare has again quibbled upon *rest*. 'The Coun-
ty Paris hath set up his rest, that you shall rest but
little.'

Gob. He hath a great infection, sir, as one would say, to serve—

Laun. Indeed, the short and the long is, I serve the Jew, and I have a desire, as my father shall specify,

Gob. His master and he (saving your worship's
reverence) are scarce cater-cousins:

Laun. To be brief, the very truth is, that the Jew having done me wrong, doth cause me, as my father, being I hope an old man, shall frutify unto you,

Gob. I have here a dish of doves, that I would bestow upon your worship; and my suit is,

Laun. In very brief, the suit is impertinent to myself, as your worship shall know by this honest old man; and, though I say it, though old man, yet poor man, my father,

Bass. One speak for both; —What would you?

Laun. Serve you, sir.

Gob. This is the very defect of the matter, sir.

Bass. I know thee well, thou hast obtain'd thy
suit:

Shylock, thy master, spoke with me this day,
And hath prefer'd thee, if it be preferment,
To leave a rich Jew's service, to become
The follower of so poor a gentleman.

Laun. The old proverb is very well parted between my master Shylock and you; sir; you have the grace of God, sir, and he hath enough.

Bass. You speak best it well: Go, father, with thy son:

Take leave of thy old master, and inquire
My lodging out: —Give him a livery,

More guarded³ than his fellows: See it done.

Laun. Father, in: —I cannot get a service, no; —I have ne'cr a tongue in my head.—Well; [Looking on his palm.] ' which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have good fortune. Go to, here's a simple line of life! ' here's a small trifle of wives: Alas, fifteen wives is nothing; eleven widows, and nine maids, is a simple coming-in for one man: and then, to 'scape drowning thrice; and to be in peril of my life with the edge of a feather-bed: —here are simple 'scapes! Well, if fortune be a woman, she's a good wench for this gear.—Father, come; —I'll take my leave of the Jew in the twinkling of an eye.

[Exeunt LAUNCELOT and old GOBBO.

Bass. I pray thee, good Leonardo, think on this; These things being bought, and orderly bestow'd, Return in haste, for I do feast to-night
My best esteem'd acquaintance; hie thee, go.

Leon. My best endeavours shall be done herein.

Enter GRATIANO.

Gra. Where is your master?

Leon.

Yonder, sir, he walks.

[Exit LEONARDO.

Bass. Gratiano!

Gra. I have a suit to you.

Bass.

Gra. You have obtain'd it.

Bass.

You must not deny me; I must go with you

to Belmont.
Bass. Why, then you must; —But hear thee,
Gratiano;

Thou art too wild, too rude, and bold of voice; —
Parts, that become thee happily enough,

3. i. e. ornamented. *Guards* were trimmings, facings, or other ornaments, such as gold and silver lace, applied upon a dress.

4. Mr. Tyrwhitt's explanation of this passage (which has much puzzled the commentators) seems the most plausible: Launcelot applauding himself for his success with Bassanio, and looking into the palm of his hand, which by fortune-tellers is called the *table*, breaks out into the following reflection: —'Well, if any man in Italy have a fairer table; which doth offer to swear upon a book, I shall have good fortune'; e. g. a table which doth not only promise *but* offer to swear upon a book *that* I shall have good fortune. He omits the conclusion of the sentence.

## SCENE V.

## MERCHANT OF VENICE.

221

And in such eyes as ours appear not faults;
But where thou art not known, why, what they show
Something too liberal; ¹—pray thee, take pain
To allay with some cold drops of modesty²
Thy skipping spirit; lest, through thy wild behaviour,
I be misconstrued in the place I go to,
And lose my hopes.

Gra. Signior Bassanio, hear me:
If I do not put on a sober habit,
Talk with respect, and swear but now and then,
Wear prayer-books in my pocket, look demurely;
Nay more, while grace is saying, hood mine eyes
Thus with my hat,³ and sigh, and say, amen;
Use all the observance of civility,
Like one well studied in a sad ostent⁴
To please his grandam, never trust me more.

Bass. Well, we shall see your bearing.⁵

Gra. Nay, but I bar to-night; you shall not gage
me
By what we do to-night.

Bass. No, that were pity;
I would entreat you rather to put on
Your boldest suit of birth, for we have friends
That purpose merriment: But fare you well,
I have some business.

Gra. And I must to Lorenzo, and the rest;

But we will visit you at supper-time. [Exeunt.

### SCENE III. The same. A Room in Shylock's House. Enter JESSICA and LAUNCELOT.

Jess. I am sorry, thou wilt leave my father so;
Our house is hell, and thou, a merry devil,
Didst rob it of some taste of tediousness:
But fare thee well; there is a ducat for thee.
And, Launcelot, soon at supper shall thou see
Lorenzo, who is thy new master's guest:
Give him this letter; do it secretly,
And so farewell; I would not have my father
See me talk with thee.

Laun. Adieu!—tears exhibit my tongue.—Most beautiful pagan,—most sweet Jew! If a Christian did not play the knave, and get thee, I am much deceived: But adieu! these foolish drops do some-what drown my manly spirit; adieu! [Exit.

Jess. Farewell, good Launcelot.—
Alack, what heinous sin is it in me,
To be asham'd to be my father's child!
But though I am a daughter to his blood,
I am not to his manners: O Lorenzo,
If thou keep promise, I shall end this strife;
Become a Christian, and thy loving wife. [Exit.

### SCENE IV. The same. A Street. Enter GRATTIANO, LORENZO, SALARINO, and SALANIO.

Lor. Nay, we will slink away in supper-time;
Disguise us at my lodging, and return
All in an hour.

Gra. We have not made good preparation.

Salar. We have not spoke us yet of torch-bearers.

Salan. 'Tis vile, unless it may be quaintly order'd;

And better, in my mind, not undertook.

Lor. 'Tis now but four o'clock; we have two
hours

To furnish us:—

Enter LAUNCELOT, with a Letter.

Friend Launcelot, what's the news?
Laun. An it shall please you to break up⁶ this,
it shall seem to signify.

Lor. I know the hand : in faith, 'tis a fair hand;
And whiter than the paper it writ on,
Is the fair hand that writ.

Gra. Love-news, in faith.

1. Gross, licentious.

2. So in Hamlet:

³ Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper
Sprinkle cool patience.

3 It was anciently the custom to wear the hat on during the time of dinner.

4 i. e. grave appearance; *show* of staid and serious behaviour *Ostent* is a word very commonly used for *show* among old dramatic writers.

5. Carriage, deportment.

6 To break up was a term in carving.

Laun. By your leave, sir.

Lor. Whither goest thou?

Laun. Marry, sir, to bid my old master the Jew to sup to-night with my new master the Christian.

Lor. Hold here, take this :—tell gentle Jessica,
I will not fail her;—speak it privately; go.—

Gentlemen, [Exit LAUNCELOT.
Will you prepare me for this masque to to-night?
I am provided of a torch-bearer.

Salar. Ay, marry, I'll be gone about it straight.

Salar. And so will I.

Lor. Meet me, and Gratiano,

At Gratiano's lodging, some hour hence.

Salar. 'Tis good we do so.

[Exeunt SALAR. and SALAN.

Gra. Was not that letter from fair Jessica?

Lor. I must needs tell thee all: She hath directed,
How I shall take her from her father's house:
What gold, and jewels, she is furnish'd with;
What page's suit she hath in readiness.

If e'er the Jew her father come to heaven,
It will be for his gentle daughter's sake:

And never dare misfortune cross her foot,

Unless she do it under this excuse,—

That she is issue to a faithless Jew.

Come, go with me; peruse this, as thou goest

Fair Jessica shall be my torch-bearer. [Exeunt.

### SCENE V. The same. Before Shylock's House. Enter SHYLOCK and LAUNCELOT.

Shy. Well, thou shall see, thy eyes shall be thy
judge,

The difference of old Shylock and Bassanio:—

What, Jessica!—thou shall not gormandize,

As thou hast done with me;—What, Jessica!—

And sleep and snore, and rend apparel out;—

Why, Jessica, I say!

Lor. Why, Jessica!

Shy. Who bids thee call? I do not bid thee call.

Laun. Your worship was wont to tell me, I could do nothing without bidding.

Enter JESSICA.

Jess. Call you? What is your will?

Shy. I am bid⁷ forth to supper, Jessica:

There are my keys:—But wherefore should I go?

I am not bid for love; they flatter me:

But yet I'll go in hate, to feed upon

The prodigal Christian.⁸—Jessica, my girl,

Look to my house: I am right loath to go:

There is some ill a brewing towards my rest,

For I did dream of money-bags to-night.

Laun. I beseech you, sir, go; my young master doth expect your reproach.

Shy. So do I his.

Laun. And they have conspired together.—I will not say, you shall see a masque; but if you do, then it was not for nothing that my nose fell a bleeding on Black-Monday⁹ last at six o'clock i'the morning, falling out that year on Ash Wednesday was four year in the afternoon.

Shy. What! are there masques? Hear you me, Jessica:

Lock up my doors; and when you hear the drum,
And the vile squeaking of the wry-neck'd fife,

Clamber not you up to the casements then,
Nor thrust your head into the public street,

To gaze on Christian fools with varnish'd faces:

But stop my house's ears, I mean my casements;

Let not the sound of shallow foppyery enter

My sober house.—By Jacob's staff, I swear,

I have no mind of feasting forth to-night;

7 Invited.

8 Shakspeare meant to heighten the malignity of Shylock's character by thus making him depart from his most settled resolve (that he will neither eat, drink, nor pray with Christians.) for the prosecution of his revenge.

9 i. e. Easter-Monday. It was called Black-Monday from the severity of that day, April 4, 1360, which was so extraordinary that, of Edward the Third's soldiers, then before Paris, many died of the cold. Anciently a superstitious belief was annexed to the accident of *bleed*ing at the nose.

222

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

ACT II.

But I will go.—Go you before me, sirrah;
Say, I will come.

*Laun.* I will go before, sir.—
Mistress, look out at window for all this;

There will come a Christian by,
Will be worth a Jewess' eye.

*Shy.* What says that fool of Hagar's offspring, ha?

*Jes.* His words were Farewell, mistress; no-
thing else.

*Shy.* The patch¹ is kind enough; but a huge
feeder.

Snail-slow in profit, and he sleeps by day
More than the wild cat: drones hive not with me;
Therefore I part with him; and part with him
To one that I would have him help to waste

His borrow'd purse.—Well, Jessica, go in;
Perhaps I will return immediately;

Do, as I bid you,

Shut doors after you: fast bind, fast find;

A proverb never stale in thrifty mind.

*Jes.* Farewell: and if my fortune be not crost,

I have a father, you a daughter, lost.

### SCENE VI.
The same. Enter GRATIANO and SALARINO, masqued.

*Gra.* This is the pent-house, under which Lorenzo
Desir'd us to make stand.

*Salar.* His hour is almost past.

*Gra.* And it is marvel he out-dwells his hour,
For lovers ever run before the clock.

*Salar.* O, ten times faster Venus' pigeons² fly
To seal love's bonds new made, than they are wont,
To keep obliged faith unforefeited!

*Gra.* That ever holds: who riseth from a feast,
With that keen appetite that he sits down?
Where is the horse that doth untread again
His tedious measures with the unbated fire
That he did pace them first? All things that are,
Are with more spirit chased than enjoy'd.

How like a younker or a prodigal,
The scarfed³ bark puts from her native bay,
Hugg'd and embraced by the strumpet wind¹⁴
How like the prodigal doth she return,
With over-weather'd ribs, and ragged sails,
Lean, rent, and beggar'd by the strumpet wind!

### Enter LORENZO.

*Salar.* Here comes Lorenzo;—more of this here-
after.

*Lor.* Sweet friends, your patience for my long
abode;

Not I, but my affairs have made you wait;
When you shall please to play the thieves for wives,
I'll watch as long for you then.—Approach;
Here dwells my father Jew:—Ho! who's within?

### Enter JESSICA above, in boy's clothes.

*Jes.* Who are you! Tell me for more certainty,
Albeit I'll swear that I do know your tongue.

*Lor.* Lorenzo, and thy love.

*Jes.* Lorenzo, certain; and my love indeed;
For who love I so much? And now who knows,
But you, Lorenzo, whether I am yours?

*Lor.* Heaven, and thy thoughts are witness that
thou art.

*Jes.* Here, catch this casket; it is worth the pains.
I am glad 'tis night, you do not look on me,
For I am much asham'd of my exchange;
But love is blind, and lovers cannot see
The pretty follies that themselves commit:
For if they could, Cupid himself would blush
To see me thus transformed to a boy.

*Lor.* Descend, for you must be my torch-bearer.

*Jes.* What, must I hold a candle to my shames?

1 i. e. fool or simpleton.

2 Johnson thought that lovers, who are sometimes called *tortiles* or *doves* in poetry, were meant by Venus' *pigeons*. The allusion however, seems to be to the *doves* by which Venus's chariot is drawn: 'Venus drawn by *doves* is much more prompt to seal new bonds,' &c.

3 Gray evidently caught the imagery of this passage in his Bard, but dropt the allusion to the parable of the prodigal—

They in themselves, good sooth, are too, too light.
Why, 'tis an office of discovery, love;
And I should be obscur'd.

*Lor.* So are you, sweet,
Even in the lovely garnish of a boy.

But come at once;
For the close night doth play the run-away,
And we are staid for at Bassanio's feast.

*Jes.* I will make fast the doors, and gild myself
With some more ducats, and be with you straight.

*Gra.* Now, by my hood, a gentile,⁵ and no Jew.

*Lor.* Beshrew me, but I love her heartily:

For she is wise, if I can judge of her;

And fair she is, if that mine eyes be true;

And true she is, as she hath proved herself;

And therefore, like herself, wise, fair, and true,
Shall she be placed in my constant soul.

### Enter JESSICA, below.

What, art thou come?—On, gentlemen, away:
Our masquing mates by this time for us stay.

### [Exit with JESSICA and SALARINO.

### Enter ANTONIO.

*Ant.* Who's there?

*Gra.* Signior Antonio?

*Ant.* Fye, fye, Gratiano! where are all the rest?

*Tis nine o'clock; our friends all stay for you:—*
No masque to-night: the wind is come about,
Bassanio presently will go abroad:
I have sent twenty out to seek for you.

*Gra.* I am glad on't; I desire no more delight,
Than to be under sail and gone to-night.

### SCENE VII.
Belmont. A Room in Portia's House.—Flourish of Cornets. Enter PORTIA, with the Prince of Morocco, and both their Tyains.

*Por.* Go, draw aside the curtains, and discover
The several caskets to this noble prince:—

Now make your choice.

*Mor.* The first, of gold, who this inscription
bears;—

*Who chooseth me, shall gain what many men desire.*

The second, silver, which this promise carries;—

*Who chooseth me shall get as much as he deserves.*

This third, dull lead, with warning none as blunt;

*Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath.*

How shall I know if I do choose the right?

*Por.* The one of them contains my picture prince;
If you choose that, then I am yours withal.

*Mor.* Some god direct my judgment! Let me see,
I will survey the inscriptions back again:

What says this leaden casket?

Must give—For what? for lead? hazard for lead?

This casket threatens: Men, that hazard all,
Do it in hope of fair advantages:

A golden mind stoops not to shows of dross;

Pl then not give, nor hazard, aught for lead.

What says the silver, with her virgin hue?

As much as he deserves!—Pause there, Morocco,
And weigh thy value with an even hand:

If thou be'st rated by thy estimation,

Thou dost deserve enough; and yet enough

May not extend so far as to the lady;

And yet to be afraid of my deserving,

Were but a weak disabling of myself.

As much as I deserve!—Why, that's the lady?

I do in birth deserve her, and in fortunes,

In graces and in qualities of breeding;

But more than these, in love I do deserve.

*Fair laughs the morn and soft the zephyr blows,
While proudly riding o'er the azure realm,
In gallant trim the gilded vessel goes;
Youth on the prow, and Pleasure at the helm;
Regardless of the sweeping whirlwind's sway,
That hush'd in grim repose expects his evening prey.

4 So in Othello:

*The baudy wind, that kisses all it meets.*

5 A jest arising from the ambiguity of *Gentile*, which signifies both a *heathen* and one *well born*.

["## SCENE IX.", "## MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "223", "What if I stray'd no further, but chose here ?—", "Let's see once more this saying grav'd in gold :", "*Who chooseth me, shall gain what many men desire.*", "Why, that's the lady ; all the world desires her.", "From the four corners of the earth they come,", "To kiss this shrine, this mortal breathing saint.", "The Hyrcanian deserts, and the vasty wilds", "Of wide Arabia, are as thorough-fares now,", "For princes to come view fair Portia :", "The watery kingdom, whose ambitious head", "Spits in the face of heaven, is no bar", "To stop the foreign spirits ; but they come,", "As o'er a brook, to see fair Portia.", "One of these three contains her heavenly picture.", "Is't like, that lead contains her ? 'Twere damnation,", "To think so base a thought ; it were too gross", "To rib¹ her cerecloth in the obscure grave.", "Or shall I think, in silver, she's immur'd,", "Being ten times undervalued² to try'd gold ?", "O sinful thought! Never so rich a gem", "Was set in worse than gold. They have in England", "A coin, that bears the figure of an angel", "Stamped in gold; but that's insculp'd³ upon ;", "But here an angel in a golden bed", "Lies all within.—Deliver me the key;", "Here do I choose, and thrive I as I may!", "Por. There, take it, prince, and if my form lie", "there,", "Then I am yours.", "[He unlocks the golden casket.", "Mor.", "O hell! what have we here ?", "A carrion death, within whose empty eye", "There is a written scroll: I'll read the writing.", "*All that glisters is not gold,*", "Often have you heard that told :", "Many a man his life hath sold,", "But my outside to behold :", "Gilded tombs do worms infold.", "Had you been as wise as bold,", "Young in limbs, in judgment old,", "Your answer had not been inscroll'd :⁴", "Fare you well; your suit is cold.", "Cold, indeed; and labour lost :", "Then, farewell, heat; and welcome, frost.—", "Portia, adieu ! I have too griev'd a heart", "To take a tedious leave : thus losers part. [Exit.", "Por. A gentle riddance :—Draw the curtains, go;—", "Let all of my complexion choose me so. [Exeunt.", "## SCENE VIII. Venice. A Street. Enter SALARINO and SALANIO.", "Salar. Why, man, I saw Bassanio under sail;", "With him is Gratiano gone along ;", "And in their ship, I am sure, Lorenzo is not.", "Salan. The villain Jew with outcries rais'd the duke ;", "Who went with him to search Bassanio's ship.", "Salar. He came too late, the ship was under sail ;", "But there the duke was given to understand,", "That in a gondola were seen together", "Lorenzo and his amorous Jessica :", "Besides, Antonio certify'd the duke,", "They were not with Bassanio in his ship.", "Salan. I never heard a passion so confus'd,", "So strange, outrageous, and so variable,", "As the dog Jew did utter in the streets :", "My daughter !—O my ducats !—O my daughter !", "Fled with a Christian !—O my christian ducats !—", "Justice! the law! my ducats, and my daughter !", "A sealed bag, two sealed bags of ducats,", "Of double ducats, stol'n from me by my daughter !", "And jewels; two stones, two rich and precious stones,", "Stol'n by my daughter ! Justice! find the girl !", "She hath the stones upon her, and the ducats !", "Salar. Why, all the boys in Venice follow him,\nCrying,—his stones, his daughter, and his ducats.", "Salan. Let good Antonio look he keep his day,\nOr he shall pay for this.", "Salar. Marry, well remember'd :", "I reason'd⁵ with a Frenchman yesterday ;", "Who told me,—in the narrow seas, that part", "The French and English, there miscarried", "A vessel of our country, richly fraught :", "I thought upon Antonio, when he told me ;", "And wish'd in silence that it were not his.", "Salan. You were best to tell Antonio what you\nhear ;", "Yet do not suddenly, for it may grieve him.", "Salar. A kinder gentleman treads not the earth.", "I saw Bassanio and Antonio part :", "Bassanio told him, he would make some speed", "Of his return : he answer'd—Do not so,", "Slubber⁶ not business for my sake, Bassanio,", "But stay the very riping of the time ;", "And for the Jew's bond, which he hath of me,", "Let it not enter into your mind of love :", "Be merry ; and employ your chiefest thoughts", "To courtship and such fair ostents⁷ of love", "As shall conveniently become you there :", "And even there, his eye being big with tears,", "Turning his face, he put his hand behind him,", "And with affection wondrous sensible", "He wrung Bassanio's hand, and so they parted.", "Salan. I think, he only loves the world for him.", "I pray thee, let us go, and find him out,", "And quicken his embraced heaviness⁸", "With some delight or other.", "Salar. Do we so. [Exeunt.", "## SCENE IX. Belmont. A Room in Portia's House. Enter NERISSA, with a Servant.", "Ner. Quick, quick, I pray thee, draw the curtain\nstraight;", "The prince of Arragon hath ta'en his oath,", "And comes to his election presently.", "Flourish of Cornets.", "Enter the Prince of Arragon, PORTIA, and their\nTrains.", "Por. Behold, there stand the caskets, noble prince :", "If you choose that wherein I am contain'd,", "Straight shall our nuptial rites be solemniz'd ;", "But if you fail, without more speech, my lord,", "You must be gone from hence immediately.", "Ar. I am enjoin'd by oath to observe three things :", "First, never to unfold to any one", "Which casket 'twas I chose ; next, if I fail", "Of the right casket, never in my life", "To woo a maid in way of marriage ; lastly,", "If I do fail in fortune of my choice,", "Immediately to leave you and be gone.", "Por. To these injunctions every one doth swear,\nThat comes to hazard for my worthless self.", "Ar. And so have I address'd⁹ me : Fortune now", "To my heart's hope !—Gold, silver, and base lead.", "Who chooseth me, must give and hazard all he hath.", "You shall look fairer, ere I give, or hazard.", "What says the golden chest? ha! let me see :—", "Who chooseth me, shall gain what many men desire.", "What many men desire.—That may be meant", {"bbox": [420, 108

224

MERCHANT OF VENICE

ACT III.

Why, then to thee, thou silver treasure-house;
Tell me once more what title thou dost bear:
Who chooseth me, shall get as much as he deserves;
And well said too: For who shall go about
To cozen fortune, and be honourable
Without the stamp of merit! Let none presume
To wear an undeserved dignity.
O, that estates, degrees, and offices,
Were not deriv'd corruptly! and that clear honour
Were purchased by the merit of the wearer!
How many then should cover, that stand bare?
How many be commanded, that command?
How much low peasantry would then be glean'd?
From the true seed of honour! and how much ho-
nour

Pick'd from the chaff and ruin of the times,¹
To be new varnish'd? Well, but to my choice:
Who chooseth me, shall get as much as he deserves;
I will assume desert;—Give me a key for this,
And instantly unlock my fortunes here.

Por. Too long a pause for that which you find there.
Ar. What's here? the portrait of a blinking idiot,
Presenting me a schedule. I will read it.

How much unlike art thou to Portia?
How much unlike my hopes, and my desavings?
Who chooseth me, shall have as much as he deserves.
Did I deserve no more than a fool's head?

Is that my prize? are my deserts no better?
Por. To offend, and judge, are distinct offices,
And of opposed natures.

Ar.

What is here?

The fire seven times tried this;
Seven times tried that judgment is,
That did never choose amiss:
Some there be that shadows kiss;
Such have but a shadow's bliss:
There be fools alive, I wis,²
Silver'd o'er; and so was this.
Take what wife you will to bed,³
I will ever be your head:
So begone, sir, you are sped.
Still more fool I shall appear
By the time I linger here,
With one fool's head I came to woo,
But I go away with two.—
Sweet, adieu! I'll keep my oath,
Patiently to bear my wroth.⁴

[Exeunt Arragon, and Train.

Por. Thus hath the candle sing'd the moth.
O these deliberate fools! when they do choose,
They have the wisdom by their wit to lose.

Ner. The ancient saying is no heresy;—
Hanging and wiving goes by destiny.

Por. Come, draw the curtain, Nerissa.

Enter a Servant.

Serv. Where is my lady?

Por.

Here; what would my lord?

Serv. Madam, there is alighted at your gate
A young Venetian, one that comes before

To signify the approaching of his lord:
From whom he bringeth sensible regreets:⁵
To wit, besides commends, and courteous breath,
Gifts of rich value; yet I have not seen
So likely an ambassador of love:
A day in April never came so sweet,
To show how costly summer was at hand.
As this fore-spurrer comes before his lord.

Por. No more, I pray thee; I am half afraid,
Thou wilt say anon, he is some kin to thee,
Thou spendst'st such high-day⁶ wit in praising him.—
Come, come, Nerissa; for I long to see
Quick Cupid's post, that comes so mannerly,

Ner. Bassanio, lord love, if thy will it be!

[Exeunt.

1 The meaning is, how much meanness would be found among the great, and how much greatness among the mean.

2 Know.

3 The poet had forgotten that he who missed Portia was never to marry any other woman.

4 Wroath is used in some of the old writers for misfortune and is often spelt like ruth Caxton's Recuyell

ACT III.

SCENE I. Venice. A Street. Enter SALANIO and SALARINO.

Salar. Now, what news on the Rialto?

Salar. Why, yet it lives there uncheck'd, that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wreck'd on the narrow seas; the Goodwins, I think they call the place; a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried, as they say, if my gossip report be an honest woman of her word.

Salar. I would she were as lying a gossip in that,
as ever knapp'd? ginger, or made her neighbours
believe she wept for the death of a third husband:
But it is true,—without any slips of prolixity, or
crossing the plain highway of talks,—that the good
Antonio, the honest Antonio,—O that I had a
title good enough to keep his name company:—

Salar. Come, the full stop.

Salar. Ha,—what say'st thou?—Why the end is, he hath lost a ship.

Salar. I would it might prove the end of his losses!
Salar. Let me say amen betimes, lest the devil
cross my prayer; for here he comes in the likeness
of a Jew.—

Enter SHYLOCK.

How now, Shylock? what news among the merchants?

Shy. You knew, none so well, none so well as
you, of my daughter's flight.

Salar. That's certain; I, for my part, knew the
tailor that made the wings she flew withal.

Salar. And Shylock, for his own part, knew the
bird was fledg'd; and then it is the complexion of
them all to leave the dam.

Shy. She is damn'd for it.

Salar. That's certain, if the devil may be her
judge.

Shy. My own flesh and blood to rebel!

Salar. Out upon it, old carrion! rebels it at these
years?

Shy. I say, my daughter is my flesh and blood.

Salar. There is more difference between thy flesh
and hers, than between jet and ivory; more between
your bloods, than there is between red wine and
renhen:—But tell us, do you hear whether Antonio
have had any loss at sea or not?

Shy. There I have another bad match: a bankrupt, a prodigal, who dare scarce show his head on the Rialto;—a beggar, that used to come so smug upon the mart:—let him look to his bond: he was wont to call me usurer;—let him look to his bond: he was wont to lend money for a Christian courtesy:—let him look to his bond.

Salar. Why, I am sure, if he forfeit, thou wilt not take his flesh; What's that good for?

Shy. To bait fish withal: if it will feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me of half a million; laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, or gans, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? if you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? if we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility: revenge: If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by

of the Histories of Troye, 1471, has frequent instances
of wroth.

5 Salutations.

6 So in the Merry wives of Windsor:

7 To knapp is to break short. The word occurs in the
Common Prayer. 'He knappeth the spear in sunder.'

7 To knapp is to break short. The word occurs in the
Common Prayer. 'He knappeth the spear in sunder.
We still say 'snapp'd short in two.'

## SCENE II.

## MERCHANT OF VENICE.

225

Christian example? why, revenge. The villany
you teach me, I will execute; and it shall go hard,
but I will better the instruction.

*Enter a Servant.*

*Serv.* Gentlemen, my master Antonio is at his
house, and desires to speak with you both.

*Salar.* We have been up and down to seek him.

*Enter TUBAL.*

*Salan.* Here comes another of the tribe; a third
cannot be matched, unless the devil himself turn
Jew. [Exeunt SALAN, SALAR, and Servant.*

*Shy.* How now, Tubal, what news from Genoa?
hast thou found my daughter?

*Tub.* I often came where I did hear of her, but
cannot find her.

*Shy.* Why there, there, there! a diamond
gone, cost me two thousand ducats in Frankfort!
The curse never fell upon our nation till now; I
never felt it till now :—two thousand ducats in that;
and other precious, precious jewels.—I would, my
daughter were dead at my foot, and the jewels in
her ear! 'would she were hears'd at my foot, and
the ducats in her coffin! No news of them?—Why,
so,—and I know not what's spent in the search:
Why, thou loss upon loss! the thief gone with so
much, and so much to find the thief; and no satis-
faction, no revenge: nor no ill luck stirring, but
what lights o' my shoulders; no sighs, but o' my
breathing; no tears, but o' my shedding.

*Tub.* Yes, other men have ill luck too; Antonio,
as I heard in Genoa.—

*Shy.* What, what, what? ill luck, ill luck?

*Tub.* —hath an argony cast away, coming from
Tripolis.

*Shy.* I thank God, I thank God: —Is it true? is
it true?

*Tub.* I spoke with some of the sailors that escaped
the wreck.

*Shy.* I thank thee, good Tubal; —Good news,
good news: ha! ha! —Where ! in Genoa?

*Tub.* Your daughter spent in Genoa, as I heard,
one night, fourscore ducats.

*Shy.* Thou stick'st a dagger in me: —I shall
never see my gold again: Fourscore ducats at
a sitting! fourscore ducats!

*Tub.* There came divers of Antonio's creditors
in my company to Venice, that swear he cannot
choose but break.

*Shy.* I am very glad of it; I'll plague him; I'll
torture him; I am glad of it.

*Tub.* One of them showed me a ring, that he had
of your daughter for a monkey.

*Shy.* Out upon her! Thou tortured me, Tubal:
it was my turquose;¹ I had it of Leah, when I
was a bachelor: I would not have given it for a
wilderness of monkeys.

*Tub.* But Antonio is certainly undone.

*Shy.* Nay, that's true, that's very true: Go, Tubal, fee me an officer, bespeak him a fortnight before: I will have the heart of him, if he forfeit; for were he out of Venice, I can make what merchandise I will: Go, go, Tubal, and meet me at our synagogue; go, good Tubal; at our synagogue, Tubal. [Exeunt.*

### SCENE II. Belmont. A Room in Portia's House.
*Enter BASSANIO, PORTIA, GRATIANO, NERISSA, and Attendants. The caskets are set out.*

*Por.* I pray you tarry; pause a day or two,
Before you hazard; for, in choosing wrong,
I lose your company; therefore, forbear a while:
There's something tells me, (but it is not love!)
I would not lose you: and you know yourself,

Hate counsels not in such a quality:

But lest you should not understand me well
(And yet a maiden naht no tongue but thought,)

I would detain you here some month or two,
Before you venture for me. I could teach you,
How to choose right, and then I am forsworn;

So will I never be: so may you miss me;
But if you do, you'll make me wish a sin,

That I had been forsworn. Beshrew your eyes,
They have o'erlook'd² me, and divided me;

One half of me is yours, the other half yours,
Mine own, I would say; but if mine, then yours,

And so all yours: O' these naughty times

Put bars between the owners and their rights:

And so, though yours, not yours.—Prove it so,

Let fortune go to hell for it.—not I.

I speak too long; but 'tis to peize³ the time;

To eke it, and to draw it out in length,

To stay you from election.

*Bass.*

Let me choose:

For, as I am, I live upon the rack.

*Por.* Upon the rack, Bassanio? then confess
What treason there is mingled with your love.

*Bass.* None, but that ugly treason of mistrust,
Which makes me fear the enjoying of my love:
There may as well be amity and life

'Tween snow and fire, as treason and my love.

*Por.* Ay, but, I fear, you speak upon the rack,

Where men enforced do speak any thing.

*Bass.* Promise me life, and I'll confess the truth.

*Por.* Well then, confess, and live.

*Bass.*

Confess, confess, and love,

Had been the very sum of my confession:

O happy torment, when my torturer

Doth teach me answers for deliverance!

But let me to my fortune and the caskets.

*Por.* Away: then: I'm lock'd in one of them;

If you do love me, you will find me out.—

Nerissa, and the rest, stand all aloof.—

Let music sound, while he doth make his choice;

Then, if he lose, he makes a swan-like end,

Fading in music: that the comparison

May stand more proper, my eye shall be the stream,

And wat'ry death-bed for him: He may win;

And what is music then! then music is

Even as the flourish when true subjects bow

And wat'ry death-bed for him: He may win:
I view the fight, than thou that mak'st the fray.

### SONG.

1. Tell me, where is fancy bred,
Or in the heart, or in the head?
How begot, how nourished?

### REPLY, REPLY.

2. It is engender'd in the eyes,
With crazing fed; and fancy dies
In the cradle where it lies;

Let us all ring fancy's knell;

I'll begin it.—Ding, ding, bell.

All. Ding, dong, bell.

3 To peize is from *peser*, Fr. To weigh or balance.

4 Alluding to the opinion which long prevailed, that the swan uttered a plaintive musical sound at the approach of death; there is something so touching in this ancient superstition that one feels loath to be undeceived.

5 i. e. dignity of men.

6 See Ovid. Metamorph. lib. xi. ver. 199. Malone says, Shakspeare had read the account of this adventure in the Old Legend of the Destruction of Troy.

7 Love.

1 The Turquoise is a well known precious stone found in the veins of the mountains on the confines of Persia to the east. In old times its value was much enhanced by the magic properties attributed to it in common with other precious stones, one of which was that it faded or brightened its hue as the health of the wearer increased or grew less.

2 To be o'erlook'd, forelooked, or eye-bitten, was a term for being bewitched by an evil eye.

29

226

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

Act III.

**Bass.**—So may the outward shows be least themselves;

The world is still deceiv'd with ornament.¹
In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt,
But, being season'd with a gracious² voice,
Obscures the show of evil? In religion,
What damned error, but some sober brow
Will bless it, and approve it³ with a text,
Hiding the grossness with fair ornament?
There is no vice so simple, but assumes
Some mark of virtue on his outward parts.
How many cowards, whose hearts are all as false
As stairs of sand, wear yet upon their chins
The beards of Hercules, and frowning Mars;
Who, inward search'd, have livers white as milk?
And these assume but valour's excrement,⁴
To render them redoubted. Look on beauty,
And you shall see 'tis purchasing'd by the weight;
Which therein works a mirade in nature,
Making them lightest that wear most of it:
So are those crisped snaky golden locks,
Which make such wanton gambols with the wind,
Upon supposed fairness, often known
To be the dowry of a second head,
The scull that bred them, in the sepulchre,⁵
Thus ornament is but the guiled⁶ shore
To a most dangerous sea; the beauteous scarf
Veiling an Indian beauty; in a word,
The seeming truth which cunning times put on
To entrap the wisest. Therefore, thou gaudy gold,
Hard food for Midas, I will none of thee:
Nor none of thee, thou pale and common drudge⁷
'Tween man and man: but thou, thou meagre lead,
Which rather threat'nest, than dost promise aught,
Thy paleness⁸ moves me more than eloquence,
And here choose I; Joy be the consequence!
Por. How all the other passions fleet to air,
As doubtful thoughts, and rash-embrac'd despair,
And shudd'ring fear and green-ey'd jealousy.
O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstacy,
In measure rain thy joy, scant this excess;
I feel too much thy blessing, make it less,
For fear I surfeit!

**Bass.**

What find I here?

[Opening the leaden casket.

Fair Portia's counterfeit.¹⁹ What demi-god
Hath come so near creation? Move these eyes?
Or whether, riding on the balls of mine,
Seem they in motion? Here are sever'd lips,
Parted with sugar breath; so sweet a bar
Should sunder such sweet friends: Here in her hairs
The painter plays the spider; and hath woven
A golden mesh to entrap the hearts of men,
Faster than gnats in cobwebs: But her eyes,—
How could he see to do them? having made one,
Methinks it should have power to steal both his,
And leave itself unfurnish'd:¹⁰ Yet look, how far
The substance of my praise doth wrong this shadow
In underprizing it, so far this shadow
Doth limp behind the substance.—Here's the scroll,
The continent and summary of my fortune.

*You that choose not by the view,*
*Chance as fair, and choose as true!*
*Since this fortune falls to you,*
*Be content and seek no new,*
*If you be well pleas'd with this,*
*And hold your fortune for your bliss,*
*Turn you where your lady is,*
*And claim her with a loving kiss.*

1. Bassanio begins abruptly, the first part of the argument has passed in his mind.

2. Pleasing; winning favour.

3. i. e. justify it.

4. That is, what a little higher is called the *beard* of Hercules. *Excrement*, from *excreste*, is used for every thing which appears to grow or vegetate upon the human body, as the hair, the beard, the nails.

5. Shakspeare has also satirized this fashion of false hair in Love's Labour's Lost.

6. *Guiled for guiling, or treacherous.*

7. I could wish to read

—thou *stale* and common drudge :

for so I think the poet wrote.

8. In order to avoid the repetition of the epithet *pale*,

A gentle scroll: Fair lady, by your leave;

[Kissing her]

I come by note, to give, and to receive,
Like one of two contending in a prize,
That thinks he hath done well in people's eyes,
Hearing applause, and universal shout,
Giddy in spirit, still gazing, in a doubt
Whether those peals of praise be his or no;
So, thrice fair lady, stand I, even so;
As doubtful whether what I see be true,
Until confirm'd, sign'd, ratified by you.

Por. You see me, lord Bassanio, where I stand,
Such as I am: though, for myself alone,
I would not be ambitious in my wish,
To wish myself much better; yet, for you,
I would be trebled twenty times myself;
A thousand times more fair, ten thousand times
More rich; that only to stand high on your account,
I might in virtues, beauties, livings, friends,
Exceed account: but the full sum of me
Is sum of something;¹¹ which, to term in gross,
Is an unlesson'd girl, unschool'd, unpractis'd:
Happy in this, she is not yet so old
But she may learn; happier than this,
She is not bred so dull but she can learn;
Happiest of all, is, that her gentle spirit
Commits itself to yours to be directed,
As from her lord, her governor, her king.
Myself, and what is mine, to you, and yours
Is now converted: but now I was the lord
Of this fair mansion, master of my servants,
Queen o'er myself; and even now, but now,
This house, these servants, and this same myself,
Are yours, my lord; I give them with this ring;
Which when you part from, lose, or give away,
Let it presage the ruin of your love,
And be my vantage to exclaim on you.

Bass. Madam, you have befit me of all words,
Only my blood speaks to you in my veins:
And there is such confusion in my powers,
As, after some oration fairly spoke
By a beloved prince, there doth appear
Among the buzzing pleased multitude:
Where every something, being blent together,
Turns to a wild of nothing, save of joy,
Express'd, and not express'd: But when this ring
Parts from this finger, then parts life from hence;
O, then be bold to say, Bassanio's dead.

Ner. My lord and lady, it is now our time,
That have stood by, and seen our wishes prosper,
To cry, good joy; Good joy, my lord, and lady!

Gra. My lord Bassanio, and my gentle lady,
I wish you all the joy that you can wish;
For, I am sure, you can wish none from me:¹²
And, when your honours mean to solemnize
The bargain of my faith, I do beseech you,
Even at that time I may be married too.

Bass. With all my heart, so thou canst get a wife.

Gra. I thank your lordship; you have got me one.

My eyes, my lord, can look as swift as yours:
You saw the mistress, I beheld the maid;
You lov'd, I lov'd; for intermission¹³
No more pertains to me, my lord, than you.
Your fortune stood upon the caskets there;
And so did mine too, as the matter falls
For wooing here, until I sweat again;
And swearing, till my very roof was dry
With oaths of love: at last,—if promise last,—
I got a promise of this fair one here,
To have her love, provided that your fortune

Warburton altered this to *plainness*, and he has been
followed in the modern editions, but the reading of the
old copy, which I have restored, is the true one.

9. Counterfeit anciently signified a *likeness*, a *resemblance*.

10. i. e. unfurnished with a companion or fellow.

11. The folio reads, 'Is sum of nothing,' which may
probably be the true reading, as it is Portia's intention,
in this speech, to undervale herself.

12. That is, none *away from* me; none that I shall
lose, if you gain it.

13. Pause, delay

["## SCENE III.", "## MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "227", "Achiev'd her mistress.", "Por. Is this true, Nerissa?", "Ner. Madam, it is, so you stand pleas'd withal.", "Bass. And do you, Gratiano, mean good faith?", "Gra. Yes, 'faith, my lord.", "Bass. Our feast shall be much honour'd in your marriage.", "Gra. We'll play with them, the first boy for a thousand ducats.", "Ner. What, and stake down?", "Gra. No; we shall ne'er win at that sport, and stake down.—", "But who comes here? Lorenzo, and his infidel?", "What, and my old Venetian friend, Salerio?", "Enter LORENZO, JESSICA, and SALERIO.", "Bass. Lorenzo, and Salerio, welcome hither?", "If that the youth of my new interest here\nHave power to bid you welcome:—By your leave,\nI bid my very friends and countrymen,\nSweet Portia, welcome.", "Por. So do I, my lord;", "They are entirely welcome.", "Por. Lor. I thank your honour: For my part, my lord,\nMy purpose was not to have seen you here;", "But meeting with Salerio by the way,\nHe did entreat me, past all saying nay,", "To come with him along.", "Sale. I did, my lord,", "And I have reason for it. Signior Antonio", "Commends him to you. [Gives BASSANIO a letter.", "Bass. Ere I ope his letter,", "I pray you, tell me how my good friend doth.", "Sale. Not sick, my lord, unless it be in mind;", "Nor well, unless in mind: his letter there", "Will show you his estate.", "Gra. Nerissa, cheer yon stranger; bid her welcome.", "Your hand, Salerio; What's the news from Venice?", "How doth that royal merchant, good Antonio?", "I know, we will be glad of our success;", "We are the Jasons, we have won the fleece.", "Sale. 'Would you had won the fleece that he\nhath lost!", "Por. There are some shrewd contents in yon\nsame paper,", "That steal the colour from Bassanio's cheek:", "Some dear friend dead: else nothing in the world", "Could turn so much the constitution", "Of any constant¹ man. What, worse and worse?—", "With leave, Bassanio; I am half yourself,", "And I must freely have the half of any thing", "That this same paper brings you.", "Bass. O, sweet Portia,", "Here are a few of the unpleasantest words", "That ever blotted paper! Gentle lady,", "When I did first impart my love to you,", "I freely told you, all the wealth I had", "Ran in my veins, I was a gentleman;", "And then I told you true: and yet, dear lady,", "Rating myself at nothing, you shall see", "How much I was a braggart: When I told you", "My state was nothing, I should then have told you", "That I was worse than nothing: for, indeed,", "I have engag'd myself to a dear friend,", "Engag'd my friend to his mere enemy,", "To feed my means. Here is a letter, lady", "The paper as the body of my friend,", "And every word in it a gaping wound,", "Issuing life-blood—But is it true, Salerio?", "Have all his ventures fail'd? What, not one hit?", "From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England,", "From Lishon, Barbary, and India?", "And not one vessel 'scape the dreadful touch", "Of merchant-marring rocks?", "Sale. Not one, my lord.", "Besides, it should appear, that if he had", "The present money to discharge the Jew,\nHe would not take it: Never did I know", "A creature, that did bear the shape of man", "So keen and greedy to confound a man:", "He plies the duke at morning, and at night;", "And doth impeach the freedom of the state,", "If they deny him justice: twenty merchants,", "The duke himself, and the magnificoes", "Of greatest port, have all persuaded with him;", "But none can drive him from the envious plea", "Of forfeiture, of justice, and his bond.", "Jes. When I was with him, I have heard him swear,", "To Tubal, and to Chus, his countrymen,", "That he would rather have Antonio's flesh,", "Than twenty times the value of the sum", "That he did owe him: and I know, my lord,", "If law, authority, and power deny not,", "It will go hard with poor Antonio.", "Por. Is it your dear friend, that is thus in trouble?", "Bass. The dearest friend to me, the kindest man,", "The best condition'd and unwearied spirit", "In doing courtesies; and one in whom", "The ancient Roman honour more appears,", "Than any that draws breath in Italy.", "Por. What sum owes he the Jew?", "Bass. For me, three thousand ducats.", "Por. What, no more?", "Pay him six thousand, and deface the bond;", "Double six thousand, and then treble that,", "Before a friend of this description", "Should lose a hair² through Bassanio's fault.", "First, go with me to church, and call me wife:", "And then away to Venice to your friend:", "For never shall you lie by Portia's side", "With an unquench'd soul. You shall have gold", "To pay the petty debt twenty times over;", "When it is paid, bring your true friend along:", "My maid Nerissa and myself, mean time,", "Will live as maids and widows. Come, away;", "For you shall hence upon your wedding-day:", "Bid your friends welcome, show a merry cheer;³", "Since you are dear bought, I will love you dear.—", "But let me hear the letter of your friend.", "Bass. [Reads.] Sweet Bassanio, my ships have all miscarried, my creditors grow cruel, my estate is very low, my bond to the Jew is forfeit; and since, in paying it, it is impossible I should live, all debts are cleared between you and I, if I might but see you at my death: notwithstanding, use your pleasure: if your love do not persuade you to come, let not my letter.", "Por. O love, despatch all business, and be gone.", "Bass. Since I have your good leave to go away,", "I will make haste: but, till I come again,", "No bed shall e'er be guilty of my stay,", "Nor rest be interposer 'twixt us twain.", "[Exeunt.]", "## SCENE III. Venice. A Street. Enter SHYLOCK, SALANIO, ANTONIO, and GAOLER.", "Shy. Gaoler, look to him;—Tell not me of mercy:—", "This is the fool that lent out money gratis;—\nGaoler, look to him.", "Ant. Hear me yet, good Shylock.", "Shy. I'll have my bond; speak not against my bond;", "I have sworn an oath, that I will have my bond:", "Thou call'dst me dog, before thou hadst a cause:", "But, since I am a dog, beware my fangs:", "The duke shall grant me justice.—I do wonder,", "Thou naughty gaoler, that thou art so fond⁴", "To come abroad with him at his request.", "Ant. I pray thee, hear me speak.", {"bbox": [446, 1152, 739,

228

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

ACT III.

Salan. It is the most impenetrable cur,
That ever kept with men.

Ant.

Let him alone ;

I'll follow him no more with bootless prayers.
He seeks my life; his reason well I know;
I oft deliver'd from his forfeitures
Many that have at times made moan to me;
Therefore he hates me.

Salan.

I am sure, the duke
Will never grant this forfeiture to hold.

Ant. The duke cannot deny the course of law;
For the commodity that strangers have
With us in Venice, if it be denied,

Will much impeach the justice of the state;¹
Since that the trade and profit of the city
Consisteth of all nations. Therefore, go:
These griefs and losses have so 'bated me,
That I shall hardly spare a pound of flesh

To-morrow to my bloody creditor.—
Well, gaoler, on :—Pray God, Bassanio come
To see me pay his debt, and then I care not!

[Exeunt.]

SCENE IV. Belmont. A Room in Portia's
House. Enter PORTIA, NERISSA, LORENZO,
JESSICA, and BALTHAZAR.

Lor. Madam, although I speak it in your presence,
You have a noble and a true conceit
Of god-like amity; which appears most strongly
In bearing thus the absence of your lord.

But, if you knew to whom you show this honour,
How true a gentleman you send relief,
How dear a lover of my lord your husband,
I know, you would be prouder of the work,
Than customary bounty can enforce you.

Por. I never did repent for doing good,
Nor shall not now : for in companions
That do converse and waste the time together,
Whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love,
There must be needs a like proportion
Of lineaments,² of manners, and of spirit;
Which makes me think, that this Antonio,
Being the bosom lover³ of my lord,
Must needs be like my lord : If it be so,
How little is the cost I have bestow'd,
In purchasing the semblance of my soul
From out the state of hellish cruelty?

This comes too near the praising of myself!
Therefore, no more of it: hear other things.

Lorenzo, I commit into your hands
The husbandry and manage of my house,
Until my lord's return; for mine own part
I have toward heaven breath'd a secret vow,
To live in prayer and contemplation,
Only attended by Nerissa here,
Until her husband and my lord's return :
There is a monastery two miles off,
And there we will abide. I do desire you,
Not to deny this imposition;
The which my love, and some necessity,
Now lays upon you.

Lor.

Madam, with all my heart
I shall obey you in all fair commands.

Por. My people do already know my mind,
And will acknowledge you and Jessica,
In place of lord Bassanio and myself.

So fare you well, till we shall meet again.

Lor. Fair thoughts, and happy hours, attend on
you.

1 As this passage is a little perplexed in its construc-
tion, it may not be improper to explain it:—If, says An-
tonio, the duke stop the course of law, the denial of
those rights to strangers, which render their abode at
Venice so commodious and agreeable to them, will
much impeach the justice of the state, &c.

2 The word *lineaments* was used with great laxity by
our ancient writers.

3 This word was anciently applied to those of the
same sex who had an esteem for each other. Ben Jon-
son concludes one of his letters to Dr. Donne, by telling
him ' he is his true lover.'

4. l. e. with the cerelity of imagination.

5 This word can only be illustrated at present by con-

Jes. I wish your ladship all heart's content.

Por. I thank you for your wish, and am well
pleas'd

To wish it back on you: fare you well, Jessica.—

[Exeunt JESSICA and LORENZO.

Now, Balthazar,

As I have ever found thee honest, true,
So let me find thee still: Take this same letter,
And use thou all the endeavour of a man,
In speed to Padua; see thou render Bellario;
And look, what notes and garments he doth give
thee,

Bring them, I pray thee, with imagin'd speed⁴

Unto the tranect,⁵ to the common ferry

Which trades to Venice—waste no time in words,
But get thee gone: I shall be there before thee.

Balth. Madam, I go with all convenient speed.

Por. Come on, Nerissa; I have work in hand,
That you yet know not of: we'll see our husbands,
Before they think of us.

Ner.

Shall they see us?

Por. They shall, Nerissa; but in such a habit,
That they shall think we are accomplished
With what we lack. I'll hold thee any wager,
When we are both accouter'd like young men,
I'll prove the prettier fellow of the two,

And wear my dagger with the braver grace :
And speak, between the change of man and boy,
With a reed voice; and turn two mincing steps
Into a manly stride; and speak of frays,

Like a fine bragging youth: and tell quaint lies,
How honourable ladies sought my love,
Which I denying, they fell sick and died;

I could not do withal:⁶—then I'll repent,

And wish, for all that, that I had not kill'd them
And twenty of these puny lies I'll tell,
That men shall swear, I have discontinued school
Above a twelvemonth:—I have within my mind
A thousand raw tricks of these bragging Jacks,
Which I will practise.

Ner.

Why, shall we turn to men?

Por. Eye; what a question's that,

If thou wert near a lewd interpreter?

But come, I'll tell thee all my whole device !
When I am in my coach, which stays for us
At the park gate; and therefore haste away,
For we must measure twenty miles to-day.

[Exeunt.]

SCENE V. The same. A Garden. Enter LAUN-
CELOT and JESSICA.

Laun. Yes, truly: for, look you, the sins of the
father are to be laid upon the children; therefore, I
promise you, I fear you.⁷ I was always plain with
you, and so now I speak my agitation of the mat-
ter: Therefore, be of good cheer; for, truly, I
think, you are damn'd. There is but one hope in
it that can do you any good; and that is but a kind
of bastard hope neither.

Jes. And what hope is that, I pray thee?

Por. I may, my lord, be partly hope that your
father got you not, that you are not the Jew's
daughter.

Jes. That were a kind of bastard hope, indeed;
so the sins of my mother should be visited upon me.

Laun. Truly then I fear you are damn'd both by
father and mother; thus when I shun Scylla, your

jecture. It evidently implies the name of a place where
the passage-boat set out, and is in some way derived
from 'Tranare, Ital. To pass or swim over :' perhaps,
therefore, 'Tranetto, signified a little fording place or
ferry, and hence the English word 'Tranect, but no
other instance of its use has yet occurred.

6 Some of the commentators had strained this inno-
cent phrase to a wanton meaning. Mr. Gifford, in a
note on Jonson's 'Silent Woman, p. 470, has clearly
shown, by ample illustration, that it signified nothing
more than ' I could not help it.'

7 So in K. Richard III.

⁴ The king is sickly, weak, and melancholy,
And his physicians fear him highly.

SCENE V.

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

229

father, I fall into Charybdis, your mother:¹ well,
you are gone both ways.

Jes. I shall be saved by my husband; he hath
made me a Christian.

Laun. Truly, the more to blame he; we were
Christians enough before; e'en as many as could
well live, one by another: This making of Chris-
tians will raise the price of hogs; if we grow all to
be pork-eaters, we shall not shortly have a rasher
on the coals for money.

Enter LORENZO.

Jes. I'll tell my husband, Launcelot, what you
say; here he comes.

Lor. I shall grow jealous of you shortly, Laun-
celot, if you thus get my wife into corners.

Jes. Nay, you need not fear me, Lorenzo; Laun-
celot and I are out: he tells me flatly, there is no
mercy for me in heaven, because I am a Jew's
daughter: and he says you are no good member
of the commonwealth; for, in converting Jews to
Christians, you raise the price of pork.

Lor. I shall answer that better to the common-
wealth, than you can the getting up of the negro's
belly: the Moor is with child by you, Launcelot.

Laun. It is much, that the Moor should be more²
than reason; but if she be less than an honest wo-
man, she is, indeed, more than I took her for.

Lor. How every fool can play upon the word! I
think, the best grace of wit will shortly turn into
silence; and discourse grow commendable in none
only but parrots.—Go in, sirrah; bid them prepare
for dinner.

Laun. That is done, sir; they have all stomachs.

Lor. Goodly lord, what a wit-snapper are you!
then bid them prepare dinner.

Laun. That is done too, sir; only, cover the
word.

Lor. Will you cover then, sir?

Laun. Not so, sir, neither; I know my duty.

Lor. Yet more quarrelling with occasion! Wilt
thou show the whole wealth of thy wit in an instant?
I pray thee, understand a plain man in his plain
meaning: go to thy fellows; bid them cover the table,
serve in the meat, and we will come in to dinner.

Laun. For the table, sir, it shall be served in: for
the meat, sir, it shall be covered; for your coming
in to dinner, sir, why, let it be as humours and con-
ceits shall govern.

[Exit LAUNCELOT.

Lor. O dear discretion, how his words are suited!¹³
The fool hat plantèd in his memory:
An army of good words: And I do know
As many fools, that stand in better place,
Garnish'd like him, that for a tricksy word
Defy the matter. How cheery'st thou, Jessica!
And now, good sweet, say thy opinion,
How dost thou like the lord Bassanio's wife?
Jes. Past all expressingly: It is very meet,
The lord Bassanio live an upright life;
For, having such a blessing in his lady,
He finds the joys of heaven here on earth;
And, if on earth he do not mean it, it
Is reason he should never come to heaven.
Why, if two gods should play some heavenly match,
And on the wager lay two earthly women,
And Portia one, there must be something else

1 Alluding to the well known line.

'Incidis in Scyllam, cupiens vitare Charybdim.'

The author of which was unknown to Erasmus but was
pointed out by Galeottus Martius. It is in the Alexan-
dreis of Philip Gaultier, who flourished at the com-
 mencement of the 13th century. Nothing is more fre-
quent than this proverb in our old English writers.

2 Milton's quibbling epigram has the same kind of
humour to boast of—

'Galli ex concubitu gravida'm te, Pontia, Mori,

'Quis bene moratam morigeramque neget.'

3 i. e. suited or fitted to each other, arranged.

4 *Envy* in this place means *hatred* or *malice*.

5 *Remorse* in Shakespeare's time generally signified *pity*, *tenderness*.

6 i. e. seeming, not real.

7 Whereas.

8 Royal merchant is not merely a ranting epithet as
applied to merchants, for such were to be found at Ve-
nice in the Sanudo's, the Giustiniani, the Grimaldi, &c.

Pawn'd with the other; for the poor rude world
Hath not her fellow.

Lor. Even such a husband

Hast thou of me, as she is for a wife.

Jes. Nay, but ask my opinion too of that.

Lor. I will anon; first let us go to dinner.

Jes. Nay, let me praise you, while I have a sto-
mach.

Lor. No, pray thee let it serve for table-talk;

Then, howso'er thou speak'st, 'mong other things
I shall digest it.

Jes.

Well, I'll set you forth. [Exeunt.

ACT IV.

### SCENE I. Venice. A Court of Justice. Enter the Duke, the Magnificoes; ANTONIO, BASSANIO, GRATIANO, SALARINO, SALANIO, and others.

Duke. What, is Antonio here?

Ant. Ready, so please your grace.

Duke. I am sorry for thee; thou art come to
answer

A stony adversary, an inhuman wretch
Un capable of pity, void and empty
From any dram of mercy.

Ant. I have heard,

Your grace hath ta'en great pains to qualify
His rigorous course; but since he stands obdurate,
And that no lawful means can carry me
Out of his envy's⁴ reach, I do oppose
My patience to his fury; and am arm'd
To suffer, with a quietness of spirit,
The very tyranny and rage of his.

Duke. Go one, and call the Jew into the court.

Salan. He's ready at the door: he comes, my lord.

Enter SHYLOCK.

Duke. Make room, and let him stand before our
face.—

Shylock, the world thinks, and I think so too,
That thou but lead'st this fashion of thy malice
To the last hour of act; and then, 'tis thought,
Thou'lt show thy mercy, and remorse,⁵ more strange
Than is thy strange apparent⁶ cruelty:
And where?⁷ thou now exact'st the penalty,
(Which is a pound of this poor merchant's flesh.)

Thou wilt not only lose the forfeiture,
But touch'd with human gentleness and love,
Forgive a moiety of the principal;

Glancing an eye of pity on his losses,
That have of late so huddled on his back;
Enough for a royal⁷ merchant down,
And pluck commiseration of his state
From brassy bosoms, and rough hearts of flint,
From stubborn Turks, and Tartars, never train'd
To offices of tender courtesy.

We all expect a gentle answer, Jew.

Shy. I have possess'd your grace of what I pur-
pose;

And by our holy Sabbath have I sworn,

To have the due and forfeit of my bond:

If you deny it, let the danger light
Upon your charter, and your city's freedom.

You'll ask me, why I rather choose to have

A weight of carrion flesh, than to receive

Three thousand ducats: I'll not answer that:⁹

But, say, it is my humour;¹⁰ Is it answer'd?

This epithet was striking and well understood in Shak-
speare's time, when Gresham was dignified with the
title of the *royal merchant*, both from his wealth, and
because he constantly transacted the mercantile busi-
ness of Queen Elizabeth.

9 The Jew being asked a question which the law does not require him to answer, stands upon his right and re-fuses; but afterwards gratifies his own malignity by such answers as he knows will aggravate the pain of the inquirer. I will not answer, says he, as to a legal question; but, since you want an answer, will this serve you?

10 The worthy Corporal Nym hath this apology usu-
ally at his finger's ends, and Shylock condescends to
excuse his extravagant cruelty as a *humour*, or irresis-
tible propensity of the mind. The word humour is not
used in its modern signification, but for a peculiar qua-
lity which sways and masters the individual through all
his actions

230

MERCHANT OF VENICE.

Act IV.

What if my house be troubled with a rat,
And I be pleas'd to give ten thousand ducats
To have it baned? What, are you answer'd yet?
Some men there are love not a gaping pig;¹
Some, that are mad, if they behold a cat;
And others, when the bag-pipe sings i' the nose,
Cannot contain their urine; For affection,²
Master of passion, sways it to the mood
Of what it likes or loathes: Now, for your answer:
As there is no firm reason to be render'd,
Why he cannot abide a gaping pig:
Why he, a harmless necessary cat;
Why he, a woollen³ bag-pipe; but of force
Must yield to such inevitable shame,
As to offend, himself being offended;
So can I give no reason, nor I will not,
More than a lodg'd hate, and a certain loathing
I bear Antonio, that I follow thus
A losing suit against him. Are you answer'd?
Bass. This is no answer, thou unfeeling man,
To excuse the current of thy cruelty.

Shy. I am not bound to please thee with my answer.

Bass. Do all men kill the things they do not love?

Shy. Hates any man the thing he would not kill?

Bass. Every offence is not a hate at first.

Shy. What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

Ant. I pray you, think you question⁴ with the Jew:
You may as well go stand upon the beach,

And bid the main flood bate his usual height;
You may as well use question with the wolf,
Why he hath made the ewe bleat for the lamb;
You may as well forbid the mountain pines
To wag their high tops, and to make no noise,
When they are fretted with the gusts of heaven;⁵
You may as well do any thing most hard,

As seek to soften that (than which what's harder?)
His Jewish heart: —Therefore I do beseech you,

Make no more offers, use no further means,

But, with all brief and plain conveniency,

Let me have judgment, and the Jew his will.

Bass. If every ducat in six thousand ducats

Were in six parts, and every part a ducat,

I would not draw them, I would have my bond.

Duke. How shall thou hope for mercy, rendring none?

Shy. What judgment shall I dread, doing no
wrong?

You have among you many a purchaser's slave,
Which, like your asses, and your dogs, and mules,

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them: —Shall I say to you,
Let them be free, marry them to your heirs?

Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds

Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates

Be season'd with such viands? You will answer,

The slaves are ours: —So do I answer you;

The pound of flesh, which I demand of him,

Is dearly bought, 'tis mine, and I will have it:.

If you deny me, fye upon your law!

There is no force in the decrees of Venice:
I stand for judgment: answer; shall I have it?

Duke. Upon my power, I may dismiss this court,

Unless Bellario, a learned doctor,
Whom I have sent for to determine this,

Come here to-day.

Salar. My lord, here stays without
A messenger with letters from the doctor,

New come from Padua.

Duke. Bring us the letters; Call the messenger.

Bass. Good cheer, Antonio! What, man? cou-
rage yet!

1 A pig prepared for the table is most probably meant, for in that state is the epithet gaping most applicable to this animal.

2 *Affection* stands here for tendency, disposition; Appetitus animi.

3 It was usual to cover with *woollen* cloth the bag of this instrument. The old copies read *woollen*, the conjectural reading *swoollen* was proposed by Sir J. Hawkins.

The Jew shall have my flesh, blood, bones, and all,
Ere thou shall lose for me one drop of blood.

Ant. I am a tainted wether of the flock.

Meetest for death; the weakest kind of fruit

Drops earliest to the ground, and so let me:

You cannot better be employ'd, Bassanio,

Than to live still, and write mine epitaph.

Enter NERISSA, dressed like a Lawyer's Clerk.

Duke. Came you from Padua, from Bellario?

Ner. From both, my lord: Bellario greets your

grace.

[Presents a Letter, to Bellario.
Bass. Why dost thou whet thy knife so earnestly?

Shy. To cut the forfeiture from that bankrupt there.

Gra. Not on thy sole, but on thy soul,⁶ harsh Jew,
Thou mak'st thy knife keen: but no metal can,
No, not the hangman's axe, bear half the keenness
Of thy sharp envy.⁷ Can no prayers pierce thee?

Shy. No, none that thou hast wit enough to make.

Gra. O, be thou damn'd, inexorable dog!

And for thy life let justice be accus'd.

Thou almost mak'st me waver in my faith,

To hold opinion with Pythagoras,

That souls of animals infuse themselves

Into the trunks of men: thy currish spirit,

Govern'd a wolf, who, hang'd for human slaughter,

Even from the gallows did his fell soul fleet,

And, whilst thou lay'st in thy unhalow'd dam,

Infus'd itself in thee; for thy desires

Are wolfish, bloody, starv'd, and ravenous.

Shy. Till thou canst rail the seal from off my
bond,

Thou but offend'st thy lungs to speak so loud:

Repair thy wit, good youth, or it will fall

To cureless ruin.—I stand here for law.

Duke. This letter from Bellario doth commend

A young and learned doctor to our court: —

Where is he?

Ner. He attendeth here hard by,

To know your answer, whether you'll admit him.

Duke. With all my heart: some three or four of

you,

Go, give him courteous conduct to this place.—

Mean time, the court shall hear Bellario's letter.

[Clerk reads.] Your grace shall understand, that,
at the receipt of your letter, I am very sick: but in
the instant that your messenger came, in loving visitation
was with me a young and Antonio the merchant:
Balthasar: I acquainted him with the cause in con-
troversy between the Jew and Antonio the merchant:
we turned o'er many books together: he is furnish'd
with my opinion: which, better'd with his own learn-
ing, (the greatness whereof I cannot enough com-
mend,) comes with him, at my importunity, to fill up
your grace's request in my stead. I beseech you, let
his lack of years be no impediment to let him lack a
revertend estimation; for I never knew so young a body
with so old a head. I leave him to your gracious
acceptance, whose trial shall better publish his com-
mendation.

Duke. You hear the learn'd Bellario, what he writes:

And here, I take it, is the doctor come.—

Enter PORTIA dressed like a Doctor of Laws.

Give me your hand: Came you from old Bellario?

Por. I did, my lord.

Duke. You are welcome: take your place.

Are you acquainted with the difference

That holds this present question in the court?

Por. I am inform'd thoroughly of the cause.

Which is the merchant here, and which the Jew?

Duke. Antonio and old Shylock, both stand forth.

4 Converse.

5 This image seems to have been caught from Gold-
ing's version of Ovid, 1587, book xv. p. 196:

⁴ Such noise as pine-trees make, what time the heady

easterne winde

Doth whizz amongst them.

⁶ The conceit is that his *soul* was so hard that it
might serve him for a whet-stone.

7 Malice.

["## SCENE I.", "## MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "231", "Por. Is your name Shylock?", "Shy.", "Shylock is my name.", "Por. Of a strange nature is the suit you follow;", "Yet in such rule, that the Venetian law", "Cannot impugn¹ you, as you do proceed—\nYou stand within his danger,² do you not?", "[To ANTONIO.", "Ant. Ay, so he says.", "Por.", "Do you confess the bond?", "Ant. I do.", "Por. Then must the Jew be merciful.", "Shy. On what compulsion must I? tell me that.", "Por. The quality of mercy is not strain'd;³", "It droppeth, as the gentle wind from heaven", "Upon the place beneath: it is twice bless'd;", "It blesseth him that gives, and him that takes:", "'Tis mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes", "The throned monarch better than his crown;", "His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,", "The attribute to awe and majesty,", "Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;", "But mercy is above this sceptred sway,", "It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,", "It is an attribute to God himself:", "And earthly power doth then show likest God's,", "When mercy seasons justice.⁴ Therefore, Jew,", "Though justice be thy plea, consider this,—", "That in the course of justice, none of us", "Should see salvation; we do pray for mercy;", "And that same prayer doth teach us all to render", "The deeds of mercy.⁵ I have spoke thus much,", "To mitigate the justice of thy plea;", "Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice", "Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant\nthere.", "Shy. My deeds upon my head! I crave the law,", "The penalty and forfeit of my bond.", "Por. Is he not able to discharge the money?", "Bass. Yes, here I tender it for him in the court;", "Yea, twice the sum: if that will not suffice,", "I will be bound to pay it ten times o'er,", "On forfeit of my hands, my head, my heart:", "If this will not suffice, it must appear", "That malice bears down truth.⁶ And, I beseech\nyou,", "Wrest once the law to your authority:", "To do a great right, do a little wrong;", "And curb this cruel devil of his will.", "Por. It must not be; there is no power in Venice\nCan alter a decree established;", "'Twill be recorded for a precedent;", "And many an error, by the same example,", "Will rush into the state: it cannot be.", "Shy. A Daniel come to judgment! yea, a\nDaniel!—", "O wise young judge, how do I honour thee!", "Por. I pray you, let me look upon the bond.", "Shy. Here 'tis, most reverend doctor, here it is.", "Por. Shylock, there's thrice thy money offer'd thee.", "Shy. An oath, an oath, I have an oath in heaven:\nShall I lay perjury upon my soul?", "No, not for Venice.", "Por.", "Why, this bond is forfeit; And lawfully by this the Jew may claim", "A pound of flesh, to be by him cut off", "Nearest the merchant's heart:—Be merciful;", "Take thrice thy money; bid me tear the bond.", "Shy. When it is paid according to the tenour.—\nIt doth appear, you are a worthy judge;", "You know the law, your exposition", "Hath been most sound: I charge you by the law,", "", "1 To impugn is to oppose, to controveat.", "2 i. e. within his reach or controul. The phrase is thought to be derived from a similar one in the monkish Latin of the middle age.", "3 Shakspeare probably recollected the following verse of Ecclesiastics, xxxv. 20, in composing these beautiful lines: 'Merry is seasonable in the time of affiction, as clouds of rain in the time of drought.'", "4 So in K. Edward III. a Tragedy, 1596:", "'And Kings approach the nearest unto God,\nBy giving life and safety unto men.'", "Whereof you are a well-deserving pillar,", "Proceed to judgment: by my soul, I swear,", "There is no power in the tongue of man", "To alter me: I stay here on my bond.", "Ant. Most heartily I do beseech the court", "To give the judgment.", "Por. Why then, thus it is.", "I must prepare your bosom for his knife:", "Shy. O noble judge! O excellent young man!", "Por. For the intent and purpose of the law", "Hath full relation to the penalty,", "Which here appeareth due upon the bond.", "Shy. 'Tis very true: O wise and upright judge!", "How much more elder art thou than thy looks!", "Por. Therefore lay bare your bosom.", "Shy.", "Ay, his breast;", "So says the bond;—Doth it not, noble judge?—", "Nearest his heart, those are the very words.", "Por. It is so. Are there balance here, to weigh", "The flesh?", "Shy. I have them ready.", "Por. Have by some surgeon, Shylock, on your\ncharge,", "To stop his wounds, lest he do bleed to death.", "Shy. Is it so nominated in the bond?", "Por. It is not so express'd; But what of that?", "'Twere good you do so much for charity.", "Shy. I cannot find it; 'tis not in the bond.", "Por. Come, merchant, have you any thing to say?", "Ant. But little; I am arm'd, and well prepar'd.—", "Give me your hand, Bassanio; fare you well!", "Grieve not that I am fallen to this for you!", "For herein fortune shows herself more kind", "Than is her custom: it is still her use,", "To let the wretched man out-live his wealth,", "To view with hollow eye, and wrinkled brow,", "An age of poverty; from which lingering penance", "Of such misery doth she cut me off.", "Commend me to your honourable wife:", "Tell her the process of Antonio's end,", "Say, how I lov'd you, speak me fair in death:", "And, when the tale is told, bid her be judge,", "Whether Bassanio had not once a love.", "Repent not that you shall lose your friend,", "And he repents not that he pays your debt;", "For, if the Jew do cut but deep enough,", "I'll pay it instantly with all my heart.", "Bass. Antonio, I am married to a wife,", "Which is as dear to me as life itself:", "But life itself, my wife, and all the world,", "Are not with me esteem'd above thy life:", "I would lose all, ay, sacrifice them all", "Here to this devil, to deliver you.", "Por. Your wife would give you little thanks for that,", "If she were by, to hear you make the offer.", "Gra. I have a wife, whom, I protest, I love;", "I would she were in

["232", "MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "ACT IV.", "Shy. Most learned judge !—A sentence : come,\nprepare.", "Por. Tarry a little :—there is something else.—", "This bond doth give thee here no lot of blood;", "The words expressly are, a pound of flesh:", "Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh;", "But, in the cutting it, if thou dost shed", "One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods", "Are, by the laws of Venice, confiscate", "Unto the state of Venice.", "Gra. O upright judge !—Mark, Jew ;—O learn-\ned judge !", "Shy. Is that the law?", "Por.", "Thyself shall see the act:", "For, as thou urgest justice, be assur'd,", "Thou shall have justice, more than thou desir'st.", "Gra. O learned judge !—Mark, Jew ;—a learn-\ned judge !", "Shy. I take this offer then ;—pay the bond thrice,\nAnd let the Christian go.", "Bass.", "Por.", "Soft ;", "The Jew shall have all justice :—soft !—no haste ;", "He shall have nothing but the penalty.", "Gra. O Jew ! an upright judge, a learned judge !", "Por. Therefore prepare thee to cut off the flesh,", "Shed thou no blood; nor cut thou less, nor more,", "But just, a pound of flesh; if thou tak'st more,", "Or less, than a just pound,—be it but so much", "As makes it light, or heavy, in the substance,", "Or the division of the twentieth part", "Of one poor scruple ; nay, if the scale do turn", "But in the estimation of a hair—", "Thou diest, and all thy goods are confiscate.", "Gra. A second Daniel, a Daniel, Jew !", "Now, infidel, I have thee on the hip.", "Por. Why doth the Jew pause ? take thy forfeiture.", "Shy. Give me my principal, and let me go.", "Bass. I have it ready for thee ; here it is.", "Por. He hath refus'd it in the open court;", "He shall have merely justice, and his bond.", "Gra. A Daniel, still say I; a second Daniel !—", "I thank thee, Jew, for teaching me that word.", "Shy. Shall I not have barely my principal?", "Por. Thou shall have nothing but the forfeiture,", "To be so taken at thy peril, Jew.", "Shy. Why then the devil give him good of it!", "I'll stay no longer question.", "Por.", "Tarry, Jew ;", "The law hath yet another hold on you.", "It is enacted in the laws of Venice,—", "If it be prov'd against an alien,", "That by direct, or indirect attempts,", "He seek the life of any citizen,", "The party, 'gainst the which he doth contrive,", "Shall seize one half his goods; the other half", "Comes to the privy coffer of the state;", "And the offender's life lies in the mercy", "Of the duke only, 'gainst all other voice.", "In which predicament, I say, thou stand'st:", "For it appears by manifest proceeding,", "That, indirectly, and directly too,", "Thou hast contriv'd against the very life", "Of the defendant: and thou hast incurr'd", "The danger formerly by me rehears'd.", "Down, therefore, and beg mercy of the duke.", "Gra. Beg, that thou may'st have leave to hang\nthyself:", "And yet, thy wealth being forfeit to the state,", "Thou hast not left the value of a cord;", "Therefore, thou must be hang'd at the state's\ncharge.", "Duke. That thou shall see the difference of our\nspirit,", "I pardon thee thy life before thou ask it:", "1 Balthasar Gracian, the celebrated Spanish Jesuit, in his *Hero*, relates a similar judgment, which he attributes to the great Turk.", "2 Antonio's offer has been variously explained. It appears to be 'that he will quit his share of the fine, as the duke has already done that portion due to the state,", "For half thy wealth, it is Antonio's;", "The other half comes to the general state,\nWhich humbleness may drive unto a fine.", "Por. Ay, for the state; not for Antonio.", "Shy. Nay, take my life and all, pardon not that:", "You take my house, when you do take the prop", "That doth sustain my house; you shall have my life,", "When you do take the means whereby I live.", "Por. What mercy can you render him, Antonio ?", "Gra. A halter gratis; nothing else, for God's sake.", "Ant. So please my lord the duke and all the court,\nTo quit the fine for one half of his goods;\nI am content, so he will let me have", "The other half in use,²—to render it,", "Upon his death, unto the gentleman", "That lately stole his daughter:", "Two things provided more.—That, for this favour,", "He presently become a Christian;", "The other, that he do record a gift,", "Here in the court, of all he dies possess'd,", "Unto his son Lorenzo, and his daughter.", "Duke. He shall do this; or else I do recant", "The pardon that I late pronounced here.", "Por. Art thou contented, Jew, what dost thou say?", "Shy. I am content.", "Por.", "Clerk, draw a deed of gift.", "Shy. I pray you, give me leave to go from hence;\nI am not well; send the deed after me,\nAnd I will sign it.", "Duke.", "Get thee gone, but do it.", "Gra. In christening thou shall have two godfathers;", "Had I been judge, thou shouldst have had ten\nmore;³", "To bring thee to the gallows, not to the font.", "[Exit SHYLOCK.", "Duke. Sir, I entreat you home with me to dinner.", "Por. I humbly do desire your grace of pardon;", "I must away this night toward Padua,", "And it is meet I presently set forth.", "Duke. I am sorry that your leisure serves you not.", "Antonio, gratify this gentleman;", "For, in my mind, you are much bound to him.", "[Exeunt Duke, Magnificoes, and Train.", "Bass. Most worthy gentleman, I and my friend\nHave by your wisdom been this day acquitted", "Of grievous penalties; in lieu whereof,", "Three thousand ducats, due unto the Jew,", "We freely cope your courteous pains withal.", "Ant. And stand indebted, over and above,\nIn love and service to you evermore.", "Por. He is well paid that is well satisfied;", "And I, delivering you, am satisfied,", "And therein do account myself well paid;", "My mind was never yet more mercenary.", "I pray you, know me, when we meet again;", "I wish you well, and so I take my leave.", "Bass. Dear sir, of force I must attempt you further;", "Take some remembrance of us, as a tribute,", "Not as a fee: grant me two things, I pray you,", "Not to deny me, and to pardon me.", {"bbox": [661, 10

["## SCENE II.", "## MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "233", "You taught me first to beg: and now, methinks,\nYou teach me how a beggar should be answer'd.", "Bass. Good sir, this ring was given me by my\nwife;", "And when she put it on, she made me vow,", "That I should neither sell, nor give, nor lose it.", "Por. That 'scuse serves many men to save their\ngifts.", "An if your wife be not a mad woman,", "And how well I have deserv'd this ring,\nShe would not hold out enemy for ever,", "For giving it to me. Well, peace be with you!", "[Exeunt PORTIA and NERISSA.", "Ant. My lord Bassanio, let him have the ring ;", "Let his deservings, and my love withal,", "Be valued 'gainst your wife's commandment.", "Bass. Go, Gratiano, run and overtake him,", "Give him the ring; and bring him, if thou canst,\nUnto Antonio's house;—away, make haste.", "[Exit GRATIANO.", "Come, you and I will thither presently ;", "And in the morning early will we both", "Fly toward Belmont: Come Antonio.", "[Exeunt.]", "### SCENE II. The same. A Street. Enter PORTIA and NERISSA.", "Por. Inquire the Jew's house out, give him this deed,", "And let him sign it; we'll away to-night,", "And be a day before our husbands home :", "This deed will be well welcome to Lorenzo.", "Enter GRATIANO.", "Gra. Fair sir, you are well overtaken :", "My lord Bassanio, upon more advice,¹", "Hath sent you here this ring ; and doth entreat\nYour company at dinner.", "Por. That cannot be:", "This ring I do accept most thankfully,", "And so, I pray you, tell him: Furthermore,", "I pray you, show my youth old Shlokys house.", "Gra. That will I do.", "Ner. Sir, I would speak with you :—", "I'll see if I can get my husband's ring.", "[To PORTIA.]", "Which I did make him swear to keep for ever.", "Por. Thou may'st, I warrant: We shall have old²\nswearing,", "That they did give the rings away to men ;", "But we'll outface them, and outswear them too.", "Away, make haste; thou know'st where I will try.", "Ner. Come, good sir, will you show me to this\nhouse ?", "[Exeunt.]", "## ACT V.", "### SCENE I. Belmont. Avenue to Portia's House. Enter LORENZO and JESSICA.", "Lor. The moon shines bright:—In such a night\nas this,³", "When the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees,", "And they did make no noise: in such a night,", "Troilus, methinks, mounted the Trojan walls,⁴", "And sigh'd his soul toward the Grecian tents,", "Where Cressid lay that night.", "Jes. In such a night,", "Did Thisbe fearfully o'ertrip the dew ;", "And saw the lion's shadow ere himself,", "And ran dismay'd away.", "Lor. In such a night,", "1 i. e. more reflection.", "2 Of this once common augmentative in colloquial\nlanguage there are various instances in the plays of\nShakspeare, in the sense of *abundant*, *frequent*.", "3 The several passages beginning with these words\nare imitated in the old comedy of Wily Beguiled, writ-\nten before 1596. See the play in Hawkins's Origin of\nthe Drama, vol. iii.", "4 This image is from Chaucer's *Troilus and Cres-\nseide*, b. v. v. 666, and 1142.", "5 Steevens observes that this is one instance, among\nmany, that might be brought to prove that Shakspeare\nwas no reader of the classics.", "6 Steevens refers to Gower's description of Medea in\nhis Confessio Amantis.", "Stood Dido, with a willow in her hand⁵", "Upon the wild sea-banks, and wav'd her love", "To come again to Carthage.", "Jes. In such a night,", "Medea gather'd the enchanted herbs", "That did renew old Æson.⁶", "Lor. In such a night,", "Did Jessica steal from the wealthy Jew :", "And with an unthrift love did run from Venice,", "As far as Belmont.", "Jes. In such a night,", "Did young Lorenzo swear he lov'd her well ;", "Stealing her soul with many vows of faith,", "And ne'er a true one.", "Lor. In such a night,", "Did pretty Jessica, like a little shrew,", "Slander her love, and he forgave it her.", "Jes. I would out-night you, did nobody come :", "But, hark, I hear the footing of a man.", "Enter STEPHANO.", "Lor. Who comes so fast in silence of the night ?", "Steph. A friend.", "Lor. A friend ? what friend ? your name, I pray\nyou, friend ?", "Steph. Stephano is my name; and I bring word,", "My mistress will before the break of day", "Be here at Belmont: she doth stray about", "By holy crosses, where she kneels and prays", "For happy wedlock hours.⁷", "Lor. Who comes with her ?", "Steph. None, but a holy hermit, and her maid.", "I pray you, is my master yet return'd ?", "Lor. He is not, nor we have not heard from him.—", "But go we in, I pray thee, Jessica,", "And ceremoniously let us prepare", "Some welcome for the mistress of the house.", "Enter LAUNCELOT.", "Laun. Sola, sola, wo, ha, ho, sola, sola!", "Lor. Who calls?", "Laun. Sola! did you see master Lorenzo, and\nmistress Lorenzo ? sola, sola !", "Lor. Leave hollauing, man ; here.", "Laun. Sola! Where ? where ?", "Lor. Here.", "Laun. Tell him, there's a post come from my\nmaster, with his horn full of good news ; my master\nwill be here ere morning.", "[Exit.]", "Laun. Sweet soul, let's in, and there expect their\ncoming.", "And yet no matter;—Why should we go in ?", "My friend Stephano, signify, I pray you,", "Within the house, your mistress is at hand ;", "And bring your music forth into the air.—", "[Exit STEPHANO.", "How sweet the moon-light sleeps upon this bank !", "Here will we sit, and let the sounds of music", "Creep in our ears;⁸ soft stillness, and the night,", "Become the touches of sweet harmony.", "Sit, Jessica: Look, how the floor of heaven", "Is thick inlaid with patines⁹ of bright gold :", "There's not the smallest orb, which thou behold'st,", "But in his motion like an angel sings,", "Still quiring to the young-ey'd cherubins ;", "Such harmony is in immortal souls ;", "But, whilst this muddy vesture of decay", "Doth grossly close us in, we cannot hear it.—¹⁰", "7 So in the Merry Devil of Edmonton :", {"bbox": [449, 1122, 750, 1148],

["234", "MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "ACT V.", "Enter Musicians.", "Come, ho, and wake Diana with a hymn;", "With sweetest touches pierce your mistress' ear,\nAnd draw her home with music.", "[Music.", "Jes. I am never merry, when I hear sweet music.", "Por. The reason is, your spirits are attentive:", "For do but note a wild and wanton herd,", "Or race of youthful and unhandled colts,", "Fetching mad bounds, bellowing, and neighing loud,\nWhich is the hot condition of their blood;", "If they but hear perchance a trumpet sound,", "Or any air of music touch their ears,", "You shall perceive them make a mutual stand,", "Their savage eyes turn'd to a modest gaze,", "By the sweet power of music: Therefore, the poet", "Did feign that Orpheus drew trees, stones, and floods;", "Since nought so stockish, hard, and full of rage,", "But music for the time doth change his nature:", "The man that hath no music in himself,", "Nor is not mov'd with concord of sweet sounds,", "Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils;", "The motions of his spirit are dull as night,", "And his affections dark as Erebus:", "Let no such man be trusted.—Mark the music.", "Enter PORTIA and NERISSA at a distance.", "Por. That light we see, is burning in my hall.", "How far that little candle throws his beams!", "So shines a good deed in a naughty world.", "Ner. When the moon shone, we did not see the\ncandle.", "Por. So doth the greater glory dim the less:", "A substitute shines brightly as a king,", "Until a king be by; and then his state", "Empties itself, as doth an inland brook", "Into the main of waters. Music! hark!", "Ner. It is your music, madam, of the house.", "Por. Nothing is good, I see, without respect;³", "Methinks, it sounds much sweeter than by day.", "Ner. Silence bestows that virtue on it, madam.", "Por. The crow doth sing as sweetly as the lark,", "When neither is attended; and, I think,", "The nightingale, if she should sing by day,", "When every goose is cackling, would be thought", "No better a musician than the wren.", "How many things by season season'd are", "To their right praise, and true perfection!—", "Peace, ho! the moon sleeps with Endymion,", "And would not be awak'd!", "[Music ceases.", "Lor.", "Or I am much deceiv'd, of Portia.", "Por. He knows me, as the blind man knows the\ncuckoo,", "By the bad voice.", "Lor.", "Dear lady, welcome home.", "Por. We have been praying for our husbands'\nwelfare,", "Which speed, we hope, the better for our words.", "Are they return'd?", "Madam, they are not yet;", "But there is come a messenger before,", "To signify their coming.", "Por.", "Go in, Nerissa,", "Give order to my servants, that they take", "No note at all of our being absent hence;—", "Nor you, Lorenzo;—Jessica, nor you.", "[A tucket⁴ sounds.", "Lor. Your husband is at hand, I hear his trumpet;\nWe are no tell-tales, madam; fear you not.", "Por. This night, methinks, is but the daylight sick,\nIt looks a little paler; 'tis a day,", "Such as a day is when the sun is hid.", "1 We find the same thought in the Tempest:\n—Then I beat my tabor,", "", "At which, like unback'd colts, they pricked their ears,\nAdvanc'd their eyelids, lifted up their noses", "As they smelt music.", "2 Steevens, in one of his splenetic moods, censures\nthis passage as neither pregnant with physical and\nmoral truth, nor poetically beautiful; and, with the as-\nsistance of Lord Chesterfield's tirade against music,\nlevels a blow at the lovers and professors of it.", "Enter BASSANIO, ANTONIO, GRATIANO, and their\nFollowers.", "Bass. We should hold day with the Antipodes,\nIf you would walk in absence of the sun.", "Por. Let me give light, but let me give not be light;⁵", "For a light wife doth make a heavy husband,", "And never be Bassanio so for me;", "But God sort all!—You are welcome home, my lord,\nBass. I thank you, madam: give welcome to my\nfriend.—", "This is the man, this is Antonio,\nTo whom I am so infinitely bound.", "Por. You should in all sense be much bound to him,\nFor, as I hear, he was much bound for you.", "Ant. No more than I am well acquitted of.", "Por. Sir, you are very welcome to our house:", "It must appear in other ways than words,", "Therefore, I scant this breathing courtesy.⁶", "[GRATIANO and NERISSA seem to talk apart.", "Gra. By wonder moon, I swear, you do me wrong;", "In faith, I gave it to the judge's clerk:", "Would he were gelt that had it, for my part,", "Since you do take it, love, so much at heart.", "Por. A quarrel, ho, already? what's the matter?", "Gra. About a hoop of gold, a paltry ring", "That she did give me; whose pozs was", "For all the world like cutler's poetry", "Upon a knife,⁷ Love me, and leave me not.", "Ner. What talk you of the pozs, or the value?", "You spoke to me, when I did give it you,", "That you would wear it till your hour of death;", "And that it should lie with you in your grave:", "Though not for me, yet for your vehement oaths,", "You should have been respective,⁸ and have kept it.", "Gave it a judge's clerk !—but well I know,", "The clerk will ne'er wear hair on his face that had it.", "Gra. He will, an if he live to be a man.", "Ner. Ay, if a woman live to be a man.", "Gra. Now, by this hand, I gave it to a youth,—", "A kind of boy; a little scrubbed boy,", "No higher than thyself; the judge's clerk;", "A prating boy, that begg'd it as a fee;", "I could not for my heart deny it him.", "Por. You would to blame, I must be plain with you,", "To part so slightly with your wife's first gift;", "A thing stuck on with oaths upon your finger,", "And riveted so with faith unto your flesh.", "I gave my love a ring, and made me man swear", "Never to part with it; and here he stands;", "I dare be sworn for him, but would not leave it,", "Nor pluck it from his finger, for the wealth", "That the world masters. Now, in faith, Gratiano,", "You give your wife too unkind a cause of grief;", "An were to me, I should be mad at it.", "Bass. Why, I were best to cut my left hand off,", "And swear I lost the ring defending it. [Aside.", "Gra. My lord Bassanio gave his ring away", "Unto the judge that begg'd it, and, indeed,", {"bbox": [667

["## SCENE I.", "## MERCHANT OF VENICE.", "235", "Ner. Nor I in yours,\nTill I again see mine.", "Bass.", "Sweet Portia,", "If you did know for whom I gave the ring,\nIf you did know for whom I gave the ring,", "And would conceive for what I gave the ring,\nAnd how unwilling I left the ring,", "When ought would be accepted but the ring,", "You would abate the strength of your displeasure.", "Por. If you had known the virtue of the ring,", "Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,", "Or your own honour to contain¹ the ring,", "You would not then have parted with the ring.", "What man is there so much unreasonable,", "If you had pleas'd to have defended it", "With any terms of zeal, wanted the modesty", "To urge the thing held as a ceremony ?²", "Nerissa teaches me what to believe ;", "I'll die for't, but some woman had the ring.", "Bass. No, by mine honour, madam, by my soul,", "No woman had it, but a civil doctor,", "Which did refuse three thousand ducats of me,", "And begg'd the ring; the which I did deny him,", "And suffer'd him to hold in displeased away;", "Even he that had held up the very life", "Of my dear friend. What should I say, sweet lady ?", "I was enforc'd to send it after him ;", "I was beset with shame and courtesy;", "My honour would not let ingratitude", "So much besmeak it: Pardon me, good lady ;", "For, by these blessed candles³ of the night,", "Had you been there, I think, you would have begg'd", "The ring of me to give the worthy doctor.", "Por. Let not that doctor e'er come near my house :", "Since he hath got the jewel that I lov'd,", "And that which you did swear to keep for me,", "I will become as liberal as you :", "I'll not deny him any thing I have,", "No, not my body, nor my husband's bed :", "Know him to shall, I am well sure of it:", "Lie not a night from home; watch me, like Argus :", "If you do not, if I be left alone,", "Now, by mine honour, which is yet my own,", "I'll have that doctor for my bedfellow.", "Ner. And I his clerk; therefore be well advis'd,", "How you do leave me your own protection.", "Gra. Well, do you so: let not me take him then ;", "Por. If I do, I'll mar the young clerk's pen.", "Ant. I am the unhappy subject of these quarrels.", "Por. Sir, grieve not you; You are welcome not-\nwithstanding.", "Bass. Portia, forgive me this enforced wrong ;", "And, in the hearing of these many friends,", "I swear to thee, even by thine own fair eyes,", "Wherein I see myself,—", "Por. Mark you but that!", "In both my eyes he doubly sees himself:", "In each eye, one:—swear by your double⁴ self,", "And there's an oath of credit.", "Bass. Nay, but hear me :", "Pardon this fault, and by my soul I swear,", "I never more will break an oath with thee.", "Ant. I once did lend my body for his wealth;⁵", "Which, but for him that had your husband's ring,", "[To PORTIA.", "Had quite miscarried: I dare be bound again,\nMy soul upon the forfeit, that your lord", "Will never more break faith advisedly.", "Por. Then you shall be his surety: Give him\nthis:", "And bid him keep it better than the other.", "Ant. Here, lord Bassanio; swear to keep this\nring.", "Bass. By heaven, it is the same I gave the doc-\ntor !", "Por. I had it of him: pardon me, Bassanio:", "For by this ring the doctor lay with me.", "Ner. And pardon me, my gentle Gratiano ;", "For that same scrubbed boy, the doctor's clerk,", "In lieu of this, last night did lie with me.", "Gra. Why, this is like the mending of highways\nIn summer, where the ways are fair enough;", "What ! are we cuckolds, ere we have deserv'd it ?", "Por. Speak not so grossly.—You are all amaz'd :", "Here is a letter, read it at your leisure ;", "It comes from Padua, from Bellario:", "There you shall find, that Portia was the doctor ;", "Nerissa there, her clerk: Lorenzo here", "Shall witness, I set forth as soon as you,", "And but even now return'd: I have not yet", "Enter'd my house.—Antonio, you are welcome ;", "And I have better news in store for you,", "Than you expect: unseal this letter soon ;", "There you shall find, three of your argosies", "Are richly come to harbour suddenly ;", "You shall not know by what strange accident", "I chanced on this letter.", "Ant.", "I am dumb.", "Bass. Were you the doctor, and I knew you not ?", "Gra. Were you the clerk, that is to make me\ncuckold?", "Ner. Ay; but the clerk that never means to do it ;", "Unless he live until he be a man.", "Bass. Sweet doctor you shall be my bedfellow ;", "When I am absent, then lie with my wife.", "Ant. Sweet lady, you have given me life, and\nliving ;", "For here I read for certain, that my ships", "Are safely come to road.", "Por. How now, Lorenzo ?", "My clerk hath some good comforts too for you.", "Ner. Ay, and I'll give them him without a fee.—", "There do I give to you, and Jessica,", "From the rich Jew, a special deed of gift,", "After his death, of all he dies possess'd of.", "Lor. Fair ladies, you drop manna in the way", "Of starved people.", "Por. It is almost morning,", "And yet, I am sure, you are not satisfied", "Of these events at full: Let us go in ;", "And charge us there upon inter'gatories,", "And we will answer all things faithfully.", "Gra. Let it be so: The first inter'gatory", "That my Nerissa shall be sworn on, is,", "Whether till the next night she had rather stay ;", "Or go to bed now, being two hours to day :", "But were the day come, I should wish it dark,", "That I were couching with the doctor's clerk.", "Well, while I live, I'll fear no other thing", "So sore, as keeping safe Nerissa's ring.", "[Exeunt.", "1 To contain had nearly the same meaning with to retain.", "2 i. e. kept in a measure religiously, or superstitiously.", "3 We have again the same expression in one of Shakspeare's Sonnets, in Macbeth, and in Romeo and Juliet.", "4 Double is here used for *deceitful*, *full of duplicity*.", "5 i. e. for his *advantage*; to obtain his happiness.\n*Wealth* was the term generally opposed to adversity or calamity.", "OF the Merchant of Venice the style is even and easy, with few peculiarities of diction, or anomalies of construction. The comic part raises laughter,

## SCENE I.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

237

His horses are bred better; for, besides that they are fair with their feeding, they are taught their manage, and to that end riders clearly hired: but I, his brother, gain nothing under him but growth: for the which his animals on his dung-hills are as much bound to him as I. Besides this nothing that he so plentifully gives me, the something that nature gave me, his countenance seems to take from me: he lets me feed with his hinds, bars me the place of a brother, and, as much as in him lies, mines my gentleness with my education. This is it, Adam, which grieves me; and the spirit of my father, which I think is within me, begins to mutiny against this servitude: I will no longer endure it, though yet I know no wise remedy how to avoid it.

### Enter OLIVER.

Adam. Yonder comes my master, your brother.

Orl. Go apart, Adam, and thou shall hear how he will shake me up.

Oli. Now, sir! what make you here ?

Orl. Nothing: I am not taught to make any thing.

Oli. What mar you then, sir?

Orl. Marry, sir, I am helping you to mar that which God made, a poor unworthy brother of yours, with idleness.

Oli. Marry, sir, be better employed, and be naught awhile.

Orl. Shall I keep your hogs, and eat husks with them? What prodigal portion have I spent, that I should come to such penury?

Oli. Know you where you are, sir?

Orl. O, sir, very well: here in your orchard.

Oli. Know you before whom, sir?

Orl. Ay, better than he³ I am before knows me. I know you are my eldest brother; and, in the gentle condition of blood, you should so know me: The courtesy of nations allows you my better, in that you are the first-born; but the same tradition takes not away my blood, were there twenty brothers betwixt us: I have as much of my father in me, as you; albeit, I confess, your coming before me is nearer to his reverence.

Oli. What, boy!

Orl. Come, come, elder brother, you are too young in this.

Oli. Wilt thou lay hands on me, villain.

Orl. I am no villain:⁵ I am the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Bois; he was my father; and he is thrice a villain, that says, such a father begot villains: Wert thou not my brother, I would not take this hand from thy throat, till this other had pulled out thy tongue for saying so: thou hast railed on thyself.

Adam. Sweet masters, be patient; for your father's remembrance, be at accord.

Oli. Let me go, I say.

Orl. I will not, till I please: you shall hear me. My father charged you in his will to give me good education: you have trained me like a peasant, obsequious and hiding from me all gentleman-like qualities: the spirit of my father grows strong in me, and I will no longer endure it: therefore allow me such exercises as may become a gentleman, or give me the poor allottery my father left me by testament: with that I will go buy my fortunes.

Oli. And what wilt thou do? beg, when that is spent? Well, sir, get you in: I will not long be troubled with you: you shall have some part of your will: I pray you, leave me.

Orl. I will no further offend you than becomes me for my good.

Oli. Get you with him, you old dog.

Adam. Is old dog my reward? Most true, I have lost my teeth in your service.—God be with my old master! he would not have spoke such a word.

[Exeunt ORLANDO and ADAM.

Oli. Is it even so? begin you to grow upon me? I will physic your rankness, and yet give no thousand crowns neither. Hola, Dennis!

### Enter DENNIS.

Den. Calls your worship?

Oli. Was not Charles, the Duke's wrestler, here to speak with me?

Den. So please you, he is here at the door, and importunes access to you.

Oli. Call him in. [Exit DENNIS.]—'Twill be a good way; and to-morrow the wrestling is.

### Enter CHARLES.

Cha. Good morrow to your worship.

Oli. Good monsieur Charles!—what's the new news at the new court!

Cha. There's no news at the court, sir, but the old news; that is, the old duke is banished by his younger brother the new duke; and three or four loving lords have put themselves into voluntary exile with him, whose lands and revenues enrich the new duke; therefore he gives them good leave⁶ to wander.

Oli. Can you tell, if Rosalind, the duke's daughter,⁷ be banished with her father.

Cha. O, no; for the duke's daughter,⁸ her cousin, so loves her,—being ever from their cradles bred together,—that she would have followed her exile, or have died to stay behind her. She is at the court, and no less beloved of her uncle than his own duke; and never two ladies loved as they do.

Oli. Where will the old duke live?

Cha. They say, he is already in the forest of Arden,⁹ and a many merry men with him; and there they live like the old Robin Hood of England: they say, many young gentlemen flock to him every day; and fleet!¹⁰ the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world.

Oli. What, you wrestle to-morrow before the new duke?

Cha. Marry, do I, sir; and I came to acquaint you with a matter. I am given, sir, secretly to understand, that your younger brother, Orlando, hath a disposition to come in undisguised against me to try a fall: To-morrow, sir, I wrestle for my credit; and he that escapes me without some broken limb, shall acquit him well. Your brother is but young, and tender; and, for your love, I would be loth to foil him, as I must, for my own honour, if he come in: therefore out of my love to you, I came hither to acquaint you withal; that either you might stay him from his intendment, or brook such disgrace well as he shall run into; in that it is a thing of his own search, and altogether against my will.

Oli. Charles, I thank thee for thy love to me, which thou shall find I will most kindly require. I had myself notice of my brother's purpose herein, and have by underhand means laboured to dissuade him from it; but he is resolute. I'll tell thee, Charles, —it is the stubbornest young fellow of France: full of ambition, an envious emulator of every man's good parts, a secret and villanous contriver against me his natural brother; therefore use thy discretion;

worthless fellow; and by Orlando, for a man of base extraction.

6. 'He gives them good leave.' As often as this phrase occurs, it means a ready assent.

7. i. e. the banished duke's daughter.

8. i. e. the usurping duke's daughter; this may be sufficiently apparent by the words her cousin, yet it has been thought necessary to point out the ambiguity.

9. Ardenne is a forest of considerable extent in a French Flanders, lying near the river Meuse, and between Charlemont and Rocroy.

10. Fleet, i. e. to flitte, to make to pass or flow.

1. i. e. what do you here? See note in Love's Labour's Lost, Act iv. Sc. 3.

2. Be naught acharne. Warburton justly explained this phrase, which, he says, 'is only a north-country provincial curse equivalent to a mischief on your part.'

3. The first folio reads him, the second he more correctly.

4. Warburton proposed reading 'near his revenue,' which he explains, 'though you are no nearer in blood, yet it must be owned that you are nearer in estate.'

5. Villain is used in a double sense: by Oliver for a

238

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT I.

I had as lief thou didst break his neck as his finger:
and thou wert best look to't; for if thou dost him
any slight disgrace, or if he do not mightily grace
himself on thee, he will practice against thee by
poison, entrap thee by some treacherous device,
and never leave thee till he hath ta'en thy life by
some indirect means or other: for, I assure thee,
and almost with tears I speak it, there is not one so
young and so villanous this day living. I speak
but brotherly of him; but should I anatomize him
to thee as he is, I must blush and weep, and thou
must look pale and wonder.

Cha. I am heartily glad I came hither to you: If
he come to-morrow, I'll give him his payment: If
ever he go alone again, I'll never wrestle for prize
more: And so, God keep your worship! [Exit.

Oli. Farewell, good Charles.—Now will I stir
this gamester;¹ I hope, I shall see an end of him:
for my soul, yet I know not why, hates nothing more
than he. Yet he's gentle; never school'd, and yet
learned; full of noble device; of all sorts² enchant-
ingly beloved; and, indeed, so much in the heart
of the world, and especially of my own people, who
best know him, that I am altogether misprised; but
it shall not be so long; this wrestler shall clear
all: nothing remains, but that I kindle³ the boy
thither, which now I'll go about. [Exit.

## SCENE II. A Lawn before the Duke's Palace.
Enter ROSALIND and CELIA.

Cel. I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be
merry.

Ros. Dear Celia, I show more birth than I am
mistress of; and would you yet I were merrier?
Unless you could teach me to forget a banished fa-
ther, you must not learn me how to remember any
extraordinary pleasure.

Cel. Herein, I see, thou lovest me not with the
full weight that I love thee: if my uncle, thy ba-
nished father, had banished thy uncle, the duke my
father, so thou hadst been still with me, I could
have taught my love to take thy father for mine; so
wouldst thou, if the truth of thy love to me were so
righteously temper'd as mine is to thee.

Ros. Well, I will forget the condition of my es-
tate, to rejoice in yours.

Cel. You know, my father hath no child but I,
nor none is like to have; and, truly, when he dies,
thou shall be his heir: for what he hath taken away
from thy father perforce, I will render thee again in
affection: by mine honour, I will; and when I
break that oath, let me turn monster: therefore,
my sweet Rose, my dear Rose, be merry.

Ros. From henceforth I will, coz, and devise
sports: let me see; What think you of falling in
love?

Cel. Marry, I pr'ythee, do, to make sport withal:
but love no man in good earnest; nor no further in
sport neither, than with safety of a pure blush thou
may'st in honour come off again.

Ros. What shall be our sport then?

Cel. Let us sit and mock the good housewife,
Fortune, from her wheel, that her gifts may hence-
forth be bestowed equally.

Ros. I would, we could do so; for her benefits
are mightily misplaced: and the bountiful blind
woman doth most mistake in her gifts to women.

Cel. 'Tis true: for those, that she makes fair,
she scarce makes honest; and those, that she makes
honest, she makes very ill-favour'dly.

Ros. Nay, now thou goest from fortune's office to
nature's: fortune reigns in gifts of the world, not in
the lineaments of nature.

1 i. e. frolicksome fellow.

2 i. e. of all ranks.

3 *But that I kindle the boy thither.* He means,
*that I excite the boy to it.*

4 The old copy reads *perceiveth.* The folio, 1632,
reads *perceiving.*

5 This reply to the Clown, in the old copies, is given
to Rosalind. *Frederick* was however the name of Celia's
father, and it is therefore most probable the reply should
be hers.

## Enter TOUCHSTONE.

Cel. No? When nature hath made a fair crea-
ture, may she not by fortune fall into the fire?—
Though nature hath given us wit to float at for-
tune, hath not fortune sent in this fool to cut off the
argument?

Ros. Indeed, there is fortune too hard for na-
ture; when fortune makes nature's natural the cut-
ter off of nature's wit.

Cel. Peradventure, this is not fortune's work nei-
ther, but nature's; who perceiving⁴ our natural wits
too dull to reason of such goddesses, hath sent this
natural for our whetstone: for always the dulness
of the fool is the whetstone of his wits.—How now,
wit? whither wander you?

Touch. Mistress. You must come away to your
father.

Cel. Were you made the messenger?

Touch. No, by mine honour; but I was bid to
come for you.

Ros. Where learned you that oath, fool?

Touch. Of a certain knight, that swore by his
honour they were good pancakes, and swore by his
honour the mustard was naught; now, I'll stand to
it, the pancakes were naught, and the mustard was
good; and yet was not the knight forsworn.

Cel. How prove you that, in the great heap of
your knowledge?

Ros. Ay, marry; now unmuzzle your wisdom.

Touch. Stand you both forth now: stroke your
chins, and swear by your beards that I am a knave.

Cel. By our beards, if we had them, thou art.

Touch. By my knavery, if I had it, then I were:
but if you swear by that that is not, you are not
forsworn: no more was this knight, swearing by his
honour, for he never had any; or if he had, he had
sworn it away, before ever he saw those pancakes,
or that mustard.

Cel. Pr'ythee, who is't that thou meanst!

Touch. One that old Frederick, your father, loves.

Cel.⁵ My father's love is enough to honour him.
Enough! speak no more of him; you'll be whipp'd
for taxation,⁶ one of these days.

Touch. The more pity, that fools may not speak
wisely, what wise men do foolishly.

Cel. By my troth, thou say'st true: for since the
little wit, that fools have, was silenced, the little
foolery, that wise men have, makes a great show.
Here comes Monsieur Le Beau.

## Enter LE BEAU.

Ros. With his mouth full of news.

Cel. Which he will put on us, as pigeons feed
their young.

Ros. Then shall we be news-cramm'd.

Cel. All the better; we shall be the more mar-
ketable. Bon jour, Monsieur Le Beau: What's
the news?

Le Beau. Fair princess, you have lost much good
sport.

Cel. Sport? Of what colour?

Le Beau. What colour, madam? how shall I an-
swer you?

Ros. As wit and fortune will.

Touch. Or as the destinies decree.

Cel. Well said: that was laid on with a trowel.

Touch. Nay, if I keep not my rank,—

Ros. Thou losest thy old smell.

Le Beau. You amaze me, ladies: I would have
told you of good wrestling, which you have lost the
sight of.

Ros. Yet tell us the manner of the wrestling.

Le Beau. I will tell you the beginning, and, if
please your ladyships, you may see the end; for the
best is yet to do; and here, where you are, they are
coming to perform it.

6 *— you'll be whipp'd for taxation.* This was the
discipline usually inflicted upon fools.

7 *Laid on a trowel.* This is a proverbial phrase
not yet quite disused. It is, says Mason, to do any thing
strongly, and without delicacy. If a man flatters gross-
ly, it is a common expression to say, that he *lays it on
with a trowel.*

## SCENE II.

AS YOU LIKE IT

239

Cel. Well,—the beginning, that is dead and buried.

Le Beau. There comes an old man, and his three sons;—

Cel. I could match this beginning with an old tale.

Le Beau. Three proper young men, of excellent growth and presence;—

Ros. With bills on their necks,—Be it known unto all men by these presents,¹—

Le Beau. The eldest of the three wrestled with Charles, the duke's wrestler; which Charles in a moment threw him, and broke three of his ribs, that there is little hope of life in him: so he served the second, and so the third: Yonder they lie; the poor old man, their father, making such pitiful dole over them, that all the beholders take his part with weeping.

Ros. Alas!

Touch. But what is the sport, monsieur, that the ladies have lost?

Le Beau. Why, this that I speak of.

Touch. Thus men may grow wiser every day! it is the first time that ever I heard, breaking of ribs was sport for ladies.

Cel. Or I, I promise thee.

Ros. But is there any else longs to see this broken music in his sides? is there yet another dots upon rib-breaking:—Shall we see this wrestling, cousin?

Le Beau. You must, if you stay here: for here is the place appointed for the wrestling, and they are ready to perform it.

Cel. Yonder, sure, they are coming: Let us now stay and see it.

Flourish. Enter DUKE FREDERICK, Lords, ORLANDO, CHARLES, and Attendants.

Duke F. Come on; since the youth shall not be entreated, his own peril on his forwardness.

Ros. Is yonder the man?

Le Beau. Even he, madam.

Cel. Alas, he is too young: yet he looks successfully.

Duke F. How now, daughter and cousin? are you crept hither to see the wrestling?

Ros. Ay, my liege: so please you give us leade.

Duke F. You will take little delight in it, I can tell you, there is such odds in the men: In pity of the challenger's youth, I would fain dissuade him, but he will not be entreated: Speak to him, ladies; see if you can move him.

Cel. Call him hither, good Monsieur Le Beau.

Duke F. Do so; I'll not be by. [Duke goes apart.

Le Beau. Monsieur the challenger, the princesses call for you.

Orl. I attend them, with all respect and duty.

Ros. Young man, have you challenged Charles the wrestler?²

Orl. No, fair princess; he is the general challenger: I come but in, as others do, to try with him the strength of my youth.

Cel. Young gentleman, your spirits are too bold for your years: You have seen cruel proof of this man's strength: if you saw yourself with your eyes, or knew yourself with your judgment, the fear of your adventure would counsel you to a more equal enterprise. We pray you, for your own sake, to embrace your own safety, and give over this attempt.

Ros. Do, young sir; your reputation shall not therefore be misprised: we will make it our suit to the duke, that the wrestling might not go forward.

Orl. I beseech you, punish me not with your hard thoughts; wherein³ I confess me much guilty, to

deny so fair and excellent ladies any thing. But let your fair eyes and gentle wishes go with me to my trial: wherein, if I be foiled, there is but one shamed that was never gracious;⁴ if killed, but one dead that is willing to be so; I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me; the world no injury, for in it I have nothing, only in the world I fill up a place, which may be better supplied when I have made it empty.

Ros. The little strength that I have, I would it were with you.

Cel. And mine, to eke out hers.

Ros. Fare you well. Pray heaven, I be deceived in you!

Cel. Your heart's desires be with you.

Cha. Come, where is this young gallant, that is so desirous to lie with his mother earth?

Orl. Ready, sir; but his will hath in it a more modest working.

Duke F. You shall try but one fall.

Cha. No, I warrant your grace; you shall not entreat him to a second, that have so mightily persuaded him from a first.

Orl. You mean to mock me after; you should not have mocked me before: but come your ways.

Ros. Now, Hercules be thy speed, young man!

Cel. I would I were invisible, to catch the strong fellow by the leg. [CHA. and ORL. wrestling.

Ros. O excellent young man!

Cel. If I had a thunderbolt in mine eye, I can tell who should down. [CHARLES is thrown. Shout.

Duke F. No more, no more.

Orl. Yes, I beseech your grace; I am not yet well breathed.

Duke F. How dost thou, Charles?

Le Beau. He cannot speak, my lord.

Duke F. Bear him away. [CHARLES is borne out.]

What is thy name, young man?

Orl. Orlando, my liege; the youngest son of Sir Rowland de Bois.

Duke F. I would, thou hadst been son to some man else.

The world esteem'd thy father honourable,
But I did find him still mine enemy:

Thou shouldst have better pleas'd me with this deed,
Hadst thou descended from another house.

But fare thee well; thou art a gallant youth;
I would, thou hadst told me of another father.

[Exeunt DUKE FRED. Train, and LE BEAU.

Cel. Were I my father, coz, would I do this?

Orl. I am more proud to be Sir Rowland's son, His youngest son;²—and would not change that calling,⁵

To be adopted heir to Frederick.

Ros. My father lov'd Sir Rowland as his soul,

And all the world was of my father's mind:
Had I before known this young man his son,
I should have given him tears unto entreaties,
Ere he should thus have ventur'd.

Cel.

Let us go thank him, and encourage him:

My father's rough and envious disposition

Sticks me at heart.—Sir, you have well deserv'd:

If you do keep your promises in love

But justly, as you have exceeded all promise,

Your mistress shall be happy.

Ros.

Gentleman,
[Giving him a Chain from her neck.
Wear this for me; one out of suits with fortune;⁷
That could give more, but that her hand lacks means.—

Shall we go, coz?

Cel. Ay:—Fare you well, fair gentleman.

1 Warburton thought the text should stand thus:

Touch. Be it known unto all men by these presents,—
The ladies and the fool being at cross purposes, Rosa-
lind banteringly means bills or halberds. The Clown
turns it jestingly to a taw instrument.

2 This wrestling match is minutely described in Lodge's novel.

3 Johnson thought we should read 'therein.' Mason proposed to read herein.

4 Gracious was anciently used in the sense of the Ita-

lian gratiato, i. e. graced, favoured, countenanced; as well as for graceful, comely, well favoured, in which sense Shakspeare uses it in other places.

5 The words 'than to be descended from any other house, however high,' must be understood.

6 Calling here 'means appellation,' a very unusual if not unprecedented use of the word.

7 Out of suits appears here to signify out of favour, discarded by fortune. To suit with anciently signified to agree with.

240

AS YOU LIKE IT.

Act I.

Orl. Can I not say, I thank you ? My better parts
Are all thrown down, and that which here stands up,
Is but a quintain,¹ a mere lifeless block.

Ros. He calls us back : my pride fell with my fortunes :
I'll ask him what he would :—Did you call, sir ?—
Sir, you have wrestled well, and overthrown
More than your enemies.

Cel.

Will you go, coz ?

Ros. Have with you :—Fare you well.

[Exeunt ROSALIND and CELIA.

Orl. What passion hangs these weights upon my tongue ?

I cannot speak to her, yet she urg'd conference.

Re-enter LE BEAU.

O poor Orlando ! thou art overthrown;
Or Charles, or something weaker, masters thee.

Le Beau. Good sir, I do in friendship counsel you
To leave this place : Albeit you have deserv'd
High commendation, true applause, and love;
Yet such is now the duke's condition,²
That he misconstrues all that you have done.

The duke is humourous; what he is, indeed,
More suits you to conceive, than me to speak of.

Orl. I thank you, sir: and, pray you, tell me this;
Which of the two was daughter of the duke,
That here was at the wrestling ?

Le Beau. Neither his daughter, if we judge by manners ;

But yet, indeed, the smaller³ is his daughter :
The other is daughter to the banish'd duke,
And here detain'd by her usurping uncle,
To keep his daughter company; whose loves
Are dearer than the natural bond of sisters.
But I can tell you that of late this duke
Hath ta'en displeasure 'gainst his gentle niece;
Grounded upon no other argument,
But that the people praise her for her virtues,
And pity her for her good father's sake;
And on my life, his malice 'gainst the lady
Will suddenly break forth.—Sir, fare you well;
Hereafter in a better world than this,
I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.

Orl. I rest much bounden to you : fare you well!

[Exit LE BEAU.

Thus must I from the smoke into the smother;
From tyrant duke, unto a tyrant brother :—

But heavenly Rosalind !

[Exit.]

SCENE III. A Room in the Palace. Enter CELIA and ROSALIND.

Cel. Why, cousin; why, Rosalind;—Cupid have
mercy !—Not a word?

Ros. Not one to throw at a dog.

Cel. No, thy words are too precious to be cast
away upon curs, throw some of them at me ; come,
lame me with reasons.

Ros. Then there were two cousins laid up ; when
the one should be lamed with reasons, and the other
mad without any.

Cel. But is all this for your father?

Ros. No, some of it for my child's father.⁴ O
how full of briars is this working-day world!

Cel. They are but burs, cousin, thrown upon thee
in holiday foolery; if we walk not in the trodden
paths, our very petticoats will catch them.

Ros. I could shake them off my coat; these burs
are in my heart.

Cel. Hem them away.

Ros. I would try : if I could cry hem, and have
him.

Cel. Come, come, wrestle with thy affections.

Ros. O, they take the part of a better wrestler
than myself.

Cel. O, a good wish upon you ! you will try in time, in despite of a fall.—But turning these jests out of service, let us talk in good earnest: Is it possible, on such a sudden, you should fall into so strong a liking with old Sir Rowland's youngest son ?

Ros. The duke my father lov'd his father dearly.

Cel. Doth it therefore ensue, that you should love
his son clear? By this kind of chase, I should hate
him, for my father hated his father clear!⁵ yet I
hate not Orlando.

Ros. No 'faith, hate him not, for my sake.

Cel. Why should I not ? doth he not deserve
well ?⁶

Ros. Let me love him for that; and do you love
him, because I do :—Look here comes the duke.

Cel. With his eyes full of anger.

Enter DUKE FREDERICK, with Lords.

Duke F. Mistress, dispatch you with your safest
haste,

And get you from our court.

Ros.

Me, uncle?

Duke F.

You, cousin;

Within these ten days if that thou be'st found

So near our public court as twenty miles,
Thou diest for it.

Ros.

I do beseech your grace,
Let me the knowledge of my fault bear with me :
If with myself I hold intelligence,
Or have acquaintance with mine own desires;
If that I do not dream, or be not frantic,
(As I do trust I am not,) then dear uncle,
Never, so much as in a thought unborn,
Did I offend your highness.

Duke F.

Thus do all traitors;
If their purgation did consist in words,
They are as innocent as grace itself :—
Let it suffice thee, that I trust thee not.

Ros. Yet your mistrust cannot make me a traitor.

Tell me, whereon the likelihood depends.

Duke F. Thou art thy father's daughter, there's enough.

Ros. So was I when your highness took his dukedom;

So was I when your highness banish'd him :

Treason is not inherited, my lord;

Or, if we did derive it from our friends,

What's that to me ; my father was no traitor :

Then good, my liege, mistake me not so much,

To think my poverty is treacherous.

Cel. Dear sovereign hear me speak.

Duke F. Ay, Celia; we stay'd her for your sake,
Else had she with her father rang'd along.

Cel. I did not then entreat to have her stay,
It was your pleasure and your own remorse ;

I was too young that time to value her,

But now I know her ; if she be a traitor,

Why so am I ; we have still slept together,

Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,

And wheresoe'er we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled, and inseparable.

Duke F. She is too subtle for thee; and her
smoothness,

Her very silence, and her patience,

Speak to the people, and they pity her.

Thou art a fool : she robs thee of thy name ;

And thou wilt show more bright, and seem more
virtuous,

When she is gone : then open not thy lips ;

Firm and irrevocable is my doom

Which I have pass'd upon her ; she is banish'd.

1 His better parts, i. e. his spirits or senses. A quin-
tain was a figure set up for tillers to run at in mock re-
semblance of a tournament.

2 i. e. demeanour, temper, disposition. Antonio in the
Merchant of Venice is called by his friend 'the best con-
dition'd man.' Humourous is capricious.

3 The old copy reads taller, which is evidently wrong.
Pope altered it to shorter. The present reading is Ma-
lone's.

4 i. e. for him whom she hopes to marry and have
children by. So Theobald explains this passage. Some
of the modern editions read: 'my father's child.'

5 Shakspeare's apparent use of dear in a double sense
has been already illustrated. See note on Twelfth Night,
Act v. Sc. i.

6 Celia answers as if Rosalind had said 'love him, for
my sake,' which is the implied sense of her words.

7 i. e. compassion. So in Macbeth:

'Stop the access and passage to remorse'

["### SCENE III.", "AS YOU LIKE IT.", "241", "Cel. Pronounce that sentence then on me, my liege:", "I cannot live out of her company.", "Duke F. You are a fool :—You, niece, provide yourself!", "If you out-stay the time, upon mine honour,\nAnd in the greatness of my word, you die.", "[Exeunt] DUKE FREDERICK and Lords.", "Cel. O my poor Rosalind ! whither wilt you go?\nWilt thou change fathers ? will I give thee mine.\nI charge thee be not thou more griev'd than I am.\nRos. I have more cause.", "Cel.", "Thou hast not, cousin ;\nPr'ythee be cheerful : know'st thou not, the duke\nHath banish'd me his daughter?", "Ros.", "Cel. No ? hath not? Rosalind lacks then the love\nWhich teacheth me that thou and I are one:\nShall we be sunder'd ? shall we part, sweet girl ?\nNo ; let my father seek another heir.", "Therefore devise with me, how we may fly,", "Whither to go, and what to bear with us :", "And do not seek to take your change¹ upon you,", "To bear your griefs yourself, and leave me out ;", "For, by this heaven, now at our sorrows pale,\nSay what thou canst, I'll go along with thee.", "Ros. Why, whither shall we go ?", "Cel. To seek my uncle in the forest of Arden.", "Ros. Alas what danger will it be to us,", "Maides as we are, to travel forth so far ?", "Beauty provoketh thieves sooner than gold.", "Cel. I'll put myself in poor and mean attire,", "And with a kind of umber² smirch my face ;", "The like do you ; so shall we pass along,", "And never stir assailants.", "Ros.", "Were it not better,\nBecause that I am more than common tall,\nThat I did suit me all points like a man ?", "A gallant curtle-axe³ upon my thigh,", "A boar spear in my hand; and (in my heart", "Lie there what hidden woman's fear there will,", "We'll have a swashing⁴ and a martial outside ;", "As many other mannish cowards have,", "That do out face it with their semblances.", "Cel. What shall I call thee, when thou art a man ?", "Ros. I'll have no worse a name than Jove's own page,", "And therefore, look you, call me Ganymede.", "But what will you be call'd ?", "Cel. Something that hath a reference to my state ;", "No longer Julia, but Aliena.", "Ros. But, cousin, what if we assay'd to steal", "The cleanish flout out of your father's court ?", "Would he not be a comfort to our travel ?", "Cel. He'll go along o'er the wide world with me ;", "Leave me alone to woo him : Let's away,", "And get our jewels and our wealth together ;", "Devise the fittest time, and safest way", "To hide me from pursuit that will be made", "After my flight: Now go we in content,", "To liberty, and not to banishment.", "[Exeunt]", "1 The second folio reads *charge*. Malone explains it 'to take your change or reverse of fortune upon your self, without any aid of participation.'", "2 'A kind of *umber*, a dusky yellow-coloured earth, brought from Umbria in Italy, well known to artists.", "3 This was one of the old words for a *cutlass*, or short crooked sword, *coutelas*, French. It was variously spelled, *courtlas*, *courtlax*, *curtlax*.", "4 i. e. as we now say, *dushing*; spirited and calculated to surprise.", "5 The old copy reads 'not the penalty.' Theobald proposed to read *but*, and has been followed by subsequent editors. 'Surely the old reading is right,' says Mr. Boswell; 'here we feel not, do not suffer, from the penalty of Adam; for when the winter's wind blows upon my body, I smile and say—'", "6 It was currently believed in the time of Shakspeare that the toad had a stone contained in its head which was endued with singular virtues. This was called the *toudstone*.", "7 It irks me, i. e. it gives me pain. 'Mi rincreisce, mi fa male.'—Torriano's *Dict*.", "8 Barbed arrows.", "### ACT II.", "#### SCENE I. The forest of Arden. Enter Duke senior, AMIENS, and other Lords, in the dress of Foresters.", "Duke S. Now, my co-mates, and brothers in exile,\nHath not old custom made this life more sweet\nThan that of painted pomp ? Are not these woods\nMore free from peril than the envious court ?\nHere feel we but⁵ the penalty of Adam,\nThe seasons' difference ; as, the icy fang,\nAnd churlish chiding of the winter's wind,\nWhich when it bites and blows upon my body,\nEven till I shrink with cold, I smile, and say—\nThis is no flattery ; these are counsellors\nThat feelingly persuade me what I am.\nSweet are the uses of adversity ;", "Sweet are the uses of adversity ;", "Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,", "Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;⁶", "And this our life, exempt from public haunt,", "Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,", "Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.", "Ami. I would not change it: Happy is your grace,\nThat can translate the stubbornness of fortune\nInto so quiet and so sweet a style.", "Duke S. Come, shall we go and kill you venison ?\nAnd yet it irks⁷ me, the poor dappled fools—", "And yet it irks⁷ me, the poor dappled fools—", "Beating native beggars of this desert city,", "Should in their own confines, with forked heads⁸", "Have their round haunches gor'd.", "1 *Lord.*", "Indeed, my lord,\nThe melancholy Jaques grieves at that;\nAnd, in that kind, swears you do more usurp\nThan doth your brother that hath banish'd you.", "To-day, my lord of Amiens, and myself,", "Did steal behind him as he lay along", "Under an oak, whose antique root peeps out", "Upon the brook that brawls along this wood;⁹", "To the which place a poor sequester'd stag,", "That from the hunter's aim had ta'en a hurt,", "Did come to languish; and, indeed my lord,", "The wretched animal heav'd both such groans,", "That their discharge did stretch his leathern coat", "Almost to bursting; and the big round tears", "Cours'd one another down his innocent nose¹⁰", "In piteous chase; and thus the hairy fool,", "Much marked of the melancholy Jaques,", "Stood on the extremest verge of the swift brook,", "Augmenting it with tears.", "Duke S.", "But what said Jaques ?", "Did he not moralize this spectacle ?", "1 *Lord.* O yes, into a thousand similes.", "First, for his weeping in the needless¹¹ stream ;", "Poor deer, quoth he, *thou mak'st* an testament", "As worldlings do, giving thy sum of more", "To that which had too much:¹² Then, being alone,", "Left and abandon'd of his velvet friends;", "'Tis right, quoth he; this *misery* doth part", "The flux of company: Anon, a careless herd,", "Full of the pasture, jumps along by him,", "And never stays to greet him; *Ay*, quoth Jaques,", "Sweep on, you fat and greasy citizens ;", "'Tis just the fashion: Wherefore do you look", "Upon that poor and broken bankrupt there ?", "Thus most invectively he pierceth through", "The body of country, city, court,", "9 Gray, in his Elegy, has availed himself of this passage:—", "'There at the foot of yonder nodding beech", "That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high,", "His listless length at noontide would he stretch,", "And pore upon the brook that babbles by.'", "10 'Saucius at quadrupes nota intra tecta refugit", "Successitque gemens stabulis; questueque cruentus", "Atque imploranti similis, tectum omne replevit.'", "11 i. e. the stream that *needed* not such a supply of moisture.", {"bbox": [443, 1256, 700, 12

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT II

242

Yea, and of this our life; swearing, that we
Are mere usurpers, tyrants, and what's worse,
To fright the animals, and to kill them up,
In their assign'd and native dwelling-place.

Duke S. And did you leave him in this contem-
plation?

2 Lord. We did, my lord, weeping and comment-
ing

Upon the sobbing deer.

Duke S.

Show me the place;

I love to cope! him in these sullen fits,
For then he's full of matter.

2 Lord. I'll bring you to him straight.

### SCENE II. A Room in the Palace. Enter DUKE FREDERICK, Lords, and Attendants.

Duke F. Can it be possible that no man saw them?

It cannot be: some villains of my court
Are of consent and sufferance in this.

1 Lord. I cannot hear of any that did see her.

The ladies, her attendants of her chamber,
Saw her a-bed; and, in the morning early,
They found the bed untreasur'd of their mistress.

2 Lord. My lord, the roynish² clown, at whom
so oft

Your grace was wont to laugh, is also missing.
Hesperia, the princess' gentlewoman,
Confesses, that she secretly o'er-heard
Your daughter and her cousin much commend
The parts and graces of the wrestler³
That did but lately foil the sinewy Charles;
And she believes, wherever they are gone,
That youth is surely in their company.

Duke F. Send to his brother; fetch that gallant
hither;

If he be absent, bring his brother to me,
I'll make him find him: do this suddenly;
And let not search and acquisition quail⁴.

To bring again these foolish run-aways.

### SCENE III. Before Oliver's House. Enter ORLANDO and ADAM, meeting.

Orl. Who's there?

Adam. What! my young master?—O, my gentle
master,

O, my sweet master, O you memory⁵
Of old Sir Rowland! why, what make you here?
Why are you virtuous? Why do people love you?
And wherefore are you gentle, strong, and valiant?
Why would you be so fond⁶ to overcome
The bony priser⁷ of the humorous duke?
Your praise is come too swiftly home before you.
Know you not, master, to some kind of men
Their graces serve them but as enemies?

No more do yours; your virtues, gentle master,
Are sanctified and holy traitors to you.
O, what a world is this, when what is comely
Envenoms him that bears it!

Orl. Why, what's the matter?

Adam. O unhappy youth,
Come not within these doors; within this roof
The enemy of all your graces lives:
Your brother—(no, no brother: yet the son—
Yet not the son;—I will not call him son
Of him I was about to call his father,—)
Hath heard your praises; and this night he means
To burn the lodging where you use to lie,
And you within it: if he fail of that,
He will have other means to cut you off:
I overheard him, and his practices.⁸

Adam. O, what a matter! O unhappy youth,
Come not within these doors; within this roof
The enemy of all your graces lives:
Your brother—(no, no brother: yet the son—
Yet not the son;—I will not call him son
Of him I was about to call his father,—)
Hath heard your praises; and this night he means
To burn the lodging where you use to lie,
And you within it: if he fail of that,
He will have other means to cut you off:
I overheard him, and his practices.⁸

1 i. e. to encounter him. Thus in K. Henry VIII. Act i. Sc. 2:

2 'The roynish clown,' mangy or scurvy, from roigneux, French. The word is used by Chaucer.

3 *Wrestler* is here to be sounded as a trisyllable.

4 'To quail,' says Stevens, 'is to faint, to sink into
dejection.' It may be so, but in neither of these senses
is the word here used by Shakspeare.
5 Shakspeare uses *memory* for *memorial*.
6 i. e. rash, foolish.
7 I suspect that a *priser* was the term for a *wrestler*,
a *prise* was a term in that sport for a grappling or hold
taken.

3 'Wrestler' is here to be sounded as a trisyllable.

6 i. e. rash, foolish.

This is no place,⁹ this house is but a butchery;
Abhor it, fear it, do not enter it.

O! Why, whither, Adam, wouldst thou have me go?

Adam. No matter whither, so you come not here.

Orl. What, wouldst thou have me go and beg my

Or, with a base and boisterous sword, enforce
A thievish living on the common road?

This I must do, or know not what to do:

Yet this I will not do, do how I can;
I rather will subject me to the malice

Of a diverted blood,¹⁰ and bloody brother.

Adam. But do not so: I have five hundred crowns,
The thrifty hire I sav'd under your father,
Which I did store, to be my foster-nurse,
When service should in my old limbs lie lame,
And unregarded age in corners thrown;

Take that: and He that doth the ravens feed,
Yea, providently caters for the sparrow,¹¹

Be comfort to my age! Here is the gold;

All this I give you: Let me be your servant;

Though I look old, yet I am strong and lusty:

For in my youth I never did apply

Hot and rebellious liquors in my blood;

Nor did not with unbashful forehead woe

The means of weakness and debility;

Therefore my age is as a lusty winter,

Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you;

I'll do the service of a younger man

In all your business and necessities.

Orl. O good old man; how well in thee appears
The constant service of the antique world,

When service sweat for duty, not for meed!

Thou art not for the fashion of these times,

Where none will sweat, but for promotion;

And having that, do choke their service up

Even with the having:¹² it is not so with thee.

But, poor old man, thou prunnst a rotten tree,

That cannot so much as a blossom yield,

In lieu of all thy pains and husbandry:

But come thy ways, we'll go along together;

And ere we have thy youthful wages spent.

We'll light upon some settled low content.

Adam. Master, go on, and I will follow thee,
To the last gasp, with truth and loyalty.—

From seventeen years till now almost fourscore

Here lived I, but now live here no more.

At seventeen years many their fortunes seek;

But at fourscore, it is too late a week:

Yet fortune cannot recompense me better,

Than to die well, and not my master's debtor.

### SCENE IV. The Forest of Arden. Enter RosALIND in boy's clothes, CELIA drest like a Shep herdess, and TOUCHSTONE.

Ros. O Jupiter! how weary¹³ are my spirits!

Touch. I care not for my spirits, if my legs were not weary.

Ros. I could find in my heart to disgrace my
man's apparel, and to cry like a woman: but I
must comfort the weaker vessel, as doublet and
hose ought to show itself courageous to petticoat:
therefore, courage, good Aliena.

Cel. I pray you, bear with me; I cannot go no further.

Touch. For my part, I had rather bear with you,
than bear you; yet I should bear no cross,¹⁴ if I
did bear you; for, I think, you have no money in
your purse.

8 i. e. treacherous devices.

9 *Place* here signifies a *seat*, a *mansion*, a *residence*: it is not yet obsolete in this sense.

10 i. e. blood turned out of a course of nature. Affections alienated.

11 See St. Luke, xii. 6 and 24.

12 Even with the *promotion* gained by service is ser vice extinguished.

13 The old copy reads *merry*; perhaps rightly. Rosalind's language as well as her dress may be intended to have an assumed character.

14 A cross was a piece of money stamped with a cross; on this Shakspeare often quibbles.

## SCENE V.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

243

Ros. Well, this is the forest of Arden.

Touch. Ay, now am I in Arden: the more fool I: when I was at home, I was in a better place; but travellers must be content.

Ros. Ay, be so, good Touchstone:—Look you, who comes here; a young man, and an old, in solemn talk.

Enter CORIN and SILVIUS.

Cor. That is the way to make her scorn you still.

Sil. O Corin, that thou knew'st how I do love her!

Cor. I partly guess; for I have lov'd ere now.

Sil. No, Corin, being old, thou canst not guess; Though in thy youth thou wast as true a lover

As ever sigh'd upon a midnight pillow:
But if thy love were ever like to mine

(As sure I think did never man love so.)

How many actions most ridiculous

Hast thou been drawn to by thy fantasy?

Cor. Into a thousand that I have forgotten.
Sil. O, thou didst then ne'er love so heartily:

If thou remember'st not the slightest folly

That ever love did make thee run into,

Thou hast not lov'd:

Or if thou hast not sat as I do now,
Wearying thy hearer in thy mistress' praise,

Thou hast not lov'd:

Or if thou hast not broke from company,

Abruptly, as my passion now makes me,

Thou hast not lov'd: O Phebe, Phebe, Phebe!

[Exit SILVIUS.

Ros. Alas, poor shepherd! searching of thy wound,
I have by hard adventure found mine own.

Touch. And I mine: I remember, when I was in
love, I broke my sword upon a stone, and bid him
take that for coming night to Jane Smile: and I
remember the kissing of her battlet,¹ and the cow's
dugs that her pretty chopp'd hands had milk'd²: and
I remember the woofing of a peascod³ instead of
her; from whom I took two cods, and, giving her
them again, said, with weeping tears, *Wear these
for my sake.* We, that are true lovers, run into
strange capers: but as all is mortal in nature, so is
all nature in love mortal⁴ in folly.

Ros. Thou speak'st wiser than thou art 'ware of.

Touch. Nay, I shall ne'er be 'ware of mine own
wit, till I break my shins against it.

Ros. Jove! Jove! this shepherd's passion
Is much upon my fashion.

Touch. And mine; but it grows something stale
with me.

Cel. I pray you, one of you question 'yond man,
if he for gold will give us any food;

I faint almost to death.

Touch. Holla; you, clown!

Ros. Peace, fool: he's not thy kinsman.

Cor. Who calls?

Touch. Your betters, sir.

Cor. Else are they very wretched.

Ros.

Peace, I say:—

Good even to you, friend.

Cor. And to you, gentle sir, and to you all.

Ros. I pr'ythee, shepherd, if that love, or gold,
Can in this desert place buy entertainment,
Bring us where we may rest ourselves, and feed:

Here's a young maid with travel much oppress'd,
And faints for succour.

Cor.

Fair sir, I pity her,

And wish for her sake, more than for mine own,
My fortunes were more able to relieve her:

But I am shepherd to another man,

And do not shear the fleeces that I graze;

My master is of churlish disposition,

And little recks⁴ to find the way to heaven

By doing deeds of hospitality:

Besides, his cote,⁵ his flocks, and bounds of feed,
Are now on sale, and at our sheepcote now,
By reason of his absence, there is nothing
That you will feed on: but what is, come see,
And in my voice⁶ most welcome shall you be.

Ros. What is he that shall buy his flock and
pasture?

Cor. That young swain that you saw here but
crewwhite,

That little cares for buying any thing.

Ros. I pray thee, if it stand with honesty,

Buy thou the cottage, pasture, and the flock,
And thou shall have to pay for it of us.

Cel. And we will mend thy wages: I like this
place,

And willingly could waste my time in it.

Cor. Assuredly, the thing is to be sold:

Go with me: if you like, upon report,

The soil, the profit, and this kind of life,

I will your very faithful feeder be,

And buy it with your gold right suddenly. [Exeunt.

## SCENE V.
The same. Enter AMIENS, JAQUES, and others.

### SONG.

Ami. Under the greenwood tree,

Who loves to lie with me,

And turn' his merry note

Unto the sweet bird's throat,

Come hither, come hither, come hither:

Here shall he see

No enemy,

But winter and rough weather.

Jaq. More, more, I pr'ythee, more.

Ami. It will make you melancholy, monsieur
Jaques.

Jaq. I thank it. More, I pr'ythee, more. I can
suck melancholy out of a song, as a weazel sucks
eggs: More, I pr'ythee, more.

Ami. My voice is ragged;⁸ I know, I cannot
please you.

Jac. I do not desire you to please me, I do desire you to sing: Come, more; another stanza:
Call you them stanzas?

Ami. What you will, monsieur Jaques.

Jaq. Nay, I care not for their names; they owe
me nothing: Will you sing?

Ami. More at your request, than to please myself.

Jaq. Well then, if ever I thank any man, I'll thank
you: but that they call compliment, is like the en-
counter of two dog-apes; and when a man thanks
me heartily methinks, I have given him a penny,
and he renders me the beggarly thanks. Come,
sing; and you that will not, hold your tongues.

Ami. Well, I'll end the song.—Sirs, cover the
while: the duke will drink under this tree!—he hath
been all this day to look you.

Jaq. And I have been all this day to avoid him.
He is too disputable⁹ for my company: I think of
as many matters as he; but I give heaven thanks,
and make no boast of them. Come, warble, come.

### SONG.

Who doth ambition shun,

[All together here.

And loves to live i' the sun,

Seeking the food he eats,

And pleas'd with what he gets,

Come hither, come hither, come hither;

Here shall he see

No enemy,

But winter and rough weather.

4. i. e. heeds, cares for. So in Hamlet:—' and recks not his own rede.

5. i. e. col or cottage, the word is still used in its compound form, as sheepcote in the next line.

6. In my voice, as far as I have a voice or vote, as far as I have the power to bid you welcome.

7. The old copy reads: 'And turne his merry note,'
which Pope altered unnecessarily to tune, the reading
of all the modern editions.

8. Ragged and rugged had formerly the same meaning.

9. Disputable, i. e. disputations.

1. Ballet, the instrument with which washers beat clothes.

2. A peascod. This was the ancient term for peas growing or gathered, the cod being what we now call the pod. It is evident why Shakspeare uses the former word.

3. In the middle counties, says Johnson, they use mortal as a particle of amplification, as mortal tall, mortal little. So the meaning here may be 'abounding in folly.'

244

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT II.

Jaq. I'll give you a verse to this note, that I made yesterday in despite of my invention.

Ami. And I'll sing it.

Jaq. Thus it goes:

> If it do come to pass,
> That any man turn ass,
> Leaving his wealth and ease,
> A stubborn will to please,
> Ducdame, ducdame, ducdame;¹
> Here shall he see,
> Gross fools as he,
> An if he will come to me.

Ami. What's that ducdame?

Jaq. 'Tis a Greek invocation, to call fools into a circle. I'll go sleep if I can; if I cannot, I'll rail against, all the first-born of Egypt.²

Ami. And I'll go seek the duke; his banquet is prepar'd.

[Exeunt severally.]

### SCENE VI. The same. Enter ORLANDO and ADAM.

Adam. Dear master, I can go no further: O, I die for food! Here lie I down, and measure out my grave,³ Farewell, kind master.

Orl. Why, how now, Adam! no greater heart in thee? Live a little; comfort a little; cheer thyself a little: if this uncouth forest yield any thing savage, I will either be food for it, or bring it for food to thee. Thy conceit is nearer death than thy powers. For my sake, be comfortable; hold death while at the arm's end: I will here be with thee presently; and if I bring thee not something to eat, I'll give thee leave to die: but if thou diest before I come, thou art a marksman of my labour. Well said! thou look'st cheerly: and I'll be with thee quickly.— Yet thou liest in the bleak air: Come, I will bear thee to some shelter; and thou shall not die for lack of a dinner, if there live any thing in this desert. Cheerly, good Adam! [Exeunt].

### SCENE VII. The same. A Table set out. Enter Duke senior, AMIENS, Lords, and others.

Duke S. I think he be transform'd into a beast; For I can no where find him like a man.

1. Lord. My lord, he is but even now gone hence: Here was he merry, hearing of a song.

Duke S. If he, compact of jars,⁴ grow musical, We shall have shortly discord in the spheres:— Go, seek him; tell him, I would speak with him.

Enter JAQUES.

1. Lord. He saves my labour by his own approach. Duke S. Why, how now, monsieur! What a life is this,

That your poor friends must woo your company? What! you look merrily.

Jaq. A fool, a fool!—I met a fool i' the forest, A motley fool; —a miserable world!

As I do live by food, I met a fool; Who laid him down and bask'd him in the sun, And rail'd on lady Fortune in good terms,

In good set terms,—and yet a motley fool. Good-morrow, fool, quoth I: No, sir, quoth he, Call me not fool, till heaven hath sent me fortune:⁵ And then he drew a dial from his poke; And looking on it with lack-lustre eye,

1. Sir Thomas Hanmer reads *duc ad me*, i. e. bring him to me, which reading Johnson highly approves.

2. 'The firstborn of Egypt,' a proverbial expression for *high-born* persons; it is derived from Exodus, xii. 29.

3. So in Romeo and Juliet:—

‘— fall upon the ground, as I do now, Taking the measure of an unmade grave.’

4. i. e. made up of discords. In the Comedy of Errors we have ‘*compact* of credit,’ for made up of credulity.

5. Alluding to the proverb, *Fortuna favet fatus*, 'Fools have fortune.'

6. The fool was anciently dressed in a party-coloured coat.

7. So in Ben Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour:

‘And now and then breaks a dry biscuit jest, Which, that it may more easily be chew'd, He steeps in his own laughter,⁶’

Says, very wisely, *It is ten o'clock*:

Thus may we see, quoth he, *how the world wags*:

'Tis but an hour ago, since it was nine;

And after an hour more, 'twill be eleven;

And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot,

And thereby hangs a tale. When I did hear

The motley fool thus moral on the time,

My lungs began to crow like chanticleer,

That fools should be so deep-contemplative;

And I did laugh, sans intermission,

An hour by his dial.—O noble fool!

A worthy fool! Motley's the only wear.⁸

Duke S. What fool is this?

Jaq. O worthy fool! —One that hath been a courtier:

And says, if ladies be but young, and fair,
They have the gift to know it: and in his brain,—
Which is as dry as the remainder biscuit?

After a voyage,—he hath strange places cramm'd

With observation, the which he vents

In mangled forms:—O, that I were a fool!

I am ambitious for a motley coat.

Duke S. Thou shall have one.

Jaq. It is my only suit;⁹

Provided, that you weed your better judgments

Of all opinion that grows rank in them,

That 'tis a wise. I must have liberty

Withal, as large a charter as the wind,¹⁰

To blow on whom I please; for so fools have:

And they are most galled with my folly,

They most must laugh: And why, sir, must they so?

The *why* is plain as way to parish church:

He, that a fool doth very wisely hit,

Doth very foolishly, although he smart,

¹⁰Not to seem senseless of the bob: if not,

The wise man's folly is anatomiz'd

Even by the squand'ring glances of the fool.

Invest me in my motley; give me leave

To speak my mind, and I will through and through

Cleanse the foul body of the infected,¹¹

If they will patiently receive my medicine,

Duke S. Fye on thee! I can tell what thou wouldst do.

Jaq. What, for a counter,¹² would I do, but good?

Duke S. Most mischievous foul sin, in chiding sin:

For thou thyself hast been a libertine,

As sensual as the brutish sting,¹³ itself;

And all the embossed sores, and headed evils,

That thou with licence of free foot hast caught,

Wouldst thou disgorge into the general world.

Jaq. Why, who cries out on pride,

That can therein tax any private party?

Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea,

Till that the very very means do ebb,¹⁴

What woman in the city do I name,

When that I say, The city-woman bears

The cost of princes on unworthy shoulders?

Who can come in, and say, that I mean her,

When such a one as she, such is her neighbour?

Or what is of basest function,

That says, his bravery¹⁵ is not on my cost,

(Thinking that I mean him,¹⁶) but therein suits

His folly to the mettle of my speech?

S. 'My only *suit*, a quibble between petition and dress is here intended.

9. In Henry V. we have—

'The wind, that charter'd libertine, is still.'

10. The old copies read only, *seem senseless*, &c. not to be supplied by Theobald.

11. So in Macbeth:—

'Cleanse the stuff'd bosom of that perilous stuff.'

12. About the time when this play was written, the French *counters* (i. e. pieces of false money used as a means of reckoning) were brought into use in England. They are again mentioned in Troilus and Cressida, and in the Winter's Tale.

13. So in Spenser's Faerie Queene, b. i. c. xii.—

¹⁴ 'A herd of bulls whom kindly rage doth sting?'

14. The old copies read—

'Till that the *weary* very means do ebb, &c.

The emendation is by Pope.

15. Finery.

["## SCENE VII.", "AS YOU LIKE IT.", "245", "There then; How then, what then?¹¹ Let me see\nwherein", "My tongue hath wrong'd him: if it do him right,\nThen he hath wrong'd himself; if he be free,\nWhy then, my taxing, like a wild goose flies,\nUnclaim'd of any man.—But who comes here?", "*Enter ORLANDO, with his Sword drawn.*", "Orl. Forbear, and eat no more.", "Jaq. Why, I have eat none yet.", "Orl. Nor shall not, till necessity be serv'd.", "Jaq. Of what kind should this cock come of?", "Duke S. Art thou thus bolden'd, man, by thy\ndistress?", "Or else a rude despiser of good manners,", "That in civility thou seem'st so empty?", "Orl. You touch'd my vein at first; the thorny\npoint", "Of bare distress hath ta'en²² from me the show", "Of smooth civility; yet I am inland bred,³", "And know some nurture:⁴ But forbear, I say;", "He dies, that touches any of this fruit,", "Till I and my affairs are answered.", "Jaq. An you will not be answered with reason, I\nmust die.", "Duke S. What would you have? Your gentleness shall force,", "More than your force move us to gentleness.", "Orl. I almost die for food, and let me have it.", "Duke S. Sit down and feed, and welcome to our\ntable.", "Orl. Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray\nyou:", "I thought, that all things had been savage here;", "And therefore put I on the countenance", "Of stern commandment: But, whate'er you are,", "That in this desert inaccessible,⁵", "Under the shade of melancholy boughs,", "Lose and neglect the creeping hours of time;", "If ever you have look'd on better days,", "If ever been where bells have knoll'd to church;", "If ever sat at any good man's feast;", "If ever from your eye-lids wip'd a tear,", "And know what 'tis to pity, and be pitied;", "Let gentleness my strong enforcement be:", "In the which hope, I blush, and hide my sword.", "Duke S. True is it that we have seen better days;", "And have with holy bell been knoll'd to church;", "And sat at good men's feasts; and wip'd our eyes", "Of drops that sacred pity hath engender'd:", "And therefore sit you down in gentleness,", "And take upon command⁶ what help we have,", "That to your wanting may be ministered.", "Orl. Then, but forbear your food a little while,\nWhiles, like a doe, I go to find my fawn,", "And give it food.⁷ There is an old poor man,", "Who after me hath many a weary step", "Limp'd in pure love: till he be first suffic'd,—", "Oppress'd with two weak evils, age and hunger,—\nI will not touch a bit.", "Duke S. Go find him out,", "And we will nothing waste till you return.", "Orl. I thank ye; and be bless'd for your good\ncomfort! [Exit]", "Duke S. Thou seest, we are not all alone un-\nhappy:", "This wide and universal theatre", "Presents more woful pageants than the scene", "Wherein we play in.⁸", "Jaq.", "All the world's a stage,", "And all the men and women merely players:", "They have their exits, and their entrances;", "And one man in his time plays many parts,", "His acts being seven ages.⁹ At first, the infant,", "Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms;", "And then, the whining school-boy, with his satchel,", "And shining morning face, creeping like snail", "Unwillingly to school: and then, the lover;", "Sighing like furnace,¹⁰ with a woful ballad", "Made to his mistress' eye-brow: Then, a soldier;", "Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,", "Jealous in honour, sudden¹¹ and quick in quarrel,", "Seeking the bubble reputation", "Even in the cannon's mouth: And then, the justice;", "In fair round belly, with good capon lin'd,", "With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,", "Full of wise saws and modern¹² instances,", "And so he plays his part: The sixth age shifts", "Into the lean and slipper'd pantaloon;¹³", "With spectacles on nose, and pouch on side;", "His youthful hose well sav'd, a world too wide", "For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,", "Turning again toward childish treble, pipes", "And whistles in his sound: Last scene of all,", "That ends this strange eventful history,", "Is second childhood, and mere oblivion;", "Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans every thing.", "*Re-enter ORLANDO, with ADAM.*", "Duke S. Welcome: Set down your venerable\nburden,", "And let him feed.", "Orl. I thank you most for him.", "Adam. So had you need;", "I scarce can speak to thank you for myself.", "Duke S. Welcome, fall to: I will not trouble you\nAs yet, to question you about your fortunes:—", "Give us some music; and, good cousin, sing.", "AMIENS sings.", "## SONG.", "### I.", "Blow, blow, thou winter wind,", "Thou art not so unkind¹⁴", "As man's ingratitude;", "Thy tooth is not so keen,", "Because thou art not seen,¹⁵", "Although thy breath be rude.", "Heigh, ho! sing, heigh, ho! unto the green holly :", "Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly :", "Then, heigh, ho, the holly !", "This life is most jolly.", "### II.", "Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,", "Thou dost not bite so nigh", "As benefits forgot :", "1 Malone thinks we should read, *where then?* in this redundant line.", "2 'We might read torn with more elegance,' says Johnson, 'but elegance alone will not justify alteration.'", "3 *Inland* here, and elsewhere in this play, is opposite to *outland*, or *upland*. Orlando means to say that he had not been *bred among clowns*.", "4 *Nurture* is education, breeding, manners. 'It is a point of *nour tour* or *good manners* to salute them that you meet.'", "5 'This desert inaccessible.' So in the Adventures of Simonides, by Barnabe Riche, 1580; —and only acquainted himself with this *unaccessible desert*.'", "6 i. e. at your own command.", "7 So in Venus and Adonis—", "'Like a milch doe,' whose swelling dugs doake,\nHasting to feede her fawn.'", "8 Pleonasmbs of this kind were by no means uncommon in the writers of Shakspeare's age: 'I was afearde to what end his talke would come to?' *Baret.*", "9 In the old play of Damon and Pythias, we have— 'Pythagoras said, that this world was like a stage whereon many play their parts.'", "10 So in Cymbeline; 'He furnaceth the thick sighs from him.'", "11 One of the ancient senses of sudden is violent", "12 Trite, common, trivial.", "13 The pantaloon was a character in the old Italian farces; it represented, as Warburton observes, a thin emaciated old man in slippers.", "14 That is, thy action

246

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT III.

Though thou the waters warp,¹

Thy sting is not so sharp,

As friend remember'd not.²

Heigh, ho! sing, heigh, ho! &c.

**Duke S.** If that you were the good Sir Rowland's son,—

As you have whisper'd faithfully you were;
And as mine eye doth his effigies witness
Most truly limn'd, and living in your face,—
Be truly welcome hither: I am the duke,
That lov'd your father: The residue of your fortune,
Go to my cave and tell me.—Good old man,
Thou art right welcome as thy master is:
Support him by the arm.—Give me your hand,
And let me all your fortunes understand. [Exeunt.

ACT III.

### SCENE I. A Room in the Palace. Enter Duke FREDERICK, OLIVER, Lords, and Attendants.

**Duke F.** Not see him since? Sir, sir, that cannot be:

But were I not the better part made mercy,
I should not seek an absent argument³
Of my revenge, thou present: But look to it;
Find out thy brother, wheresoe'er he is;
Seek him with candle: bring him dead or living,
Within this twelvemonth, or turn thou no more
To seek a living in our territory.
Thy lands, and all things that thou dost call thine,
Worth seizure, do we seize into our hands;
Till thou canst quit thee by thy brother's mouth,
Of what we think against thee.

Oli, O, that your highness knew my heart in this?

I never lov'd my brother in my life.

**Duke F.** More villain thou.—Well, push him out of doors;

And let my officers of such a nature

Make an extent⁴ upon his house and lands:

Do this expediently,⁵ and turn him going. [Exeunt.

### SCENE II. The Forest. Enter ORLANDO, with a Paper.

Orl. Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love:

And thou, thrice-crowned queen of night,⁶ survey
With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above,
Thy huntress' name, that my full life doth sway.

O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books,

And in their barks my thoughts I'll character;

That every eye, which in this forest looks,

Shall see thy virtue witness'd every where.

Run, run, Orlando; carve, on every tree,
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive⁷ she. [Exit.

Enter CORIN and TOUCHSTONE.

**Corin.** And how like you this shepherd's life, master Touchstone?

**Touch.** Truly, shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a very vile life. Now in respect it is in the fields, it

1 'Though thou the waters warp.' Mr. Holt White has pointed out a Saxon adage in Hicke's Thesaurus, vol. p. 221; Winter shall warp water. So that Shakespeare's expression was anciently proverbial. To warp, from the Gothic *Wairpan*, jacere, proijicere, signified anciently to weave, as may be seen in Florio's Dict. v. ordire; or in Cotgrave v. *ourdir*. 'Though thou the waters warp,' may therefore be explained, as Mr. Nares suggests, 'Though thou weave the waters into a firm texture.'

2 'Remember'd' for remembering. So afterwards in Act III. Sc. ult. 'And now I am remember'd,' i. e. and now that I bethink me, &c.

3 The *argument* is used for the *contents* of a book; thence Shakespeare considered it as meaning the *subject*, and then used it for *subject* in another sense.

4 Seize by legal process.

5 i. e. *expeditiously*. Expedient is used by Shakespeare throughout his plays for *expeditious*.

6 This passage seems to evince a most intimate knowledge of ancient mythology, but Shakespeare was doubtless familiar with that fine racy old poet, Chapman's

pleaseth me well; but in respect it is not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there is no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach. Hast any philosophy in thee, shepherd?

Cor. No more, but that I know, the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is; and that he that wants money, means, and content, is without three good friends:—That the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn: That good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night, is lack of good art, may complain of a good breeding, or comes of a very dull kindred.

**Touch.** Such a one is a natural⁹ philosopher. Wast ever in court, shepherd?

Cor. No, truly.

**Touch.** Then thou art damn'd.

Cor. Nay, I hope,—

**Touch.** Truly, thou art damn'd; like an ill-roasted egg, all on one side.¹⁰

Cor. For not being at court? Your reason.

**Touch.** Why, if thou never wast at court, thou never saw't good manners; if thou never saw't good manners, then thy manners must be wicked; and wickedness is sin, and sin is damnation: Thou art in a parlous state, shepherd.

Cor. Not a whit, Touchstone: those, that are good manners at the court, are as ridiculous in the country, as the behaviour of the country is most mockable at the court. You told me, you salute not at the court, but you kiss your hands; that courtesy would be uncleanly, if courtiers were shepherds.

**Touch.** Instance, briefly; come, instance.

Cor. Why, we are still handling our ewes; and their fells, you know, are greasy.

**Touch.** Why, do not your courtier's hands sweat? and is not the grease of a mutton as wholesome as the sweat of a man? Shallow, shallow: A better instance, I say; come.

Cor. Besides, our hands are hard.

**Touch.** Your lips will feel them the sooner. Shallow, again: a more sounder instance, come.

Cor. And they are often tarr'd over with the surgery of our sheep; And would you have us kiss tar? The courtier's hands are prefumed with civet.

**Touch.** Most shallow man! Thou worms-meat, in respect of a good piece of flesh: Indeed!—Learn of the wise, and perpend: Civeſ is of a baser birth than far; the very uncleanly flux of a cat. Mend the instance, shepherd.

Cor. You have too courtly a wit for me; I'll rest.

**Touch.** Wilt thou rest damn'd? God help thee, shallow man! God make incision¹¹ in thee! thou art raw.¹²

Cor. Sir, I am a true labourer; I earn that I eat, get that I wear; owe no man hate, envy no man's happiness; glad of other men's good, content with my harm: and the greatest of my pride is, to see my ewes graze, and my lambs suck.

Hymns to Night and to Cynthia, which, though over-
learned with learning, have many highly poetical pas-
sages.

7 i. e. *inexpressible*.

8 'Of good breeding,' &c. The anomalous use of this preposition has been remarked on many occasions in these plays.

9 A *natural* being a common term for a fool, Touchstone evidently intended to quibble on the word.

10 'Touchstone,' says Malone, 'I apprehend only means to say, that Corin is completely damned; as irretrievably destroyed as an egg that is spoiled in the roasting, by being done on one side only.' With Johnson I must say, 'I do not fully comprehend the meaning of this jest.'

11 'God make incision in thee! thou art raw.' It has been ingeniously urged that *institution* or *grafling* is here meant, and that the phrase may be explained: 'God put knowledge into thee,'—but we want instances to confirm this. Steevens thought the allusion here was to the common expression of *cutting for the simples*; and the subsequent speech of Touchstone, 'That is another simple sin in you,' gives colour to this conjecture.

12 i. e. ignorant, unexperienced.

248

AS YOU LIKE IT.

Act III.

doublet and hose in my disposition? One inch of delay more is a South sea of discovery.¹ I pr’ythee, tell me who is it? quickly, and speak apace: I would thou couldst stammer, that thou might’t pour this concealed man out of thy mouth, as wine comes out of a narrow-mouth’d bottle; either too much at once, or none at all. I pr’ythee take the cork out of thy mouth, that I may drink thy tidings.

Cel. So you may put a man in your belly.

Ros. Is he of God’s making? What manner of man? Is his head worth a hat, or his chin worth a beard?

Cel. Nay, he hath but a little beard.

Ros. Why, God will send more if the man will be thankful: let me stay the growth of his beard, if thou delay me not the knowledge of his chin.

Cel. It is young Orlando; that tripp’d up the wrestler’s heels, and your heart, both in an instant.

Ros. Nay, but the devil take mocking; speak sad brow, and true maid.²

Cel. ’Phith, coz, ’tis he.

Ros. Orlando?

Cel. Orlando.

Ros. Alas the day! what shall I do with my doublet and hose?—What did he, when thou sawt him? What said he? How looked he? Wherein went he?³ What makes he here? Did he ask for me? Where remains he? How parted he with thee? and when shall thou see him again? Answer me in one word.

Cel. You must borrow me Garagantua’s⁴ mouth first: ’tis a word too great for any mouth of this age’s size: To say, ay, and no, to these particulars, is more than to answer in a catechism.

Ros. But doth he know that I am in this forest, and in man’s apparel? Looks he as freshly as he did the day he wrestled?

Cel. It is as easy to count atomies,⁵ as to resolve the propositions of a lover:—but take a taste of my finding him, and relish it with a good observance. I found him under a tree, like a dropp’d acorn.

Ros. It may well be call’d Jove’s tree, when it drops forth such fruit.

Cel. Give me audience, good madam.

Ros. Proceed.

Cel. There lay he, stretch’d along, like a wounded knight.

Ros. Though it be pity to see such a sight, it well becomes the ground.

Cel. Cry, holla!⁶ to thy tongue, I pr’ythee; it curvets very unseasonably. He was furnish’d like a hunter.

Ros. O ominous! he comes to kill my heart.⁷

Cel. I would sing my song without a burden: thou bring’st me out of tune.

Ros. Do you not know I am a woman? when I think, I must speak. Sweet, say on.

Enter ORLANDO and JAQUES.

Cel. You bring me out:—Soft! comes he not here?

Ros. ’Tis he; slink by, and note him.

[CELIA and ROSALIND retire.

Jaq. I thank you for your company; but, good faith, I had as lief have been myself alone.

Orl. And so had I; but yet, for fashion’s sake, I thank you too for your society.

Jaq. God be with you; let’s meet as little as we can.

milar to Goodness me! many such have been current in familiar speech at all times.

1 ‘A south sea of discovery,’ is not a discovery as far off, but as comprehensive as the South Sea, which being the largest in the world, affords the widest scope for exercising curiosity.

2 ‘Speak sad brow, and true maid,’ Speak seriously and honestly; or in other words, ‘speak with a serious countenance, and as truly as thou art a virgin.’

3 i. e. how was he dressed?

4 ‘Garagantua.’ The giant of Rabelais, who swallowed five pilgrims, their staves and all, in a salad.

5 ‘An atomie is a mote flying in the sunne. Any thing so small that it cannot be made lesse.’ *Butlokar’s English Expositor*, 1616.

Orl. I do desire we may be better strangers.

Jaq. I pray you, mar no more trees with writing love-songs in their barks.

Orl. I pray you, mar no more of my verses with reading them ill-favouredly.

Jaq. Rosalind is your love’s name?

Orl. Yes, just.

Jaq. I do not as high as my name.

Orl. There was no thought of pleasing you, when she was christen’d.

Jaq. What stature is she of?

Orl. Just as high as my heart.

Jaq. You are full of pretty answers: Have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths’ wives, and conn’d them out of rings?

Orl. Not so; but I answer you right painted cloth,⁵ from whence you have studied your questions.

Jaq. You have a nimble wit; I think it was made of Atalanta’s heels. Will you sit down with me? and we two will rail against our mistress the world, and all our misery.

Orl. I will chide no breather in the world, but myself; against whom I know most faults.

Jaq. The worst fault you have, is to be in love.

Orl. ’Tis a fault I will not change for your best virtue. I am weary of you.

Jaq. By my troth, I was seeking for a fool, when I found you.

Orl. He is drown’d in the brook; look but in and you shall see him.

Jaq. There shall I see mine own figure,

Orl. Which I take to be either a fool, or a cipher.

Jaq. I’ll tarry no longer with you: farewell, good signior love.

Orl. I am glad of your departure; adieu, good monsieur melancholy.

*[Exit] JAQ.—CEL. and Ross. come forward.*

Orl. I will speak to him like a saucy lacquey, and under that habit play the knave with him.—Do you hear, forester?

Orl. Very well; what would you?

Ros. I pray you, what is’t o’clock?

Orl. You should ask me, what time o’day; there’s no clock in the forest.

Ros. Then there is no true lover in the forest; else sighing every minute, and groaning every hour, would detect the lazy foot of time, as well as a clock.

Orl. And why not the swift foot of time? had not that been as proper?

Ros. By no means, sir: Time travels in divers paces with divers persons: I’ll tell you who time ambles withal, who time trots withal, who time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.

Orl. I pr’ythee, who doth he trot withal?

Ros. Marry, he trots hard with a young woman, between the contract of her marriage, and the day it is solemnized: if the interim be but a se’nnight, time’s pace is so hard that it seems the length of seven years.

Orl. Who ambles time withal.

Ros. With a priest that lacks Latin, and a rich man that hath not the gout; for the one sleeps easily, because he cannot study; and the other lives merrily, because he feels no pain: the one lacking the burden of lean and wasteful learning; the other knowing no burden of heavy tedious penury: These time ambles withal.

Orl. Who doth he gallop withal.

Ros. With a thief to the gallows: for though he

6 *Holla!* This was a term of the manage, by which the rider restrained and *stopped* his horse.

7 A quibble between *hart* and *heart*, then spelt the same.

8 To answer right painted cloth, is to answer sementiously. We still say she talks right Billingsgate. Painted cloth was a species of hangings for the walls of rooms, which has generally been supposed and explained to mean *tapestry*; but was really cloth or canvass painted with various devices and motos. The verses, motos, and proverbial sentences on such cloths are often made the subject of allusion in our old writers.

## SCENE III.

## AS YOU LIKE IT.

249

go as softly as foot can fall, he thinks himself too soon as there will be.

Orl. Who stays it there?

Ros. With lawyers in the vacation: for they sleep between term and term, and then they perceive not how time moves.

Orl. Where dwell you, pretty youth?

Ros. With this shepherdess, my sister; here in the skirts of the forest, like fringe upon a petticoat.

Orl. Are you a native of this place?

Ros. As the convey that you see dwell where she is kindled.

Orl. Your accent is something finer than you could purchase in so removed¹ a dwelling.

Ros. I have been told so of many: but, indeed, an old religious uncle of mine taught me to speak, who was in his youth an inland² man; one that knew courtship³ too well, for there he fell in love. I have heard him read many lectures against it; and I thank God, I am not a woman, to be touch'd with so many giddy offences as he hath generally tax'd their whole sex withal.

Orl. Can you remember any of the principal evils that he laid to the charge of women?

Ros. There were none principal; they were all like one another, as half-pence are; every one fault seeming monstrous, till his fellow fault came to match it.

Orl. I pr'y'thee, recount some of them.

Ros. No; I will not cast away my physic, but on those that are sick. There is a man haunts the forest, that abuses our young plants with carving Rosalind on their barks; hangs odes upon hawthorns, and elegies on brambles; all forsooth, deifying the name of Rosalind: if I could meet that fancymonger, I would give him some good counsel, for he seems to have the quotidian of love upon him.

Orl. I am he that is so love-shaked; I pray you tell me your remedy.

Ros. There is none of my uncle's marks upon you: he taught me how to know a man in love; in which cage of rushes, I am sure, you are not a prisoner.

Orl. What were his marks?

Ros. A lean cheek;⁴ which you have not: a blue eye,⁵ and sunken; which you have not: an unquestionable spirit;⁶ which you have not: a beard neglected; which you have not;—but I pardon you for that; for, simply, your having⁶ in beard is a younger brother's revenue:—Then your hose should be ungarter'd, your bonnet unbanded, your sleeve unbuttoned, your shoe untied, and every thing about you demonstrating a careless desolation.⁷ But you are no such man; you are rather point-device⁸ in your accoutrements; as loving yourself, than seeming the lover of any other.

Ros. Fair youth, I would I could make thee believe I love.

Ros. Me believe it! you may as soon make her that you love believe it; which, I warrant, she is after to do, than to confess she does: that is one of the points in which women still give the lie to their consciences. But, in good sooth, are you he that hangs the verses on the trees, wherein Rosalind is so admired?

1 i. e. sequestered.

2 i. e. civilized. See note on Act ii. Sc. 7.

3 *Courtship* is here used for *courty behaviour, couriership*. See Romeo and Juliet, Act iii. Sc. 3. The context shows that this is the sense:—'for there he fell in love'; i. e. *at court*.

4 i. e. a blueness about the eyes, an evidence of anxiety and dejection.

5 i. e. *a spirit averse to conversation*. Shakspeare often uses *question* for discourse, conversation, as in the next scene: 'I met the duke yesterday, and had much question with him.'

6 *Having* is possession, estate.

7 These seem to have been the established and characteristic marks of a lover in Shakspeare's time.

8 i. e. *precise*, *exact*; drest with finical nicety.

9 *Moonish*, that is, as changeable as the moon.

10 'If,' says Johnson, 'this be the true reading, we must by *living* understand *lasting* or *permanent*.¹¹ But

Orl. I swear to thee, youth, by the white hand of Rosalind, I am that he, that unfortunate he.

Ros. But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak?

Orl. Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much.

Ros. Love is merely a madness; and I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip, as mad-men do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured, is, that the lunacy is so ordinary, that the whippers are in love too: Yet I profess curing it by counsel.

Orl. Did you ever cure any so?

Ros. Yes, one; and in this manner. He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me: At which time would I, being but a moonish³ youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing, and liking; proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles; for every passion something, and for no passion truly any thing, as boys and women are for the most part cattle of this colour: would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; then I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love, to a living humour of madness;¹⁰ which was to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic: And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in't.

Orl. I would not be cured, youth.

Ros. I would cure you, if you would but call me Rosalind, and come every day to my cote, and woo me.

Orl. Now, by the faith of my love, I will: tell me where it is.

Ros. Go with me to it, and I'll show it you: and, by the way, you shall tell me where in the forest you live: Will you go?

Orl. With all my heart, good youth.

Ros. Nay, you must call me Rosalind:—Come, sister, will you go? [Exeunt.]

### SCENE III. Enter TOUCHSTONE and AUDREY;¹¹
JAQUES at a distance, observing them.

Touch. Come apace, good Audrey; I will fetch up your goats, Audrey: And how, Audrey? am I the man yet? Doth my simple feature content you?

Aud. Your features! Lord warrant us! what features?¹²

Touch. I am here with thee and thy goats, as the most capricious;¹³ poet, honest Ovid, was among the Goths.

Jaq. O knowledge ill-inhabited!¹⁴ worse than Jove in a thatch'd house! [Aside.]

Touch. When a man's verses cannot be understood, nor a man's good wit seconded with the forward child, understanding, it strikes a man more dead than a great reckoning in a little room:¹⁵—Truly, I would the gods had made thee poetical.

Aud. I do not know what poetical is: Is it honest in deed, and word? Is it a true thing?

he suspected that this passage was corrupt; that originally some antithesis was intended, which is now lost.

11 *Audrey* is a corruption of *Etheldreda*. The saint of that name is so styled in ancient calendars.

12 'What features!' Mr. Nares's explanation of this passage appears to be the true one, it is that 'the word feature is too learned for the comprehension of Audrey,' and she reiterates it with simple wonder.

13 Shakspeare remembered that *caper* was Latin for a goat, and thence chose this epithet. There is also a poor quibble between *goats* and *goths*.

14 *Ill-lodged.*

15 'A great reckoning in a little room.' Warburton, with his usual ingenuity, has found out a reference to the saying of Rabelais, that 'there was only one quarter of an hour in human life passed ill, and that was between the calling for a reckoning and the paying it.' Tavern jollity is interrupted by the coming in of a great reckoning, and there seems a sly insinuation that it could not be escaped from in a little room.

32

250

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT III.

Touch. No, truly, for the truest poetry is the most feigning; and lovers are given to poetry; and what they swear in poetry, may be said, as lovers, they do feign.¹

Aud. Do you wish, then, that the gods had made me poetical?

Touch. I do, truly: for thou swear'st to me thou art honest; now, if thou wert a poet, I might have some hope thou didst feign.

Aud. Would you not have me honest?

Touch. No truly, unless thou wert hard favour'd: for honesty coupled to beauty, is to have honey a sauce to sugar.

Jaq. A material fool!²

[Aside.]

Aud. Well, I am not fair; and therefore I pray the gods make me honest!

Touch. Truly, and to cast away honesty upon a foul slut, were to put good meat into an unclean dish.

Aud. I am not a slut, though I thank the gods I am foul,³

Touch. Well, praised be the gods for thy foulness! sluttishness may come hereafter. But be it as it may be, I will marry thee: and to that end, I have been with Sir Oliver Mar-text, the vicar of the next village; who hath promised to meet me in this place of the forest, and to couple us.

Jaq. I would fain see this meeting.

[Aside.]

Aud. Well, the gods give us joy!

Touch. Amen. A man may if he were of a fearful heart, stagger in this attempt; for here we have no temple but the wood, no assembly but hornbeasts. But what though? Courage! As horns are odious, they are necessary. It is said,—Many a man knows no end of his goods: right; many a man has good horns, and knows no end of them. Well, that is the dowry of his wife; 'tis none of his own getting. Horns? Even so:—Poor men alone?—No, no; the noblest deer hath them as huge as the rascal.⁴ Is the single man therefore blessed? No: as a wall'd town is more worthier than a village, so is the forehead of a married man more honourable than the bare brow of a bachelor: and by how much defence⁵ is better than no skill, by so much is a horn more precious than to want.

Enter SIR⁶ OLIVER MAR-TEXT.

Here comes Sir Oliver:—Sir Oliver Mar-text, you are well met: Will you dispatch us here under this tree, or shall we go with you to your chapel?

Sir Oli. Is there none here to give the woman?

Touch. I will not take her on gift of any man.

Sir Oli. Truly, she must be given, or the marriage is not lawful.

Jaq. [Discovering himself.] Proceed, proceed; I'll give her.

Touch. Good even, good master *What ye call't* How do you, sir? You are very well met: God'll you' for your last company: I am very glad to see you:—Even a toy in hand here, sir:—Nay; pray be cover'd.

Jaq. Will you be married, Motley?

Touch. As the ox hath his bow,⁶ sir, the horse his curb, and the falcon her bells, so man hath his desires; and as pigeons bill, so wedlock would be nibbling.

1 This should probably be read—‘it may be said, as lovers they do feign.’

2 ‘A material fool,’ is a fool with matter in him.

3 ‘I thank the gods I am foul.’ The humour of this passage has, I think, been missed by the commentators. Audrey in the simplicity of her heart here ‘thanks the gods amiss;’ mistaking *foulness*, for some notable virtue, or commendable quality. But indeed *foul* was an- ciently used in opposition to *fair*, the one signifying *homely*, the other *handsome*.

4 Lean deer are called *rascal* deer.

5 I. e. the art of fencing.

6 ‘Sir Oliver.’ This title, it has been already observed, was formerly applied to priests and curates in general. See notes on Merry Wives of Windsor, Act. i. Sc. 1.

7 I. e. God yield you, God reward you.

8 I. e. his *yoke*, which, in ancient time, resembled a bow or branching horns. See note on Merry Wives of Windsor, Act v. Sc. 5.

Jaq. And will you, being a man of your breeding, be married under a bush, like a beggar? Get you to church, and have a good priest that can tell you what marriage is: this fellow will but join you together as they join wainscot; then one of you will prove a shrunk panel, and, like green timber, warp, warp.

Touch. I am not in the mind but I were better to be married of him than of another: for he is not like to marry me well; and not being well married, it will be a good excuse for me hereafter to leave my wife.

Jaq. Go thou with me, and let me counsel thee.

[Aside.]

Touch. Come, sweet Audrey;

We must be married, or we must live in bawdry.

Farewell, good master Oliver!

Not—O sweet Oliver,

O brave Oliver,

Leave me not behind thee:

But—wind away,

Begone, I say,

I will not to wedding with thee.⁹

[Exeunt] JAQ. TOUCH. and AUDREY.

Sir Oli. 'Tis no matter; ne'er a fantastical knave of them all shall flout me out of my calling. [Exits.]

### SCENE IV. The same. Before a Cottage. Enter ROSALIND and CELIA.

Ros. Never talk to me, I will weep.

Cel. Do, I pr'ythee; but yet have the grace to consider, that tears do not become a man.

Ros. But have I not cause to weep?

Cel. As good cause as one would desire; therefore weep.

Ros. His very hair is of the dissembling colour.

Cel. Something browner than Judas's:¹⁰ marry, his kisses are Judas's own children.

Ros. I'faith, his hair is of a good colour.

Cel. An excellent colour: your chestnut was ever the only colour.

Ros. And his kissing is as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread.

Cel. He hath bought a pair of cast lips of Diana: a nun of winter's sisterhood kisses not more religiously; the very ice of chastity is in them.¹¹

Ros. But why did he swear he would come this morning, and comes not?

Cel. Nay, certainly, there is no truth in him.

Ros. Do you think so?

Cel. Yes: I think he is not a pick-purse, nor a horse-stealer; but for his verity in love, I do think him as concave as a cover'd goblet, or a worm-eaten nut.

Ros. Not true in love?

Cel. Yes, when he is in; but, I think he is not in.

Ros. You have heard him swear downright, he was.

Cel. *Was* as not *is*: besides the oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster; they are both the confirmer of false reckonings; He attends here in the forest on the duke your father.

Ros. I met the duke yesterday, and had much question¹² with him. He asked me of what parentage I was; I told him, of as good as he; so he laugh'd, and let me go. But what talk we of fathers, when there is such a man as Orlando?

9 The ballad of ‘O sweete Olyver, leave me not behind thee,’ and the answer to it, are entered on the Stationers' books in 1584 and 1586. Touchstone says I will sing—not that part of the ballad which says—‘Leave me not behind thee; but that which says—’ Begone, I say,’ probably part of the answer.

10 It has been already observed, in a note on The Merry Wives of Windsor, that Judas was constantly represented in old paintings and tapestry, with red hair and *beard*.

11 Surely this speech is sufficiently intelligible without the blundering of Theobald or the pediatric refinement of Warburton? There is humour in the expression *cast tips*; which Theobald rightly explained *left off*, as we still say *cast* clothes. Who would ever dream of taking this figurative passage in its literal meaning? The nun of *winter's* sisterhood, with the very *ice* of chastity in her lips, needs no explanation.

12 *Question* is conversation.

SCENE V.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

251

Cel. O that's a brave man! he writes brave verses,
speaks brave words, sweats brave oaths, and breaks
them bravely, quite traverse, athwart' the heart of
his lover; '2 as a puny tilter, that spurs his horse but
on one side, breaks his staff like a noble goose: '3
but all's brave, that young mounts, and folly guides:
—Who comes here?

Enter CORIN.

Cor. Mistress, and master, you have oft inquired
After the shepherd that complain'd of love;
Who you saw sitting by me on the turf,
Praising the proud disdainful shepherdess
That was his mistress.

Cel.

Well, and what of him ?

Cor. If you will see a pageant truly play'd,

Between the pale complexion of true love
And the red glow of scorn and proud disdain,
Go hence a little, and I shall conduct you,
If you will mark it.

Ros.

O, come, let us remove ;

The sight of lovers feedeth those in love :—
Bring us unto this sight, and you shall say
I'll prove a busy actor in their play.

[Exeunt.]

SCENE V. *Another part of the Forest. Enter SILVIUS and PHEBE.*

Sil. Sweet Phebe, do not scorn me; do not, Phebe:
Say, that you love me not; but say not so
In bitterness. The common executioner,
Whose heart the acoustum'd sight of death makes
hard,

Falls not the axe upon the humbled neck,
But first begs pardon; Will you sterner be
Than he that dies and lives⁴ by bloody drops?

Enter ROSALIND, CELIA, and CORIX, at a distance.

Phe. I would not be the executioner :

I fly thee, for I would not injure thee.

Thy pretty, sure, and very probable,

'Tis that eyes, 'tis the frail't and freshest things,
Who shut their coward gates on atomies,—
Should he call'd tyrants, butchers, murderers!

Now I do frown on thee with all my heart ;

And, if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee ;

Now counterfeit to swoon ; why now fall down ;

Or, if thou cannot, O, for shame, for shame,

Lie not, to say mine eyes are murderer.

Now show the wound mine eye hath made in thee :

Scratch thee but with a pin, and there remains

Some scar of it; lean but upon a rush,

The cicatrice and palpable¹⁰ impressure

Thy palm some moment keeps: but now mine eyes,
Which I have darted at thee, hurt thee not ;

Nor, I am sure, there is no force in eyes

That can do hurt.

Sil.

O dear Phebe,

If ever, (as that ever may be near,)

You meet in some fresh cheek the power of fancy,

Then shall you know the wounds invisible

That love's keen arrows make.

Phe.

But, till that time,

Come not thou near me : and, when that time comes,
Afflict me with thy mocks, pity me not ;

As, till that time, I would not pity thee.

Ros. And why, I pray you? [Advancing.] Who
might be your mother,

That you insult, exult, and all at ence,

Over the wretched? What though? you have no
beauty?

(As, by my faith, I see no more in you

Than without candle may go dark to bed,)

Must you be therefore proud and pitiless?

Why, what means this? Why do you look on me ?

I see no more in you, than in the ordinary

Of nature's sale-work:—Od's my little life !

I think she means to tangle my eyes too :

No, 'faith, proud mistress, hope not after it ;

'Tis not your inky brows, your black silk-hair,

Your bugle eye-balls, nor your cheek of cream,

That can entame our spirits to your worship,—
You foolish shepherd, wherefore do you follow her,
Like foggy south, puffing with wind and rain ?

You are a thousand times a properer man,

Than she a woman: 'Tis such fools as you,

That make the world full of ill-favour'd children:

'Tis not her glass but you that flatters her ;

And out of you she sees herself more proper,

Than any of her lineaments can show her.—

But mistress, know yourself; down on your knees

And thank heaven fasting, for a good man's love :

For I must tell you friendly in your ear,—

Sell when you can; you are not for all markets :

Cry the man mercy; love him; take his offer ;

Foul is most foul, being foul to be a scaffer.⁹

So take her to her shepherd:—fare you well.

Phe. Sweet youth, I pray you chide a year together;

I had rather hear you chide than this man woo.

Ros. He's fallen in love with her foulness, and
she'll fall in love with my anger: If it be so, as fast
as she answers thee with frowning looks, I'll sauce
her with bitter words.—Why look you so upon me ?

Phe. For no ill will I bear you.

Ros. I pray you, do not fall in love with me,

For I am falser than vows made in wine :

Besides, I like you not: If you will know my house,

'Tis at the tuft of olives, here hard by :—

Will you go, sister ?—Shepherd, ply her hard :—

Come, sister :—Shepherdess, look on him better,

And is not proud: though all the world could see,

None could be so abus'd in sight as he.⁹

Come, to our flock.

[Exeunt ROSALIND, CELIA, and CORIN.

Phe. Dead shepherd! now I find thy saw of
might;

Who ever lov'd, that lov'd not at first sight ?¹⁰

Sil. Sweet Phebe,—

Phe. Ha! what say'st thou, Silvius?

Sil. Sweet Phebe, pity me.

Phe. Why, I am sorry for thee, gentle Silvius.

Sil. Wherever sorrow is, relief would be ;

If you do sorrow at my grief in love,

By giving love, your sorrow and my grief

Were both extermin'd.

Phe. Thou hast my love ; is not that neighbourly ?

Sil. I would have you.

Phe.

Why, that were covetousness.

Silvius, the time was, that I hated thee ;

And yet it is not, that I bear thee love ;

But since that thou canst talk of love so well,

Thy company, which erst was irksome to me,

I will endure ; and I'll employ thee too :

used for skin mark, which is in fact a scar, though not
an indelible one.

6. Love.

7: What though ? you have no beauty. This is the
reading of the old copy, which Malone thought erro-
neous, and proposed to read mo' beauty; Steevens
adopted his emendation, and reads more. This is cer-
tainly wrong; the whole of Rosalind's spirited address
to Phebe tends to the disparagement of her beauty, and
whoever reads it with attention will conclude with me
that the old copy is right.

8 That is, says Johnson, 'The ugly seem most ugly,
when, though ugly, they are scoffers.'

9 If all men could see you, none could be so deceived
as to think you beautiful but he.

10 This line is from Marlowe's beautiful poem of
Hero and Leander, left unfinished at his death in 1592,
and first published in 1598, when it became very popu-
lar.

1 When the tilter, by unsteadiness or awkwardness,
suffered his spear to be turned out of its direction, and
to the broken across the body of his adversary, instead
of by the push of the point, it was held very disgraceful.

2 i. e. *mistress*.

3 Sir Thomas Hanmer proposed to read 'nose-quilled
goose,' which has received some support from Farmer
and Steevens.

4 i. e. he who to the very end of life, continues a com-
mon executioner. So in the second Scene of Act. v. of
this play:—'I live and die a shepherd.'

5 The cicatrice and palpable impressure. The old
copy reads 'capable impressure.' I think it is evident
we should read palpable. For one can surely be
satisfied with the strained explanations offered by John-
son and Malone. Cicatrice, however improperly, is

252

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT IV.

But do not look for further recompense,
Than thine own gladness that thou art employ'd.

*Sil.* So holy, and so perfect is my love,

And I in such a poverty of grace,
That I shall think it a most plenteous crop

To glean the broken ears after the man
That the main harvest reaps: loose now and then
A scatter'd smile, and that I'll live upon.

*Phe.* Know'st thou the youth that spoke to me
erewhile?

*Sil.* Not very well, but I have met him oft:

And he hath bought the cottage, and the bounds,
That the old carlot¹ once was master of.

*Phe.* Think not I love him, though I ask for him;
'Tis but a peevish² boy :—yet he talks well;—
But what care I for words? yet words do well,
When he that speaks them pleases those that hear.
It is a pretty youth :—not very pretty :—
But, sure, he's proud; and yet his pride becomes
him:

He'll make a proper man: The best thing in him
Is his complexion; and faster than his tongue
Did make offence, his eye did heal it up.

He is not very tall; yet for his years he's tall:
His leg is but so so; and yet 'tis well:
There was a pretty redness in his lip;

A little riper and more lusty red
Than that mix'd in his cheek; 'twas just the dif-
ference

Betwixt the constant red, and mingled damask.
There be some women, Silvius, had they mark'd
him:

In parcels as I did, would have gone near
To fall in love with him; but, for my part,
I love him not, nor hate him not; and yet
I have more cause to hate him than to love him:
For what had he to do to chide at me?

He said, mine eyes were black, and my hair black;
And, now I am remember'd, scorn'd at me:

I marvel, why I answer'd not again:
But that's all one; omittance is no quittance.
I'll write to him a very taunting letter,

And thou shall bear it; Wilt thou, Silvius?

*Sil.* Phebe, with all my heart.

*Phe.*

The matter's in my head, and in my heart:

I will be bitter with him, and passing short:
Go with me, Silvius.

[Exeunt]

ACT IV.

SCENE I. The same. Enter ROSALIND, Celia and JAQUES.

Jaq. I 'pr'ythee, pretty youth, let me be better
acquainted with thee.

*Ros.* They say, you are a melancholy fellow.

*Jaq.* I am so; I do love it better than laughing.

*Ros.* Those that are in extremity of either, are
abominable fellows; and betray themselves to eve-
ry modern³ censure, worse than drunkards.

*Jaq.* Why, 'tis good to be sad and say nothing.

*Ros.* Why then, 'tis good to be a post.

*Jaq.* I have neither the scholar's melancholy,
which is emulation; nor the musician's, which is
fantastical; nor the courtier's, which is proud;
nor the soldier's, which is ambitious; nor the law-
yer's, which is politic; nor the lady's, which is
nice;⁴ nor the lover's, which is all these: but it is
a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many
simples, extracted from many objects; and, indeed,
the sundry contemplation of my travels; which,
by often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous
sadness.⁵

1 *Carlot.* This is printed in Italics as a proper name in the old edition. It is however apparently formed from *carle* a peasant.

2 *i. e.* weak, silly.

3 *i. e.* common, trifling.

4 *Nice,* here means tender, delicate, and not silly, trifling, as Steevens supposed; though the word is occasionally used by Shakspeare in common with Chaucer, in the sense of the old French *nice* *niais*.

5 *The old copy reads and points thus :—* and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, *in which by*

*Ros.* A traveller! By my faith, you have great
reason to be sad; I fear you have sold your own
lands, to see other men's; then, to have seen much,
and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor
hands.

*Jaq.* Yes, I have gained my experience.

Enter ORLANDO.

*Ros.* And your experience makes me sad: I had
rather have a fool to make me merry, than experi-
ence to make me sad; and to travel for it too.

*Jaq.* Good day, and happiness, dear Rosalind!

*Jaq.* Nay, then, God be w' you, an you talk in
blank verse.

[Exit.]

*Ros.* Farewell, monsieur traveller: Look, you
lisp, and wear strange suits: disable⁶ all the bene-
fits of your own country; be out of love with your
nativity, and almost chide God for making you that
countenance you are; or I will scarce think you
have swam in a gondola.—Why, how now, Orfan-
do! where have you been all this while? You a
lover?—An you serve me such another trick, never
come in my sight more.

*Orl.* My fair Rosalind, I come within an hour of
my promise.

*Ros.* Break an hour's promise in love? He that
will divide a minute into a thousand parts, and
break but a part of the thousandth part of a minute
in the affairs of love, it may be said of him, that
Cupid hath clapp'd him o' the shoulder, but I war-
rant him heart-whole.

*Orl.* Pardon me, dear Rosalnd,

*Ros.* Nay, an you be so tardy, come no more in
my sight: I had as lief be woo'd of a snail.

*Orl.* Of a snail?

*Ros.* Ay, of a snail; for though he comes slowly,
he carries his house on his head: a better jointure,
I think, than you can make a woman: Besides, he
brings his destiny with him.

*Orl.* What's that?

*Ros.* Why, horns, which such as you are fair
to be beholden to your wives for: but he comes
armed in his fortune, and prevents the slander of
his wife,

*Orl.* Virtue is no horn-maker; and my Rosalind
is virtuous.

*Ros.* And I am your Rosalind.

*Cel.* It pleases him to call you so; but he hath a
Rosalind of a better leer⁷ than you.

*Ros.* Come, woo me, woo me; for now I am in a
holiday humour, and like enough to consent:
What would you say to me now, an I were your
very very Rosalind?

*Orl.* I would kiss, before I spoke.

*Ros.* Nay, you were better speak first; and when
you were gravelled for lack of matter, you might
take occasion to kiss. Very good orators, when
they are out, they will spit; and for lovers, lacking
(God warn us!) matter, the cleanliest shift is to
kiss.

*Orl.* How if the kiss be denied?

*Ros.* Then she puts you to entreaty, and there
begins new matter.

*Orl.* Who could be out, being before his beloved
mistress?

*Ros.* Marry, that should you, if I were your mis-
tress; or I should think my honesty ranker than
my wit.

*Orl.* What, of my suit?

*Ros.* Not out of your apparel, and yet out of
your suit. Am not I your Rosalind?

*Orl.* I take some joy to say you are, because I
would be talking of her.

*Ros.* Well, in her person, I say—I will not have
you.

often rumination, wraps me in a most humorous sad-
ness.' The emendation is Malone's.

6 *i. e.* undervale.

7 *i. e.* been at Venice; then the resort of all travellers,
as Paris now. Shakspeare's temporaries also point
their shafts at the corruption of our youth by travel.
Bishop Hall wrote his little book *Quo Vadis?* to stem
the fashion.

8 *i. e.* complexion colour,

## SCENE II.

AS YOU LIKE IT.

253

Orl. Then, in mine own person, I die.

Ros. No, faith, die by attorney. The poor world is almost six thousand years old, and in all this time there was not any man died in his own person, *videlicet*, in a love-cause. Troilus had his brains dashed out with a Greecian club; yet he did what he could to die before; and he is one of the patterns of love. Leander, he would have lived many a fair year, though Hero had turned nun, if it had not been for a hot midsummer night: for, good youth, he went but forth to wash him in the Hellespont, and, being taken with the cramp, was drounped; and the foolish chroniclers¹ of that age found it was—Hero of Sestos. But these are all lies; men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

Orl. I would not have my right Rosalind of this mind; for, I protest, her frown might kill me.

Ros. By this hand, it will not kill a fly: But come, now I will be your Rosalind in a more coming-on disposition; and ask me what you will, I will grant it.

Orl. Then love me, Rosalind.

Ros. Yes, faith will I, Fridays, and Saturdays, and all.

Orl. And wilt thou have me?

Ros. Ay, and twenty such.

Orl. What say'st thou?

Ros. Are you not good?

Orl. I hope so.

Ros. Why, then, can one desire too much of a good thing?—Come, sister, you shall be the priest, and marry us.—Give me your hand, Orlando:—What do you say, sister?

Orl. Pray thee, marry us.

Cel. I cannot say the words.

Ros. You must begin,—Will you, Orlando,—

Cel. Go to:—Will you, Orlando, have to wife this Rosalind?

Orl. I will.

Ros. Ay, but when?

Orl. Why now; as fast as she can marry us.

Ros. Then you must say,—I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.

Orl. I take thee, Rosalind, for wife.

Ros. I might ask you for your commission; but —I do take thee, Orlando, for my husband: There a girl goes before the priest; and, certainly, a man's thought runs before her actions.

Ros. So do all thoughts; they are winged.

Ros. Now tell me, how long you would have her after you have possessed her.

Orl. For ever and a day.

Ros. Say a day, without the ever: No, no, Orlando; men are April when they woo: December when they wed; maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives. I will be more jealous of thee than a barbary cock-pigeon over his hen; more clamorous than a parrot against rain; more new-fangled than an ape; more giddy in my desires than a monkey: I will weep for nothing, like Diana in the fountain;² and I will do that when you are disposed to be merry: I will laugh like a hyena,³ and that when thou art inclined to sleep.

Orl. But will my Rosalind do so?

Ros. By my life, she will do as I do.

Orl. O, but she is wise.

1 'The foolish chroniclers.' Sir Thomas Hanmer reads *coroners*; and it must be confessed the context seems to warrant the innovation, unless Shakspeare means to designate the *jury* impaneled on a coroner's inquest by the term *chroniclers*.

2 Figures, and particularly that of *Diana*, with water conveyed through them, were anciently a frequent ornament of fountains.

3 The bark of the hyena was thought to resemble a loud laugh.

4 i. e. *bar* the doors.

5 'Wit, whither wilt?' This was a kind of prover-bial phrase, the origin of which has not been traced. It seems to be used chiefly to express a want of command over the fancy or inventive faculty. It occurs in many writers of Shakspeare's time.

Ros. Or else she could not have the wit to do this: the wiser, the wayward: Make the doors⁴ upon a woman's wit, and it will out at the casement; shut that, and 'twill out at the key-hole: stop that, 'twill fly with the smoke out at the chimney.

Orl. A man that had a wife with such a wit, he might say,—*Wit, whither wilt?*⁵

Ros. Nay, you might keep that check for it, till you met your wife's wit going to your neighbour's bed.

Orl. And what wit could wit have to excuse that?

Ros. Marry, to say,—she came to seek you there. You shall never take her without her answer,⁶ unless you take her without her tongue. O, that woman that cannot make her fault her husband's occasion,⁷ let her never nurse her child herself, for she will breed it like a fool.

Orl. For these two hours, Rosalind, I will leave thee.

Ros. Alas, dear love, I cannot lack thee two hours.

Orl. I must attend the duke at dinner; by two o'clock I will be with thee again.

Ros. Ay, go your ways, go your ways;—I knew what you would prove; my friends told me as much, and I thought no less:—that flattering tongue of yours won me:—'tis but one cast away, and so,—come, death.—Two o'clock is your hour?

Orl. Ay, sweet Rosalind.

Ros. By my troth, and in good earnest, and so God mend me, and by all pretty oaths that are not dangerous, if you break one jot of your promise, or come one minute behind your hour, I will think you the most pathetical⁸ break-promise, and the most hollow lover, and the most unworthy of her you call Rosalind, that may be chosen out of the gross band of the unfaithful: therefore beware my censure, and keep your promise.

Orl. With no less religion, than if thou wert indeed my Rosalind: So, adieu.

Ros. Well, time is the old justice that examines all such offenders, and let time try: Adieu!

[Exit ORLANDO.

Cel. You have simply misus'd our sex in your love prate: we must have your doublet and hose pluck'd over your head, and show the world what the bird hath done with her own nest.⁹

Ros. O coz, coz, coz, my pretty little coz, that thou didst know how many fathom deep I am in love! But it cannot be sounded; my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the bay of Portugal.

Cel. Or rather, bottomless; that as fast as you pour affection in, it runs out.

Ros. No, that same wicked bastard of Venus, that was begot of thought, conceived of spleen, and born of madness; that blind rascally boy, that abuses every one's eyes, because his own are out, let him be judge, how deep I am in love:—I'll tell thee, Aliena, I cannot be out of the sight of Orlando: I'll go find a shadow,¹⁰ and sigh till he come.

Cel. And I'll sleep.

[Exeunt.

## SCENE II. Another part of the Forest. Enter JAQUES and Lords, in the habit of Foresters.

Jaq. Which is he that kill'd the deer?

1 Lord. Sir, it was I.

Jaq. Let's present him to the duke, like a Roman conqueror; and it would do well to set the deer's

6 This bit of satire is also to be found in Chaucer's *Marchantes Tale*, where Proserpine says of women on like occasion:

'For lacke of answerse none of us shall dien.'

7 i. e. represent her fault as occasioned by her husband. Hanmer reads, her husband's accusation.

8 *Pathetical* and *passionate* were used in the same sense in Shakspeare's time. Whether Rosalind has any more meaning than Costard in the use of the word when he calls Armado's boy *a most pathetical* nit.' I leave the reader to judge.

9 This is borrowed from Lodge's Rosalynnd.

10 So in Macheth:

'Let us seek out some desolate *shade*, and there Weep our sad bosoms empty.'

["254", "AS YOU LIKE IT.", "ACT IV.", "horns upon his head, for a branch of victory:—\nHave you no song, forester, for this purpose?", "2. Lord. Yes, sir.", "Jaq. Sing it; 'tis no matter how it be in tune, so\nit makes noise enough.", "### SONG.", "1. What shall he have that kill'd the deer ?", "2. His leather skin, and horns to wear.", "1. Then sing him home:\nTake thou no scorn, to wear the horn;\nIt was a crest ere thou wast born;\n1. Thy father's father wore it; 2. And thy father bore it:", "All. The horn, the horn, the lusty horn,", "Is not a thing to laugh to scorn.¹", "[Exeunt.]", "### SCENE III. The Forest. Enter ROSALIND and CELIA.", "Ros. How say you now? Is it not past two o'clock? and here much Orlando?²", "Cel. I warrant you, with pure love, and troubled\nbrain, he hath ta'en his bow and arrows, and is gone\nforth—to sleep; Look, who comes here.", "### Enter SILVIUS.", "Sil. My errand is to you, fair youth :—", "My gentle Phebe, bid me give you this :", "[Giving a letter.", "I know not the contents; but as I guess,\nBy the stern brow, and waspish action\nWhich she did use as she was writing of it,\nIt bears an angry tenour: pardon me,\nI am but as a giltless messenger.", "Ros. Patience herself would startle at this letter,\nAnd play the swaggerer; bear this, bear all!", "", "She says, I am not fair; that I lack manners;", "She calls me proud; and, that she could not love me\nWere man as rare as phoenix: Od's my will!", "Her love is not the hare that I do hunt :", "Why writes she so to me ?—Well, shepherd, well,\nThis is a letter of your own device.", "Sil. No, I protest, I know not the contents;\nShe did write it.³", "", "Ros. Come, come, you are a fool,", "And turn'd into the extremity of love.", "I saw her hand: she has a leathern hand,", "A freestone-colour'd hand; I verify do think", "That her old gloves were on, but 'twas her hands;", "She has a huswife's hand : but that's no matter :", "I say, she never did invent this letter ;", "This is a man's invention, and his hand.", "Sil. Sure, it is hers.", "Ros. Why, 'tis a boisterous and a cruel style,", "A style for challengers: why, she defies me,", "Like Turk to Christian: woman's gentle brain", "Could not drop forth such giant-rude invention,", "Such Ethiop words, blacker in their effect\nThan in their countenance :—Will you hear the\nletter?", "Sil. So please you, for I never heard it yet :", "Yet heard too much of Phebe's cruelty.", "Ros. She Phebes me: Mark how the tyrant\nwrites.", "Art thou god to shepherd turn'd,", "[Reads.]", "That a maiden's heart hath burn'd?", "Can a woman rail thus?", "Sil. Call you this railing ?", "Ros. Why, thy godhead laid apart,", "Warr'st thou with a woman's heart?", "1 In Playford's Musical Companion, 1673, where this\nsong is set to music by John Hilton, the words 'Then\nsing him home' are omitted, and it should be remarked\nthat in the old copy, these words, and those which have\nbeen regarded by the editors as a stage direction, are\ngiven in one line.", "2 i. e. here is no Orlando. Much was a common\nironical expression of doubt or suspicion, still used by\nthe vulgar in the same sense; as, 'much of that.'", "3 Mason thinks that part of Silvius's speech is lost,\nand that we should read—", "'Phebe did write it with her own fair hand.'", "and then Rosalind's reply follows more naturally.", "4 i. e. mischief.", "8 Kind, for nature, or natural affections.", "Did you ever hear such railing ?—", "Whiles the eye of man did woo me,", "That could do no vengeance⁴ to me—", "Meaning me, a beast—", "If the scorn of your bright eyne⁵", "Have power to raise such love in mine,", "Alack, in me what strange effect", "Would they work in mild aspect?", "Whiles you chid me, I did love;", "How then might your prayers move ?", "He, that brings this love to thee,", "Little knows this love in me :", "And by him seal up thy mind;", "Whether that thy youth and kind⁶", "Will the faithful offer take", "Of me, and all that I can make;", "Or else by him my love deny,", "And then I'll study how to die.", "Sil. Call you this chiding?", "Cel. Alas, poor shepherd!", "Ros. Do you pity him ? no, he deserves no pity.—", "Wilt thou love such a woman ?—What, to make\nthee an instrument, and play false strains upon thee !\nnot to be endured !—Well, go your way to her, (for\nI see, love hath made thee a tame snake,') and say\nthis to her ;—That if she love me, I charge her to\nlove thee ; if she will not, I will never have her,\nunless thou entreat for her.—If you be a true lover,\nhence, and not a word; for here comes more com-\npany.", "[Exit SILVIUS.]", "### Enter OLIVER.", "Oli. Good-morrow, fair ones: Pray you, if you", "know", "Where, in the purliews of this forest, stands", "A sheep-cote, fenc'd about with olive-trees?", "Cel. West of this place, down in the neighbour\nbottom,", "The rank of osiers, by the murmuring stream,\nLeft on your right hand, brings you to the place:", "But at this hour the house doth keep itself,", "There's none within.", "Oli. If that an eye may profit by a tongue,", "Then I should know you by description;", "Such garments, and such years: The boy is fair,", "Of female favour, and bestows⁷ himself", "Like a ripe sister : but the woman low,", "And browner than her brother. Are not you", "The owner of the house I did inquire for?", "Cel. It is no boast, being ask'd, to say, we are.", "Oli. Orlando doth commend him to you both;", "And to that youth, he calls his Rosalind,", "He sends this bloody napkin;⁹ Are you he?", "Ros. I am: What must we understand by this?", "Oli. Some of my shame; if you will know of me", "What man I am, and how, and why, and where", "This handkerchief was stain'd.", "Cel. I pray you, tell it.", "Oli. When last the young Orlando parted from\nyou,", "He left a promise to return again", "Within an hour; and, pacing through the forest,", "Chewing the food of sweet and bitter fancy,¹⁰", "Lo, what he befell! he threw his eye aside,", "And, mark, what object did present itself!", "Under an oak,¹¹ whose boughs were moss'd with age,", "And high top bald with dry antiquity,", "A wretched ragged man, o'ergrown with hair,", "Lay sleeping on his back: about his neck", "A green and gilded snake had wreath'd itself,", "7 A poor snake was a term of reproach equivalent to\na wratch or poor creature. Hence also a sneaking or\ncreeping fellow.", "8 i. e. acts, or behaves like, &c.", "9 A napkin and handkerchief were the same thing in\nShakspeare's time, as we gather from the dictionaries\nof Baret and Hutton in their explanations of the word\nCostium and Sudarium. Napkin, for handkerchief,\nis still in use in the north.", {"bbox": [657, 1230, 955, 1257], "category": "Text", "

256

AS YOU LIKE IT.

Act V.

### SCENE II. The same. Enter ORLANDO and OLIVER.

Orl. Is't possible, that on so little acquaintance you should like her? that but seeing, you should love her? and, loving, woo? and, wooing, she should grant? and will you persever to enjoy her?¹

Oli. Neither call the giddiness of it in question, the poverty of her, the small acquaintance, my sudden wooing, nor her sudden consenting; but say with me, I love Aliena; say with her, that she loves me; consent with both, that we may enjoy each other: it shall be to your good: for my father's house, and all the revenue that was old Sir Rowland's, will I estate upon you, and here live and die a shepherd.

Enter ROSALIND.

Orl. You have my consent. Let your wedding be to-morrow: thither will I invite the duke, and all his contented followers: Go you, and prepare Aliena; for, look you, here comes my Rosalind.

Ros. God save you, brother.

Oli. And you, fair sister.²

Ros. O, my dear Orlando, how it grieves me to see thee wear thy heart in a scarf.

Orl. It is my arm.

Ros. I nought thy heart had been wounded with the claws of a lion.

Orl. Wounded it is, but with the eyes of a lady.

Ros. Did your brother tell you how I counterfeited to swoon, when he showed me your handkerchief?

Orl. Ay, and greater wonders than that.

Ros. O, I know where you are:—Nay, 'tis true: there never was any thing so sudden, but the fight of two rams, and Cæsar's thronasical brag of—I came, saw, and overcame: For your brother and my sister no sooner met, but they looked; no sooner looked, but they loved; no sooner loved, but they sighed; no sooner sighed, but they asked one another the reason; no sooner knew the reason, but they sought the remedy: and in these degrees have they sought a pair of stairs to marriage, which they will climb incontinent,³ or else be incontinent before marriage: they are in the very wrath of love, and they will together; clubs cannot part them.⁴

Orl. They shall be married to-morrow; and I will bid the duke to the nuptial. But, O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man's eyes! By so much the more shall I to-morrow be at the height of heart-heaviness, by how much I shall think my brother happy, in having what he wishes for.

Ros. Why then, to-morrow I cannot serve your turn for Rosalind?

Orl. I can live no longer by thinking.

Ros. I will weary you no longer then with idle talking. Know of me then, (for now I speak to some purpose,) that I know you are a gentleman of good conceit:⁵ I speak not this, that you should bear a good opinion of my knowledge, insomuch, I say, I know you are; neither do I labour for a greater esteem than may in some little measure draw a belief from you, to do yourself good, and not to grace me. Believe then, if you please, that I can do strange things: I have, since I was three

1 Shakspeare, by putting this question into the mouth of Orlando, seems to have been aware of the improbability in his plot caused by deserting his original. In Odyssey's novel the elder brother is instrumental in saving Aliena from a band of ruffians; without this circumstance the passion of Aliena appears to be very hasty indeed.

2 Oliver must be supposed to speak to her in the character she had assumed of a woman courted by his brother Orlando, for there is no evidence that he knew she was one.

3 *Incontinent* here signifies *immediately*, without any stay or delay, out of hand; so Baret explains it. But it had also its now usual signification, and Shakspeare delights in the equivoke.

4 It was a common custom in Shakspeare's time, on the breaking out of a fray, to call out, 'clubs, clubs,' to part the combatants.

years old, conversed with a magician, most profound in this art, and yet not damnable. If you do love Rosalind so near the heart as your gesture cries it out, when your brother marries Aliena, shall you marry her: I know into what straits of fortune she is driven; and it is not impossible to me, if it appear not inconvenient to you, to set her before your eyes to-morrow; human as she is,⁶ and without any danger.

Orl. Speakest thou in sober meanings?

Ros. By my life, I do; which I tender dearly, though I say I am a magician:¹? Therefore put you in your best array, bid⁷ your friends; for if you will be married to-morrow, you shall; and to Rosalind, if you will.

Enter SILVIUS and PHEBE.

Look, here comes a lover of mine, and a lover of hers.

Phe. Youth, you have done me much unentertainment,

To show the letter that I writ to you.

Ros. I care not, if I have: it is my study,

To seem despiteful and untender to you;

You are there follow'd by a faithful shepherd;

Look upon him, love him; he worships you.

Phe. Good shepherd, tell this youth what 'tis to love.

Sil. It is to be all made of sighs and tears;—
And so am I for Phebe.

Phe. And I for Ganymede.

Orl. And I for Rosalind.

Ros. And I for no woman.

Sil. It is to be all made of faith and service;

And so am I for Phebe.

Phe. And I for Ganymede.

Orl. And so am I for Rosalind.

Ros. And so am I for no woman.

Sil. It is to be all made of fantasy,

All-made of passion, and all-made of wishes;

All adoration, duty, and observance,

All humbleness, all patience, and impatience,

All purity, all trial, all obeisance;⁹—

And so am I for Phebe.

Phe. And so am I for Ganymede.

Phe. If this be so, why blame you me to love you?

[To SILVIUS.]

Sil. If this be so, why blame you me to love you?

[To PHEBE.]

Orl. If this be so, why blame you me to love you?

Ros. Who do you speak to, why blame you me to love you?

Orl. To her, that is not here; nor doth not hear.

Ros. Pray you, no more of this; 'tis like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon.—I will help you, [To SILVIUS] if I can.—I would love you, [To PHEBE] if I could.—To-morrow meet me all together.—I will marry you, [To PHEBE] if ever I marry woman, and I'll be married to-morrow;—I will satisfy you, [To ORLANDO] if ever I satisfied man, and you shall be married to-morrow;—I will content you, [To SILVIUS] if what pleases you contents you, and you shall be married to-morrow.—As you [To ORLANDO] love Rosalind, meet;—as you [To SILVIUS] love Phebe,

5 Conceit in the language of Shakspeare's age signified wit; or conception, and imagination.

6 'Human as she is,' that is, not a phantom, but the real Rosalind, without any of the danger generally conceived to attend upon the rites of incantation.

7 'I say I am a magician.' She alludes to the danger in which her avowal of practising magic, had it been a serious one, would have involved her. The poet refers to his own times, when it would have brought her life in danger.

8 I. e. invite.

9 *Obeisance.* The old copy reads *observance*, but it is very unlikely that word should have been set down by Shakspeare twice so close to each other. *Ritson proposed the present emendation. Observance is attonation, deference.*

## SCENE IV.

## AS YOU LIKE IT.

257

meet: And as I love no woman, I'll meet.—So
fare you well; I have left you commands.

Sil. I'll not fail, if I live.

Phe.

Orl.

Nor I.

Nor I.

[Exeunt]

### SCENE III. The same. Enter TOUCHSTONE and AUDREY.

Touch. To-morrow is the joyful day, Audrey;
to-morrow will we be married.

Aud. I do desire it with all my heart; and I hope
it will not dishonest desire, to desire to be a woman of
the world.¹ Here comes two of the banish'd duke's
pages.

Enter two Pages.

1 Page. Well met, honest gentleman.

Touch. By my trotn, well met: Come, sit, sit,
and a song.

2 Page. We are for you: sit! the middle.

1 Page. Shall we clap into't roundly, without
hawking, or splitting, or saying we are hoarse;
which are the only prologues to a bad voice.

2 Page. I'faith, I'faith; and both in a tune, like
two gipsies on a horse.

### SONG.

I.

It was a lover, and his lass,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino,²

That o'er the green corn-field did pass,

In the spring time, the only pretty rank time,

When birds do sing, hey ding a ding, ding;

Sweet lovers love the spring.

II.

Between the acres of the rye,

These pretty country folks would lie,

In spring time, &c.

III.

This carol they began that hour,

How that life was but a flower

In spring time, &c.

IV.

And therefore take the present time,

With a hey, and a ho, and a hey nonino;

For love is crowned with the prime

In spring time, &c.

Touch. Truly, young gentleman, though there
was no greater matter in the ditty, yet the note was
very untunable.

1 Page. You are deceived, sir; we kept time,
we lost not our time.

Touch. By my trotn, yes; I count it but time lost
to hear such a foolish song. God be with you; and
God mend your voices! Come, Audrey. [Exeunt.

### SCENE IV. Another part of the Forest. Enter Duke senior, AMIENS, JAQUES, ORLANDO, OLIVER, and CELIA.

Duke S. Dost thou believe, Orlando, that the boy
Can do all this that he hath promised?

Orl. I sometimes do believe, and sometimes do
not:

As those that fear they hope, and know they fear.³

Enter ROSALIND, SILVIUS, and PHEBE.

Ros. Patience once more, whiles our compact is
urged;—

You say, if I bring in your Rosalind, [To the Duke.
You will bestow her on Orlando here?

Duke S. That would I, had I kingdoms to give
with her.

Ros. And you say, you will have her, when I
bring her?

Orl. That would I, were I of all kingdoms king.

Ros. You say, you'll marry me, if I be willing?

Phe. That will I, should I die the hour after.

Ros. But if you do refuse to marry me,

You'll give yourself to this most faithful shepherd?

Phe. So is the bargain.

Ros. You say, that you'll have Phebe, if she will?

Sil. Though to have her and death were both one
thing.

Ros. I have promis'd to make all this matter even.

Keep you your word, O duke, to give your daughter;—

You yours, Orlando, to receive his daughter;—

Keep your word, Phebe, that you'll marry me;

Or else, refusing me, to wed this shepherd:—

Keep your word, Silvius, that you'll marry her,

If she refuse me:—and from hence I go,

To make these doubts all even.⁴

[Exeunt ROSALIND and CELIA.

Duke S. I do remember in this shepherd-boy
Some lively touches of my daughter's favour.

Orl. My lord, the first time that I ever saw him,
Methought he was a brother to your daughter:

But, my good lord, this boy is forest-born;

And hath been tutor'd in the rudiments

Of many desperate studies by his uncle,

Whom he reports to be a great magician,
Obscured in the circle of this forest.

Enter TOUCHSTONE and AUDREY.

Jaq. There is, sure, another flood toward, and
these couples are coming to the ark! Here comes
a pair of very strange beasts, which in all tongues
are called fools.

Touch. Salutation and greeting to you all!

Jaq. Good, my lord, bid him welcome: This is
the motley-minded gentleman, that I have so often
met in the forest: he hath been a courtier, he
swears.

Touch. If any man doubt that, let him put me to
my purgation. I have trod a measure;⁵ I have
flattered a lady; I have been politic with my friend,
smooth with mine enemy; I have undone three
tailors; I have had four quarrels, and like to have
fought one.

Jaq. And how was that ta'en up?

Touch. 'Faith, we met, and found the quarrel
was upon the seventh cause.

Jaq. How seventh cause?—Good my lord, like
this fellow.

Jaq. I like him very well.

Touch. God'd you, sir; I desire you of the
like.⁶ I press in here, sir, amongst the rest of the
country copulatives, to swear, and to forswear; ac-
cording as marriage binds, and blood breaks:—
A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favoured thing, sir, but mine
own; a poor humour of mine, to take that that no
man else will: Rich honesty dwells like a miser,

to me the best emendation which has been proposed;

'As those that fear their hope, and know their fear.'

4 Thus in Measure for Measure:

yet death we fear.

That makes these odds all even.⁷

5 Touchstone, to prove that he has been a courtier,
particularly mentions a *measure*, because it was a
stately dance peculiar to the polished part of society, as
the minuet in later times. Hence the phrase was to
* tread a measure*, as we used to say to *walk a minuet*.
See note on Much Ado about Nothing, Act II, Sc. 1.

6 'I desire you of the like.' This mode of expression
occurs also in the Merchant of Venice, and in A Mid-
summer Night's Dream. It is frequent in Spenser:

'— of pardon you I pray.'

7 By the marriage ceremony a man swears that he
will keep only to his wife; but his blood or passion often
makes him break his oath.

I, e. a married woman. So in Much Ado about
Nothing, Beatrice says:—'Thus every one goes to the
world but I.'

2 This burthen, which had a wanton sense, is com-
mon to many old songs. See Florio's Ital. Dict. Ed. 1611,
sub voce Fussa.

3 This line is very obscure, and probably corrupt.
Henley proposed to point it thus:

'As those that fear; they hope, and know they fear.'
And Malone explains it: 'As those who fear,—they,
even those very persons entertain hopes, that their fears
will not be realized; and yet, at the same time, they well
know there is reason for their fears.' Heath's appears

33

AS YOU LIKE IT.

ACT V.

258

sir, in a poor-house; as your pearl, in your foul
oyster.

*Duke S.* By my faith, he is very swift and sententious.¹

*Touch.* According to the fool's bolt, sir, and such dulcet diseases.²

*Jaq.* But, for the seventh cause; how did you find the quarrel on the seventh cause?

*Touch.* Upon a lie seven times removed:³—Bear your body more seeming,⁴ Audrey; —as thus, sir, I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier's beard; he sent me word, if I said his beard was not cut well, he was in the mind it was: This is called the *Retort courteous*. If I sent him word again, it was not well cut, he would send me word, he cut it to please himself: This is called the *Quip modest*. If again, it was not well cut, he disabled⁵ my judgment: This is called the *Reply churlish*. If again, it was not well cut, he would answer, I spake not true: This is called the *Reproof valiant*. If again, it was not well cut, he would say, I lie: This is called the *Countercheck quarrelsome*: and so the *Lie circumstantial*, and the *Lie direct*.

*Jaq.* And how oft did you say, his beard was not well cut?

*Touch.* I durst go no further than the *Lie circumstantial*, nor he durst not give me the *Lie direct*; and so we measured swords, and parted.

*Jaq.* Can you nominate in order now the degrees of the lie?

*Touch.* O, sir, we quarrel in print, by the book;⁶ as you have books for good manners:⁷ I will name you the degrees. The first, the Retort courteous; the second, the Quip modest; the third, the Reply churlish; the fourth, the Reproof valiant; the fifth, the Countercheck quarrelsome; the sixth, the Lie with circumstance; the seventh, the Lie direct. All these you may avoid, but the lie direct, and you may avoid that too, with an *If*. I knew when seven justices could not take up a quarrel; but when the parties were met themselves, one of them thought but of an *If*, as *If you said so, then I said so*; and they shook hands, and swore brothers. Your *If* is the only peace-maker; much virtue in *If*.

*Jaq.* Is not this a rare fellow, my lord? he's as good at any thing, and yet a fool.

*Duke S.* He uses his folly like a stalking-horse,⁸ and under the presentation of that, he shoots his wit.

*Enter HYMEN,⁹ leading ROSALIND in women's clothes; and CELIA.*

Still Music.

*Hym.* Then is there mirth in heaven,
When earthly things made even,
*Atone*¹⁰ together.

Good duke, receive thy daughter,
Hymen from heaven brought her,
Yea, brought her hither;

That thou mightst join her hand with his
*Whose heart within her bosom is.*

*Ros.* To you I give myself, for I am yours:—

[To Duke S.

To you I give myself, for I am yours.

[To ORLANDO.

*Duke S.* If there be truth in sight, you are my daughter.

1 i. e. prompt and pithy.

2 ' Dulcet diseases.' Johnson thought we should read—*discourses*? but it is useless labour to endevour to make the fantastic Touchstone orthodox in his meaning.

3 i. e. the lie removed seven times, counting backwards from the last and most aggravated species of lie, viz. the lie direct.

4 Seemly. 5 i. e. *impeached*, or *dispraised*.

6 The poet has, in this scene, rallied the mode of formal duelling, then so prevalent, with the highest humour and address. The book alluded to is entitled, 'Of Honour and Honourable Quarrels, by Vincentio Savioli,' 1594, 4to.

7 The Booke of Nurture; or, Schoole of Good Maners for Men, Servants, and Children, with *stans puer*

*Orl.* If there be truth in sight, you are my Rosalind.

*Phe.* If sight and shape be true,
Why then,—my love, adieu!

*Ros.* I'll have no father, if you be not he:—

[To Duke S.] I'll have no husband, if you be not he:—

[To ORLANDO.] Nor ne'er w'd woman, if you be not she:—

*Hym.* Peace, ho! I bar confusion:
'Tis I must make conclusion,

Of these most strange events:
Here's eight that must take hands,
To join in Hymen's bands,

If truth holds true contents,¹¹
You and you no cross shall part:

[To ORLANDO and ROSALIND.]

You and you are heart in heart:

[To OLIVER and CELIA.] You [To PHEBE] to his love must accord, Or have a woman to your lord:—
You and you are sure together,

[To TOUCHSTONE and AUDREY, As the winter to foul weather.
Whiles a wedlock-hymn we sing,
Feed yourselves with questioning;¹²
That reason wonder may diminish,
How thus we met, and these things finish.

SONG.

*Wedding is great Juno's crown;
O blessed bond of board and bed!*

'Tis Hymen peoples every town;

'High wedlock then be honoured;

Honour, light honour and renown,

*To Hymen, god of every town!*

*Duke S.* O my dear niece, welcome thou art to me;
Even daughter, welcome in no less degree.

*Phe.* I will not eat my word, now thou art mine;
Thy faith my fancy to thee doth combine,¹³

[To SILVIA.]

*Enter JAQUES DE BOIS.*

*Jaq. de B.* Let me have audience for a word or two;

*I am the second son of old Sir Rowland,*
That bring these tidings to this fair assembly:—
Duke Frederick, hearing how that every day
Men of great worth resorted to this forest,
Address'd¹⁴ a mighty power! which were on foot,
In his own conduct, purposely to take
His brother here, and put him to the sword:
And to the skirts of this wild wood he came;
Where, meeting with an old religious man,
After some question with him, was converted
Both from his enterize, and from the world:
His crown bequeathing to his banish'd brother,
And all their lands restor'd to them again,
That were with him exil'd: This to be true,
I do engage my life.

*Duke S.* Welcome, young man;
Thou offer'tst fairly to thy brothers' wedding:
To one, his lands withheld; and to the other,
A land itself at large, a potent dukedom.
First, in this forest, let us do those ends
That here were well begun, and well begot:

*ad mensam*, 12mo. without date, in black letter, is most probably the work referred to. It was written by Hugh Rhodes, and first published in the reign of Edward VI.

8 'A walking-horse.' See note on Much Ado about Nothing, Act ii. Sc. 3.

9 Rosalind is imagined by the rest of the company to be brought by enchantment, and is therefore introduced by a supposed aerial being in the character of Hymen.

10 i. e. *at one*; *accord*, or *agree* together. This is the old sense of the phrase, 'an *allitionement*, a loving again after a breach or falling out. Reditus in gratia cum aliquo.—Baret.

11 i. e. unless truth fails of veracity; if there be *truth in truth*.

12 i. e. take your fill of *discourse*.

13 i. e. unite, attach.

14 i. e. prepared.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

259

And after, every of this happy number,
That have endur'd shrewd days and nights with us,
Shall share the good of our returned fortune,
According to the measure of their states.
Meantime, forget this new-fall'n dignity,
And fall into our rustic revelry :-
Play, music;—and you, brides and bridegrooms all,
With measure heap'd in joy, to the measures fall.
Jaa. Sir, by your patience: If I heard you rightily,

EPILOGUE.

Ros. It is not the fashion to see the lady the epi-
logue; but it is no more unhandsome, than to see
the lord the prologue. If it be true, that good wine
needs no bush,² 'tis true that a good play needs no
epilogue: Yet to good wine they do use good
bushes; and good plays prove the better by the help
of good epilogues. What a case am I in then, that
am neither a good eniligne, nor cannot insinuate

YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY

To Information
From Catalogue
Subject
Date

Leonard B. Bacon

Harris, Beach, Folger, Bacon, and Keating
5 South Fitzhugh Street
Rochester, New York

In a letter of August 13 to Prof. Alfred R. Bellinger, Mr. Bacon offered (at the suggestion of his brother, Henry Seldon Bacon) certain books formerly belonging to Great Aunt Delia,

who has been incorrectly called the originator
of the Bacon-Shakespeare theory, is buried in the
family lot in N.H.Cemetery.

The books offered include a 2 vol. copy of Shakes-
peare's Plays bearing penciled notes, and a copy
of Montaigne's Essays similarly annotated. These
volumes were mentioned by Hawthorne in "Our Old
Home", in the chapter entitled "Memories of a
Gifted Woman", as lying on her table when he
called upon her in lodging in Stratford.

Form no. 18

touched with a less delicate and mastery than I could
in extraordinary and embarrassing circumstances, there
is a propriety and delicacy in all her actions, which is
consistent with the guileless innocence of her heart.

The King is properly made an instrument in the de-
nouement of the plot of the play, and this a most striking
and judicious deviation from the novel; his gratitude
and esteem for Helen are consistent and honourable to
him as a man and a monarch.

Johnson has expressed his dislike of the character of

ment might be carried too far. Who that has been au-
verted with the truly comic scenes in which Parolles is
made to appear in his true character, could have wished
him to have been otherwise dismissed?—

'Though you are a fool and a knave, you shall eat.'

It has been remarked that 'the style of the whole
play is more conspicuous for sententiousness than ima-
gery.' and that 'the glowing colours of fancy could not

260

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

ACT I.

have been introduced into such a subject. May not the
period of life at which it was produced have something
to do with this? Malone places the date of its composi-
tion in 1606, and observes that a beautiful speech of the
sick king has much the air of that moral and judicious
reflection that accompanies an advanced period of life.

'— Let me not live

After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff

Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses

All but new things disdain: whose judgments are
More fathers of their garments; whose constancies
Expire before their fashions.

It appears probable that the original title of this play was 'Love's Labours Wonne,' at least a piece under that title is mentioned by Meres in his 'Wits Treasurie,' in 1598; but if this was the play referred to, what becomes of Malone's hypothesis relating to the date of its composition?

PERSONS REPRESENTED.

King of France.

Duke of Florence.

BERTRAM, Count of Rousillon.

LAFEU,¹ an old Lord.

PAROLLES,¹ a follower of Bertram.

Several young French Lords, that serve with Bertram
in the Florentine war.

Steward,

Clown,

A Page.

Serrants to the Countess of Rousillon.

Countess of Rousillon, Mother to Bertram.

HELENA, a Gentlewoman protected by the Countess.

An old Widow of Florence.

DIANA, Daughter to the Widow.

VIOLENTA,

MARIANA, { Neighbours and Friends to the Widow.

Lords, attending on the King; Officers, Soldiers,
&c. French and Florentine.

SCENE, partly in France, and partly in Tuscany.

ACT I.

### SCENE I. Rousillon. A Room in the Countess's Palace. Enter BERTRAM, the Countess of Rousillon, HELENA, and LAFEU, in mourning.

Countess.

In delivering my son from me, I bury a second
husband.

Ber. And I, in going, madam, weep o'er my father's death anew: but I must attend his majesty's command, to whom I am now in ward,² evermore in subjection.

Laf. You shall find of the king a husband, madam;—you, sir, a father: He that so generally is at all times good, must of necessity hold his virtue to you; whose worthiness would stir it up where it wanted, rather than lack it where there is such abundance.

Count. What hope is there of his majesty's amend-
ment?

Laf. He hath abandoned his physicians, madam; under whose practices he hath persecuted time with hope; and finds no other advantage in the process but only the losing of hope by time.

Count. This young gentlewoman had a father (O, that had! how sad a passage³! Is!) whose skill was almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so far, would have made nature immortal, and death should have play for lack of work, 'Would, for the king's sake, he were living! I think, it would be the death of the king's disease.

Laf. How called you the man you speak of, madam?

Count. He was famous, sir, in his profession, and it was his great right to be so: Gerard de Narbonn.

Laf. He was excellent, indeed, madam; the king very lately spoke of him, admiringly, and mourningly: he was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge could be set up against mortality.

1 Steevens says that we should write *Lefeu* and *Pae*.
roles.

2 The heirs of great fortunes were formerly the king's
wards. This prerogative was a branch of the feudal
law.

3 In the Heautontimorumenes of Terence, which had been translated in Shakespeare's time, is the following passage:

'— Filium unicum adolescentulum

Habeo. Ah quid dixi Habere me ? imo

habul, Chreme,

Nunc habeam incertum est.

4 We feel regret even in commending such qualities, joined with an evil disposition; they are traitors, because they give the possessors power over others; who, admiring such estimable qualities, are often betrayed by the malevolence of the possessors. Helena's virtues are the better because they are artless and open.

Ber. What is it, my good lord, the king, languishes of?

Laf. A fistula, my lord.

Ber. I heard not of it before.

Laf. I would, it were not notorious.—Was this gentlewoman the daughter of Gerard de Narbonn?

Count. His sole child, my lord; and bequeathed to my overlooking. I have those hopes of her good, that her education promises: her dispositions she inherits, which make fair gifts fairer; for where an unclean mind carries virtuous qualities,⁴ there commendations go with pity, they are virtues and traitors too; in her they are the better for their simplicity; she derives her honesty, and achieves her goodness.

Laf. Your commendations, madam, get from her tears.

Count. 'Tis the best brine a maiden can season; her praise in. The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart, but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood⁵ from her cheek. No more of this, Helena, go to, no more; lest it be rather thought you affect a sorrow, than to have?'

Hel. I do affect a sorrow, indeed, but I have it too,⁶

Laf. Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead, excessive grief the enemy to the living.

Count. If the living be enemy to the grief, the excess makes it soon mortal,⁹

Ber. Madam, I desire your holy wishes.

Laf. How understand we that?

Count. Be thou blest, Bertram! and succeed thy father

In manners, as in shape! thy blood, and virtue, Contend for empire in thee; and thy goodness Share with thy birth-right! Love all, trust a few, Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy Rather in power, than use; and keep thy friend Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence, But never tax'd for speech. What heaven more will, That thee may furnish,¹⁰ and my prayers pluck down, Fall on thy head! Farewell.—My lord, 'Tis an unseason'd courtier; good my lord, Advise him.

5 So in Chapman's version of the third Iliad:

'Season'd her tears her joys to see,' &c.

6 All appearance of life.

7 This kind of phraseology was not peculiar to Shakespeare, though it appears uncouth to us: it is plain that he meant—'lest it be rather thought you affect a sorrow than have it.'

8 Helena's affected sorrow was for the death of her father: her real grief related to Bertram and his departure.

9 This is, 'if the living do not indulge grief, grief destroys itself by its own excess.'

10 i. e. that may help thee with more and better qualifications.

262

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

ACT I.

And show what we alone must think;¹ which never
Returns us thanks.

Enter a Page.

Page. Monsieur Parolles, my lord calls for you.

[Exit Page.

Par. Little Helen, farewell: if I can remember thee, I will think of thee at court.

Hel. Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.

Par. Under Mars, I.

Hel. I especially think, under Mars.

Par. Why under Mars?

Hel. The wars have so kept you under, that you must needs be born under Mars.

Par. When he was predominant.

Hel. When he was retrograde, I think, rather.

Par. Why think you so?

Hel. You go so much backward, when you fight.

Par. That's for advantage.

Hel. So is running away, when fear proposes the safety; But the composition, that your valour and fear makes in you, is a virtue of a good wing,² and I like the wear well.

Par. I am so full of businesses, I cannot answer thee acutely: I will return perfect courtier; in the which, my instruction shall serve to naturalize thee, so thou wilt be capable³ of a courtier's counsel, and understand what advice shall thrust upon thee; else thou diest in thine unthankfulness, and thine ignorance makes thee away: farewell. When thou hast leisure, say thy prayers; when thou hast none, remember thy friends: get thee a good husband, and use him as he uses thee: so farewell. [Exit.

Hel. Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie, Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky Gives us free scope; only, doth backward pull Our slow designs, when we ourselves are dull. What power is it which mounts my love so high; That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?⁴ The mightiest space in fortune nature brings To join like likes, and kiss like native things.⁵ Impossible be strange attempts, to those That weigh their pains in sense; and do suppose, What hath been cannot be: Who ever strove To show her merit, that did miss her love? The king's disease—my project may deceive me, But my intents are fix'd, and will not leave me.

[Exit.]

### SCENE II. Paris. A Room in the King's Parolce. Flourish of Cornets. Enter the King of France, with Letters; Lords and others attending.

King. The Florentines and Senoys⁶ are by the ears;

Have fought with equal fortune, and continue A braving war.

1 Lord. So 'tis reported, sir.

King. Nay, 'tis most credible; we here receive it

A certainty, vouch'd from our cousin Austria, With caution, that the Florentine will move us

For speedy aid; wherein our dearest friend

1 i. e. and show by realities what we now must only think.

2 This is a metaphor from Shakspeare's favorite source; Falconry. A bird of good wing was a bird of swift and strong flight. 'If your valour will suffer you to go backward for advantage, and your fear, for the same reason, will make you run away, the composition is a virtue that will fly far and swiftly.' Mason thinks we should read—'is like to wear well.'

3 Capable and susceptible were synonymous in Shakspeare's time, as appears by the dictionaries. He-len says before:

'heart too capable

Of every line and trick of his sweet favour.'
4 She means, 'why am I made to discern excellence, and left to long after it without the food of hope.'

5 The mightiest space in fortune is a licentious expression for persons the most widely separated by fortune like likes (i. e. equals,) and kiss like native things (i. e. and unite like things formed by nature for each other.) Or in other words, 'Nature often unites those whom fortune or inequality of rank has separated.'

Prejudicates the business, and would seem To have us make denial.

1 Lord. His love and wisdom, Approv'd so to your majesty, may plead For ample crédonce.

King. He hath arm'd our answer, And Florence is denied before he comes: Yet, for our gentlemen, that mean to see The Tuscan service, freely have they leave To stand on either part.

2 Lord. It may well serve A nursery to our gentry, who are sick For breathing and exploit.

King. What's he comes here?

Enter BERTRAM, LAFEU, and PAROLLES.

1 Lord. It is the count Rousillon, my good lord, Young Bertram.

King. Youth, thou bear'st thy father's face; Frank nature, rather curious than in haste, Hath well compos'd thee. Thy father's moral parts May'st thou inherit too! Welcome to Paris.

Ber. My thanks and duty are your majesty's.

King. I would I had that corporal soundness now, As when thy father, and myself, in friendship First tried our generosity! I did look far Into the service of the time, and was Discipl'd of the bravest: he lasted long; But on us both did haggish age steal on, And wore us out of act. It many repairs' me To talk of your good father: In his youth He had the wit, which I can well observe To-day in our young lords; but they may jest, Till their own scorn return to them unnoted, Ere they can hide their levity in honour.

So like a courtier, contempt nor bitterness Were in his pride or sharpness: if they were, His equal had awak'd them;⁹ and his honour, Clock to itself, knew the true minute when Exception bid him speak, and, at this time, His tongue obey'd his¹⁰ hand: who were below him He us'd as creatures of another place; And bow'd his eminent top to their low ranks, Making them proud of his humility,

Ber. His good remembrance, sir, Lies richer in your thoughts, than on his tomb; So in approaf¹¹ lives not his epitaph, As in your royal speech.

King. 'Would, I with him! He would always say,

(Methinks I hear him now; his plausible words He scatter'd not in ears, but grafted them, To grow there, and to bear)—Let him not live,— Thus his good 'melancholy oft began,

On the catastrophe and heel of pastime, When it was out,—let me not live, quoth he After my flame lacks oil, to be the snuff Of younger spirits, whose apprehensive senses All but new things disdain; whose judgments are

6 The citizens of the small republic of which Siena is the capital. The *Sanesi*, as Boccaccio calls them, which Painter translates *Senois*, after the French me-thor.

7 To repair in these plays generally signifies to reno-vate.

8 That is, 'cover petty faults with great merit;' honour does not stand for dignity of rank or birth, but acquired reputation. 'This is an excellent observation (says Johnson,) jocose follies, and slight offences, are only allowed by mankind in him that overpowers them by great qualities.'

9 Nor was sometimes used without reduplication. 'He was so like a courtier, that there was in his dignity of manner nothing contemptuous, and in his keenness of wit nothing bitter. If bitterness or contemptuous-ness ever appeared, they had been awakened by some injury, not of a man below him, but for his equal.'

10 His for it.

11 The approbation of his worth lives not so much in his epitaph as in your royal speech.

## SCENE III.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

263

Mere fathers of their garments;¹ whose constancies
Expire before their fashions:—This he wish'd:
I, after him, do after him wish too,

Since I nor wax, nor honey, can bring home,
I quickly were dissolved from my hive,
To give some labourers room.

2. Lord.

You are lov'd, sir;

They, that least lend it you, shall lack you first.

King. I fill a place, I know't.—How long is't,
count,

Since the physician at your father's died?

He was much fam'd.

Ber.

Some six months since, my lord.
King. If he were living, I would try him yet;—
Lead me an arm;—the rest have worn me out

With several applications:—nature and sickness

Debate it at their leisure.² Welcome, count;
My son's no dearer.

Ber.

Thank your majesty.

[Exeunt. Flourish.]

## SCENE III. Rousillon. A Room in the Countess's Palace. Enter Countess, Steward, and Clown.³

Count. I will now hear; what say you of this gentlewoman?

Stew. Madam, the care I have had to even your content,⁴ I wish might be found in the calendar of my past endeavours; for then we wound our mo-desty, and make foul the clearness of our deserv-ings, when of ourselves we publish them.

Count. What does this knave here? Get you gone, sirrah: The complaints, I have heard of you, I do not all believe; 'tis my slowness, that I do not: for, I know, you lack not folly to commit them, and have ability enough to make such knaveries yours.

Count. 'Tis not unknown to you, madam, I am a poor fellow.

Wel. well, sir.

Clo. No, madam, 'tis not so well, that I am poor; though many of the rich are damned: But, if I may have your ladyship's good will to go to the world,⁵ Isabel the woman and I will do as we may.

Count. Wilt thou needs be a beggar?

Clo. I do beg your goodwill in this case.

Count. In what case?

Clo. In Isabel's case, and mine own. Service is no heritage: and, I think, I shall never have the blessing of God, till I have issue of my body: for, they say, bears⁶ are blessings.

Count. Tell me thy reason why thou wilt marry.

Clo. My poor body, madam, requires it: I am driven on by the flesh; and he must needs go, that the devil drives.

Count. Is this all your worship's reason?

Clo. Faith, madam, I have other holy reasons, such as they are.

Count. May the world know them?

Clo. I have been, madam, a wicked creature, as you and all flesh and blood are; and, indeed, I do marry, that I may repent.

Count. Thy marriage, sooner than thy wickedness.

Clo. I am out of friends, madam; and I hope to have friends for my wife's sake.

Count. Such friends are thine enemies, knave.

Clo. You are shallow, madam; e'en great friends;

1 Who have no other use of their faculties than to invent new modes of dress.

2 So in Macbeth:

'Death and nature do contend about them.'

3 The Clown in this comedy is a domestic fool of the same kind as Touchstone. Such fools were, in the poet's time, maintained in all great families, to keep up merriment in the house.

4 To act up to your desires.

5 To be married.

6 Children.

7 Ploughs.

8 Therefore.

9 Malone conjectures that we should read, 'Poisson' the papist,' alluding to the custom of eating fish on fast days: as Charbon the puritan alludes to the fiery zeal of that sect. It is much in Shakspeare's manner to use significant names.

10 The readiest way.

11 i. e. nature.

12 Foolishly done.

for the knaves come to do that for me, which I am a-weary of. He, that earns⁷ my land, spares my team, and gives me leave to inn the crop: if I be his Midold, he's my drudge: He that comforts my wife, is the nourisher of my flesh and blood; he, that cherishes my flesh and blood, loves my flesh and blood; he, that loves my flesh and blood, is my friend: ergo,⁸ he that kisses my wife, is my friend. If men could be contented to be what they are, there were no fear in marriage: for young Charbon the puritan, and old Poysam⁹ the papist, howsoe'er their hearts are severed in religion, their heads are both one, they may joll horns together, like any deer' the herd.

Count. Wilt thou ever be a foul-mouthed and calumnious knave?

Clo. A prophet I, madam; and I speak the truth the next way:¹⁰

For I the ballad will repeat,

Which men full true shall find;

Your marriage comes by destiny,

Your cuckoo sings by kind.¹¹

Count. Get you gone, sir; I'll talk with you more anon.

Stew. May it please you, madam, that he bid Helen come to you; of her I am to speak.

Count. Sirrah, tell my gentlewoman, I would speak with her; Helen I mean.

Clo. Was this fair face the cause, quoth she,

[Singing.]

Why the Grecians sacked Troy?

Fond done,¹² done fond,

Was this king Priam's joy,¹³

With that she sighed as she stood,

And gave this sentence then;

Among nine bad if one be good,

There's yet one good in ten.

Count. One good in ten; you corrupt the song, sirrah.

Clo. One good woman in ten, madam; which is a purifying o'the song: 'Would, God would serve the world so all the year! we'd find no fault with the theite-woman, if I were the parson: One in ten, quoth a'! an we might have a good woman born, but on¹⁴ every blazing star, or at an earthquake, 'twould mend the lottery well; a man may draw his heart out, ere he pluck one.

Count. You'll be gone, sir knave, and do as I command you?

Clo. That man should be at woman's command, and yet no hurt done!—Though honesty be no puritan, yet it will do no hurt; it will wear the surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart.¹⁵—I am going, forsooth: the business is for Helen to come hither.

[Exit Clown.]

Count. Well, now.

Stew. I know, madam, you love your gentlewoman entirely.

Count. Faith, I do: her father bequeathed her to me; and she herself, without other advantage, may lawfully make title to as much love as she finds: there is more owing her, than is paid; and more shall be paid her, than she'll demand.

Stew. Madam, I was very late more near her than, I think, she wished me! alone she was, and did

13 The name of Helen brings to the Clown's memory this fragment of an old ballad; something has escaped him it appears, for Paris 'was king Priam's only joy,' as Helen was Sir Paris's. According to two fragments quoted by the commentators.

14 The old copy reads *one*. Malone substituted *on*.

15 The clown answers, with the licentious petulance allowed to the character, that 'if a man does as a woman commands, it is likely he will do amiss; that he does not amiss, he makes the effect not of his lady's goodness, but of his own honesty, which, though not very nice or puritanical, will do no hurt, but, unlike the puritans, will comply with the injunctions of superiors; and wear the 'surplice of humility over the black gown of a big heart,' will obey commands, though not much pleased with a state of subjection.

["ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.", "Act II.", "King. I would, I had; so I had broke thy pate,\nAnd ask'd thee mercy for't.", "Laf. Goodfaith, across :¹\nBut, my good lord, 'tis thus; Will you be cur'd\nOf your infirmity?", "King.", "No.", "Laf.", "O, will you eat", "No grapes, my royal fox ? yes, but you will,\nMy noble grapes, an if my royal fox\nCould reach them : I have seen a medicine,²", "That's able to breathe life into a stone ;\nQuicken a rock, and make you dance canary,³", "With spittery fire and motion ; whose simple touch\nIs powerful to raise king Pepin, nay,", "To give great Charlemain a pen in his hand,\nAnd write to her a love-line.⁴", "King.", "What her is this?", "Laf. Why, doctor she : My lord, there's one\narriv'd,", "If you will see her,—now, by my faith and honour,\nIf seriously I may convey my thoughts", "In this my light deliverance, I have spoke", "With one, that, in her sex, her years, profession,⁵", "Wisdom, and constancy, hath amaz'd me more", "Than I dare blame my weakness:⁶ Will you see her,\n(For that is her demand,) and know her business ?", "That done, laugh well at me.", "King.", "Now, good Lafeu,", "Bring in the admiration ; that we with thee", "May spend our wonder too, or take off thine,", "By wond'ring how thou took'st it.", "Nay, I'll fit you,", "And not be all day neither.", "[Exit LAFEU.", "King. Thus he his special nothing ever prologues.\nRe-enter LAFEU, with HELENA.", "Laf. Nay, come your ways.", "King.", "This haste hath wings indeed.", "Laf. Nay, come your ways:", "This is his majesty, say your mind to him:", "A traitor you do look like; but such traitors", "His majesty seldom fears : I am Cressid's uncle,⁸", "That dare leave two together ; fare you well. [Exit.", "King. Now, fair one, does your business follow us?", "Hel. Ayl, my good lord. Gerard de Narbon was", "My father ; in what he did profess, well found.⁹", "King. I knew him.", "Hel. The rather will I spare my praises towards\nhim;", "Knowing him, is enough. On his bed of death", "Many receipts he gave me; chiefly one,", "Which, as the dearest issue of his practice,", "And of his old experience the only darling,", "He bade me store up, as a triple eye,¹⁰", "Safer than mine own two, more dear ; I have so :", "And, hearing your high majesty is touch'd", "With that malignant cause wherein the honour", "Of my dear father's gift stands chief in power,", "I come to tender it, and my appliance,", "With all bound humbleness.", "King. We thank you, you, maiden ;", "But may not be so credulous of cure,", "When our most learned doctors leave us; and", "The congregated college have concluded", "That labouring art can never ransom nature", "From her inadable estate,—I say we must not", "Stain our judgment, or corrupt our hope,", "To prostitute our past-cure malady", "To empires; or to dissever so", "Our great self and our credit, to esteem", "A senseless help, when help past sense we deem.", "Hel. My duty then shall pay me for my pains :\nI will no more enforce mine office on you;\nHumbly entreating from your royal thoughts\nA modest one to bear me back again.", "King. I cannot give thee less, to be call'd grateful :\nThou thought'st to help me; and such thanks I give,\nAs one near death to those that wish me live;\nBut, what at full I know, thou know'st no part\nI knowing all my peril, thou no art.", "Hel. What I can do, can do no hurt to try,\nSince you set up your rest¹¹ 'gainst remedy :", "He that of greatest works is finisher,", "Oft does them by the weakest minister:", "So holy writ in babes hath judgment shown,\nWhen judges have been babes.¹² Great floods have\nflown", "From simple sources;¹³ and great seas have dried,", "When miracles have by the greatest been denied.¹⁴", "Oft expectation fails, and most oft there", "Where most it promises, and oft it hits,", "Where hope is coldest, and despair most sits.", "King. I must not hear thee; fare thee well, kind", "Thy pains, not us'd, must by himself be paid", "Proffers, not took, reap thanks for their reward.", "Hel. Inspired merit so by breath is barr'd:", "It is not so with him that all things knows,", "As 'tis with us that square our guess by shows :", "But most it is presumption in us, when", "The help of heaven we count the act of an", "Dear sir, to my endeavours give consent;", "Of heaven, not me, make an experiment.", "I am not an impostor, that proclaim", "Myself against the level of mine aim;¹⁵", "But know I think, and think I know most sure,", "My art is not past power, nor you past cure.", "King. Art thou so confident? Within what space", "Hop'st thou my cure?", "Hel.", "The greatest grace lending grace,¹⁶", "Ere twice the horses of the sun shall bring", "Their fiery torcher his diurnal ring;", "Ere twice in murk and occidental damp", "Moist Hesperus hath quench'd his sleepy lamp;", "Or four and twenty times the pilot's glass", "Hath told the thievish minutes how they pass;", "What is infirm from your sound parts shall fly,", "Health shall live free, and sickness freely die.", "King. Upon thy certainty and confidence,\nWhat dar'st thou venture?", "Hel.", "Tax of impudence,—", "A strumpet's boldness, a divulged shame,—", "Traduc'd by odious ballads : my maiden's name", "Sear'd otherwise ; ne worse of worst extended,", "With vilest torture let my life be ended.¹⁷", "King. Methinks in thee some blessed spirit doth\nspeak;", "His powerful sound within an organ weak:", "And what impossibility would slay", "In common sense, sense saves another way.", "Thy life is dear; for all, that life can rate", "1 This word, which is taken from breaking a spear across in chivalric exercises, is used elsewhere by Shakspeare where a pass of wit miscarries. See As You Like It, Act III, Sc. 4.", "2 Medicine is here used by Lafeu ambiguously for a female physician.", "3 It has been before observed that the canary was a kind of lively dance.", "4 Malone thinks something has been omitted here : to complete the sense the line should read:—", "And cause him write to her a love line.?", "5 By profession is meant her declaration of the object of her coming.", "6 This is one of Shakspeare's perplexed expressions: — 'To acknowledge how much she has astonished me would be to acknowledge more weakness that I am willing to do.'", "7 Stevens has inconsiderately stigmatized this with the title of vulgarism. Malone has justly defended it", "as the phraseology of the poet's age, and adduces a similar mode of expression from our excellent old version of the Bible.", "8 I am like Pandarus. See Troilus and Cressida.", "9 Of known and acknowledged excellence.", "10 A third eye.", {"bbox": [671, 1135, 9

## SCENE III.

# ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

267

Worth name of life, in thee hath estimate:¹

Youth, beauty, wisdom, courage, virtue, all

That happiness and prime² can happy call:

Thou this to hazard, needs must intimate

Skill infinite, or monstrous desperate.

Sweet practiser, thy physic I will try;

That ministers thine own death, if I die.

*Hel.* If I break time, or finch in property³

Of what I spoke, unpitied let me die;

And well deserv'd: Not helping, death's my fee;

But, if I help, what do you promise me?

*King.* Make thy demand.

*Hel.*

*But will you make it even?*

*King.* Ay, by my sceptre, and my hopes of
heaven.⁴

*Hel.* Then shall thou give me, with thy kingly
hand,

What husband in thy power I will command:

Exempted be from me the arrogance

To choose from forth the royal blood of France;

My low and humble name to propagate

With any branch or impage of thy state:⁵

But such a one, thy vassal, whom I know

Is free for me to ask, thee to bestow.

*King.* Here is my hand; the premises observ'd,
Thy will by my performance shall be serv'd;

So make the choice of thy own time; for I,

Thy resolv'd patient, on thee still rely.

More should I question thee, and more I must;

Though, more to know, could not be more to trust;

From whence thou cam'st, how tended on,—But
rest

Unquestion'd welcome, and undoubted blest.—

Give me some help here, ho!—If thou proceed

As high as word, my deed shall match thy deed.

[Flourish. Exeunt.]

## SCENE II. Rousillon. A Room in the Countess's Palace. Enter Countess and Clown.

*Count.* Come on, sir; I shall now put you to the height of your breeding.

*Clo.* I will show myself highly fed and lowly taught: when I know my business is but to the court.

*Count.* To the court! why, what place make you special, when you put off that with such contempt? But to the court!

*Clo.* Truly, madam, if God have lent a man any manners, he may easily put it off at court: he that cannot make a leg, put off's cap, kiss his hand, and say nothing, has neither leg, hands, lip, nor cap; and, indeed, such a fellow, to say precisely, were not for the court: but, for me, I have an answer will serve all men.

*Count.* Marry, that's a bountiful answer, that fits all questions.

*Clo.* It is like a barber's chair, that fits all buttocks;⁶ the pin-buttock, the quatch-buttock, the brown buttock, or any buttock.

*Count.* Will your answer serve fit to all questions?

*Clo.* As fit as ten groats is for the hand of an attorney, as your French crown for your taffata punk, as Tib's rush for Tom's fore-finger,⁷ as a pancake for Shrove-tuesday, a morris for May-day, as the nail to his hole, the cuckold to his horn, as a scolding quean to a wrangling knave, as the nun's lip to the friar's mouth; nay, as the pudding to his skin.

*tended* evil than what I have mentioned, the loss of my honour, which is the worst that could happen,) let me die with torture. *Ne is nor.*

1 i. e. may be counted among the gifts enjoyed by thee.

2 *Prime* here signifies that *sprightly vigour* which usually accompanies us in the prime of life; which old Montaigne calls, *cet estat plein de verder et de feste, and which Florio translates, *that state, full of lust, of prime, and mirth.*

3 *Property* seems to be used here for performance or achievement, singular as it may seem.

4 The old copy reads ‘hopes of help.’ The emendation is Thirteenth.

5 The old copy reads ‘image of thy state.’ Warburton proposed *impage*, which Steevens rejects, saying unadvisedly ‘there is no such word.’ It is evident that Shakspeare formed it from ‘an impe, a scion, or young slip of a tree.’

*Count.* Have you, I say, an answer of such fitness for all questions?

*Clo.* From below your duke, to beneath your controllable, it will fit any question.

*Count.* It must be an answer of most monstrous size, that must fit all demands.

*Clo.* But a trifle neither, in good faith, if the learned should speak truth of it: here it is, and all that belongs to't: Ask me, if I am a courtier; it shall do you no harm to learn.

*Count.* To be young again, if we could: I will be a fool in question, hoping to be the wiser by your answer. I pray you, sir, are you a courtier?

*Clo.* O Lord, sir,⁸—There's a simple putting off;—more, more, a hundred of them.

*Count.* Sir, I am a poor friend of yours, that loves you.

*Clo.* O Lord, sir,—Thick, thick, spare not me.

*Count.* I think, sir, you can eat none of this homely meat.

*Clo.* O Lord, sir,—Nay, put me to't, I warrant you.

*Count.* You were lately whipped, sir, as I think.

*Clo.* O Lord, sir,—Spare not me.

*Count.* Do you cry, O Lord, sir, at your whipping, and spare not me? Indeed, your O Lord, sir, is very sequent⁹ to your whipping; you would answer very well to a whipping, if you were but bound to't.

*Clo.* I ne'er had worse luck in my life, in my— O Lord, sir: I see, things may serve long, but not serve ever.

*Count.* I play the noble housewife with the time, to entertain it so merrily with a fool.

*Clo.* O Lord, sir,—Why, there't serves well again.

*Count.* An end, sir, to your business: Give He Len this.

And urge her to a present answer back:

Recommend me to my kinsmen, and my son;

This is not much.

*Clo.* Not much commendation to them.

*Count.* Not much employment for you: You understand me?

*Clo.* Most fruitfully; I am there before my legs.

*Count.* Haste you again.

[Exeunt severally.]

## SCENE III. Paris. A Room in the King's Palace. Enter Bertram, Lafeu, and Parolles.

*Laf.* They say, miracles are past; and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern¹⁰ and familiar things, supernatural and causeless. Hence is it, we make trifles of terrors; enseconcing¹¹ ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.¹²

*Par.* Why, 'tis the rarest argument of wonder, that hath shot out in our latter times.

*Ber.* And so 'tis.

*Laf.* To be relinquish'd of the artists,—

*Par.* So I say; both of Galen and Paracelsus.

*Laf.* Of all the learned and authentic¹³ fellows,—

*Par.* Right, so I say.

*Laf.* That gave him out incurable,—

*Par.* Why, there 'tis; so say I too.

*Laf.* Not to be helped,—

*Par.* Right: as 'twere, a man assured of an—

6 This is a common proverbial expression.

7 *Tom* and *Tibb* were apparently common names for a *lad* and *lass*, the *rush ring* seems to have been a kind of love token, for plighting of troth among rustic lovers.

8 A ridicule on this silly expletive of speech, then in vogue at court. Thus *Clove* and *Orange*, in Every Man in his Humour: 'You conceive me, sir?—O Lord, sir?'

9 Properly follows.

10 Common, ordinary.

11 *Sconce* being a term in fortification for a chief fortress. To *ensconce* literally signifies to *secure* as in a fort.

12 *Fear* means here an object of fear.

13 *Authentic* is *allowed, approved*; and seems to have been the proper epithet for a physician regularly bred or licensed. The diploma of a licentiate still has *authentice licentiatus*.

268

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

ACT II.

Laf. Uncertain life, and sure death.

Par. Just, you say well; so would I have said.

Laf. I may truly say, it is a novelty to the world.

Par. It is, indeed: if you will have it in refus,
you shall read it in—What do you call there?—

Laf. A showing of a heavenly effect in an earthly
actor.

Par. That's it I would have said; the very same.

Laf. Why, your dolphin¹ is not lustier: 'fore me
I speak in respect—

Par. Nay, 'tis strange, 'tis very strange, that is
the brief and the tedious of it; and he is of a most
facinorous² spirit, that will not acknowledge it to be
the—

Laf. Very hand of heaven.

Par. Ay, so I say.

Laf. In a most weak—

Par. And debile minister, great power, great
transcendence: which should, indeed, give us a
further use to be made, than alone the recovery of
the king, as to be³—

Laf. Generally thankful.

Enter King, HELENA, and Attendants.

Par. I would have said it; you say well: Here
comes the king.

Laf. Lustick,⁴ as the Dutchman says: I'll like
a maid the better, whilst I have a tooth in my head:

Why, he's able to 'lead her a coranto.

Par. *Fort du Vinaigre!* Is not this Helen ?

Laf. 'Fore God, I think so.

King. Go, call before me all the lords in court.—

[Exit an Attendant.

Sit, my preserver, by thy patient's side;

And with this healthful hand, whose banish'd sense

Thou hast repeal'd, a second time receive

The confirmation of my promis'd gift,

Which but attends thy naming.

Enter several Lords.

Fair maid, send forth thine eye: this youthful parcel
Of noble bachelors stand at my bestowing,

O'er whom both sovereign power and father's voice⁵

I have to use: thy frank election make;

Thou hast power to choose, and they none to for-
sake.

Hel. To each of you one fair and virtuous mistress
Fall, when love please !—marry, to each, but one ¹⁶

Laf. I'd give bay Curtal,⁷ and his furniture,
My mouth no more were broken than these boys,
And writ as little beard.

King. Peruse them well!

Not one of those, but had a noble father,

Hel. Gentlemen,

Heaven hath, through me, restor'd the king to
health.

All. We understand it, and thank heaven for you.

Hel. I am a simple maid; and therein wealthiest,
That, I protest, I simply am a maid:—

Please it your majesty, I have done already:

The blushes in my cheeks thus whisper me,

*We blush, that thou shouldst choose; but, be refus'd,*

*Let the white death sit on thy cheek for ever;*

*We'll ne'er come there again.⁸*

King. Make choice; and, see,

Who shuns thy love, shuns all his love in me.

1 The *Dauphin* was formerly so written, but it is
doubtful whether Lafeu means to allude to the *Prince*
or the fish. The old orthography is therefore continued.

2 Wicked.

3 Dr. Johnson thought this and some preceding
speeches in the scene were erroneously given to Parolles
instead of to Lafeu. This seems very probable, for the
humour of the scene consists in Parolles's pretensions to
knowledge and sentiments which he has not.

4 *Lustick* is the Dutch for active, pleasant, playful, sportive.

5 They were wards as well as subjects.

6 i. e. *except* one, meaning Bertram: *but* in the sense of *be-out*.

7 *A curtail* was the common phrase for a *horse*; i. e.
⁶ I'd give my bay *horse*, &c. that my age were not greater
than these boys: a *broken mouth* is a mouth which has
lost part of its teeth.

8 ⁴ My blushes (says Helen) thus whisper me—We

Hel. Now, Dian, from thy altar do I fly;

And to imperial Love, that god most high,

Do my sighs stream.—Sir, will you hear my suit?

1 Lord. And grant it.

Hel. Thanks, sir, all the rest is mute.⁹

Laf. I had rather be in this choice, than throw
ames-ace¹⁰ for my life.

Hel. The honour, sir, that flames in your fair eyes,
Before I speak, too threateningly replies:
Love make your fortunes twenty times above
Her that so wishes, and her humble love!

2 Lord. No better, if you please.

Hel.

My wish receive,
Which great love grant! and so I take my leave.

Laf. Do all they deny her ?¹¹ An they were sons
of mine, I'd have them whipped; or I would send
them to the Turk, to make eunuchs of.

Hel. Be not afraid [*To a Lord*] that I your hand
should take;

I'll never do you wrong for your own sake:

Blessing upon your vows! and in your bed

Find fairer fortune, if you ever wed!

Laf. These boys are boys of ice, they'll none have
her: sure, they are bastards to the English; the
French ne'er got them.

Hel. You are too young, too happy, and too good,
To make yourself a son out of my blood.

1 Lord. Fair one, I think not so.

Laf. There's one grape yet,—I am sure thy father drank wine,—But if thou'rt not an ass, I am a youth of fourteen; I have known thee already.

Hel. I dare not say, I take you; [To Bertram] but I give

Me, and my service, ever whilst I live,

Into your guiding power.—This is the man.

King. Why then, young Bertram, take her, she's
thy wife.

Ber. My wife, my liege? I shall beseech your
highness.

In such a business give me leave to use

The help of mine own eyes.

King.

Know'st thou not, Bertram,

What has she done for me?

Ber.

Yes, my good lord;

But never hope to know why I should marry her.

King. Thou know'st she has raised me from
sickly bed.

Ber. But follows it, my lord, to bring me down

Must answer for your rising? I know her well;

She had her breeding at my father's charge:

A poor physician's daughter my wife !—disdain

Rather corrupt me ever!

King. 'Tis only title¹² thou disdain't in her, the
which

I can build up. Strange is it that our bloods,

Of colour, weight, and heat, pour'd all together,

Would quite confound distinction, yet stand off

In differences so mighty: If she be

All that is virtuous (save what thou dislik'st,

A poor physician's daughter), thy dislik'st

Of virtue for the name: but do not so.

From lowest place when virtuous things proceed,

The place is dignified by the doer's deed:

Where great additions¹³ swell and virtue none,

It is dropped honour: good alone

Is good;—without a name, vileness is so:¹⁴

blush that thou shouldst have the nomination of thy hus-
band. However, choose him at thy peril; but if thou
be refused, let thy cheeks be forever pale; we will never
revisit them again. 'Be refused' means the same as
'thou being refused,' or, 'be thou refused.' 'The white
death is the pateness of death.'

9 i. e. 'I have no more to say to you.' So Hamlet,

'the rest is silence.'

10 The lowest chance of the dice.

11 The scene must he so regulated that Lafeu and Parolles talk at a distance, where they may see what passes between Helena and the Lords, but not hear it, so that they know not by whom the refusal is made.

12 i. e. the want of title.

13 Titles.

14 Good is good, independent of any worldly distinc-
tion: and so vileness would be ever vile, did not rank,
power, and fortune screen it from opprobrium.

### SCENE III.

## ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

269

The property by what it is should go,

Not by the title. She is young, wise, fair;

In these to nature she's immediate heir;

And these breed honour; that is honour's scorn,

Which challenges itself as honour's born,¹

And is not like the sire: Honours best thrive,²

When rather from our acts we them derive

Than our fore-goers: the mere word's a slave,

Debauch'd then upon a tomb; on every grave,

A lying trophy, and as oft is dumb,

Where dust and damn'd oblivion is the tomb

Of honour'd bones indeed. What should be said?

If thou canst like this creature as a maid,

I can create the rest: virtue, and she,

Is her own dower: honour and wealth from me.

Ber. I cannot love her, nor will strive to do't.

King. Thou wrong'st thyself, if thou shouldst strive to choose.

Hel. That you are well restor'd, my lord, I am glad;

Let the rest go.

King. My honour's at the stake; which to defeat,³

I must produce my power: Here, take her hand,

Proud cornful boy, unworthy this good gift;

That dost in vile misprision shackle up

My love, and her desert; that canst not dream,

We, poising you in her defective scale,

Shall weigh thee to the beam: that wilt not know,

It is in us to plant thine honour, where

We please to have it grow: Check thy contempt:

Obey our will, which travails in thy good:

Believe not thy disdain, but presently

Do thine own fortunes that obedient right,

Which both thy duty owes, and our power claims;

Or I will throw thee from my care for ever,

Into the staggers⁴ and the careless lapse

Of youth and ignorance; both my revenge and hate,

Loosing upon thee in the name of justice,

Without all terms of pity: Speak; thine answer.

Ber. Pardon, my gracious lord; for I submit

My fancy to your eyes: When I consider,

What great creation, and what dole⁵ of honour,

Flies where you bid it; I find, that she, which late

Was in my nobler thoughts most base, is now

The praised of the king; who, so ennobled,

Is, as 'twere, born so.

King.

Take her by the hand,

And tell her, she is thine: to whom I promise

A counterpoint; if not to thy estate,

A balance more replete.

Ber.

I take her hand.

King. Good fortune, and the favour of the king,

Smile upon this contract: whose ceremony

Shall seem expedient on the now-born brief,

And be perform'd to-night:⁶ the solemn feast

Shall more attend upon the coming space,

Expecting absent friends. As thou lov'st her,

Thy love's to me religious; else, does err.
[Exeunt King, BERTRAM, HELENA, Lords,
and Attendants.

Laf. Do you hear, monsieur? a word with you.

Par. Your pleasure, sir?

Laf. Your lord and master did well to make his recantation.

Par. Recantation? My lord? my master?

Laf. Ay; Is it not a language, I speak?

Par. A most harsh one; and not to be under-

stood without bloody succeeding. My master?

Laf. Are you companion to the count Rousillon?

Par. To any count; to all counts; to what is man.

1 i.e. the child of honour.

2 The first folio omits best; the second folio supplies it.

3 The implication or clause of the sentence (as the grammarians say) here serves for the antecedent, 'which danger to defeat.'

4 The commentators here kindly inform us that the staggers is a violent disease in horses; but the word in the text has no relation, even metaphorically, to it. The reeling and unsteady course of a drunken or sick man is meant.

5 i.e. portion.

6 Shakespeare uses expedient and expeditiously in the

Laf. To what is count's man: count's master is of another style.

Par. You are too old, sir; let it satisfy you, you are too old.

Laf. I must tell thee, sirrah, I write man; to which title age cannot bring thee.

Par. What I dare too well do, I dare not do.

Laf. I did think thee, for two ordinaries,⁷ to be a pretty wise fellow; thou didst make tolerable vent of thy travel; it might pass: yet the scarfs, and the bannerers, about thee, did manifoldly dissuade me from believing thee a vessel of too great a burden. I have now found thee; when I lose thee again, I care not: yet art thou good for nothing but taking up;⁸ and that thou art scarce worth.

Par. Hadst thou not the privilege of antiquity upon thee,—

Laf. Do not plunge thyself too far in anger, lest thou hasten thy trial; which if—Lord have mercy on thee for a hen!¹ So, my good window of lattice, fare thee well; thy casement I need not open, for I look through thee. Give me thy hand.

Par. My lord, you give me most egregious indignity.

Laf. Ay, with all my heart; and thou art worthy of it.

Par. I have not, my lord, deserved it.

Laf. Yes, good faith, every dram of it; and I will not bate thee a scruple.

Par. Well, I shall be wiser.

Laf. E'en as soon as thou canst, for thou hast to pull at a smack o' the contrary. If ever thou be'st bound around thy scarf, and beaten, thou shall find what it is to be proud of thy bondage. I have a desire to hold my acquaintance with thee, or rather my knowledge; that I may say, in the default,⁹ he is a man I know.

Par. My lord, you do me most insupportable vexation.

Laf. I would it were hell-pains for thy sake, and my poor doing eternal: for doing I am past; as I will by thee, in what motion age will give me leave.¹⁰

[Exit.]

Par. Well, thou hast a son shall take this disgrace off me; scurvy, old, filthy, scurvy lord!—Well, I must be patient; there is no fettering of authority. I'll beat him by my life, if I can meet him with any convenience, an he were double and double a lord. I'll have no more pity of his age, than I would have of—I'll beat him, an if I could but meet him again.

Re-enter LAFEU.

Laf. Sirrah, your lord and master's married, there's news for you; you have a new mistress.

Par. I most unfeignedly beseech your lordship to make some reservation of your wrongs: He is my good lord: whom I serve above, is my master.

Laf. Who? God?

Par. Ay, sir.

Laf. The devil it is, that's thy master. Why dost thou garter up thy arms o' this fashion? dost make thou lord of thy sleeves? do other servants so? Thou wert best set thy lower part where thy nose stands. By mine honour, if I were but two hours younger, I'd beat thee: methinks, thou art a general offence, and every man should beat thee. I think, thou wast created for men to breathe¹¹ themselves upon thee.

Par. This is hard and undeserved measure, my lord.

sense of expeditiously: and brief in the sense of a short note or intimation concerning any business, and sometimes without the idea of writing.

7 i.e. while I sat twice with thee at dinner.

8 To take up is to contradict; to call to account; as well as to pick off the ground.

9 i.e. at a need.

10 There is a poor conceit here hardly worth explaining, but that some of the commentators have misunderstood it:—'Doing I am past,' says Lafeu, 'as I will by thee, in what motion age will give me leave;' i. e. 'as I will pass by thee as fast as I am able;' and he immediately goes out.

11 Exercise.

270

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

ACT II.

Laf. Go to, sir; you were beaten in Italy for picking a kernel out of a pomegranate; you are a vagabond, and no true traveller: you are more saucy with lords, and honourable personages, than the hierarchy of your birth and virtue gives you commission. You are not worth another word, else I'd call you knave. I leave you.
[Exit.]

Enter BERTRAM.

Par. Good, very good; it is so then.—Good, very good; let it be concealed a while.

Ber. Undone, and forfeited to cares for ever!

Par. What is the matter, sweet heart?

Ber. Although before the solemn priest I have sworn,

I will not bed her.

Par. What? what, sweet heart?

Ber. O my Parolles, they have married me :—

I'll to the Tuscan wars, and never bed her.

Par. France is a dog-hole, and it no more merits

The tread of a man's foot: to the wars !

Ber. There's letters from my mother; what the import is,

I know not yet.

Par. Ay, that would be known: To the wars, my boy, to the wars!

He wears his honour in a box unseen,
That hugs his kicksy-wicksy¹ here at home;
Spending his manly marrow in her arms,
Which should sustain the bound and high curvet
Of Mars's fiery steed: To other regions !
France is a stable: we, that dwell in't, jades;
Therefore, to the war!

Ber. It shall be so; I'll send her to my house,
Acquaint my mother with my hate to her,
And wherefore I am fled; write to the king
That which I durst not speak: His present gift
Shall furnish me to those Italian fields,
Where noble fellows strike: War is no strife
To the dark house,² and the detested wife.

Par. Will this capricio hold in thee, art sure?

Ber. Go with me to my chamber, and advise me.

I'll send her straight away: To-morrow

I'll to the wars, she to her single sorrow.

Par. Why, these balls bound; there's noise in it.—'Tis hard;

A young man, married, is a man that's marr'd:

Therefore away, and leave her bravely; go :

The king has done you wrong; but, hush! 'tis so.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV. The same. Another Room in the same.
Enter HELENA and Clown.

Hel. My mother greets me kindly; Is she well?

Clo. She is not well; but yet she has her health; she's very merry; but yet she is not well: but thanks be given, she's very well, and wants nothing i'the world; but yet she is not well.

Hel. If she be very well, what does she ail, that she's not very well?

Clo. Truly, she's very well, indeed, but for two things.

Hel. What two things?

Clo. One, that she's not in heaven, whither God send her quickly! the other, that she's in earth, from whence God send her quickly!

Enter PAROLLES.

Par. Bless you, my fortunate lady!

Hel. I hope, sir, I have your good-will to have mine own good fortunes.

Par. You had my prayers to lead them on: and to keep them on, have them still.—O, my knave! How does my old lady?

Clo. So that you had her wrinkles, and I her money, I would she did as you say.

1 A cant term for a wife.

2 The dark house is a house made gloomy by discontent.

3 Perhaps the old saying, 'better fed than taught,' is alluded to here as in a preceding scene, where the clown says, 'I will show myself highly fed and lowly taught.'

4 The old copy reads 'to a compell'd restraint.'

5 The meaning appears to be, that the delay of the

Par. Why, I say nothing.

Clo. Marry, you are the wiser man; for many a man's tongue shakes out his master's undoing: To say nothing, to do nothing, to know nothing, and to have nothing, is to be a great part of your title; which is within a very little of nothing.

Par. Away, thou'rt a knave.

Clo. You should have said, sir, before a knave thou art a knave; that is, before me thou art a knave: this had been truth, sir.

Par. Go to, thou art a witty fool, I have found thee.

Clo. Did you find me in yourself, sir? or were you taught to find me? The search, sir, was profitable; and much fool may you find in me, even to the world's pleasure, and the increase of laughter.

Par. A good knave, i'faith, and well fed,³—

Madam, my lord, will go away to-night;

A very serious business calls on him.

The great prerogative and rite of love, Which, as your due, time claims, he does acknowledge;

But puts it off by a⁴ compell'd restraint;

Whose want, and whose delay, is strewed with sweets,

Which they distil now in the curbed time,

To make the coming hour o'erflow with joy,

And pleasure drown the brim.

Hel.

Par. That you will take your instant leave o' the kings,

And make this haste as of your own good proceeding, Strengthen'd with what apology you think

May make it probable need.⁶

Hel.

Par. What more commands he?

Attend his further pleasure.

Hel. In every thing I wait upon his will.

Par. I shall report it so.

Hel.

I pray you.—Come, sirrah. [Exeunt.]

### SCENE V. Another Room in the same.
Enter LAFEU and BERTRAM.

Laf. But, I hope, your lordship thinks not him a soldier.

Ber. Yes, my lord, and of very valiant approof.

Laf. You have it from his own deliverance.

Ber. And by other warranted testimony.

Laf. Then my dial goes not true; I took this lark for a bunting.

Ber. I do assure you, my lord, he is very great in knowledge, and accordingly, and accordingly.

Laf. I have then sinned against his experience, and transgressed against his valour; and my state that way is dangerous, since I cannot yet find in my heart to repent. Here he comes; I pray you, make us friends, I will pursue the amity.

Enter PAROLLES.

Par. These things shall be done, sir.

[To BERTRAM.]

Laf. Pray you, sir, who's his tailor?

Par. Sir?

Laf. O, I know him well: Ay, sir; he, sir, is a good workman, a very good tailor.

Ber. Is she gone to the king?

[Aside to PAROLLES.]

Par. She is.

Ber. Will she away to-night?

Par. As you'll have her.

Ber. I have writ my letters, casketed my treasure, Given order for our horses, and to-night, When I should take possession of the bride,— And, ere I do begin,—

Laf. A good traveller is something at the latter end of a dinner; but one that lies three-thirds, and

joys, and the expectation of them, would make them more delightful when they come. The curbed time means the time of restraint, whose want means the want of which.

6 A specious appearance of necessity.

7 The bunting nearly resembles the sky-lark; but has little or no song, which gives estimation to the sky-lark.

## SCENE V.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

271

uses a known truth to pass a thousand nothings with,
should be once heard, and thrice beaten.—God save
you, captain.

Ber. Is there any unkindness between my lord
and you, monsieur?

Par. I know not how I have deserved to run into
my lord's displeasure.

Laf. You have made shift to run into't, boots and
spurs and all, like him that leaped into the custard;¹
and out of it you'll run again, rather than suffer
question for your residence.

Ber. It may be, you have mistaken him, my lord.

Laf. And shall do so ever, though I took him at
his prayers. Fare you well, my lord; and believe
this of me, There can be no kernel in this light nut;
the soul of this man is his clothes: trust him not in
matter of heavy consequence; I have kept of them
tame, and know their natures.—Farewell, monsieur:
I have spoken better of you, than you have or will²
deserve at my hand; but we must do good against
evil.

[Exit.]

Par. An idle lord, I swear.

Ber. I think so.

Par. Why, do you not know him ?

Ber. Yes, I do know him well; and common
speech

Gives him a worthy pass. Here comes my clog.

### Enter HELENA.

Hel. I have, sir, as I was commanded from you,
Spoke with the king, and have procur'd his leave
For present parting: only, he desires
Some private speech with you.

Ber. I shall obey his will. You must not marvel, Helen, at my course, Which holds not colour with the time, nor does The ministration and required office On my particular: prepar'd I was not. For such a business; therefore am I found So much unsettled: This drives me to entreat you, That presently you take your way for home; And rather muse,³ than ask, why I entreat you: For my respects are better than they seem; And my appointments have in them a need, Greater than shows itself at the first view, To you that know them not. This to my mother:

[Giving a letter.]

'Twill be two days ere I shall see you; so

I leave you to your wisdom.

Hel.

Sir, I can nothing say,

But that I am your most obedient servant.

Ber. Come, come, no more of that.

Hel.

And ever shall

With true observance seek to eke out that,

Wherein toward me my homely stars have fail'd

To equal my great fortune.

Ber. Let that go:

My haste is very great: Farewell, hie home.

Hel. Pray, sir, your pardon.

Ber.

Well, what would you say ?

Hel. I am not worthy of the wealth I owe;⁴

Nor dare I say, 'tis mine; and yet it is;

But, like a timorous thief, most fain would steal

What law does vouch mine own.

Ber.

What would you have ?

Hel. Something; and scarce so much:—nothing,
indeed.—

I would not tell you what I would: my lord—
'faith, yes;—

Strangers and foes, do sunder, and not kiss.

Ber. I pray you stay not, but in haste to horse.

Hel. I shall not break your bidding, good my lord.

Ber. Where are my other men, monsieur?—Farewell.

[Exit HELENA.]

Go thou toward home; where I will never come,

1 It was a piece of foolery practised at city entertainments, when an allowed fool or jester was in fashion, for him to jump into a large deep custard set for the purpose, to cause laughter among the 'barren spectators.'

2 The first folio reads, 'than you have or will to deserve.'—Perhaps the word *wit* was omitted, the second folio omits to.

3 To *muse* is to *wonder*.

4 Possess, or own.

Whilst I can shake my sword, or hear the drum:—
Away, and for our flight.

Par

Bravely, coragio!

[Exeunt.]

## ACT III.

### SCENE I. Florence.
A Room in the Duke's Palace. Flourish. Enter the Duke of Florence, attended; two French Lords, and others.

Duke. So that, from point to point, now have you heard

The fundamental reasons of this war;

Whose great decision hath much blood let forth,
And more thirst after.

1 Lord.

Holy seems the quarrel

Upon your grace's part; black and fearful

On the opposer.

Duke. Therefore we marvel much, our cousin

France

Would, in so just a business, shut his bosom
Against our borrowing prayers.

2 Lord.

Good my lord,

The reasons of our state I cannot yield,⁵

But like a common and an outward man,⁶

That the great figure of a council frames

By self-unable motion;⁷ therefore dare not

Say what I think of it; since I have found

Myself in my uncertain grounds to fail

As often as I guess'd.

Duke.

Be it his pleasure.

2 Lord. But I am sure, the younger of our nature,⁸

That surfet on their ease, will, day by day,

Come here for physic.

Duke.

Welcome shall they be;

And all the honours, that can fly from us,

Shall on them settle. You know your places well;

When better fall, for your avails they fell:

To-morrow to the field.

[Flourish. Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. Rousillon.
A Room in the Countess's Palace. Enter Countess and Clown.

Count. It hath happened all as I would have had
it, save, that it comes not along with her.

Clo. By my troth, I take my young lord to be a
very melancholy man.

Count. By what observance, I pray you?

Clo. Why, he will look upon his boot, and sing;
mend the ruff,⁹ and sing; ask questions, and sing;
pick his teeth, and sing; I know a man that had
this trick of melancholy, sold a goodly manor for a
song.

Count. Let me see what he writes, and when he
means to come.

[Opening a Letter.]

Clo. I have no mind to Isbel, since I was at
court; our old ling and our Isbels o'the country
are nothing like your old ling and your Isbels o'the
court: the brains of my Cupid's knocked out; and
I begin to love, as an old man loves money, with
no stomach.

Count. What have we here?

Clo. E'en that you have there.

[Exit.]

Count. [Reads.] I have sent you a daughter-in-law: she has recovered the king, and undone me. I have wedded her, not bedded her; and sworn to make the not eternal. You shall hear, I am run away; know it, before the report come. If there be breadth enough in the world, I will hold a long distance. My duty to you.

Your unfortunate son,

BERTRAM.

This is not well, rash and unbridled boy,

To fly the favours of so good a king;

To pluck his indignation on thy head,

5 i. e. I cannot inform you of the reasons.

6 One not in the secret of affairs: so inward in a contrary sense.

7 Warburton and Upton are of opinion that we should read, 'By self unable notion.'

8 As we say at present, our young fellows.

9 The tops of the boots in Shakspeare's time turned down, and hung loosely over the leg. The folding part or top was the ruff. It was of softer leather than the boot, and often fringed.

272

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

Act III.

By the misprizing of a maid too virtuous
For the destruction of empire.

Re-enter Clown.

Clo. O madam, yonder is heavy news within,
between two soldiers and my young lady.

Count. What is the mater?

Clo. Nay, there is some comfort in the news,
some comfort; your son will not be killed so soon
as I thought he would.

Count. Why should he be killed?

Clo. So say I, madam, if he run away, as I hear
he does: the danger is in standing to't; that's the
loss of men, though it be the getting of children.
Here they come, will tell you more; for my part, I
only hear, your son was run away.

[Exit Clown.

Enter HELENA and two Gentlemen.

1 Gent. Save you, good madam.

Hel. Madam, my lord is gone, for ever gone.

2 Gent. Do not say so.

Count. Think upon patience.—'Pray you, gentlemen,—

I have felt so many quirks of joy, and grief,
That the first face of neither, on the start,
Can woman¹ me unto't:—Where is my son, I pray
you?

2 Gent. Madam, he's gone to serve the duke of Florence:

We met him thitherward; from thence we came,
And, after some despatch in hand at court,
Thither we bend again.

Hel. Look on his letter, madam; here's my passport.

[Reads.] When thou canst get the ring upon my finger² which never shall come off, and show me a child begotten of thy body, that I am father to, then call me husband: but in such a then I write a never.

This is a dreadful sentence!

Count. Brought you this letter, gentlemen?

1 Gent. Ah, madam;

And, for the contents' sake, are sorry for our pains.

Count. I pr'ythee, lady, have a better cheer ;

If thou engrossest all the griefs are thine,³
Thou robb'st me of a moiety: He was my son;
But I do wash his name out of my blood,

And thou art all my child.—Towards Florence is he?

2 Gent. Ay, madam.

Count. And to be a soldier?

2 Gent. Such is his noble purpose : and, believe't,

The duke will lay upon him all the honour

That good convenience claims.

Count. Return you thither ?

1 Gent. Ay, madam, with the swiftest wing of speed.

Hel. [Reads.] Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France.

'Tis bitter !

Count. Find you that there ?

Hel. Ah, madam.

1 Gent. 'Tis but the boldness of his hand, happy,
which

His heart was not consenting to

Count. Nothing in France, until he have no wife !

There's nothing here, that is too good for him,

But only she ; and she deserves a lord,

That twenty such rude boys might tend upon,

And call her hourly, mistress. Who was with him?

1 i. e. affect me suddenly and deeply, as our sex are usually affected.

2 i. e. when you can get the ring which is on my finger into your possession.

3 If thou keepest all thy sorrows to thyself: an elliptical expression for 'all the griefs that are thine?'

4 This passage as it stands is very obscure; it appears to me that something is omitted after much. Warburton interprets it, 'That his vices stand him in stead of virtues.' And Heath thought the meaning was:— 'This fellow hath a deal too much of that which alone can hold or judge that he has much in him ;' i. e. folly and ignorance.

5 In reply to the gentleman's declaration that they are her servants, the countess answers—no otherwise than as she returns the same offices of civility.

1 Gent. A servant only, and a gentleman
Which I have some time known.

Count. Parolles, was't not?

1 Gent. Ay, my good lady, he.

Count. A very tainted fellow and full of wickedness.

My son corrupts a well-derived nature

With his inducement:

1 Gent. Indeed, good lady,
The fellow has a deal of that, too much,
Which holds him much to have.⁴

Count. You are welcome, gentlemen,
I will entreat you, when you see my son,
To tell him that his sword can never win
The honour that he loses: more I'll entreat you
Written to bear along.

2 Gent. We serve you, madam,
In that and all your worthiest affairs.

Count. Not so, but as we change our courtesies,⁵
Will you draw near?

[Exeunt Countess and Gentlemen.

Hel. Till I have no wife, I have nothing in France.
Nothing in France, until he has no wife !
Thou shall have none, Rousillon, none in France,
Then hast thou all again. Poor lord! is't I
That chase thee from thy country, and expose
Those tender limbs of thine to the event

Of the none-sparing war ? and is it I
That drive thee from the sportive court, where thou
Was shot at with fair eyes, to be the mark
Of smoky muskets ? O you leaden messengers,
That ride upon the violent speed of fire,
Fly with false aim; move the still-piecing⁶ air,
That sings with piercing, do not touch my lord!
Whoever shoots at him, I set him there;
Whoever charges on his forward breast,
I am the caitiff, that do hold him to it;
And, though I kill him not, I am the cause
His death was so effected; better 'twere,
I met the ravin' lion when he roar'd

With sharp constraint of hunger; better 'twere
That all the miseries, which nature owes,
Were mine at once: No, come thou home, Rousillon,
Whence honour but of danger wins a scar,
As oft it loses all.⁸ I will be gone :

My being here it is, that holds thee hence:
Shall I stay here to do't ? no, no, although

The air of paradise did fan the house,

And angels offic'd all: I will be gone ;

That pitiful rumour may report my flight,

To consolate thine ear. Come, night; end, day !

For, with the dark, poor thief, I'll steal away.

[Exit.]

SCENE III. Florence. Before the Duke's Palace.

Flourish. Enter the Duke of Florence, BERTRAM, Lords, Officers, Soldiers, and others.

Duke. The general of our horse thou art; and we,
Great in our hope, lay our best love and credence,
Upon thy promising fortune.

Ber. Sir, it is
A charge too heavy for my strength; but yet
We'll strive to bear it for your worthy sake,
To the extreme edge of hazard.⁹

Duke. Then go thou forth; And fortune play upon thy prosperous helm,¹⁰
As thy auspicious mistress!

Ber. This very day,
Great Mars, I put myself into thy file :

6 The old copy reads, *still-peering*. The emendation was adopted by Steevens: *still-piecing* is still reuniting; *piecing* is the old orthography of the word. I must confess that I should give the preference to *still-pacing*, i. e. *still-moving*, as more in the poet's manner.

7 That is the *ravenous* or *ravening* lion.
8 The sense is, 'From that place, where all the advantages that honour usually reaps from the danger it rushes upon, is only a scar in testimony of its bravery, as, on the other hand, it often is the cause of losing all, even life itself.'

9 So in Shakespeare's 116th Sonnet :

'But bears it out, even to the edge of doom.'

10 In K Richard III. we have:

*'Fortune and victory sit on thy helm'*

### SCENE V.

## ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

273

Make me but like my thoughts; and I shall prove
A lover of me, drum, hater of love.
[Exeunt.]

### SCENE IV.
Rousillon. A Room in the Countess's Palace. Enter Countess and Steward.

Count. Alas! and would you take the letter of her?
Might you not know, she would do as she has done,
By sending me a letter? Read it again.

Stew. I am Saint Jaques' pilgrim, thither gone;
Ambitious love hath soft in me offended,

That bare-foot plod I the cold ground upon,
With sainted vow my faults to have amended,

Write, write, that from the bloody course of war,
My dearest master, your dear son, may he;

Bless him at home in peace, whilst I from far,
His name with zealous fervour sanctify :

His taken labours bid him me forgive;
I, his despiteful Juno,²² sent him forth

From courtly friends, with camping foes to live,
Where death and danger dog the heels of worth:

He is too good and fair for death and me

Whom I myself embrace, to set him free.

Count. Ah, what sharp stings are in her mildest
words!—

Rinaldo, you did never lack advice³ so much,
As letting her pass so; had I spoke with her,
I could have well diverted her intents,
Which thus she hath prevented.

Stew.

Pardon me, madam:

If I had given you this at over-night,
She might have been o'erta'en; and yet she writes,
Pursuit would be in vain.

Count.

What angel shall

Bless this unworthy husband? he cannot thrive,
Unless her prayers, whom heaven delights to hear,
And loves to grant, reprieve him from the wrath
Of greatest justice.—Write, write, Rinaldo,
To this unworthy husband of his wife;

Let every word weigh heavy of her worth,
That he does weigh⁴ too light: my greatest grief,
Though little he do feel it, set down sharply.

Despatch the most convenient messenger :—
When, haply, he shall hear that she is gone,
He will return; and hope I may, that she,
Hearing so much, will speed her foot again,
Led hither by pure love: which of them both
Is dearest to me, I have no skill in sense

To make distinction :—Provide this messenger :—
My heart is heavy, and mine age is weak;
Grief would have tears, and sorrow bids me speak.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE V.
Without the Walls of Florence, A
Tucket afar off. Enter an old Widow of Florence,
DIANA, VIOLENTA, MARIANA, and other Citizens.

Wid. Nay, come; for if they do approach the
city, we shall lose all the sight.

Dia. They say, the French count has done most
honourable service.

Wid. It is reported that he has taken their greatest commander; and that with his own hand he slew the duke's brother. We have lost our labour; they are gone a contrary way: hark! you may know by their trumpets.

Mar. Come, let's return again, and suffice ourselves with the report of it. Well, Diana, take heed of this French earl: the honour of a maid is her name; and no legacy is so rich as honesty.

Wid. I have told my neighbour, how you have
been solicited by a gentleman his companion.

Mar. I know that knave; hang him! one Parolles: a filthy officer he is in those suggestions⁵ for the young earl.—Beware of them, Diana; their promises, enticements, oaths, tokens, and all these engines of lust, are not the things they go under:⁶ many a maid hath been seduced by them; and the misery is, example, that so terrible shows in the wreck of maidenhead, cannot for all that dissuade succession, but that they are limed with the twigs that threaten them. I hope, I need not to advise you further; but, I hope, your own grace will keep you where you are, though there were no further danger known, but the modesty which is so lost.

Dia. You shall not need to fear me.

Enter HELENA, in the dress of a Pilgrim.

Wid. I hope so.—Look, here comes a pilgrim;
I know she will lie at my house: thither they send
one another: I'll question her.—

God save you, pilgrim! Whither are you bound?

Hel. To Saint Jaques le grand.

Where do the palmers' lodge, I do beseech you?

Wid. At the Saint Francis here, beside the port.

Hel. Is this the way?

Wid. Ay, marry, is it.—Hark you;
[A march afar off.]

They come this way:—If you will tarry, holy pilgrim,
But till the troops come by,

I will conduct you where you shall be lodg'd;

The rather, for, I think, I know your hostess
As ample as myself.

Hel. Is it yourself?

Wid. If you shall please so, pilgrim.

Hel. I thank you, and will stay upon your leisure.

Wid. You came, I think, from France?

Hel.

I did so.

Wid. Here you shall see a countryman of yours,
That has done worthy service.

Hel.

His name, I pray you.

Dia. The count Rousillon; Know you such a one?

Hel. But by the ear, that hears most nobly of him;

His face I know not.

Dia. Whatsoe' er he is,

He's bravely taken here. He stole from France,
As 'tis reported, for⁸ the king had married him
Against his liking: Think you it is so?

Hel. Ay, surely, mere the truth;⁹ I know his lady.

Dia. There is a gentleman, that serves the count,
Reports but coarsely of her.

Hel. What's his name?

Dia. Monsieur Parolles.

O, I believe with him,

Hel.

In argument of praise, or to the worth

Of the great count himself, she is too mean

To have her name repeated; all her deserving

Is a reserved honesty, and that

I have not heard examin'd.¹⁰

Dia.

Alas, poor lady!

'Tis a hard bondage, to become the wife
Of a detesting lord.

Wid. Ay, right; good creature, wheresoe'er she is,¹¹
Her heart weighs sadly: this young maid might do her
A shrewd turn, if she pleas'd.

Hel.

How do you mean?

May be, the amorous count solicits her

In the unlawful purpose.

Wid.

He does, indeed;

And brokes¹² with all that can in such a suit

1 At Orleans was a church dedicated to St. Jaques, to which pilgrims formerly used to resort, to adore a part of the cross pretended to be found there. See Heylin's France Painted to the Life, 1656, p. 270—6.

2 Alluding to the story of Hercules.

3 i. e. discretion or thought.

4 Weigh here means to value or esteem.

5 Suggestions are temptations.

6 They are not the things for which their names would make them pass. To go under the name of so and so is a common expression.

7 Pilgrims; so called from a staff or bough of palm they were wont to carry, especially such as had visited the holy places at Jerusalem. Johnson has given

Stavely's account of the difference between a palmer and a pilgrim in his Dictionary.

8 For, here and in other places, signifies cause, which
Tooke says is always its signification.

9 i. e. the mere truth, or merely the truth. Mere was
used in the sense of simple, absolute, decided.

10 That is, questioned, doubted.

11 The old copy reads:

'I write good creature, wheresoe'er she is.'

Malone once deemed this an error, and proposed, 'A
right good creature,' which was admitted into the text,
but he subsequently thought that the old reading was
correct.

12 Deals with panders.

35

274

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

ACT III.

Corrupt the tender honour of a maid :

But she is arm'd for him, and keeps her guard
In honestest defence.

*Enter, with Drum and Colours, a party of the Florentine Army, BERTRAM, and PAROLLES.*

*Mar. The gods forbid else!*

*Wid.* So, now they come :—
That is Antonio, the duke's eldest son ;
That Escalus.

*Hel.*

*Dias.* Which is the Frenchman ?

*Hel.*
*Dias.* He ;
That with the plume : 'is a most gallant fellow ;
I would, he lov'd his wife : if he were honest,
He were much goodlier :—Is't not a handsome gen-

tleman ?

*Hel.* I like him well.

*Dia.* 'Tis pity, he is not honest: Yond's that same knave,
That leads him to these places ;' were I his lady,
I'd poison that vile rascal.

*Hel.*

*Dias.* Which is he ?

*Dia.* That jack-an-apes with scarfs : Why is he
melancholy ?

*Hel.* Perchance he's hurt i'the battle.

*Par.* Lose our drum ! well.

*Mar.* He's shrewdly vexed at something : Look,
he has spied us.

*Wid.* Marry, hang you !

*Mar.* And your courtesy, for a ring-carier :
*[Exeunt BERTRAM, PAROLLES, Officers, and Soldiers.]*
*Wid.* The troop is past : Come, pilgrim, I will
bring you

Where you shall host: of enjoin'd penitents,
There's four or five, to great Saint Jaques bound,
Already at my house.

*Hel.*

Please it this matron, and this gentle maid,
To eat with us to-night, the charge, and thanking,
Shall be for me; and, to requite you further,
I will bestow some precepts on this virgin,
Worthy the note.

*Both.* We'll take your offer kindly. [*Exeunt.*

### SCENE VI. Camp before Florence. Enter BERTRAM, and the two French Lords.

1. **Lord.** Nay, good my lord, put him to't: let him have his way.

2. **Lord.** If your lordship find him not a hilding; hold me no more in your respect.

1. **Lord.** On my life, my lord, a bubble.

*Ber.* Do you think, I am so far deceived in him ?
1. **Lord.** Believe it, my lord, in mine own direct knowledge, without any malice, but to speak of him, as my kinsman, he's a most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner of no one good quality worthy your lordship's entertainment.

2. **Lord.** It were fit you knew him ; lest, reposing too far in his virtue, which he hath not, he might, at some great and trusty business, in a main danger, fail you.

*Ber.* I would, I knew in what particular action to try him.

2. **Lord.** None better than to let him fetch off his drum, which you hear him so confidently undertake to do.

1. **Lord.** I, with a troop of Florentines, will suddenly surprise him; such I will have, whom, I am sure, he knows not from the enemy: we will bind

and hoodwink him so, that he shall suppose no other but that he is carried into the leaguer of the adversaries, when we bring him to our tents: Be but your lordship present at his examination; if he do not, for the promise of his life, and in the highest compulsion of base fear, offer to betray you, and deliver all the intelligence in his power against you, and that with the divine forfeiture of his soul upon oath, never trust my judgment in any thing.

2. **Lord.** O, for the love of laughter, let him fetch his drum; he says, he has a stratagem for't; when your lordship sees the bottom of his success in't, and to what metal this counterfeit lump of ore⁴ will be melted, if you give him not John Drum's entertainment,⁵ your inclining cannot be removed. Here he comes.

### Enter PAROLLES.

1. **Lord.** O, for the love of laughter, hinder not the humour of his design; let him fetch off his drum in any hand.⁵

*Ber.* How now, monsieur ? this drum sticks sorely in your disposition.

2. **Lord.** A pox on't, let it go; 'tis but a drum.

*Par.* But a drum! Is't but a drum? A drum so lost!—There was an excellent command! to charge in with our horse upon our own wings, and to rend our own soldiers.

2. **Lord.** That was not to be blamed in the command of the service; it was a disaster of war that Caesar himself could not have prevented, if he had been there to command.

*Ber.* Well, we cannot greatly condemn our success: some dishonour we had in the loss of that drum; but it is not to be recovered.

*Par.* It might have been recovered.

*Ber.* But might, but it is not now.

*Par.* It is to be recovered: but that the merit of service is seldom attributed to the true and exact performer, I would have that drum or another, or his jacet?

*Ber.* Why, if you have a stomach to't, monsieur, if you think your mystery in stratagem can bring this instrument of honour again into his native quarter, be magnanimous in the enterprise, and go on; I will grace the attempt for a worthy exploit: if you speed well in it, the duke shall both speak of it, and extend to you what further becomes his greatness, even to the utmost syllable of your worthiness.

*Par.* By the hand of a soldier, I will undertake it.

*Ber.* But you must not now slumber in it.

*Par.* I'll about it this evening: and I will presently pen down my dilemmas,⁶ encourage myself in my certainty, put myself into my mortal preparation, and, by midnight, look to hear further from me.

*Ber.* May I be bold to acquaint his grace, you are gone about it?

*Par.* I know not what the success will be, my lord; but the attempt I vow.

*Ber.* I know, thou art valiant; and, to the possibility of my soldiership, will subscribe for thee.⁷ Farewell.

*Par.* I love not many words.

*[Exit.]*

1. **Lord.** No more than a fish loves water.—Is not this a strange fellow, my lord ? that so confidently seems to undertake this business, which he knows is not to be done; danns himself to do, and dares better be damned than to do't.

2. **Lord.** You do not know him, my lord, as we do: certain it is, that he will steal himself into a man's favour, and, for a week, escape a great deal

1. Theobald thought that we should read *paces*; but we may suppose the *places* alluded to be the houses of pimps and panders.

2. *A hilding* is a paltry fellow, a coward.

3. The *camp*. It seems to have been a new-fangled term at this time, introduced from the Low Countries.

4. The old copy reads *ours*. The emendation is Theobald's.

5. This was a common phrase for *ill treatment*.

6. A phrase for *at any rate*. Sometimes, 'at any hand.'

7. I would recover the lost drum or another, or die in the attempt. An epitaph then usually began *his jacet*.

8. The *dilemmas* of Parolles have nothing to do with those of the schoolmen, as the commentators imagined:—his dilemmas are the *difficulties* he was to encounter. Mr. Boswell argues that the penning down of these could not well encourage him in his certainty: but why are those distinct actions necessarily connected?

9. Steevens has mistaken this passage: Malone is right. Bertram's meaning is, that he will vouch for his doing all that it is possible for soldiership to effect. He was not yet certain of his cowardice.

R

## SCENE VII.

# ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

275

of discoveries; but when you find him out, you have him ever after.

Ber. Why, do you think, he will make no deed at all of this, that so seriously he does address himself unto?

I Lord. None in the world; but return with an invention, and clap upon you two or three probable lies: but we have almost embossed him,' you shall see his fall to-night; for, indeed, he is not for your lordship's respect.

2 Lord. We will make you some sport with the fox, ere we case him.² He was first smoked by the old lord Laefe: when his disguise and he is parted, tell me what a sprat you shall find him; which you shall see this very night.

1 Lord. I must go look my twigs; he shall be caught.

Ber. Your brother, he shall go along with me.
1 Lord. As't please your lordship: I'll leave you.

Ber. Now will I lead you to the house, and show you the lass I spoke of.

2 Lord. But, you say, she's honest.

Ber. That's all the fault: I spoke with her but once, And found her wondrous cold; but I sent to her, By this same coxcomb that we have 'the wind,³ Tokens and letters which she did resend;

And this is all I have done: She's a fair creature: Will you go see her?

2 Lord.

With all my heart, my lord.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE VII. Florence. A Room in the Widow's House. Enter HELENA and Widow.

Hel. If you misdoubt me that I am not she, I know not how I shall assure you further, But I shall lose the grounds I work upon.⁴

Wid. Though my estate be fallen, I was well born, Nothing acquainted with these businesses; And would not put my reputation now In any staining act.

Hel. Nor would I wish you.

First, give me trust, the count he is my husband; And, what to your sworn counsel I have spoken, Is so, from word to word; and then you cannot, By the good advice that I of you shall borrow, Err in bestowing it.

Wid. I should believe you;

For you have show'd me that, which well approves You are great in fortune.

Hel. Take this purse of gold, And let me buy your friendly help thus far, Which I will overpay, and pay again,

When I have found it. The count he woos your daughter,

Lays down his wanton siege before her beauty, Resolves to carry her; let her, in fine, consent, As we'll direct her how 'tis best to bear it, Now his important⁵ blood will nought deny That she'll demand: a ring the county⁶ wears That downward hath succeeded in his house, From son to son, some four or five descents Since the first father wore it; this ring he holds In most rich choice; yet, in his idle fire, To buy his will, it would not seem too dear, Howe'er repented after.

Wid.

Now I see

The bottom of your purpose.

Hel. You see it lawful then: It is no more,

But that your daughter, ere she seems as won, Desires this ring; appoints him an encounter; In fine, delivers me to fill the time, Herself most chastely absent: after this, To marry him, I'll add three thousand crowns To what is past already.

Wid.

I have yielded:

Instruct my daughter how she shall persever, That time and place, with this deceit so lawful, May prove coherent. Every night he comes With musics of all sorts, and songs compos'd To her unworthiness: It nothing steads us, To chide him from our eaves:⁷ for he persists, As if his life lay on't.

Hel.

Why then, to-night

Let us assay our plot; which, if it speed, Is wicked meaning in a lawful deed,

And lawful meaning in a lawful act;

Where both not sin, and yet a sinful fact:⁹

But let's about it.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT IV.

### SCENE I. Without the Florentine Camp. Enter first Lord, with five or six Soldiers in ambush.

1 Lord. He can come no other way but by this hedge⁶ corner: When you sally upon him, speak what terrible language you will; though you understand it not yourselves, no matter: for we must not seem to understand him; unless some one among us, whom we must produce for an interpreter.

1 Sold. Good captain, let me be the interpreter.

1 Lord. Art not acquainted with him? knows he not thy voice?

1 Sold. No, sir, I warrant you.

1 Lord. But what linsy-woolsy hast thou to speak to us again?

1 Sold. Even such as you speak to me.

1 Lord. He must think us some band of strangers 'the adversary's entertainment.⁹ Now he hath a smack of all neighbouring languages; therefore we must every one be a man of his own fancy,¹⁰ to know what we speak one to another; so we seem to know, is to know straight our purpose:¹⁰ though's¹¹ the language, gable enough and good enough. As for you, interpreter, you must seem very politic. But couch, ho! here he comes; to begone two hours in a sleep, and then to return and swear the lies he forges.

### Enter PAROLLES.

Par. Ten o'clock: within these three hours 'twill be time enough to go home. What shall I say I have done? It must be a very plausible invention that carries it: They begin to smoke me; and disgraces have of late knocked too often at my door. I find my tongue is too fool-hardy; but my heart hath the fear of Mars before it, and of his creatures, not daring the reports of my tongue.

1 Lord. This is the first truth that e'er thine own tongue was guilty of.

[Aside.]

Par. What the devil should move me to undertake the recovery of this drum; being not ignorant of the impossibility, and knowing I had no such purpose? I must give myself some hurts, and say, I got them in exploit: Yet slight ones will not carry it: They will say, Came you off with so little? and great ones I dare not give. Wherefore?

7 From under our windows.

8 This glinging riddle may be thus briefly explained. Bertram's is a wicked intention, though the act he commits is lawful. Helen's is both a lawful intention and a lawful deed. The fact as relates to Bertram was sinful, because he intended to commit adultery; yet neither he nor Helen actually sinned.

9 i. e. foreign troops in the enemy's pay.

10 The sense of this very obscure passage appears, from the context, to be: ' we must each fancy a jargon for himself, without aiming to be understood by each other; for, provided we appear to understand, that will be sufficient.' I suspect that a word or two is omitted.

11 A bird of the jack-daw kind.

1 That is, almost run him down. An emboss'd stag is one so hard chased that it foams at the mouth. V. note on The Induction to The Taming of the Shrew

2 Before we strip him naked, or unmask him.

3 This proverbial phrase is noted by Ray, p. 216, ed. 1737. It is thus explained by old Cotgrave: 'Estre sur vent. To be in the wind, or to have the wind of. To get the wind, advantage, upper hand of; to have a man under his lee.'

4 i. e. by discovering herself to the Count.

5 Important, here and in other places, is used for impropriate. Mr. Tyrwhitt says, that important may be from the French important.

6 i. e. the Count.

276

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

ACT IV

what's the instance?¹ Tongue, I must put you into a butterwoman's mouth, and buy another of Bazajet's mute,² if you prattle me into these perils.

I Lord. Is it possible, he should know what he is, and be that he is?

[Aside.]
Par. I would the cutting of my garments would serve the turn; or the breaking of my Spanish sword.

1 Lord. We cannot afford you so.

[Aside.]
Par. Or the baring³ of my beard; and to say, it was in stratagem.

1 Lord. 'Twould not do.

[Aside.]
Par. Or to drown my clothes, and say, I was stripped.

1 Lord. Hardly serve.

[Aside.]
Par. Though I swore I leaped from the window of the citadel—

1 Lord. How deep?

1 Lord. Thirty fathom.
1 Lord. Three great oaths would scarce make that be believed.

[Aside.]
Par. I would, I had any drum of the enemy's; I would swear, I recovered it.

1 Lord. You shall hear one anon.

1 Lord. A drum now of the enemy's!

[Alarum within.
1 Lord. Throea movousus, cargo, cargo, cargo.
All. Cargo, cargo, villianda par corbo, cargo.
Par. O! ransom, ransom:—Do not hide mine eyes.

1 Sold. Boskos thromuldo boskos.

[Par. I know you are the Muskos' regiment. And I shall lose my life for want of language: If there be here German, or Dane, low Dutch, Italian, or French, let him speak to me, I will discover that which shall undo The Florentine.

1 Sold. Boskos vauvado:—

I understand thee, and can speak thy tongue:—
*Kerelybonto:*—Sir,

Betake thee to thy faith, for seventeen poniards Are at thy bosom.

1 Sold. Oh!
1 Sold. O pray, pray, pray.

Manka revania dulche.
1 Lord. Oscorbi dulchos volivorca.
1 Sold. The general is content to spare thee yet;

And, hoodwink'd as thou art, will lead thee on
To gather from thee: haply, thou may'st inform
Something to save thy life.

1 Sold. O, let me live,

And all the secrets of our camp I'll show,
Their force, their purposes: nay, I'll speak that Which you will wonder at.

1 Sold. But wilt thou faithfully ?

Par. If I do not, damn me.

1 Sold. Acordo linta.—

Come on, thou art granted space.
[Exit, with PAROLLES guarded.

1 Lord. Go, tell the count Rousillon, and my brother,

We have caught the woodcock, and will keep him muffled,

Till we do hear from them.

2 Sold. Captain, I will.

1 Lord. He will betray us all unto ourselves;—
Inform 'em that.

2 Sold. So I will, sir.
1 Lord. Till then, I'll keep him dark, and safely lock'd.

1 The proof.

2 The old copy reads *mule*. The emendation was made by Warburton.

3 i. e. the *shaving* of my beard. To *bare* anciently signified to *shave*.

4. i. e. against his determined resolution never to co-habit with Helena.

5 The sense is—*we never swear by what is not holy, but take to witness the Highest, the Divinity*.

6 Heath's attempt at explanation of this very obscure passage does not satisfy me. It appears to be corrupt; and, after much attention to its probable meaning, and taken with the preceding and succeeding speeches, I feel persuaded that it should stand thus:

### SCENE II. Florence.
*A Room in the Widow's House.*

#### Enter BERTRAM and DIANA.

Ber. They told me, that your name was Fonti-bell.

Dia. No, my good lord, Diana.

Ber. Titled goddess; And worth it, with addition! But, fair soul, In your fine frame hath love no quality? If the quick fire of youth light not your mind, You are no maids, but a monument: When you are dead, you should be such a one As you are now, for you are cold and stern; And now you should be as your mother was, When your sweet self was got.

Dia. She then was honest.

Ber. How should you be.

Dia. So should you be.
My mother did but duty; such, my lord, As you owe your wife.

Ber. No more of that !

I pr'ythee, do not strive against my vows:⁴ I was compell'd to her; but I love thee. By love's own sweet constraint, and will for ever Do thee all rights of service.

Dia. Ay, so you serve us,

Till we serve you: but when you have our roses, You barely leave our thorns to prick ourselves, And mock us with our bareness.

Ber. How have I sworn?

Dia. 'Tis not the many oaths, that make the truth;

But the plain single vow, that is vow'd true.
What is not holy, that we swear not by,
But take the highest to witness:⁵ Then, pray you, tell me,

If I should swear by Jove's great attributes,
I lov'd you dearly, would you believe my oaths,
When I did love you ill? this has no holding,
To swear by him whom I protest to love,
That I will work against him:⁶ Therefore, your oaths.

Are words, and poor conditions; but unseal'd;
At least, in my opinion.

Ber. Change it, change it;

Be not so holy-cruel: love is holy;
And my integrity ne'er knew the crafts

That you do charge men with: Stand no more off,
But give thyself unto my sick desires,

Who then recover: say, thou art mine, and ever
My love, as it begins, shall so persevere.

Dia. I see, that men make hopes, in such a war, That we'll forsake ourselves. Give me that ring.

Ber. I'll lend it thee, my dear, but have no power To give it from me.

Dia. Will you not, my lord?

Ber. It is an honour 'longing to our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors;
Which were the greatest obloquy i'the world In me to lose.

Dia. Mine honour's such a ring:
My chastity's the jewel of our house,
Bequeathed down from many ancestors;
Which were the greatest obloquy i'the world In me to lose: Thus your own proper wisdom Brings in the champion honour on my part, Against your vain assault.

Ber. Here, take my ring:
My house, mine honour, yea, my life be thine,
And I'll be bid by thee.

'If I should swear by Love's great attributes I lov'd you dearly, would you believe my oaths, When I did love you ill? this has no holding, To swear by him, when I protest to love That I will work against him.'

7 The old copy reads, 'make ropes in such a scarre.' Rowe changed it to, 'make hopes in such affairs'; and Malone to, make hopes in such a scene. But affairs and scene have no literal resemblance to the old word *scarre*: *warre* is always so written in the old copy; the change is therefore less violent, more probable, and, I think, makes better sense.

## SCENE III.

## ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

277

Dia. When midnight comes, knock at my cham-
ber window;

I'll order take, my mother shall not hear.

Now will I charge you in the band of truth,

When you have conquer'd my yet maiden bed,

Remain there but an hour, nor speak to me;

My reasons are most strong; and you shall know
them.

When back again this ring shall be deliver'd :

And on your finger, in the night, I'll put

Another ring; that, what in time proceeds,

May token to the future our past deeds.

Adieu, till then; then, fail not: You have won
A wife of me, though there my hope be done.

Ber. A heaven on earth I have won, by wooing
thine.

Dia. For which live long to thank both heaven
and me!

You may so in the end.—

My mother told me just how he would woo,

As if she sat in his heart; she says, all men

Have the like oaths: he had sworn to marry me,

When his wife's dead; therefore I'll lie with him,

When I am buried. Since Frenchmen are so
braid,

Marry that will, I'll live and die a maid :

Only in this disguise, I think't no sin,

To cozen him, that would unjustly win.

[Exit.]

### SCENE III. The Florentine Camp. Enter the two French Lords, and two or three Soldiers.

1. Lord. You have not given him his mother's letter?

2. Lord. I have delivered it an hour since: there is something in't that stings his nature; for, on the reading it, he chang'd almost into another man.

1. Lord. He has much worthy blame laid upon
him, for shaking off so good a wife, and so sweet a
lady.

2. Lord. Especially he hath incurred the everlast-
ing displeasure of the king, who had even tuned his
bounty to sing happiness to him. I will tell you a
thing, but you shall let it dwell darkly with you.

1. Lord. When you have spoken it 'tis dead, and
I am the grave of it.

2. Lord. He hath perverted a young gentlewoman
here in Florence, of a most chaste renown; and
this night he fleshes his will in the spoil of her hon-
our; he hath given her his monumental ring, and
thinks himself made in the unchaste composition.

1. Lord. Now, God delay our rebellion; as we
are ourselves, what things are we!

2. Lord. Merely our own traitors. And as in
the common course of all treasons, we still see them
reveal themselves, till they attain to their abhorred
ends; so he that in this action contrives against
his own nobility, in his proper stream o'erflows
himself.

1. Lord. Is it not meant damnable⁴ in us to be
trumpeters of our unlawful intents? We shall not
then have his company to-night.

2. Lord. Not till after midnight; for he is dieted
to his hour.

1. Lord. That approaches apace; I would gladly
have him see his company⁵ anatomized; that he
might take a measure of his own judgment,⁶ where-
in so curiously he had set this counterfeit.

2. Lord. We will not meddle with him till he
come; for his presence must be the whip of the
other.

1. Lord. In the mean time, what hear you of these
wars?

2. Lord. I hear, there is an overture of peace.

1. Lord. Nay, I assure you, a peace concluded.

1 i. e., false, deceitful, tricking, beguiling.

2 This may mean, they are perpetually talking
about the mischief they intend to do, till they have
obtained an opportunity of doing it.

3 i. e., betrays his own secrets in his own talk.

4 Damnable for damnable; the adjective used ad-
verbially.

5 Company for companion.

6 This is a very just and moral reason. Bertram, by
ing off his spurs.

2. Lord. What will count Rousillon do then? will
he travel higher, or return again into France?

1. Lord. I perceive by this demand, you are not
altogether of his council.

2. Lord. Let it be forbid, sir! so should I be a
great deal of his act.

1. Lord. Sir, his wife, some two months since,
fled from his house: her pretence is a pilgrimage
to Saint Jaques le grand; which holy undertaking,
with most austere sanctimony, she accomplished;
and, there residing, the tenderness of her nature
became as a prey to her grief; in fine, made a
groan of her last breath, and now she sings in
heaven.

2. Lord. How is this justified?

1. Lord. The stronger part of it by her own letters; which makes her story true, even to the point of her death: her death itself, which could not be her office to say, is come, was faithfully confirmed by the rector of the place.

2. Lord. Hath the count all this intelligence?

1. Lord. Ay, and the particular confirmations,
point from point, to the full arming of the verity.

2. Lord. I am heartily sorry, that he'll be glad of
this.

1. Lord. How mightily, sometimes, we make us
comforts of our losses!

2. Lord. And how mightily, some other times, we
drown our gain in tears! The great dignity, that
his valour hath here acquired for him, shall at home
be encountered with a shame as ample.

1. Lord. The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together: our virtues would be proud,
if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes
would despair, if they were not cherish'd by our
virtues.

### Enter a Servant.

How now? where's your master?

Serv. He met the duke in the street, sir, of
whom he hath taken a solemn leave; his lordship
will next morning for France. The duke hath of-
fere'd him letters of commendations to the king.

2. Lord. They shall be no more than needful
there, if they were more than they can commend.

### Enter BERTRAM.

1. Lord. They cannot be too sweet for the king's
tartness. Here's his lordship now. How now, my
lord, is't not after midnight?

Ber. I have to-night despatched sixteen busi-
nesses, a month's length a-piece, by an abstract of
success: I have conge'd with the duke, done my
adieu with his nearest; buried a wife, mourned for
her; writ to my lady mother, I am returning; en-
tertained my convoy; and, between these main
parcels of despatch, effected many nicer needs; the
last was the greatest, but that I have not ended
yet.

2. Lord. If the business be of any difficulty and
this morning your departure hence, it requires haste
of your lordship.

Ber. I mean, the business is not ended, as fear-
ing to hear of it hereafter: But shall we have this
dialogue between the fool and the soldier? Come,
bring forth this counterfeit module;⁸ he has
deceived me, like a double-meaning prophesier.

2. Lord. Bring him forth: [Exeunt Soldiers.] he
has sat in the stocks all night, poor gallant knave.

Ber. No matter; his heels have deserved it, in
usurping his spurs⁹ so long. How does he carry
himself?

1. Lord. I have told your lordship already; the
finding how erroneously he has judged, will be less
confident, and more easily moved by admonition.

7. Counterfeit, besides its ordinary signification of a
person pretending to be what he is not, also meant a
picture, the word set shows that the word is used in both
senses here.

8. Module and model were synonymous. The mean-
ing is, bring forth this counterfeit representation of a
soldier.

9. An allusion to the degradation of a knight by hack-
ing off his spurs.

## SCENE IV.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

279

Ber. He shall be whipped through the army with this rhyme in his forehead.

2. Lord. This is your devoted friend, sir, the manifold linguist, and the armipotent soldier.

Ber. I could endure anything before but a cat, and now he's a cat to me.

1. Sold. I perceive, sir, by the general's looks, we shall be fain to hang you.

Par. My life, sir, in any case: not that I am afraid to die; but that, my offences being many, I would repent out the remainder of nature; let me live, sir, in a dungeon, i'the stocks, or any where, so I may live.

1. Sold. We'll see what may be done, so you confess freely; therefore, once more to this captain Dumain: You have answered to his reputation with the duke, and to his valour: What is his honesty?

Par. He will steal, sir, an egg out of a cloister;¹ for rapes and ravishments he parallels Nessus.² He professes not keeping of oaths; in breaking them, he is stronger than Hercules. He will lie, sir, with such volubility, that you would think truth were a fool: drunkenness is his best virtue; for he will be swine-drunk; and in his sleep he does little harm, save to his bed-clothes about him; but they know his conditions, and lay him in straw. I have but little more to say, sir, of his honesty: he has every thing that an honest man should not have; what an honest man should have, he has nothing.

1. Lord. I begin to love him for this.

Ber. For this description of thine honesty? A pox upon him for me, he is more and more a cat.

1. Sold. What say you to his expertness in war?

Par. Faith, sir, he has led the drum before the English tragedians,—to belie him, I will not,—and more of his soldiership I know not; except in that country, he had the honour to be the officer at a place there call'd Mile End,³ to instruct for the doubling of files: I would do the man what honour I can, but of this I am not certain.

1. Lord. He hath out-villainied villainy so far, that the rarity redeems him.

Ber. A pox on him! he's a cat still.

1. Sold. His qualities being at this poor price, I need not ask you, if gold will corrupt him to revolt.

Par. Sir, for a *quart* *décu*⁴ he will sell the fee-simple of his salvation, the inheritance of it: and cut the entail from all remainders, and a perpetual succession for it perpetually.

1. Sold. What's his brother, the other captain Dumain?

2. Lord. Why does he ask of me?

1. Sold. What's he?

Par. 'Ev'n a crow of the same nest; not altogether so great as the first in goodness, but greater a great deal in evil. He excels his brother for a coward, yet his brother is reputed one of the best that is: In a retreat he outruns any lackey; marry, in coming on he has the clamp.

1. Sold. If your life be sav'd, will you undertake to betray the 'Florentine?

Par. Ay, and the captain of his horse, count Rousillon.

1. Sold. I'll whisper with the general, and know his pleasure.

Par. I'll no more drumming; a plague of all drums! Only to seem to deserve well, and to beguile the supposition⁵ of that lascivious young boy the count, have I run into this danger: Yet, who would have suspected an ambush where I was taken?

*[Aside.]*

1. Sold. There is no remedy, sir, but you must die: the general says, you, that have so traitorous ly discovered the secrets of your army, and made

such pestiferous reports of men, very nobly held, can serve the world for no honest use; therefore you must die. Come, headsmen, off with his head.

Par. O Lord, sir; let me live, or let me see my death!

1. Sold. That shall you, and take your leave of all your friends. [Unmuffling him.

So, look about you: Know you any here?

Ber. Good morrow, noble captain

2. Lord. God bless you, captain Parolles.

1. Lord. God save you, noble captain.

2. Lord. Captain, what greeting will you to my lord Lafeu? I am for France.

1. Lord. Good captain, will you give me a copy of the sonnet you writ to Diana in behalf of the count Rousillon? an I were not a very coward, I'd compel it of you; but fare you well.

*[Exeunt BERTRAM, Lords, &c.]*

1. Sold. You are undone, captain: all but your scarf, that has a knot on't yet.

Par. Who cannot be crushed with a plot?

1. Sold. If you could find out a country where but women were that had received so much shame, you might begin an impudent nation. Fare you well, sir; I am for France too; we shall speak of you there. [Exit.]*

Par. Yet am I thankful: if my heart were great, 'Twould burst at this: Captain I'll be no more; But I will eat and drink, and sleep as soft As captain shall: simply the thing I am Let make me live. Who knows himself a braggart,

Let him fear this; for it will come to pass, That every braggart shall be found an ass. Rust, sword! cool, blushes! and, Parolles, live Safest in shame! being fool'd, by foolery thrive! There's place, and means, for every man alive. I'll after them. [Exit.]*

## SCENE IV. Florence. A Room in the Widow's House. Enter HELENA, Widow, and DIANA.

Hel. That you may well perceive I have not wrong'd you,

One of the greatest in the Christian world Shall be my surety; 'fore whose throne, 'tis needful I Ere I can perfect mine intents, to kneel:

Time was, I did him a desired office, Dear almost as his life; which gratitude Through flinty Tartar's bosom would peep forth, And answer, thanks: I duly am inform'd, His grace is at Marseilles;⁵ to which place We have convenient convoy. You must know, I am supposed dead: the army breaking, My husband hies him home; where, heaven aiding, And by the leave of my good lord the king, We'll be, before our welcome.

Wid. Gentle madam,

You never had a servant, to whose trust Your business was more welcome.

Hel. Nor you, mistress,

Ever a friend, whose thoughts more truly labour To recompense your love: doubt not, but heaven Hath brought me up to be your daughter's dower, As it hath fated her to be my motive?

And helper to a husband. But, O strange men! That can such sweet use make of what they hate, When saucy⁶ trusting of the cozen'd thoughts Defiles the pitchy night! so lust doth play With what it loathes, for that which is away: But more of this hereafter:—You, Diana, Under my poor instructions yet must suffer Something in my behalf.

Dia. Let death and honesty

Go with your impositions, I am yours,⁷ Upon your will to suffer.

6 It appears that Marseilles was pronounced as a word of three syllables. In the old copy it is written Marcellæ and Marcelles.

7 i. e. to be my mover.

8 Saucy was used in the sense of *wanton*. We have it with the same meaning in Measure for Measure.

9 i. e. let death, accompanied by *honesty*, go with the *task you impose, still* I am yours, &c.

1 i. e. he will steal any thing, however trifling, from any place, however holy.

2 The Centaur killed by Hercules.

3 Mite End Green was the place for public sports and exercises. See K. Henry IV. P. II. Act iii. Sc. 2.

4 The fourth part of the smaller French crown, about eight-pence.

5 To deceive the opinion

280

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

Act V.

Hel.

Yet, I pray you,¹—
But with the word, the time will bring on summer,
When briars shall have leaves as well as thorns,
And be as sweet as sharp. We must away;
Our waggon is prepar'd, and time revives us:
All's well that ends well: still the fine's the crown;²;
Whate'er the course, the end is the renown.
[Exeunt.

SCENE V. Rousillon. *A Room in the Countess's Palace. Enter Countess, LAFEU, and Clown.*

Laf. No, no, no, your son was misled with a
snipt-taffata fellow there; whose villainous saffron
would have made all the unbaked and doughty youth
of a nation in his colour: your daughter-in-law
had been alive at this hour; and your son here at
home, more advanced by the king, than by that
red-tailed humble-bee I speak of.

Count. I would, I had not known him! it was the death of the most virtuous gentlewoman, that ever nature had praise for creating: if she had partaken of my flesh, and cost me the dearest groans of a mother, I could not have owed her a more rooted love.

Laf. 'Twas a good lady, 'twas a good lady: we
may pick a thousand salads, ere we light on such
another herb.

Clo. Indeed, sir, she was the sweet-marjoram of
the salad, or rather the herb of grace.⁴

Laf. They are not salad-herbs, you knave, they
are nose-herbs.

Clo. I am no great Nebuchadnezzar, sir, I have
not much skill in grass.⁵

Laf. Whether dost thou profess thyself; a knave,
or a fool?

Clo. A fool, sir, at a woman's service, and a
knave at a man's.

Laf. Your distinction?

Clo. I would cozen the man of his wife, and do
his service.

Laf. So you were a knave at his service, indeed.

Clo. And I would give his wife my bauble,⁶ sir,
to do her service.

Laf. I will subscribe for thee; thou art both
knave and fool.

Clo. At your service.

Laf. No, no, no.

Clo. Why, sir, if I cannot serve you, I can serve
as great a prince as you are.

Laf. Who's that? a Frenchman?

Clo. Faith, sir, he has an English name;⁷ but
his phisnomy is more hotter⁸ in France, than there.

Laf. What prince is that?

Clo. The black prince, sir, alias, the prince of
darkness; alias, the devil.

Laf. Hold thee, there's my purse: I give thee
not this to suggest thee from thy master thou talk-
est of; serve him still.

Clo. I am a woodland fellow, sir, that always
loved a great fire; and the master I speak of, ever
keeps a good fire. But, sure,⁹ he is the prince of
the world, let his nobility remain in his court. I
am for the house with the narrow gate, which I take
to be too little for pomp to enter: some, that hum-

1 The reading proposed by Blackstone,

'Yet I 'fray you

But with the word: the time will bring, &c.¹⁰
seems required by the context, and makes the passage
intelligible.

2 A translation of the common Latin proverb, *Finis coronat opus*: the origin of which has been pointed out by Mr. Douce, in his Illustrations, vol. i, p. 323.

3 It has been thought that there is an allusion here to the fashion of *yellow starch* for bands and ruffs, which was long prevalent: and also to the custom of colouring paste with saffron. The plain meaning seems to be—that Parolles's vices were of such a colourable quality as to be sufficient to corrupt the inexperienced youth of a nation, and make them take the same hue.

4 i. e. rue.

5 The old copy reads *grace*. The emendation is
Rowe's: who also supplies the word *salad* in the pre-
ceding speech. The clown quibbles on *grass* and *grace*.

ble themselves, may; but the many will be too
chill and tender; and they'll be for the flowery way,
that leads to the broad gate, and the great fire.

Laf. Go thy ways, I begin to be a-weak of thee;
and I tell thee so before, because I would not fail
out with thy ways; let my horses be
well looked to, without any tricks.

Clo. If I put any tricks upon 'em, sir, they shall
be jades' tricks; which are their own right by the
law of nature.

Laf. A shrewd knave, and an unhappy.¹⁰

Count. So he is. My lord, that's gone, made
himself much sport out of him: by his authority
he remains here, which he thinks is a patent for his
sauciness; and, indeed, he has no pace,¹¹ but runs
where he will.

Laf. I like him well; 'tis not amiss: and I was
about to tell you, since I heard of the good lady's
death, and that my lord your son was upon his re-
turn home, I moved the king my master, to speak
in the behalf of my daughter; which, in the mino-
rity of them both, his majesty, out of a self-gra-
cious remembrance, did first propose: his highness
hath promised me to do it; and, to stop up the dis-
pleasure he hath conceived against your son, there
is no fitter matter. How does your ladyship like it?

Count. With very much content, my lord, and I
wish it happily effected.

Laf. His highness comes post from Marseilles, of
as able body as when he numbered thirty; he will be
here to-morrow, or I am deceived by him that in
such intelligence hath seldom failed.

Count. It rejoices me, that I hope I shall see him
ere I die. I have letters that my son will be here
to-night: I shall beseech your lordship, to remain
with me till they meet together.

Laf. Madam, I was thinking, with what manners
I might safely be admitted.

Count. You need but plead your honourable pri-
ilege.

Laf. Lady, of that I have made a bold charter;
but, I thank my God, it holds yet.

Re-enter Clown.

Clo. O madam, yonder's my lord your son with
a patch of velvet on's face: whether there be a scar
under it, or no, but the velvet knows; but 'tis a gooly
patch of velvet: his left cheek is a cheek of two
pile and a half, but his right cheek is worn bare.

Laf. A scar nobly got, or a noble scar, is a good
livery of honour; so, belike, is that.

Clo. But it is your carbonadoe.¹² face.

Laf. Let us go see your son, I pray you; I long
to talk with the young noble soldier.

Clo. 'Faith, there's a dozen of 'em, with delicate
fine hats, and most courteous feathers, which bow
the head, and nod at every man.
[Exeunt.

ACT V.

SCENE I. Marseilles. *A Street. Enter HENEA, Widow, and DIANA, with two Attendants.*

Hel. But this exceeding posting, day and night,
Must wear your spirits low: we cannot help it!

6 The fool's *bauble* was 'a short stick ornamented at the end with the figure of a fool's head, or sometimes with that of a doll or puppet. To this instrument there was frequently annexed an inflated bladder, with which the fool belaboured those who offended him, or with whom he was inclined to make sport. The French call a bauble, *marotte*, from *Marionette*.

7 The old copy reads *maune*.

8 Warburton thought we should read, *honour'd*.
11 No pace, i. e. no prescribed course; he has the un-
bricked liberty of a fool.

9 Stevens thinks, with Sir T. Hanmer, that we
should read *since*.
10 i. e. mischievously waggish, unlucky.

12 *Carbonadoe* is 'slashed over the face in a manner that catcheth the flesh with it,' metaphorically from a *carbonado* or collop of meat.

### SCENE III.

## ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

But, since you have made the days and nights as one,

To wear your gentle limbs in my affairs,

Be bold, you do so grow in my requalit,

As nothing can unroot you. In happy time ; —

Enter a gentle Astringer.¹

This man may help me to his majesty's ear,

If he would spend his power.—God save you, sir.

Gent. And you.

Hel. Sir, I have seen you in the court of France.

Gent. I have been sometimes there.

Hel. I do presume, sir, that you are not fallen

From the report that goes upon your goodness ;

And therefore, goaded with most sharp occasions,

Which lay nice manners by, I put you to

The use of your own virtues, for the which

I shall continue thankful.

Gent.

What's your will ?

Hel. That it will please you

To give this poor petition to the king;

And aid me with that store of power you have,

To come into his presence.

Gent. The king's not here.

Hel.

Not here, sir ?

Gent.

He remence'd last night, and with more haste
Than is his use.

Wid.

Lord, how we lose our pains !

Hel. All's well that ends well, yet ;

Though time seem so adverse, and means unfit,—

I do beseech you, whither is he gone ?

Gent. Marry, as I take it, to Rousillon ;

Whither I am going.

Hel.

I do beseech you, sir,
Since you are like to see the king before me,
Commend the paper to his gracious hand ;

Which, I presume, shall render you no blame,

But rather make you thank your pains for it :

I will come after you, with what good speed

We could make us means means.²

Gent.

Hel. And you shall find yourself to be well
thank'd,

Whate'er falls more.—We must to horse again;—

Go, go, provide.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. Rousillon.
The inner Court of the Countess's Palace. Enter Clown and PAROLLES.

Par. Good Monsieur Lavatch,³ give my Lord
Lafeu this letter: I have ere now, sir, been better
known to you, when I have held familiarity with
fresher clothes; but I am now, sir, muddled in for-
tune's mood,⁴ and smell somewhat strong of her
strong displeasure.

Clo. Truly, fortune's displeasure is but sluttish,
if it smell so strong as thou speakest of: I will
hencetheft eat no fish of fortune's buttering. Pr'y-
thee, allow the wind.⁵

Par. Nay, you need not stop your nose, sir; I
spake but by a metaphor.

Clo. Indeed, sir, if your metaphor stink,⁶ I will
stop my nose; or against any man's metaphor.
Pr'ythee, get thee further.

Par. Pray you, sir, deliver me this paper.

Clo. Foh, pr'ythee, stand away; A paper from

1 i. e. a gentleman falconer, called in Juliana Barnes' Book of Hunteyng, kc. Ostreger. The term is applied particularly to those that keep goshawks.

2 i. e. 'they will follow with such speed as the means which they have will give them ability to exert.'

3 Perhaps a corruption of *La Vache*.

4 Warburton changed *mood*, the reading of the old copy, to *moat*, and was followed and defended by Steevens; but though the emendation was ingenious and well supported, it appears unnecessary. *Fortune's mood* is several times used by Shakspeare for the whimsical *caprice* of fortune.

5 i. e. stand to the leeward of me.

6 Warburton observes, ' that Shakspeare throughout his writings, if we except a passage in Hamlet, has scarce a metaphor that can offend the most squeamish reader.'

fortune's close-stool to give to a nobleman! Look,
here he comes himself.

### Enter LAFEU.

Here is a pur of fortune's, sir, or of fortune's
cat, (but not a musk-cat,) that has fallen into the
unclean fishpond of her displeasure, and, as he says,
is muddied withal: Pray you, use the carp as
you may; for he looks like a poor, decayed, inge-
nious, foolish, rascally knave. I do pity his dis-
tress in my smiles' of comfort, and leave him to
your lordship.

[Exit Clown.]

Par. My lord, I am a man whom fortune hath
cruelly scratched.

Laf. And what would you have me to do ? 'tis
too late to pare her nails now. Wherein have you
played the knave with fortune, that she should
scratch you, who of herself is a good lady, and
would not have knaves thrive long under her ?
There's a quart d'ecu for you: Let the justices
make you and fortune friends; I am for other bu-
siness.

Par. I beseech your honour, to hear me one
single word.

Laf. You beg a single penny more: come, you
shall ha't: save your word.

Par. My name, my good lord, is Parolles.

Laf. You beg more than one word then.⁸—Cox'
my passion ! give me your hand :—How does your
drum?

Par. O my good lord, you were the first that
found me.

Laf. Was I, in sooth? and I was the first that
lost thee.

Par. It lies in you, my lord, to bring me in some
grace, for you did bring me out.

Laf. Out upon thee, knave ! dost thou put upon
me at once both the office of God and the devil?
one brings thee in grace, and the other brings thee
out. [Trumpets sound.] The king's coming, I know
by his trumpets.—Sirrah, inquire further after me:
I had talk of you last night: though you are a fool
and a knave, you shall eat; go to, follow.³

Par. I praise God for you.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE III. The same. A Room in the Countess's Palace. Flourish. Enter King, Countess, LAFEU, Lords, Gentlemen, Guards, &c.

King. We lost a jewel of her; and our esteem¹⁰
Was made much poorer by it: but your son,
As mad in folly, lack'd the sense to know
Her estimation home.¹¹

Count. 'Tis past, my liege :

And I beseech your majesty to make it

Natural rebellion, done ?'tis the blaze¹² of youth :

When oil and fire, too strong for reason's force,
O'erbears it, and burns on.

King. My honour'd lady,

I have forgiven and forgotten all;

Though my revenges were high bent upon him,
And watch'd the time to shoot.

Laf. This I must say,—

But first I beg my pardon,—The young lord

Did to his majesty, his mother, and his lady,

Offence of mighty note ; but to himself

The greatest wrong of all: he lost a wife,

Whose beauty did astonish the survey

7 Warburton says we should read, 'similes of comfort,' such as calling him fortune's cat, carp, &c.

8 A quibble is intended on the word *Parolles*, which in French signifies *words*.

9 Johnson justly observes that ' Parolles has many of the lineaments of Falstaff, and seems to be a charmer that Shakspeare delighted to draw, a fellow that had more wit than virtue. Though justice required that he should be detected and exposed, yet his vices sit so fit in him that he is not at last suffered to starve.'

10 i. e. in losing her we lost a large portion of our esteem, which she possessed.

11 Completely, in its full extent.

12 The old copy reads *blade*. Theobald proposed the present reading.

36

["282", "ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.", "Act V.", "Of richest eyes;¹ whose words all ears took captive;\nWhose dear perfection, hearts that scorn'd to serve,\nHumbly call'd mistress.", "King. Praising what is lost,", "Makes the remembrance dear.—Well, call him hither:", "We are reconciled, and the first view shall kill", "All repetition:²—Let him not ask our pardon;", "The nature of his great offence is dead,", "And deeper than oblivion do we bury", "The incensing relics of it: let him approach,", "A stranger, no offender; and inform him,", "So 'tis our will he should.", "Gent.", "I shall, my liege.", "[Exit] Gentleman.", "King. What says he to your daughter? have you spoken?", "Laf. All that he is hath reference to your highness.", "King. Then shall we have a match. I have letters sent me,", "That set him high in fame.", "Enter BERTRAM.", "Laf.", "He looks well on't.", "King. I am not a day of season,³", "For thou mayst see a sun-shine and a hail", "In me at once: But to the brightest beams", "Distracted clouds give way; so stand thou forth,", "The time is fair again.", "Ber.", "My high-repented blames,⁴", "Dear sovereign, pardon to me.", "King.", "All is whole;", "Not one word more of the consumed time.", "Let's take the instant by the forward top;", "For we are old, and on our quick'st decrees", "The inaudible and noiseless foot of time", "Steals ere we can affect them: You remember", "The daughter of this lord?", "Ber. Admirably my liege: at first", "I stuck my choice upon her, ere my heart", "Durst make too bold a herald of my tongue:", "Where the impression of mine eye infixing,", "Contempt his scornful perspective did lend me,", "Which warp'd the line of every other favour;", "Scorn'd a fair colour, or express'd it stol'n;", "Extended or contracted all proportions,", "To a most hideous object: Thence it came,", "That she, whom all men prais'd, and whom myself,", "Since I have lost, have lov'd, was in mine eye", "The dust that did offend it.", "King.", "Well excus'd:", "That thou didst love her, strikes some scores away", "From the great compt: But love, that comes too late,", "Like a remorseful pardon slowly carried,", "To the great sender turns a sour offence,", "Crying, that's good that's gone: our rash faults", "Make trivial price of serious things we have,", "Not knowing them, until we know their grave:", "Oft our displeasures, to ourselves unjust,", "Destroy our friends, and after weep their dust:", "Our own love waking cries to see what's done,", "While shameful hate sleeps out the afternoon.⁵", "Be this sweet Helen's knell, and now forget her.", "Send forth your amorous token for fair Maudlin:", "1 So in As You Like It:—to have 'seen much and to have nothing, is to have rich eyes and poor hands.⁶ Those who have seen the greatest number of fair women might be said to be the richest in ideas of beauty.", "2 i. e. the first interview shall put an end to all recollection of the past.", "3 i. e. a seasonable day; a mixture of sunshine and hail, of winter and summer, is unseasonable.", "4 Faults repented of to the utmost.", "5 This obscure couplet seems to mean that 'Our love awaiting to the worth of the lost object too late laments: our shameful hate or dislike having slept out the period when our fault was remediable.'", "6 'The last time that ever I took leave of her at court.'", "7 Malone quarrels with the construction of this passage:—'I bade her, &c.—that by this token,' &c. but Shakespeare uses I bade her for I told her.", "The main consents are had; and here we'll stay\nTo see our widower's second marriage-day.", "Count. Which better than the first; O dear heaven, bless!", "Or, ere they meet, in me, O nature, cease!", "Laf. Come on, my son, in whom my house's name", "Must be digested, give a favour from you,", "To sparkle in the spirits of my daughter,", "That she may quickly come.—By my old beard,", "And every hair's that's on't, Helen, that's dead,", "Was a sweet creature; such a ring as this,", "The last that e'er I took her leave at court,⁶", "I saw upon her finger.", "Ber.", "Hers it was not.", "King. Now, pray you, let me see it; for mine eye,", "While I was speaking, oft was fasten'd to't.—", "This ring was mine: and, when I gave it Helen,", "I bade her, if her fortune ever stood", "Necessitated to help, that by this token?", "I would relieve her: Had you that craft to reave her", "Of what should stead her most?", "Ber.", "My gracious sovereign,", "Howe'er it pleases you to take it so,", "The ring was never hers.", "Count.", "Son, on my life,", "I have seen her wear it; and she reckon'd it", "At her life's rate.", "Ber.", "I am sure, I saw her wear it.", "Ber. You are deceiv'd, my lord, she never saw it:", "In Florence was it from a casement thrown me⁷", "Wrapp'd in a paper, which contain'd the name,", "Of her that threw it: noble she was, and thought", "I stood ingag'd:⁸ but when I had subscrib'd¹⁰", "To mine own fortune, and inform'd her fully,", "I could not answer in that course of honour", "And she had made the overture, she ceas'd,", "In heavy satisfaction, and would never", "Receive the ring again.", "King.", "Plutus himself,", "That knows the tinct and multiplying medicine,", "Hath not in nature's mystery more science,", "Than I have in this ring: 'twas mine, 'twas Helen's.", "Whoever gave it you: Then if you know", "That you are well acquainted with yourself,¹²", "Confess 'twas hers, and by what rough enforcement", "You got it from her: she call'd the saints to surety,", "That she would never put it from her finger", "Unless she gave it to yourself in bed,", "(Where you have never come,) or sent us up", "Upon her great disaster.", "Ber.", "She never saw it.", "King. Thou speak'st it falsely, as I love mine honour;", "And mak'st conjectural fears to come into me,", "Which I would fain shut out: If it should prove", {"bbox": [700, 921, 987, 9

STILE III.

ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL.

283

Ber. If you shall prove
This ring was ever hers, you shall as easy
Prove that I husbanded her bed in Florence,
Where yet she never was.

*[Exit BERTRAM, guarded.*

Enter a Gentleman.

King. I am wrapp'd in dismal thinkings.
Gent. Gracious sovereign,
Whether you have been to blame, or no, I know not;
Here's a petition from a Florentine,
Who hath, for four or five removes,¹ come short
To tender it herself. I undertook it,
Vanquish'd thereto by the fair grace and speech
Of the poor suppliant, who by this, I know,
Is here attending: her business looks in her
With an importing visage; and she told me,
In a sweet verbal brief, it did concern
Your highness with herself.

King. [Reads.] Upon his many protestations to
marry me, when his wife was dead, I blush to say it,
he won me. Now is the Count Rousillon a widower;
his vows are forfeited to me, and my honour's paid to
him. He stole from Florence, taking no leave, and
I follow him to his country for justice: Grant it me,
O king; in you it best lies; otherwise a seducer flout-
ishes, and a poor maid is undone.

DIANA CAPLEUT.

Laf. I will buy me a son-in-law in a fair, and
toll² for this; I'll none of him.

King. The heavens have thought well on thee,
Lafue.
To bring forth this discovery.—Seek these suitors:—
Go, speedily, and bring again the court.

*[Exeunt] Gentleman, and some Attendants.*
I am afeard, the life of Helen, lady,
Was foully snatch'd.

Count.

Now, justice on the doers !

Enter BERTRAM, guarded.

King. I wonder, sir, since wives are monsters to
And that you fly them as you swear them lordship,
Yet you desire to marry.—What woman's that ?

Re-enter Gentleman, with Widow, and DIANA.

Dia. I, am, my lord, a wretched Florentine,
Deriv'd from the ancient Capulet:

My suit, as I do understand, you know,
And therefore know how far I may be pitied.

Wid. I am her mother, sir, whose age and honour
both suffer under this complaint we bring,
And both shall cease,⁴ without your remedy.

King. Come hither, count; Do you know these
women?

Ber. My lord, I neither can, nor will deny
But that I know them: Do they charge me further ?

Dia. Why do you look so strange upon your wife ?
Ber. She's none of mine, my lord.

Dia. If you shall marry,
You give away this hand, and that is mine;

You give away heaven's vows, and those are mine;
You give away myself, which is known mine ;

For I by vow am so embodied yours,
That she, which marries you, must marry me,

Either both or none.

Laf. Your reputation [To BERTRAM] comes too
short for my daughter; you are no husband for her.

Ber. My lord, this is a fond and desperate creature,
Whom sometimes I have laugh'd with: let your
highness

Lay a more noble thought upon mine honour,
Than for to think that I would sink it here.

King. Sir, for my thoughts, you have them ill to
friend,

Till your deeds gain them : Fairer prove your ho-
nour,

Than in my thought it lies !

Dia.

Good my lord,

Ask him upon his oath, if he does think
He had not my virginity.

King. What say'st thou to her ?

Ber.

She's impudent, my lord ;

And was a common gamester to the camp.⁵
Dia. He does me wrong, my lord ; if I were so,

He might have bought me at a common price:
Do not believe him : O, behold this ring;⁶

Whose high respect, and rich validity,
Did lack a parallel ; yet, for all that,
I gave it to a commoner o' the camp,
If I be one.

Count. He blushes, and 'tis it :⁷

Of six preceding ancestors, that gem
Conferr'd by testament to the sequent issue,
Hath it been own'd and worn. This is his wife
That ring's a thousand proofs.

King.

Methought, you said,
You saw one here in court could witness it.

Dia. I did, my lord, but loath am to produce

So bad an instrument; his name's Parolles.

Laf. I saw the man to-day, if man he be.

King. Find him, and bring him hither.

Ber.

What of him ?
He's quoted⁸ for a most perfidious slave,

With all the spots o' the world tax'd and debosh'd :⁹

Whose nature sickens, but to speak a truth :

Am I or that, or this, for what he'll utter,

That will speak any thing ?

King.

She hath that ring of yours.

Ber. I think she has : certain it is, I lik'd her,
And boarded her i' the wanton way of youth :

She knew her distance, and did angle for me,
Maddening my eagerness with her restraint,

As all impediments in fancy's course

As motives of more fancy; and, in fine,

Her insult coming with her modern grace,¹⁰

Subdued me to her rate: she got the ring ;

And I had that, which any inferior might
At market-price have bought.

Dia.

I must be patient ;

You that turned off a first so noble wife,

May justly diet me. I pray you yet,
(Since you lack virtue, I will lose a husband),

Send for your ring, I will return it home,
And give me mine again.

Ber.

I have it not.

King. What ring was yours, I pray you ?

Dia.

Sir, much like

The same upon your finger.

King. Know you this ring ? this ring was his of late.

Dia. And this was it I gave him, being a-bed.

King. The story then goes false, you threw it him
Out of a casement.

Dia.

I have spoke the truth.

5 The following passage from The False One of
Beaumont and Fletcher will sufficiently elucidate this
term when applied to a female:—

'Tis a catalogue

Of all the gamesters in the court and city,
Which lord lies with that lady, and what gallant
Sports with that merchant's wife.

6 i. e. value.

7 Malone remarks that the old copy reads, 'tis hit,
and that in many of our old chronicles he had found hit
printed instead of it. It is not in our old chronicles alone,
but in all our old writers that the word may be found in
this form.

8 Noted.

9 Debauch'd.

10 'Every thing that obstructs love is an occasion by
which love is heightened, and to conclude her solicitation
concurring with her common or ordinary grace she got
the ring.'

1 Removes are journeys or post stages; she had
not been able to overtake the king on the road.

2 The second folio reads:—'I will buy me a son-in-
law in a fair, and toll for him: for this, I'll none of him.'
I prefer the reading of the first folio, as in the text. The
allusion is to the custom of paying toll for the liberty of
selling in a fair, and means, 'I will buy me a son-in-
law in a fair, and sell this one; pay toll for the liberty
of selling him.'

3 The first folio reads:—

'I wonder, sir, sir; wives, &c. ;'
The emendation is Mr. Tyrwhitts. 'As in the succeed-
ing line means as soon as.

4 Decease, die.

["284", "ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL", "ACT V.", "Enter PAROLLES.", "Ber. My lord, I do confess the ring was hers.", "King. You boggle shrewdly, every feather starts you.—", "Is this the man you speak of?", "Dia.", "Ay, my lord.", "King. Tell me, sirrah, but tell me true, I charge you,", "Not fearing the displeasure of your master\n(Which, on your just proceeding, I'll keep off.)", "By him, and by this woman here, what know you?", "Par. So please your majesty, my master hath\nbeen an honourable gentleman; tricks he hath had\nin him, which gentlemen have.", "King. Come, come, to the purpose: Did he love\nthis woman?", "Par. 'Faith, sir, he did love her; But how ?", "King. How, I pray you?", "Par. He did love her, sir, as a gentleman loves", "a woman.", "King. How is that?", "Par. He loved her, sir, and loved her not.", "King. As thou art a knave, and no knave :—", "What an equivocal companion¹ is this?", "Par. I am a poor man, and at your majesty's command.", "Laf. He's a good drum, my lord, but a naughty\norator.", "Dia. Do you know, he promis'd me marriage?", "Par. 'Faith, I know more than I'll speak.", "King. But wilt thou not speak all my knave's?", "Par. Yes, so please your majesty: I did go between them, as I said; but more than that, he loved her,—for, indeed, he was mad for her, and talk'd of Satan, and of limbo, and of furies, and I know not what: yet I was in that credit with them at that time, that I knew of their going to bed; and of other motions, as promising her marriage, and things that would derive me ill will to speak of, therefore I will not speak what I know.", "King. Thou hast spoken all already, unless thou\ncanst say we are married: But thou art too fine²\nin thy evidence: therefore stand aside.—", "This ring, you say, was yours?", "Dia.", "Ay, my good lord.", "King. Where did you buy it ? or who gave it you ?", "Dia. It was not given me, nor I did not buy it.", "King. Who lent it you?", "Dia.", "It was not lent me neither.", "King. Where did you find it then?", "Dia.", "I found it not.", "King. If it were yours by none of all these ways,\nHow could you give it him?", "Dia.", "I never gave it him.", "Laf. This woman's an easy glove, my lord; she\ngoes off and on at pleasure.", "King. This ring was mine, I gave it his first wife.", "Dia. It might be yours, or hers, for aught I know.", "King. Take her away, I do not like her now;", "To prison with her: and away with him.—", "Unless thou tell'st me where thou hadst this ring,\nThou diest within this hour.", "Dia.", "I'll never tell you.", "King. Take her away.", "Dia.", "I'll put in bail, my liege.", "King. I think thee now some common customer.", "Dia. By Jove, if ever I knew man, 'twas you.", "King. Wherefore hast thou accused him all this\nwhile?", "Dia. Because he's guilty, and he is not guilty;", "He knows I am no maid, and he'll swear to't:", "I'll swear I am a maid, and he knows not.", "Great King, I am no strumpet, by my life;", "I am either maid, or else this old man's wife,", "[Pointing to LAFEU.]", "King. She does abuse our ears; to prison with her.", "Dia. Good mother, fetch my bail.—Stay, royal\nsir;", "[Exit Widow", "The jeweller that owes⁵ the ring is sent for,", "And he shall surety me. But for this lord,", "Who hath abus'd me, as he knows himself,", "Though yet he never harm'd me, here I quit him:", "He knows himself my bed he hath defil'd;", "And at that time he got his wife with child:", "Dead though she be, she feels her young one kick;", "So there's my riddle, One, that's dead, is quick:", "And now behold the meaning.", "Re-enter Widow, with HELENA.", "King.", "Is there no exorcist?", "Beguiles the truer office of mine eyes?", "Is't real that I see?", "Hel.", "No, my good lord;", "'Tis but the shadow of a wife you see,", "The name, and not the thing.", "Ber.", "Both, both: O, pardon!", "Hel. O, my good lord, when I was like this maid,\nI found you wondrous kind. There is your ring,", "And, look you, here's your letter: This it says.", "When from my Jemzer you can get this ring,", "And are by me with child, &c.—This is done.", "Will you be mine, now you are doubly won?", "Ber. If she, can make me know this clearly,", "I'll love her dearly; ever, ever dearly.", "Hel. If it appear not plain, and prove untrue,\nDeadly divorce step between me and you!\nO, my dear mother, do I see you living?", "Laf. Mine eyes smell of onions, I shall weep anon:—\n—Good Tom Drum, [To PAROLLES,] lend me a\nhandkerchief: So, I thank thee; wait on me home.\nI'll make sport with thee: Let thy courtesies alone,\nthey are scurvy ones.", "King. Let us from point to point this story know,\nTo make the even truth in pleasure flow:—\nIf thou be'st yet a fresh uncropped flower,", "[To DIANA.]", "Choose thou thy husband, and I'll pay thy dower:", "For I can guess, that, by thy honest aid,", "Thou keptst¹ a wife herself, thyself a maid.—", "Of that, and all the progress, more and less,", "Resolvedly more leisure shall express;", "All yet seems well; and if it end so meet,", "The bitter past, more welcome is the sweet.", "[Flourish.]", "Advancing.", "The King's a beggar, now the play is done;", "All is well ended, if this suit be won,", "That you express content; which we will pay,", "With strife to please you, day exceeding day.", "Ours be your patience then, and yours our parts.", "Your gentle hands lend us, and take our hearts.", "[Exeunt.]", "THIS play has many delightful scenes, though not sufficiently probable, and some happy characters, though not new, nor produced by any deep knowledge of human nature. Parolles is a boaster and a coward, such as has always been the sport of the stage, but perhaps never raised more laughter or contempt than in the hands of Shakspeare.", "I cannot reconcile my heart to Bertram; a man noble\nwithout generosity, and young without truth; who mar-\nries Helen as a coward, and leaves her as a profligate;\nwhen she is dead by his unkindness, sneaks home to a\nsecond marriage, is accused by a woman he has wronged,\ndefends himself by falsehood, and is dismissed to hap-\npiness.", "The story of Bertram and Diana had been told before\nof Mariana and Angelo, and, to confess the truth, scarce-\nly merited to be heard a second time.\nJOHNSON.", "5 Thus, in Julius Caesar, Ligarius says:—", "'Thou like an exorcist hast conjured up", "My mortified spirit.", "Exorcist and conjurer were synonymous in Sh-\nskare's time.", "6 i. e. hear us without interruption, and take our parts,\ni. e. support and defend us.", "1 i. e. fellow.", "2 In the French sense *trop fine*.", {"bbox": [369, 1253,

286

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

INDUO.

INDUCTION.

## SCENE I. Before an Alehouse on a Heath.
Enter Hostess and SLY.

Sly.

I'LL pheese¹ you, in faith.

Host. A pair of stocks, you rogue!

Sly. Y'are a baggage; the Slies are no rogues:
Look in the chronicles, we came in with Richard
Conqueror. Therefore, paucas pallabris;² let the
world slide.³ Sessa!³

Host. You will not pay for the glasses you have
burst?⁴

Sly. No, not a denier: Go by, says Jeronimy;—
Go to thy cold bed, and warm thee.⁵

[Exit.]

Host. I know my remedy, I must go fetch the
thirdborough.⁶

Sly. Third, or fourth, or fifth borough, I'll answer
him by law: I'll not budge an inch, boy; let him
come, and kindly.

[Lies down on the ground, and falls asleep.

Wind Horns. Enter a Lord from Hunting, with
Huntsmen and Servants.

Lord. Huntsman, I charge thee, tender well my
hounds:

Brach Merriman,—the poor cur is emboss'd,⁷
And couple Clowder with the deep-mouth'd brach.⁸
Saw'st thou not, boy, how Silver made it good
At the hedge corner, in the coldest fault ?
I would not lose the dog for twenty pound.

1 Hunt. Why, Belman is as good as he, my lord;
He cried upon it at the merest loss.
And twice to-day pick'd out the dullest scent:
Trust me, I take him for the better dog.

Lord. Thou art a fool; if Echo were as fleet,
I would esteem him worth a dozen such.

But sup them well, and look unto them all;

To-morrow I intend to hunt again.

1 Hunt. I will, my lord.

Lord. What's here? one dead, or drunk? See,
doth he breathe?

2 Hunt. He breathes, my lord: Were he not
warm'd with ale,

This were a bed but cold to sleep so soundly,

Lord. O monstrous beast! how like a swine he
lies!

Grim death, how foul and loathsome is thine image!

Sirs, I will practise on this drunken man.

What think you, if he were convey'd to bed,
Wrapp'd in sweet clothes, rings put upon his fingers,
A most delicious banquet by his bed,

And brave attendants near him when he wakes;

Would not the beggar then forget himself?

1 Hunt. Believe me, lord, I think he cannot choose,

2 Hunt. It would seem strange unto him when he
wak'd.

Lord. Even as a flattering dream, or worthless
fancy.

Then take him up, and manage well the jest:—

Carry him gently to my fairest chamber,

And hang it round with all my wanton pictures :

Balm his foul head with warm distilled waters,

And burn sweet wood to make the lodging sweet:

Procure me music ready when he wakes,

To make a dulcet and a heavenly sound:

And if he chance to speak, be ready straight,

And, with a low submissive reverence,

Say,—What is it your honour will command?

Let one attend him with a silver bason,

Full of rose-water, and bestrew'd with flowers;

Another bear the ewer, the third a diaper;

And say,—Will't please your Lordship cool your
hands?

Some one be ready with a costly suit,

And ask him what apparel he will wear;

Another tell him of his hounds and horse,

And that his lady mourns at his disease:

Persuade him that he hath been lunatic.

And, when he says he is—, say that he dreams,

For he is nothing but a mighty lord.

This do, and do it kindly,⁹ gentle sirs;

It will be pastime passing excellent,

If it be husbanded with modesty.¹⁰

1 Hunt. My lord, I warrant you, we'll play our
part,

As he shall think, by our true diligence,

He is no less than what we say he is,

Lord. Take him up gently, and to bed with him;

And each one to his office when he wakes.

[Some bear out SLY. A trumpet sounds.
Sirrah, go see what trumpet 'tis that sounds:—

[Exit Servant.
Belike, some noble gentleman; that means,
Travelling some journey, to repose him here.

Re-enter a Servant.

How now? who is it?

Serv.

An it please your honour,
Players that offer service to your lordship.

Lord. Bid them come near:—

Enter Players.

Now, fellows, you are welcome.

1 Play. We thank your honour.

Lord. Do you intend to stay with me to-night?

2 Play. So please your lordship to accept our
duty?¹¹

Lord. With all my heart.—This fellow I re-
member,

Since once he play'd a farmer's eldest son:—
'Twas where you woo'd the gentlewoman so well:

I have forgot your name; but, sure, that part

Was aptly fitted, and naturally perform'd.

1 Play. I think 'twas Soto that your honour
means.¹²

Lord. 'Tis very true;—thou didst it excellent.—

Well, you are come to me in happy time;

The rather for I have some sport in hand,

Wherein your cunning can assist me much.

There is a lord will hear you play to-night:

But I am doubtful of your modesties;

Lest, over-eying of his odd behaviour,

(For yet his honour never heard a play),

You break into some merry passion,

And so offend him ? for I tell you, sirs,

If you should smile, he grows impatient.

1 Play. Fear not, my lord; we can contain our
selves,

Were he the veriest antick in the world.¹³

1 So again in Troilus and Cressida, Ajax says of
Achilles:—'I'll pheese his pride.' And in Ben Jon-
son's Alchemist:

'Come, will you quarrel? I'll feize you, sirrah.'

2 Pocas palabras, *Span.* few words.

3 Cessa, *Ital.* be quiet.

4 Broke.

5 This line and the scrap of Spanish is used in bur-
lesque from an old play called Hieronymo, or the
Spanish Tragedy. The old copy reads: 'S. Jeronimy.'
The emendation is Mason's.

6 An officer whose authority equals that of a con-
stable.

7 'Emboss'd,' says Philips in his World of Words,
't is a term in hunting, when a deer is so hard chased
that she foams at the mouth; it comes from the Span-
ish Desembocar, and is metaphorically used for any
kind of weariness.

8 Brach originally signified a particular species of
dog used for the chase. It was a long eared dog, hunt-
ing by the scent.

9 Naturally.

10 Moderation.

11 It was in old times customary for players to travel
in companies and offer their service at great houses.

12 The old copy prefixes the name of Sincklo to this
line, who was an actor in the same company with Shak-
speare. Soto is a character in Beaumont and Fletcher's
Woman Pleased; he is a farmer's eldest son, but he
does not woo any gentlewoman.

13 In the old play the dialogue is thus continued:

'San. [To the other.] Go get a dishclout to make
cleyne your shooes, and Ile speak for the properties.
[Exit Player.] My lord, we must have a shoulder of
mutton for a property, and a little vinegre to make our
divell roar.'

## SCENE II.

# TAMING OF THE SHREW.

287

Lord. Go, sirrah, take them to the buttery,¹
And give them friendly welcome every one :—
Let them want nothing that my house affords,—

[Exeunt] Servants and Players.
Sirrah, go you to Bartholomew my page

[To a Servant.]
And see him dress'd in all suits like a lady:
That done, conduct him to the drunkard's chamber,
And call him—Madam, do him obeisance,
Tell him from me (as he will win my love),
He bear himself with honourable action,
Such as he hath observ'd in noble ladies
Unto their lords, by them accomplish'd:
Such duty to the drunkard let him do,
With soft low tongue, and lowly courtesy:
And say,—What is't your honour will command,
Wherein your lady and your humble wife,
May show her duty, and make known her love ?
And then—with kind embracements, tempting kisses,
And with declining head into his bosom,—
Bid him shed tears, as being overjoy'd,
To see her noble lord restored to health,
Who, for twice² seven years, hath esteem'd him³
No better than a poor and loathsome beggar:
And if the boy have not a woman's gift,
To rain a shower of commanded tears,
An onion will do well for such a shift;
Which in a napkin being close convey'd,
Shall in despite enforce a watery eye.
See this despatch'd with all the haste thou canst;
Anon I'll give thee more instructions.—

[Exit] Servant.
I know the boy will well usurp the grace;
Voice, gait, and action of a gentlewoman:
I long to hear him call the drunkard husband;
And how men will stay themselves from laughter,
When they do homage to this simple peasant.
I'll in to counsel them: haply,⁴ my presence
May well abate the over-merry spleen,
Which otherwise would grow into extremes.

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE II. A Bedchamber in the Lord's House.
Sly is discovered in a rich night gown, with Attendants; some with apparel, others with bason, ewer, and other appurtenances. Enter Lord, dressed like a Servant.

Sly. For God's sake, a pot of small ale.

1. Serv. Will't please your lordship drink a cup of sack?

2. Serv. Will't please your honour taste of these conserves?

3. Serv. What raiment will your honour wear today?

Sly. I am Christopher Sly; call not me—hONOUR,
nor lordship: I never drank sack in my life; and if
you give me any conserves, give me conserves of
beef. Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear: for I
have no more doublets than backs, no more stock-
ings than legs, nor no more shoes than feet; nay,
sometimes, more feet than shoes, or such shoes as
my toes look through the over leather.

Lord. Heaven cease this idle humour in your honour!

O, that a mighty man of such descent,
Of such possessions, and so high esteem,
Should be infused with so foul a spirit!

1. Pope remarks, in his preface to Shakspeare, that 'the top of the profession were then mere players, not gentlemen of the stage; they were led into the buttery, not placed at the lord's table, or the lady's toilet.'

2. The old copy reads this. The emendation is Theobaldus.

3. Him is used for himself, as in Chapman's Banquet of Sense, 1595:

'The sense wherewith he feels him deified.'

4. Perhaps.

5. From the original stage direction in the first folio, it appears that Sly and the other persons mentioned in the Induction were intended to be exhibited here, and during the representation of the comedy, in a balcony above the stage.

6. Wilnecottne, says Warton, is a village in Warwickshire, with which Shakspeare was well acquainted,

Sly. What, would you make me mad? Am not
I Christopher Sly, old Sly's son of Burton-heath; by
birth a pedler, by education a card-maker, by trans-
mutation a bear-herd, and now by present profession
a tinker? Ask Marian Hackett, the fat ale-wife of
Wincot,⁶ if she know me not: if she say I am not
fourteen pence on the score for sheer ale,⁷ score me
up for the lyingest knave in Christendom. What,
I am not bestraited:⁸ Here's—

1. Serv. O, this it is that makes your lady morn.

2. Serv. O, this it is that makes your servants droop.

Lord. Hence comes it that your kindred shun your house,

As beaten hence by your strange lunacy.

O, noble lord, bethink thee of thy birth;
Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment,
And banish hence these abject lowly dreams:
Look how thy servants do attend on thee,
Each in his office ready at thy beck.

Wilt thou have music? hark! Apollo plays,

And twenty caged nightingales do sing:

Or wilt thou sleep? we'll have thee to a couch,
Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed
On purpose trimm'd up for Semiramis.

Say, thou wilt walk; we will bestrew the ground:

Or wilt thou ride? thy horses shall be trapp'd,
Their harness studded all with gold and pearl.

Dost thou love hawking? thou hast hawks will soar
Above the morning lark: Or wilt thou hunt?

Thy hounds shall make the welkin answer them,
And fetch shrill echoes from the hollow earth.

1. Serv. Say, thou wilt course; thy greyhounds are as swift.

As breathed stags, ay, fleeter than the roe.

2. Serv. Dost thou love pictures? we will fetch thee straight

Adonis, painted by a running brook;

And Cytherea all in sedges hid;

Which seem to move and wanton with her breath,
Even as the waving sedges play with wind.

Lord. We'll show thee I, as she was a maid ;

And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,
As lively painted as the deed was done.

3. Serv. Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood:
Scratching her legs that one shall swear she bleeds:

And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep,
So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn.

Lord. Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord:
Thou hast a lady far more beautiful

Than any woman in this waning age.

1. Serv. And, till the tears that she hath shed for thee,

Like envious floods, o'er-ran her lovely face,

She was the fairest creature in the world;
And yet she is inferior to none.

Sly. Am I a lord; and have I such a lady?

Or do I dream? or have I dream'd till now?

I do not sleep; I see, I hear, I speak.

I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things:—

Upon my life, I am a lord, indeed;

And not a tinker, nor Christopher Sly.—

Well, bring our lady hither to our sight;

And once again, a pot o'the smallest ale.

2. Serv. Will't please your mightiness to wash your hands;

[Servants present a ewer, bason, and napkin.

near Stratford. The house kept by our genial hostess still remains, but is at present a mill. There is a village also called *Barton on the heath* in Warwickshire.

7. *Sheer-ale* has puzzled the commentators; and as none of the conjectures offered appear to me satisfactory, I shall add one of my own. Maunday Thursday, the day preceding Good-Friday, was anciently called *Sheer-Thursday*, and as it was a day of great comfort to the poor from the doles or distribution of clothes, meat and drink, made by the rich; so *Sheer-ale* may have been ale which the Tinker had drunk on that day, at his own charge, or rather at that of his landlady, in addition to the portion he had received as alms. But after all, *sheer-ale* may mean nothing more than *ale unmixed, mere-ale*, or *pure ale*. The word *sheer* is still used for mere, *pure*.

8. i. e. distraught, distracted.

["288", "TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "Act I.", "O, how we joy to see your wit restor'd! O, that once more you knew but what you are! These fifteen years you have been in a dream; Or, when you wak'd, so wak it' as if you slept.", "", "", "", "Sly. These fifteen years! by my fay,¹ a goodly nap.", "But did I never speak of all that time?", "1 *Serv. O, yes, my lord*; but very idle words:—", "For though you lay here in this goodly chamber,", "Yet would you say, ye were beaten out of door;", "And rail upon the hostess of the house;", "And say, you would present her at the leet,²", "Because she brought stone jugs and no seal'd quarts:", "Sometimes you would call out for Cicely Hacket.", "Sly. Ay, the woman's maid of the house.", "3 *Serv. Why, sir, you know no house, nor no such maid,*", "Nor no such men as you have reckon'd up,—", "As Stephen Sly, and 'old John Naps of Greece,³", "And Peter Turf, and Henry Pimpernell;", "And twenty more such names and men as these,", "Which never were, nor no man ever saw.", "Sly. Now, Lord be thanked for my good amends!", "All. Amen.", "Sly. I thank thee; thou shall not lose by it.", "*Enter the Page, as a Lady, with Attendants.*", "Page. How fares my noble lord?", "Sly. Marry, I fare well; for here is cheer enough.", "Where is my wife?", "Page. Here, noble lord; What is thy will with her?", "Sly. Are you my wife, and will not call me—husband?", "My men should call me—lord; I am your goodman.", "Page. My husband and my lord, my lord and husband;", "I am your wife in all obedience.", "Sly. I know it well:—What must I call her?", "Lord. Madam.", "Sly. Al'ce madam, or Joan madam?", "Lord. Madam, and nothing else: so lords call ladies.", "Sly. Madam wife, they say that I have dream'd and slept", "Above some fifteen year and more.", "Page. Ay, and the time seems thirty onto me;", "Being all this time abandon'd from your bed.", "Sly. 'Tis much;—Servants, leave me and her alone.—", "Madam, undress you, and come now to bed.", "Page. Thrice noble lord, let me entreat of you", "To pardon me yet for a night or two;", "Or, if not so, until the sun be set:", "For your physicians have expressly charg'd,", "In peril to incur your former malady,", "That I should yet absent me from your bed;", "I hope this reason stands for my excuse.", "Sly. Ay, it stands so, that I may hardly tarry so long. But I would be loath to fall into my dreams again; I will therefore tarry, in despite of the flesh and the blood.", "*Enter a Servant.*", "Serv. Your honour's players, hearing your amendment,", "Are come to play a pleasant comedy,", "For so your doctors hold it very meet;", "Seeing too much sadness hath congeal'd your blood, And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy,", "1 According to some old authorities, Sly here uses a very ladylike imprecation. 'Ecastor,' says Cooper, 'by my fay, used only of women.' It is merely a contraction of *by my faith*.", "2 That is at the *Court Leet*, where it was usual to present such matters, as appears from Kitchen on Courts: 'Also if tipplers sell by cups and dishes, or measures sealed or not sealed, is iniquirable.'", "3 Blackstone proposes to read, 'old John Naps o'the Green.' The addition seems to have been a common one.", "4 For comedy.", "5 *Ingenious* and *ingenious* were very commonly confounded by old writers.", "Therefore they thought it good you hear a play, And frame your mind to birth and merriment,", "Which bars a thousand harms, and lengthens life.", "Sly. Marry, I will; let them play it: Is not a com-monty⁴ a Christmas gambol, or a tumbling trick?", "Page. No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.", "Sly. What, household stuff?", "Page. It is a kind of history.", "Sly. Well, we'll see't: Come, madam wife, sit by my side, and let the world slip; we shall ne'er be younger.", "*[They sit down.*", "## ACT I.", "### SCENE I. Padua. A public Place. Enter LUCENTIO and TRANIO.", "Luc. Tranio, since—for the great desire I had", "To see fair Padua, nursery of arts,—", "I am arriv'd for fruitful Lombardy,", "The pleasant garden of great Italy;", "And, by my father's love and leave, am arm'd", "With his good will, and thy good company,", "Most trusty servant, well approv'd in all;", "Here let us breathe, and happily institute", "A course of learning, and ingenuous⁵ studies.", "Pisa, renowned for grave citizens,", "Gave my being, and my father first,", "A merchant of great traffic through the world,", "Vincentio, come of the Bentivoli.", "Vincentio's son, brought up in Florence,", "It shall become, to serve all hopes conceiv'd,⁶", "To deck his fortune with his virtuous deeds:", "And therefore, Tranio, for the time I study,", "Virtue, and that part of philosophy", "Will I apply,⁷ that treats of happiness", "By virtue 'specially to be achieved.", "Tell me your mind: for I have Pisa left,", "And am to Padua come: as he that leaves", "A shallow plash,⁸ to plunge him in the deep,", "And with satiety seeks to quench his thirst.", "Tra. *Mi perdonate,*⁹ gentle master mine, I am in all affected as yourself.", "Glad that you thus continue your resolve,", "To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy.", "Only, good master, while we do admire", "This virtue, and this moral discipline,", "Let's be no stoics, nor no stocks, I pray:", "Or so devote to Aristotle's ethics,¹⁰", "As Ovid be an outcast quite abjurd'.", "Balke¹¹ logic with acquaintance that you have,", "And practise rhetoric in your common talk:", "Music and poesy use to quicken¹² you;", "The mathematics, and the metaphysics,", "Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you:", "No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:—", "In brief, sir, study what you most affect.", "Luc. Gramercies, Tranio, well dost thou advise.", "If, Biondello, thou wert come asore,", "We could at once put us in readiness;", "And take a lodging fit to entertain", "Such friends as time in Padua shall beget.", "But stay awhile: What company is this?", "Tra. Master, some show, to welcome us to town.", "Enter BAPTISTA, KATHARINA, BIANCA, GRE-MIO, and HORTENSI. LUCENTIO and TRANIO stand aside.", "Bap. Gentlemen, importune me no further, For how I firmly am resolv'd you know;", "That is—not to bestow your youngest daughter,", "6 i. e. to fulfil the expectations of his friends.", "7 *Apply for ply* is frequently used by old writers. Thus Baret: 'with diligent endeavour to apply their studies.' And in 'Turberville's Tragic Tales: 'How she her wheele applyes.'", {"bbox": [711, 1188, 843, 1

["## SCENE I.", "### TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "Before I have a husband for the elder :", "If either of you both love Katharina,", "Because I know you well, and love you well,", "Leave shall you have to court her at your pleasure.", "Gre. To cart her rather : She's too rough for me :—", "There, there, Hortensio, will you any wife ?", "Kath. I pray you, sir, [To BAP.] is it your will", "To make a stale¹ of me amongst these mates ?", "Hor. Mates, maid! how mean you that ? no mates for you,", "Unless you were of gentler, milder mould.", "Kath. Pfaith, sir, you shall never need to fear ;", "I wis,² it is not half way to her heart :", "But if it were, doubt not your care should be", "To comb your noddle with a three-legg'd stool,", "And paint your face, and use you like a fool.", "Hor. From all such devils, good Lord, deliver us !", "Gre. And me too, good Lord !", "Tra. Hush, master! here is some good pastime toward ;", "That wench is stark mad, or wonderful froward.", "Lue. But in the other's silence I do see", "Maid's mild behaviour and sobriety.", "Peace, Tranio.", "Tra. Well said, master; mum! and gaze your fill.", "Bap. Gentlemen, that I may soon make good", "What I have said,—Bianca, get you in :", "And let it not displease thee, good Bianca ;", "For I will love thee ne'er the less, my girl.", "Kath. A pretty pie !³ 'tis best", "Put finger in the eye,—an she knew why.", "Bian. Sister, content you in my discontent.—", "Sir, to your pleasure humbly I subscribe :", "My books, and instruments, shall be my company ;", "On them to look, and practise by myself.", "Luc. Hark, Tranio! thou mayst hear Minerva speak.", "Hor. Signior Baptista, will you be so strange ?⁴", "Sorry am I that our goodwill effects", "Bianca's grief.", "Gre. Why, will you mew⁵ her up,", "Signior Baptista, for this fief of hell,", "And make her bear the penance of her tongue ?", "Bap. Gentlemen, content ye ; I am resolv'd :—", "Go in, Bianca.", "[Exit BIANCA.", "And for I know, she taketh most delight", "In music, instruments, and poetry,", "Schoolmasters will I keep within my house,", "Fit to instruct her youth.—If you, Hortensio,", "Or signior Gremio, you,—know any such,", "Prefe⁷ them hither; for to cunning⁷ men", "I will be very kind, and liberal", "To mine own children in good bringing up ;", "And so farewell. Katharina, you may stay :", "For I have more to commune with Bianca. [Exit].", "Kath. Why, and I trust, I may go too: May I not?", "What, shall I be appointed hours ; as though, be-\nlike,", "I knew not what to take and what to leave ? Ha—", "[Exit].", "Gre. You may go to the devil's dam : your gifts⁶ are so good, here is none will hold you. Their⁷ love is not so great, Hortensio, but we may blow our nails together, and fast it fairly out; our cake's dough on both sides. Farewell,—yet, for the love I hear my sweet Bianca, if I can by any means", "light on a fit man to teach her that wherein she de-\nlights, I will wish¹⁰ him to her father.", "Hor. So well, signior Gremio: but a word, I pray. Though the nature of our quarrel yet never brook'd parle, know now, upon advice,¹¹ it toucheth us both,—that we may yet again have access to our fair mistress, and be happy rivals in Bianca's love,—to labour and effect one thing: 'specially.", "Gre. What's that, I pray ?", "Marry, sir, to get a husband for her sister.", "Gra. A husband! a devil.¹¹", "Hor. I say, a husband.", "Gra. I say, a devil: Think'st thou, Hortensio,\nthough her father be very rich, any man is so very\na fool to be married to hell?", "Hor. Tush, Gremio, though it pass your patience\nand mine, to endure her loud alarums, why, man,\nthere be good fellows in the world, an a man could\nlight on them, would take her with all faults, and\nmoney enough.", "Gra. I cannot tell; but I had as lief take her\ndowry with this condition,—to be whipped at the\nhigh-cross every morning.", "Hor. 'Faith, as you say, there's small choice in\nrotten apples. But come; since this bar in law\nmakes us friends, it shall be so far forth friendly\nmaintained,—till by helping Baptista's eldest daugh-\nter to a husband, we set his youngest free for a\nhusband, and then have to't afresh.—Sweet Bianca !\n—Happy man be his dole!¹² He that runs fastest,\ngets the ring.¹³ How say you, signior Gremio ?", "Gra. I am agreed: and 'would I had given him\nthe best horse in Padua to begin his wooing, that\nwould thoroughly woo her, wed her, and bed her,\nand rid the house of her. Come on.", "[Exeunt GREMIO and HORTENSIO.", "Tra. [Advancing.] I pray, sir, tell me,—Is it possible", "That love should of a sudden take such hold ?", "Luc. O Tranio, till I found it to be true,", "I never thought it possible, or likely,", "But see! while idly I stood looking on,", "I found the effect of love in idleness :", "And now in plainness do confess to thee,—", "That art to me as secret, and as dear,", "As Anna to the queen of Carthage was,—", "Tranio, I burn, I pine, I perish, Tranio,", "If I achieve not this young modest girl :", "Counsel me, Tranio for I know thou canst ;", "Assist me, Tranio, for I know thou wilt.", "Tra. Master, it is no time to chide you now ;", "Affection is not rated¹⁴ from the heart :", "If love have touch'd you, nought remains but so,—\nRedime te captum quam queas minimo.¹⁵", "Luc. Gramercies, lad; go forward: this contains ;", "The rest will comfort, for thy counsel's sound.", "Tra. Master, you look'd so longl¹⁶ on the maid,\nPerhaps you mark'd not what's the pith of all.", "Luc. O yes, I saw sweet beauty in her face,", "Such as the daughter¹⁷ of Agenor had,", "That made great Jove to humble him to her hand,", "When with his knees he kiss'd the Cretan strand.", "Tra. Saw you no more; mark'd you not, how\nher sister", "Began to scold; and raise up such a storm,", "That mortal ears might hardly endure the din ?", "Luc. Tranio, I saw her coral lips to move,", "And with her breath she did perfume the air ;\nSacred, and sweet, was all I saw in her.", "old writing stood for either their or your. If their love\nbe right, it must mean—the goodwill of Baptista and\nBianca towards us.", "10 i. e. I will recommend him.", "11 Consideration, or reflection.", "12 A proverbial expression. Dole is lot, portion.", "The phrase is of very common occurrence.", "13 The allusion is probably to the sport of running at\nthe ring, or some similar game.", "14 Is not driven out by chiding.", "15 This line is quoted as it appears in Lilly's Gram-\nmar, and not as it is in Terence. See Farmer's Essay\non the Learning of Shakspeare.", "16 Longingly.", "17 Europa.", "1 She means 'do you intend to make a strumpet of me among these companions?' But the expression seems to have a quibbling allusion to the chess term of stale-mate.", "2 Think.", "3 Pet.", "4 i. e. so odd, so different from others in your conduct.", "5 To mew up, was to confine or shut up close, as it was the custom to confine hawks while they mew'd", "6 Recommend.", "7 Cunningham has not yet lost its original signification of knowing, learned, as may be observed in the translation of the Bible.", "

290

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

Act I

Tra. Nay, then, 'tis time to stir him from his
trance.
I pray, awake, sir; If you love the maid,
Bend thoughts and wits to achieve her. Thus it
stands:

Her elder sister is so curst and shrewd,
That, till the father rids his hands of her,
Master, your love must live a maid at home:
And therefore has he closely mew'd her up,
Because she shall not be annoy'd with suitors.

Luc. Ah, Tranio, what a cruel father's he!
But art thou not advis'd, he took some care

To get her cunning schoolmasters to instruct her?

Tra. Ay, marry, am I, sir; and now 'tis plotted.

Luc. I have it, Tranio.

Tra. Master, for my hand,

Both our inventions meet and jump in one.

Luc. Tell me thine first.

Tra. You will be schoolmaster,

And undertake the teaching of the maid:

That's your device.

Luc. It is: May it be done?

Tra. Not possible: For who shall bear your part,
And be in Padua here Vincentio's son?

Keep house, and ply his book; welcome his friends;

Visit his countrymen, and banquet them?

Luc. Basta;¹ content thee, for I have it full.

We have not yet been seen in any house;

Nor can we be distinguish'd by our faces,

For man, or master: then it follows thus:—

Keep house, and port,² and servants, as I should:
I will some other be; some Florentine,

Some Neapolitan, or meaner man of Pisa.

'Tis hatch'd, and shall be so: Tranio, at once

Uncase thee; take my colour'd hat and cloak;

When Biondello comes, he waits on thee:

But I will charm him first to keep his tongue.

Tra. So had you need. [They exchange habits.

In brief then, sir, sith² it your pleasure is,
And I am tied to be obedient;

(For so your father charg'd me at our parting;

Be serviceable to my son, quoth he;

Although, I think, 'twas in another sense;)"

I am content to be Lucentio.

Because so well I love Lucentio.

Luc. Tranio, be so, because Lucentio loves.

And let me be a slave, to achieve that maid
Whose sudden sight hath thrall'd my wounded eye.

### Enter BIONDELLO.

Here comes the rogue.—Sirrah, where have you
been?

Bion. Where have I been? Nay, how now, where
are you?

Master, has my fellow Tranio stol'n your clothes?

Or you stol'n his? or both? pray what's the news?

Luc. Sirrah, come hither; 'tis no time to jest,

And therefore frame your manners to the time.

Your fellow Tranio here, to save my life,

Puts my apparel and my countenance on,

And I for my escape have put on his;

For in a quarrel, since I came ashore,

I kill'd a man, and fear I was described:

Wait you on him, I charge you, as becomes,

While I make way from hence to save my life:

You understand me?

Bion. I, sir, ne'er a whit.

Luc. And not a jot of Tranio in your mouth;

Tranio is chang'd into Lucentio.

Bion. The better for him: 'Would, I were so too!

1 It is enough, *Ital.*

2 *Port* is figure, show, appearance.

3 Since.

4 Here in the old copy we have, 'The presenters
above speak?' meaning *Sly, &c.* who were placed in a
' would it were done,' the marginal direction is, *They sit
and mark.*

5 Malone remarks that Grumio's pretensions to wit
have a strong resemblance to Dromio's, in The Comedy
of Errors; and the two plays were probably written in
no great distance of time from each other. I have else-
where had occasion to observe that the idiom, 'Knock
me here,' is familiar to the French language.

Tra. So would I, faith, boy, to have the next
wish after,—

That Lucentio indeed had Baptista's youngest
daughter.

But, sirrah,—not for my sake, but your master's—
I advise.

You use your manners discreetly in all kind of com-
panies.

When I am alone, why then I am Tranio;

But in all places else, your master Lucentio.

Luc. Tranio, let's go:—

One thing more rests, that thyself execute:—
To make one among these wooers: If thou ask me
why,—

Sufficeth, my reasons are both good and weighty.

I Serv. *My lord, you nod; you do not mind the play.*

Sly. Yes, by Saint Anne, do I. A good matter,
surely: *Comes there any more of it?*

Page. *My lord, 'tis but begun.*

Sly. 'Tis a very excellent piece of work, madam
lady: 'Would, 'were done!

### SCENE II. The same. Before Hortensio's House.
Enter PETRUCHIO and GRUMIO.

Pet. Verona, for a while I take my leave,

To see my friends in Padua; but, of all,

My best beloved and approved friend,

Hortensio; and, I trow, this is his house:—

Here, sirrah Grumio; knock, I say.

Gru. Knock, sir! whom should I knock? is there
any man has rebused your worship?

Pet. Villain, I say, knock me here soundly.

Gru. Knock you here, sir? why, sir, what am I,
sir, that I should knock you here, sir?

Pet. Villain, I say, knock me at this gate,

And rap me well, or I'll knock your knave's pate.

Gru. My master is grown quarrelsome: I should
knock you first,

And then I know after who comes by the worst.

Pet. Will it not be?

'Faith, sirrah, an you'll not knock, I'll wring it;

I'll try how you can *sol, fa, and sing it.*

[He wrings GRUMIO by the ears.

Gru. Help, masters, help! my master is mad.

Pet. Now, knock when I bid you: sirrah! villain!

### Enter HORTENSIO.

Hor. How now? what's the matter?—My old
friend Grumio! and my good friend Petrucho!—
How do you all at Verona?

Pet. Signior Hortensio, come you to part the fray?

Con tutto il core bene trovato, may I say.

Hor. *Alla nostra casa bene venuto,*

*Molto honorato, signor mio Petrucho.*

Rise, Grumio, rise; we will compound this quarrel.

Gru. Nay, 'tis no matter what he leges' in Latin.
—If this be not a lawful cause for me to leave his
service.—Look you, sir, he bid me knock him and
rap him soundly, sir: Well, was it fit for a servant
to use his master so: being, perhaps, (for aught I
see) two and thirty,—a pip out?⁸

Whom, 'would to God, I had well knock'd at first,

Then had not Grumio come by the worst.

Pet. A senseless villain—Good Hortensio,
I bade the rascal knock upon your gate,

And could not get him for my heart to do it.

Gru. Knock at the gate?—O heavens!

Spake you not these words plain,—Sirrah, knock
me here,

*Rap me here, knock me well, and knock me soundly?*

And come you now with—knocking at the gate?

6 Gascoigne in his Supposes has spelt this name correctly *Petrucio*, but Shakspeare wrote it as it appears in the text, in order to teach the actors how to pronounce it.

7 I. e. what he *alleges* in Latin. Grumio mistakes the Italian spoken for Latin. Tyrwhitt suggests that we should read—⁹ Nay, 'tis no matter what *be leges* in Latin. If this be not a lawful cause for me to leave his service. That is, 'Tis no matter what *is lae* if this be not a lawful cause,? etc.

8 This passage has escaped the commentators, and
yet it is more obscure than many they have explained.

## SCENE II.

## TAMING OF THE SHREW.

291

Pet. Sirrah, be gone, or talk not, I advise you.
Hor. Petruchio, patience; I am Grumio's pledge:
Why, this a heavy chance 'twixt him and you;
Your ancient, trusty, pleasant servant, Grumio.
Blow me now, sweet friend,—what happy gale
Blows you to Padua here, from old Verona?

Pet. Such wind as scatters young men through the
world,
To seek their fortunes further than at home,
Where small experience grows. But, in a few,
Signior Hortensio, thus it stands with me:—
Antonio, my father, is decreas'd;
And I have thrust myself into this maze,
Haply to wive, and thrive, as best I may:
Crowns in my purse I have, and goods at home,
And so am come abroad to see the world.

Hor. Petruchio, shall I then come roundly to thee,
And wish thee to a shrewd ill-favour'd wife?
Thou'dst thank me but a little for my counsel:
And yet I'll promise thee she shall be rich,
And very rich:—But thou'rt too much my friend,
And I'll not wish thee to her.

Pet. Signior Hortensio; 'twixt such friends as we
Few words suffice: and, therefore, if thou know
One rich enough to be Petruchio's wife,
(As wealth is burdened of my wooing dance,)
Be she as foul as was Florentius? love,²
As old as Sibyl, and as curst and shrewd
As Socrates' Xantippe, or a worse,
She moves me not, or not removes, at least,
Affection's edge in me; were she as rough
As are the swelling Adriatic seas;
I come to wive it healthily in Padua;
If healthily, then happily in Padua.

Gru. Nay, look you, sir, he tells you flatly what
his mind is: Why, give him gold enough and marry
him to a puppet, or an aglet-baby;³ or an old trot
with ne'er a tooth in her head, though she have as
many diseases as two and fifty horses:⁴ why, no-
thing comes amiss, so money comes withal.

Hor. Petruchio, since we have stepp'd thus far in,
I will continue that I broach'd in jest.
I can, Petruchio, help thee to a wife
With wealth enough, and young, and beauteous;
Brought up as best becomes a gentlewoman;
Her only fault (and that is faults enough),
Is,—that she is intolerably curst,⁵
And shrewd, and froward; so beyond all measure,
That, were my state far worse than it is,
I would not wet her for a mine of gold.

Pet. Hortensio, peace; thou know'st not gold's
effect:
Tell me her father's name, and 'tis enough;
For I will board her, though she chide as loud
As thunder, when the clouds in autumn crack.

Hor. Her father is Baptista Minola,
An affable and courteous gentleman:
Her name is Katharina Minola,
Renown'd in Padua for her scolding tongue.

Pet. I know her father, though I know not her;
And he knew my deceased father well:
I will not sleep, Hortensio, till I see her;
And therefore let me be thus bold with you,
To give you over at this first encounter,
Unless you will accompany me thither.

Gru. I pray you, sir, let him go while the hur-
mour lasts. O' my word, an she knew him as well
Perhaps it was passed over because it was not under-
stood? The allusion is to the old game of Bone-ace or
one-and-thirty. A pip is a spot upon a card. The old
copy has it *peee*.

1 In a few, means the same as in short, in a few words.

2 This allusion is to a story told by Gower in the first book of his Confessio Amantis. Florent is the name of a knight who bound himself to marry a deformed hag provided she taught him the solution of a riddle on which his life depended.

3 In e. c. 'a diminutive being, not exceeding in size the tag of a point,' says Steevens; 'a small image or head cut on the tag of a point or lace,' says Malone. It was no such thing; an aglet was not only a tag of a point, but a brooch or 'jewel in one's cap,' as Baret explains it. An aglet-baby, therefore was a diminutive figure

as I do, she would think scolding would do little
good upon him: She may, perhaps, call him half
a score knaves or so: why, that's nothing; an he
begin once, he'll rail in his rope-tricks.⁶ I'll tell
you what, sir,—an she stand? him but a little, he
will throw a figure in her face, and so disfigure her
with it, that she shall have no more eyes to see
withal than a cat:⁸ You know him not, sir.

Hor. Tarry, Petruchio, I must go with thee;
For in Baptista's keep⁹ my treasure is:
He hath the jewel of my life in hold,
His youngest daughter, beautiful Bianca;
And her withholds from me, and other more
Suitors to her, and rivals in my love:
Supposing it a thing impossible,
(For those defects I have before rehears'd,)
That ever Katharina will be woo'd;
Therefore this order¹⁰ hath Baptista ta'en;—
That none shall have access unto Bianca,
Till Katharine the curst have got a husband.
Gru. Katharine the curst!

A title for a maid, of all titles the worst.
Hor. Now shall my friend Petruchio do me grace;
And offer me, discreet'd in sober robes,
To old Baptista as a schoolmaster
Well seen¹¹ in musick, to instruct Bianca:
That so I may by this device, at least,
Have leave and leisure to make love to her,
And, unsuspected, court her by herself.

Enter GREMIO; with him LUCENTIO disguised,
with books under his arm.

Gru. Here's knavery! See, to beguile the old
folks, how the young folks lay their heads togeth'r!
Master, master, look about you: Who goes there? ha!
Hor. Peace, Grumio: 'tis the rival of my love:—
Petruchio, stand by a while.

Gru. A proper stripling, and an amorous!

[They retire.]

Gre. O, very well; I havealus'd the note.
Hark you, sir; I'll have them very fairly bound:
All books of love, see that at any hand;¹²
And see you read no other lectures to her:

You understand me;—Over and beside
Signior Baptista's liberality,

'I'll mend it with a largess:¹³ Take your papers too,
And let me have them very well perfum'd;
For she is sweeter than perfume itself,

To whom they go. What will you read to her?
Luc. Whate'er I read to her, I'll plead for you,
As for my patron, (stand you so assur'd),

As firmly as yourself were still in place:
Yea, and (perhaps) with more successful words
Than you, unless you were a scholar, sir.

Gru. O this learning; what a thing it is!

Gru. O this woodcock! what an ass it is!

Pet. Peace, sirrah.
Hor. Grumio, mum!—God save you, signior
Gremio!

Hor. And you're well met, signior Hortensio.
Trow you,

Whither I am going?—To Baptista Minola.

I promis'd to enquire carefully

About a schoolmaster for fair Bianca:

And, by good fortune, I have lighted well

carved on an aglet or jewel; such as Queen Mab is
described:

In shape no bigger than an agate stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman.

4 The fifty diseases of a horse seems to be proverbial,
of which, probably, the text is only an exaggeration.

5 Cross, froward, petulant.

6 i. e. rogush tricks. Ropery is used by Shakspeare in Romeo and Juliet for rogury. A rope-ripe is one for whom the gallows groans, according to Cotgrave.

7 Withstand.

8 To endeavour to explain this would certainly be lost labour. Mr. Boswell justly remarks 'that nothing is more common in ludicrous or playful discourse than to use a comparison where no resemblance is intended.'

9 Keep here means care, keeping, custody.

10 To take order is to take measures.

11 To be well seen in any art was to be well skilled
in it.

12 Rate.

13 Present.

["292", "TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "ACT II.", "On this young man; for learning and behaviour,\nFit for her turn; well read in poetry", "And other books,—good ones, I warrant you.", "Hor. 'Tis well: and I have met a gentleman,\nHath promis'd me to help me to another,", "A fine musician to instruct our mistress;", "So shall I no whit be behind in duty", "To fair Bianca, so belov'd of me.", "Gre. Belov'd of me,—and that my deeds shall prove.", "Gru. And that his bags shall prove.", "[Aside.] Hor. Gremio, 'tis now no time to vent our love:", "Listen to me, and if you speak me fair,", "I'll tell you news indifferent good for either.", "Here is a gentleman, whom by chance I met,\nUpon agreement from us to his liking,", "Will undertake to woo curst Katharine;", "Yea, and to marry her, if her dowry please.", "Gre. So said, so done, is well:", "Hortensio, have you told him all her faults?", "Pet. I know, she is an irksome brawling scold;", "If that be all, masters, I hear no harm.", "Gre. No! say'st me so, friend? What countryman?", "Pet. Born in Verona, old Antonio's son:", "My father dead, my fortune lives for me;", "And I do hope good days, and long, to see.", "Gre. O, sir, such a life, with such a wife, were\nstrange:", "But, if you have a stomach, to't o' God's name,\nYou shall have me assisting you in all.", "But will you woo this wild cat?", "Pet.", "Will I live?", "Gru. Will he woo her? ay, or I'll hang her.", "[Aside.]", "Pet. Why came I hither, but to that intent?", "Think you, a little din can daunt mine ears?", "Have I not in my time heard lions roar?", "Have I not heard the sea, puff'd up with winds,\nRage like an angry boar, chafed with sweat?", "Have I not heard great ordnance in the field,\nAnd heaven's artillery thunder in the skies?", "", "Have I not in a pitched battle heard", "Loud 'larums, neighing steeds, and trumpets' clang?", "And do you tell me of a woman's tongue,", "That gives not half so great a blow to the ear", "As will a chestnut in a farmer's fire?", "Tush! tush! fear boys with bugs.¹", "Gru.", "For he fears none. [Aside.]", "Gru. Hortensio, hark!", "This gentleman is happily arriv'd,", "My mind presumes, for his own good, and ours.", "Hor. I promis'd, we would be contributors,", "And bear his charge of wooing, whatso'er.", "Gru. And so we will; provided that he win her.", "Gru. I would, I were as sure of a good dinner.", "[Aside.]", "Enter TRANIO, bravely apparell'd; and BIONDELLO.", "Tra. Gentlemen, God save you! If I may be bold,\nTell me, I beseech you, which is the readiest way\nTo the house of signior Baptista Minola?", "Bion. He that has the two fair daughters:—is't", "[Aside to TRANIO] he you mean?", "Tra. Even he, Biondello.", "Gru. Hark you, sir; You mean not her to—²", "Tra. Perhaps him and her, sir; What have you to do?", "Pet. Not her that chides, sir; at any hand, I pray.", "Tra. I love no chiders, sir:—Biondello, let's away.", "Luc. Well begun, Tranio.", "[Aside.]", "Hor. Sir, a word ere you go;—", "Are you a suitor to the maid you talk of, yea or no?", "Tra. An if I be, sir, is it any offence?", "Gru. No; if without more words, you will get\nyou hence.", "1 Fright boys with bug-hears.", "2 This hiatus is in the old copy; it is most probable\nthat an abrupt sentence was intended.", "3 Ungrateful.", "4 To contrive is to wear out, to pass away, from con-\ntrivi, the preterie of contero, one of the disused Lati-\nnisms.", "For me as for you?", "Gre.", "But so is not she.", "Tra. For what reason, I beseech you?", "Gru. For this reason, if you'll know;—\nThat she's the choice love of Signior Gremio.", "Hor. That she's the chosen of Sigmor Hortensio.", "Tra. Softly, my masters! if you be gentlemen,\nDo me this right,—hear me with patience.", "Baptista is a noble gentleman,", "To whom his father is not all unknown;", "And, were his daughter fairer than she is,", "She may more suitors have, and me for one.", "Fair Leda's daughter had a thousand wooers;", "Then well one more may fair Bianca have:", "And so she shall; Lucentio shall make one,", "Though Paris came in hope to speed alone.", "Gru. What! this gentleman will out-talk us all.", "Luc. Sir, give him head; I know he'll prove a\njade.", "Pet. Hortensio, to what end are all these words?", "Hor. Sir, let me be so bold as ask you,", "Did you yet ever see Baptista's daughter?", "Tra. No, sir; but hear I do that he hath two:", "The one as famous for a scolding tongue,", "As is the other for beauteous modesty.", "Pet. Sir, sir, the first's for me; let her go by.", "Gru. Yea, leave that labour to great Hercules;", "And let it be more than Alcides' twelve.", "Pet. Sir, understand you this of me, insooth;—\nThe youngest daughter, whom you hearken for,", "Her father keeps from all access of suitors;", "And will not promise her to any man,", "Until the elder sister first be wed:", "The younger then is free, and not before.", "Tra. If it be so, sir, that you are the man", "Must stead us all, and me among the rest;", "An if you break the ice, and do this feat,—", "Achieve the elder, set the younger free.", "For our access,—whose hap shall be to have her,", "Will not so graceless be, to be ingrate.²", "Hor. Sir, you say well, and well you do conceive;\nAnd since you do profess to be a suitor,\nYou must, as we do, gratify this gentleman,\nTo whom we all rest generally beholding.", "Tra. Sir, I shall not be slack: in sign whereof,\nPlease ye we may contrive⁴ this afternoon,\nAnd quaff carouses to our mistress' health;\nAnd do as adversaries⁵ do in law,—", "Strive mightily, but eat and drink as friends.", "Gru. Bion. O excellent motion! Fellows,⁶ let's\nbegone.", "Hor. The motion's good indeed, and be it so;—\nPetruchio, I shall be your ben venuto. [Exeunt.]", "ACT II.", "### SCENE I. The same. A Room in Baptista's\nHouse. Enter KATHARINA and BIANCA.", "### Bian. Good sister, wrong me not, nor wrong\nyourself,", "To make a bondmaid and a slave of me;", "That I disdain: but for these other gawds,⁷", "Unbind my hands, I'll put them off myself,", "Yea, all my raiment, to my petticoat;", "Or, what you will command me, will I do,", "So well I know my duty to my elders.", {"bbox": [666, 1092

["294", "TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "ACT II.", "Yet extreme gusts will blow out fire and all :", "So I to her, and so she yields to me ;", "For I am rough, and woo not like a babe.", "Bap. Well may'st thou woo, and happy be thy", "speed!", "But be thou arm'd for some unhappy words.", "Pet. Ay, to the proof; as mountains are for winds,", "That shake not, though they blow perpetually.", "Re-enter HORTENSIO, with his head broken.", "Bap. How now, my friend ? why dost thou look\nso pale ?", "Hor. For fear, I promise you, if I look pale.", "Bap. What, will my daughter prove a good mu-\nsician?", "Hor. I think, she'll sooner prove a soldier ;", "Iron may hold with her, but never lutes.", "Bap. Why then thou canst not break her to the\nlute ?", "Hor. Why, no; for she hath broke the lute to me.\nI did but tell her, she mistook her frets,", "And bow'd her hand to teach her fingering ;", "When, with a most impatient devilish spirit,", "Frets, call you these ? quoth she : I'll fume with them :\nAnd, with that word, she struck me on the head,", "And through the instrument my pate made way ;", "And there I stood amazed for a while,", "As on a pillory, looking through the lute ;", "While she did call me,—rascal fiddler,", "And—twangling Jack; with twenty such vile terms,", "As she had studied to misuse me so.", "Pet. Now, by the world, it is a lusty wench ;", "I love her ten times more than e'er I did :", "O, how I long to have some chat with her !", "Bap. Well, go with me, and be not so discomfited :", "Proceed in practice with my younger daughter ;", "She's apt to learn, and thankful for good turns.—", "Signior Petruchio, will you go with us ;", "Or, shall I send my daughter Kate to you ?", "Pet. I pray you, do ; I will attend her here,—", "[Exeunt BAPTISTA, GREMIO, TRANIO,\nand HORTENSIO.", "And woo her with some spirit when she comes.\nSay, that she rail; Why, then I'll tell her plain,\nShe sings as sweetly as a nightingale :", "Say, that she frown; I'll say she looks as clear", "As morning roses newly washed with dew :", "Say, she be mute, and will not speak a word ;", "Then I'll commend her volubility,", "And say—she uttereth piercing eloquence :", "If she do bid me pack, I'll give her thanks,", "As though she bid me stay by her a week :", "If she deny to wed, I'll crave the day", "When I shall ask the banns, and when be married :", "But here she comes; and now, Petruchio, speak.", "Enter KATHARINA.", "Good-morrow, Kate; for that's your name, I hear.", "Kath. Well have you heard, but something hard\nof hearing ;", "They call me—Katharine, that do talk of me.", "Pet. You lie, in faith; for you are call'd plain\nKate,", "And bonny Kate, and sometimes Kate the curst ;", "But Kate, the prettiest Kate in Christendom,", "Kate of Kate-Hall, my super-dainty Kate,", "For dainties are all cates: and therefore, Kate,", "Take this of me, Kate of my consolation;—", "Hearing thy mildness prais'd in every town,", "Thy virtues spoke of, and thy beauties sounded,", "(Yet not so deeply as to thee belongs.)", "Myself am mov'd to woo thee for my wife.", "Kath. Mov'd! in good time: let him that mov'd\nyou hither,", "1 *Frets* are the points at which a string is to be stopped, formerly marked on the neck of such instruments as the lute or guitar.", "2 So Milton in *L'Allegro* :—", "'There on beds of violets blue,", "And fresh blown roses *wash'd* in *dew*.", "It is from the old play of the Taming of a Shrew :—", "'As glorious as the morning *washt* with *dew*.'", "Remove you hence: I knew you at the first,\nYou were a moveable.", "Pet.", "Kath. A joint-stool.", "Pet.", "Kath. Asses are made to bear, and so are you.", "Pet. Women are made to bear, and so are you.", "Kath. No such jade, sir, as you, if me you mean.", "Pet. Alas, good Kate, I will not burden thee :", "For knowing thee to be but young and light,—", "Kath. Too light for such a swan as you to catch ;", "And yet as heavy as my weight should be.", "Pet. Should be ? should buzz.", "Kath.", "Pet. O, slow-wing'd turtle! shall a buzzard take thee?", "Kath. Ay, for a turtle; as he takes a buzzard.", "Pet. Come, come, you wasp; I'faith, you are too angry.", "Kath. If I be waspish, best beware my sting.", "Pet. My remedy is then, to pluck it out.", "Kath. Ay, if the fool could find it where it lies.", "Pet. Who knows not where a wasp doth wear\nhis sting?", "In his tail.", "Kath. In his tongue.", "Pet. Whose tongue ?", "Kath. Yours, if you talk of tails: and so farewell.", "Pet. What, with my tongue in your tail ? nay,\ncome again.", "Good Kate; I am a gentleman.", "Kath.", "That'll try.", "[Striking him.", "Pet. I swear I'll cuff you, if you strike again.", "Kath. So may you lose your arms :", "If you strike me, you are no gentleman ;", "And if no gentleman, why, then no arms.", "Pet. A herald, Kate ? O, put me in thy books.", "Kath. What is your crest ? a coxcomb?", "Pet. A combell cock, so Kate will be my hen.", "Kath. No cock of mine, you crow too like a\ncraven.", "Pet. Nay, come, Kate, come; you must not look\nso sour.", "Kath. It is my fashion when I see a crab.", "Pet. Why here's no crab; and therefore look not\nsour.", "Kath. There is, there is.", "Pet. Then show it me.", "Kath. Had I a glass, I would.", "Pet. What, you mean my face ?", "Kath. Well aim'd of such a young one.", "Pet. Now, by Saint George, I am too young for\nyou.", "Kath. Yet you are wither'd.", "Pet.", "'Tis with cares.", "Kath.", "I care not.", "Pet. Nay, hear you, Kate: in sooth you 'scape\nnot so.", "Kath. I chafe you, if I tarry; let me go.", "Pet. No, not a whit; I find you passing gentle.", "'Twas told me, you were rough, and coy, and sullen,\nAnd now I find report a very liar ;", "For thou art pleasant, gamesome, passing cour-\nteous;", {"bbox": [683, 1063,

296

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

Act III.

Tra. Gremio, 'tis known, my father hath no less
Than three great argosies; besides two galliasses,
And twelve tight galleys: these I will assure her,
And twice as much, what' er thou offer'st next.
Gre. Nay, I have offer'd all, I have no more ;
And she can have no more than all I have ;—
If you like me, she shall have me and mine.

Tra. Why, then the maid is mine from all the
world,

By your firm promise; Gremio is out-vied.²

Bap. I must confess, your offer is the best;
And, let your father make her the assurance,
She is your own; else, you must pardon me :
If you should die before him, where's her dower?

Tra. That's but a cavil; he is old, I young.

Gre. And may not young men die, as well as old?

Bap. Well, gentlemen,
I am thus resolv'd:—On Sunday next, you know,
My daughter Katharine is to be married:
Now, on the Sunday following, shall Bianca,
Be bride to you, if you make this assuariance;
If not, to Signior Gremio:
And so I take my leave, and thank you both.

Gre. Adieu, good neighbour.—Now, I fear thee not;

Sirrah, young gamester, your father were a fool
To give thee all, and, in his waning age,
Set foot under thy table: Tut! a toy !

An old Italian fox is not so kind, my boy. [Exit.]

Tra. A vengeance on your crafty wither'd hide !
Yet I have faced it with a card of ten.³
'Tis in my head to do my master good:—
I see no reason, but suppos'd Lucentio
Must get a father, call'd—suppos'd Vincentio;
And that's a wonder: fathers, commonly,
Do get their children; but, in this case of wooing,
A child shall get a sire, if I fail not of my cunning.

[Exit.]

ACT III.

SCENE I. A Room in Baptista's House. Enter
LUCENTIO, HORTENSIO, and BIANCA.

Luc. Fiddler, forbear; you grow too forward, sir:
Have you so soon forgot the entertainment
Her sister Katharine welcom'd you withal?

Hor. But, wrangling pedant, this is

The patroness of heavenly harmony ;

Then give me leave to have prerogative ;

And when in music we have spent an hour,

Your lecture shall have leisure for as much.

Luc. Preposterous ass! that never read so far
To know the cause why music was ordain'd !
Was it not to refresh the mind of man,
After his studies, or his usual pain ?

Then give me leave to read philosophy,

And, while I pause, serve in your harmony.

Hor. Sirrah, I will not bear these braves of thine.

Bian. Why, gentlemen, you do me double wrong.

To strive for that which resteth in my choice :

1 A galliass, galeazza, Ital. was a great or double galley. The masts were three, and the number of seats for rowers thirty-two.

2 The origin of this term is also from gaming. When one man vied upon another, he was said to be *outvied*.

3 This phrase, which often occurs in old writers, was most probably derived from some game at cards, where-
ful. *To face it* meant, as it still does, to bully, to attack by impudence of face. Whether a *card of ten* was properly a *cooling card* has not yet been ascertained, but they are united in the following passage from Lyly's *Euphues. ' And all lovers, he only excepted, are cool- ed with a *card of ten*."

4 After this Mr. Pope introduced the following speeches of the presenters as they are called; from the old play:—

Slie. When will the fool come again?*

* This probably alludes to the custom of filling up the vacancy of the stage between the Acts by the appearance of a fool on the stage. Unless Sly meant, *Sander* the servant to Ferando in the old piece, which seems likely from a subsequent passage.

I am no breeching scholar⁵ in the schools;

I'll not be tied to hours, nor 'pointed times,

But learn my lessons as I please myself,

And, to cut off all strife, here sit we down:—

Take you your instrument, play the whiles ;
His lecture will be done ere you have tun'd.

Hor. You'll leave his lecture when I am in tune?
[To Bianca.—Hortensio retires.

Luc. That will be never!—tune your instrument.

Bian. Where left we last ?

Luc. Here, madam:—

Hac ibat Simoïs; *hic est Sigeia tellus*;

Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.

Bian. Construe them.

Luc. Hac ibat, as I told you before,⁶—Simoïs,
I am Lucentio,—hic est, son unto Lucentio of Pisa,
—Sigeia tellus, disguised thus to get your love;
Hic steterat, and that Lucentio that comes a wooing,
Priami, is my man Tranio,—regia, bearing my port,
—celsa senis, that we might beguile the old panfla-
loon.

Hor. Madam, my instrument's in tune.

[Returning.](Hortensio plays.)

Bian, Let's hear.—

[Hortensio plays.]

O fye! the treble jars.

Luc. Spit in the hole, man, and tune again.

Bian. Now let me see if I can construe it: *Hac ibat Simoïs, I know you not;*—*hic est Sigeia tellus, I trust you not;*—*Hic steterat Priami, take heed he hear us not;*—*regia, presume not;*—*celsa senis, des- pair not.*

Hor. Madam, 'tis now in tune.

Luc. All but the base.

Hor. The base is right; 'tis the base knave that jars.

How fiery and forward our pedant is !

Now, for my life, the knave doth court my love:

Pedasoucle,⁷ I'll watch you better yet.

Bian. In time I may believe, yet I mistrust.

Luc. Mistrust it not; for sure, Æacides

Was Ajax,⁸—call'd so from his grandfather.

Bian. I must believe my master; else, I promise

I should be arguing still upon that doubt:

But let it rest.—Now, Licio, to you:—

Good masters, take it not unkindly, pray,

That he have been thus pleasant with you both.

Hor. You may go walk [to Lucentio,] and give me leave awhile!

My lessons make no music in three parts.

Luc. Are you so formal, sir? well, I must wait,
And watch withal; for, but⁹ I be deceiv'd,
Our fine musician groweth amorous.

Hor. Madam, before you touch the instrument,

To learn the order of my fingering,

I must begin with rudiments of art:

To teach you gamut in a briefer sort,

More pleasant, pithy, and effectual,

Than hath been taught by any of my trade ;

And there it is in writing, fairly drawn.

Bian. Why, I am past my gamut long ago.

Hor. Yet read the gamut of Hortensio.

Sim. Anon, my lord.

Slie. Give some more drink here; where's the tapster?

Here, Sim, eat some of these things.

Sim. I do, my lord.

Bian. Here, Sim, I drink to thee.

5 No schoolboy, liable to be whipt.

6 This species of humour, in which Latin is translated into English of a perfectly different meaning, is to be found in two plays of Middleton, The Witch, and The Chaste Maid of Cheapside; and in other writers.

7 Pedant.

8 'This is only said to deceive Hortensio, who is supposed to be listening. The pedigree of Ajax, however, is properly made out, and might have been taken from Golding's Version of Ovid's Metamorphoses, book xiii? or, it may be added, from any historical and poetical dictionary, such as is appended to Cooper's Latin Dictionary, and others of that time.

But is here used in its expeotive sense of *be-out*, without. Vide Note on the Tempest, Act III. Sc. 1.

## SCENE II.

## TAMING OF THE SHREW.

297

A re, to plead Hortensio's passion;

B mi, Bianca, take him for thy lord,

C faunt, that loves with all affection;

D sol re, one cliff, two notes have I;

E la mi, show pity, or I die.

Call you this—gant? tut! I like it not:

Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice,

### Enter a Servant.

Serv. Mistress, your father prays you leave your books.

And help to dress your sister's chamber up;

You know, to-morrow is the wedding-day.

Bian. Farewell, sweet masters both; I must be gone.

[Exeunt BIANCA and Servant.

Luc. 'Faith, mistress, then I have no cause to stay.

[Exit.]

Hor. But I have cause to pry into this pedant; Methinks, he looks as though he were in love:—

Yet if thy thoughts, Bianca, be so humble,

To cast thy wand'ring eyes on every stale,

Seize thee that list: If once I find thee ranging,

Hortensio will be quit with thee by changing.

[Exit.]

### SCENE II. The same. Before Baptista's House.

Enter BAPTISTA, GREMIO, TRANIO, KATHARINA, BIANCA, LUENTIO, and Attendants.

Bap. Signior Lucentio, [to TRANIO,] this is the 'pointed day,

That Katharine and Petruchio should be married,

And yet we hear not like our son-in-law:

What will be said? what mockery will it be,

To want the bridegroom, when the priest attends

To speak the ceremonial rites of marriage?

What says Lucentio to this shame of ours?

Kath. No shame but mine: I must, forsooth, be fore!

To give my hand, oppos'd against my heart,

To a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen;

Who woo'd in haste, and means to wed at leisure.

I told you, I, he was a frantic fool,

Hiding his bitter jests in blunt behaviour:

And, to be noted for a merry man,

He'll woo a thousand, 'point the day of marriage,

Make friends invite them, and proclaim the banns;

Yet never means to wed where he hath woo'd.

Now must the world point at poor Katharine,

And say,—Lo, there is mad Petruchio's wife,

If it would please him come and marry her.

Tra. Patience, good Katharine, and Baptista too;

Upon my life, Petruchio means but well,

Whatever fortune stays him from his word;

Though he be blunt, I know him passing wise;

Though he be merry, yet within he's honest.

Kath. 'Would, Katharine had never seen him though!

[Exit, weeping, followed by BIANCA and others.

Bap. Go, girl; I cannot blame thee now to weep;

For such an injury would vex a very saint,

Much more a shrew of thy impudent humour.

### Enter BRONDELLO.

Bio. Master, master! news, old news,⁵ and such news as you never heard of!

Bap. Is it new and old too? how may that be?

Bion. Why, is it not news to hear of Petruchio's coming?

Bap. Is he come?

Bion. Why, no, sir.

Bap. What then?

Bion. He is coming.

Bap. When will he be here?

Bion. When he stands where I am, and sees you there.

Tra. But, say, what:—To thine old news.

Bion. Why, Petruchio is coming, in a new hat and an old jerkin; a pair of old breeches, thrice turned; a pair of boots that have been candle-cases, one buckled, another laced; an old rusty sword ta'en out of the town armory, with a broken hilt and chapeless; with two broken points:⁶ His horse hipped with an old mothy saddle, the stirrups of no kindred: besides, possessed with the glanders, and like to mose in the chine; troubled with the lampas, infected with the fashions,⁷ full of windgalls, sped with spavins, raied with the yellows, past cure of the fives,⁸ stark spoiled with the staggers, begnawn with the bots; swayed in the back, and shoulder-shotten; ne'er legged before; and with a half-checked bit, and a head-stall of sheep's leather; which, being restrained to keep him from stumbling, hath been often burst, and now repaired with knots: one girt six times pieced, and a man's crupper of velle,⁹ which hath two letters for her name, fairly set down in studs, and here and there pieced with packthread.

Bap. Who comes with him?

Bion. O sir, his latkey, for all the world caparisned like the horse; with a linen stock¹⁰ on one leg, and a kersey boot-hose on the other; gartered with a red and blue list: an old hat, and The honour of forty footies.¹¹ pricked in't for a feather: a monster, a very monster in apparel; and not like a christian footboy, or a gentleman's lackey.

Tra. 'Tis some odd humour pricks him to this fashion!—

Yet oftentimes he goes but mean apparell'd.

Bap. I am glad he is come, howsoever he comes.

Bion. Why, sir, he comes not.

Bap. Didst thou not say, he comes?

Bion. Who ? that Petruchio came?

Bap. Ay, that Petruchio came.

Bion. No, sir; I say, his horse comes with him on his back.

Bap. Why, that's all one.

Bion. Nay, by Saint Jamy, I hold you a penny, A horse and a man is more than one, and yet not

many.

### Enter PETRUCHIO and GRUMIO.

Pet. Come, where be these gallants? who is at home?

Bap. You are welcome, sir.

Pet. And yet I come not well.

Bap. Who ? that Petruchio came?

Bap. Ay, that Petruchio came.

Bap. Why, that's all one.

Bap. You are welcome, sir.

Pet. And yet I come not well.

Bap. And yet you halt not.

Tra. Not so well apparell'd

As I wish you were.

Pet. Were it better, I should rush in thus.

But where is Kate? where is my lovely bride?—

How does my father?—Gentles, methinks you frown:

And wherefore gaze this goodly company,

As if they saw some wondrous monument,

Some comet, or unusual prodigy?

1. The equivocal use of the word nice by our ancestors has caused some confusion among the commentators; from Baret it appears to have been synonymous, with tender, delicate, effeminate.

2. A stale was a decay or bait; originally the form of a bird was set up to allure a hawk or other bird of prey, and hence used for any object of allurement. Stale here may, however, only mean every common object, as stale was applied to common women.

3. Humour, caprice, inconstancy.

4. Them is not in the old copy, it was supplied by Malone: the second folio reads—yes.

5. Old news. These words were added by Rowe, and necessarily, as appears by the reply of Baptista. Old, in the sense of abundant, as, 'old turning the key,' &c. occurs elsewhere in Shakspeare.

6. Least the reader should imagine that a sword with two broken points is here meant, he should know that points were tagged laces used in fastening different parts of the dress: two broken points would therefore add to the slovenly appearance of Petruchio.

7. i. e. the farcy, called fashions in the west of England.

8. Vives: a distemper in horses, little differing from the strangles.

9. Velvet. 10. Stocking.

11. Warburton's supposition, that Shakspeare ridicules some popular cheap book of this title, by making Petruchio prick it up in his footboy's hat instead of a feather, has been well supported by Steevens; he observes that 'a penny book, containing forty short poems, would, properly managed, furnish no unapt plume of feathers for the hat of a humourist's servant.'

38

298

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

Act III.

Bap. Why sir, you know, this is your wedding-day.

First were we sad, fearing you would not come;
Now sadder, that you come so unprovided.
Eye! doff this habit, shame to your estate,
An eye-sore to our solemn festival.

Tra. And tell us, what occasion of import
Hath all so long detain'd you from your wife,
And sent you hither so unlike yourself?

Pet. Tedious it were to tell, and harsh to hear:
Sufficeth, I am come to keep my word,
Though in some part enforced to disgress;¹
Which, at more leisure, I will so excuse
As you shall well be satisfied withal.
But, where is Kate? I stay too long from her;
The morning wears, 'tis time we were at church.

Tra. See not your bride in these unreverent robes;
Go to my chamber, put on clothes of mine.

Pet. Not I, believe me; thus I'll visit her.

Bap. But thus, I trust, you will not marry her.

Pet. Good sooth, even thus; therefore have done
with words;

To me she's married, not unto my clothes:
Could I repair what she will wear in me,
As I can change these poor accoutrements,
'Twere well for Kate, and better for myself.
But what a fool am I to chat with you,
When I should bid good-morrow to my bride,
And seal the title with a lovely kiss?

[Exeunt PET. GRU. and BRO.]

Tra. He hath some meaning in his mad attire:
We will persuade him, be it possible,
To put on better ere he go to church.

Bap. I'll after him, and see the event of this.

Tra. But, sir, to her² love concerneth us to add
Her father's liking; which to bring to pass,
As I before imparted to your worship,
I am to get a man,—what'ser he be;
It skills³ not much; we'll fit him to our turn,—
And he shall be Vincentio of Pisa;
And make assurance, here in Padua,
Of greater sums than I have promised,
So shall you quietly enjoy your hope,
And marry sweet Bianca with consent.

Lue. Were it not that my fellow schoolmaster
Doth watch Bianca's steps so narrowly,
'Twere good, methinks, to steal our marriage;
Which once perform'd, let all the world say—no,
I'll keep mine own, despite of all the world.

Tra. That by degrees we mean to look into,
And watch our vantage in this business:
We'll overreach the greybeard, Gremio,
The narrow-prying father, Minola;
The quaint⁴ musician, amorous Licio;
All for my master's sake, Lucentio.—

Re-enter GREMIO.

Signior Gremio! came you from the church?

Gre. As willingly as e'er I came from school.

Tra. And is the bride and bridegroom coming
home?

Gre. A bridegroom, say you? 'tis a groom, indeed,

A grumbling groom, and that the girl shall find.

Tra. Curster than she? why, 'tis impossible.

Gre. Why, he's a devil, a devil, a very fiend.

Tra. Why, she's a devil, a devil, the devil's dam.

Gre. Tut! she's a lamb, a dove, a fool to him.

I'll tell you, Sir Lucentio: When the priest
Should ask—if Katharine should be his wife,
Ay, by gogs-wouns, quoth he; and swore so loud,
That, all amaz'd, the priest let fall the book:
And, as he stoop'd again to take it up,

The mad-brain'd bridegroom took him such a cuff,
That down fell priest and book, and book and priest:
Now take them up, quoth he, if any list.
Tra. What said the wench, when he arose again?
Gre. Trembled and shook; for why, he stamp'd
and swore,

As if the vicar meant to cozen him.

But after many ceremonies done,
He calls for wine:—A health, quoth he; as if
He had been aboard carouging to his mates.

After a storm:—Quaff'd off the muscadel,⁵
And threw the sops all in the sexton's face;

Having no other reason,—

But that his beard grew thin and hungerly,
And seem'd to ask him sops as he was drinking.
This done, he took the bride about the neck;

And kiss'd her lips with such a clamourous smack,
That, at the parting, all the church did echo.

I, seeing this, came thence for very shame;

And after me, I know, the rout is coming:

Such a mad marriage never was before;

Hark, hark! I hear the minstrels play.

[Music. Enter PETRUCHIO, KATHARINA, BIANCA, BAPTISTA, HORTENSIO, GRUMIO, and Train.]

Pet. Gentlemen and friends, I thank you for your
pains:

I know you think to dine with me to-day.

And have prepared great store of wedding cheer;

But so it is, my haste doth call me hence,

And therefore here I mean to take my leave,

Bap. Is't possible, you will away to-night?

Pet. I must away to-day, before night come:—
Make it no wonder; if you knew my business;
You would entreat me rather go than stay.

And, honest company, I thank you all,

That have beheld me give you behalf myself.

To this most patient, sweet, and virtuous wife:

Dine with my father, drink a health to me;

For I must hence, and farewell to you all!

Tra. Let us entreat you stay till after dinner.

Pet. It may not be.

Gre.

Let me entreat you.

Pet. It cannot be.

Kath.

Let me entreat you.

Pet. I am content.

Kath.

Are you content to stay?

Pet. I am content you shall entreat me stay,

But yet not stay, entreat me how you can.

Kath. Now, if you love me, stay.

Pet.

Grumio, my horses.

Gru. Ay, sir, they be ready; the oats have eaten
the horses.

Kath. Nay, then,

Do what thou canst, I will not go to-day;

No, nor to-morrow, nor till I please myself.

The door is open, sir, there lies your way,

You may be jogging whiles your boots are green;

For me, I'll not be gone, till I please myself;—

'Tis like you'll prove a jolly surly groom,
That take it on you at the first so roundly.

Pet. O, Kate, content thee; pr'y'thee be not angry.

Kath. I will be angry; What hast thou to do?

Father, be quiet; he shall stay my leisure.

Gre. Ay, marry, sir; now it begins to work.

Kath. Gentlemen, forward to the bridal dinner:—

I see a woman may be made a fool of.

If she had not a spirit to resist.

Pet. They shall go forward, Kate, at thy command:

Obey the bride, you that attend on her:

Go to the feast, revel and domineer,⁶

Carouse full measure to her maidenhead,

Be mad and merry,—or go hang yourselves;

1. i. e. to deviate from my promise.

2. The old copy reads, 'But, sir, love concerneth us to add, Her father's liking.' The emendation is Mr. Tyrwhitt's. The nominative case to the verb concerneth is here understood.

3. 'It matters not much,' it is of no importance.

4. Quaint had formerly a more favorable meaning than strange, awkward, fantastical, and was used in commendation, as neat, elegant, dainty, dexterous.

5. The custom of having wine and sops distributed immediately after the marriage ceremony in the church is very ancient. It existed even among our Gothic ancestors, and is mentioned in the ordinances of the house hold of Henry VIL For the marriage of a Princess:—'Then potes of Iperice to be ready, and to bee put into cups with soppe, and to be borne to the estates, and to take a soppe and drinke.'

6. That is bluster or swagger.

## SCENE II.

## TAMING OF THE SHREW.

299

But for my bonny Kate, she must with me.

Nay, look not big, nor stamp, nor stare, nor fret; I will be master of what is mine own:

She is my goods, my chattels; she is my house,

My household-stuff, my field, my barn,

My horse, my ox, my ass, my any thing;

And here she stands, touch her whoever dare;

I'll bring my action on the proudest he

That stops my way in Padua.—Grumio,

Draw forth thy weapon, we're beset with thieves; Rescue thy mistress, if thou be a man:—

Fear not, sweet wench, they shall not touch thee, Kate;

I'll buckler thee against a million.

[Exeunt PET. KATH. and GRU.

Bap. Nay, let them go, a couple of quiet ones!

Gre. Went they not quickly, I should die with laughing.

Tra. Of all mad matches, never was the like !

Luc. Mistress, what's your opinion of your sister ?

Bian. That, being mad herself, she's madly mated.

Gre. I warrant him, Petrucho is Kated.

Bap. Neighbours and friends, though bride and bridegroom wants

For to supply the places at the table,

You know there wants no junkets¹ at the feast.—

Lucentio, you shall supply the bridegroom's place, And let Bianca take her sister's room.

Tra. Shall sweet Bianca practise how to bride it ?

Bap. She shall, Lucentio.—Come, gentlemen, let's go.

[Exeunt.]

## ACT IV.

### SCENE I. A Hallin Petruchio's Country House. Enter GRUMIO.

Gru. Fye, fye on all tired jades! on all mad masters! and all foul ways! Was ever man so beaten; was ever man so rayed ?² was ever man so weary ? I am sent before to make a fire, and they are coming after to warm them. Now, were not I a little pot, and soon hot,³ my very lips might freeze to my teeth, my tongue to the roof of my mouth, my heart in my belly, ere I should come by a fire to thaw me:—But I, with blowing the fire, shall warm myself; for, considering the weather, a taller man than I will take cold. Holla! hoa! Curtis!

### Enter CURTIS.

Curt. Who is that, calls so coldly?

Gru. A piece of ice: If thou doubt it, thou mayst slide from my shoulder to my heel, with no greater run but my head and my neck. A fire, good Curtis.

Curt. Is my master and his wife coming, Grumio?

Bap. O, ay, Curtis, ay : and therefore fire, fire; cast on no water.⁴

Curt. Is she so hot a shrew as she's reported?

Gru. She was, good Curtis, before this frost: but thou knowst⁵, winter tames man, woman, and beast: for it hath tamed my old master, and my new mistress, and myself,⁶ fellow Curtis.

Curt. Away, thou three-inch fool! I am no beast.

Gru. Am I but three inches? why, thy horn is a foot; and so long am I,⁶ at the least. But wilt thou make a fire, or shall I complain on thee to our

1 Delicacies.

2 Bewrayed, dirty.

3 A little pot soon hot, is a common proverb.

4 There is an old popular catch of three parts in these words:—

'Scotland burneth, Scotland burneth,

Fire, fire; ——Fire, fire,

Cast on some more water.

5 Grumio calls himself a beast, and Curtis one also by inference in calling him fellow: this would not have been noticed but that one of the commentators once thought it necessary to alter myself in Grumio's speech to thyself. Grumio's sentence is proverbial:

'Wedding, and ill-wintering tame both man and beast.'

6 Curtis contemptuously alludes to Grumio's diminutive size; and he in return calls Curtis a cuckold.

7 This is the beginning of an old round in three parts, the music is given in the Variorum Shakespeare.

8 It is probable that a quibble was intended. Jack and Jill signify two drinking vessels as well as men and maid-servants.

mistress, whose hand (she being now at hand) thou mist soon feel, to thy cold comfort, for being slow in thy hot office.

Curt. I pr'ythee, good Grumio, tell me, How goes the world?

Gru. A cold world, Curtis, in every office but thine; and, therefore, fire: Do thy duty, and have thy duty; for my master and mistress are almost frozen to death.

Curt. There's fire ready: And, therefore, good Grumio, the news?

Gru. Why, Jack boy! ho boy !⁷ and as much news as thou wilt.

Curt. Come, you are so full of catchycancing:—

Gru. Why, therefore, fire; for I have caught extreme cold. Where's the cook? is supper ready, the house trimmed, rushes strewed, cobwebs swept; the serving-men in their new fustian, their white stockings, and every officer his wedding garment on? Be the jacks fair within, the jills⁸ fair without, the carpets laid,⁹ and every thing in order?

Curt. All ready; and therefore I pray thee, news.

Gru. First, know, my horse is tired; my master and mistress fallen out.

Curt. How?

Gru. Out of their saddles into the dirt; and thereby hangs a tale.

Curt. Let's ha't good Grumio.

Curt. Lend thine ear.

Curt. Here.

Curt. There.

[Striking him.]

Curt. This is to feel a tale, not to hear a tale.

Gru. And therefore'tis called a sensible tale: and this cuff was but to knock at your ear, and beesech listening. Now I begin: Imprimis, we came down a foul hill, my petruler riding behind my mistress.

Curt. Both on one horse?

Curt. What's that to thee?

Curt. Why, a horse.

Gru. Tell the tale:—But hadst thou not crossed me, thou shouldst have heard how her horse fell, and she under her horse; thou shouldst have heard, in how miry a place: how she was bemoiled;¹⁰ how he left her with the horse upon her; how he beat me because her horse stumbled; how she waded through the dirt to pluck him off me; how he swore; how she prayed—that never prayed before; how I cried; how the horses ran away, how her bridle was burst;¹¹ how I lost my crupper;—with many things of worthy memory; which now shall die in oblivion, and thou return unexperienced to thy grave.

Curt. By this reckoning, he is more shrew than she.¹²

Gru. Ay; and that thou and the proudest of you all shall find, when he comes home. But what talk I of this?—call forth Nathaniel, Joseph, Nicholas, Philip, Walter, Sugarsop, and the rest; let their heads be sleekly combed, their blue coats¹³ brushed, and their garters of an indifferent¹⁴ knit: let them curtsey with their left legs; and not presume to touch a hair of my master's horse-tail, till they kiss their hands. Are they all ready?

Curt. They are.

Curt. Call them forth.

Curt. Do you hear, ho! you must meet my master, to countenance my mistress.

Gru. Why, she hath a face of her own.

9 The carpets were laid over the tables. The floors, as appears from the present passage and others, were strewed with rushes.

10 t. e. bedraggled, bemired.

11 Broken.

12 The term shrew was anciently applied to either sex, as appears from Chaucer's Testam. of Love, fol. 300, Ed. Spэгт. 1598.

13 Blue coats were the usual habits of servants. Hence a blue-bottle was sometimes used as a term of reproach for a servant.

14 Of an indifferently knit is tolerably knit, pretty good in quality. Hamlet says, 'I am myself indifferently houest,' i. e. tolerably honest. The reader, who will be at the pains to refer to the Variorum Shakespeare, may be amused with, the discordant blunders of the most eminent commentators about this simple expression.

300

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

ACT IV.

Curt. Who knows not that?

Gru. Thou, it seems; that callest for company
to countenance her.

Curt. I call them forth to credit her.

Gru. Why, she comes to borrow nothing of them.

Enter several Servants.

Nath. Welcome home, Grumio.

Phil. How now, Grumio?

Jos. What, Grumio!

Nich. Fellow Grumio!

Nath. How now, old lad?

Gru. Welcome, you;—how now, you; what, you;
—fellow, you;—and thus much for greeting. Now,
my spruce companions, is all ready, and all things
neat?

Nath. All things is ready:¹ How near is our
master?

Gru. E'en at hand, alighted by this; and there-
fore be not—Cock's passion, silence!—I hear
my master.

Enter PETRUCHIO and KATHARINA.

Pet. Where be these knaves? What, no man at
door,

To hold my stirrup, nor to take my horse!

Where is Nathaniel, Gregory, Philip?—

All Serv. Here, here, sir; here, sir.

Pet. Here, sir! here, sir! here, sir! here, sir! —

You logger-headed and unpolish'd grooms!

What, no attendance? no regard? no duty?

Where is the foolish knave I sent before?

Gru. Here, sir; as foolish as I was before.

Pet. You peasant swain! you whoreson, malt-
horse drudge!

Did I not bid thee meet me in the park,

And bring along these rascal knaves thee?

Gru. Nathaniel's coat, sir, was not fully made,
And Gabriel's pumps were all unpink'd i'the heel;
There was no link³ to colour Peter's hat,
And Walter's dagger was not come from sheathing:
There were none fine, but Adam, Ralph, and Gre-
gory;

The rest were ragged, old, and beggarly;

Yet, as they are, here are they come to meet you.

Pet. Go, rascals, go, and fetch my supper in.—

[Exeunt some of the Servants.

Where is the life that late I led?—³ [Sings]
Where are those—Sit down, Kate, and welcome.
Soud, soud, soud, soud!¹⁴

Re-enter Servants, with supper.

Why, when, I say?—Nay, good, sweet Kate, be
merry.

Off with my boots, you rogues, you villains; When?

It was the friar of orders grey,⁵ [Sings.

As he forthewalked on his way:—

Out, out, you rogue! you pluck my foot awry:

Take that, and mend the plucking off the other.—

[Strikes him.

Be merry, Kate:—Some water, here; what, ho!
Where's my spaniel Troilus?—Sirrah, get you hence,
And bid my cousin Ferdinand come hither:—

One, Kate, that you must kiss, and be acquainted
with.—

Where are my slippers?—Shall I have some water?

[A bason is presented to him.

1 The false concord here was no doubt intentional, it
suits well with the character.

2 Green, in his Mihil Mumchance, says, 'This cozen-
age is used likewise in selling old hats found upon
dunghills, instead of newe, blackt over with the smoake
of an olde link?'

3 This ballad was well suited to Petruchio, as appears
by the answer in A Handful of Pleasant Delites, 1584;
which is called 'Dame Beautie's reple to the lover late
at libertie, and now complaineth him to be her captive,'
entituled 'Where is the life that late I led?'

4 A word coined by Shakspeare to express the noise
made by a person heated and fatigued.

5 Dr. Percy has constructed his beautiful ballad,
'The Friar of Orders Gray,' from the various fragments
and hints dispersed through Shakespeare's plays, with a
few supplemental stanzas.

Come, Kate, and wash,⁶ and welcome heartily.—
You whoreson villain! will you let it fall?

[Servant lets the ever fall.

Kath. Patience, I pray you; 'twas a fault unwilling.
Pet. A whoreson, beetleheaded, flap-ear'd knave!
Come, Kate, sit down; I know you have a stomach.
Will you give thanks, sweet Kate; or else shall I?—

What is this? Mutton?

1 Serv. Ay.

Pet. Who brought it?

1 Serv. I.

Pet. 'Tis burnt; and so is all the meat:

What dogs are these!—Where is the rascal cook?

How durst you, villains, bring it from the dresser,
And serve it thus to me that love it not?

There, take it to you, trenchers, cups, and all:

[Throws the meat, &c. about the stage.
You heedless joltheads, and unmanner'd slaves!

What, do you grumble? I'll be with you straight.

Kath. I pray you, husband, be not so disquiet;

The meat was well, if you were so contented.

Pet. I tell thee, Kate, 'twas burnt and dried away;

And I expressly am forbidden to touch it,

For it engenders choler, planteth anger;

And better 'twere that both of us did fast,

Since, of ourselves, ourselves are choleric,

Than feed it with such over-roasted flesh.

Be patient; to-morrow it shall be mended,

And, for this night, we'll fast for company—

Come, I will bring thee to thy bridal chamber.

[Exeunt PETRUCHIO and CURT.
Nath. [Advancing.] Peter, didst ever see the like?

Peter. He kills her in her own humour.

Re-enter CURTIS.

Gru. Where is he?

Curt. In her chamber,

Making sermon of continency to her:

And rails, and swears, and rates; that she, poor soul,
Knows not which way to stand, to look, to speak;

And sits as one new-risen from a dream.

Away, away! for he is coming hither. [Exeunt]

Re-enter PETRUCHIO.

Pet. Thus have I politely begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully;

My falcon now is sharp, and passing empty;

And, till she stop, she must not be full-gorged,

For then she never looks upon her lure.⁶

Another way I have to man my haggard,⁹

To make her come, and know her keeper's call,
That is,—to watch her, as we watch these kites
That bate,¹⁰ and beat, and will not be obedient.

She eat no meat to-day, nor none shall eat;

Last night she slept not, nor to-night she shall not;

As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I'll find about the making of the bed;

And here I'll fling the pillow, there the bolster,

This way the coverlet, another way the sheets:—

Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend¹¹.

And, in conclusion, she shall watch all night:

And, if she chance to nod, I'll rail and brawl,

And with the clamour keep her still awake.

This is a way to kill a wife with kindness;

And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.

He that knows better how to tame a shrew,

Now let him speak; 'tis charity to shew. [Exit.]

6 It was the custom in ancient times to wash the
hands immediately before dinner and supper, and after-
wards. As our ancestors eat with their fingers, we can-
not wonder at such repeated ablations.

7 Shakspeare delights in allusions to Falconry; the
following allegory comprises most of its terms. A hawk
full fed was untractable, and refused the lure.

8 The lure was a thing stuffed to look like the game
the hawk was to pursue; its use was to tempt him back
after he had flown.

9 A haggard by a wild hawk, to man her is to tame
her. To watch or wake a hawk was one part of the
process of taming.

10 To bate is to flutter the wings as preparing for
flight; batter 'ale, Italian.

11 Intend is used for pretend.

## SCENE II.

## TAMING OF THE SHREW.

301

### SCENE II. Padua. Before Baptista's House.
Enter TRANIO and HORTENSIО.

Tra. Is't possible, friend Licio, that Bianca
Doth fancy any other but Lucentio?
I tell you, sir, she bears me fair in hand.

Hor. Sir, to satisfy you in what I have said,
Stand by, and mark the manner of his teaching.

[They stand aside.

#### Enter BIANCA and LUCENTIO.

Luc. Now, mistress, profit you in what you read?

Tra. What, master, read you ? first resolve me
that.

Luc. I read that I profess, the art of love.

Tra. And may you prove, sir, master of your art!

Luc. While you, sweet dear, prove mistress of
my heart.

[They retire.

Hor. Quick proceeders, marry ! Now, tell me, I
pray,

You that durst swear that your mistress Bianca
Lov'd none in the world so well as Lucentio.

Tra. O despiteful love! unconstant woman-
kind!

I tell thee, Licio, this is wonderful.

Hor. Mistake no more: I am not Licio,
Nor a musician; but I seem to be.

But one that scorn to live in this disguise,
For such a one as leaves a gentleman,
And makes a god of such a cullion :

Know, sir, that I call'd—Hortensio.

Tra. Signior Hortensio, I have often heard
Of your entire affection to Bianca ;

And since mine eyes are witness of her lightness,
I will with you,—if you be so contented,—
Forswear Bianca and her love for ever.

Hor. See, how they kiss and court!—Signior
Lucentio.

Here is my hand, and here I firmly vow—
Never to woo her more; but do forswear her,
As one unworthy all the former favours
That I have fondly flatter'd her within.

Tra. And here I take the like unfeigned oath,—
Ne'er to marry with her though she would entreat:
Fye on her! see, how beastly she doth court him.

Hor. 'Would, all the world, but he, had quite
forsworn!

For me,—that I may surely keep mine oath,
I will be married to a wealthy widow,

Ere three days pass; which hath as long loved me,
As I have lov'd this proud disdainful haggard:
And so forewell, signior Lucentio!

Kindness in women, not their beauteous looks,
Shall win my love;—and so I take my leave,

In resolution as I swore before.

[Exit HORTENSIО.—LUCENTIO and BIANCA advance.

Tra. Mistress Bianca, bless you with such grace
As 'longeth to a lover's blessed case!

Nay, I have ta'en you napping, gentle love;

And have forsworn you, with Hortensio.

Tra. Tranio, you jest; But have you both forsworn me?

Tra. Mistress, we have.

Luc. Then we are rid of Licio.

Tra. 'Faith he'll have a lusty widow now,
That shall be woo'd and wedded in a day

Tra. God give him joy!

Tra. Ay, and he'll tame her.

Tra. He says so, Tranio.

Tra. 'Faith he is gone unto the taming-school.
Bian. The taming-school! what, is there such a
place?

Tra. Ay, mistress, and Petrucho is the master :

¹ Coglione, a cugion, a gull, a meacock,¹ says Florio. It is equivalent to a great booby.

² So in King Henry VI. Part 3.

³ Peace, wilful boy, or I will charmer your tongue.⁴ In Psalm viii. we read of the charmer who charms wisely, in order to quell the fury of the adder.

⁴ For angel, Theobald, and after him Hanmer and Warburton, read engluer; which Hanmer calls a gull, deriving it from engluer, French, to catch with birdlime; but without sufficient reason. Mr. Gifford, in a

That teacheth tricks eleven and twenty long,—
To tame a shrew, and charm² her chattering tongue.

#### Enter BIONDELLO, running.

Bion. O master, master, I have watch'd so long
That I'm dog-weary; but at last I spied
An ancient angel³ coming down the hill
Will serve the turn.

Tra. What is he, Biondello?
Bion. Master, a mercatante, or a pedant,⁴
I know not what; but formal in apparel,
In gait and countenance surely like a father.

Luc. And what of him, Tranio?
Tra. If he be credulous, and trust my tale,
I'll make him glad to seem Vincentio;

And give assurance to Baptista Minola,
As if he were the right Vincentio.

Take in your love, and then let me alone.

[Exeunt LUCENTIO and BIANCA.
Enter a Pedant.

Ped. God save you, sir!

Tra. And you, sir! you are welcome

Travel you far on, or are you at the furthest?

Tra. Sir, at the furthest for a week or two:

But then up further; and as far as Rome ;

And so to Tripoly, if God lend me life.

Tra. What countryman, I pray ?

Ped. Of Mantua?

Tra. Of Mantua, sir ?—marry, God forbid!

And come to Padua, careless of your life?

Tra. My life, sir! how, I pray? for that goes
hard.

Tra. 'Tis death for any one in Mantua

To come to Padua: Know you not the cause?

Your ships are staid at Venice; and the duke

(For private quarrel 'twixt your duke and him)

Hath publish'd and proclaim'd it openly:

'Tis marvel; but that you're but newly come,
You might have heard it else proclaim'd about.

Tra. Alas, sir, it is worse for me than so ;

For I have bills for money by exchange

From Florence, and must here deliver them.

Tra. Well, sir, to do you courtesy,

This will I do, and this will I advise you;—

First, tell me, have you ever been at Pisa

Tra. Ay, sir, in Pisa have I often been;

Pisa, renowned for grave citizens.

Tra. Among them, know you one Vincentio?

Tra. I know him not, but I have heard of him
A merchant of incomparable wealth.

Tra. He is my master, sir; and sooth to say,
In countenance somewhat doth resemble you.

Bion. As much as an apple doth an oyster, and
all one.

[Aside.

Tra. To save your life in this extremity,

This favour will I do you for his sake;

And think it not the worst of all your fortunes,

That you are like to Sir Vincentio.

His name and credit shall you undertake,

And in my house you shall be friendly lodged.—

Look, that you take upon you as you should:

You understand me, sir;—so shall you stay

Till you have done your business in the city:

If this be courtesy, sir, accept of it.

Tra. O, sir, I do; and will repute you ever
the patron of my life and liberty.

Tra. Then go with me, to make the matter good.

This, by the way, I let you understand;—

My father is here look'd for every day,

To pass assurance³ of a dower in marriage

'Twixt me and one Baptista's daughter here:

In all these circumstances I'll instruct you:

Go with me, sir, to clothe you as becomes you.

[Exeunt.

note on Jonson's Poetaster, is decidedly in favour of enghle with Hammer's explanation, and supports it by referring to Gascoigne's Supposes, from which Shakespeare took this part of his plot.

5 i. e. a merchant or a schoolmaster.

⁵ i. e. to agree upon a settlement of dower; Dotem firmare. Deeds by law-writers called the common assurances of the realm, because thereby each man's property is assured to him. So in a subsequent scene:—
they are busied about a counterfeit assurance.

["302", "TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "ACT IV", "### SCENE III. A Room in Petrucho's House.", "*Enter KATHARINA and GRUMIO.*", "*Gru.* No, no; forsooth; I dare not, for my life.", "*Kath.* The more my wrong, the more his spite appears:", "*What, did he marry me to famish me?*", "*Beggars that come unto my father's door,*", "*Upon entreaty, have a present alms;*", "*If not, elsewhere they meet with charity:*", "*But I,—who never knew how to entreat,—*", "*Am starv'd for meat, giddy for lack of sleep:*", "*With oaths kept waking, and with brawling fed:*", "*And that which spites me more than all these wants,*", "*He does it under name of perfect love;*", "*As who should say,—if I should sleep, or eat,*", "*’Twere deadly sickness, or else present death.—*", "*I pry'thee go, and get me some repast;*", "*I care not what, so it be wholesome food.*", "*Gru.* What say you to a neat's foot?", "*Kath.* ’Tis passing good; I pry'thee let me have it.", "*Gru.* I fear it is too choleric a meat:—", "*How say you to a fat tripe, finely broil'd?*", "*Kath.* I like it well; good Grumio, fetch it me.", "*Gru.* I cannot tell; I fear, ’tis choleric.", "*What say you to a piece of beef, and mustard?*", "*Kath.* A dish that I do love to feed upon.", "*Gru.* Ay, but the mustard is too hot a little.¹", "*Kath.* Why, then the beef, and let the mustard rest;", "*Gru.* Nay, then I will not; you shall have the mustard,", "Or else you get no beef of Grumio.", "*Kath.* Then both, or one, or any thing thou canst.", "*Gru.* Why, then the mustard without the beef.", "*Kath.* Go, get thee gone, thou false deluding slave,", "[Beats him.]", "That feed'st me with the very name of meat:", "Sorrow on thee, and all the pack of you,", "That triumph thus upon my misery!", "Go, get thee gone, I say.", "*Enter PETRUCHIO with a dish of meat; and HORTENSIO.*", "*Pet.* How fares my Kate? What, sweeting, all amort?²*", "*Hor.* Mistress, what cheer?", "*Kath.* 'Faith, as cold as can be.*", "*Pet.* Pluck up thy spirits, look cheerfully upon me.", "Here, love; thou see'st how diligent I am,", "To dress thy meat myself, and bring it thee:", "[Sets the dish on a table.]", "I am sure, sweet Kate, this kindness merits thanks.", "What, not a word? Nay then, thou lov'st it not;", "And all my pains is sorted to no 'proof:³—", "Here, take away this dish.", "*Kath.* Pray you, let it stand.", "*Pet.* The poorest service is repaid with thanks;", "And so shall mine, before you touch the meat.", "*Kath.* I thank you, sir.", "*Hor.* Signior Petruchio, fye! you are to blame !", "Come, mistress Kate, I'll bear you company.", "*Pet.* Eat it up all, Hortensio, if thou lov'st me.—", "[Aside.]", "Much good do it unto thy gentle heart!", "Kate, eat apace :—And now, my honey love,", "Will we return unto thy father's house ;", "¹ This is agreeable to the doctrine of the times. In The Glasse of Humours, no date, p. 60, it is said, 'But note here, that the first diet is not only in avoiding sueschewing such as are obnoxious, and least agreeable with our happy temperate state; as for a choleric man to abstain from all salt, scorched, dry meats, from mus'tard, and such like things as will aggravate his malig'nant humours.' Petruchio before objects to the overroasted mutton.", "² That is, *all sunk* and *dispirited*. This gallicism is frequent in many of the old plays.", "³ And all *my* labour has ended in nothing, or *proved nothing*, says Johnson. This can hardly be right. Mr. Douce's suggestion, that it means 'all my labour is adapted to no *approef*,' is much better; indeed there", "can be no doubt that we should read 'proof with a mark of elision for *approef*; but *sort* is used in the sense of *sorter*, French, to issue, to terminate.'—'It *sorted not*.'", "With silken coats, and caps, and golden rings,", "With ruffs, and cuffs, and farthingales, and things;\nWith scarfs, and fans, and double change of bra-", "very,⁴", "With amber bracelets, beads, and all this knavery,\nWhat, hast thou din'd? The tailor stays thy leisure,\nTo deck thy body with his ruffling⁵ treasure.", "*Enter Tailor.*", "Come, tailor, let us see these ornaments;", "*Enter Haberdasher.*", "*Lay forth the gown.—What news with you, sir?*", "*Hab.* Here is the cap your worship did bespeak.", "*Pet.* Why, this was moulded on a porringer!", "A velvet dish;—fye, fye! 'tis lewd and filthy:", "Why, 'tis a cockle, or a walnutshell,", "A knack, a toy, a trick, a baby's cap;", "Away with it; come, let me have a bigger.", "*Kath.* I'll have no bigger; this doth fit the time,", "And gentlewoman wear such caps as these.", "*Pet.* When you are gentle, you shall have one too,", "And not till then.", "*Hor.* That will not be in haste. [Aside.]", "*Kath.* Why, sir, I trust, I may have leave to speak;", "And speak I will; I am no child, no babe:", "Your betters have endur'd me say my heart;", "And, if you cannot, best you stop your ears.", "My tongue will tell the anger of my heart;", "Or else my heart, concealing it, will break:", "And, rather than it shall, I will be free.", "Even to the uttermost, as I please, in words.", "*Pet.* Why, thou say'st true; it is a paltry cap,", "A custard-coffin,⁶ a bauble, a silken pie:", "I love thee well, in that thou lik'st it not.", "*Kath.* Love me, or love me not, I like the cap;", "And it I will have, or I will have none.", "*Pet.* Thy gown? why, ay:—Come, tailor, let us see'.", "O mercy, God! what masking stuff is here?", "*What's this? a sleeve! 'tis like a demi-cannon:*", "*What! up and down, carv'd like an apple-tart?*", "Here's snip, and nip, and cut, and slish, and slash,\nLike to a censer⁷ in a barber's shop:—", "Why, what, o'devil's name, tailor, call'st thou this?", "*Hor.* I see, she's like to have neither cap nor gown.", "[Aside.]", "*Tai.* You bid me make it orderly and well,", "According to the fashion, and the time.", "*Pet.* Marry, and did; but if you be remember'd, I did not bid you mar it to the time.", "Go, hop me over every kennel home,", "For you shall hop without my custom, sir;", "I'll none of it; hence, make your best of it.", "*Kath.* I never saw a better-fashion'd gown,", "More quaint,⁸ more pleasing, no more commendable;", "Belike, you mean to make a puppet of me.", "*Pet.* Why, true; he means to make a puppet of thee.", "*Tai.* She says, your worship means to make a puppet of her.", "*Pet.* O monstrous arrogance! Thou liest, thou thread,", "Thou thimble,", "can be no doubt that we should read 'proof with a mark of elision for *approef*; but *sort* is used in the sense of *sorter*, French, to issue, to terminate.'—'It *sorted not*.'\n\n⁴ Finery.\n\n⁵ To ruffle, in Shakespeare's time, sign

["SCENE IV", "TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "303", "Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail,\nThou flea, thou nit, thou winter cricket thou;\nBrav'd in mine own house with a skein of thread!\nA way, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant;\nOr I shall so be-mettè thee with thy yard,\nAs thou shall think on prating whilst thou liv'st!\nI tell thee, I, that thou hast marr'd her gown.", "Tai. Your worship is deceiv'd; the gown is made", "Just as my master had direction :", "Grumio gave order how it should be done.", "Gru. I gave him no order, I gave him the stuff.", "Tai. But how did you desire it should be made?", "Gru. Marry, sir, with needle and thread.", "Tai. But did you not request to have it cut ?", "Gru. Thou hast faced many things.²", "Tai. I have.", "Gru. Face not me; thou hast brav'd³ many men, brave not me; I will neither be fac'd nor brav'd. I say unto thee,—I bid thy master cut out the gown; but I did not bid him cut it to pieces:⁴ ergo, thou liest.", "Tai. Why, here is the note of the fashion to testify.", "Pet. Read it.", "Gru. The note lies in his throat, if he say I said so.", "Tai. Imprimis, a loose-bodied gown :", "Gru. Master, if ever I said loose-bodied gown,⁵ sew me in the skirts of it, and beat me to death with a bottom of brown thread: I said, a gown.", "Pet. Proceed.", "Tai. With a small compassed cape;⁶", "Gru. I confess the cape.", "Tai. With a trunk sleeve ;—", "Gru. I confess two sleeves.", "Tai. The sleeves curiously cut.", "Pet. Ay, there's the villany.", "Gru. Error i'the bill, sir; error i'the bill. I commanded the sleeves should be cut out, and sewed up again; and that I'll prove upon thee, though thy little finger be armed in a thimble.", "Tai. This is true, that I say; an I had thee in place where, thou should'st know it.", "Gru. I am for thee straight: take thou the bill,⁷ give me thy mete-yard, and spare not me.", "Hor. God-à-mercy, Grumio! then he shall have no odds.", "Pet. Well, sir, in what case is the gown not for-me.", "Gru. You are i'the right, sir; 'tis for my mistress.", "Pet. Go, take it up unto thy master's use.", "Gru. Villain, not for thy life: Take up my mistress' gown for thy master's use!", "Pet. Why, sir, what's your conceit in that?", "Gru. O, sir, my conceit is deeper than you think for.", "Take up my mistress' gown to his master's use !", "O, fye, fye, fye !", "Pet. Hortensio, say thou wilt see the tailor paid:—", "[Aside.]", "Go take it hence; be gone, and say no more.", "Hor. Tailor, I'll pay thee for thy gown to-morrow.", "Take no unkindness of his hasty words:", "Away, I say; commend me to thy master.", "[Exit Tailor.]", "Pet. Well, come, my Kate; we will unto your father's,", "Even in these honest mean habiliments ;", "Our purches shall be proud, our garments poor;", "For, 'tis the mind that makes the body rich;", "And as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds,\nSo honour peereth in the meanest habit.", "What, is the jay more precious than the lark,\nBecause his feathers are more beautiful ?", "Or is the adder better than the eel,", "Because his painted skin contents the eye?", "O, no, good Kate; neither art thou the worse", "For this poor furniture, and mean array.", "If thou account'st it shame, lay it on me:", "And therefore, frolic; we will hence forthwith,", "To feast and sport us at thy father's house.—", "Go, call my men, and let us straight to him ;", "And bring our horses unto Long-lane end,", "There will we mount, and thither walk on foot.", "Let's see; I think, 'tis now some seyen o'clock,", "And well we may come there by dinner time.", "Kath. I dare assure you, sir, 'tis almost two ;", "And 'twill be supper time, ere you come there.", "Pet. It shall be seven, ere I go to horse ;", "Look, what I speak, or do, or think to do,", "You are still crossing it.—Sirs, let't alone:", "I will not go to-day; and ere I do,", "It shall be what o'clock I say it is.", "Hor. Why, so! this gallant will command the sun.", "[Exeunt.]⁸", "### SCENE IV. Padua. Before Baptista's House. Enter TRANIO, and the Pedant dressed like VINCENTIO.", "Tra. Sir, this is the house; Please it you, that I call?", "Ped. Ay, what else? and, but⁹ I be deceived,", "Signior Baptista may remember me.", "Near twenty years' ago, in Genoa, where", "We were lodgers at the Pegasus.¹⁰", "Tra.", "'Tis well :", "And hold your bill, in any case, with such\nAusterity as 'londeth to a father.", "### Enter BIONDELLO.", "Ped. I warrant you: But, sir, here comes your boy;", "'Twere good, he were school'd.", "Tra. Fear you not him. Sirrah, Biondello,", "Now do your duty throughly, I advise you;", "Imagine 'twere the right Vincentio.", "Biom. Tut! fear not me.", "Tra. But hast thou done thy errand to Baptista ?", "Biom. I told him, that your father was at Venice ?", "And that you look'd for him this day in Padua.", "Tra. Thou'rt a tall¹¹ fellow; hold thee that to drink.", "Here comes Baptista:—set your countenance, sir.—", "### Enter BAPTISTA and LUCENTIO.", "Signior Baptista, you are happily met.—", "Sir, [to the Pedant.]", "This is the gentleman I told you of;", "I pray you, stand good father to me now,", "Give me Bianca for my patrimony.", "Ped. Soft, son!—", "Sir, by your leave: having come to Padua", "To gather in some debts, my son Lucentio", "Made me acquainted with a weighty cause", "Of love between your daughter and himself:", "And,—for the good report I hear of you;", "And for the love he beareth to your daughter,", "And she to him,—to stay him not too long", "play is supposed to be exhibited, were introduced, from the old play, by Mr. Pope in his edition.", "«Lord. Who's within there! [Enter Servants.]", "Asleep again! Go take him easily up, and put him in his own apparel again. But see you wake him not in any case.", "Serv. It shall be done, my lord; come, help to bear him hence. [They bear off Sly.]", "Johnson thought the fifth act should begin here.", "9 See the note on Act iii. Sc. 1.", "10 Shakspeare has here taken a sign out of London, and hung it up in Padua. The Pegasus is the arms of the Middle Temple, and is a very popular sign.", "11 i. e. a high fellow, a brave boy, as we now say, Vide note on Merry Wives of Windsor, Act i. Sc. 4,", "1 Be-measure.", "2 Turned up many garments with facings.", "3 Grumio quibbles upon to brave, to make fine, as he does upon facing.", "4 Mr. Douce remarks that this scene appears to have been originally borrowed from a story of Sir Philip Caulthrop and John Drakes, a silly shoemaker of Norwich, related in the Camden's Remains and Leigh's Accedence of Armorie.", "5 This being a very customary dress with women of abandoned character, was probably not much in repute.", "6 A round cape.", {"bbox": [

304

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

ACT IV.

I am content, in a good father's care,
To have him match'd; and,—if you please to like
No worse than I, sir,—upon some agreement,
Me shall you find most ready and most willing
With one consent to have her so bestow'd;
For curious¹ I cannot be with you,
Signior Baptista, of whom I hear so well.

Bap. Sir, pardon me in what I have to say :-
Your plainness, and your shortness, please me well.
Right true it is, your son Lucentio here
Doth love my daughter, and she loveth him,
Or both dissemble deeply their affections :
And, therefore, if you say no more than this,
That like a father you will deal with him,
And pass² my daughter a sufficient dower,
The match is made, and all is done :
Your son shall have my daughter with consent.

Tra. I thank you, sir. Where then do you know best,

We be affixed;³ and such assurance ta'en,
As shall with either part's agreement stand?

Bap. Not in my house, Lucentio; for you know,
Pitchers have ears, and I have many servants :
Besides, Old Gremio is hearkening still ;
And, happily,⁴ we might be interrupted.

Tra. Then at my lodging, as it like you, sir;
There doth my father lie ; and there, this night
We'll pass the business privately and well :
Send for your daughter by your servant here,
My boy shall fetch the scrivener presently.
The worst is this,—that, at so slender warning,
You're like to have a thin and slender pittance.

Bap. It likes me well :-Cambio, hie you home,
And bid Bianca make your ready straight:

And, if you will, tell what hath happened :-

Lucentio's father is arrived in Padua,

And how she's like to be Lucentio's wife.

Luc. I pray the gods she may, with all my heart!
Tra. Dally not with the gods, but get thee gone.

Signior Baptista, shall I lead the way?

Welcome! one mess is like to be your cheer:

Come, sir: we'll better it in Pisa.

Bap.

I follow you. [Exeunt TRANIO, Pedant, and BAPTISTA.

Bion. Cambio.—

Luc.

What say'st thou, Biondello?

Bion. You saw my master wink and laugh upon
you?

Luc. Biondello, what of that?

Bion. 'Faith, nothing: but he has left me here
behind, to expound the meaning or moral⁵ of his
signs and tokens.

Luc. I pray thee, moralize them.

Bion. Then thus. Bäßtista is safe, talking with
the deceiving father of a deceitful son.

Luc. And what of him?

Bion. His daughter is to be brought by you to
the supper.

Luc. And then ?—

Bion. The old priest at St. Luke's church is at
your command at all hours.

Luc. And what of all this?

Bion. I cannot tell; except⁶ they are busied
about a counterfeit assurance: Take you assurance
of her, cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum⁷ to
the church;—take the priest, clerk, and some suffi-
cient honest witnesses :

1 i. e. scrupulous. 2 Assure, or convey; a law term.

3 Betrothed.

4 Happily, in Shakspeare's time, signified *peradventure*, as well as fortunately; we now write it *happily*.

5 i. e. the secret purpose.

6 The first folio reads *expect*.

7 These were the words of the old exclusive privilege for *imprinting* a book. A quibble is meant.

8 Here in the old play, the Tinker speaks again :-

'Slie. Sim, must they be married now?'

Lord. I, my lord.

Enter Ferando and Sander.

Slie. Look, Sim, the fool is come again now?

9 We should probably read, 'and so it shall be still' for Katharine.

10 In the first sketch of this play are two passages

If this be not that you look for, I have no more to say,
But, bid Bianca farewell for ever and a day.

Luc. Hear'st thou, Biondello?

[Going.]

Bion. I cannot tarry: I knew a wench married in
an afternoon as she went to the garden for parsley
to stuff a rabbit; and so may you, sir; and so adieu,
sir. My master hath appointed me to go to Saint
Luke's, to bid the priest be ready to come against
you come with your appendix.

[Exit.]

Luc. I may, and will, if she be so contented:
She will be pleas'd, then wherefore should I doubt?
Hap what hap may, I'll roundly go about her:
It shall go hard, if Cambio go without her.

[Exit, ²]

SCENE V. A public road. Enter PETRUCHIO, KATHARINA, and HORTENSIO.

Pet. Come on, o' God's name: once more to-
ward our father's.

Good Lord, how bright and goodly shines the moon!

Kath. The moon! the sun; it is not moonlight now.

Pet. I say, it is the moon that shines so bright.

Kath. I know, it is the sun that shines so bright.

Pet. Now, by my mother's son, and that's myself,
It shall be moon or stars, or what I list,

Or ere I journey to your father's house :-

Go on, and fetch our horses back again.—

Evermore cross'd, and cross'd; nothing but cross'd.

Hor. Say as he says, or we shall never go.

Kath. Forward, I pray, since we have come so far,
And be it moon, or sun, or what you please :

And if you please to call it a rush your candle,

Henceforth I vow it shall be so for me.

Pet. I say it is the moon.

Kath.

I know, it is the moon.

Pet. Nay, then you lie; it is the blessed sun.

Kath. Then, God be bless'd, it is the blessed
sun!

But sun it is not, when you say it is not;

And the moon changes, even as your mind.

What you will have it nam'd, even that it is;

And so it shall be so,⁸ for Katharine.¹

Hor. Petruchjo, go thy ways; the field is won.

Pet. Well, forward, forward: thus the bow
should run,

And not unluckily against the bias.—

But soft; what company is coming here?

Enter VINCENTIO, in a travelling dress.

Good-morrow, gentle mistress: Where away ?—

[To VINCENTIO.

Tell me, sweet Kate, and tell me truly too,¹⁰

Hast thou beheld a fresher gentlewoman?

Such war of white and red within her cheeks?

What stars do spangle heaven with such beauty,

As those two eyes become that heavenly face?

Fair lovely maid, once more good day to thee?

Sweet Kate, embrace her for her beauty's sake.

Hor. 'A will make the man mad, to make a wo-
man of him.

Kath. Young budding virgin, fair, and fresh, and
sweet,

Whither away: or where is thy abode?

Happy the parents of so fair a child ;

Happier the man, whom favourable stars

Allot thee for his lovely bed-fellow !¹¹

worth preserving, and which Pope thought to be from
the hand of Shakspeare.

'Faire lovely maiden, young and affable,

More clear of hue, and far more beautiful

Than precious sardonyx or purple rocks

Of amethysts, or glistering hyacinth—

'Sweete Kate, entertaine this lovely woman—

Kath. Fair lovely lady, bright and chrysaline

Beauteous and stately as the eye-train'd bird;

As glorious as the morning wash'd with dew,
Within whose eyes she takes her dawning beams,

And golden summer sleeps upon thy cheeks.

Wrap up thy radiations in some cloud,

Lest that thy beauty make this stately town

Inhabitable, like the burning zone,

With sweet reflections of thy lovely face.

11 This is from the fourth book of Ovid's *Metamorphoses*, by Golding, 1686, p. 36. Ovid borrowed his ideas from the sixth book of the Odyssey, 154, &c.

## SCENE V.

## TAMING OF THE SHREW.

305

Pet. Why, how now, Kate! I hope thou art not mad?

This is a man, old, wrinkled, faded, wither'd; And not a maiden, as thou say'st he is.

Kath Pardon, old father, my mistaking eyes,
That have been so bedazzled with the sun,
That every thing I look on seemeth green:¹
Now I perceive thou art a reverend father;
Pardon, I pray thee, for my mad mistaking.

Pet. Do, good old grandsire; and, withal, make known

Which way thou travellest; if along with us,
We shall be joyful of thy company.

Vin. Fair sir,—and you, my merry mistress,—
That with thy strange encounter much amaz'd me;
My name is call'd—Vincentio; my dwelling—Pisa;
And hound I am to Padua; there to visit

A son of mine, which long I have not seen.

Pet. What is his name?

Vin.

Lucentio, gentle sir.

Pet. Happily met; the happier for thy son.

And now by law as well as reverend age,
I may entitle thee—my loving father;

The sister to my wife, this gentlewoman,
The son of this hath married: Wonder not,
Nor be not griev'd; she is of good esteem,
Her dowry worthy, and of worthy birth;
Beside, so qualified as may beseem
The spouse of any noble gentleman.

Vin. But is this true? or is it else your pleasure,
Like pleasant travellers to break a jest
Upon the company you overtake?

Hor. I do assure thee, father, so it is.

Pet. Come, go along, and see the truth hereof;
For our first merriment hath made thee jealous.

[Exeunt PET. KATH. and VIN.

Hor. Well, Petruchio, this hath put me in heart.
Have to my dowry; and if she be froward,
Then hast thou taught Hortensio to be untoward.

[Exit.]

## ACT V.

### SCENE I. Padua. Before Lucentio's House,
Enter on one side BIONDELLO, LUCENTIO, and
BIANCA; GREMIO walking on the other side.

Bion. Softly and swiftly, sir; for the priest is ready.

Luc. I fly, Biondello: but they may chance to need thee at home, therefore leave us.

Bion. Nay, faith, I'll see the church o'your back; and then come here to make master² as soon as I can.

[Exeunt LUC. BIAN. and BION.

Gre. I marvel Cambio comes not all this while.

Enter PETRUCHIO, KATHARINA, VINCENTIO,
and Attendants.

Pet. Sir, here's the door, this is Lucentio's house.
My father's bears more toward the market-place;
Thither must I, and here I leave you, sir.

Vin. You shall not choose, but drink before you go;
I think, I shall command your welcome here,
And, by all likelihood, some cheer is toward.

[Knocks.]

Gre. They're busy within, you were best knock louder.

Enter Pedant above at a window.

Ped. What's he, that knocks as he would beat down the gate?

Vin. Is Signior Lucentio within, sir?

Ped. He's within, sir, but not to be spoken withal.

Vin. What if a man bring him a hundred pound or two, to make merry withal?

1 Another proof of Shakspeare's accurate observation of natural phenomena. When one has been long in the sunshine, the surrounding objects will often appear tinged with green. The reason is assigned by writers upon optics.

2 The old editions read *mistress*. The emendation is Theobald's, who rightly observes, that by *master*, Biondello means his pretended master, Tranio.

Ped. Keep your hundred pounds to yourself; he shall need none, so long as I live.

Pet. Nay, I told you, your son was beloved in Padua.—Do you hear, sir?—to leave frivolous circumstances,—I pray you, tell Signior Lucentio, that his father is come from Pisa, and is here at the door to speak with him.

Ped. Thou liest: his father is come from Pisa,³ and here looking out at the window.

Vin. Art thou his father?

Ped. Ay, sir; so his mother says, if I may believe her.

Pet. Why, how now, gentleman! [To VINCENT.] Why, this is flat knavery, to take upon you another man's name.

Ped. Lay hands on the villain; I believe 'a means to cozen somebody in this city under my countenance.

Re-enter BIONDELLO.

Bion. I have seen them in the church together: God send 'em good shipping!—But who is here? mine old master, Vincentio? now we are undone, and brought to nothing.

Vin. Come hither, crack-hemp.

[Seeing BIONDELLO.

Bion. I hope, I may choose, sir.

Vin. Come hither, you rogue: What, have you forgot me?

Bion. I forgot you? no, sir: I could not forget you, for I never saw you before in all my life.

Vin. What, you notorious villain, didst thou never see thy master's father, Vincentio?

Bion. What, my old worshipful old master? yes,
marry, sir; see where he looks out of the window.

Vin. Is't so, indeed?

[Beats BIONDELLO.

Bion. Help, help, help! here's a madman to me.

Ped. Help son! help, Signior Baptista!

[Exit.]

Pet. Pr'ythee, Kate, let's stand aside, and see the end of this controversy.

[They retire.]

Re-enter Pedant below; BAPTISTA, TRANIO, and Servants.

Tra. Sir, what are you that offer to beat my servant?

Vin. What am I, sir? nay, what are you, sir?—O immortal gods! O fine villain! A silken doublet! a velvet hose! a scarlet cloak! and a copcat hat!⁴—O, I am undone! I am undone! while I play the good husband at home, my son and my servant spend all at the university.

Tra. How now! what's the matter?

Bap. What, is the man lunatic?

Tra. Sir, you seem a sober ancient gentleman by your habit, but your words show you a madman: Why, sir, what concerns it you, if I wear pearl and gold? I thank my good father, I am able to maintain it.

Vin. Thy father? O, villain! he is a sail-maker in Bergamo.

Bap. You mistake, sir; you mistake, sir: Pray, what do you think is his name?

Vin. His name? as if I knew not his name; I have brought him up ever since he was three years old, and his name is—Tranio.

Ped. Away, away, mad ass! his name is Lucentio; and he is mine only son, and heir to the lands of me, Signior Vincentio.

Vin. Lucentio! O, he hath murdered his master! —Lay hold on him, I charge you, in the duke's name:—O, my son, my son!—tell me, thou villain, where is my son Lucentio?

Tra. Call forth an officer:⁵ [Enter one with an

3 The old copy reads Padua.

4 A sugar-loaf hat, a coppid-tanke hat; galerus ac-cuminatus.—*Junius Nomenclator*, 1585.

5 Here, in the original play, the Tinker speaks again:

a. *Slie*. My lord, this is but the play; they're but in jest.

b. *Slie*. I tell thee, Sim, weele have no sending

to prison, that's flat; why, Sim, am I not Don Christo Vari?

Therefore, I say, they shall not goe to prison.

39

306

TAMING OF THE SHREW.

ACT V.

Officer.] Carry this mad knave to the gaol : - Father
Baptista, I charge you see that he be forth coming.

Vin. Carry me to the gaol!

Gre. Stay, officer ; he shall not go to prison.

Bap. Talk not, Signior Gremio ; I say, he shall
go to prison.

Gre. Take heed, Signior Baptista, lest you be
coney-catched¹ in this business; I dare swear, this
is the right Vincentio.

Ped. Swear, if thou darest.

Gre. Nay, I dare not swear it.

Tra. Then thou wert best say, that I am not Lu-
centio.

Gre. Yes, I know thee to be Signior Lucentio.

Bap. Away with the dotard ; to the gaol with him.

Vin. Thus strangers may be haled and abused :--
O monstrous villain !

Re-enter BIONDELLO, with LUCENTIO, and
BIANCA.

Bion. O, we are spoiled, and---Yonder he is;
deny him, forswear him, or else we are all undone.

Luc. Pardon, sweet father. [Kneeling,

Vin. Lives my sweet son?

[BIONDELLO, TRANIO, and Pedant run out.

Bion. Pardon, dear father. [Kneeling,

Bap. How hast you offended ?

Where is Lucentio ?

Luc. Here's Lucentio,

Right son unto the right Lucentio;

That have by marriage made thy daughter mine,

While counterfeit supposes blear'd thine cyne.²

Gre. Here's packing,³ with a witness, to deceive
us all !

Vin. Where is that damned villain, Tranio,
That fac'd and brav'd me in this matter so?

Bap. Why, tell me, is not this my Cambio ?

Bian. Cambio is chang'd into Lucentio.

Luc. Love wrought these miracles. Bianca's love
Made me exchange my state with Tranio,
While he did bear my countenance in the town;
And happily I have arriv'd at last

Unto the wished haven of my bliss :—

What Tranio did, myself enforc'd him to;

Then pardon him, sweet father, for my sake.

Vin. I'll slit the villain's nose, that would have
sent me to the gaol.

Bap. But do you hear, sir? [To LUCENTIO.]
Have you married my daughter without asking my
good-will?

Vin. Fear not, Baptista; we will content you,
go to: But I will in, to be revenged for this vil-
lainy.

Bap. And I, to sound the depth of this knavery. [Exit.]

Luc. Look not pale, Bianca; thy father will not
frown. [Exeunt. Luc. and BIAN.

Gre. My cake is dough:⁴ But I'll in among the
rest:

Out of hope of all,—but my share of the feast.

PETRUCHIO and KATHARINA advance.

Kath. Husband, let's follow, to see the end of
this ado,

Pet. First kiss me, Kate, and we will.

Kath. What, in the midst of the street?

Pet. What, art thou ashamed of me?

Kath. No, sir; God forbid :—but ashamed to kiss.

Lord. No more they shall not, my lord:

They be runne away.

Slie. Are they run away, Sim ? that's well;

Then gis some more drinke, and let them play againe.

Lord. Here, my lord.⁵

I, e. deceived, cheated.

2 This is probably an allusion to Gascoigne's comedy, entitled *Supposes*, from which several of the incidents are borrowed. Gascoigne's original was Ariosto's *I Suppositi*. The word *supposes* was often used as it is in the text, by Shakspeare's contemporaries; one instance, from Drayton's epistle of King John to Matilda, may suffice.⁶

⁶ And tell me those are shadows and *supposes*.⁷

3 Plottings, underhand contrivances.

Pet. Why, then let's home again :—Come, sirrah,
let's away.

Kath. Nay, I will give thee a kiss: now pray
thee, love, stay.

Pet. Is not this well?—Come, my sweet Kate;
Better once than never, for never too late. [Exeunt.

### SCENE II.
A Room in Lucentio's House. A
Banquet set out. Enter BAPTISTA, VINCENTIO,
GREMIO, the Pedant, LUCENTIO, BIANCA, Pet-
TRUCHIO, KATHARINA, HORTENSIO, and Widow.
TRANIO, BIONDELLO, GRUMIO, and others, at
tending.

Luc. At last, though long, our jarring notes agree.
And time it is, when raging war is done,⁵

To smile at 'scapes and perils overblown.—

My fair Bianca, bid my father welcome,

While I with selfsame kindness welcome thine :—

Brother Petruchio,—sister Katharina,—

And thou, Hortensio, with thy loving, widow,—

Feast with the best, and welcome to my house;

My banquet⁶ is to close our stomachs up,

After our great good cheer: Pray you, sit down;

For now we sit to chat, as well as eat.

[They sit at table.
Pet. Nothing but sit, and eat and eat!

Bap. Padua affords this kindness, son Petrichio.

Pet. Padua affords nothing but what is kind.

Hor. For both our sakes, I would that word were
true.

Pet. Now, for my life, Hortensio fears his widow.

Wid. Then never trust me if I be afraid.

Pet. You are sensible, and yet you miss my sense;

I mean, Hortensio is afraid of you.

Wid. He that is giddy, thinks the world turns
round.

Pet. Roundly replied.

Kath. Mistress, how mean you that?

Wid. Thus I conceive by him.

Pet. Conceives by me!—How likes Hortensio
that?

Hor. My widow says, thus she conceives her tale.

Pet. Very well mended: Kiss him for that, good
widow.

Kath. He that is giddy, thinks the world turns
round—

I pray you, tell me what you meant by that.

Wid. Your husband, being troubled with a shrew,
Measures my husband's sorrow by his woe:⁷

And now you know my meaning.

Kath. A very mean meaning.

Wid. I'll tell you, Right, I mean you.

Kath. And I am mean indeed, respecting you.

Pet. To her, Kate!

Hor. To her, widow!

Pet. A hundred marks, my Kate does put her down.

Hor. That's my office.

Pet. Spoke like an officer :—Ha? to thee, lad.

[Drinks to HORTENSIO.
Bap. How likes Gremio these quick-witted folks?

Gre. Believe me, sir, they butt together well.

Bian. Head, and butt? a hasty-witted body

Would say, your head and butt were head and horn.

Vin. Ay, mistress bride, hath that awaken'd you?

Bian. Ay, but not frightened me; therefore I'll
sleep again.

Pet. Nay, that you shall not; since you have
begun,

Have at you for a bitter⁸ jest or two.

4 An obsolete proverb, repeated on the loss of hope or expectation. Its meaning is not easily explained. It has been suggested that a cake which comes out of the oven in a state of dough, is utterly spoiled.

5 The old copy reads *come*; the emendation is *Rowes*.

6 The *banquet* here, as in other places of Shakspeare, was a reflection similar to our modern *dessert*, consisting of cakes, sweetmeats, fruits, &c.

7 As this was meant for a rhyming couplet, it should be observed that *shrew* was pronounced *shrew*. See also the finale, where it rhymes to *so*.

8 The old copy reads *better*. The emendation is *Cappell's*.

["## SCENE II.", "## TAMING OF THE SHREW.", "907", "Bian. Am I your bird? I mean to shift my bush,\nAnd then pursue me as you draw your bow:—\nYou are welcome all.", "[Ezeunt BIANCA, KATHARINA, and Widow.", "Pet. She hath prevented me.—Here, Signor\nTranio,", "This bird you aim'd at, though you hit her not;", "Therefore, a life to all that shot and miss'd.", "Tra. O, sir, Lucentio slipp'd me like his grey-\nhound,", "Which runs himself, and catches for his master.", "Pet. A good swift¹ simile, but something currish.", "Tra. 'Tis well, sir, that you hunted for yourself;", "'Tis thought, your deer does hold you out a bay.", "Bap. O ho, Petruchio, Tranio hits you now.", "Luc. I thank thee for that gird,² good Tranio.", "Hor. Confess, confess, hath he not hit you here?", "Pet. 'A has a little gall'd me, I confess;", "And, as the jest did glance away from me,", "'Tis ten to one it maim'd you two outright.", "Bap. Now, in good sadness, son Petruchio,", "I think thou hast the veriest shrew of all.", "Pet. Well, I say—no; and therefore, for assu-\nance,", "Let's each one send unto his wife;", "And he, whose wife is most obedient", "To come at first when he doth send for her,", "Shall win the wager which we will propose.", "Hor. Content:—What is the wager?", "Luc. A hundred, then.", "Pet. Twenty crowns!", "I'll venture so much on my hawk, or hound,", "But twenty times so much upon my wife.", "Luc. A hundred, then.", "Hor.", "Content.", "Pet.", "A match; 'tis done.", "Hor. Who shall begin?", "That will I, Go,", "Biondello, bid your mistress come to me.", "Bim. I go.", "[Exit].", "Bap. Son, I will be your half, Biondello.", "Luc. I'll have no halves; I'll bear it all myself.", "Re-enter BIONDELLO.", "How now! what news?", "Bion. Sir, my mistress sends you word", "That she is busy, and she cannot come.", "Pet. How! she is busy, and she cannot come!", "Is that an answer?", "Gre.", "Ay, and a kind one too:", "Pray God, sir, your wife send you not a worse.", "Pet. I hope, better.", "Hor. Petruchio, Biondello, go, and entreat my wife", "To come to me forthwith.", "[Exit BIONDELLO].", "Pet. O, ho! entreat her!", "Nay, then she must needs come.", "Hor.", "I am afraid, sir, I", "Do what you can, yours will not be entreated", "Re-enter BIONDELLO.", "Now where's my wife?", "Bion. She says, you have some goodly jest in\nhand;", "She will not come; she bids you come to her.", "Pet. Worse and worse; she will not come! O vile,", "Intolerable, not to be endur'd!", "Sirrah, Grumio, go to your mistress;", "Say, I command her come to me.", "[Exit GRUMIO].", "Hor. I know her answer.", "Pet.", "What?", "Hor.", "She will not.", "Pet. The fouler fortune mine, and there an end.", "Enter KATHARINA.", "Bap. Now, by my holidame, here comes Ka-\ntharina!", "Kath. What is your will, sir, that you send for me?", "Pet. Where your sister, and Hortensio's wife?", "Kath. They sit conferring by the parlour fire.", "Pet. Go fetch them hither; if they deny to come,", "Swinge me them soundly forth unto their husbands:\nAway, I say, and bring them hither straight.", "[Exit KATHARINA.", "Luc. Here is a wonder, if you talk of a wonder.", "Hor. And so it is; I wonder what it bodes.", "Pet. Marry, peace it bodes, and love, and quiet\nlife,", "An awful rule, and right supremacy;", "And, to be short, what not, that's sweet and happy.", "Bap. Now fair befall thee, good Petruchio!", "The wager thou hast won; and I will add", "Unto their losses twenty thousand crowns;", "Another dowry to another daughter,", "For she is chang'd, as she had never been.", "Pet. Nay, I will win my wager better yet;", "And show more sign of her obedience,", "Her new-built virtue and obedience.", "Re-enter KATHARINA, with BIANCA and Widow.", "See, where she comes; and brings your froward wives", "As prisoners to her womanly persuasion.—", "Katharina, that cap of yours becomes you not;", "Off with that bauble, throw it under foot.", "[KATHARINA pulls off her cap, and throws\nit down.", "Wid. Lord, let me never have a cause to sigh,", "Till I be brought to such a silly pass!", "Bian. Fye! what a foolish duty call you this?", "Luc. I would, your duty were as foolish too:", "The wisdom of your duty, fair Bianca,", "Hath cost me a hundred crowns since supper-time.", "Bian. The more fool you for laying on my duty.", "Pet. Katharine, I charge thee, tell these head-\nstrong women", "What duty they do owe their lords and husbands.", "Wid. Come, come, you're mocking; we will have\nno telling.", "Pet. Come on, I say; and first begin with her.", "Luc. She shall not.", "Pet. I say, she shall;—and first begin with her.", "Kath. Fye, fye! unknit that threatening unkind\nbrow;", "And dart not scornfulnce from those eyes,", "To wound thy lord, thy king, thy governor:", "It blots thy beauty, as frosts do bite the meads;", "Confounds thy fame, as whirlwinds shake fair buds,", "And in no sense is meet or amiable.", "A woman mov'd, is like a fountain troubled,", "Muddy, ill seeming, thick, bereft of beauty;", "And, while it is so, none so dry or thirsty", "Will deign to sip, or touch one drop of it.", "Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,", "Thy head, thy sovereign; one that cares for thee,", "And for thy maintenance: commits his body", "To painful labour, both by sea and land;", "To watch the night in storms, the day in cold,", "While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe;", {"bbox": [4

WINTER'S TALE.

309

Malone places the composition of the Winter's Tale in 1611, because it was first licensed for representation by Sir George Bucke, Master of the Revels, who did not assume the functions of his office until August 1610. The mention of the 'Puritan singing psalms to horns' also points at this period, as does another passage, which is supposed to be a compliment to James on his escape from the Gowrie Conspiracy. These are conjectures, but probable ones; Malone had in former instances placed the date much earlier; first in 1594, and then in 1602. The supposition that Ben Jonson intended a sneer at this play in his induction to Bartho-

Measure for Measure, which were either grounded on impossibilities, or at least so meanly written, that the comedy neither caused your mirth, nor the serious parts your concernment.' Pope, in his Preface to Shakspeare, almost reechoes this: 'I should conjecture (says he) of some of the others, particularly Love's Labour's Lost, The Winter's Tale, Comedy of Errors, and - Titus An-

lomew Fair has been satisfactorily answered by Mr. Giford.†

Horace Walpole in his Historic Doubts attempts to show that The Winter's Tale was intended (in compliment to Queen Elizabeth) as an indirect apology for her mother Ann Boleyn; but the ground for his conjecture is so slight as scarcely to deserve attention. Indeed it may be answered that the plot of the play is not the invention of Shakspeare, who therefore cannot be charged with this piece of flattery; if it was intended, it must be attributed to Greene, whose novel was published in 1588. I think with Mr. Boswell that these supposed allusions by Shakspeare to the history of his own time are very much to be doubted.

dronicus, that only some characters or single scenes, or perhaps a few particular passages, are from the hand of Shakspeare.

† Works of Ben Jonson, vol. iv. p. 371.

PERSONS REPRESENTED.

LEONTES, King of Sicilia.
MAMILLIUS, his Son.
CAMILLO,
ANTIGONUS,
CLEOMENES,
DION,
Sicilian Lords.
Another Sicilian Lord.
ROGERO, a Sicilian Gentleman.
An Attendant on the young Prince Mamillius.
Officers of a Court of Judicature.
POLIXENES, King of Bohemia.
FLORIZEL, his Son.
ARCHIDAMUS a Bohemian Lord
A Mariner.
Gaoler.
An old Shepherd, reputed Father of Perdita.

Clown, his Son.
Servant to the old Shepherd.
AUTOLYCUS, a Rogue.
Time, as Chorus.
HERMIONE, Queen to Leontes.
PERDITA, Daughter to Leontes and Hermione.
PAULINA, Wife to Antigonus.
EMILIA, a Lady, attending the Queen.
Two other Ladies,
MOPSA,
DORCAS,
Shepheresses.
Lords, Ladies, and Attendants; Satyrs for a Dance;
Shepherds, Shepherdesses, Guards, &c.
SCENE, sometimes in Sicilia, sometimes in Bohemia.

ACT I.

## SCENE I. Sicilia. An Antichamber in Leontes'
Palace. Enter CAMILLO and ARCHIDAMUS.

Archidamus.

If you shall chance, Camillo, to visit Bohemia, on the like occasion whereon my services are now on foot, you shall see, as I have said, great difference betwixt our Bohemia, and your Sicilia.

Cam. I think, this coming summer, the King of Sicilia means to pay Bohemia the visitation which he justly owes him.

Arch. Wherein our entertainment shall shame us, we will be justified in our loves : for, indeed, —
Cam. Beseech you, —

Arch. Verily, I speak it in the freedom of my knowledge: we cannot with such magnificence—in so rare—I know not what to say.—We will give you sleepy drinks; that your senses, unintelligent of our insignificance, may, though they cannot praise us, as little accuse us.

Cam. You pay a great deal too dear for what's given freely.

Arch. Believe me, I speak as my understanding instructs me, and as mine honesty puts it to utterance.

Cam. Sicilia cannot show himself over-kind to Bohemia. They were trained together in their childhoods; and there rooted betwixt them then such an affection, which cannot choose but branch now. Since their more mature dignities, and royal necessities made separation of their society, their encounters, though not personal, have been royally attornied,¹ with interchange of gifts, letters, loving embassies; that they have seemed to be together, though absent; shook hands, as over a vast; and

1 'Royally attornied.' Nobly supplied by substitu-
  of embassies.

2 i. e. over a wide intervening space.

3 'Physics the subject.' Affords a cordial to the state,
has the power of assuaging the sense of misery.

4 That for Oh that ! is not uncommon in old writers.

embraced, as it were, from the ends of opposed
winds. The heavens continue their loves !

Arch. I think, there is not in the world either malice, or matter, to alter it. You have an unspeakable comfort of your young prince Mamillius; it is a gentleman of the greatest promise, that ever came into my note.

Cam. I very well agree with you in the hopes of him: it is a gallant child; one that, indeed, physics the subject,³ makes old hearts fresh: they, that went on crutches ere he was born, desire yet their life, to see him a man.

Arch. Would they else be content to die ?

Cam. Yes; if there were no other excuse why
they should desire to live.

Arch. If the king had no son, they would desire
to live on crutches till he had one.

[Exeunt.

## SCENE II. The same. A Room of State in the Palace. Enter LEONTES, POLIXENES, HERMIONE, MAMILLIUS, CAMILLO, and Attendants.

Pol. Nine changes of the wat'ry star have been
The shepherd's note, since we have left our throne
Without a burden: time as long again

Would be fill'd up, my brother, with our thanks :
And yet we should, for perpetuity,

Go hence in debt: And therefore, like a cipher.

Yet standing in rich place, I multiply,

With one we-thank-you, many thousands more
That go before it.

Leon Stay your thanks awhile ;

And pay them when you part.

Pol.

Sir, that's to-morrow.
I am question'd by my fears, of what may chance,
Or breed upon our absence: That⁴ may blow
No sneaking⁵ winds at home, to make us say,
This is put forth too truly!⁶ Besides, I have stay'd
To tire your royalty.

5 Sneaking, nipping.

6 i. e. to make me say, I had too good reason for
my fears concerning what may happen in my absence
from home.

310

WINTER'S TALE.

ACT I.

Leon. We are tougher, brother,

Than you can put us to't.

Pol. No longer stay.

Leon. One seven-night longer.

Pol. Very sooth, to-morrow.

Leon. We'll part the time between's then: and in that

I'll no gain-saying.

Pol. Press me not, 'beseech you, so:

There is no tongue that moves, none, none' the world
So soon as yours, could win me: so it should now,
Were there necessity in your request, although
'Twere needful I denied it. My affairs

Do even drag me homeward: which to hinder

Were, in your love, a whip to me: my stay,

To you a charge and trouble: to save both,

Farewell, our brother.

Leon. Tongue-tied, our queen? speak you.

Her. I had thought, sir, to have held my peace,
until

You had drawn oaths from him not to stay. You, sir,
Charge him too coldly: Tell him, you are sure,

All in Bohemia's well: this satisfaction

The by-gone day proclaim'd; say this to him,

He's beat from his best ward.

Leon. Well said, Hermione.

Her. To tell he longs to see his son, were strong:

But let him say so then, and let him go;

But let him swear so, and he shall not stay,

We'll thwack him hence with distaffs.

Yet of your royal presence [To Pol. I'll adventure
The borrow of a week. When at Bohemia

You take my lord, I'll give him my commission,

To let him there a month, behind the gest¹

Prefix'd for his parting: yet, good deed,² Leontes,

I love thee not a jar o' the clock behind

What lady she her lord.—You'll stay?

Pol. No, madam.

Her. Nay, but you will ?

Pol. I may not, verily.

Her. Verily!

You put me off with limber vows: But I,

Though you would seek to unsphere the stars with
oaths,

Should yet say, *Sir, no going*. Verily,

You shall not go; a lady's verily is

As potent as a lord's. Will you go yet?

Force me to keep you as a prisoner,

Not like a guest; so you shall pay your fees,

When you depart, and save your thanks. How
say you?

My prisoner? or my guest? by your dread verily,
One of them you shall be.

Pol. Your guest, then, madam:

To be your prisoner, should import offending;

Which is for me less easy to commit,

Than you to punish.

Her. Not your gaoler, then,

But your kind hostess. Come, I'll question you

Of my lord's tricks, and yours, when you were boys,

You were pretty lordings³ then.

Pol. We were, fair queen,

Two lads that thought there was no more behind,
But such a day to-morrow as to-day,
And to be boy eternal.

Her. Was not my lord the verier wag o' the two?

Pol. We were as twinn'd lambs, that did frisk
i' the sun,

And bleat the one at the other: what we chang'd,
Was innocence for innocence; we knew not

The doctrine of ill doing, nor dream'd

That any did: Had we pursued that life,
And our weak spirits ne'er been higher fear'd

With stronger blood, we should 'have answered' heaven

Boldly, *Not Guilty*; the imposition clear'd,⁴
Hereditary ours.

Her. By this we gather,
You have tripp'd since.

O, my most sacred lady,
Tempestations have since then been born to us: for
In those unfled'd days was my wife a girl;
Your precious self had then not cross'd the eyes
Of my young play-fellow.

Her. Grace to boot!⁵

Of this make no conclusion; lest you say,

Your queen and I are devils: Yet, go on;

The offences we have made you do, we'll answer;

If you first sinn'd with us, and that with us

You did continue fault, and that you slipp'd not

With any but with us.

Leon. Is he won yet?

Her. He'll stay, my lord.

Leon. At my request he would not,
Hermione, my dearest, thou never spok'st

To better purpose.

Her. Never?

Leon. Never, but once.

Her. What? What have I twice said well? when was't
before?

I pr'y'thee, tell me: Cram us with praise, and make us
As fat as tame things: One good deed, dying tongue-
less,

Slaughters a thousand, waiting upon that.

Our praises are our wages: You may ride us,

With one soft kiss, a thousand furlongs, ere

With spur we heat an acre. But to the goal;—

My last good was, to entreat his stay;

What was my first? it has an elder sister,

Or I mistake you: O,³ would, her name were Grace!

But once before I spoke to the purpose: When?

Nay, let me hav't; I long.

Leon. Why that was when
Three crabbed months had sour'd themselves to
death,

Ere I could make thee open thy white hand,
And clap⁴ thyself my love; then didst thou utter,
I am yours for ever.

Her. It is grace, indeed.—

Why, lo you now, I have spoke to the purpose twice:

The one for ever earn'd a royal husband,

The other, for some while a friend.

[Giving her hand to POLIXENES.

Leon. Too hot, too hot: [Aside.
To mingle friendship far, is mingling blood.

I have tremor cordis on me:—my heart dances;

But not for joy,—not joy.—This entertainment

May a free face put on; derive a liberty

From heartiness, from bounty, fertile bosom,

And well become the agent: it may, I grant:

But to be paddling palms, and pinching fingers,

As now they are: and making practis'd smiles,

As in a looking-glass;—and then to sigh, as 'twere

The mort o' the deer;⁵ O, that is entertainment

My bosom likes not, nor my brows.—Mamillius,
Art thou my boy?

Man. Ay, my good lord.

Leon. I'fecks?

Why, that's my bawcock.⁹ What, hast smutch'd
thy nose?—

⁵ 'Grace to boot.' An exclamation equivalent to give us grace.

1 To *let* had for its synonyms *to stay* or *stop*; to *let* him there, is to stay him there. *Gests* were scrolls in which were marked the stages or places of rest in a progress or journey, especially a royal one.

2 i. e. indeed, in very deed, in troth. *Good deed* is used in the same sense by the Earl of Surrey, Sir John Hayward, and Gascoigne.

3 *Lordings*, a diminutive of lords, often used by Chaucer.

4 i. e. setting aside the original sin, bating the impotence from the offence of our first parents, we might have boldly protested our innocence.

⁶ At entering into any contract, or plighting of troth, this clapping of hands together set the seal. Numerous instances of allusion to the custom have been added by the editors; one shall suffice, from the old play of Ram Alley: 'Come, clap hands, a match.' The custom is not yet disused in common life.

⁷ from bounty, fertile bosom, I think with Malone that a letter has been omitted, and that we should read:—

‘— from bounty’s fertile bosom.’

⁸ i. e. *the death of the deer*. The *mort* was also certain notes played on the horn at the death of the deer.

⁹ *Bawcock.* A burlesque word of endearment sup-

["## SCENE II.", "WINTER'S TALE.", "311", "They say, it's a copy out of mine. Come, captain,\nWe must be neat; not neat, but cleanly, captain:\nAnd yet the steer, the heifer, and the calf;\nAre all call'd, neat.—Still virginalling!", "[Observing POLIXENES and HERMIONE.", "Upon his palm ?—How now, you wanton calf?", "Art thou my calf?", "Mam. Yes, if you will, my lord.", "Leon. Thou wantest a rough pash, and the shoots\nthat I have,²", "To be full³ like me, yet, they say, we are\nAlmost as like as eggs; women say so,\nThat will say any thing: But were they false\nAs o'er-dyed blacks,⁴ as wind, as waters; false\nA dice are to be wish'd, by one that fixes\nNo born 'twixt his and mine; yet were it true\nTo say this boy were like me.—Come, sir page,\nLook on me with your welkin⁵ eye: Sweet villain!\nMost dear'st! my collop!¹⁶—Can thy dam?—may't\nbe?", "Affection! thy intention stabs the centre;⁷\nThou dost make possible, things not so held;\nCommunicat'st with dreams;—(How can this be?)\nWith what's unreal thou coactive art,\nAnd fellow'st nothing: Then, 'tis very credent,⁸\nThou may'st conjoin with something; and thou dost;\n(And that beyond commission, and I find it;)\nAnd that to the infection of my brains,\nAnd hardening of my brows.", "Pol. What means Sicilia?", "Leon. Her. He something seems unsettled.", "Pol. How, my lord ?", "What cheer? how is't with you, best brother ?\nHer.", "Her. You look, as if you held a broow of much distraction:", "Are you mov'd, my lord ?", "Leon. No, in good earnest.—", "How sometimes nature will betray its folly,\nIts tenderness, and make itself a pastime", "To harder bosoms! Looking on the lines", "Of my boy's face, methought I did recoil", "Twenty-three years; and saw myself unbreech'd,\nIn my green glycerin coat; my dagger muzzled,", "Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,\nAs ornaments oft do, too dangerous.", "How like, methought, I then was to this kernel,", "This squash,⁹ this gentleman!—Mine honest friend,", "Will you take eggs for money ?¹⁰", "Mam. No, my lord, I'll fight.", "Leon. You will? why, happy man be his dole!¹¹—\nmy brother,", "Are you so fond of your young prince, as we\nDo seem to be of ours?", "Pol. If at home, sir,", "He's my all my exercise, my birth, my matter:", "Now my sworn friend, and then mine enemy;", "My parasite, my soldier, statesman, all;", "He makes a July's day short as December;", "And, with his varying childhood, cures in gone", "Thoughts that would thick my blood.", "Leon. So stands this squire", "Offic'd with me: We two will walk. my lord,\nAnd leave you to your graver steps.—Hermione,\nHow thou lov'st us, show in our brother's welcome;\nLet what is dear in Sicily be cheap:\nNext to thyself, and my young rover he's\nApparent¹² to my heart.", "Her. If you would seek us,", "We are yours the garden; Shall's attend you there.", "Leon. To your own bents dispose you: you'll be\nfound,", "Be you beneath the sky:—I am angling now,", "Though you perceive me not how I give line.", "Go to, go to!", "[Aside. Observing POLIXENES and HERMIONE.", "How she holds up the neb,¹³ the bill to him!", "And arms her with the boldness of a wife", "To her allowing¹⁴ husband! Gone already!", "Inch-thick, knee-deep, o'er head and ears a fork'd\none¹⁵", "[Exeunt POL. HER. and Attendants.", "Go, play, boy, play;—thy mother plays, and I", "Play too; but so disgrac'd a part, whose issue", "Will hiss me to my grave; contempt and clamour", "Will be my knell.—Go, play, boy, play.—There\nhave been,", "Or I am much deceiv'd, cuckolds ere now;", "And many a man there is, even at this present,", "Now, while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm,", "That little thinks, she has been sluic'd in his absence,", "And his pond fish'd by his next neighbour, by", "Sir Smile, his neighbour: nay, there's comfort in't,", "Whiles other men have gates; and those gates\nopen'd,", "As mine, against their will: Should all despair,", "That have revolted wives, the tenth of mankind", "Would hang themselves. Physic for't there is none ;", "It is a bawdy planet, that will strike", "Where 'tis predominant; and 'tis powerful, think it,", "From east, west, north, and south: Be it concluded,", "No barricado for a belly; know it;", "It will let in and out the enemy,", "With bag and baggage: many a thousand of us", "Have the disease, and feel't not.—How now, boy?", "Mam. I am like you, they say.", "Leon. Why, that's some comfort.—", "What! Camillo there?", "Cam. Ay, my good lord.", "Leon. Go play, Mamillius; thou'rt an honest\nman. [Exit MAMILLIUS.", "Camillo, this great sir will yet stay longer.", "Leon. You had much ado to make his anchor hold ;", "When you cast out, it still came home.¹⁶", "Leon. Didst note it?", "Cam. He would not stay at your petitions; made", "His business more material.¹⁷", "Leon. Didst perceive it?—", "They're here with me already:¹⁸ whispering,\nrounding.¹⁹", "Sicilia is a so-forth: 'Tis far gone,", "When I shall gust²⁰ it last.—How came't, Camillo,", "That he did stay ?", "Cam. At the good queen's entreaty.", "posed to be derived from *beau-coq*, or boy-cock. It\noccurs again in Twelfth Night, and in King Henry V.\nand in both places is coupled with chuck or chick. It is\nsaid that *bra'-cock* is still used in Scotland.", "1. Still playing with her fingers as a girl playing on the virginals. Virginals were stringed instruments played with keys like a spinnet, which they resembled in all respects but in shape, spinnets being nearly triangular, and virginals of an oblong square shape like a small piano forte.", "2. Thou wantest a rough head, and the budding horns that I have. A pash in some places denoting a young bull calf whose horns are springing; a mad pash, a mad-brained boy.", "3. i. e. entirely.", "4. i. e. old faded stuffs of other colours dyed black.", "5. Welkin is blue, i. e. the colour of the welkin or sky.", "6. In King Henry VI. Part I. we have—\n    'God knows, thou art a collop of my flesh.'\n7. Affection here means imagination. Intention is\nearnest consideration, eager attention. It is this vehe-\nmence of mind which affects Leontes, by making him", "conjure up unreal causes of disquiet; and thus, in the\npoet's language, 'stabs him to the centre.'", "S Credent, credible.", "9. i. e. an immature pea-pod.", "10. 'Will you take eggs for money?' A proverbial\nphrase for 'will you suffer yourself to be cajoled or im-\nposed upon?'", "11. i. e. may happiness be his portion!", "12. Heir apparent, next claimant.", "13. i. e. mouth. 14. i. e. approving", "15. i. e. a horned one, a cuckold.", "16. 'It still came home,' a nautical term, meaning,\n'the anchor would not take hold.'", "17. The more you requested him to stay, the more ur-\ngent he represented that business to be which summon-\ned him away.", "18. Not Polixenes and Hermione, but casual obser-\nvers.", "19. To round in the ear was to tell secretly, to whisper.", "20. i. e. taste it:—", "ile domus sciet ultimus.", "Juv. Sat. x.", "Act L", "ear'd\nanswer'd\n'td,⁶", "sacred laity\nfor us;\nthe eyes\nof the\n\n1st\n\n1st\n\n1st\n\n1st\n\n1st

["312", "WINTER'S TALE.", "ACT I.", "Leon. At the queen's, be't: good, should be pertinent;", "But so it is, it is not. Was this taken", "By any understanding pate but thine ?", "For thy conceit is soaking, will draw in", "More than the common blocks :—Not noted, is't,", "But of the finer natures ? by some severals,", "Of head-piece extraordinary? lower messes,", "Perchance, are to this business purblind: say.", "Cam. Business, my lord? I think, most understand", "Bohemia stays here longer.", "Leon. Ha?", "Cam.", "Stays here longer.", "Leon. Ay, but why?", "Cam. To satisfy your highness, and the entreaties", "Of our most gracious mistress.", "Leon.", "Satisfy", "The entreaties of your mistress?—satisfy?—", "Let that suffice. I have trusted thee, Camillo,", "With all the nearest things to my heart, as well", "My chamber-councils: wherein, priestlike, thou", "Hast cleans'd my bosom; I from thee departed", "Thy penitent reform'd: but we have been", "Deceiv'd in thy integrity, deceiv'd", "In that which seems so.", "Cam. Be it forbid, my lord!", "Leon. To bide upon't:—Thou art not honest: or,", "If thou inclin'st that way, thou art a coward;", "Which hoxes² honesty behind, restraining", "From course requir'd: Or else thou must be counted", "A servant, grafted in my serious trust,", "And therein negligent; or else a fool,", "That see'st a game play'd home, the rich stake\ndrawn,", "And tak'st it all for jest.", "Cam. My gracious lord,", "I may be negligent, foolish, and fearful ;", "In every one of these no man is free,", "But that his negligence, his folly, fear,", "Amongst the infinite doings of the world,", "Sometime puts forth: In your affairs, my lord,", "If ever I were wilful-negligent,", "It was my folly; if industriously", "I play'd the fool, it was my negligence,", "Not weighing well the end; if ever fearful", "To do a thing, where I the issue doubted,", "Whereof the execution did cry out", "Against the non-performance,³ 'twas a fear", "Which oft affects the wisest: these, my lord,", "Are such allow'd infirmities, that honesty", "Is never free of. But, 'beseech your grace,", "Be plainer with me; let me know my trespass", "By its own visage: if I then deny it,", "'Tis none of mine.", "Leon. Have not you seen, Camillo,", "(But that's past doubt: you have; or your eye-glass", "Is thicker than a cuckold's horn;) or heard,", "(For, to a vision so apparent, rumour", "Cannot be mute,) or thought,—(for cogitation", "Resides not in that man, that does not think,)⁴—", "My wife is slippery? If thou wilt confess,", "1 Messes is here put for degrees, conditions. The company at great tables were divided according to their rank into higher and lower messes. Those of lower condition sitting below the great standing salt in the centre of the table.", "2 To hox is to hamstring, the proper word is to hough.", "3 This is expressed obscurely, but seems to mean 'the execution of which (when done) cried out against the nonperformance of it before;' or, as Johnson lacinarily expresses it, was 'a thing necessary to be done,' but which Camillo had delayed doing because he doubted the issue.", "4 Theobald quoted this passage in defence of the well known line in his Double Falsehood, 'None but himself can be his parallel.'—'For who does not see at once,' says he, 'that he who does not think has no thought in him.' In the same light the subsequent editors view this passage, and read with Pope, 'that does not think it.' But the old reading is right, and the absurdity only in the misapprehension of it. Leontes means to say, 'Have you not thought that my wife is slippery (for cogitation resides not in the man that does", "(Or else be impudently negative,", "To have nor eyes, nor ears, nor thought,) then say,", "My wife's a hobby-horse; deserves a name", "As rank as any flax-wench, that puts to", "Before a troth-plight: say it, and justify it.", "Cam. I would be a stander-by, to hear", "My sovereign mistress clouded so, without", "My present vengeance taken: 'Shrew my hear", "You never spoke what did become you less", "Than this, which to reiterate, were sin", "As deep as that, though true.⁵", "Leon. Is whispering nothing?", "Is leaning cheek to cheek ? is meeting noses?", "Kissing with inside lip ? stopping the career", "Of laughter with a sigh ? (a note infallible", "Of breaking honesty:) horsing foot on foot?", "Skulking in corners ? wishing clocks more swift?", "Hours, minutes ? noon, midnight ? and all eyes blind", "With the pin and web,⁶ but theirs, theirs only,", "That would unseen be wicked ? is this nothing?", "Why, then, the world, and all that's in't, is nothing;", "The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;", "My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothing,", "If this be nothing.", "Cam. Good my lord, be cur'd", "Of this diseas'd opinion, and betimes;", "Of 't is most dangerous.", "Leon. Say, it be; 'tis true.", "Cam. No, no, my lord.", "Leon. It is: you lie, you lie:", "I say, thou liest, Camillo, and I hate thee;", "Pronounce thee a gross lout, a mindless slave;", "Or else a hovering temporizer, that", "Canst with thine eyes at once see good and evil,", "Incline to them both: Were my wife's liver", "Infected as her life, she would not live", "The running of one glass.⁷", "Cam. Who does infect her?", "Leon. Why, he, that wears her like his medal,⁸\nhanging", "About his neck, Bohemia: Who—if I", "Had servants true about me: that bare eyes", "To see alike mine honour as their profits,", "Their own particular thrifts,—they would do that", "Which should undo more doing: Ay, and thou,", "His cup-bearer,—whom I from meaner form", "Have bench'd, and rear'd to worship; who may'st\nsee", "Plainly, as heaven sees earth, and earth sees heaven,\nHow I am galled,—might'st bespice a cup,⁹", "To give mine enemy a lasting wink;", "Which draught to me were cordial.", "Cam. Sir, my lord,\nI could do this: and that with no rash¹⁰ potion,", "But with a ling'ring dram, that should not work", "Maliciously like poison: But I cannot", "Believe this crack to be in my dread mistress,", "So sovereignly being honourable.", "I have lov'd thee,¹¹", "Leon. Make't thy question, and go rot!¹¹", "not think my wife is slippery.¹² The four latter words, though disjoined from the word think by the necessity of a parenthesis, are evidently to be connected in construction with it.", "5 To reiterate your accusation of her would be as great a sin as that, if committed, of which you accuse her.", "

["## SCENE II.", "WINTER'S TALE.", "313", "Dost think, I am so muddy, so unsettled,\nTo appoint myself to this vexation ? sully\nThe purity and whiteness of my sheets,\nWhich to preserve, is sleep; which being spotted,\nIs goods, thorns, nettles, tails of wasps ?¹", "Give scandal to the blood o' the prince my son,\nWho, I do think is mine, and love as mine;\nWithout ripe moving to't ? Would I do this?", "Could man so blench ?²", "Cam. I must believe you, sir;", "I do: and will fetch off Bohemia for't:", "Provided, that when he's remov'd, your highness", "Will take again your queen, as yours at first;", "Even for your son's sake; and thereby, for sealing", "The injury of tongues in courts and kingdoms", "Known and allied to yours.", "Leon.", "Thou dost advise me,", "Even so as I mine own course have set down:", "I'll give no blemish to her honour, none.", "Cam. My lord,", "Go then; and with a countenance as clear", "As friendship wears at feasts, keep with Bohemia,", "And with your queen: I am his cupbearer;", "If from me he have wholesome beverage,", "Account me not your servant.", "Leon.", "This is all;", "Do't, and thou hast the one half of my heart;", "Do't not, thou split't stane own,", "Leon.", "I'll do't, my lord.", "Cam. I will seem friendly, as thou hast advis'd me.", "Cam. O miserable lady !—But, for me,", "What case stand I in ? I must be the poisoner", "Of good Polixenes: and my ground to do't", "Is the obedience to a master; one,", "Who, in rebellion with himself, will have", "All that are his, so too.—To do this deed,", "Promotion follows: If I could find example", "Of thousands, that had struck anointed kings,", "And flourish'd after, I'd not do't; but since", "Nor brass, nor stone, nor parchment, bears not one,", "Let villany itself forswear't. I must", "Forsake the court: to do't, or no, is certain", "To me a break-neck. Happy star, reign now!", "Here comes Bohemia.", "## Enter POLIXENES.", "Pol.", "This is strange! methinks, My favour here begins to warp. Not speak?—\nGood-day, Camillo.", "Cam. Hail, most royal sir!", "Pol. What is the news i'the court?", "Cam. None rare, my lord.", "Pol. The king hath on him such a countenance, As he had lost some province, and a region,", "Lov'd as he loves himself: even now I met him With customary compliment; when he,", "Wafting his eyes to the contrary, and falling", "A lip of much contempt, speeds from me; and", "So leaves me to consider what is breeding,", "That changes thus his manners.", "Cam. I dare not know, my lord.", "Pol. How! dare not? do not.— Do you know,", "and dare not", "Be intelligent to me? 'Tis thereabouts;", "For, to yourself, what you do know, you must;", "And cannot say you dare not. Good Camillo,", "Your chang'd complexions are to me a mirror,", "Which shows me mine chang'd too: for I must be", "A party in this alteration, finding", "Myself thus alter'd with it.", "Cam.", "There is a sickness Which puts some of us in distemper; but", "I cannot name the disease; and it is caught Of you that yet are well.", "Pol.", "How! caught of me?", "Make me not sighted like the basilisk:", "I have look'd on thousands, who have sped the better", "By my regard, but kill'd none so. Camillo,— As you are certainly a gentleman; thereto", "Clerk-like, experienc'd, which no less adorns", "Our gentry, than our parents' noble names,", "In whose success we are gentle,³—I beseech you, If you know aught which does behove my knowledge", "Thereof to be inform'd, imprison it not", "In ignorant concealment.", "Cam.", "I may not answer.", "Pol. A sickness caught of me, and yet I well!", "I must be answer'd.—Dost thou hear, Camillo,", "I conjure thee, by all the parts of man,", "Which honour does acknowledge,—whereof the least", "Is not this suit of mine,—that thou declare", "What incidency thou dost guess of harm", "Is creeping toward me; how far off, how near;", "Which way to be prevented, if to be;", "If not, how best to bear it.", "Cam.", "Sir, I'll tell you;", "Since I am charg'd in honour, and by him", "That I think honourable: Therefore, mark my counsel;", "Which must be even as swiftly follow'd, as", "I mean to utter it; or both yourself and me", "Cry, lost, and so good-night.", "Pol.", "On, good Camillo.", "Cam. I am appointed him to murder you.⁴", "Pol. By whom, Camillo?", "Cam.", "By the king.", "Pol.", "For what?", "Cam. He thinks, nay, with all confidence he swears,", "As he had seen't, or been an instrument", "To vice? you to't,—that you have touch'd his queen", "Forbiddenly.", "Pol.", "O, then my best blood turn", "To an infected jelly; and my name", "Be yoked with his, that did betray the best ¹⁶", "Turn then my freshest reputation to", "A savour, that may strike the dullest nostril", "Where I arrive; and my approach be shunn'd,", "Nay, hated too, worse than the great'st infection", "That e'er was heard, or read!", "Cam.", "Swear his thought over.", "By each particular star in heaven, and", "By all their influences, you may as well", "Forbid the sea for to obey the moon,", "As, or by oath, remove, or counsel, shake", "The fabric of his folly; whose foundation", "Is pil'd upon his faith,⁸ and will continue", "The standing of his body.", "Pol.", "How should this grow?", "Cam. I know not: but, I am sure, 'tis safer to", "Avoid what's grown, than question how 'his born.", "If therefore you dare trust my honesty,—", "That lies enclosed in this trunk, which you", "Shall bear along impawn'd,—away to-night.", {"bbox": [438, 1071, 715, 1087], "category

["814", "WINTER'S TALE.", "ACT II.", "Than one condemn'd by the king's own mouth,\nthereon", "His execution sworn.", "Pol.", "I do believe thee:", "I saw his heart in his face.¹ Give me thy hand;", "Be pilot to me, and thy places shall", "Still neighbour mine;² My ships are ready, and", "My people did expect my hence departure", "Two days ago.—This jealousy", "Is for a precious creature; as she's rare,", "Must it be great; and, as his person's mighty,", "Must it be violent; and as he does conceive,", "He is dishonour'd by a man which ever", "Profess'd to him, why, his revenges must", "In that be made more bitter. Fear o'ershades me;", "Good expedition be my friend, and comfort", "The gracious queen, part of his theme, but nothing", "Of his ill-ta'en suspicion.¹³ Come, Camillo;", "I will respect thee as a father, if", "Thou bear'st my life off hence: Let us avoid.", "Cam. It is in mine authority, to command", "The keys of all the posterns: Please your highness", "To take the urgent hour: come, sir, away.", "[Exeunt.]", "Her. Nay, come, sit down; then on.", "Mam. Dwelt by a church-yard;—I will tell it\nsoftly;", "Yon crickets shall not hear it.", "Her.", "Come on then,", "And give't me in mine ear.", "Enter LEONTES, ANTIGONUS, Lords, and others.", "Leon. Was he met there? his train? Camillo\nwith him?", "1 Lord. Behind the tuft of pines I met them;\nnever", "Saw I men scour so on their way: I ey'd them\nEven to their ships.", "Leon.", "How bless'd am I", "In my just censure?⁴ in my true opinion?—", "Alack, for lesser knowledge!⁵ How accurs'd,", "In being so blest!—There may be in the cup", "A spider⁶ steep'd, and one may drink; depart,", "And yet partake no venom; for his knowledge", "Is not infected: but if one present", "The abhor'd ingredient to his eye; make known,", "How he hath drunk, he cracks his gorge, his sides", "With violent hefts:—I have drunk, and seen the\nspider.", "Camillo was his help in this, his pander:—", "There is a plot against my life, my crown;", "All's true that is mistrusted:—that false villain,", "Whom I employ'd, was pre-employ'd by him:", "He has discover'd my design, and I", "Remain a pinch'd thing;⁹ yea, a very trick", "For them to play at will:—How came the posterns", "So easily open?", "1 Lord.", "By his great authority;", "Which often hath no less prevail'd than so,", "On your command.", "Leon.", "I know't too well.—", "Give me the boy; I am glad, you did not nurse him:", "Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you", "Have too much blood in him.", "Her.", "What is this? sport?", "Leon. Bear the boy hence, he shall not come about\nher;", "Away with him:—and let his sport herself", "With that she's big with; for 'tis Polixenes", "Has made thee swell thus.", "Her.", "But I'd say, he had not,", "And, I'll be sworn, you would believe my saying,", "Howe'er you lean to the mayward.", "Leon.", "You, my lords,", "Look on her, mark her well; be but about", "To say, she is a goodly lady, and", "The justice of your hearts will thereto add,", "'Tis pity, she's not honest, honourable:", "Praise her but for this her without-door form,", "(Which, on my faith, deserves high speech) and", "straight", "The shrug, the hum, or ha; these petty brands,", "That calumny doth use:—O, I am out,", "That mercy does; for calumny will tear?", "Virtue itself:—these shrugs, these hums, and has,", "When you have said, she's goodly, come between,", "Ere you can say she's honest: But be it known,", "From him that has most cause to grieve it should be,", "She's an adultress.", "Her.", "Should a villain say so,", "The most replenish'd villain in the world,", "He were as much more villain: you, my lord,", "Do but mistake.", "Leon.", "You have mistook, my lady,", "Polixenes for Leontes: O thou thing,", "Which I'll not call a creature of thy place,", "ACT II.", "### SCENE I. The same. Enter HERMIONE, MA-\nMILLIUS, and Ladies.", "Her. Take the boy to you: he so troubles me,\n'Tis past enduring.", "1 Lady.", "Come, my gracious lord,", "Shall I be your playfellow?", "Mam.", "No, I'll none of you.", "1 Lady.", "Why, my sweet lord?", "Mam. You'll kiss me hard; and speak to me as", "if I were a baby still.—I love you better.", "2 Lady.", "And why so, my lord?", "Mam.", "Not for because", "Your brows are blacker; yet blacker brows, they say,", "Become some women best; so that there be not", "Too much hair there, but in a semicircle,", "Or half-moon made with a pen.", "2 Lady.", "Who taught you this?", "Mam. I learn'd it out of women's faces.—Pray\nnow", "What colour are your eye-brows?", "1 Lady.", "Blue, my lord.", "Mam. Nay, that's a mock: I have seen a lady's\nnose", "That has been blue, but not her eye-brows.", "2 Lady.", "Hark ye:", "The queen, your mother, rounds apace: we shall", "Present our services to a fine new prince,", "One of these days; and then you'd wanton with us,", "If we would have you.", {"bbox": [411, 926, 451, 941], "category": "Text", "

## SCENE I.

WINTER'S TALE.

315

Lest barbarism, making me the precedent,
Should a like language use to all degrees,
And mannerly distinction leave out
Betwixt the prince and beggar!—I have said,
She's an adultress; I have said with whom:
More, she's a traitor! and Camillo is
A federary¹ with her; and one that knows
What she should shame to know herself,
But² with her most vile principal, that she's
A bed-swerver, even as bad as those
That vulgars give bold'st titles; ay, and privy
To this their late escape.

Her. No, by my life,
Privy to none of this: How will this grieve you,
When you shall come to clearer knowledge, that
You thus have publish'd me? Gentle my lord,
You scarce can right me throughly then, to say
You did mistake.

Leon. No, no; if I mistake
In those foundations which I build upon,
The centre is not big enough to bear
A school-boy's top.—Away with her to prison:
He, who shall speak for her, is afar off guilty,
But that he speaks.⁴

Her. There's some ill planet reigns:
I must be patient till the heavens look
With an aspect more favourable.—Good my lords,
I am not prone to weeping, as our sex
Commonly are; the want of which vain dew,
Perchance, shall dry your pities; but I have
That honourable grief lodg'd here, which burns
Worse than tears drown: 'Beseeth you all, my
lords,
With thoughts so qualified as your charities
Shall best instruct you, measure me;—and so
The king's will be perform'd.⁵

Leon. Shall I be heard?

Her. [To the Guards.
Who is't that goes with me?—'Beseeth
your highness,
My women may be with me; for, you see,
My plight requires it. Do not weep, good fools;
There is no cause: when you shall know your mis-
tress

Has deserv'd prison, then abound in tears,
As I come out: this action, I now go on,⁶
Is for my better grace.—Adieu, my lord:
I never wish'd to see you sorry; but I
trust, I shall.—My women, come; you have
leave.

Leon. Go, do our bidding; hence.

1 Lord. 'Beseeth your highness, call the queen
again.

Ant. Be certain what you do, sir; lest your justice
Prove violence; in the which three great ones suffer,
Yourself, your queen, your son.

1 Lord. For her, my lord,—
I dare my life lay down, and will do't, sir,
Please you to accept it, that the queen is spotless
The eyes of heaven, and to you; I mean,
In this which you accuse her.

Ant. If it prove
She's otherwise, I'll keep my stables⁸ where
I lodge my wife; I'll go in couples with her;
Then when I feel, and see her, no further trust her;
For every inch of woman in the world,
Ay, every dram of woman's flesh, is false,
If she be.

Leon. Hold your peaces.

1 Lord. Good my lord,—

Ant. It is for you we speak, not for ourselves:
You are abus'd, and by some putter-on,
That will be damn'd for't; 'would I knew the villain,
I would land-damn him: Be she honour-flaw'd,—
I have three daughters; the eldest is eleven;
The second, and the third, nine, and some five;
If this prove true, they'll pay for't: by mine honour,
I'll geld them all: fourteen they shall not see,
To bring false generations; they are coheirs;
And I had rather glib⁹ myself, than they
Should not produce fair issue.

Leon. Cease; no more.

You smell this business with a sense as cold
As is a dead man's nose: but I do see't and feel't,
As you feel doing thus; and see withal
The instruments that feel.⁹

Ant. If it be so,

We need no grave to bury honesty;
There's not a grain of it, the face to sweeten
Of the whole dungy earth.

Leon. What! lack I credit?

1 Lord. I had rather you did lack, than I, my lord,
Upon this ground: and more it would content me
To have her honour true, than your suspicion;
Be blam'd for't how you might.

Leon. Why, what need we
Commune with you of this? but rather follow
Our forceful instigation? Our prerogative
Calls not your counsels; but our natural goodness
Imparts this: which,—if you (or stupified,
Or seeming so in skill) cannot, or will not,
Relish as¹⁰ truth, like us; inform yourselves,
We need no more of your advice: the matter,
The loss, the gain, the ordering on't, is all
Properly ours.

Ant. And I wish, my liege,
You had only in your silent judgment tried it,
Without more overture.

Leon. How could that be?

Either thou art most ignorant by age,
Or thou wert born a fool. Camillo's flight,
Added to their familiarity,
(Which was as gross as ever touch'd conjecture,
That lack'd sight only, nought for approbation,¹¹
But only seeing, all other circumstances
Made up to the deed) doth push on this proceeding:
Yet, for a greater confirmation,
(For, in an act of this importance, 'twere
Most piteous to be wild) I have despatch'd in post,
To sacred Delphos, to Apollo's temple,
Cleomenes and Dion, whom you know
Of stuff'd sufficiency:¹² Now from the oracle
They will bring all; whose spiritual counsel had
Shall stop, or spur me. Have I done well?

1 Lord. Well done, my lord.

Leon. Though I am satisfied, and need no more
Than what I know, yet shall the oracle
Give rest to the minds of others; such as he,
Whose ignorant credulity will not
Come up to the truth: so have we thought it good,
From our free person she should be confined;
Lest that the treachery of the two fled hence,
Be left her to perform. Come, follow us;
We are to speak in public: for this business
Will raise us all.

Ant. [Aside.] To laughter, as I take it,
If the good truth were known.

[Exeunt.]

1 *Federary.* This word, which is probably of the poet's own invention, is used for *confederate*, *accomplice*.

2 One that knows what she should be ashamed to know herself, even if the knowledge of it was shared *but with her* paramount. It is the use of *but for be-out (only)*, according to Malone that obscures the sense.

3 i. e. no foundation can be trusted.

4 'He who shall speak for her is afar off guilty, But that he speaks.⁵

He who shall speak for her is remotely guilty in merely speaking.

5 i. e. what I am now about to do.

6 Much has been said about this passage: one has thought it should be *stable-stand*; another that it means *station*. But it may be explained thus:—'If she prove

false, I'll make my stables or kennel of my wife's chamber; I'll go in couples with her like a dog, and never leave her for a moment; trust her no further than I can feel and see her.

7 'I would land-damn him.' Johnson interprets this: 'I will damn or condemn him to quit the land.'

8 *Glib* or *lib*, i. e. castrate.

9 I see and feel *my disgrace*, as you, Antigonus, *now* feel my doing this *to you*, and as *you now* see the instruments that feel, i. e. *my fingers*. Leontes must here be supposed to touch or lay hold of Antigonus.

10 The old copy reads a truth. Rowe made the correction.

11 i. e. proof.

12 i. e. of abilities more than sufficient.

["916", "WINTER'S TALE.", "Act II.", "### SCENE II. The same. The outer Room of a Prison. Enter PAULINA and Attendants.", "Paul. The keeper of the prison,—call to him;", "[Exit an Attendant.", "Let him have knowledge who I am,—Good lady!", "No court in Europe is too good for thee,", "What dost thou then in prison?—Now, good sir,", "Re-enter Attendant, with the Keeper.", "You know me, do you not?", "Keeper.", "For a worthy lady,", "And one whom I much honour.", "Paul.", "Pray you, then,", "Conduct me to the queen.", "Keep. I may not, madam; to the contrary", "I have express commandment.", "Paul.", "Here's ado,", "To lock up honesty and honour from", "The access of gentle visitors!—Is it lawful,", "Pray you, to see her women? any of them?", "Emilia?", "Keep. So please you, madam, to put", "Apart these your attendants, I shall bring", "Emilia forth.", "Paul. I pray now, call her.", "Withdraw yourselves.", "[Exeunt Attend.", "Keep.", "And, madam,", "I must be present at your conference.", "Paul. Well, be it so, pr'ythee.", "[Exit Keeper.", "Here's such ado to make no stain a stain,", "As passes colouring.", "Re-enter Keeper, with EMILIA.", "Dear gentlewoman, how fares our gracious lady?", "Emil. As well as one so great, and so forlorn,", "May hold together: On her frights and griefs", "(Which never tender lady hath borne greater),", "She is, something before her time, deliver'd.", "Paul. A boy?", "Emil.", "A daughter; and a goodly babe,", "Lusty, and like to live: the queen receives", "Much comfort in't: says, *My poor prisoner*,", "*I am innocent as you.*", "Paul.", "I dare be sworn :", "These dangerous unsafe lunes¹ o'the king! be-\nshrew them!", "He must be told on't, and he shall: the office", "Becomes a woman best; I'll take't upon me:", "If I prove honey-mouth'd, let my tongue blister;", "And never to my red-look'd anger be", "The trumpet any more:—Pray you, Emilia,", "Commend my best obedience to the queen;", "If she dares trust me with her little babe,", "I'll show't the king, and undertake to be", "Her advocate to th' loudest: We do not know", "How he may soften at the sight o'the child;", "The silence often of pure innocence", "Persuades, when speaking fails.", "Emil.", "Most worthy madam,", "Your honour, and your goodness, is so evident,", "That your free undertaking cannot miss", "A thriving issue; there is no lady living,", "So meet for this great errand: Please your ladyship", "To visit the next room, I'll presently", "Acquaint the queen of your most noble offer;", "Who, but to-day, hammer'd of this design;", "But durst not tempt a minister of honour,", "Lest she should be denied.", "Paul.", "Tell her, Emilia,", "I'll use that tongue I have: if wit flow from it,", "As boldness from my bosom, let it not be doubted", "I shall do good.", "Emil.", "Now be you blest for it!", "I'll to the queen: Please you, come something nearer.", "Keep. Madam, if't please the queen to send the\nbabe,", "I know not what I shall incur, to pass it,", "Having no warrant.", "Paul.", "You need not fear it, sir:", "1 Lunes. This word has not been found in any other English writer; but it is used in old French for *frenzy*, *lunacy*, *folly*. A similar expression occurs in The Re-venger's Tragedy, 1605.", "The child was prisoner to the womb; and is,\nBy law and process of great nature, thence\nFreed and enfranchis'd: not a party to\nThe anger of the king; nor guilty of,\nIf any be, the trespass of the queen.", "", "", "Keep. I do believe it.", "Paul.", "Do not you fear: upon\nMine honour, I will stand 'twixt you and danger.", "[Exeunt.", "### SCENE III. The same. A Room in the Palace. Enter LEONTES, ANTIGONUS, Lords, and other Attendants.", "Leon. Nor night, nor day, no rest: It is but weakness", "To bear the matter thus; mere weakness, if", "The cause were not in being;—part of the cause,", "She, the adultress;—for the harlot king", "Is quite beyond mine arm, out of the blank", "And level² of my brain, plot-proof: but she", "I can hook to me: Say, that she were gone,", "Given to the fire, a moiety of my rest", "Might come to me again.—Who's there?", "I Attend.", "My lord!", "[Advancing.", "Leon. How does the boy?", "I Attend.", "He took good rest to-night;", "'Tis hop'd his sickness is discharg'd.", "Leon.", "To see,", "His nobleness!", "Conceiving the dishonour of his mother,", "He straight declin'd, droop'd, took it deeply;", "Fasten'd and fix'd the shame on't in himself;", "Threw off his spirit, his appetite, his sleep,", "And downright languish'd.—Leave me solely:—²⁰,", "See how he fares. [Exit Attend.]—Fye, fye! no thought of him;—", "The very thought of my revenges that way", "Recoil upon me: in himself too mighty;", "And in his parties, his alliance,—Let him be,", "Until a time may serve: for present vengeance,", "Take it on her. Camillo and Polixenes", "Laugh at me; make their pastime at my sorrow:", "They should not laugh, if I could reach them; nor", "Shall she, within my power.", "Enter PAULINA, with a Child.", "1 Lord.", "You must not enter.", "Paul. Nay, rather, good your lords, be second to me.", {"

["### SCENE III.", "### WINTER'S TALE.", "317", "Ant. Lo you now, you hear!", "When she will take the rein, I let her run;\nBut she'll not stumble.", "Paul.", "Good my liege, I come,—", "And, I beseech you, hear me, who profess!", "Myself your loyal servant, your physician,", "Your most obedient counsellor; yet that dare", "Less appear so, in comforting your evils,²", "Than such as most seem yours:—I say, I come", "From your good queen.", "Leon.", "Good queen!", "Paul. Good queen, my lord, good queen: I say,\ngood queen?", "And would by combat make her good, so were I\nA man, the worst³ about you.", "Leon.", "Force her hence.", "Paul. Let him, that makes but trifles of his eyes,\nFirst hand me: on my own accord, I'll off;\nBut, first, I'll do my errand.—The good queen,\nFor she is good, hath brought you forth a daughter;\nHere 'tis; commends it to your blessing.", "[Laying down the Child.", "Leon.", "Out!", "A mankind⁴ witch? Hence with her, out o' door:\nA most intelligicing bawd!", "Paul.", "Not so:", "I am as ignorant in that, as you", "In so enticing me: and no less honest", "Than you are mad; which is enough, I'll warrant,\nAs this world does, to pass for honest.", "Leon.", "Traitors!⁵", "Will you not push her out? Give her the bastard:—\nThou dotard [To ANTIGONUS,] thou art woman-\ntir'd,⁶ unroosted", "By thy dame Partlet here:—take up the bastard;\nTake't up, I say; give't to thy crone.⁶\nPaul.", "Paul.", "For ever", "Unvenerable be thy hands, if thou", "Takest up the princess, by that forced⁷ baseness", "Which he has put upon't!", "Leon.", "He dreads his wife.", "Paul. So, I would, you did; then, 'twere past all doubt,", "You'd call your children yours.", "Leon.", "A nest of traitors!", "Ant. I am none, by this good light.", "Paul.", "Nor I; nor any,", "But one, that's here; and that's himself: for he\nThe sacred honour of himself, his queen's,\nHis hopeful son's, his babe's, betrays to slander,\nWhose sting is sharper than the sword's;⁸ and will not", "(For, as the case now stands, it is a curse", "He cannot be compell'd to't), once remove", "The root of his opinion, which is rotten,", "As ever oak, or stone, was sound.", "Leon.", "A callat,⁹", "Of boundless tongue; who late hath beat her husband,\nAnd now baits me!—This brat is none of mine;", "It is the issue of Polixenes:", "Hence with it; and, together with the dam,", "Commit them to the fire.", "Paul.", "It is yours;", "And, might we lay the old proverb to your charge,\nSo like you, 'tis the worse.—Behold, my lords,", "Although the print be little, the whole matter", "And copy of the father: eye, nose, lip,", "The trick of his frown, his forehead; nay, the valley,", "The pretty dimples of his chin, and cheek; his smiles;", "The very mould and frame of hand, nail, finger:—\nAnd, thou, good goddess nature, which hast made it", "So like to him that got it, if thou hast", "The ordering of the mind too, 'mongst all colours", "No yellow¹⁰ in't; lest she suspect, as he does,\nHer children not her husband's!", "Leon.", "A gross hag!—", "And, lozel,¹¹ thou art worthy to be hang'd,\nThat wilt not stay her tongue.", "Ant.", "Hang all the husbands", "That cannot do that feat, you'll leave yourself", "Hardly one subject.", "Leon.", "Once more, take her hence.", "Paul. A most unworthy and unnatural lord\nCan do no more.", "Leon.", "I'll have thee burn'd.", "Paul.", "I care not:", "It is a heretic that makes the fire,", "Not she which burns in't. I'll not call you tyrant;", "But this most cruel usage of your queen", "(Not able to produce more accusation", "Than your own weak-hing'd fancy) something savours", "Of tyranny, and will ignoble make you,", "Yea, scandalous to the world.", "Leon.", "On your allegiance,", "Out of the chamber with her. Were I a tyrant,", "Where were her life? she durst not call me so.", "If she did know me one. Away with her.", "Paul. I pray you, do not push me; I'll be gone.", "Look to your babe, my lord; 'tis yours: Jove send her", "A better guiding spirit!—What need these hands?—", "You, that are thus so tender o'er his follies,", "Will never do him good, not one of you.", "So, so:—Farewell; we are gone.", "Leon. 'Exit.'\nThou, traitor, hast set on thy wife to this.—", "My child? away with't!—even thou, that hast", "A heart so tender o'er it, take it hence,", "And see it instantly consum'd with fire;", "Even thou, and none but thou. Take it up straight:", "Within this hour bring me word, 'tis done", "(And by good testimony,) or I'll seize thy life,", "With what thou else call'st thine: If thou refuse,", "And wilt encounter with my wrath, say so;", "The bastard brains with these my proper hands", "Shall I dash out. Go, take it to the fire;", "For thou sett'st on thy wife.", "Ant.", "I did not, sir:", "These lords, my noble fellows, if they please,", "Can clear me in't.", "1 Lord.", "We can; my royal liege,", "He is not guilty of her coming hither.", "Leon. You are liars all.", "1 Lord. 'Beseech thy highness, give us better\ncredit:", "We have always truly serv'd you; and beseech", "So to esteem of us; And on our knees we beg", "(As recompense of our dear services,", "Past, and to come) that you do change this purpose;", "Which, being so horrible, so bloody, must", "Lead on to some foul issue: We all kneel.", "Leon. I am a feather for each wind that blows;—", "Shall I live on, to see this bastard kneel", "And call me father? Better burn it now,", "Than curse it then. But, be it; let it live:", {"bbox": [420, 1069, 713, 1086

318

WINTER'S TALE.

ACT III.

To save this bastard's life:—for 'tis a bastard,

So sure as this beard's gray,¹—what will you ad-
venture

To save this brat's life?

Ant.

Any thing, my lord,
That my ability may undergo,
And nobleness impose: at least, thus much;
I'll pawn the little blood which I have left,
To save the innocent: any thing possible.

Leon. It shall be possible: Swear by this sword,²
Thou wilt perform my bidding.

Ant.

Leon. Mark, and perform it; (seest thou?) for
the fail

Of any point in't shall not only be
Death to thyself, but to thy lewd-tongu'd wife;
Whom, for this time, we pardon. We enjoin thee,
As thou art liegeman to us, that thou carry
This female bastard hence; and that thou bear it
To some remote and desert place, quite out
Of our dominions; and that there thou leave it,
Without more mercy, to its own protection,
And favour of the climate. As by strange fortune
It came to us, I do in justice charge thee;—
On thy soul's peril, and thy body's torture,—
That thou commend it strangely to some place,³
Where chance may nurse, or end it: Take it up.
Ant. I swear to do this, though a present death
Had been more merciful.—Come on, poor babe:—
Some powerful spirit instruct the kites and ravens,
To be thy nurses! Wolves, and bears, they say,
Casting their savageness aside, have done
Like offices of pity.—Sir, be prosperous
In more than this deed doth require! and blessing,⁴
Against this cruelty, fight on thy side,
Poor thing, condemn'd to loss!⁵

Leon.

Another's issue.

1 Atten.

Please your highness, posts,
From those you sent to the oracle, are come
An hour since: Cleomenes and Dion,
Being well arrived at Delphos, are both landed,
Hasting to the court.

1 Lord.

So please you, sir, their speed
Hath been beyond account.

Leon.

Twenty-three days
They have been absent: 'Tis good speed; foretells,
The great Apollo suddenly will have
The truth of this appear. Prepare you, lords;
Summon a session, that we may arraign
Our most disloyal lady: for, as she hath
Been publicly accused, so shall she have
A just and open trial. While she lives,
My heart will be a burden to me. Leave me;
And think upon my bidding.

[Exeunt, with the Child.

No, I'll not rear

ACT III.

## SCENE I. The same. A Street in some Town.
Enter CLEOMENES and DION.

Cleo. The climate's delicate; the air most sweet;
Fertile the isle;⁶ the temple much surpassing
The common praise it bears.

Dion.

I shall report,
For most it caught me, the celestial habits
(Methinks, I should term them,) and the reverence
Of the grave wearers. O, the sacrifice!
How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly
It was! the offering!

Cleo.

But, of all, the burst

1. Leontes must mean the beard of Antigonus, which he may be supposed to touch. He himself tells us that twenty-three years ago he was unbreech'd, of course his age must be under thirty, and his own beard would hardly be gray.

2. It was anciently a practice to swear by the cross at the hilt of a sword.

3. i. e. *commit* it to some place as a stranger. To *commend* is to commit, according to the old dictionaries.

4. i. e. the favour of heaven.

5. i. e. to exposure, or to be lost or dropped.

6. Warburton has remarked that the temple of Apollo was at Delphi, which was not an island. But Shak-

And ear-deafening voice o'the oracle,

Kin to Jove's thunder, so surpris'd my sense,
That I was nothing.

Dion.

If the event o'the journey
Prove as successful to the queen,—O, be't, so.—
As it hath been to us, rare, pleasant, speedy,
The time is worth the use on't.

Cleo.

Great Apollo,
Turn all to the best! These proclamations,
So forcing faults upon Hermione,
I little like.

Dion.

The violent carriage of it
Will clear, or end, the business: When the oracle,
(Thus by Apollo's great divine seal'd up)
Shall the contents discover, something rare,
Even then will rush to knowledge.—Go,—fresh
horses:—

And gracious be the issue!

[Exeunt.]

## SCENE II. The same. A Court of Justice. LEX-
TES, Lords, and Officers, appear properly seated.

Leon. This sessions (to our great grief, we pro-
nounce)

Even pushes 'gainst our heart: The party tried,
The daughter of a king; our wife; and one
Of us too much below'd.—Let us be clear'd
Of being tyrannous; since we so openly
Proceed in justice; which shall have due course,
Even to the guilt, or the purgation.—
Produce the prisoner.

Offi. It is his highness' pleasure, that the queen
Appear in person here in court.—Silence!

HERMIONE is brought in, guarded; PAULINA and
Ladies, attending.

Leon. Read the indictment.

Offi. Hermione, queen to the worthy Leontes, king of Sicilia, thou art here accused and arraigned of high treason, in committing adultery with Polixenes, king of Bohemia; and conspiring with Camillo to take away the life of our sovereign lord and king, thy royal husband; the pretence⁹ whereof being by circumstances partly laid open, thou, Hermione, contrary to the faith and allegiance of a true subject, didst counsel and aid them, for their better safety, to fly away by night.

Her. Since what I am to say, must be but that
Which contradicts my accusation; and
The testimony on my part, no other
But what comes from myself; it shall scarce boot me
To say, *Not guilty*: mine integrity,
Being counted falsehood,¹⁰ shall, as I express it,
Be so receiv'd. But thus,—If powers divine
Behold our human actions (as they do),
I doubt not then, but innocence shall make
False accusation blush, and tyranny
Tremble at patience.—You, my lord, best know
(Who least seem to meet so do so!) my past life
Hath been as continent, as chaste, as true,
As I am now unhappy; which¹⁰ is more
Than history can pattern, though devis'd,

And play'd to take spectators: For behold me,—
A fellow of the royal bed, which owe¹¹
A moiety of the throne, a great king's daughter,
The mother to a hopeful prince—here standing
To prate and talk for life, and honour, 'fore
Who please to come and hear. For life, I prize it
As I weigh grief, which I would spare:¹² for honour,

speare little regarded geographical accuracy. He fol-
lowed Green's Dorastus and Fawnia, in which it is cal-
led the *isle* of Delphos. There was a temple of Apollo
in the isle of Delos.

7. 'The time is worth the use on't; that is, the event of our journey will recompense us for the time we spent in it.

8. i. e. the *design*. Shakspeare often uses the word for *design* or *intention*.

9. i. e. *my virtue* being accounted *wickedness*, *my* assertion of it will pass but for a *lie*. Falsehood means both *treachery* and *lie*.

10. *Which*, that is, *which unhappiness*.

11. *Own, possess.*

12. I prize my life no more than I value grief, which I would willingly spare. This sentiment, which is pro-

## SCENE II.

# WINTER'S TALE.

819

'Tis a derivative from me to mine,
And only that I stand for. I appeal
To your own conscience, sir, before Polixenes
Came to your court, how I was in your grace,
How merited to be so; since he came,
With what encounter so uncurrent I

How merited to be so; since he came,
With what encounter so uncurrent I
Have strain'd, to appear thus :¹ if one jot beyond
The bound of honour; or, in act, or will,
That way inclining; harden'd be the hearts
Of all that hear me; and my near'st of kin
Cry, Fye upon my grave!

Leon.

I ne'er heard yet,

That any of these bolder vices wanted
Less impudence to gainsay what they did,
Than to perform it first.²

Her.

That's true enough;

Though 'tis a saying, sir, not due to me.

Leon. You will not own it.

More than mistress of,

Which comes to me in name of fault, I must not
At all acknowledge. For Polixenes,
(With whom I am accus'd) I do confess,
I lov'd him, as in honour he requir'd;

Which such a kind of love, as might become
A lady like me; with a love, even such,

So, and no other, as yourself commanded :

Which not to have done, I think, had been in me
Both disobedience and ingratitude,

To you, and toward your friend; whose love had
spoke,

Even since it could speak, from an infant freely,
That it was yours. Now, for conspiracy,
I know not how it tastes; though it be dish'd

For me to try how: all I know of it,
Is, that Camillo was an honest man;

And, why he left your court, the gods themselves,
Wotting no more than I, are ignorant.

Leon. You knew of his departure, as you know

What you have underta'en to do in his absence.
Her. Sir,

You speak a language that I understand not :

My life stands in the level³ of your dreams,
Which I'll lay down.

Leon.

Your actions are my dreams;

You had a bastard by Polixenes,

And I but dream'd it:—As you were past all shame
(Those of your fact⁴ are so,) so past all truth :
Which to deny, concerns more than avails:⁵ for as
Which thy brat hath been cast out, like to itself,
No father owning it (which is, indeed,

More criminal in thee, than it,⁶ so thou

Shalt feel our justice; in whose easiest passage,

Look for no less than death.

Her.

Sir, spare your threats;

The bug,⁷ which you would fright me with, I seek.

To me can life be no commodity :

The crown and comfort of my life, your favour,
I do give lost; for I do feel it gone,

But know not how it went: My second joy,
And first-fruits of my body, from his presence
I am barr'd, like one infectious: My third comfort,
Starr'd most unluckily,

Starr'd most unluckily," is from my breast,
The innocent milk in its most innocent mouth,
Haled out to murder: Myself on every post
Proclaim'd a strumpet; with immodest hatred,
The child-bed privilege denied, which 'longs

bably derived from Ecclesiasticus, iii. 11, cannot be too

often impressed on the female mind: 'The glory of a
man is from the honour of his father; and a mother in
dishonour is a reproach to her children.'

¹ *Encounter so uncurrent is unallowed* or *unlawful meeting*.—Strain'd means swerv'd or gone astray from the line of duty.

² It is to be observed that originally in our language,
two negatives did not *affirm*, but only strengthen the
negation. Examples of similar phraseology occur in
several of our author's plays, and even in the first act of
this very drama: in this passage, Johnson observes that,
according to the present use of words, *less* should be
*more*, or *wanted* should be *had*.

³ See note 2, p. 316. To stand within the *level* of a
gun is to stand in a direct line with its mouth, and in
danger of being hurt by its discharge. This expression
often occurs in Shakspeare.

To women of all fashion :—Lastly, hurried
Here to this place, 'the open air, before
I have got strength of limit.⁸ Now, my liege,
Tell me what blessings I have here alive,
That I should fear to die? Therefore, proceed.

But yet hear this; mistake me not;—No! life,
I prize it not a straw :—but for mine honour
(Which I would free,) if I shall be condemn'd
Upon surmises; all proofs sleeping else,
But what your jealousies awake; I tell you,
'Tis rigour, and not law.—Your honours all,
I do refer me to the oracle;

Apollo be my judge.

1 Lord.

This your request

Is altogether just : therefore, bring forth,
And in Apollo's name, his oracle.

*[Exeunt certain Officers.*

Her. The emperor of Russia was my father :

O, that he were alive, and here beholding

His daughter's trial! that he did but see

The flatness⁹ of my misery; yet with eyes

Of pity, not revenge!

*Re-enter Officers with CLEOMENES and DION.*

Offi. You here shall swear upon this sword of justice,

That you, Cleomenes and Dion, have

Been both at Delphos; and from thence have brought

This seal'd-up oracle, by the hand deliver'd
Of great Apollo's priest; and that, since then,
You have not dar'd to break the holy seal,

Nor read the secrets in't.

Cleo. Dion.

All this we swear.

Leon. Break up the seals and read.

Offi. [Reads.] Hermione is chaste, Polixenes
blameless, Camillo a true subject, Leontes a jealous
tyrant, his innocent babe truly begotten; and the king
shall live without an heir, if that, which is lost, be not
found.¹⁰

Lords. Now blessed be the great Apollo!

Her.

Praised!

Leon. Hast thou read truth ?

Offi.

Ay, my Lord; even so

As it is here set down.

Leon. (There is no truth at all i'the oracle :

The sessions shall proceed; this is mere falsehood.

*Enter a Servant, hastily.*

Serv. My lord the king, the king!

Leon. What is the business ?

Serv. O sir, I shall be hated to report it;

Serv. O, I shall be hated to report it;

The prince your son, with mere conceit and fear
Of the queen's speed,¹¹ is gone.

Leon.

How! gone?

Serv.

Is dead.

Leon. Apollo's angry; and the heavens themselves

Do strike at my injustice.

*[HERMIONE faints.*

How now there ?

Paul. This news is mortal to the queen :—Look down,

And see what death is doing.

Leon.

Take her hence ;

Her heart is but o'ercharg'd; she will recover.—

I have too much believed mine own suspicion :—
'Beseech you, tenderly apply to her

4 i. e. they who have done like you. Shakspeare had
this from Dorastus and Fawnia, 'if he part to deny
such a monstrous crime, and to be impudent in forswear-
ing the fact, since she had passed all shame in commit-
ting the fault.'

5 It is your *business* to deny this charge; but the
mere denial will be useless, will prove nothing.

6 Bugbear.

7 'Starr'd most unluckily.' Ill-starred; born under
an inauspicious planet.

8 *Strength of limit*, i, e. the degree of strength which
it is customary to acquire before women are suffered to
go abroad after child-bearing.

9 'The flatness of my misery,' that is *absoluteness*,
the completeness of my misery.

10 This is almost literally from Greene's novel.

11 i. e. of the event of the queen's trial. We still say,
he sped well or ill.

["320", "WINTER'S TALE.", "ACT III.", "Some remedies for life.—Apollo, pardon", "[Exeunt PAULINA and Ladies, with HERM.", "My great profaneness 'gainst thine oracle!—\nI'll reconcile me to Polixenes;", "New woo my queen; recall the good Camillo;", "Whom I proclaim a man of truth, of mercy;", "For, being transported by my jealousies", "To bloody thoughts and to revenge, I chose\nCamillo for the minister, to poison", "My friend Polixenes: which had been done,", "But that the good mind of Camillo tardied", "My swift command, though I with death, and with\nReward, did threaten and encourage him,", "Not doing it, and being done: he, most humane,", "And fill'd with honour, to my kingly guest", "Unclasp'd my practice; quit his fortunes here,", "Which you knew great; and to the certain¹ hazard\nOf all uncertainties himself commended,²", "No richer than his honour:—How he glisters", "Thorough my rust! and how his piety", "Does my deeds make the blacker!³", "Re-enter PAULINA.", "Paul.", "Woe the while!", "O, cut my lace; lest my heart, cracking it,", "Break too!", "1 Lord. What fit is this, good lady?", "Paul. What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?", "What wheels ? racks ? fires ? What flaying ?\nboiling", "In leads or oils? what old, or newer torture", "Must I receive; whose every word deserves", "To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny", "Together working with thy jealousies,—", "Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle", "For girls of nine!—O, think, what they have done,", "And then run mad, indeed; stark mad! for all", "Thy by-gone fooleries were but spices of it.", "That thou betray'dst Polixenes, 'twas nothing;", "That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant,", "And damnable² ungrateful: nor was't much,", "Thou wouldst have poison'd good Camillo's honour,⁶", "To have him kill a king; poor trespasses,", "More monstrous standing by: whereof I reckon", "The casting forth to crows thy baby daughter,", "To be or none, or little; though a devil", "Would have shed water out of fire,⁷ ere done't:", "Nor is't directly laid to thee, the death", "Of the young prince; whose honourable thoughts", "(Thoughts high for one so tender) cleft the heart", "That could conceive a gross and foolish sire", "Blemish'd his gracious dam: this is not, no,", "Laid to thy answer: But the last,—O, lords,", "When I have said, cry, woe!—the queen, the queen,", "The sweetest, dearest, creature's dead; and ven-\ngence for't", "Not dropp'd down yet.", "1 Lord.", "The higher powers forbid!", "Paul. I say, she's dead; I'll swear't: if word,\nnor oath,", "Prevail not, go and see: if you can bring", "Tincture, or lustre, in her lip, her eye,", "Heat outwardly, or breath within, I'll serve you", "As I would do the gods.—But, O thou tyrant!", "Do not repent these things; for they are heavier", "Than all thy woes can stir; therefore betake thee", "To nothing but despair. A thousand knees", "Ten thousand years together, naked, fasting,", "Upon a barren mountain, and still winter", "In storm perpetual, could not move the gods", "To look that way thou wert.", "Leon.", "Go on, go on:", "¹ Certain is not in the first folio, it was supplied by\nthe editor of the second.", "2 See p. 318, note 3.", "3 This vehement retraction of Leontes, accompanied\nwith the confession of more crimes than he was suspect-\ned of, is agreeable to our daily experience, of the vicis-\nsitudes of violent tempers, and the eruptions of minds\noppressed with guilt.", "4 The same construction occurs in the second book of\nPhaer's version of the Æneid:", "Thou canst not speak too much; I have deserv'd\nAll tongues to talk their bitterest.", "1 Lord.", "Say no more;", "Howe'er the business goes, you have made fault\nThe boldness of your speech.", "Paul.", "I am sorry for't;", "All faults I make, when I shall come to know them,", "I do repent: Alas, I have show'd too much", "The rashness of a woman: he is touch'd", "To the noble heart.—What's gone, and what's past", "Should be past grief: Do not receive affliction", "At my petition, I beseech you; rather", "Let me be punished, that have minded you", "Of what you should forget. Now, good my liege,", "Sir, royal sir, forgive a foolish woman:", "The love I bore your queen,—lo, fool again!—", "I'll speak of her no more, nor of your children;", "I'll not remember you of my own lord,", "Who is lost too: Take your patience to you,", "And I'll say nothing.", "Leon.", "Thou didst speak but well,", "When most the truth; which I receive much better", "Than to be pitied of thee. Pr'ythee, bring me", "To the dead bodies of my queen, and son;", "One grave shall be for both; upon them shall", "The causes of their death appear, unto", "Our shame perpetual: Once a day I'll visit", "The chapel where they lie: and tears, shed there,", "Shall be my recreation: So long as", "Nature will bear up with this exercise,", "So long I daily vow to use it. Come,", "And lead me to these sorrows.", "[Exeunt.", "### SCENE III. Bohemia.\nA desert Country near the Sea. Enter ANTIGONUS, with the Child; and a Mariner.", "Ant. Thou art perfect⁸ then, our ship hath touch'd\nupon", "The deserts of Bohemia?", "Mar.", "Ay, my lord; and fear", "We have landed in ill time: the skies look grimly,", "And threaten present blusters. In my conscience,", "The heavens with that we have in hand are angry,", "And frown upon us.", "Ant. Their sacred wills be done!—Go, get aboard;\nLook to thy bark; I'll not be long, before\nI call upon thee.", "Mar. Make your best haste; and go not too\nfar i'the land; 'tis like to be loud weather,\nBesides, this place is famous for the creatures\nOf prey, that keep upon't.", "Go thou away:\nI'll follow instantly.", "Mar.", "I am glad at heart", "To be so rid o'the business.", "Ant.", "[Exit.]\nCome, poor babe:", "I have heard, (but not believ'd), the spirits of the dead", "May walk again: if such thing be, thy mother", "Appear'd to me last night; for ne'er was dream", "

## SCENE III.

## WINTER'S TALE.

521

Is counted lost for ever, Perdita,
I'p'three call't; for this ungentle business,
Put on thee by my lord, thou ne'er shall see
Thy wife Paulina more: and so, with shrieks,
She melted into air. Affrighted much,
I did in time collect myself; and thought
This was so, and no slumber. Dreams are toys:
Yet, for this once, yea, superstitiously,
I will be squar'd by this. I do believe
Hermione hath suffer'd death; and that
Apollo would, this being indeed the issue
Of king Polixenes, it should here be laid,
Either for life, or death, upon the earth
Of its right father.—Blossom, speed thee well!

[Laying down the Child.]

There lie; and there thy character:¹ there these;
[Laying down a Bundle,
Which may, if fortune please, both breed thee,
pretty,

And still rest thine.—The storm begins:—Poor
wretch,

That, for thy mother's fault, art thus expos'd
To loss, and what may follow!—Weep I cannot,
But my heart bleeds; and most accurs'd am I,
To be by oath enjoin'd to this.—Farewell!

The day frowns more and more; thou art like to have
A lullaby too rough: I never saw

The heavens so dim by day. A savage clamour!²
Well may I get aboard!—This is the chase;

I am gone for ever.

[Exit, pursued by a Bear.

### Enter an old Shepherd.

Shep. I would, there were no age between ten
and three-and-twenty; or that youth would sleep
out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but
getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry,
stealing, fighting.—Hark you now!—Would any
but those boiled brains of nineteen and two-
twenty, hunt this weather? They have scared away
two of my best sheep; which, I fear, the wolf will
somerday than the master: if any where I have
them, 'tis by the sea-side, browsing of ivy.³ Good
luck, an't be thy will! what have we here? [Taking
up the Child.] Mercy on's, a barn; a very pretty
barne! A boy, or a child,⁴ I wonder? A pretty
one; a very pretty one: Sure some scape: though
I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentle-
woman in the scape. This has been some stair-
work, some trunk-work, some behind-door work:
they were warmer that got this, than the poor thing
is here. I'll take it up for pity: yet I'll tarry till
my son come; he holla'd but even now. Whoa,
ho, hoa!

### Enter Clown.

Clo. Hilloa, loa!

Shep. What, art so near? If thou'lt see a thing
to talk on when thou art dead and rotten, come
hither. What ailst thou, man?

Clo. I have seen two such sights, by sea, and by
land;—but I am not to say, it is a sea, for it is now
the sky; betwixt the firmament and it, you cannot
thrust a bodkin's point.

Shep. Why, boy, how is it?

Clo. I would, you did but see how it chafes, how

1 i. e. description. The writing afterward discovered with Perdita.

2 'A savage clamour.' This clamour was the cry of the dogs and hunters; then seeing the bear, he cries this is the chase, i. e. the animal pursued.

3 This is from the novel. It is there said to be 'sea ivie,' on which they do greatly feed.

4 A barne. This word is still in use in the northern dialects for a child. It is supposed to be derived from born, things born seeming to answer to the Latin nati. Stevens says that he had been told ' that in some of our inland counties a child signified a female infant in contradiction to a male one? but the assertion wants confirmation, and we may rather refer this use of it to the simplicity of the shepherd.

5 i. e. *swallowed it*, as our ancient topers swallowed flap-dragons.

6 Shakspear, who knew that he himself designed Antigonus for an old man, has inadvertently given this knowledge to the shepherd, who had never seen him.

it rages, how it takes up the shore! but that's not to the point: O, the most piteous cry of the poor souls! sometimes to see 'em, and not to see 'em: now the ship boring the moon with her main-mast; and anon swallowed with yest and froth, as you'd thrust a cork into a hogshead. And then for the land service,—To see how the bear tore out his shoulder-bone! how he cried to me for help, and said, his name was Antigonus, a nobleman:—But to make an end of the ship:—to see how the sea flap-dragoned⁵ it:—but, first, how the poor souls roared, and the sea mocked them;—and how the poor gentleman roared, and the bear mocked him, both roaring louder than the sea, or weather.

Shep. 'Name of mercy, when was this, boy?

Clo. Now, now; I have not winked since I saw
these sights: the men are not yet cold under water,
nor the bear half dined on the gentleman; he's at it
now.

Shep. 'Would, I had been by, to have helped the old man!'

Clo. I would you had been by the ship side, to have helped her; there your charity would have lacked footing.

[Aside, Shep. Heavy matters! heavy matters! but look thee here, boy. Now bless thyself; thou met'st with things dying, I with things new born. Here's a sight for thee; look thee, a bearing-cloth' for a squire's child! Look thee here: take up, take up, boy; open't. So, let's see; It was told me, I should be rich, by the fairies: this is some changeing:—open't: What's within, boy?

Clo. You're a made⁹ old man; if the sins of your youth are forgiven you, you're well to live. Gold! all gold!

Shep. This is fairy gold, boy, and 'twill prove so: up with it, keep it close; home, home, the next¹⁰ way. We are lucky, boy; and to be so still, requires nothing but secrecy,—Let my sheep go:—
Come, good boy, the next way home.

Clo. Go you the next way with your findings; I'll go see if the bear be gone from the gentleman, and how much he hath eaten: they are never curst,¹¹ but when they are hungry: if there be any of him left, I'll bury it.

Shep. That's a good deed; If thou may'st discern by that which is left of him, what he is, fetch me to the sight of him.

Clo. Marry, will I: and you shall help to put him in'the ground.

Shep. 'Tis a lucky day, boy; and we'll do good deeds on't.

[Eweunt.]

## ACT IV.

### Enter Time, as Chorus.

Time. I,—that please some, try all; both joy
and terror,

Of good and bad; that make, and unfold error,¹²—
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime,
To me, or my swift passage, that I slide
O'er sixteen years,¹³ and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap;¹⁴ since it is in my power

7 A bearing-cloth, is the mantle of fine cloth, in which a child was carried to be baptized.

8 A changeling. Some child left behind by the fairies, in the room of one which they had stolen.

9 The old copies read mad. The emendation is Theobald's.

10 i. e. nearest.

11 *Curst here signifies mischievous.* The old adage says, *Curst cows have short horns.*

12 *Departed time renders many facts obscure, and in that sense is the cause of error. Time to come brings discoveries with it.*

13 It is certain that Shakspeare was well acquainted with the laws of the drama, as they are called, but disregarded, may wilfully departed from them, and 'snatch'd' a grace beyond the reach of art.' His productions are not therefore to be tried by such laws.

14 i. e. leave unexamined the progress of the intermediate time which filled up the gap in Perdita's story, The reasoning of Time is not very clear; he seems to

41

322

WINTER'S TALE.

ACT IV.

To o'erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o'erheiml custom: Let me pass
The same I am, ere ancient'st order was,
Or what is now received: I witness to
The times that brought them in; so shall I do
To the freshest things now reigning: and make stale
The glistering of this present, as my tale
Now seems to it. Your patience this allowing,
I turn my glass; and give my scene such growing,
As you had slept between. Leontes leaving
The effects of his fond jealousies; so grieving,
That he shuts up himself; imagine me,¹
Gentle spectators, that I now may be
In fair Bohemia; and remember well,
I mentioned a son o' the king's, which Florizel
I now name to you; and with speed so pace
To speak of Perdita, now grown in grace
Equal with wond'ring: What of her ensues,
I list not prophesy; but let Time's news
Be known, when 'tis brought forth:---a shepherd's
daughter,
And what to her adheres, which follows after,
Is the argument² of time: Of this allow,³
If ever you have spent time worse ere now;
If never yet, that Time himself doth say,
He wishes earnestly you never may.
[Exit.]

### SCENE I.
The same. A Room in the Palace of Polixenes. Enter POLIXENES and CAMILLO.

Pol. I pray thee, good Camillo, be no more im-
portunate: 'tis a sickness, denying thee any thing;
a death, to grant this.

Cam. It is fifteen⁴ years, since I saw my country:
though I have, for the most part, been aired abroad,
I desire to lay my bones there. Besides, the peni-
tent king, my master, hath sent for me: to whose
feeling sorrows I might be some allay, or I o'er-
ween to think so; which is another spur to my
departure.

Pol. As thou lovest me, Camillo, wipe not out
the rest of thy services, by leaving me now:
the need I have of thee, thine own goodness hath made;
better not to have had thee, than thus to want thee:
thou, having made me businesses, which none without-
out thee can sufficiently manage, must either stay
to execute them thyself, or take away with thee the
very services thou hast done: which if I have not
enough considered, (as too much I cannot,) to be
more thankful to thee, shall be my study; and my
profit therein, the heaping friendships.⁵ Of that
fatal country, Sicilia, pr'ythee speak no more: whose
very naming punishes me with the remembrance of
that penitent, as thou call'st him, and reconciled
king, my brother: whose loss of his most precious
queen and children, are even now to be afresh la-
mented. Say to me, when saw'st thou the prince
Florizel, my son ? Kings are no less unhappy, their
issue not being gracious, than they are in losing them,
when they have approved their virtues.

Cam. Sir, it is three days since I saw the prince:
What his happier affairs may be, are to me un-
known: but I have missingly noted,⁶ he is of late
much retired from court; and is less frequent to his
princely exercises, than formerly he hath appeared.

Pol. I have considered so much, Camillo; and

mean, that he who overthrows every thing, and makes
as well as overwhelms custom, may surely infringe the
laws of custom as they are made by him.

1. i. e. imagine with me. It is a French idiom which Shakspeare has played upon in the Taming of the Shrew.

2. Argument, subject.

3. i. e. approve.

4. It should be *sixteen*, as Time has just stated, and future passages have it.

5. Heaping friendships, friendly offices.

6. Missingly noted, observed at intervals.

7. Angle is here used for the bait, or line and hook,
that draws his son like a fish away.

8. Autolycus was the son of Mercury, and as famous for all the arts of fraud and thievery as his father.

9. i. e. 'the red, the *springing* blood now reigns over the *parts* lately under the *dominion* of winter.' A *pale* was a division, a place set apart from another, as the English *pale*, the *pale* of the church. The words *pale*

with some care; so far, that I have eyes under my
service, which look upon his removedness; from
whom I have this intelligence; That he is seldom
from the house of a most homely shepherd; a man,
they say, that from very nothing, and beyond the
imagination of his neighbours, is grown into an un-
speakable estate.

Cam. I have heard, sir, of such a man, who hath
a daughter of most rare note: the report of her is
extended more than can be thought to begin from
such a cottage.

Pol. That's likewise part of my intelligence.
But, I fear the angle' that plucks our son thither.
Thou shall accompany us to the place: where we
will, not appearing what are, have some ques-
tion with the shepherd; from whose simplicity, I
think it not uneasy to get the cause of my son's
resort thither. Pr'ythee, be my present partner in
this business, and lay aside the thoughts of Sicilia.

Cam. I willingly obey your command.

Pol. My best Camillo!¹—We must disguise our-
selves.

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II.
The same. A Road near the Shep-
herd's Cottage. Enter AUTOLYCUS,⁸ singing.

When daffodils begin to peer,

With heigh! the dozy over the dale,—

Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year;

For the red blood reigns in the winter's pale.⁹

The white sheet bleaching on the hedge,

With, hey! the sweet birds, O, how they sing!—

Doth set my pugging¹⁰ tooth on edge;

For a quart of ale is a dish for a king.

The lark, that tirra-lirra chants,

With, hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay:—

Are summer songs for me and my aunts,¹¹

While we lie tumbling in the hay.

I have served Prince Florizel, and, in my time,
were three-pile;¹² but now I am out of service.

But shall I go mourn, for that my dear ?

The pale moon shines by night:

And when I wander here and there,

I then do most go right.

If tinkers may have leave to live,

And bear the sow-skin budget;

Then my account I well may give.

And in the stocks avouch it.

My traffic is sheets; when the kite builds, look to
lesser linen.¹³ My father named me Autolycus;
who, being, as I am, littered under Mercury, was
likewise a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles: With
die, and drab, I purchased this caparison; and my
revenue is the silly cheat.¹⁴ Gallows, and knock, are
too powerful on the highway: beating, and hang-
ing, are terrors to me; for the life to come, I sleep
out the thought of it.—A prize! a prize!

Enter Clown.

Clo. Let me see;—Every 'leven weather—tods;¹⁵
every tod yields—pound and odd shilling; fifteen
hundred shorn,—What comes the wool to?

Aut. If the springe hold, the cock's mine.

Clo. I cannot do't without counters.¹⁶—Let me
see; what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast?
Three pound of sugar; five pound of currants; rice

[Aside.]

and red were used for the sake of the antithesis. The
glow of spring reigns over the *paleness* of winter.

10. A puggard was a cant name for some kind of thief.

11. *Junt* was a cant word for a *baved* or *trull*.

12. i. e. rich velvet, so called.

13. Autolycus means that his practice was to steal sheets; leaving the smaller linen to be carried away by the kites, who will sometimes carry it off to line their nests.

14. The silly cheat is one of the slang terms belonging to *coney-catching* or *thievery*. It is supposed to have meant *picking of pockets*.

15. Every eleven sheep will produce a tod or twenty-eight pounds of wool. The price of a tod of wool was about 20 or 22s. in 1551.

16. Counters were circular pieces of base metal, anciently used by the illiterate to adjust their reckonings.

## SCENE II.

WINTER'S TALE.

323

—What will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on. She hath made me four-and twenty nosegays for the shearers: three-man song-men¹ all, and very good ones; but they are most of them means² and bases: but one Puritan amongst them, and he sings psalms to hornpipes. I must have saffron,³ to colour the warden pies;⁴ mace,—dates,—none; that's out of my note: nut-megs, seven; a race, or two, of ginger; but that I may beg;—four pound of prunes, and as many of raisins o' the sun.

Aut. O, that ever I was born!

[Grovelling on the ground.]

Clo. I the name of me,

Aut. O, help me, help me! pluck but off these rags; and then, death, death!

Clo. Alack, poor soul! thou hast need of more rags to lay on thee, rather than have these off.

Aut. O sir, the loathsomeness of them offends me more than the stripes I have received; which are mighty ones and millions.

Clo. Alas, poor man! a million of beating may come to a great matter.

Aut. I am robbed, sir, and beaten; my money and apparel ta'en from me, and these detestable things put upon me.

Clo. What, by a horse-man, or a foot-man?

Aut. A foot-man, sweet sir, a foot-man.

Clo. Indeed, he should be a footman, by the garments he hath left with thee; if this be a horse-man's coat, it hath seen very hot service. Lend me thy hand, I'll help thee: come, lend me thy hand. [Helping him up.

Aut. O! good sir, tenderly, oh!

Clo. Alas, poor soul!

Aut. O, good sir, sofely, good sir: I fear, sir, my shoulder-blade is out.

Clo. How now? can stand?

Aut. Sofely, dear sir; [picks his pocket] good sir, sofely: you ha' done me a charitable office.

Clo. Dost-lack any money? I have a little money for thee.

Aut. No, good sweet sir; no, I beseech you, sir; I have a kinsman not past three quarters of a mile hence, unto whom I was going; I shall there have money, or any thing I want: Offer me no money, I pray you; that kills my heart.

Clo. What manner of fellow was he that robbed you?

Aut. A fellow, sir, that I have known to go about with trol-my dames;⁵ I knew him once a servant of the prince; I cannot tell, good sir, for which of his virtues it was, but he was certainly whipped out of the court.

Clo. His vices, you would say; there's no virtue whipped out of the court: they cherish it, to make it stay there; and yet it will no more but abide.

Aut. Vices. I would say, sir. I know this man well: he hath been since an ape-bearer; then a processerver, a bailiff; then he compassed a motion⁶ of the prodical son, and married a tinker's

wife within a mile where my land and living lies; and, having flown over many knavish professions, he settled only in rogue: some call him Autolycus.

Clo. Out upon him! Prig,⁸ for my life, prig: he haunts wakes, fairs, and bear-batings.

Aut. Very true, sir, he sir, he; that's the rogue, that put me into this apparel.

Clo. Not a more cowardly rogue in all Bohemia; if you had but looked big, and spat at him, he'd have run.

Aut. I must confess to you, sir, I am no fighter: I am false of heart that way; and that he knew, I warrant him.

Clo. How do you now?

Aut. Sweet sir, much better than I was; I can stand, and walk: I will even take my leave of you, and pace softly towards my kinsman's.

Clo. Shall I bring thee on the way?

Aut. No, good-faced sir: no, sweet sir.

Clo. Then fare thee well; I must go buy spices for our sheep-shearing.

Aut. Prosper you, sweet sir!—[Exit Clown.] Your purse is not hot enough to purchase your spice. I'll be with you at your sheep-shearing too: If I make not this cheat bring out another, and the shearers prove sheep, let me be unrolled,⁹ and my name put in the book of virtue!

Jog on, jog on, the foot-path way,
And merriest hent¹⁰ the stile-a:

A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad tires in a mile-a.

[Ext.]

## SCENE III. The same. A Shepherd's Cottage.
Enter FLORIZEL and PERDITA.

Flo. These your unusual weeds to each part of you.

Do give a life: no shepherdess, but Flora, Peering in April's front. This your sheep-shearing is as a meeting of the petty gods, And you the queen on't.

Per.

Sir, my gracious lord, To chide at your extremes,¹¹ it not becomes me; O, pardon, that I name them: your high self, The gracious mark¹² o' the land, you have obscur'd With a swain's wearing; and me, poor lowly maid, Most goddesslike prank'd up: But that our feasts In every mess have folly, and the feeders Digest it with a custom, I should blush To see you so attired; sworn, I think, To show myself a glass.¹³

Flo.

I bless the time, When my good falcon made her flight across Thy father's ground.

Per.

Now Jove afford you cause! To me, the difference¹⁴ forges dread; your greatness

Hath not been used to fear. Even now I tremble

To think, your father, by some accident, Should pass this way, as you did: O, the fates! How would he look, to see his work, so noble, Vilely bound up?¹⁵ What would he say? Or how Should I, in these my borrow'd flaunts, behold The sternness of his presence?

1 i. e. singers of catches in three parts.

2 Means are tenors.

3 Wardens are a large sort of pear, called in French Poires de Garde, because, being a late hard pear, they may be kept very long. It is said that their name is derived from the Anglo Saxon wearden, to preserve. They are now called baking-pears, and are generally coloured with cochineal instead of saffron, as of old.

4 Dame Quickly, speaking of Falstaff, says:—'the king having killed his heart.'

5 'Trol-my dames.' The old English title of this game was pigeon-holes; as the arches in the board through which the balls are to be rolled resemble the cavities made for pigeons in a dove-house.

6 'Abide,' only sojourn, or dwell for a time.

7 He compassed a motion, &c.; he obtained a pup-pet-show, &c.

8 Prig, another cant phrase for the order of thieves. Harman in his Caveat for Cursetor, 1573, calls a horse-stealer 'a prigger of prancers; for prigge in their language is to steale.'

9 I.e. dismissed from the society of rogues.

10 To hent the stile is to take the stile. It comes from the Saxon hentan.

11 i. e. the extravagance of his conduct in disguising himself in shepherd's clothes, while he pranked her up most goddesslike.

12 The gracious mark of the land is the object of all men's notice and expectation.

13 'To show myself a glass,' She probably means, that the prince, by the rustic habit he wears, seems as if he had sworn to show her as in a glass how she ought to be dressed, instead of being so goddesslike prank'd up. And were it not for the licence and folly which custom had made familiar at such feasts, as that of

sheep-shearing, when mimetic sports were allowable, she should blush to see him so attired.
14 Meaning the difference between his rank and hers.

15 'Vilely bound up.' This was a metaphor natural enough to a writer, though not exactly suitable in the mouth of Perdita. Shakspeare has repeated it more than once in Romeo and Juliet.

324

WINTER'S TALE.

ACT IV.

Flö.

Apprehend

Nothing but jollity. The gods themselves,
Humbling their deities to love, have taken
The shapes of beasts upon them:¹ Jupiter
Became a bull, and bellow'd; the green Neptune
A ram, and bleated; and the fire-rob'd god,
Golden Apollo, a poor humble swain,
As I seem now: Their transformations
Were never for a piece of beauty rarer;
Nor in a way so chaste: since my desires
Run not before mine honour; nor my lusts
Burn hotter than my faith.

Per.

O but, dear² sir,

Your resolution cannot hold, when 'tis
Oppos'd, as it must be, by the power o' the king:
One of these two must be necessities,

Which then will speak; that you must change this
purpose,

Or I my life.

Flö.

Thou dearest Perdita,

With these forc'd³ thoughts, I pry'thee, darken not
The mirth o' the feast: Or I'll be thine, my fair,
Or not my father's: for I cannot be
Mine own, nor anything to any, if

I be not thing : to this I am most constant,
Though destiny say, no. Be merry, gentle;
Strangle such thoughts as these, with any thing
That you behold the while. Your guests are coming:

Lift up your countenance; as it were the day
Of celebration of that nuptial, which

We two have sworn shall come.

Per.

O lady fortune,

Stand you auspicious !

Enter Shepherd, with POLIXENES and CAMILLO,
disguised; Clown, MOPSA, DORCAS, and others.

Flö.

See, your guests approach :

Address yourself to entertain them sprightly,
And let's be red with mirth.

Shep. Fye, daughter ! when my old wife liv'd, upon
This day, she was both pantler, butler, cook ;

Both dame and servant: welcom' all: serv'd all:
Would sing her song, and dance her turn : now here,
At upper end o' the table, now i' the middle ;

On his shoulder, and his; her face o' fire

With labour; and the thing she took to quench it,
She would to each one sip: You are retired,

As if you were a feasted one, and not

The hostess of the meeting: Pray you, bid

These unknown friends to us welcome: for it is

A way to make us better friends, more known.

Come, quench your blushes ; and present yourself

That which you are, mistress o' the feast: Come on,

And bid us welcome to your sheep-shearing,

As your good flock shall prosper.

Per

Welcome, sir! [To Pol.

It is my father's will I should take on me

The hostessship o' the day :—You're welcome, sir !
[To CAMILLO.

Give me those flowers there, Dorcas.—Reverend
sirs.

For you there's rosemary, and rue; these keep

1 This speech is almost literally taken from the
novel.

2 *Dear* is wanting in the oldest copy.

3 i. e. far-fetched, not arising from present objects.

4 i. e. appearance and smell. *Rue*, being used in ex-
orcisms, was called *herb of grace*, and *rosemary* was
supposed to strengthen the *memory*, it is prescribed for
that purpose in the ancient herbals. Ophelia distributes
the same plants with the same attributes.

5 *For* again in the sense of *cause*.

6 Surely there is no reference here to the impracticable pretence of producing flowers by art to rival those of nature, as Steevens supposed. The allusion is to the common practice of producing by art particular varieties of colours on flowers, especially on carnations.

7 In the folio edition it is spelt *Gillyvors*. Gelofer or gillofer was the old name for the whole class of carnations, pinks, and sweetwilliams; from the French *giroule*. There were also stock-gelofer:s, and wall-gelofer:s. The variegated gilli flowers or *carnations*, being considered as a produce of art, were properly called *nature's bastards*, and being streaked with white and red, Perdita considers them a proper emblem of a *painted* or immodest woman; and therefore declines to meddle with them.

Seeming, and savour,⁴ all the winter long:
Grace, and remembrance, be to you both,
And welcome to our shearing !

Pol.

Shepherdess,

(A fair one are you,) well you fit our ages
With flowers of winter.

Per.

Sir, the year growing ancient,—
Not yet on summer's death, nor on the growing
Of trembling winter,—the fairest flowers o'the season
Are our carnations, and streak'd gilli flowers,
Which some call nature's bastards: of that kind
Our rustic garden's barren; and I care not
To get slips of them.

Pol.

Wherefore, gentle maiden,

Do you neglect them ?

Per.

For⁶ I have heard it said,

There is an art,⁶ which, in their piedness, shares
With great creating nature.

Pol.

S

Yet nature is made better by no mean,
But nature makes that mean: so, o'er that art,
Which, you say, adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes. You see, sweet maid, we marry
A gentler scion to the wildest stock;
And make conceive a bark of baser kind
By bud of nobler race; that is an art
Which does mend nature,—change it rather: but
The art itself is nature.

Per.

So it is,

Pol. Then make your garden rich in gilli flowers,¹
And do not call them bastards.

Per.

I'll not put

The dibble in earth to set one slip of them :

No more than, were I painted, I would wish

This youth should say, 'twere well: and only there-

fore

Desire to breed by me.—Here's flowers for you;

Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram;

The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun,

And with him rises weeping;⁸ these are flowers

Of middle summer, and, I think, they are given

To men of middle age: You are very welcome.

Cam. I should leave grazing, were I of your flock,
And only live by gazing.

Per.

Out, alas !

You'd be so lean, that blasts of January

Would blow you through and through,—Now, my

 fairest friend,

I would, I had some flowers o' the spring, that might

Become your time of day; and yours; and yours;

That wear upon your virgin branches yet

Your maidenheads growing:—O Proserpina,

For the flowers now, that, frightened, thou let's fall
From Dis's⁹ waggon! daffodils,

That come before the swallow dares, and take

The winds of March with beauty; violets, dim,

But than the lids of Juno's eyes,¹⁰

Or Cytherea's breath; pale primroses,

That die unmarried,¹¹ ere they can behold

She connects the gardener's art of varying the colours
of these flowers with the art of painting the face, a f-
shion very prevalent in Shakespeare's time. This is
Mr. Douce's very ingenious solution of this riddle,
which had embarrassed Mr. Steevens.

8 'Some call it *sponsus solis*, the spowse of the sunne,
because it sleeps and is awakened with him.'—*Lupton's
Notable Things*, book vi.

9 See Ovid's *Metam. b. v.*—

Collect flores tunicis cedere remissis;

or the whole passage as translated by Golding, and given
in the *Variatrum* Shakespeare.

10 Johnson had not sufficient imagination to compre-
hend this exquisite passage, he thought that the poet had
mistaken Juno for Pallas, and says, that 'sweeter than
an eyelid is an odd image'. But the eyes of Juno were
as remarkable as those of Pallas, and

'—of a beauty never yet

Equalled in height of tincture.

The beauties of Greece and other Asiatic nations tinged
their eyelids of an obscure violet colour by means of
some unguent, which was doubtless perfumed like those
for the hair, &c. mentioned by Atheneus.

11 Perhaps the true explanation of this passage may
be deduced from the subjoined verses in the original

## SCENE III.

WINTER'S TALE.

325

Bright Phoebus in his strength, a malady
Most incident to maidens; bold oxlips, and
The crown-imperial; lilies of all kinds,
The flower-de-luce being one! O, these I lack,
To make you garlands of; and, my sweet friend,
To strew him o'er and o'er.

Flor.

What? like a corse ?

Per. No, like a bank, for love to lie and play on; Not like a corse: or if,—not to be buried, But quick, and in mine arms. Come, take your flowers :

Methinks, I play as I have seen them do
In Whitsun' pastorals: sure, this robe of mine

Does change my disposition.

Flor.

What you do,

Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet,
I'd have you do it ever: when you sing,
I'd have you buy and sell so; so give alms;
Pray so; and for the ordering your affairs,

To sing them too: When you do dance, I wish you
A wave o' the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so, and own
No other function: Each your doing,

So singular in each particular,

Crowns what you are doing in the present deeds,
That all your acts are queens.

Per.

O Doricles,

Your praises are too large: but that your youth,
And the true blood, which fairly peeps through it,¹
Do plainly give you out an unstain'd shepherd,
With wisdom I might fear, my Doricles,
You woo'd me the false way.

Flor.

I think, you have

As little skill to fear,² I have purpose.

To put you to't.—But, come, our dance, I pray :

Your hand, my Perdita: so turtles pair,

That never mean to part.

Per.

I'll swear for 'em.³

Pol. This is the prettiest low-born lass, that ever
Ran on the green-sward: nothing she does, or seems,
But smacks of something greater than herself;
Too noble for this place.

Cam.

He tells her something,
That makes her blood look out: Good sooth, she is
The queen of curds and cream.

Clo.

Come on, strike up.

Dor. Mopsa must be your mistress: marry, garlic,
To mend your kissing with.

Mop.

Now, in good time !

Clo. Not a word, a word; we stand upon our manners.⁴

Come, strike up.

[Music.]

Here a dance of Shepherds and Shepherdesses.

Pol. Pray, good shepherd, what

Fair swain is this, which dances with your daughter?

Shep. They call him Doricles, and he boasts himself
To have a worthy feeding:⁵ but I have it

Upon his own design, and I believe it;

He looks like sooth:⁶ He says he loves my daughter;

edition of Milton's Lycidas, which he subsequently omitted, and altered the epithet *unwedded* to *forsaken* in the preceding line:

> 'Bring the rathe primrose that unwedded dies,
> Colouring the pale cheek of unenjoy'd love.'

Every reader will see that the 'texture and sentiments' are derived from Shakspeare; and it serves as a beautiful illustration of his meaning.

1. Thus Marlow in his Hero and Leander:—
'Through whose white skin softer than soundest sleep,
With damask eyes the ruby blood dath peep.'

2 i. e. you as little *knove* how to fear that I am false, as, &c.

3 Johnson would transfer this speech to the king, and Ritson would read 'swear for one.' Mr. Douce has justly observed that no change is necessary. It is no more than a common phrase of acquiescence, like 'I'll warrant you.'

4 i. e. we are now on our good behaviour.

5 A valuable tract of pasturage.

6 Truth.

7 That is *dexterously*, *nimblly*.

8 The trade of milliner was formerly carried on by men exclusively.

9 'With a hie *dildo* dill, and a *dildo* dee,' is the bur-

I think so too; for never gaz'd the moon
Upon the water, as he'll stand, and read,
As 'twere, my daughter's eyes: and, to be plain,
I think, there is not half a kiss to choose,
Who loves another best.

Pol.

She dances feately.⁷

Shep. So she does any thing; though I report it,
That should be silent: if young Doricles
Do light upon her, she shall bring him that
Which he not dreams of.

### Enter a Servant.

Serv. O master, if you did but hear the pedler at the door, you would never dance again after a tabor and pipe; no, the bagpipe could not move you: he sings several tunes, faster than you'll tell money; he utters them as he had eaten ballads, and all men's ears grew to his tunes.

Clo. He could never come better; he shall come in: I love a ballad but even too well; if it be doleful matter, merrily set down, or a very pleasant thing indeed, and sung lamentably.

Serv. He hath songs, for man, or woman, of all sizes; no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves;⁸ he has the prettiest love-songs for maids; so without bawdry, which is strange; with such delicate burdens of *dildos* and *fadings*;⁹ *jump her* and thump her; and where some stretch-mouth'd rascal would, as it were, mean mischief, and break a foul gap into the matter, he makes the maid to answer, *Whoop, do me no harm, good man;* puts him off, slightes him, with *Whoop, do me no harm, good man*.¹⁰

Pol. This is a brave fellow.

Clo. Believe me thou talkest of an admirable conceited fellow. Has he any unbraided wares?¹¹

Serv. He hath ribbands of all the colours 't'rainbow; points,¹² more than all the lawyers in Bohemia can learnedly handle, though they come to him by the gross; inkles,¹³ caddisses,¹⁴ cambrics, lawns: why, he sings them over, as they were gods or goddesses; you would think, a smock were a she-angel; he so chants to the sleeve-hand,¹⁵ and the work about the square on't.¹⁶

Clo. Pr'ythee, bring him in; and let him approach singing.

Per. Forewarn him, that he use no scurrilous words in his tunes.

Clo. You have of these pedlers, that have more 'em than you'd think, sister.

Per. Ay, good brother, or go about to think.

### Enter AUTOLYCUS, singing.

Lawn, as white as driven snow;
Cyprus, black as e'er was crow;
Gloves, as sweet as damask roses;
Masks for faces, and for noses;
Bugle-bracelet, necklace-amber;
Perfume for a lady's chamber;¹⁷
Golden quifs, and stomachers;
For my lads to give their dears;
Pins, and poking-sticks of steel,¹⁸
What maids tack from head to heel :

den of an old ballad or two. *Fading* is also another burden to a ballad found in Shirley's Bird in a Cage; and perhaps to others. It is also the name given to an Irish dance, probably from *fédan*, I whistle, as it was danced to the pipes.

10 This was also the burden of an old ballad,

11 i. e. *undamaged wares*, true and good. This word has sadly perplexed the commentators, who have all left the reader in the dark as to the true meaning. The quotation by Steevens from 'Any Thing for a Quiet Life' ought to have led to a right explanation:—' She says that you sent *ware* which is not warrantable, *braided ware*, and that you give not London measure.'

12 *Points*, upon which lies the quibble, were laces with tages.

13 A kind of tape.

14 A kind of ferret or worsted lace.

15 *Sleeve-hand*, the cuffs, or wristband.

16 The work about the bosom of it.

17 *Amber*, of which necklaces were made fit to perfume a lady's chamber.

18 These *poking-sticks* are described by Stubbes in his

326

WINTER'S TALE.

Come, buy of me, come; come buy, come buy;

Buy, lads, or else your lasses cry;

Come buy, &c.

Clo. If I were not in love with Mopsa, thou shouldst take no money of me; but being enthralld' as I am, it will also be the bondage of certain r bands and gloves.

Mop. I was promis'd them against the feast; but they come not too late now.

Dor. He hath promised you more than that, or there be liars.

Mop. He hath paid you all he promised you: may be, he has paid you more; which will shame you to give him again.

Clo. Is there no manners left among maids? will they wear their plackets, where they should bear their faces? Is there not milking-time, when you are going to bed, or kiln-hole,¹ to whistle off these secrets; but you must be title-tattling before all our guests? ²Tis well, they are whispering: Clamour your tongues,² and not a word more.

Mop. I have done. Come, you promised me a tawdry lace,³ and a pair of sweet gloves.⁴

Clo. Have I not told thee, how I was cozened by the way, and lost all my money?

Aut. And, indeed, sir, there are cozeners abroad; therefore it behooves men to be wary.

Clo. Fear not thou man, thou shall lose nothing here.

Aut. I hope so, sir; for I have about me many parcels of charge.

Clo. What hast here? ballads?

Mop. 'Pray now, buy some: I love a ballad in print, a'-life; for then we are sure they are true.

Aut. Here's one to a very doleful tune, How a usurper's wife was brought to bed of twenty money-bags at a burden; and how she longed to eat adders' heads, and toads carbonadoed.

Mop. Is it true, think you ?

Aut. Very true; and but a month old.

Dor. Bless me from marrying a usurer !

Aut. Here's the midwife's name to't, one mistress Taleporter; and five or six honest wives', that were present: Why should I carry lies abroad?

Mop. 'Pray you now, buy it.

Clo. Come on, lay it by: And let's first see more ballads; we'll buy the other things anon.

Aut. Here's another ballad, of a fish, that appeared upon the coast, on Wednesday the fourscore of April, forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad against the hard hearts of maids: it was thought, she was a woman, and was turned into a cold fish, for she would not exchange flesh with one that loved her: The ballad is very pitiful and as true.⁵

Dor. Is it true, think you ?

Aut. Five justices' hands at it; and witnesses, more than my pack will hold.

Clo. Lay it by too: another.

Anatomie of Abuses, Part ii.—'They be made of yron and steelie, and some of brasse, kept as bright as silver, yea, some of silver itselfe; and it is well, if in processe of time, they grow not to be of gold. The fashion whereafter they be made, I cannot resemble to any thing so well as to a squirt or a little squibbe, which little children used to squirt water out withal; and when they come to starching and setting off their ruffes, then must this instrument be heated in the fire, the better to stiffen the ruff.' Stowe informs us that 'about the sixteenth year of the queene (Elizabeth) began the making of steelie paking-sticks, and until that time all lawn-dresses used setting sticks made of wood or bone.⁶

1 The kiln-hole generally means the fireplace for drying malt; still a noted gossiping place.

2 An expression taken from bell-ringing; now con- tracted to clam. The bells are said to be clammed, when, after a course of rounds or changes, they are all pulled off at once, and give a general clash or clam, by which the peal is concluded. As this clam is succeeded by a silence, it exactly suits the sense of the passage.—Nares.

3 A tawdry lace was a sort of necklace worn by coun- try wenches; so named after St. Audrey (Ethelreda) who is said to have died of a swelling in her throat, which she considered as a particular judgment, for

ACT IV.

Aut. This is a merry ballad; but a very pretty one.

Mop. Let's have some merry ones.

Aut. Why, this is a passing merry one; and goes to the tune of, 'Two maids wooing a man: there's scarce a maid westward, but she sings it; 'is in request, I can tell you.'

Mop. We can both sing it; if thou'lt bear a part, thou shall hear; 'is in three parts.

Dor. We had the tune late a month ago.

Aut. I can bear my part; you must know, 'is my occupation: have at it with you.

### SONG.

A. Get you hence, for I must go;

Where, it fits you not to know.

D. Whither? M. O, whither? D. Whither?

M. It becomes thy oath full well,

Thou, above thy secrets tell:

D. Me too, let me go thither.

M. Or thou go'st to the grange, or mill;

D. If to either, thou dost ill.

A. Neither. D. What, neither? A. Neither.

D. Thou hast sworn my love to be:

M. Thou hast sworn it more to me;

Then, whither go'st? say, whither?

Clo. We'll have this song out anon by ourselves: My father and the gentleman are in sad⁶ talk, and we'll not trouble them: Come, bring away thy pack after me. Wenches, I'll buy for you both: —Peder, let's have the first choice.—Follow me, girls.

Aut. And you shall pay well for 'em.

[Aside.

Will you buy any tape, or lace for your capé?

My dainty duck, my dear-a?

Any silk, any thread,

Any toys for your head,

Of the new'st, and fin'st, fin'st wear-a?

Come to the pedler;

Money's a medler,

That doth utter⁷ all men's ware-a.

[Exeunt Clown, AUT. DORC. and MOPSa.

Enter a Servant.

Serv. Master, there is three carters, three shepherds, three neat-herds, three swine-herds, that have made themselves all men of hair;⁸ they call themselves salifiers:⁹ and they have a dance which the wenches say is a gallinaufry of gambols, because they are not in't; but they themselves are of the mind, (if it be not too rough for some, that know little but bowling.)—It will please plentifully,

Shep. Away! 'we'll none on't; here has been too much homely foolery already:—I know, sir, we exchange you.

Pol. You weary those that refresh us: 'Pray, let's see these four threes of herdsmen.

Serv. One three of them, by their own report, sir, hath danced before the king; and not the worst of

having been in her youth much addicted to wearing fine necklaces; or it probably implies that they were bought at the fair of St. Audrey, where gay toys of all sorts were sold. This fair was held in the Isle of Ely on the Saint's day, the 17th of October; Harpsfield, who tells the story of the saint, describes the necklace:—' Solent Anglia nostræ mulieres torquem quendam, extenui et subtili serica confecut, collo gestare quam Ethelreda torquem appellamus (tawdry lace) forsan in ejus quod diximus memoriam.'—*Hist. Eccles. Angl.* p. 86.

4 Sweet, or perfumed gloves, are often mentioned by Shakspeare; they were very much esteemed, and a frequent present in the poet's time.

5 All extraordinary events were then turned into ballads. In 1604 was entered on the Stationers' books—'A strange report of a monstrous, fish that appeared in the form of a woman from her waist upward.' To this it is highly probable that Shakspeare alludes.

6 I. e. serious.

7 'A sale or utterance of ware. Exactus.'—Baret.

8 It is most probable that they were dressed in goat-skins. A dance of satyrs was no unusual entertainment in Shakspeare's time, or even at an earlier period. A very curious relation of a disquising or mummery of this kind, which had like to have proved fatal to some of the actors in it, is related by Froissart as occurring in the court of France in 1392.

9 Satyrs.

["SCENE III.", "WINTER'S TALE.", "327", "the three, but jumps twelve foot and a half by the\nsquire.¹", "Shep. Leave your prating; since these good men\nare pleased, let them come in; but quickly now.", "Serv. Why, they stay at door, sir. [Exit.]", "Re-enter Servant, with twelve Rustics habited like\nSatyrs. They dance, and then exequint.", "Pol. O, father, you'll know more of that here-\nafter. —", "Is it not too far gone?—'Tis time to part them.—", "He's simple, and tells much. [Aside.]—How now,\nfair shepherd?", "", "Your heart is full of something, that does take\nYour mind from feasting. Sooth, when I was young,\nAnd handed love, as you do, I was wont", "To load my she with knacks: I would have ran-\nsack'd", "The pedler's silken treasury, and have pour'd it", "To her acceptance; you have let him go,", "And nothing marted³ with him: if your lass", "Interpretation should abuse; and call this", "Your lack of love or bounty; you were straited⁴", "For a reply; at least, if you make a care", "Of happy holding her.", "Flor. Old sir, I know", "She prizes not such trifles as these are:", "The gifts she looks from me are pack'd and lock'd\nUp in my heart; which I have given already,", "But not deliver'd.—O, hear me breathe my life", "Before this ancient sir, who, it should seem,\nHath sometime lov'd: I take thy hand; this hand,\nAs soft as dove's down, and as white as it;", "Or Ethiopian's tooth, or the fann'd snow,", "That's bolted⁵ by the northern blasts twice o'er.", "Pol. What follows this?", "How prettily this young swain seems to wash\nThe hand, was fair before!—I have put you out:—", "But to your protestation; let me hear", "What you profess.", "Flor. Do⁶, and be witness to't.", "Pol. And this my neighbour too?", "Flor. —", "Than he, and men; the earth, the heavens, and all:\nThat,—were I crown'd the most imperial monarch,\nThereof most worthy; were I the fairest youth", "That ever made eye swerve; had force, and know-\nledge,", "More than was ever man's,—I would not prize them,\nWithout her love: for her employ them all;", "Commend them, and condemn them, to her service,\nOr to their own perdition.", "Pol. Fairly offer'd.", "Cam. This shows a sound affection.", "Shep. —", "Say you the like to him?", "Per. I cannot speak", "So well, nothing so well; no, nor mean better:\nBy the pattern of my own thoughts I cut out\nThe purity of his.", "Shep. Take hands, a bargain; —", "And, friends unknown, you shall bear witness to't:", "I give my daughter to him, and will make", "Her portion equal his.", "Flor. O, that must be", "I' the virtue of your daughter: one being dead,\nI shall have more than you can dream of yet;", "Enough then for your wonder: But, come on,\nContract us 'fore these witnesses.", "Shep. —", "Come, your hand; —", "And, daughter, yours.", "Pol.", "Soft, swain, a while, 'beseech you;", "Have you a father?", "Flor. I have: But what of him?", "Pol. Knows he of this?", "Flor. He neither does, nor shall.", "Pol. Methinks, a father", "Is, at the nuptial of his son, a guest", "That best becomes the table. Pray you, once more;", "Is not your father grown incapable", "Of reasonable affairs? is he not stupid", "With age, and altering rheums? Can he speak?\nhear?", "Know man from man? dispute his own estate?⁶⁰\nLies he not bed-rid? and again does nothing,\nBut what he did being childish?", "Flor. No, good sir;", "He has his health, and ampler strength, indeed,\nThan most have of his age.", "Flor. By my white beard,", "You offer him, if this be so, a wrong", "Something unfilial: Reason, my son", "Should choose himself a wife; but as good reason,\nThe father (all whose joy is nothing else", "But fair posterity) should hold some counsel", "In such a business.", "Flor. I yield all this;", "But, for some other reasons, my grave sir,", "Which 'tis not fit you know, I not acquaint", "My father of this business.", "Flor. Let him know't.", "Flor. He must not.", "Pr'ythee, let him.", "Flor. No, he must not.", "Shep. Let him, my son; he shall not need to\ngrrieve", "At knowing of thy choice.", "Flor. Come, come, he must not: —", "Mark our contract.", "Flor. Mark your divorce, young sir, [Discovering himself.", "Whom son I dare not call; thou art too base", "To be acknowledg'd: Thou a sceptre'st heir,\nThat thus affect'st a sheep-hook!—Thou, old traitor,\nI am sorry that, by hanging thee, I can but", "Shorten thy life one week.—And thou, fresh piece", "Of excellent witchcraft; who, of force, must know", "The royal fool thou cop'st with; —", "Shep. O, my heart!", "Pol. I'll have thy beauty scratch'd with briars,\nand made", "More homely than thy state.—For thee, fond boy,—", "If I may ever know, thou dost but sigh,", "That thou no more shall never see this knack, (as", "never", "I mean thou shalt,) we'll bar thee from succession;", "Not hold thee of our blood, no, not our kin.", "Far' than Deucalion off:—Mark thou my words;", "Follow us to the court.—Thou churl, for this time,", "Though full of our displeasure, yet we free thee\nFrom the dead blow of it.—And you, enchant-", "ment, —", "Worthy enough a herdsman; yea, him too,", "That makes himself, but for our honour themer,", "Unworthy thee,—if ever, henceforth, thou", "These rural latches to his entrance open,", "Or hoop⁹ his body more with thy embraces,", "I will devise a death as cruel for thee,", "As thou art tender to't.", "[Exit.]", "Per. Even here undone!", "I was not much afeard: for once, or twice,", "I was about to speak;⁹ and tell him plainly,", "The selfsame sun, that shines upon his court,", "Hides not his visage from our cottage, but", "Looks on alike.¹⁰—Will't please you, sir, be gone?", "[To FLORIZEL.", "1 Foot rule, *esquierre*, Fr.", "2 This is an answer to something which the shepherd is supposed to have said to Polixenes during the dance.", "3 Bought, trafficked.", "4 *Straitened*, put to difficulties.", "5 That is *sifted*.", "6 i. e. 'converse about his own affairs.'", "7 *Far*, in the Old spelling *farre*, i. e. *farther*. The ancient comparative of *fer* was *ferrer*.", "8 The old copy reads *

528

WINTER'S TALE.

ACT IV

I told you what would come of this: 'Beseech you,
Of your own state take care: this dream of mine,—
Being now awake, I'll queen it no inch further,
But milk my ewes, and weep.

Cam.

Why, how now, father,

Speak, ere thou diest.

Shep.

Nor dare to know that which I know.—O, sir,

[To FLORIZEL.]

You have undone a man of fourscore three,¹
That thought to fill his grave in quiet: yea,
To die upon the bed my father died,

To lie close by his honest bones: but now
Some hangman must put on my shroud, and lay me

Where no priest shovels-in dust.—O cursed wretch!¹
[To PERDITA.

That knew'st this was the prince, and wouldst ad-venture

To mingle faith with him.—Undone! undone!

If I might die within this hour, I have liv'd

To die when I desire.

[Exit.]

Flor.

I am but sorry, not afeard! delay'd,

But nothing altered: What I was, I am:

More straining on, for plucking back; not following
My leash³ unwillingly.

Cam.

Gracious my lord,
You know your father's temper: at this time
He will allow no speech,—which, I do guess,
You do not purpose to him;—and as hardly

Will he endure your sight as yet, I fear:
Then, till the fury of his highness settle,
Come not before him.

Flor.

I not purpose it.

I think, Camillo.

Cam.

Even he, my lord.

Per. How often have I told you, 'twould be thus?
How often said, my dignity would last

But till 'twere known?

Flor.

It cannot fail, but by
The violation of my faith; And then

Let nature crush the sides o' the earth together,
And mar the seeds within! —Lift up thy looks:—
From my succession wipe me, father! I

Am heir to my affection.

Cam.

Be advis'd.

Flor. I am; and by my fancy:⁴ if my reason
Will thereto be obedient, I have reason;

If not, my senses, better pleas'd with madness,
Do bid it welcome.

Cam.

This is desperate, sir.
Flor. So call it; but it does fulfill my vow;

I needs must think it honesty. Camillo,
Not for Bohemia, nor the pomp that may
Be thereat glean'd; for all the sun sees, or
The close earth wombs, or the profound seas hide
In unknown fathoms, will I break my oath
To this my fair belov'd: Therefore, I pray you,
As you have ever been my father's honour'd friend,
When he shall miss me (as, in faith, I mean not
To see him any more), cast your good counsels
Upon his passion: Let myself and fortune

Tug for the time to come. This you may know,

And so deliver;—I am put to sea

With her, whom here I cannot hold on shore;

And, most opportune to our² need, I have

A vessel rides fast by, but not prepar'd
For this design. What course I mean to hold
Shall nothing benefit your knowledge, nor
Concern me the reporting.

Cam.

O, my lord,

I would your spirit were easier for advice
Or stronger for your need.

Flor.

Hark, Perdita.—

[Takes her aside.]

I'll hear you by-and-by.

Cam.

[To CAMILLO.]

He's irremovable

Resolv'd for flight: Now were I happy, if

His going I could frame to serve my turn;

Save him from danger, do him love and honour;

Purchase the sight again of dear Sicilia,
And that unhappy king, my master, whom
I so much thirst for see.

Flor.

Now, good Camillo,
I am so fraught with curious business, that
I leave out ceremony.

Sir, I think

[Going.]

You have heard of my poor services, i' the love
That I have borne your father?

Flor.

Very nobly
Have you deserv'd: it is my father's music

To speak your deeds; not little of his care

To have them recompens'd as thought on.

Cam.

Well, my lord,
If you may please to think I love the king;
And, through him, what is nearest to him, which is

Your gracious self; embrace but my direction,
(If your more ponderous and settled project
May suffer alteration,) on mine honour.

I'll point you where you shall have such receiving
As shall become your highness; where you may
Enjoy your mistress (from the whom, I see,
There's no disjunction to be made, but by

As heavens foretell your ruin): marry her;

And (with my best endeavours, in your absence)
Your discontenting⁵ father strive to qualify,

And bring him up to liking.

Flor.

How, Camillo,

May this, almost a miracle, be done?

That I may call thee something more than man,
And, after that, trust to thee.

Cam.

Have you thought on
A place, wherein you'll go?

Flor.

Not any yet: ¹

But as the unthought-on accident¹ is guilty

To⁶ what we wildly do; so we profess

Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies

Of every wind that blows.

Cam.

Then list to me:
This follows,—if you will not change your purpose,
But undergo this flight;—Make for Sicilia;

And there present yourself, and your fair princess
(For so, I see, she must be), 'fore Leontes;
She shall be habited as it becomes

The partner of your bed. Methinks, I see

Leontes, opening his free arms, and weeping
His welcomes forth: asks thee, the⁹ son, forgiv-

As 'twere i' the father's person: kisses the hands
Of your fresh princess: o'er and o'er divides him
'Twist his unkindness and his kindness; the one
He chides to hell, and bids the other o'row,
Faster than thought, or time.

Flor.

Worthy Camillo,
What colour for my visitation shall I

Hold up before him?

Cam.

Sent by the king your father
To greet him, and to give him comforts. Sir:

The manner of your bearing towards him, with
What you, as from your father shall deliver,

Things known betwixt us three, I'll write you down:

The which shall point you forth, at every sitting.¹⁰

What you must say; that he shall not perceive,

1 This speech of the old clown is admirably characteristic; his selfishness is seen by his concealing the adventure of Perdita, and here supported by the little regard he shows for his son or her: he is entirely taken up with himself, though fourscore and three.

2 Before the reform of the burial service by Edward VI. it was the custom for the priest to throw earth on the body in the form of a cross, and then sprinkle it with holy water.

3 *Leash*, a leading string.

4 *Fancy* here means *love*, as in other places already pointed out

5 *Our need.* The old copy reads *her*. The emendation is Theobald's.

6 *Discontenting* for discontented.

7 This *unthought-on accident* is the unexpected discovery made by Polixenes.

8 *Guilty to,* though it sound harsh to our ears, was the phraseology of Shakspeare.

9 The old copy reads, 'there there son.' The correction was made in the third folio.

10 The council-days were called *sittings*, in Shakespeare's time.

## SCENE III.

## WINTER'S TALE.

329

But that you have your father's bosom there,
And speak his very heart.

Flor.

There is some sap in this.
Cam.

A course more promising
than a wild dedication of yourselves.
To unpath'd waters, undream'd shores; most certain,

To miseries enough: no hope to help you;
But as you shake off one, to take another:
Nothing so certain as your anchors: who
Do their best office, if they can but stay you
Where you'll be loath to be: Besides, you know,
Prosperity's the very bond of love;
Whose fresh complexion and whose heart together
Affliction alters.

One of these is true:
I think affliction may subdue the cheek,
But not take in¹ the mind.

Cam.

Yea, say you so?

There shall not, at your father's house, these seven
years,
Be born another such.

Flor.

My good Camillo,

She is as forward of her breeding, as
She is i' the rear our birth.

Cam.

I cannot say, 'tis pity

She lacks instructions; for she seems a mistress
To most that teach.

Per.

Your pardon, sir, for this;

I'll blush you thanks.

Flor.

My prettiest Perdita.—

But, O, the thorns we stand upon!—Camillo,—
Preserver of my father, now of me;
The medicine of our house!—how shall we do ?
We are not furnish'd like Bohemia's son;

Nor shall appear in Sicilia—
Cam.

Per.

My lord,

Fear none of this: I think, you know, my fortunes
Do all lie there: it shall be so my care

To have you loyally appointed, as if
The scene you play, were mine. For instance, sir,
That you may know, you shall not want,—one word.

They talk aside.

### Enter AUTOLYCUS.

Aut. Ha, ha! what a fool honesty is! and trust,
his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman! I have
sold all my trumpery; not a counterfeit stone, not
a riband, glass, pomander,² brooch, table-book,
ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-
ring, to keep my pack from fasting; they throng
who should buy first; as if my trinkets had been
hallowed,³ and brought a benediction to the buyer:
by which means, I saw whose purse was best in
picture; and, what I saw, to my good use, I re-
membered. My clown (who wants but something
to be a reasonable man) grew so in love with the
wenches' song, that he would not stir his pettites,
till he had both tune and words, which so drew the
rest of the herd to me, that all their other senses
stuck in ears: you might have pinch'd a placket,⁴
it was senseless; ⁵twas nothing, to geld a codpiece
of a purse; I would have filed keys off, that hung
in chains: no hearing, no feeling, but my sir's
song, and admiring the nothing of it. So that, in
this time of lethargy, I picked and cut most of their

1 To take in, is to conquer, to get the better of.

2 Pomanders were little balls of perfumed paste, worn in the pocket, or hung about the neck, and even sometimes suspended to the wrist, according to Phillips. They were used as amulets against the plague or other infections, as well as for mere articles of luxury. Various receipts for making them may be found in old books of housewifery, and even in one or two old plays. They have recently been revived and made into a variety of ornamental forms under the name of Amulets. Fumigating pastilles are another modification of the pomander. The name is derived from pomme d'ambre, I know not on what authority, for in all the old French dictionaries they are called pommes de senteur. Philips says pomambers, Dutch.

3 This alludes to the beads often sold by the Roman

festival purses; and had not the old man come in
with a whoobub against his daughter and the king's
son, and scared my choughs from the chaff, I had
not left a purse alive in the whole army.

[CAMILLO, FLORIZEL, and PERDITA
come forward.

Cam. Nay, but my letters by this means being
there

So soon as you arrive, shall clear that doubt.

Flor. And those that you'll procure from king
Leontes—

Cam. Shall satisfy your father.
Per.

Happy be you!

All, that you speak, shows fair.

Cam.

Who have we here?

[Seeing AUTOLYCUS.

We'll make an instrument of this; omit

Nothing, may give us aid.

Aut. If they have overheard me now,—why,
hanging.

[Aside.

Cam. How now, good fellow? Why shakest
thou so? Fear not, man; here's no harm intended
to thee.

Aut. I am a poor fellow, sir.

Cam. Why be so still; here's nobody will steal
that from thee: Yet, for the outside of thy poverty,
we must make an exchange: therefore, discale
thee instantly, (thou must think, there's necessity
in't,) and change garments with this gentleman:
Though the pennyworth, on his side, be the worst,
yet hold thee, there's some boot.⁵

Aut. I am a poor fellow, sir;—I know ye well
enough.

Cam. Nay, pr'ythee, despatch: the gentleman is
half flayed⁶ already.

Aut. Are you in earnest, sir?—I smell the trick
of it.

Flor. Despatch, I pr'ythee.

Aut. Indeed, I have had earnest; but I cannot
with conscience take it.

Cam. Unbuckle, unbuckle.—

[FLO. and AUTOL. exchange garments.

Fortunate mistress,—let my prophecy

Come home to you!—you must retire yourself
Into some covert; take your sweetheart's hat,
And pluck it o'er your brows; muffle your face;
Dismantle you: and as you can, disliken
The truth of your own seeming; that you may
(For I do fear eyes over you) to shipboard
Get undescribed.

Per.

I see, the play so lies,

That I must bear a part.

Cam.

No remedy.—

Have you done there?

Flor.

Should I now meet my father,

He would not call me son.

Cam.

Nay, you shall have

No hat:—Come, lady, come.—Farewell, my friend.

Aut. Adieu, sir.

Flor. O Perdita, what have we twain forgot?

Pray you, a word.

[They converse apart.

Cam. What I do next, shall be to tell the king

[Aside.

Of this escape, and whither they are bound;
Wherein my hope is, I shall so prevail,
To force him after: in whose company
I shall review Sicilia; for whose sight
I have a woman's longing.

ists, as made particularly efficacious by the touch of
some relic.

4 Stevens has been very facetious about a *placket*,
and has explained it to be the opening in a woman's
petticoat. It was no such thing, it was nothing more
than a *stomacher*: as appears by Florio's Dictionary,
under the word *Torace*: 'The breast or bulke of a
man: also the middle space between the necke and the
thighs: also a *placket*, a *stomacher*. Thomas gives
the same explanation of *Thoraca*, except that he spells
the word *placcard*.

5 *Boot* is advantage, profit. We now say something to boot, something beside the articles exchanged for each other.

6 Stripped.

42

330

WINTER'S TALE.

ACT IV

Flo. Fortune speed us!—

Thus we set on, Camillo, to the sea-side.

Cam. The swifter speed, the better.

[Exeunt F.L.O. PER. and Cam.

Aut. I understand the business, I hear it: To have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses. I see, this is the time that the unjust man doth thrive. What an exchange had this been, without boot? What a boot is here, with this exchange? Sure, the gods do this year connive at us, and we may do any thing extempore. The prince himself is about a piece of iniquity; stealing away from his father, with his clog at his heels: If I thought it were a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, I would not do't:¹ I hold it the more knavery to con ceal it; and therein am I constant to my profession.

Enter Clown and Shepherd.

Aside, aside;—here is more matter for a hot brain: Every lane's end, every shop, church, session, hanging, yields a careful man work.

Clo. See, see; what a man you are now! there is no other way, but to tell the king she's a changing, and none of your flesh and blood.

Shep. Nay, but hear me.

Clo. Nay, but hear me.

Shep. Go to, then.

Clo. She being none of your flesh and blood, your flesh and blood has not offended the king: and, so, your flesh and blood is not to be punished by him. Show those things you found about her: those secret things, all but what she has with her: This being done, let the law go whistle; I warrant you.

Shep. I will tell the king all, every word, yea, and his son's pranks too: who, I may say, is no honest man neither to his father, nor to me, to go about to make me the king's brother-in-law.

Clo. Indeed, brother-in-law was the farthest off you could have been to him; and then your blood had been the dearer, by I know how² much an ounce.

Aut. Very wisely; puppies! [Aside.

Shep. Well; let us to the king; there is that in this fardel, will make him scratch his beard.

Aut. I know not what impediment this complaint may be to the flight of my master.

Clo. 'Pray heartily, he be at palace.

Aut. Though I am not naturally honest, I am so sometimes by chance:—Let me pocket up my pedler's excrement.³ [Takes off his false beard.] How now, rustics? whither are you bound?

Shep. To the palace, an it like your worship.

Aut. Your affairs there? what? with whom? the condition of that fardel,⁴ the place of your dwelling, your names, your ages, of what having's, breeding, and any thing that is fitting to be known, discover.

Clo. We are but plain fellows, sir.

Aut. A lie; you are rough and hairy: Let me have no lying; it becomes none but tradesmen, and they often give us soldiers the lie: but we pay them for it with stamped coin, not stabbing steel; therefore they do not give us the lie.⁶

Clo. Your worship had like to have given us one, if you had not taken yourself with the manner.⁷

Shep. Are you a courtier, an't like you, sir?

Aut. Whether it like me, or no, I am a courtier. See't thou not the air of the court, in these enfoldings? hath not my gait in it, the measure of the court?⁹ receives not thy nose court-odour from me? reflect I not on thy baseness, court-contempt? Think'st thou, for that I insinuate, or toze³ from thee thy business, I am therefore no courtier? I am courtier, cap-a-pie; and one that will either push on, or pluck back thy business there: whereupon I command thee to open thy affair.

Shep. My business, sir, is to the king.

Aut. What advocate hast thou to him?

Shep. I know not, an't like you.

Clo. Advocate's the court word for a pheasant; say you have none.

Shep. None, sir; I have no pheasant, cock, nor hen.¹⁰

Aut. How bless'd are we, that are not simple men!

Yet nature might have made me as these are, Therefore I'll not disdain.

Clo. This cannot but be a great courtier.

Shep. His garments are rich, but he wears them not handsomely.

Clo. He seems to be the more noble in being tasteful; a great man, I'll warrant; I know, by the picking on's teeth.

Aut. The fardel there? what's i' the fardel? Wherefore that box?

Shep. Sir, there lies such secrets in this fardel, and box, which none must know but the king; and which he shall know within this hour, if I may come to the speech of him.

Aut. Age, thou hast lost thy labour.

Shep. Why, sir?

Aut. The king is not at the palace; he is gone aboard a new ship to purge melancholy, and air himself: For, if thou be'st capable of things serious, thou must know, the king is full of grief.

Shep. So 'tis said, sir; about his son, that should have married a shepherd's daughter.

Aut. If that shepherd be not in hand-fast, let him fly; the curses he shall have, the tortures he shall feel, will break the back of man, the heart of monster.

Clo. Think you so, sir?

Aut. Not he alone shall suffer what wit can make heavy, and vengeance bitter; but those that are germane¹¹ to him, though removed fifty times, shall all come under the hangman: which though it be great pity, yet it is necessary. An old sheep-whistlingrogue, a ram-tender, to offer to have his daughter come into grace! Some say he shall be stoned; but that death is too soft for him, say I: Draw our throne into a sheep-cot! all deaths are too few, the sharpest too easy.

Clo. Has the old man e'er a son, sir, do you hear, an't like you, sir?

Aut. He has a son, who shall be flayed alive; then, 'nointed over with honey, set on the head of a WASP'S nest; then stand, till he be three quarters and a dram dead: then recovered again with aquavite, or some other hot infusion: then raw as he is, and in the hottest day prognostication proclaims,¹² shall he be set against a brick wall, the sun looking with a southward eye upon him; where he is to behold him, with flies blown to death. But

1 Steevens reads, 'If I thought it were not a piece of honesty to acquaint the king withal, I would do it.' The transposition of the word not was made by Hanmer; it does not render the passage more intelligible, and as we can extract a meaning out of the passage as it originally stood, I do not think so violent a transposition admissible.

2 We should probably read, 'by I know not how much an ounce.'

3 Thus in the Comedy of Errors: 'Why is time such a niggard of his hair, being as it is so plentiful an excrement?'

4 Fardel is a bundle, a pack or burthen. 'A pack that a man doth bear with him in the way,' says Baret. 5 i. e. estate, property.

6 The meaning is, they are paid for lying, therefore they do not give us the lie.

7 That is, in the fact. Vide Love's Labour's Lost, Act i. Se. 1.

8 The measure, the stately tread of courtiers.

9 'Think'st thou because I wind myself into, or draw from thee thy business, I am therefore no courtier?' To toze is to pluck or draw out. As to toze or toze wool, Carpere lanam. See the old dictionaries.

10 Malone says, 'perhaps in the first of these speeches we should read, a present, which the old shepherd mistakes for a pheasant.' The clowns perhaps thought courtiers as corruptible as some justices then were, of whom it is said, 'for half a dozen of chickens they would dispense with a whole dozen of penal statutes.'

11 Germane, related.

12 The hottest day foretold in the almanack.

### SCENE III.

WINTER'S TALE.

331

what talk we of these traitorous rascals, whose miseries are to be smiled at, their offences being so capital? Tell me (for you seem to be honest plain men) what you have to the king: being something gently considered,¹ I'll bring you where he is aboard, tender your persons to his presence, whisper him in your behalfs; and, if it be in man, besides the king, to effect your suits, here is man shall do it.

Clo. He seems to be of great authority: close with him, give him gold; and though authority be a stubborn bear, yet he is oft led by the nose with gold: show the inside of your purse to the outside of his hand, and no more ado: Remember stoned, and flayed alive.

Shep. An't please you, sir, to undertake the business for us, here is that gold I have: I'll make it as much more; and leave this young man in pawn, till I bring it you.

Aut. After I have done what I promised?

Shep. Ay, sir.

Aut. Well, give me the moiety:—Are you a party in this business?

Clo. In some sort, sir: but though my case be a pitiful one, I hope I shall not be flayed out of it.

Aut. O, that's the case of the shepherd's son:—Hang him, he'll be made an example.

Clo. Comfort, good comfort: we must to the king, and show our strange sights; he must know, 'is none of your daughter nor my sister; we are gone else. Sir, I will give you as much as this old man does, when the business is performed; and remain, as he says, your pawn, till it be brought you.

Aut. I will trust you. Walk before toward the sea-side; go on the right hand; I will but look upon the hedge, and follow you.

Clo. We are blessed in this man, as I may say, even blessed.

Shep. Let's before, as he bids us; he was provided to do us good.

Aut. If I had a mind to be honest, I see, fortune would not suffer me; she drops booties in my mouth. I am cored now with a double occasion: good; and a means to do the prince my master good; which, who knows that may turn back to my advancement? I will bring these two moles, these blind ones, aboard him: if he think it to shore them again, and that the complaint they have to the king concerns him nothing, let him call me rogue, for being so far officious: for I am proof against that title, and what shame else belongs to't: To him I will present them; there may be matter in it.

[Exit.]

### ACT V.

#### SCENE I. Sicilia. A Room in the Palace of Leontes. Enter LEONTES, CLEOMENES, DION, PAULINA, and others.

Cleo. Sir, you have done enough, and have performed'd.

A saintlike sorrow; no fault could you make, Which you have not redeem'd; indeed, paid down More penitence, than done trespass: at the last, Do, as the heavens have done; forget your evil: With them, forgive yourself.

Leon. Whilst I remember

Her and her virtues, I cannot forget
My blemishes in them; and so still think of
The wrong I did myself; which was so much,
That heirless it hath made my kingdom; and
Destroy'd the sweetest companion that e'er man
Bred his hopes out of.

Paul. True, too true, my lord:

If, one by one, you wedded all the world,

Or, from the all that are, took something good, To make a perfect woman; she, you kill'd, Would be unparalleled.

Leon.

She I kill'd? I did so: but thou strik'st me

Sorely, to say I did; it is as bitter

Upon thy tongue, as in my thought: Now, good now,

Say so but seldom.

Cleo.

Not at all, good lady: You might have spoken a thousand things that would

Have done the time more benefit, and grac'd
Your kindness better.

Paul.

Paul. You are one of those,

Would have him wed again.

Dion.

If you would not so,

You pity not the state, nor the remembrance

Of his most sovereign dame; consider little,

What dangers, by his highness' fail of issue,

May drop upon his kingdom, and devour

Incerta lookers-on. What were more holy,

Than to rejoice, the former queen is well?²

What holier, than,—for royalty's repair,

For present comfort and for future good,—

To bless the bed of majesty again

With a sweet fellow to't?

Paul. There is none worthy,

Respecting her that's gone. Besides, the gods

Will have fulfilled their secret purposes:

For has not the divine Apollo said,

Is't not the tenour of his oracle,

That king Leontes shall not have an heir,

Till his lost child be found? which, that it shall,

Is all as monstrous to our human reason,

As my Antigonus to break his grave,

And come again to me; who, on my life,

Did perish with the infant. 'Tis your counsel,

My lord should to the heavens be contrary,

Oppose against their wills.—Care not for issue:

[To LEONTES.]

The crown will find an heir: Great Alexander

Left his to the worthiest; so his successor

Was like to the best.

Leon.

Good Paulina,—

Who has the memory of Hermione,

I know, in honour,—O, that ever I

Had squar'd me to thy counsel!—then, even now,

I might have look'd upon my queen's full eyes;

Have taken treasure from her lips,

Paul.

And left them

More rich, for what they yielded.

Leon.

No more such wives; therefore no wife: one worse,

And better us'd, would make her sainted spirit

Again possess her corps; and, on this stage

(Where we offenders now appear,) soul-vex'd,

Begin, *And why to me?*³

Paul.

Had she such power,

She had just cause. She had; and would incense⁴ me

To murder her I married.

Paul.

I should so:

Were I the ghost that walk'd, I'd bid you mark

Her eye; and tell me, for what dull part in't

You chose her: then I'd shriek, that even your ears
Should rift⁵ to hear me; and the words that follow'd
Should be, *Remember mine.*

Leon.

Stars, stars, And all eyes else dead coals!—fear thou no wife,

I'll have no wife, Paulina.

Paul.

Will you swear Never to marry, but by my free leave?

Leon. Never, Paulina; so be bless'd my spirit!

Paul. Then, good my lords, bear witness to his oath.

1. i. e. being handsomely bribed: to consider often signified to reward.

2. i. e. at rest, dead.

3. The old copy reads, 'And begin, *why to me.*' The transposition of *and* was made by Steevens.

4. *Incense*, to instigate or stimulate, was the ancient sense of this word: it is rendered in the Latin dictionaries by *dare* *stimulo*.

5. i. e. split.

["332", "WINTER'S TALE.", "ACT V.", "Cleo. You tempt him over-much.", "Paul.", "As like Hermione as is her picture,\nAffront' his eye.", "Cleo.", "Paul.", "Good madam,—", "I have done.", "Yet, if my lord will marry,—if you will, sir,\nNo remedy, but you will: give me the office\nTo choose you a queen: She shall not be so young\nAs was your former; but she shall be such,", "As, walk'd your first queen's ghost, it should take joy\nTo see her in your arms.", "Leon.", "My true Paulina,", "We shall not marry, till thou bidd'st us.", "Paul.", "That", "Shall be, when your first queen's again in breath;\nNever till then.", "Enter a Gentleman.", "Gent. One that gives out himself prince Florizel,\nSon of Polixenes, with his princess (she\nThe fairest I have yet beheld,) desires access\nTo your high presence.", "Leon. What with him ? he comes not\nLike to his father's greatness : his approach,\nSo out of circumstance, and sudden, tells us,\n'Tis not a visitation fram'd, but forc'd\nBy need, and accident. What train ?\nGent.\nBut few,", "Paul.", "And those but mean.", "Leon. His princess, say you, with him ?", "Gent. Ay; the most peerless piece of earth, I think;\nThat e'er the sun shone bright on.", "Paul.", "O Hermione,", "As every present time doth boast itself", "Above a better, gone; so must thy grave²", "Give way to what's seen now. Sir, you yourself", "Have said, and writ so³ (but your writing now\nIs colder than that theme⁴) She had not been", "Nor was not to be equal'd;—thus your verse", "Flow'd with her beauty once; 'tis shrewdly ebb'd,\nTo say, you have seen a better.", "Gent.", "Pardon, madam:", "The one I have almost forgot (your pardon ;)", "The other, when she has obtain'd your eye,", "Will have your tongue too. This is a creature,", "Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal", "Of all professors else: make proselytes", "Of who she but bid follow.", "Paul.", "How? not women ?", "Gent. Women will love her, that she is a woman\nMore worth than any man; men, that she is\nThe rarest of all women.", "Leon.", "Go, Cleomenes ;", "Yourself, assisted with your honour'd friends,\nBring them to our embracement.—Still 'tis strange,", "[Exeunt CLEOMENES, Lords, and Gentlemen.", "He thus should steal upon us.", "Paul.", "Had our prince\n(Jewel of children) seen this hour, he had pair'd\nWell with this lord; there was not full a month\nBetween their births.", "Leon.", "Pr'ythee, no more; thou know'st,⁵\nHe dies to me again, when talk'd of: sure,", "When I shall see this gentleman, thy speeches", "Will bring me to consider that which may", "Unfurnish me of reason.—They are come.—", "Re-enter CLEOMENES, with FLORIZEL, PERDITA,\nand Attendants.", "Your mother was most true to wedlock, prince;", "For she did print your royal father off,", "Conceiving you: Were I but twenty-one,", "Your father's image is so hit in you,", "His very air, that I should call you brother,", "As I did him: and speak of something, wildly", "By us perform'd before. Most clearly welcome!", "And your fair princess, goddess!—O, alas!", "I lost a couple, that 'twixt heaven and earth", "Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as", "You, gracious couple, do! and then I lost", "(All mine own folly) the society,", "Amity too, of your brave father; whom,", "Though bearing misery, I desire my life", "Once more to look upon him.⁶", "By his command", "Have I here touch'd Sicilia: and from him", "Give you all greetings, that a king, or friend,", "Can send his brother: and, but infirmity", "(Which waits upon worn times) hath something\nseiz'd", "His wish'd ability, he had himself", "The lands and waters 'twixt your throne and his", "Measur'd, to look upon you; whom he loves", "(He bade me say so) more than all the sceptres,", "And those that bear them, living.", "Leon.", "O, my brother,", "(Good gentleman!) the wrongs I have done thee, stir", "Afresh within me; and these thy offices,", "So rarely kind, are as interpreters", "Of my behind-hand slackness!—Welcome hither,", "As is the spring to the earth. And hath he too", "Expos'd this paragon to the fearful usage", "(At least, ungentle) of the dreadful Neptune,", "To greet a man, not worth her pains; much less", "The adventure of her person?", "Leon.", "Good my lord,", "She came from Libya.", "Leon.", "Where the warlike Sthalus,", "That noble honour'd lord, is fear'd, and lov'd?", "Flo. Most royal sir, from thence; from him, whose\ndaughter", "His tears proclaim'd his, parting with her: thence", "(A prosperous south-wind friendly) we have cross'd,", "To execute the charge my father gave me,", "For visiting your highness! My best train", "I have from your Sicilian shores dismiss'd;", "Who for Bohemia bend, to signify", "Not only my success in Libya, sir,", "But my arrival, and my wife's, in safety,", "Here, where we are.", "Leon.", "The blessed gods", "Purge all infection from your air, whilst you", "Do climate here! You have a holy father,", "A graceful³ gentleman; against whose person,", "So sacred as it is, I have done sin:", "For which the heavens, taking angry note,", "Have left me issueless; and your father's bless'd", "(As he from heaven merits it) with you,", "Worthy his goodness. What might I have been,", "Might I a son and daughter now have look'd on,", "Such goodly things as you?", "Enter a Lord.", "Lord.", "Most noble sir,", "That, which I shall report, will bear no credit,", "Were not the proof so nigh. Please you, great sir,", "Bohemia greets you from himself, by me:", "Desires you to attach his son; who has", "(His dignity and duty both cast off)", "Fled from his father, from his hopes, and with", "A shepherd's daughter.", {"bbox": [721, 1100, 759, 1113], "category": "Text", "text

## SCENE II.

WINTER'S TALE.

333

My marvel, and my message. To your court
Whiles he was hast'ning (in the chase, it seems,
Of this fair couple,) meets he on the way
The father of this seeming lady, and
Her brother, having both their country quitted
With this young prince.

Flor.

Camillo has betray'd me;

Whose honour, and whose honesty, till now
Endur'd all weathers.

Lord.

Lay't so to his charge;

He's with the king your father.

Leon.

Who? Camillo?

Lord. Camillo, sir; I spake with him: who now
Has these poor men in question.¹ Never saw I
Wretches so quake: they kneel, they kiss the earth;
Forswear themselves as often as they speak;
Bohemia stops his ears, and threatens them
With divers deaths in death.

Per.

O, my poor father!—

The heaven sets spies upon us, will not have
Our contract celebrated.

Leon.

You are married?

Flor. We are not, sir, nor are we like to be;

The stars, I see, will kiss the valleys first:—
The odds for high and low's alike.

Leon.

My lord,

Is this the daughter of a king?

Flor.

She is,

When once she is my wife.

Leon. That once, I see, by your good father's
speed,

Will come on very slowly. I am sorry,
Most sorry, you have broken from his liking,
Where you were tied in duty: as, say, you,
Your choice is not so rich in worth² as beauty,
That you must well enjoy her.

Flor.

Dear, look up:

Though fortune, visible an enemy,
Should chase us with my father; power no jot
Hath she, to change our loves.—'Beseech you, sir,
Remember since you ow'd no more to time
Than I do now: with thought of such affections,
Step forth mine advocate; at your request,
My father will grant precious things, as trifles.

Leon. Would he do so, I'd beg your precious
mistress,

Which he counts but a trifle.

Paul.

Sir, my liege,

Your eye hath too much young youth in't: not a month
'Fore your queen died, she was more worth such
gazes

Than what you look on now.

Leon.

I thought of her,

Even in these looks I made.—But your petition

[To FLORIZEL.]

Is yet unanswer'd; I will to your father;
Your honour not o'erthrown by your desires,
I am a friend to them, and you: upon which errand
I now go toward him; therefore, follow me,
And mark what way I make: Come, good my lord.

### SCENE II. The same. Before the Palace. Enter AUTOLYCUS and a Gentleman.

Aut. 'Beseech you, sir, were you present at this
relation?

1. Gent. I was by the opening of the fardel, heard the old shepherd deliver the manner how he found it; whereupon, after a little amazedness, we were all commanded out of the chamber; only this, methought, I heard the shepherd say, he found the child.

Aut. I would most gladly know the issue of it.

1. Gent. I make a broken delivery of the business;
But the changes I perceived in the king, and
Camillo, were very notes of admiration: they seem'd
almost, with staring on one another, to tear the
cases of their eyes; there was speech in their dumb-

1 i. e. conversation.

2 Worth for descent or wealth.

3 i. e. import, the thing imported.

4 In Shakspeare's time, to affect a thing meant, to
have a tendency or disposition to it. The affections
were the dispositions, Appetitus animi.

ness, language in their very gesture; they looked,
as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one de-
stroied: A notable passion of wonder appeared in
them: but the wisest beholder, that knew no more
but seeing, could not say, if the importance³ were
joy, or sorrow: but in the extremity of the one, it
must needs be.

Enter another Gentleman.

Here comes a gentleman, that, happily, knows more:
The news, Rogero?

2. Gent. Nothing but bonfires: The oracle is fulfilled; the king's daughter is found: such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour, that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it.

Enter a third Gentleman.

Here comes the lady Paulina's steward; he can deliver you more.—How goes it now, sir? this news, which is called true, is so like an old tale, that the verity of it is in strong suspicion: Has the king found his heir?

3. Gent. Most true; if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance: that, which you hear, you'll swear you see, there is such unity in the proofs. The mantle of queen Hermione: —her jewel about the neck of it: the letters of Antigonus, found with it, which they know to be his character: —the majesty of the creature, in resemblance of the mother; —the affection⁴ of nobleness, which nature shows above her breeding, —and many other evidences, proclaim her, with all certainty, to be the king's daughter. Did you see the meeting of the two kings?

2. Gent. No.

3. Gent. Then have you lost a sight, which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of. There might you have beheld one joy crown another; so, and in such manner, that, it seemed, sorrow wept to take leave of them; for their joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands; with countenance of such distraction, that they were to be known by garment, not by favour.⁵ Our king, being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter; as if that joy were now become a loss, cries, O, thy mother, thy mother! then asks Bohemia forgiveness; then embraces his son-in-law; then again worries he his daughter, with clipping⁶ her; now he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by, like a weather-bitten conduit of many kings' reigns.⁷ I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it.

2. Gent. What, pray you, became of Antigonus,
that carried hence the child?

3. Gent. Like an old tale still; which will have matter to rehearse, though credit be asleep, and not an ear open: He was torn to pieces with a bear; this avouches the shepherd's son; who has not only his innocence (which seems much) to justify him, but a handkerchief, and rings, of his, that Paulina knows.

1. Gent. What became of his bark, and his followers?

3. Gent. Wrecked the same instant of their master's death: and in the view of the shepherd: so that all the instruments, which aided to expose the child, were even then lost, when it was found. But, O, the noble combat, that, 'twixt joy and sorrow, was fought in Paulina! She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband; another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled: She lifted the princess from the earth; and so locks her in embracing, as if she would pin her to her heart, that she might no more be in danger of losing.

1. Gent. The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes; for by such was it acted.

3. Gent. One of the prettiest touches of all, and

5 Favour here stands for mén, feature.

6 i. e. embracing.

7 Conduits or fountains were frequently representations of the human figure. One of this kind has been already referred to in As You Like It, Act iv. Sc. 1.

WINTER'S TALE.

334

ACT V.

that which angled for mine eyes (caught the water, though not the fish) was, when at the relation of the queen's death, with the manner how she came to it (bravely confessed, and lamented by the king,) how attentiveness wounded his daughter: till, from one sign of dolour to another, she did, with an alas! I would fain say, bleed tears; for, I am sure, my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there?¹ changed colour; some swooned, all sorrows: if all the world could have seen it, the woe had been universal.

1 Gent. Are they returned to the court?

3 Gent. No: the princess, hearing of her mother's statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina,—a piece many years in doing, and now newly performed by that rare Italian master, Julio Romano; who, had he himself eternity,² and could put breath into his work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape: he so near to Hermione hath done Hermione, that, they say, one would speak to her, and stand in hope of answer: thither with all greediness of affection, are they gone; and there they intend to sup.

2 Gent. I thought, she had some great matter there in hand; for she hath privately, twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed³ house. Shall we thither, and with our company piece the rejoicing?

1 Gent. Who would be thence, that has the benefit of access? every wink of an eye, some new grace will be born: our absence makes us unthrifty to our knowledge. Let's along. [Exeunt.]

Aut. Now, had I not the dash of my former life in me, would preferment drop on my head. I brought the old man and his son aboard the prince; told him, I heard them talk of a fardel, and I know not what: but he at that time, over-fond of the shepherd's daughter (so he then took her to be,) who began to be much sea-sick, and himself little better, extremity of weather continuing, this mystery remained undiscovered. But 'tis all one to me; for had I been the finder-out of this secret, it would not have relished among my other discredits.

Enter Shepherd and Clown.

Here come those I have done good to against my will, and already appearing in the blossoms of their fortune.

Shep. Come, boy; I am past more children; but thy sons and daughters will be all gentlemen born.

Clo. Your are well met, sir: You denied to fight with me this other day, because I was no gentleman born: See you these clothes? say, you see them not, and think me still no gentleman born: you were best say, these robes are not gentleman born. Give me the lie; do; and try whether I am not a gentleman born.

Aut. I know, you are now, sir, a gentleman born.
Clo. Ay, and have been so any time these four hours.

Shep. And so have I, boy.

Clo. So you have:—but I was a gentleman born before my father: for the king's son took me by the hand, and called me, brother; and then the two kings called my father, brother; and then the prince, my brother, and the princess, my sister, called my father, father; and so we wept: and there was the first gentlemanlike tears that ever we shed.

Shep. We may live, son, to shed many more.

Clo. Ay; or else 'twere hard luck, being in so preposterous estate as we are.

Aut. I humbly beseech you, sir, to pardon me all the faults I have committed to your worship, and to give me your good report to the prince my master.

Shep. 'Pr'ythee, son, do; for we must be gentle, now we are gentlemen.

Clo. Thou wilt amend thy life?

1 'Who was most marble:' that is, those who had the hardest hearts.

2 However misplaced the praise, it is no small honour to Julio Romano to be thus mentioned by the poet. By eternity Shakspeare only means immortality.

3 i. e. remote.

Aut. Ay, an it like your good worship.

Clo. Give me thy hand: I will swear to the prince, thou art as honest a true fellow as any is in Bohemia.

Shep. You may say it, but not swear it.

Clo. Not swear it, now I am a gentleman? Let boors and franklins⁴ say it, I'll swear it.

Shep. How if it be false, son?

Clo. If it be ne'er so false, a true gentleman may swear it in the behalf of his friend:—And I'll swear to the prince, thou art a tall⁵ fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt not be drunk; but I know thou art no tall fellow of thy hands, and that thou wilt be drunk; but I'll swear it: and I would, thou wouldst be a tall fellow of thy hands.

Aut. I will prove so, sir, to my power.

Clo. Ay, by any means prove a tall fellow: If I do not wonder how thou darest venture to be drunk, not being a tall fellow, trust me not.—Hark! the kings and the princes, our kindred, are going to see the queen's picture. Come, follow us: we'll be thy good masters.⁶

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE III. The same.
A Room in Paulina's House. Enter LEONTES, POLIXENES, FLORIZEL, PERDITA, CAMILLO, PAULINA, Lords and Attendants.

Leon. O grave and good Paulina, the great comfort that I have had of thee!

Paul. What, sovereign sir, I did not well, I meant well: All my services, You have paid home: but that you have vouchsaf'd with your crown'd brother, and these your contracted

Heirs of your kingdoms, my poor house to visit, It is a surplus of your grace, which never My life may last to answer.

Leon. O Paulina,

We honour you with trouble: But we came To see the statue of our queen: your gallery Have we pass'd through, without much content In many singularities; but we saw no That which my daughter came to look upon, The statue of her mother.

Paul. As she liv'd peerless,

So her dead likeness, I do well believe, Excels whatever yet you look'd upon, Or hand of man hath done; therefore I keep it Lonely,⁷ apart: But here it is: prepare To see the life as lively mock'd, as ever

Still sleep mock'd death: behold; and say, 'tis well.

Paul. undraws a curtain and discovers a Statue. I like your silence, it the more shows off Your wonder: But yet speak:—first, you, my liege, Comes it not something near?

Leon. Her natural posture!—

Chide me, dear stone; that I may say, indeed, Thou art Hermione: or, rather, thou art she, In thy not chiding; for she was as tender As infancy and grace.—But yet, Paulina, Hermione was not so much wrinkled, nothing So aged, as this seems.

Pol. O, not by much.

Paul. So much the more our carver's excellence; Which lets go by some sixteen years, and makes her As she liv'd now.

Leon. As now she might have done

So much to my good comfort, as it is
Now piercing to my soul. O, thus she stood,
Even with such life of majesty (warm life,
As now it coldly stands), when first I woo'd her!
I am asham'd: Does not the stone rebuke me,
For being more stone than it?—O, royal piece,
There's magic in thy majesty; which has
My evils conjured to remembrance; and
From thy admiring daughter took the spirits,
Standing like stone to thee:

4 i. e. Yeomen.

5 i. e. a bold, courageous fellow.

6 Good masters. It was a common petitionary phrase to ask a superior to be 'wood lord or good master' to the supplicant.

7 The old copy reads *lovely*.

## SCENE III.

## WINTER'S TALE.

335

*Per.* And give me leave;

And do not say, 'tis superstition, that
I kneel, and then implore her blessing.—Lady,
Dear queen, that ended when I but began,
Give me that hand of yours, to kiss.

*Paul.* O, patience;
The statue is but newly fix'd, the colour's
not dry.

*Cam.* My lord, your sorrow was too sore laid on;
Which sixteen winters cannot blow away,
So many summers, dry; scarce any joy
Did ever so long live; no sorrow,
But kill'd itself much sooner.

*Pol.* Dear my brother,
Let him, that was the cause of this, have power
To take off so much grief from you, as he
Will piece up in himself.

*Paul.* Indeed, my lord,
If I had thought the sight of my poor image
Would thus have wrought it you (for the stone is
mine),

I'd not have show'd it.²

*Leon.* Do not draw the curtain.
*Paul.* No longer shall you gaze on't; lest your
fancy

May think anon, it moves.

*Leon.* Let be, let be.
'Would I were dead, but that, methinks, already³—
What was he that did make it?—See, my lord,
Would you not deem, it breath'd ? and that those
Would you not deem, it breath'd ? and that those
veins

Did verily bear blood?

*Pol.* Masterly done:

The very life seems warm upon her lip.
Leon. The fixture of her eye has motion in't,⁴
As we are mock'd with art.⁵

*Paul.* I'll draw the curtain;
My lord's almost so far transported, that
He'll think anon it lives.

*Leon.* O sweet Paulina,
Make me to think so twenty years together;
No settled senses of the world can match
The pleasure of that madness. Let't alone.

*Paul.* I am sorry, sir, I have thus far stirr'd you;
but
I could affect you further.

*Leon.* Do, Paulina;

For this affliction has a taste as sweet
As any cordial comfort.—Still, methinks,
There is an air comes from her: What fine chise
Could ever yet cut breath? Let no man mock me,
For I will kiss her.

*Paul.* Good my lord, forbear:
The ruddiness upon her lip is wet;
You'll mar it, if you kiss it; stain your own
With oily painting: Shall I draw the curtain?

*Leon.* No, not these twenty years.
*Per.* So long could I

Stand by, a looker on.

*Paul.* Either forbear,
Quit presently the chapel; or resolve you
For more amazement: If you can behold it,
I'll make the statue move indeed; descend,
And take you by the hand; but then you'll think
(Which I protest against,) I am assisted
By wicked powers.

*Leon.* What you can make her do,
I am content to look on: what to speak,
I am content to hear; for 'tis as easy
To make her speak, as move.

*Paul.* It is requir'd;

You do awake your faith: Then, all stand still;
Or those that think it is unlawful business
I am about, let them depart.

*Leon.* Proceed;
*Paul.* No foot shall stir.

*Paul.* Music; awake her: strike.—
[T]he 'Tis time; descend; be stone no more: approach,
Strike all that look upon marvel. Come:
I'll fill your grave up: stir; nay, come away;
Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him
Dear life redeems you.—Your perceive she stirs:

*HERMIONE comes down from the Pedestal.*
Start not: her actions shall be holy, as,
You hear, my spell is lawful: do not shun her,
Until you see her die again; for then
You kill her double: Nay, present your hand:
When she was young, you woo'd her; now, in age,
Is she become the suitor.

*Leon.* O, she's warm! [Embracing her]
If this be magic, let it be an art,
Lawful as eating.

*Pol.* She embraces him.
*Cam.* She hangs about his neck;

If she pertain to life, let her speak too.

*Pol.* Ay, and make't manifest where she has liv'd,
Or, how stol'n from the dead?

*Paul.* That she is living,
Were it but told you, should be hooted at
Like an old tale; but it appears she lives,
Though yet she speak not. Mark a little while.—
Please you to interpose, fair madam; kneeł,
And pray your mother's blessing.—Turn, good lady;
Our Perdita is found.

*Presenting PER. who kneels to HER.*
*Her.* You gods, look down,
And from your sacred vials pour your graces
Upon your daughter's head!—Tell me, mine own,
Where hast thou been preserved? where lived? how
found

Thy father's court? for thou shall hear, that I,—
Knowing by Paulina that the oracle
Gave hope, thou wast in being,—have preserv'd
Myself to see the issue.

*Paul.* There's time enough for that;
Lest they desire, upon this push to trouble
Your joys with like relation. Go together,
You precious winners⁶ all; your exultation
Partake⁷ to every one. I, an old turtle,
Will wing me to some wither'd bough; and there
My mate, that's never to be found again,
Lament till I am lost.⁸

*Leon.* O peace, Paulina;
Thou shouldst' a husband take by my consent,
As I by thine, a wife: this is a match,
And made between's by vows. Thou hast found
mine;

But how is it to be question'd: for I saw her,
As I thought, dead: and have in vain said many
A prayer upon her grave: I'll not seek far
(For him, I partly know his mind,) to find thee
An honourable husband:—Come, Camillo,
And take her by the hand: whose⁹ worth, and
honesty,

Is¹⁰ richly noted; and here justified
By us, a pair of kings.—Let's from this place.—
What!—Look¹¹ upon, my brother:—both your par-
dons,

1 Worked, agitated.

2 The folio reads 'I'd not have show'd it.' In the late edition of Malone's Shakspeare it stands, 'I'll not have show'd it.' But surely this is erroneous.

3 The sentence if completed would probably have been, 'but that, methinks, already I converse with the dead.'—His passion made him break off.

4 i. e. Though his eye be fixed, it seems to have motion in it.

5 'Is as if. With has the force of by.

6 You who by this discovery have gained what you desired.

7 i. e. participate.

8 Thus in Lodge's Rosalynde, 1592:—

'A turtle sat upon a leavelesse tree,
Mourning her absent pheree.

With sad and sorry cheere:

And whilst her plumes she rents,
And for her love laments, &c.

9 Whose relates to Camillo, though Paulina is the immediate antecedent. I have observed, in the loose construction of ancient phraseology, whose often used in this manner, where his would be more proper.

10 It is erroneously printed for is here in the late Vari-
orum Shakspeare.

11 Look upon for look on. Thus in King Henry V
Part III. Act ii. Sc. 3:

'And look upon, as if the tragedy,' &c.

## ACT I.

### ACT I.

#### SCENE I. A Hall in the Duke's Palace. Enter
Duke, Ægeon, Gaoler, Officer, and other Attendants.

Ægeon.

PROCEED, Solinus, to procure my fall,
And, by the doom of death, end woes and all.
Duke. Merchant of Syracusa, plead no more;
I am not partial, to infringe our laws:
The enmity and discord, which of late
Sprung from the rancorous outrage of your duke
To merchants, our well-dealing countrymen,—
Who, wanting gilders¹ to redeem their lives,
Have seal'd his rigorous statutes with their bloods,
Excludes all pity from our threat'ning looks.

For, since the mortal and intestine jars
'Twist thy seditious countrymen and us,
It hath in solemn synops been decreed,
Both by the Syracusans and ourselves,
To admit no traffic to our adverse towns:
Nay, more,
If any, born at Ephesus, be seen
At any Syracusan marts and fairs,
Again, If any, Syracusan born,
Come to the bay of Ephesus, he dies,
His goods confiscate to the duke's dispose;
Unless a thousand marks be levied,
To quit the penalty and to ransom him.
Thy substance, valued at the highest rate,
Cannot amount unto a hundred marks;
Therefore by law thou art condemn'd to die.

Æge. Yet this my comfort; when your words
are done,

My woes end likewise with the evening sun.
Duke. Well, Syracusan, say, in brief, the cause
Why thou departedst from thy native home;
And for what cause thou cam'st to Ephesus?

Æge. A heavier task could not have been imposed.
Than I to speak my griefs unspeakable:
Yet, that the world may witness that my end
Was wrought by nature,² not by vile offence,
I'll utter what my sorrow gives me leave.
In Syracusa I was born, and wed
Unto a woman, happy but for me,
And by me too, but not our hap been bad.
With her I liv'd in joy; our wealth increas'd,
By prosperous voyages I often made
To Epidamnum, till my factor's death;
And the³ great care of goods at random left,
Drew me from kind embracements of my spouse:
From whom my absence was not six months old,
Before herself (almost at fainting, under
The pleasing pleasure that women bear)
Had made provision for her following me,
And soon, and safe, arrived where I was.
There she had not been long, but she became
A joyful mother of two goodly sons;
And, which was strange, the one so like the other,
As could not be distinguishing but by names.
That very hour, and in the selfsame inn,
A poor⁴ mean woman was delivered
Of such a burden, male twins, both alike:
Those, for their parents were exceeding poor,
I bought, and brought up to attend my sons.
My wife, not meanly proud of two such boys,
Made daily motions for our home return:
Unwilling I agreed; alas! too soon.
We came aboard:
A league from Epidamnum had we sail'd,

1 A gilder was a coin valued from one shilling and sixpence to two shillings.

2 i. e. natural affection.

3 The old copy reads he: the emendation is Malone's. It is a happy restoration; for the manner in which Stevens pointed this passage gave to it a confused if not an absurd meaning.

4 The word poor was supplied by the editor of the second folio.

5 Instance appears to be used here for symptom or prognostic. Shakespeare uses this word with very great latitude.

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

337

Before the always wind-obeying deep
Gave any tragic instance⁵ of our harm:
But longer did we not retain much hope;
For what obscured light the heavens did grant
Did but convey unto our fearful minds
A doubtful warrant of immediate death;
Which, though myself would gladly have embrac'd,
Yet the incessant weepings of my wife,
Weeping before for what she saw must come,
And piteous plainings of the pretty babes,
That mourn'd for fashion, ignorant what to fear
Fore'd me to seek delays for them and me.
And this it was,—for other means was none.—
The sailors sought for safety by our boat,
And left the ship, then sinking ripe, to us:
My wife, more careful for the latter-born,
Had fasten'd him unto a small spare mast,
Such as seafaring men provide for storms;
To him one of the other twins was bound,
Whilst I had been like heedful of the other.
The children thus dispos'd, my wife and I,
Fixing our eyes on whom our care was fix'd,
Fasten'd ourselves at either end the mast;
And floating straight, obedient to the stream,
Were carried towards Corinth, as we thought.
At length the sun, gazing upon the earth,
Dispers'd those vapours that offended us;
And, by the benefit of his wish'd light,
The seas wax'd calm, and we discovered
Two ships from far making amain to us,
Of Corinth that, of Epidaurus this:
But ere they came,—O, let me say no more!

Gather the sequel by that went before.
Duke. Nay, forward, old man, do not break off so;

For we may pity, though not pardon thee.
Æge. O, had the gods done so, I had not now
Worthily term'd them merciful to us!
For, ere the ships could meet by twice five leagues,
We were encounter'd by a mighty rock;
Which being violently borne upon,⁶
Our helpful ship was splited in the midst,
So that, in this unjust divorce of us,
Fortune had left to both of us alike
What to delight in, what to sorrow for.
Her part, poor soul! seeming as burdened
With lesser weight, but not with lesser woe,
Was carried with more speed before the wind;
And in our sight they three were taken up
By fishermen of Corinth, as we thought.
At length, another ship had seiz'd on us;
And, knowing whom it was their hap to save,
Gave healthful⁷ welcome to their shipwreck'd
guests;
And would have reft the fishers of their prey,
Had not their bark been very slow of sail,
And therefore homeward did they bend their
course.—

Thus you have heard me sever'd from my bliss;
That by misfortunes was my life prolong'd;
To tell sad stories of my own mishaps.

Duke. And, for the sake of them thou sorrowest for,

Do me the favour to dilate at full
What hath befall'n of them, and thee, till now.

Æge. My youngest boys,⁸ and yet my eldest care,
At eighteen years became inquisitive
After his brother; and importun'd me,
That his attendant (for⁹ his case was like,
Reft of his brother, but¹⁰ retain'd his name)
Might bear him company in the quest of him:
Whom whilst I labour'd of a love to see,

6 The first folio reads 'borne up.'

7 The second folio altered this to 'helpful welcome'; but change was unnecessary. A healthful welcome is a kind welcome, wishing health to their guests. It was not a helpful welcome, for the slowness of their bark prevented them from rendering assistance.

8 It appears, from what goes before, that it was the eldest, and not the youngest. He says, 'My wife, more careful of the latter born; &c.'

9 The first folio reads so; the second for.

10 The personal pronoun he is suppressed: such phraseology is not unfrequent in the writings of that age.

Act I.
author.
reusable.

to
the
cave
of
the
dry
lens
of
the
axe,
is

at page
one.

page 1
of 1
wroes

the only
remon-
found in
the Shire,
which served
as aca-
pulament
have seen
beaten
Anghilam,
pers
per
Walter's
Sourles
that he
provenge
the critics,
that the
care,
Dr.
Dy
play, as
the case
may be
in
may co
best of all
the is
in
a
merry
material.
1505, or
now
it was
looked on

s
phils

s
phils

43

338

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

ACT I.

I hazarded the loss of whom I lov'd.
Five summers have I spent in furthest Greece,
Roaming clean through the bounds of Asia,
And, coasting homeward, came to Ephesus;
Hopeless to find, yet loath to leave unsought,
Or that, or any place that harbours men.
But here must end the story of my life;
And happy were I in my timely death,
Could all my travels warrant me they live.

Duke. Hapless Ægeon, whom the fates have
mark'd

To bear the extremity of dire mishap!
Now, trust me, were it not against our laws,
Against my crown, my oath, my dignity,
Which princes, would they, may not disannul,
My soul should sue as advocate for thee.
But, though thou art adjudged to the death,
And passed sentence may not be recall'd,
But to our honour's great disparagement,
Yet will I favour thee in what I can:
Therefore, merchant, I'll limit thee this day,
To seek thy help by beneficial help:
Try all the friends thou hast in Ephesus;
Beg thou, or borrow, to make up the sum,
And live; if not,¹ then thou art doomed to die:—
Gaoler, take him to thy custody.
Gaol. I will, my lord.
Æge. Hopeless and helpless doth Ægeon wend,²
But to procrastinate his lifeless end.
[Exeunt]

### SCENE II. A public Place. Enter ANTIPHOLUS and DROMIO of Syracuse, and a Merchant.

Mer. Therefore, give out, you are of Epidamnus,
Lest that your goods too soon be confiscate.
This very day, a Syracusan merchant
Is apprehended for arrival here:
And, not being able to buy out his life,
According to the statute of the town,
Dies ere the weary sun set in the west.
There is your money that I had to keep.
Ant. S. Go bear it to the Centaur, where we host,
And stay there, Dromio, till I come to thee.
Within this hour it will be dinner-time:
Till that, I'll view the manners of the town,
Peruse the traders, gaze upon the buildings,
And then return, and sleep within mine inn;
For with long travel I am stiff and weary.
Get thee away.

Dro. S. Many a man would take you at your
word,

And go indeed, having so good a mean.

[Exit DRO. S.

Ant. S. A trusty villain,³ sir; that very oft,
When I am dull with care and melancholy,
Lightens my humour with his merry jests.
What, will you walk with me about the town,
And then go to my inn, and dine with me ?

Mer. I am invited, sir, to certain merchants,
Of whom I hope to make much benefit;
I crave your pardon. Soon, at five o'clock,
Please you, I'll meet with you upon the mart:
And afterwards consort⁴ you till bed-time;
My present business calls me from you now.

Ant. S. Farewell till then: I will go lose myself,
And wander up and down, to view the city.

Mer. Sir, I commend you to your own content.

[Exit Merchant.

Ant. S. He that commends me to my own content,
Commends me to the thing I cannot get.

I to the world am like a drop of water,
That in the ocean seeks another drop;
Who falling there to find his fellow forth,
Unseen, inquisitive, confounds⁵ himself:
So I, to find a mother, and a brother,
In quest of them, unhappy, lose myself.

Enter DROMIO of Ephesus.

Here comes the almanack of my true date,⁶—

What now? How chance, thou art return'd so soon?
Dro. E. Return'd so soon ! rather approach'd too late?

The capon burns, the pig falls from the spit:
The clock hath strucken twelve upon the bell,
My mistress made it one upon my cheek:
She is so hot, because the meat is cold;
The meat is cold because you come not home:
You come not home, because you have no stomach;
You have no stomach, having broken your fast;
But we, that know what 'tis to fast and pray,
Are penitent for your default to-day.

Ant. S. Stop in your wind, sir; tell me this, I
pray;

Where have you left the money that I gave you?

Dro. E. O,—sixpence, that I had o' Wednesday
last,

To pay the saddler for my mistress' crupper;—

The saddler had it, sir, I kept it not.

Ant. S. I am not in a sportive humour now:
Tell me and dally not, where is the money?

We being strangers here, how dar'st thou trust
So great a charge from thine own custody?

Dro. E. I pray you, jest, as you sit at dinner:
I from my mistress come to you in post;

If I return, I will be post indeed;

For she will score your fault upon my pate.
Methinks, your maw, like mine, should be your
clock,

And strike you home without a messenger.
Ant. S. Come, Dromio, come, these jests are out
of season;

Reserve them till a merrier hour than this:

Where is the gold I gave in charge to thee?

Dro. E. To me, sir ? why you gave no gold to me.

Ant. S. Come on, sir knave, have done your
foolishness,

And tell me, how thou hast dispos'd thy charge.
Dro. E. My charge was but to fetch you from
the mart

Home to your house, the Phœnix, sir, to dinner;
My mistress, and her sister, stay for you.

Ant. S. Now, as I am a Christian, answer me,
In what safe place you have bestow'd my money;
Or I shall break that merry sconce⁸ of yours,
That stands on tricks when I am undispos'd:

Where is the thousand marks thou hadst of me?

Dro. E. I have some marks of yours upon my
pate,

Some of my mistress' marks upon my shoulders,
But not a thousand marks between you both.—
If I should pay your worship those again,
Perchance you will not bear them patiently.

Ant. S. Thy mistress' marks! what mistress,
slave, hast thou?

Dro. E. Your worship's wife, my mistress at the
Phœnix;

She that doth fast, till you come home to dinner,
And prays, that you will hie you home to dinner.

Ant. S. What, wilt thou flout me thus unto my
face,

Being forbid ? There, take you that, sir knave.

[Strikes him.

1 No, which is the reading of the first folio, was an-
ciently often used for not. The second folio reads not.
2 Go.

3 That is, a faithful slave. It is the French sense of
the word.

4 i. e. 'accompany you.' In this line the emphasis
must be laid on time, at the end of the line, to preserve
the metre.

5 Confounded, here, does not signify destroyed, as
Malone asserts; but overwhelmed, mixed confusedly
together, lost.

6 They were both born in the same hour, and there-
fore the date of Dromio's birth ascertains that of his
master.

7 The old copy reads cook. The emendation is Pope's.
8 Sconce is head. So in Hamlet, Act v. Sc. 1—
'Why does he suffer this rude knave to knock him
about the sconce?' A sconce signified a blockhouse, or
strong fortification, 'for the most part round, in fashion
of a head,' says Blount. I suppose that it was ancient-
ly used for a lantern also, on account of the round
form of that implement.

SCENE II.

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

339

Dro. E. What mean you, sir? for God's sake, hold your hands;

Nay, an you will not, sir, I'll take my heels.

[Exit DROMIO E.

Ant. S. Upon my life, by some device or other, The villain is o'r-raught¹¹ of all my money. They say, this town is full of cozenage:²² As, nimble jugglers, that deceive the eye; Dark-working sorcerers, that change the mind; Soul-killing witches, that deform the body; Disguised cheaters, prating mountebanks, And many such like liberties of sin:³³ If it prove so, I will be gone the sooner. I'll to the Centaur, to go seek this slave; I greatly fear my money is not safe.

[Exit.]

ACT II.

### SCENE I. A public Place. Enter ADRIANA, and LUCIANA.

Adr. Neither my husband, nor the slave return'd, That in such haste I sent to seek his master!

Sure, Luciana, it is two o'clock.

Luc. Perhaps, some merchant hath invited him, And from the mart he's somewhere gone to dinner; Good sister, let us dine, and never fret:

A man is master of his liberty.

Time is their master; and when they see time, They'll go, or come: If so, be patient sister.

Adr. Why should their liberty than ours be more?

Luc. Because their business still lies out o'doors.

Adr. Look, when I serve him so, he takes it ill.

Luc. O, know, he is the bridle of your will.

Adr. There's none but asses, will be bridled so. Luc. Why, headstrong liberty is lash'd with woe,⁴

There's nothing, situate under Heaven's eye,

But hath his bound, in earth, in sea, in sky:

The beasts, the fishes, and the winged fowls,

Are their males' subjects, and at their contrôls:

Men, more divine, the masters of all these, Lords of the wide world, and wild watry seas, Indued with intellectual sense and souls,

Of more pre-eminence than fish and fowls,

Are masters to their females, and their lords:

Then let your preence attend your accords.

Adr. This servitude makes you to keep unwed.

Luc. Not this, but troubles of the marriage bed.

Adr. But, were you wedded, you would bear some sway.

Luc. Ere I learn love, I'll practise to obey.

Adr. How if your husband start some other where?⁵

Luc. Till he come home again, I would forbear.

Adr. Patience, unmov'd, no marvel though she pause;⁶

They can be meek, that have no other cause.⁷

A wretched soul, bruis'd with adversity,

We bid be quiet, when we hear it cry;

But were we burden'd with like weight of pain,

As much, or more, we should ourselves complain: So thou, that hast no unkind mate to grieve thee,

With urging helpless patience⁸ would'st relieve me: But, if thou live to see like right bereft, This fool-begg'd patience⁹ in thee will be left.

1 i. e. overreached.

2 This was the character which the ancients gave of Ephesus.

3 That is, licentious actions, sinful liberties.

4 The meaning of this passage may be, that those who refuse the bridle must bear the lash, and that woe is the punishment of headstrong liberty.

5 'Elsewhere, other where; in another place, alibi,' says Baret. The sense is, 'How if your husband fly off in pursuit of some other woman?'

6 To pause is to rest, to be quiet.

7 i. e. no cause to be otherwise.

8 That is, by urging me to patience which affords no help.

9 'Fool-begg'd patience' is that patience which is so near to idiotical simplicity, that you might be represented to be a fool, and your guardianship begg'd accordingly.

10 i. e. scarce stand under them.

11 Home is not in the old copy: it was supplied to complete the verse by Capell.

Luc. Well, I will marry one day, but to try;— Here comes your man, now is your husband nigh.

Enter DROMIO of Ephesus.

Adr. Say, is your tardy master now at hand?

Dro. E. Nay, he is at two hands with me, and that my two ears can witness.

Adr. Say, didst you speak with him? know'st thou his mind?

Dro. E. Ay, ay, he told his mind upon mine ear: Beshrew his hand, I scarce could understand it.

Luc. Spake he so doubtfully, thou could'st not feel his meaning?

Dro. E. Nay, he struck so plainly, I could too well feel his blows; and withal so doubtfully, that I could scarce understand them.¹⁰

Adr. But say, I pr'ythee, is he coming home?

It seems he hath great care to please his wife.

Dro. E. Why, mistress, sure my master is horn-mad.

Adr. Horn-mad, thou villain?

Dro. E. I mean not cockuck-mad; but, sure, he's stark mad:

When I desir'd him to come home to dinner,

He ask'd me for a thousand marks in gold:

'Tis dinner time, quoth I; *My gold*, quoth he:

Your meat doth burn, quoth I; *My gold*, quoth he:

Will you come home?¹¹ quoth I; *My gold*, quoth he:

Where is the thousand marks I gave thee, villain?

The pig, quoth I, is burn'd; *My gold*, quoth he:

My mistress, quoth I; *Hang up thy mistress;*

I know not thy mistress; out on thy mistress!¹²

Luc. Quoth who?

Dro. E. Quoth my master:

I know, quoth he, *no house*, no wife, no mistress;—

So that my errand, due unto my tongue,

I thank him, I bear home upon my shoulders;

For, in conclusion, he did beat me there.

Adr. Go back again, thou slave, and fetch him home.

Dro. E. Go back again, and be new beaten home?

For God's sake, send some other messenger.

Adr. Back, slave, or I will break thy pate across.

Dro. E. And he will bless that cross with other beating?

Between you I shall have a holy head.

Adr. Hence, prating peasant; fetch thy master home.

Dro. E. Am I so round¹³ with you, as you with me,

That like a football you do spurn me thus?

You spurn me hence, and he will spurn me hither:

If I last in this service, you must case me in leather.

[Exit.]

Luc. Fie, how impatience loueth in your face!

Adr. His company must do his minions grace, Whilst I at home starve for a merry look.¹⁴

Hath homely age the alluring beauty took

From my poor cheek? then he hath wasted it:

Are my discourses dull? barren my wit?

If voluble and sharp discourse be marr'd,

Unkindness blunts it, more than marble hard.

Do their gay vestments his affections bait?

That's not my fault, he's master of my state.

What ruins are in me, that can be found.

By him not ruin'd? then is he the ground

12 We have an equally unmetrical line in the first Act:—

'Therefore, merchant, I'll limit thee this day.'

13 He plays upon the word round, which signifies spherical, as applied to himself; and unrestrained, or free in speech or action, as regards his mistress. The King in Hamlet desires the Queen to be round with her son.

14 So in Shakspeare's Sonnets, the forty-seventh and seventy-fifth:—

'When the mine eye is famish'd for a look?'

'Sometimes all full with feeding on his sight,

'And by and by clean starved for a look?'

15 *Defeat and defeature* were used for disfigurement or alteration of features. Cotgrave has 'Un visage desfaict: *Groune very leane, pale, wan, or decayed in feature and colour?*

16 Fair, strictly speaking, is not used here for fair-

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

Act II.

340

A sunny look of his would soon repair:

But, too unruly deer, he breaks the pale,
And feeds from home; poor I am but his stale.¹

Luc. Self-harming jealousy! —fie, beat it hence.

Adr. Unfeeling fools can with such wrongs dis-
pense.

I know his eye doth homage elsewhere;

Or else, what lets² it but he would be here ?

Sister, you know, he promis'd me a chain;

'Would, that alone, alone he would detain,
So he would keep fair quarter with his bed'

I see, the jewel, best enamelled,

Will lose his beauty; and though gold 'bides still,
That others touch, yet often touching will

Wear gold: and no man, that hath a name,

But falsehood and corruption doth it shame.

Since that my beauty cannot please his eye,

I'll weep what's left away, and weeping die.

Luc. How many fond fools serve mad jealousy!

[Exeunt.]

### SCENE II. The same. Enter ANTIPHOLUS of Syracuse.

Ant. S. The gold, I gave to Dromio, is laid up
Safe at the Centaur; and the heedful slave
Is wander'd forth, in care to seek me out.

By computation, and mine host's report,

I could not speak with Dromio, since at first

I sent him from the mart: See, here he comes.

Enter DROMIO of Syracuse.

How now, sir? is your merry humour alter'd?

As you love strokes, so jest with me again.

You know no Centaur? you receiv'd no gold?

Your mistress sent to have me home to dinner?

My house was at the Phœnix? Wasst thou mad,

That thus so madly thou didst answer me?

Dro. S. What answer, sir? when spake I such
a word?

Ant. S. Even now, even here, not half an hour
since.

Dro. S. I did not see you since you sent me hence,
Home to the Centaur, with the gold you gave me,

Ant. S. Villain, thou didst deny the gold's receipt;

And told'st me of a mistress, and a dinner;

For which, I hope, thou felt'st I was displeas'd.

Dro. S. I am glad to see you in this merry vein:

What means this jest? I pray you, master, tell me,

Ant. S. Yea, dost thou jeer, and flout me in the
teeth?

Think'st thou, I jest? Hold, take thou that, and that.

[Beating him.]

Dro. S. Hold, sir, for God's sake: now your jest
is earnest:

Upon what bargain do you give it me?

Ant. S. Because that I familiarly sometimes

Do use you for my fool, and chat with you,

Your sauciness will jest upon my love,

And make a common of my serious hours.³

When the sun shines, let foolish gnats make sport,
But creep in crannies, when he hides his beams.

If you will jest with me, know my aspect,⁴

And fashion your demeanour to my looks,

Or I will beat this method in your sconce.

ness, as Steevens supposed; but for beauty. Shaks-
pearce has often employed it in this sense, without any
relation to whiteness of skin or complexion. The use
of the substantive instead of the adjective, in this in-
stance, is not peculiar to him; but the common practice
of his contemporaries.

I Though Shakspeare sometimes uses *stale* for a de-
cy or bait, I do not think that he meant it here; or that
Adriana can mean to call herself his *stalking-horse*.
Probably she means she is *thrown aside, forgotten,*
*cast off,* become *stale* to him. The dictionaries, in
voce *Exoletus*, countenance this explanation.

2 Hinders.

3 i. e. intrude on them when you please.

4 Study my countenance.

5 A sconce was a fortification; to *insconce* was to
*hide*, to protect as with a fort.

6 So in The Taming of the Shrew :—

'I tell thee, Kate,' twas burnt and dried away,

Dro. S. Sconce, call you it? so you would leave
battering, I had rather have it a head: an you use
these blows long, I must get a sconce for my head,
and insconce⁵ it too; or else I shall seek my wit in
my shoulders. But, I pray, sir, why am I beaten?

Ant. S. Dost thou not know?

Dro. S. Nothing, sir; but that I am beaten.

Ant. S. Shall I tell you why?

Dro. S. Ay, sir, and wherefore; for, they say,
any why hath a wherefore.

Ant. S. Why, first,—for flouting me; and then,
wherefore,—

for urging it the second time to me.

Dro. S. Was there ever any man thus beaten
out of season?

When, in the why, and the wherefore, is neither
rhyme nor reason?—

Well, sir, I thank you.

Ant. S. Thank me, sir? for what?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, for this something that you gave me for nothing.

Ant. S. I'll make you amends next, to give you
nothing for something. But say, sir, is it dinner-
time?

Dro. S. No, sir; I think, the meat wants that I
have.

Ant. S. In good time, sir, what's that?

Dro. S. Basting.

Ant. S. Well, sir, then 'twill be dry.

Dro. S. If it be, sir, I pray you eat none of it.

Ant. S. Your reason?

Dro. S. Lest it make you choleric,⁶ and purchase me another dry basting.

Ant. S. Well, sir, learn to jest in good time;
There's a time for all things.

Dro. S. I durst have denied that, before you were
so choleric.

Ant. S. By what rule, sir?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, by a rule as plain as the
plain bald pate of father Time himself.

Ant. S. Let's hear it.

Dro. S. There's no time for a man to recover his
hair, that grows bald by nature.

Ant. S. May he not do it by fine and recovery?

Dro. S. Yes, to pay a fine for a periwig, and
recover the lost hair of another man.

Ant. S. Why is time such a niggard of hair, be-
ing, as it is, so plentiful an excrement?

Dro. S. Because it is a blessing that he bestows
on beasts: and what he hath scanted men⁷ in hair,
he hath given them in wit.

Ant. S. Why, but there's many a man hath more
hair than wit.⁸

Dro. S. Not a man of those, but he hath the wit
to lose his hair.¹⁰

Ant. S. Why, thou didst conclude hairy men
plain dealers without wit.

Dro. S. The plainer dealer, the sooner lost: Yet
he lothest it in a kind of jollity.

Ant. S. For what reason?

Dro. S. For two; and sound ones too.

Ant. S. Nay, not sound, I pray you.

Dro. S. Sure ones, then.

Ant. S. Nay, not sure, in a thing falsing.¹¹

And I expressly am forbid to touch it,

For it engenders cholér, planteth anger,

7 This is another instance of Shakspeare's acquaintance with technical law terms.

8 The old copy reads them: the emendation is Theo-
bald's.

9 The following lines 4 Upon [Suckling's] Aglaura,
printed in folio,' may serve to illustrate this proverbial
sentence:—

'This great voluminous pamphlet may be said

To be like one that hath more hair than head;

More excrement than body :—trees which sprout

With broadest leaves have still the smallest fruit.

Parnassus Biceps. 1656.

10 Shakspeare too frequently alludes to this loss of
hair by a certain disease. It seems to have been a joke
that pleased him, and probably tickled his auditors.

11 To *false*, as a verb, has 'been long obsolete; but it
was current in Shakspeare's time.

["## SCENE II.", "Dro. S. Certain ones then.", "Ant. S. Name them.", "Dro. S. The one, to save the money that he spends in tiring; the other, that at dinner they should not drop in his porridge.", "Ant. S. You would all this time have proved, there is no time for all things.", "Dro. S. Marry, and did; sir; namely, e'en¹¹ no time to recover hair lost by nature.", "Ant. S. But your reason was not substantial, why there is no time to recover.", "Dro. S. Thus I mend it: Time himself is bald, and therefore, to the world's end, will have bald followers.", "Ant. S. I knew 'twould be a bald conclusion: But soft! who wafts² us yonder!", "## Enter ADRIANA and LUCIANA.", "Adr. Ay, ay, Antipholus, look strange and frown; Some other mistress hath thy sweet aspects, I am not Adriana, nor thy wife.", "The time was once, when thou unrig'd would'st vow, That never words were music to thine ear,³", "That never object pleasing in thine eye, That never touch well welcome to thy hand, That never meat sweet-savour'd in thy taste, Unless I spake, look'd, touch'd, or carv'd to thee.", "How comes it now, my husband, oh, how comes it, That thou art then estranged from thyself?", "Thyself I call it, being strange to me,", "That, undividable, incorporate,", "Am better than thy dear self's better part.", "Ah, do not tear away thyself from me;", "For know, my love, as easy may'st thou fall⁴", "A drop of water in the breaking gulf,", "And take unmingled thence that drop again,", "Without addition, or diminishing,", "As take from me thyself, and not me too.", "How dearly would it touch thee to the quick,", "Should'st thou but hear I were licentious?", "And that this body, consecrate to thee,", "By ruffian lust should be contaminate?", "Would'st thou not spit at me, and spurn at me,", "And hurl the name of husband in my face,", "And tear the stain'd skin off my harlot brow,", "And from my false hand cut the wedding ring,", "And break it with a deep divorcing vow?", "I know thou canst; and therefore, see, thou do it.", "I am possess'd with an adulterate blot;", "My blood is mingled with the crime of lust:", "For, if we two be one, and thou play false,", "I do digest the poison of thy flesh,", "Being strumpeted⁵ by thy contagion.", "Keep then fair league and truce with thy true bed;", "I live disstain'd,⁶ thou undishonoured.", "Ant. S. Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not:", "In Ephesus I am but two hours old,", "As strange unto your town, as to your talk;", "Who, every word by all my wit being scanned,", "Want wit in all one word to understand.", "Luc. Fie, brother! how the world is chang'd with that word:", "When were you wont to use my sister thus?", "She sent for you by Dromio home to dinner.", "Ant. S. By Dromio?", "Dro. S. By me?", "Adr. By thee: and this thou dost return from him,", "That he did buffet thee, and, in his blows", "Denied my house for his, me for his wife.", "Ant. S. Did you converse, sir, with this gentlewoman?", "What is the course and drift of your compact?", "1 The old copy, by mistake, has in.", "2 i. e. beckons us.", "3 Imitated by Pope in his Epistle from Sappho to Phaed:", "“My music then you could for ever hear,", "And all my words were music to your ear.”", "4 Fall is here a verb active.", "5 Shakspeare is not singular in the use of this verb.", "6 i. e. unstain'd.", "7 i. e. separated, parted.", "## COMEDY OF ERRORS.", "341", "Dro. S. I, sir? I never saw her till this time.", "Ant. S. Villain, thou liest; for even her very words", "Didst thou deliver to me on the mart.", "Dro. S. I never spake with her in all my life.", "Ant. S. How can she thus then call us by our names,", "Unless it be by inspiration?", "Adr. How ill agrees it with your gravity,", "To counterfeit thus grossly with your slave,", "Abetting him to thwart me in my mood?", "Be it my wrong, you are from me exempt,", "But wrong not that wrong with a more contempt.", "Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine:", "Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine:", "Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,", "Makes me with thy strength to communicate:", "If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,", "Usurping ivy, briar, or idle⁹ moss:", "Who, all for want of pruning, with intrusion", "Infect thy sap, and live on thy confusion.", "Ant. S. To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme:", "What, was I married to her in my dream?", "Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?", "What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?", "Until I know this sure uncertainty,", "I'll entertain the offer¹⁰ fallacy.", "Luc. Dromio, go bid the servants spread for dinner.", "Dro. S. O, for my beads! I cross me for a sinner.", "This is the fairy land;—O, spite of spites!—", "We talk with goblins, owls, and elvish sprites;¹¹", "If we obey them not, this will ensue,", "They'll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue.", "Luc. Why prat'st thou to thyself, and answer'st not?", "Dromio, thou drone,¹² thou snail, thou slug, thou sot!", "Dro. S. I am transformed, master, am not I?", "Ant. S. I think, thou art, in mind, and so am I.", "Dro. S. Nay, master, both in mind, and in my shape.", "Ant. S. Thou hast thine own form.", "Dro. S.", "No, I am an ape.", "Luc. If thou art chang'd to aught, 'tis to an ass.", "Dro. S. 'Tis true; she rides me, and I long for grass.", "'Tis so, I am an ass; else it could never be,", "But I should know her as well as she knows me.", "Adr. Come, come, no longer will I be a fool,", "To put the finger in the eye and weep,", "Whilst man, and master, laugh my woes to scorn.—", "Come, sir, to dinner; Dromio, keep the gate:—", "Husband, I'll dine above with you to-day,", "And shrive¹³ you of a thousand idle pranks:", "Sirrah, if any ask you for my master,", "Say, he dines forth, and let no creature enter.—", "Come, sister:—Dromio, play the porter well.", "Ant. S. Am I in earth, in heaven, or in hell?", "Sleeping or waking? mad, or well advis'd?", "Known unto these, and to myself undisgu'd!", "I'll say as they say, and persever so,", "And in this mist at all adventures go.", "Dro. S. Master, shall I be porter at the gate?", "Adr. Ay; and let none enter, lest I break your pate.", {"

542

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

ACT III.

### SCENE I. The same. Enter ANTIPHOLUS of Ephesus, DROMIO of Ephesus, ANGELO, and BALTHAZAR.

Ant. E. Good signior Angelo, you must excuse us all:

My wife is shrewish when I keep not hours:

Say, that I linger'd with you at your shop,

To see the making of her carkanet,

And that to-morrow you will bring it home.

But here's a villain, that would face me down,

He met me on the mart; and that I beat him,

And charg'd him with a thousand marks in gold;

And that I did deny my wife and house :—

Thou drunkard, thou, what didst thou mean by this?

Dro. E. Say what you will, sir, but I know what I know:

That you beat me at the mart, I have your hand to show:

If the skin were parchment, and the blows you gave were ink,

Your own handwriting would tell you what I think.

Ant. E. I think, thou art an ass.

Dro. E. Marry so it doth appear

By the wrongs I suffer, and the blows I bear.

I should kick, being kick'd; and, being at that pass,

You would keep from my heels, and beware of an ass.

Ant. E. You are sad, signior Balthazar: 'Pray God, our cheer

May answer my good will, and your good welcome here.

Bal. I hold your dainties cheap, sir, and your welcome dear.

Ant. E. O, signior Balthazar, either at flesh or fish,

A table full of welcome makes scarce one dainty dish.

Bal. Good meat, sir, is common; that every churl affords.

Ant. E. And welcome more common; for that's nothing but words.

Bal. Small cheer, and great welcome, makes a merry feast.

Ant. E. Ay, to a niggardly host, and more sparing guest;

But though my cates be mean, take them in good part;

Better cheer may you have, but not with better heart.

But, soft; my door is lock'd; Go bid them let us in.

Dro. E. Maud, Bridget, Marian, Cicely, Gillian, Jen'!

Dro. S. [within.] Mome,² malt-horse, capon, coxcomb, idiot, patch!³

Either get thee from the door, or sit down at the hatch:

Dost thou conjure for wenches, that thou call'st for such store,

When one is one too many? Go, get thee from the door.

Dro. E. What patch is made our porter? My master stays in the street.

Dro. S. Let him walk from whence he came, lest he catch cold on's feet.

Ant. E. Who talks within there? ho, open the door.

Dro. S. Right, sir, I'll tell you when, an you'll tell me wherefore.

Ant. E. Wherefore? for my dinner; I have not din'd to-day.

Dro. S. Nor to-day here you must not; come again, when you may.

1 A carcanet or chain for a lady's neck; a collar or chain of gold and precious stones: from the French carcan. It was sometimes spelled *karkanet* and *quarquenet*.

2 A mome was a fool or foolish jester. Momar is used by Plautus for a fool; whence the French mom'meur.

3 Patch was a term of contempt often applied to persons of low condition, and sometimes applied to a fool.

ACT III.

Ant. E. What art thou, that keep'st me out from the house I owe?⁴

Dro. S. The porter for this time, sir, and my name is Dromio.

Dro. E. O villain, thou hast stolen both mine office and my name;

The one ne'er got me credit, the other mickle blame.

If thou had'st been Dromio to-day in my place,

Thou would'st have chang'd thy face for a name, or thy name for an ass.

Luce. [within.] What a coil² is there? Dromio, who are those at the gate?

Dro. E. Let my master in, Luce.

Luce. 'Faith, no; he comes too late:

And so tell your master. O Lord, I must laugh :—

Dro. E. Have at you with a proverb.—Shall I set in my staff?

Luce. Have at you with another: that's,—When? can you tell?

Dro. S. If thy name be call'd Luce, Luce, thou hast answer'd him well,

Ant. E. Do you hear, you minion? you'll let us in, I hope?⁶

Luce. I thought to have ask'd you.

Dro. S. And you said, no.

Dro. E. So, come, help; well struck; there was blow for blow.

Ant. E. Thou baggage, let me in.

Luce. Can you tell for whose sake?

Dro. E. Master knock the door hard.

Luce. Let him knock till itake.

Ant. E. You'll cry for this, minion, if I beat the door down.

Luce. What needs all that, and a pair of stocks in the town?

Adr. [within.] Who is that at the door, that keeps all this noise?

Dro. S. By my troth, your town is troubled with unruly boys.

Ant. E. Are you there, wife? you might have come before.

Adr. Your wife, sir knave! go, get you from the door.

Dro. E. If you went in pain, master, this knave would go sore.

Ang. Here is neither cheer, sir, nor welcome; we would fain have either.

Bal. In debating which was best, we shall part' with neither.

Dro. E. They stand at the door, master; bid them welcome hither.

Ant. E. There is something in the wind, that we cannot get in.

Dro. E. You would say so, master, if your garments were thin.

Your cake here is warm within; you stand here in the cold:

It would make a man mad as a buck, to be so bought and sold.⁸

Ant. E. Go, fetch me something, I'll break ope the gate.

Dro. S. Break any breaking here, and I'll break your knave's pate.

Dro. E. A man may break a word with you, sir; and words are but wind;

Ay, and break it in your face, so he break it not behind.

Dro. S. It seems, thou wantest breaking; Out upon thee, hind!

Dro. E. Here is too much, out upon thee! I pray thee, let me in.

Dro. S. Ay, when fowls have no feathers, and fish have no fin.

4 I own, am owner of. 5 Bustle, tumult.

6 It seems probable that a line following this has been lost; in which Luce might be threatened with a rope; which would have furnished the rhyme now wanting. In a subsequent scene Dromio is ordered to go and buy a rope's end, for the purpose of using it on Adriana and her confederates.

7 Have part.

8 A proverbial phrase, meaning to be so overreached by foul and secret practices.

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

Act III.

Ant. S. Call thyself sister, sweet, for I aim¹
thee:

Thee will I love, and with thee lead my life;

Thou hast no husband yet, nor I no wife :

Give me thy hand.

Luc.

O, soft, sir, hold you still;
I'll fetch my sister, to get her good will. [Exit Luc.

Enter, from the House of ANTIPHOLUS of Ephesus,
DROMIO of Syracuse.

Ant. S. Why, how now, Dromio? where run't
thou so fast?

Dro. S. Do you know me, sir? am I Dromio?
am I your man? am I myself?

Ant. S. Thou art Dromio, thou art my man, thou
art thyself.

Dro. S. I am an ass, I am a woman's man, and
besides myself.

Ant. S. What woman's man? and how besides
thyself?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, besides myself, I am due to
a woman: one that claims me, one that haunts me,
one that will have me.

Ant. S. What claim lays she to thee ?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, such claim as you would lay
to your horse; and she would have me as a beast: not
that, I being a beast, she would have me; but
that she, being a very beastly creature, lays claim
to me.

Ant. S. What is she ?

Dro. S. A very reverend body; ay, such a one
as a man may not speak of, without he say, sir-
reverence:² I have but lean luck in the match, and
yet is she a wondrous fat marriage.

Ant. S. How dost thou mean, a fat marriage ?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, she's the kitchen wench, and
all grease; and I know not what use to put her to,
but to make a lamp of her, and run from her by her
own light. I warrant, her rags, and the tallow in
them, will burn a Poland winter: if she lives till
doomsday, she'll burn a week longer than the whole
world.

Ant. S. What complexion is she of?

Dro. S. Swart,³ like my shoe, but her face,
nothing like so clean kept: For why? she breathes,
a man may go over shoes in the grime of it.

Ant. S. That's a fault that water will mend.

Dro. S. No, sir, 'tis in grain; Noah's flood could
not do it.

Ant. S. What's her name ?

Dro. S. Nell, sir;—but her name and three quarts, that is, an ell and three quarters, will not measure her from hip to hip.⁴

Ant. S. Then she bears some breadth ?

Dro. S. No longer from head to foot, than from
hip to hip; she is spherical, like a globe; I could
find out countries in her.

Ant. S. In what part of her body stands Ireland?

Dro. S. Marry, sir, in her buttocks; I found it
out by the bogs.

Ant. S. Where Scotland?

Dro. S. I found it by the barrenness; hard, in
the palm of the hand.⁵

Ant. S. Where France?

Dro. S. In her forehead; arm'd and reverted,
making war against her heir.⁶

Ant. S. Where England?

Dro. S. I look'd for the chalky cliffs, but I could
find no whiteness in them, but I guess, it stood in
her chin, by the salt rheum that run between France
and it.

Ant. S. Where Spain?

Dro. S. 'Faith, I saw it not; but I felt it hot in
her breath.

Ant. S. Where America, the Indies?

Dro. S. O, sir, upon her nose, all o'er embell-
lish'd with rubies, carbuncles, sapphires, declining
their rich aspect to the hot breath of Spain; who
sent whole armadas of carracks⁷ to be ballast at
her nose.

Ant. S. Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?

Dro. S. O, sir, I did not look so low. To con-
clude, this drudge, or diviner, laid claim to me;
call'd me Dromio, swore, I was assur'd⁸ to her;
told me what privy marks I had about me, as the
mark of my shoulder, the mole in my neck, the
great wart on my left arm, that I, amazed, ran from
her as a witch: and, I think, if my breast had not
been made of faith,⁹ and my heart of steel, she had
transform'd me to a curtail-dog, and made me turn
i' the wheel.¹⁰

Ant. S. Go, hie thee presently, post to the road;
And if the wind blow any way from shore,
I will not harbour in this town to night.
If any bark put forth, come to the mart,
Where I will walk, till thou return to me.
If every one knows us, and we know none,
'Tis time, I think, to trudge, pack, and be gone.

Dro. S. As from a bear a man would run for
life,

So fly I from her that would be my wife. [Exit.
Ant. S. There's none but witches do inhabit
here;

And therefore 'tis high time that I were hence.
She that doth call me husband, even my soul
Doth for a wife abhor: but her fair sister,
Possess'd with such a gentle sovereign grace,
Of such enchanting presence and discourse,
Hath almost made me traitor to myself.
But, lest myself be guilty to¹¹ self-wrong,
I'll stop my ears against the mermaid's song.

Enter ANGELO.

Ang. Master Antipholus?

Ant. S. Ay, that's my name.

Ang. I know it well, sir: Lo, here is the chain;
I thought to have ta'en you at the Porcupine:¹²
The chain unfinish'd made me stay thus long.

Ant. S. What is your will, that I shall do with
this?

Ang. What, please yourself, sir; I have made it
for you.

Ant. S. Made it for me, sir! I bespoke it not.

Ang. Not once nor twice, but twenty times you
have:

Go home with it, and please your wife withal;
And soon at supper-time I'll visit you,
And then receive my money for the chain.

1 The old copy reads I am thee. The present read-
ing is Steevens'. Others have proposed I mean thee;
but aim for aim at was sometimes used.

2 This is a very old corruption of *sace* reverence,
*salva reverentia*. See Blount's Glossography, 1632.

3 *Swart*, or swarth, i. e. *dark*, *dusky*, *infuscus*.

4 This poor conundrum is borrowed by Massinger in
The Old Law.

5 Had this play been revived after the accession of
James, it is probable this passage would have been
struck out; as was that relative to the Scotch lord in
The Merchant of Venice, Act i. Sc. 1.

6 'An equivoque,' says Theobald, 'is intended. In
1589, Henry III. of France, being stabbed, was succeed-
ed by Henry IV. of Navarre, whom he had appointed
his successor; but whose claim the states of France
resisted on account of his being a protestant. This I
take to be what is meant by France making war against
her heir. Elizabeth had sent over the Earl of Essex
with four thousand men to the assistance of Henry of

Navarre, in 1591. This oblique sneer at France was
therefore a compliment to the poet's royal mistresses.
The other allusion is not of a nature to admit of expla-
nation.

7 *Carracks*, large ships of burthen; *caraca*, *Span-
Ballast* is merely a contraction of *bailasse*; to *balas*
being the old authography: as we write *drest* for *dres-
ed*, *embost* for *embossed*; &c.

8 I. e. *affianced*.

9 Alluding to the popular belief that a great share of
faith was a protection from witchcraft.

10 A turnspit.

11 Pope, not understanding sufficiently the phraseolo-
gy of Shakspeare, altered this to guilty of self-wrong.
But guilty to was the construction of that age.

12 Porcupine throughout the old editions of these
plays is written *porpentine*. I find it written *porpyn* in
an old phrase book, called Hormanni Vulgaria, 1519,
thus: *Porpyns have longer prickles than Yrchina.*

## SCENE II.

## COMEDY OF ERRORS.

845

Ang. S. I pray you, sir, receive the money now, For fear you ne'er see chain, nor money, more.

Ang. You are a merry man, sir; fare you well.

Ant. S. What I should think of this, I cannot tell; But this I think, there's no man is so vain, That would refuse so fair an offer'd chain.

I see, a man here needs not live by shifts, When in the streets he meets such golden gifts. I'll to the mart, and there for Dromio stay; If any ship put out, then straight away.

[Exit.]

[Exit.]

## ACT IV.

### SCENE I. The same. Enter a Merchant, ANGELO, and an Officer.

Mer. You know, since pentecost the sum is due, And since I have not much importun'd you; Nor now I had not, but that I am bound To Persia, and want gilders for my voyage: Therefore make present satisfaction, Or I'll attach you by this officer.

Ang. Even just the sum, that I do owe to you, Is growing¹ to me by Antiphus: And in the instant that I met with you, He had of me a chain; at five o'clock, I shall receive the money for the same: Pleaseth you walk with me down to his house, I will discharge my bond, and thank you too.

Enter ANTPHOLUS of Ephesus, and DROMIO of Ephesus, from the Courtezan's.

Off. That labour may you save; see where he comes.

Ant. E. While I go to the goldsmith's house, go thou

And buy a rope's end; that will I bestow Among my wife and her² confederates, For locking out my doors by day.— But soft, I see the goldsmith:—get thee gone: Buy that a rope, and bring it home to me.

Dro. E. I buy a thousand pound a year! I buy rope! [Exit DROMIO.

Ant. E. A man is well hump up, that trusts to you. I promised your presence, and the chain; But neither chain, nor goldsmith came to me: Belike, you thought our love would last too long, If it were chain'd together; and therefore came not.

Ang. Saving your merry humour, here's the note, How much your chain weighs to the utmost carat; The fineness of the gold, and chargeable fashion; Which doth amount to three odd ducats more Than I stand indebted to this gentleman; For he will, see him presently discharg'd, For he is bound to sea, and stays but for it.

Ant. E. I am not furnish'd with the present money.

Besides, I have some business in the town: Good signior, take the stranger to my house, And with you take the chain, and bid my wife Disburse the sum on the receipt thereof;

Perchance, I will³ be there as soon as you.

Ang. Then you will bring the chain to her yourself.

Ant. E. No! bear it with you, lest I come not time enough.

Ang. Well, sir, I will: Have you the chain about you?

Ant. E. An if I have not, sir, I hope you have: Or else you may return without your money.

1 i. e. accruing.

2 The old copy reads their.

3 I will for I shall is a Scotticism; but it is not unfrequent in old writers on this side of the Tweed.

4 Malone has a very long note on this passage, in which he says: 'it was not Angelo's meaning, that Antiphus of Ephesus should send a jewel or other token by him, but that Antiphus should send him with a verbal token to his wife, by which it might be ascertained that he came from Antiphus; and that she might safely pay the price of the chain.' In the name of common sense, what does this prove? —Can it signify

Ang. Nay, come, I pray you, sir, give me the chain;

Both wind and tide stays for this gentleman, And I, to blame, have held him here too long.

Ant. E. Good lord, you use this dalliance, to excuse

Your breach of promise to the Porcupine:

I should have chid you for not bringing it,

But, like a shrew, you first begin to brawl.

Mer. The hour steals on; I pray you, sir, despatch patch.

Ang. You hear, how he importunes me; the chain—

Ant. E. Why, give it to my wife, and fetch your money.

Ang. Come, come, you know, I gave it you even now;

Either send the chain, or send by me some token.⁴
Ant. E. Fie! now you run this humour out of breath:

Come, where's the chain? I pray you let me see it.

Mer. My business cannot brook this dalliance;

Good sir, say, wher' you'll answer me, or no;

If not, I'll leave him to the officer.

Ant. E. I answer you! What should I answer you?

Ang. The money, that you owe me for the chain.

Ant. E. I owe you none, till I receive the chain.

Ang. You know, I gave it you half an hour since.

Ant. E. You gave me none; you wrong me much to say so.

Ang. You wrong me more, sir, in denying it:

Consider, how it stands upon my credit.

Mer. Well, officer, arrest him at my suit.

Off. I do; and charge you in the duke's name to obey me.

Ang. This touches me in reputation:

Either consent to pay this sum for me,

Or I attach you by this officer.

Ant. E. Consent to pay thee that I never had!

Arrest me, foolish fellow, if thou dar'st.

Ang. Here is thy fee; arrest him, officer;

I would not spare my brother in this case,

If he should scorn me so apparently.

Off. I do arrest you, sir; you hear the suit.

Ant. E. I do obey thee, till I give thee bail:

But, sirrah, you shall buy this sport as dear

As all the metal in your shop will answer.

Ang. Sir, sir, I shall have law in Ephesus,

To your notorious shame, I doubt it not.

### Enter DROMIO of Syracuse.

Dro. S. Master, there is a bark of Epidamnum, That stays but till her owner comes aboard, And then, sir, she bears away: our fraughtage,⁵ sir, I have convey'd aboard: and I have bought The oil, the balsamum, and aqua-vitæ. The ship is in her trim; the merry wind Blows fair from land: they stay for nought at all, But for their owner, master, and yourself.

Ant. E. How now! a madman! Why thou peevish⁶ sheep,

What ship of Epidamnum stays for me?

Dro. S. A ship you sent me to, to hire waeflage.⁷

Ant. E. Thou drunken slave, I sent thee for a rope;

And told thee to what purpose and what end.

Dro. S. You sent me for a rope's end as soon:

You sent me to the bay, sir, for a bark.

Ant. E. I will debate this matter at more leisure,

And teach your ears to list me with more heed.

To Adriana, villain, hie thee straight:

Give her this key, and tell her, in the desk, That's cover'd o'er with Turkish tapestry,

whether the token Angelo wishes Antiphus to send by him was to be verbul or material? Tokens were common in Shakspeare's time of many kinds; there were tavern tokens, which were counters of lead or leather. There were written tokens or billes, as they were then called, 'given to men by which they might receive a certain sum of money,' &c. Such a one Angelo probably requires.

5 Freight, cargo.

6 Peevish was used for mad, or foolish.

7 i. e. carriage; hire is here a dissyllable, and is spelt hier in the old copy.

44

346

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

ACT IV.

There is a purse of ducats: let her send it;
Tell her, I am arrested in the street,
And that shall bail me: hie thee, slave; be gone.
On, officer, to prison, till it come.

[Exeunt] Mer. ANG. Officer, and ANT. E.
Dro. S. 'To Adriana! that is where we din'd,
Where Dowsabel did claim me for her husband:
She is too big, I hope, for me to compass.
Thither I must, although against my will,
For servants must their masters' minds fulfil. [Exit].

### SCENE II. The same. Enter ADRIANA and LUCIANA.

Adr. Ah, Luciana, did he tempt thee so ?
Might'st thou perceive austerely in his eye
That he did plead in earnest, yea or no ?
Look'd he or red, or pale ; or sad, or merrily ?
What observation mad'st thou in this case,
Of his heart's meteors tilting in his face ?¹¹

Luc. First, he denied you had in him no right.²

Adr. He meant, he did me none ; the more my
spite.

Luc. Then swore he, that he was a stranger here.

Adr. And true he swore, though yet forsworn he
were.

Luc. Then pleaded I for you.

Adr. And what said he ?

Luc. That love I begg'd for you, he begg'd of me.

Adr. With what persuasion did he tempt thy love ?

Luc. With words, that in an honest suit might
move.

First, he did praise my beauty; then my speech.
Adr. Did'st speak him fair ?

Luc. Have patience, I beseech.

Adr. I cannot, nor I will not, hold me still ;

My tongue, though not my heart, shall have his will.

He is deformed, crooked, old, and sere,³

Ill-fac'd, worse-bodied, shapeless every where ;

Vicious, ungentle, foolish, blunt, unkind ;

Stigmatical in making,⁴ worse in mind.

Luc. Who would be jealous then of such a one ?

No evil lost is wail'd when it is gone.

Adr. Ah! but I think him better than I say,
And yet would herein others' eyes were worse :

Far from her nest the lapwing cries away ;⁵

My heart prays for him, though my tongue do curse.

### Enter DROMIO of Syracuse.

Dro. S. Here, go ; the desk, the purse; sweet
now, make haste.

Luc. How hast thou lost thy breath ?

Dro. S. By running fast.

Adr. Where is thy master, Dromio ? is he well ?

Dro. S. No, he's in tartar limbo, worse than hell :

A devil in an everlasting garment⁶ hath him,
One, whose hard heart is button'd up with steel ;

A fiend, a fairy,⁷ pitiless and rough ;

A wolf, nay worse, a fellow all in buff ;

A back-friend, a shoulder-clapper, one that countermands

The passages of alleys, creeks, and narrow lands ;⁸

1 The allusion is to those meteors which have sometimes been thought to resemble armies meeting in the shock of battle. The following comparison in the second book of Paradise Lost best explains it:

⁴ As when to warn proud cities, war appears

Wag'd in the troubled sky, and armies rush

To battle in the clouds, before each van

Prick forth the aery knights, and couch their spears,
Till thickest legions close; with feats of arms

From either end of heaven the welkin burns.¹¹

2 This double negative had the force of a stronger assertion in the phraseology of that age.

3 Dry, withered.

⁴ Marked or stigmatized by nature with deformity.

5 This expression, which appears to have been proverbia!l, is again alluded to in Measure for Measure, Act i. Sc. 5.

6 The buff or leather jerkin of the sergeant is called an everlasting garment, because it was so durable.

7 Theobald would read a *fury*; but a *fairy*, in Shakespeare's time, sometimes meant a *malevolent sprite*, and coupled as it is with pitiless and rough, the meaning is clear.

A hound that runs counter, and yet draws dry-foot well;²

One that before the judgment, carries poor souls to hell.¹⁰

Adr. Why, man, what is the matter ?

Dro. S. I do not know the matter : he is 'rested on the case.

Adr. What, is he arrested ? tell me at whose suit.

Dro. S. I know not at whose suit he is arrested, well ;

But is¹¹ in a suit of buff, which 'rested him, that can I tell :

Will you send him, mistress, redemption, the money in his desk ?

Adr. Go fetch it, sister.—This I wonder at, [Exit LUCIANA].

That he, unknown to me, should be in debt : Tell me, was he arrested on a band ?¹²

Dro. S. Not on a band, but on a stronger thing ; A chain, a chain ; do you not hear it ring ?

Adr. What, the chain ?

Dro. S. No, no, the bell : 'tis time that I were gone. It was two ere I left him, and now the clock strikes one.

Adr. The hours come back ! that did I never hear.

Dro. S. O yes, If any hour meet a sergeant,
a' turns back for very fear.

Adr. As if time were in debt ! how fondly dost thou reason ?

Dro. S. Time is a very bankrupt, and owes more than he's worth to season.

Nay, he's a thief too : Have you not heard men say,
That time comes stealing on by night and day ?

If he¹³ be in debt, and theft, and a sergeant in the way,

Hath he not reason to turn back an hour in a day ?

### Enter ADRIANA.

Adr. Go, Dromio; there's the money, bear it straight ;

And bring thy master home immediately.—

Come, sister: I am press'd down with conceit ;¹⁴

Conceit, my comfort, and my injury. [Exeunt].

### SCENE III. The same. Enter ANTIPHOLUS of Syracuse.

Ant. S. There's not a man I meet, but doth salute me

As if I were their well acquainted friend ;¹⁵

And every one doth call me by my name.

Some tender money to me, some invite me ;

Some other give me thanks for kindnesses ;

Some offer me commodities to buy :

Even now a tailor call'd me in his shop,

And show'd me silks that he had bought for me,

And, therewithewill, took measure of my body.

Sure, these are but imaginary wiles,

And Lapland sorcerers inhabit here.

### Enter DROMIO of Syracuse.

Dro. S. Master, here's the gold you sent me for :
What, have you got the picture of old Adam new
apparel'd?¹⁶

8 The first folio reads, *lans*. Shakspeare would have put *lanes* but for the sake of the rhyme.

9 'To hunt or run *counter*, signifies that the hounds or beagles hunt it by the heel,' i. e. run backward, mistaking the course of the game. To *draw dry foot* was to follow the scent or track of the game. There is a quibble upon *counter*, which points at the *prison* so called.

10 Hell was the cank term for prison. There was a place of this name under the Exchequer, where the king's debtors were confined.

11 Thus the old authentic copy. The omission of the personal pronoun was formerly very common: we should now write *he's*.

12 i. e. a *bond*. Shakspeare takes advantage of the old spelling to produce a quibble.

13 The old copy reads, 'If I, &c.'

14 Fanciful conception.

15 This actually happened to Sir H. Wotton when on his travels. See *Reliquie Wottoniane*, 1685, p. 676.

16 Theobald reads, 'What, have you got rid of the picture of old Adam?' The emendation is approved and

Shakespeare

## SCENE IV.

## COMEDY OF ERRORS.

947

Ant. S. What gold is this? what Adam dost thou mean?

Ant. S. Not that Adam, that kept the paradise,
but that Adam that keeps the prison: he that goes
in the calf's-skin that was kill'd for the prodigal: he
that came behind you, sir, like an evil angel, and
bid you forsake your liberty.

Ant. S. I understand thee not.

Dro. S. No? why, 'tis a plain case: he that went
like a base-viol, in a case of leather; the man, sir,
that, when gentlemen are tired, gives them a fob,
and 'rests them; he, sir, that takes pity on decayed
men, and gives them suits of durance; he that sets
up his rest¹ to do more exploits with his mace than
a morris-pike.²

Ant. S. What! thou mean'st an officer?

Dro. S. Ay, sir, the sergeant of the band; he,
that brings any man to answer it, that breaks his
band: one that thinks a man always going bed, and
says, *God give you good rest*.

Ant. S. Well, sir, there rest in your foolery. Is
there any ship puts forth to night? may we begone?

Dro. S. Why, sir, I brought you word an hour
since, that the bark Expedition put forth to night;
and then were you hindered by the sergeant, to tarry
for the hay Delay; Here are the angles that you
sent for, to deliver you.

Ant. S. The fellow is distract, and so am I;
And here we wander in illusions;
Some blessed power deliver us from hence!

Enter a Courtezan.

Cour. Well met, well met, master Antipholus.
I see, sir, you have found the goldsmith now:
Is that the chain, you promis'd me to-day?

Ant. S. Satan, avoid! I charge thee tempt me not :

Dro. S. Master, is this mistress Satan?

Ant. S. It is the devil.

Dro. S. Nay, she is worse, she is the devil's dam;
and here she comes in the habit of a light wench;
and thereof comes, that the wenches say, God damn
me, that's as much as to say, God make me a light
wench. It is written, they appear to men like angels
of light: light is an effect of fire, and fire will burn;
ergo, light wenches will burn; Come not near her.

Cour. Your man and the chain you promis'd me.
And I'll be gone, sir, and not trouble you.

Dro. S. Some devils ask the parings of one's
bespeak a long spoon.⁴

Ant. S. Why, Dromio?

Dro. S. Marry, he must have a long spoon, that
must eat with the devil.

Ant. S. Avoid then, fiend! what tell'st thou me
of supping?

Thou art, as you are all, a sorceress :

I conjure thee to leave me, and be gone.

Cour. Give me the ring of mine you had at dinner,
Or, for my diamond, the chain you promis'd;
And I'll be gone, sir, and not trouble you.

Dro. S. Some devils ask the parings of one's
nail.

A rush, a hair, a drop of blood,⁵ a pin,

A nut, a cherry-stone : but she, more covetous,
Would have a chain.

Master, be wise : an if you give it her,

The devil will shake her chain, and fright us with it.

Cour. I pray you, sir, my ring, or else the chain;
I hope you do not mean to cheat me so.

Ant. S. Avaunt, thou witch! Come, Dromio, let
us go.

adopted by Malone; but I think, with Johnson, that the
text does not require interpolation.

1 This unfortunate phrase is again mistaken here by
all the commentators. It has nothing to do with a mus-
ket-rest; and the rest of a pike is a thing of the ima-
gination. It is a metaphorical expression for being de-
termined, or resolutely bent to do a thing, taken from
the game of Primero.

2 A morris pike is a moorish pike, commonly used
in the 16th century. It was not used in the morris dance,
as Johnson erroneously supposed.

3 Probably by purchasing something additional in the
adjoining market.

Dro. S. Fly pride, says the peacock: Mistress,
that you know. [Exeunt ANT. and DRO.

Cour. Now out of doubt, Antipholus is mad,

Else would he never so demean himself.

A ring he hath of mine worth forty ducats,

And for the same he promis'd me a chain!

Both one, and other, he denies me now.

The reason that I gather he is mad

(Besides this present instance of his rage.)

Is a mad tale, he told to-day at dinner,

Of his own doors being shut against his entrance.

Belike, his wife, acquainted with his fits,

On purpose shut the doors against his way.

My way is now, to hie home to his house,

And tell his wife, that, being lunatic,

He rush'd into my house, and took perforce

My ring away: This course I fittest choose

For forty ducats is too much to lose.

[Exit.]

### SCENE IV. The same. Enter ANTIPHOLUS of Ephesus, and an Officer.

Ant. E. Fear me not man, I will not break away;
I'll give thee, ere I leave thee, so much money
To warrant thee, as I am 'rested for.
My wife is in a wayward mood to-day;
And will not lightly trust the messenger,
That I should be attach'd in Ephesus :
I tell you, it will sound harshly in her ears.—

Enter DROMIO of Ephesus with a rope's end.

Here comes my man; I think, he brings the money.
How now, sir? have you that I sent you for?

Dro. E. Here's that, I warrant you, will pay them all.⁶

Ant. E. But where's the money?

Dro. E. Why, sir, I gave the money for the rope,

Ant. E. Five hundred ducats, villain, for a rope?

Ant. E. I'll serve you, sir, five hundred at the rate.

Ant. E. To what end did I bid thee hie the thee home?

Ant. E. To a rope's end, sir : and to that end am
I return'd.

Ant. E. And to that end, sir, I will welcome you.

[Beating him.]

Off. Good sir, be patient.

Dro. E. Nay, 'tis for me to be patient; I am in
adversity.

Off. Good now, hold thy tongue.

Dro. E. Nay, rather persuade him to hold his
hands.

Ant. E. Thou whoresore, senseless villain!

Dro. E. I would I were senseless, sir, that I
might not feel your blows.

Ant. E. Thou art sensible in nothing but blows,
and so is an ass.

Dro. E. I am an ass indeed; you may prove it
by my long ears.⁷ I have served him from the hour
of my nativity to this instant, and have nothing at
his hands for my service, but blows: when I am
cold, he heats me with beating: when I am warm,
he cools me with beating: I am waked with it,
when I sleep; raised with it, when I sit; driven
out of doors with it, when I go from home; wel-
come home with it, when I return: nay, I bear it
on my shoulders, as a beggar wont her brat; and,
I think, when he hath lamed me, I shall beg with it
from door to door

Enter ADRIANA, LUCIANA, and the Courtezan, with PINCH,⁸ and others.

Ant. E. Come, go along; my wife is coming
yonder.

4 This proverb is alluded to again in the Tempest,
Act ii. Sc. 2, p. 50:—'He who eats with the devil had
need of a long spoon.'

5 In the Witch, by Middleton, when a spirit descends,
Hecate exclaims:

'There's one come down to fetch his dues,

A kisse, a coll, a sip of blood,' etc.

6 i. e. punish them all by corporal correction. Fal-
staff says, in King Henry IV. Part 1. 'I have pepper'd
the rogues; two of them, I'm sure, I've pay'd.'

7 Long from frequent pulling.

8 In the old copy— and a schoolmaster, called

348

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

ACT IV.

Dro. E. Mistress, *respite finem*,¹ respect your end; or rather the prophecy, like the parrot, *Be-ware the rope's end*.

Ant. E. Wilt thou still talk ?

[Beats him.

Cour. How say you now ? is not your husband mad?

Adr. His incivility confirms no less.—

Good doctor Pinch, you are a conjuror;

Establish him in his true sense again,

And I will please you what you will demand.

Luc. Alas, how fiery and how sharp he looks !

Cour. Mark, how he trembles in his ecstacy !²

Pinch. Give me your hand, and let me feel your pulse.

Ant. E. There is my hand and let it feel your ear.

Pinch. I charge thee, Satan, hous'd within this man,
To yield possession to my holy prayers,

And to thy state of darkness he thee straight;

I conjure thee by all the saints in heaven.

Ant. E. Peac'e, doting wizard, peace ; I am not mad.

Adr. O, that thou wert not, poor distressed soul !

Ant. E. You minion, you, are these your customers ?³

Did this companion⁴ with a saffron face

Revel and feast it at my house to-day,

Whilst upon me the guilty doors were shut,

And I demed to enter in my house ?

Adr. O, husband, God doth know you din'd at home.

Where 'would, you had remain'd until this time,
Free from these slanders, and this open shame !

Ant. E. Din'd at home ! Thou villain, what say'st thou ?

Dro. E. Sir, sooth to say, you did not dine at home.

Ant. E. Were not my doors lock'd up, and I shut out ?

Dro. E. Perdy,⁵ your doors were lock'd, and you shut out.

Ant. E. And did not she herself revile me there ?

Dro. E. Sans fable, she herself revil'd you there.

Ant. E. Did not her kitchen maid rail, taunt, and scorn me ?

Dro. E. Certes, she did ; the kitchen-vestal scorn'd you.

Ant. E. And did not I in rage depart from thence ?

Dro. E. In verity you did ;—my bones bear witness,

That since have felt the vigour of his rage.

Adr. Is't good to sooth him in these contraries?

Pinch. It is no shame ; the fellow finds his vein,

And, yielding to him, humours well his frenzy.

Ant. E. Thou hast suborn'd the goldsmith to arrest me.

Adr. Alas, I sent you money to redeem you,

By Dromio here, who came in haste for it.

Dro. E. Money by me? heart and good-will you might,

But, surely, master, not a rag of money.

Ant. E. Went'st not thou to her for a purse of ducats?

Adr. He came to me, and I deliver'd it.

Luc. And I am witness with her, that she did.

Dro. E. God and the rope-maker, bear me witness,

That I was sent for nothing but a rope !

Pinch. Mistress, both man and master is possess'd;

I know it by their pale and deadly looks :

They must be bound, and laid in some dark room.

Ant. E. Say, wherefore didst thou lock me forth to-day,

And why dost thou deny the bag of gold?

Adr. I did not, gentle husband, lock thee forth.

Dro. E. And, gentle master, I receiv'd no gold;

But I confess, sir, that we were lock'd out.

Adr. Dissembling villain, thou speak'st false in both.

Ant. E. Dissembling harlot, thou art false in all ;
And art confederate with a damned pack.

To make a loathsome abject scorn of me :

But with these nails I'll pluck out these false eyes,
That would behold in me this shameful sport.

[PINCH and his Assistants bind ANT. and DRO.

Adr. O, bind him, bind him, let him not come near me.

Pinch. More company ;—the fiend is strong within him.

Luc. Ah me, poor man, how pale and wan he looks!

Ant. E. What, will you murder me ? Thou gaoler, thou !

I am thy prisoner ; wilt thou suffer them

To make a rescue ?

Off. Masters, let him go ;

He is my prisoner, and you shall not have him.

Pinch. Go, bind this man, for he is frantic too.

Adr. What wilt thou do, thou peevish officer?

Hast thou delight to see a wretched man

Do outrage and displeasure to himself ?

Off. He is my prisoner ; if I let him go,

The debt he owes, will be requir'd of me.

Adr. I will discharge thee, ere I go into thee:

Bear me forthwith unto his creditor.

And, knowing how the debt grows, I will pay it.

Good master doctor, see him safe convey'd

Home to my house,—O most unhappy day !

Ant. E. O most unhappy⁷ trumpet !

Dro. E. Master, I am here enter'd in bond for you,

Ant. E. Out on thee, villain ! wherefore dost thou mad me ?

Dro. E. Will you be bound for nothing ? be mad, good master ; cry, the devil.—

Luc. God help, poor souls, how idly do they talk!

Adr. Go, bear him hence.—Sister, go you with me.—

[Exeunt PINCH and Assistants with ANT. and DRO.

Say now, whose suit is he arrested at ?

Off. One Angelo, a goldsmith ; Do you know him?

Adr. I know the man : What is the sum he owes ?

Off. Two hundred ducats.

Adr. Say, how grows it due ?

Off. Due for a chain, your husband had of him.

Adr. He did bespeak a chain for me, but had it not.

Cour. When as your husband, all in rage, to-day

Came to my house, and took away my ring
(The ring I saw upon his finger now),

Straight after, did I meet him with a chain.

Adr. It may be so, but it never see it :—
Come, gaoler, bring me where the goldsmith is,
I long to know the truth hereof at large.

Enter ANTIPHOLUS of Syracuse, with his rapier drawn, and DROMIO of Syracuse.

Luc. God, for thy mercy! they are loose again.

Adr. And come with naked swords; let's call more help,

To have them bound again.

Pinch. As learning was necessary for an exorcist, the schoolmaster was often employed. Within a very few years, in country villages the pedagogue was still a reputed conjuror.

1 Buchanan wrote a pamphlet against the Lord of Liddington, which ends with these words: *respite finem*. Shakspeare's quibble may be borrowed from this. The parrot's prophecy may be understood by means of the following lines in Hudibras:—

'Could tell what subtlest parrots mean,

That speak and think contrary clean;

What member 'tis of whom they talk;

When they cry *rope*, and *walk*, *knave*, *walk*.

2 This tremor was anciently thought to be a sure indication of being possessed by the devil.

3 *A customer*,? says Malone, 'is used in Othello for a common woman. Here it seems to signify one who visits such women.' It is surprising that a man like Malone, whose life had been devoted to the study and elucidation of Shakspeare, should so often seem ignorant of the language of the poet's time. 'A customer was a familiar, an intimate, a customary haunter of any place ;' as any of the old dictionaries would have shown him under the word *consuetudo* or *custom*.

4 *Companion* is a word of contempt, anciently used as we now use *fellow*.

5 A corruption of the common French oath *par dieu*.

6 *Vide* before, p. 345, note 6.

7 *Unhappy* for unlucky, i. e. mischievous.

SCENE IV.

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

349

Off. Away, they'll kill us.

[Exeunt Officer, ADR. and Luc.]
Ant. S. I see, these witches are afraid of swords.

Dro. S. She, that would be your wife, now ran
from you.

Ant. S. Come to the Centaur; fetch our stuff
from thence:

I long, that we were safe and sound aboard.

Dro. S. Faith, stay here this night, they will
surely do no harm; you saw, they speak us fair,
give us gold: methinks, they are such a gentle na-
tion, that but for the mountain of mad flesh that
claims marriage of me, I could find in my heart to
stay here still, and turn witch.

Ant. S. I will not stay to-night for all the town;

Therefore away, to get our stuff aboard. [Exeunt.

ACT V.

### SCENE I. The same. Enter Merchant and ANGELO.

Ang. I am sorry, sir, that I have hinder'd you;
But, I protest, he had the chain of me,

Though most dishonestly he doth deny it.

Mer. How is the man esteem'd here in the city?

Ang. Of very reverend reputation, sir,

Of credit infinite, highly beloved,

Second to none that lives here in the city;

His word might bear his wealth at any time.

Mer. Speak softly: yonder, as I think, he walks.

Enter ANTIPHOLUS and DROMIO of Syracuse.

Ang. 'Tis so; and that self chain about his neck,
which he forsore, most monstrously, to have,

Good sir, draw near to me, I'll speak to him.

Signior Antiphorus, I wonder much

That you would put me to this shame and trouble;
And not without some scandal to yourself,

With circumstance, and oaths, so to deny

This chain, which now you wear so openly:

Besides the charge, the shame, imprisonment,
You have done wrong to this my honest friend;

Who, but for staying on our controversy,

Had hoisted sail, and put to sea to-day:

This chain you had of me, can you deny it?

Ant. S. I think, I had; I never did deny it.

Mer. Yes, that you did, sir; and forsore it too.

Ant. S. Who heard me to deny it, or forswear it?

Mer. These ears of mine, thou knowest, did hear
thence:

Fie on thee, wretch! 'tis pity, that thou liv'st

To walk where any honest man resort.

Ant. S. Thou art a villain to impeach me thus:

I'll prove mine honour and mine honesty

Against thee presently, if thou dar'st stand.

Mer. I dare, and do defy thee for a villain.

[They draw.]

Enter ADRIANA, LUCIANA, Courtezan, and others.

Adr. Hold, hurt him not, for God's sake; he is mad;—

Some get within him,² take his sword away:

Bind Dromio too, and bear them to my house.

Dro. S. Run, master, run; for God's sake take
a house,³

This is some priory;—In, or we are spoil'd.

[Exeunt ANTIPH. and DRO. to the Priory.]

1. i. e. baggage. *Stuff* is the genuine old English word for all moveables.

2. i. e. close, grapple with him.

3. i. e. go into a house: we still say that a dog takes the water.

4. 'The *copy*,' says Steevens, 'that is, the *theme*. We still talk of setting *copies* for boys?! Surely a boy's *copy* is not a *theme*? and that word occurs again in the fourth line of this speech. 'Our poet frequently uses *copy* for *pattern*,' says Malone. So in Twelfth Night: '—And leave the world no *copy*. I believe Malone's frequently may be reduced to two other instances, one in Henry V. and another in a sonnet.

I am persuaded nor pattern, but *copie*, *plenty*, *copious source*, an old latinism, many times used by Ben Jonson. The word is *spelt* *copie* in the folio; and in King Henry V. where

Enter the Abess.

Abb. Be quiet, people; Wherefore throng you hither?

Adr. To fetch my poor distracted husband hence:
Let us come in, that we may bind him fast,

And bear him home for his recovery.

Ang. I knew, he was not in his perfect wits.

Mer. I am sorry now, that I did draw on him.

Abb. How long hath this possession held the man?

Adr. This week he hath been heavy, sour, sad,
And much different from the man he was;

But, till this afternoon, his passion

Ne'er brake into extremity of rage.

Abb. Hath he not lost much wealth by wreck of
sea?

Buried some dear friend? Hath not else his eye
Stray'd his affection in unlawful love?

A sin, prevailing much in youthful men,

Who give their eyes the liberty of gazing.

Which of these sorrows is he subject to?

Adr. To none of these, except it be the last;

Namely, some love, that drew him oft from home.

Abb. You should for that have reprehended him.

Adr. Why, so I did.

Abb. Ay, but not rough enough.

Adr. As roughly, as my modesty would let me.

Abb. Haply, in private.

Adr. And in assemblies too.

Abb. Ay, but not enough.

Adr. It was the copy⁴ of our conference:

In bed, he slept not for my urging it;

At board, he fed not for my urging it;

Alone, it was the subject of my theme;

In company, I often glanced it;

Still did I tell him it was vile and bad.

Abb. And therefore came it, that the man was made:

The venom clamours of a jealous woman

Poison more deadly than a mad dog's tooth.

It seems his sleeps were hinder'd by thy railing:
And thereof comes it that his head is light.

Thou say'st his meat was sauc'd with thy upbraidings:

Unquiet meals make so open digestions,

Thereof the raging fire of fever bred;

And what's a-fever but a fit of madness?

Thou say'st his sports were hinder'd by thy brawls;

Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue,

But moody and dull melancholy,

(Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair;)

And, at her heels, a huge infectious troop⁵

Of pale distemperatures, and foes to life?

In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest

To be disturb'd, would mad or man or beast;

The consequence is then, thy jealous fits

Have scar'd thy husband from the use of wits.

Luc. She never reprehended him but mildly,

When he demean'd himself rough, rude, and wildly.

Why bear you these rebukes, and answer not?

Adr. She did betray me to my own reproof.—

Good people, enter, and lay hold on him.

Abb. No, not a creature enters in my house.

Adr. Then, let your servants bring my husband forth.

Abb. Neither; he took this place for sanctuary,
And it shall privilege him from your hands,
Till I have brought him to his wits again,
Or lose my labour in assaying it.

Adr. I will attend my husband, be his nurse,
Diet his sickness, for it is my office,

it means *pattern*, *example*, it is spelt *copy*. But the sense of the passage here will show that my interpretation is right.

5. I think that there is no doubt that this passage has suffered by incorrect printing; I am not satisfied with it, even with the parenthesis in which the third line is enclosed by Steevens. The second line evidently wants a word of two syllables, and I feel inclined to read the passage thus:—

'Sweet recreation barr'd, what doth ensue,

But moody [madness] and dull melancholy

Kinsmen to grim and comfortless despair;

And at their heels a huge infectious troop?

Heath proposed a similar emendation, but placed *moping* where I have placed *madness*.

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

Act V.

And will have no attorney¹ but myself;

And therefore let me have him home with me.

Abb. Be patient; for I will not let him stir,
Till I have us'd the approved means I have,
With wholesome syrups, drugs, and holy prayers,
To make of him a formal man again: ²

It is a branch and parcel of mine oath,
A charitable duty of my order;

Therefore depart, and leave him here with me.

Adr. I will not hence, and leave my husband here;
And ill it doth beseem your holiness,

To separate the husband and the wife.

Abb. Be quiet, and depart, thou shall not have
him. [Exit Abess.

Luc. Complain unto the duke of this indignity.

Adr. Come, go; I will fall prostrate at his feet,
And never rise until my tears and prayers
Have won his grace to come in person hither,
And take perforce my husband from the abbess.

Mer. By this, I think, the dial points at five :

Anon, I am sure, the duke himself in person
Comes this way to the melancholy vale ;

The place of death and sorry³ execution,
Behind the ditches of the abbey here.

Ang. Upon what cause?

Mer. To see a reverend Syracusan merchant,

Who put unluckily into this bay
Against the laws and statutes of this town,
Beheaded publicly for his offence.

Ang. See, where they come; we will behold his
death.

Luc. Kneel to the duke, before he pass the abbey.

Enter Duke attended; ÆGEON bare-headed; with
the Headsman and other Officers.

Duke. Yet once again proclaim it publicly,
If any friend will pay the sum for him,
He shall not die, so much we tender him.

Adr. Justice, most sacred duke, against the abbess!

Duke. She is a virtuous and a reverend lady ;

It cannot be, that she hath done thee wrong.

Adr. May it please your grace, Antipholus, my
husband,—

Whom I made lord of me and all I had,
At your important⁴ letters,—this ill day
A most outrageous fit of madness took him;
That desperately he hurried through the street
(With him his bondman, all as mad as he,)

Doing displeasure to the citizens

By rushing in their houses, bearing thence
Rings, jewels, any thing his rage did like.
Once did I get him bound, and sent him home,
Whilst to take order⁵ for the wrongs I went,
That here and there his fury had committed.

Anon, I wot⁶ not by what strong escape,
He broke from those that had the guard of him ;
And with his mad attendant and himself,

Each one with ireful passion, with drawn swords,
Met us again, and madly bent on us,
Chas'd us away; till raising of more aid,

We came again to bind them: then they fled
Into this abbey, whither we pursued them ;

And here the abbess shuts the gates on us,
And will not suffer us to fetch him out,

Nor send him forth, that we may bear him hence,
Therefore, most gracious duke, with thy command,
Let him be brought forth, and borne hence for help.

Duke. Long since, thy husband served me in my
wars;

And I to thee engag'd a prince's word,
When thou didst make him master of thy bed,

1 i. e. substitute.

2 i. e. to bring him back to his senses, and the accus-
tomed forms of sober behaviour. In Measure for Mea-
sure, 'informer' women' is used for just the contrary.

3 i. e. *dismal*;—*dismolde* and *sorrie*, *atra funestus*.

4 i. e. *importunate*.

5 i. e. to take measures.

6 To wot is to know. *Strong* escape is an escape
effected by strength or violence.

7 *Are* is here inaccurately put for *have*.

8 i. e. successively, one after another.

9 The heads of fools were shaved, or their hair cut
close, as appears by the following passage in The

To do him all the grace and good I could,—
Go, some of you, knock at the abbey-gate,
And bid the lady abbess come to me;
I will determine this, before I stir.

Enter a Servant.

Serv. O mistress, mistress, shift and save yourself!
My master and his man⁷ are both broke loose,
Beaten the maids a-row,⁸ and bound the doctor,
Whose beard they have singed off with brands
of fire;

And ever as it blaz'd they threw on him
Great palls of puddled mire to quench the hair:
My master preaches patience to him, and the while
His man with scissors nicks him⁹ like a fool:

And, sure, unless you send some present help,
Between them they will kill the conjuror.

Adr. Peace, fool, thy master and his man are
here;

And that is false, thou dost report to us.

Ser. Mistress, upon my life, I tell you true;
I have not breath'd almost, since I did see it.
He cries for you, and vows, if he can take you,
To scorch your face, and to disfigure you:

Adr. Come, stand by me, fear nothing: Guard
with halberds.

Adr. Ah me, it is my husband! Witness you,
That he is borne about invisible:
Even now we housed him in the abbey here;

And now he's there, past thought of human reason.

Enter ANTIPHOLUS and DROMIO of Ephesus.

Ant. E. Justice, most gracious duke, oh, grant
me justice!

Even for the service that long since I did thee,
When I bestrid thee in the wars,¹⁰ and took

Deep sacred to save thy life; even for the blood
That then I lost for thee, now grant me justice.

Æge. Unless the death of death doth make me dote,
I see my son Antipholus, and Dromio.

Ant. E. Justice, sweet prince, against that wo-
man there.

She whom thou gav'st to me to be my wife ;

That hath abused and dishonour'd me,

Even in the strength and height of injury!

Beyond imagination is the wrong,

That she this day hath shamelessly thrown on me.
Duke. Discover how, and thou shall find me just.

Ant. E. This day, great duke, she shut the doors
upon me,

While she with harlots¹¹ feasted in my house.

Duke. A grievous fault: Say, woman, dist
thou so?

Adr. No, my good lord;—myself, he, and my
sister,

To-day did dine together: So befall my soul,
As this is false he burdens me withal!

Luc. Ne'er may I look on day, nor sleep on night,
But she tells to your highness simple truth!

Ang. O perjur'd woman! They are both forsworn.
In this the madman justly chargeth them.

Ant. E. My liege, I am advised¹² what I say;
Neither disturbed with the effect of wine,

Nor heady rash, provoked with raging ire,
Albeit, my wrongs might make one wiser mad.

This woman lock'd me out this day from dinner;
That goldsmith there, were he not pack'd with her,
Could witness it, for he was with me then ;

Who parted with me to go fetch a chain,
Promising to bring it to the Porcupine,

Choice of Change, 1598. 'Three things used by monks
which provoke other men to laugh at their follies.
1. They are shaven and notched on the head like foles.
Florio explains, 'zuccone, a shaven pate, a notted poll,
a poll-pate, a gull, a ninnie.'

10 This act of friendship is frequently mentioned by
Shakspeare.

11 Harlot was a term anciently applied to a rogue or
base person among men, as well as to wantons among
women. See Todd's Johnson.

12 'I speak with consideration and circumspectly, not rashly and precipitately.'

["## SCENE I.", "# COMEDY OF ERRORS.", "351", "Where Balthazar and I did dine together.", "Our dinner done, and he not coming thither,\nI went to seek him : in the street I met him ;\nAnd not in his company, that gentleman.", "There did this perjur'd goldsmith swear me down,\nThat I this day of him receiv'd the chain,\nWhich, God he knows, I saw not: for the which,\nHe did arrest me with an officer.", "I did obey; and sent my peasant home", "For certain ducats : he with none return'd.", "Then fairly I bespoke the officer,", "To go in person with me to my house.", "By the way we met", "My wife, her sister, and a rabble more", "Of vile confederates; along with them", "They brought one Pinch ; a hungry lean-fac'd villain,\nA mere anatomy, a mountebank,", "A thread-bare juggler, and a fortune-teller ;", "A needy, hollow-eyed, sharp-looking wretch,\nA living dead man : this pernicious slave,", "Forsooth, took on him as a conjurer ;", "And, gazing in mine eyes, feeling my pulse,", "And with no face, as 'twere, outfacing me,", "Cries out I was possess'd : then altogether", "They fell upon me, bound me, bore me thence ;", "And in a dark and dankish vault at home", "There left me and my man, both bound together ;", "Still gnawing with my teeth my bonds in sunder,", "I gain'd my freedom, and immediately", "Gain hither to your grace; whom I beseech", "To give me ample satisfaction.", "For these deep shames and great indignities.", "Ang. My lord, in truth, thus far I witness with him ;", "That he din't not at home, but was lock'd out.", "Duke. But had he such a chain of thee, or no ?", "Ang. He had, my lord : and when he ran in here,\nThese people saw the chain about his neck.", "Mr. Besides I will be sworn, these ears of mine", "Heard you confess, you had the chain of him,", "After you first forswore it on the mart,", "And, thereupon I drew my sword on you ;", "And then you fled into this abbey here,", "From whence, I think, you are come by miracle,", "Ant. E. I never came within these abbey walls,", "Nor ever didst thou draw thy sword on me :", "I never saw the chain, so help me heaven !", "And this is false, you burden me withal.", "Duke. Why, what an intricate impeach is this !", "I think you all have drunk of Circe's cup.", "If here you hous'd him, here he would have been ;", "If he were mad, he would not plead so coldly :—", "You say, he dined at home ; the goldsmith here", "Denies that saying :—Sirrah, what say you ?", "Dro. E. Sir, he din'd with her there, at the Por-\ncupine.", "Cour. He did; and from my finger snatch'd that\nring.", "Ant. E. 'Tis true, my liege, this ring I had of her,", "Duke. Saw'st thou him enter at the abbey here ?", "Cour. As sure, my liege, as I do see your grace.", "Duke. Why, this is strange :—Go, call the abbess\nhither ;", "I think, you are all mated,² or stark mad.", "[Exit an Attendant.", "Æge. Most mighty duke, vouchsafe me speak a\nword ;", "Haply I see a friend will save my life,", "And pay the sum that may deliver me.", "Duke. Speak freely, Syracusan, what thou wilt.", "Æge. Is not your name, sir, call'd Antiphus ?", "And is not your bondman Dromio ?", "Dro. E. Within this hour, I was his bondman, sir,", "But he, I thank him, gnaw'd in two my cords ;", "Now am I Dromio, and his man, unbound.", "1", "but as a living death,", "So ded alive of life he drew the breath.", "Sackville's Induction to the Mirror of Magistrates.", "2 Mated is confounded. See note on Macbeth, Act vi. Sc. 1.", "3 Deformed for deforming.", "4 See note on Act ii. Sc. 1.", "5 Dromio delights in a quibble, and the word bound\nhas before been the subject of his mirth.", "Æge. I am sure, you both of you remember me.", "Dro. E. Ourselves, we do remember, sir, by you ;\nFor lately we were bound as you are now.", "You are not Pinch's patient, are you, sir ?", "Æge. Why look you strange on me ? you know\nme well.", "Ant. E. I never saw you in my life, till now.", "Æge. Oh ! grief hath chang'd me, since you saw\nme last ;", "And careful hours, with Time's deformed³ hand,\nHave written strange defeatures⁴ in my face :", "But tell me yet, dost thou not know my voice ?", "Ant. E. Neither.", "Æge. Dromio, nor thou ?", "Dro. E. No, trust me, sir, nor I.", "Æge. I am sure, thou dost.", "Dro. E. Ay, sir? but I am sure, I do not; and\nwhatsoever a man denies, you are now bound to\nbelieve him.⁵", "Æge. Not know my voice ! O, time's extremity !", "Hast thou so crack'd and splitted my poor tongue,", "In seven short years, that here my only son\nKnows not my feeble key of untun'd cares ?⁷", "Though now this grained⁸ face of mine be hid\nIn say-consuming winter's drizzled snow,", "And all the conduits of my blood froze up;", "Yet hath my night of life some memory,", "My wasting lamp some fading glimmer left,", "My dull ears a little use to hear ;", "All these old witnesses⁹ (I cannot err.)", "Tell me, thou art my son Antiphus.", "Ant. E. I never saw my father in my life.", "Æge. But seven years since, in Syracusa, boy,\nThou knowst¹⁰ we parted : but, perhaps, my son,\nThou sham'st to acknowledge me in misery.", "Ant. E. The duke and all that know me in the\ncity,", "Can witness with me that it is not so;", "I ne'er saw Syracusa in my life.", "Duke. I tell thee, Syracusan, twenty years", "Have I been patron to Antiphus,", "During which time he ne'er saw Syracusa :", "I see, thy age and dangers make thee dote.", "Enter the Abbess, with ANTIPHOLUS Syracusan,\nand DROMIO Syracusan.", "Abb. Most mighty duke, behold a man much\nwrong'd. [All gather to see him.", "Adr. I see two husbands, or mine eyes deceive me.", "Duke. One of these men is Genius to the other ;", "And so of these: Which is the natural man,", "And which the spirit? Who deciphers them?", "Dro. S. I, am Dromio; command him away.", "Dro. E. I, sir, am Dromio; pray, let me stay.", "Ant. S. Ægeon, art thou not? or else his ghost?", "Dro. S. O, my old master! who hath bound him\nhere ?", "Abb. Whoever bound him, I will loose his bonds,\nAnd gain a husband by his liberty :", "Speak, old Ægeon, if thou be'st the man", "That hadst a wife once called Æmilia,", "That bore thee at a burden two fair sons :", "O, if thou be'st the same Ægeon, speak,", "And speak unto the same Æmilia !", "Æge. If I dream not, thou art Æmilia ;⁹", "If thou art she, tell me,

COMEDY OF ERRORS.

ACT V

352

What then became of them, I cannot tell;
I, to this fortune that you see me in.

Duke. Why, here begins this morning story right;¹
These two Antipholuses, these two so alike,
And these two Dromioes, one in semblance,²

Besides her urging of her wreck at sea,—
These are the parents to these children,³

Which accidentally are met together.

Antipholus, thou cam'st from Corinth first.

Ant. S. No, sir, not I; I came from Syracuse.
Duke. Stay, stand apart; I know not which is

which.

Ant. E. I came from Corinth, my most gracious
lord.

Dro. E. And I with him.

Ant. E. Brought to this town with that most fa-
mous warrior.

Duke Menaphon, your most renowned uncle.

Adr. Which of you two did dine with me to-day?

Ant. S. I, gentle mistress.

Adr. And are not you my husband?

Ant. E. No, I say nay to that.

Ant. S. And so do I, yet did she call me so;

And this fair gentlewoman, her sister here,
Did call me brother:—What I told you then,
I hope, I shall have leisure to make good;

If this be not a dream I see and hear.

Ang. That is the chain, sir, which you had of me.

Ant. S. I think it be, sir; I deny it not.

Ant. E. And you, sir, for this chain arrested me.

Ang. I think I did, sir; I deny it not.

Adr. I sent you, money, sir, to be your bail,

By Dromio; but I think he brought it not.

Dro. E. No, none by me.

Ant. S. This purse of ducats I receiv'd from you,
And Dromio my man did bring them me:

I see, we still did meet each other's man,
And I was ta'en for him, and he for me,
And thereupon these Errors are arose.

Ant. E. These ducats pawn I for my father here.

Duke. It shall not need, thy father hath his life.

Cour. Sir, I must have that diamond from you.

Ant. E. There, take it; and much thanks for my
good cheer.

Abb. Renowned duke, vouchsafe to take the pains
To go with us into the abbey here,

And hear at large discoursed all our fortunes:—
And all that are assembled in this place,

That by this sympathized one day's error
Have suffer'd wrong, go, keep us company,

And we shall make full satisfaction.—

Twenty-five years have I but gone in travail

Of you, my sons, and till this present hour;—

My heavy burden here delivered.⁴

The duke, my husband, and my children both,
And you the calendars of their nativity,⁵

Go to a gossip's feast,⁶ and go with me;

After so long gref, such nativity!

Duke. With all my heart, I'll gossip at this feast.
[Exeunt] Duke, Abbess, Ægeon, Courtezan,
Merchant, ANGELO, and Attendants.

Dro. S. Master, shall I fetch your stuff from ship-
board?

Ant. E. Dromio, what stuff of mine hast thou em-
bark'd?

Dro. S. Your goods, that lay at host, sir, in the
Centaur.

Ant. S. He speaks to me; I am your master,
Dromio;

Come, go with us: we'll look to that anon.

Embrace thy brother there, rejoice with him.

[Exeunt] ANT. S. and ANT. E. ADR. and Luc.

Dro. S. There is a fat friend at your master's
house,

That kitchen'd me for you to-day at dinner;

She now shall be my sister, not my wife.

Dro. E. Methinks you are my glass, and not my
brother:

I see by you I am a sweet-faced youth.

Will you walk in to see their gossipping?

Dro. S. Not I, sir; you are my elder.

Dro. E. That's a question: how shall we try it?

Dro. S. We will draw cuts for the senior: till
then, lead thou first.

Dro. E. Nay; then thus:

We came into the world, like brother and brother;
And now let's go hand in hand, not one before

another.

[Exeunt]

ON a careful revision of the foregoing scenes, I do not
hesitate to pronounce them the composition of two very
unequal writers. Shakspearc had undoubtedly a share
in them; but that the entire play was no work of his, is
an opinion which (as Benedict says) "fire cannot mek
out of me; I will die in it at the stake." Thus, as we
are informed by Aulus Gellius, Lib. III. Cap. 3, some
plays were absolutely ascribed to Plautus, which in
truth had only been (retractatae et expolita) retouched
and polished by him.

In this comedy we find more intricacy of plot than dis-
tinction of character; and our attention is less forcibly
engaged, because we can guess in great measure how
the denouement will be brought about. Yet the subject
appears to have been reluctantly dismissed, even in this
last and unnecessary scene, where the same mistakes
are continued, till the power of affording entertainment
is entirely lost.

STEEVENS.

Theobald corrected it in the following manner:

Of you, my sons; nor till this present hour

My heavy burdens are delivered.

Malone, after much argument, gives it thus:

Of you, my sons; until this present hour

My heavy burden not delivered.

Thirty-three years are an evident error for twenty-five;
this was corrected by Theobald. The reader will choose
between the simple emendation which I have made in
the text, and those made by Theobald and Malone.

5 i. e. the two Dromioes. Antipholus of Syracuse has
already called one of them 'the almanack of my true
date.' See note on Act I. Sc. 2.

6 Heath thought that we should read, 'and joy with
me.' Warburton proposed gaud, but the old reading is
probably right.

1 'The morning story' is what Ægeon tells the Duke
in the first scene of this play.

2 Semblance is here a trisyllable. It appears proba-
ble that a line has been omitted here, the import of which
may have been:

'These circumstances all concur to prove

These are the parents,' &c.

If it began with the word these as well as the succeeding
one, the error would easily happen.

3 Children is here a trisyllable, it is often spelled as
it was pronounced then, children.

4 The old copy reads, erroneously, thus:

'Thirty-three years have I but gone in travail

Of you, my sons; and till this present hour

My heavy burthen are delivered.

MACBETH.

ACT I.

354

forces from Ireland and the Western Isles, and in one
action gained a victory over the king's army. In this
battle Malcolm, a Scottish nobleman (who was lieuten-
ant to Duncan in Lochaber) was slain. Afterwards
Macbeth and Banquo were appointed to the command
of the army; and Macdonwald, being obliged to take
refuge in a castle in Lochaber, first slew his wife and
children, and then himself. Macbeth, on entering the
castle, finding his dead body, ordered his head to be cut
off and carried to the king, at the castle of Bertha, and
his body to be hung on a high tree.

At a subsequent period, in the last year of Duncan's
reign, Sueno, king of Norway, landed a powerful army
in Fife, for the purpose of invading Scotland. Duncan
immediately assembled an army to oppose him, and
gave the command of two divisions of his to Macbeth and
Banquo, putting himself at the head of a third. Sueno
was successful in one battle, but in a second was routed;
and, after a great slaughter of his troops, he escaped
with ten persons only, and fled back to Norway.
Though there was an interval of time between the re-
bellion of Macdonwald and the invasion of Sueno,
Shakspeare has woven these two actions together, and
immediately after Sueno's defeat the present play com-
mences.

It is remarkable that Buchanan has pointed out Mac-
beth's history as a subject for the stage. ' Multa hic
fabuloso quidam nostrorum affingunt; sed quia theatris

aut Milesi fabulis sunt apiora quam historis, ea
omitto.'—*Rerum Scot. Hist. Lib.* vii.

Milton also enumerates the subject among those he
considered well suited for tragedy, but it appears that
he would have attempted to preserve the unity of time
by placing the relation of the murder of Duncan in the
mouth of his ghost.

Macbeth is one of the latest, and unquestionably one
of the noblest efforts of Shakspeare's genius. Equally
impressive in the closet and on the stage, where to wit-
ness its representation has been justly pronounced 'the
first of all dramatic enjoyments.' Malone places the
date of its composition in 1606, and it has been supposed
to convey a dexterous and delicate compliment to James
the first, who derived his lineage from Banquo, and first
united the threefold sceptre of England, Scotland, and
Ireland. At the same time the monarch's policies on
the subject of demonology were flattered by the choice
of the story.

It was once thought that Shakspeare derived some
hints for his scenes of incantation from The Witch, a
tragicomedy, by John Middleton, which, after lying
long in manuscript, was published about thirty years
since by Isaac Reed; but Malone* has with considera-
ble ingenuity shown that Middleton's drama was most
probably written subsequently to Macbeth.

* See the chronological order of the plays in the late
Variorum Edition, by Mr. Boswell, vol. ii. p. 430.

PERSONS REPRESENTED.

DUNCAN, King of Scotland.

MALCOLM,
DONALBAIN,
MACBETH,
BANQUO,
MACDUFF,
LENOX,
ROSSE,
MENTEITH,
ANGUS,
CATHNESS,

his Sons.

Generals of the King's Army.

Noblemen of Scotland.

FLEANCE, Son to Banquo.
SIWARD, Earl of Northumberland, General of the
English Forces.

YOUNG SIWARD, his Son.

SEXTON, an Officer attending on Macbeth.
Son to Macduff.

An English Doctor. A Scotch Doctor.

A Soldier. A Porter. An old Man.

LADY MACBETH,¹

LADY MACDUFF.

Gentlewoman attending on Lady Macbeth.
Hecate, and three Witches.²

Lords, Gentlemen, Officers, Soldiers, Murderers,
Attendants, and Messengers.

The Ghost of Banquo, and several other Apparitions.

SCENE, in the end of the Fourth Act, lies in Eng-
land; through the rest of the play, in Scotland;
and chiefly at Macbeth's Castle.

ACT I.

SCENE I. An open Place. Thunder and Lightning. Enter three Witches.

1 Witch.

WHEN shall we three meet again

In thunder, lightning, or in rain?

2 Witch. When the hurlyburly's³ done,

When the battle's lost and won.

3 Witch. That will be ere set of sun.

1 Witch. Where the place ?

2 Witch.

Upon the heath :

3 Witch. There to meet with Macbeth.

1 Witch. I come, Graymalkin!

All. Paddock calls :—Anon.⁴

1 Lady Macbeth's name was Gruach filia Bodhe, ac-
cording to Lord Hailes. Andrew of Wintown, in his
Cronykil, informs us that she was the widow of Dun-
can; a circumstance with which Shakspeare was of
course unacquainted.

2 As the play now stands, in Act iv. Se. 1, three other
witches make their appearance.

3 'When the hurlyburly's done.' In Adagia Scotica,
or A Collection of Scotch Proverbs and Proverbial
Phrases; collected by R. B.; very useful and delight-
ful. Lond. 12mo. 1668 :—

'Little kens the wife that sits by the fire

How the wind blows cold in hurte burte swyre.'

'i. e. in the tempestuous mountain-top,' says Mr.
Todd, in a note on Spenser; to which Mr. Boswell gives
his assent, and says, ' this sense seems agreeable to the
witch's answer.' But Peacham, in his Garden of Elo-
quence, 1577, shows that this was not the ancient ac-
ception of the word among us: ' Onomatopeia, when

Fair is foul, and foul is fair:

Hover through the fog and filthy air.

[Witches vanish.

SCENE II. A Camp near Fores. Alarum within.
Enter King DUNCAN, MALCOLM, DONALBAIN,
LENOX, with Attendants, meeting a bleeding Sol-
dier.⁵

Dun. What bloody man is that? He can report,
As seemeth by his plight, of the revolt
The newest state.

Mal. This is the sergeant.⁶

Who, like a good and hardy soldier, fought
'Gainst my captivity :—Hail, brave friend!
Say to the king the knowledge of the broil,
As thou didst leave it.

we invent, devise, fayne, and make a name imitating
the sound of that it signifyeth, as hurlyburly, for an up-
rore and tumultuous stirre.' So in Baret's Alvearie,
1573 :—'But harke yonder: what hurlyburly or noye is
yonde: what sturre ruffing or bruite is that?—The
witches could not mean when the storm was done, but
when the tumult of the battle was over; for they are
to meet again in lightning, thunder, and rain: their ele-
ment was a storm.
4 Upton observes, that, to understand this passage,
we should suppose one familiar calling with the voice
of a cat, and another with the croaking of a toad. A
paddock most generally seems to have signified a toad,
though it sometimes means a frog. What we now call
a toadstool was anciently called a paddock-stool.

5 The first folio reads captain.
6 Sergeants, in ancient times, were not the petty
officers now distinguished by that title, but men perform-
ing one kind of feudal military service, in rank next to
esquires.

## SCENE III.

Sold. Doubtful it stood;

As two spent swimmers, that do cling together,
And choke their art. The merciless Macdonwald
(Worthy to be a rebel; for to that¹)
The multiplying villanies of nature

The multiplying villanies of nature
Do swarm upon him, from the western isles

Do swarm upon him, from the western isles
Of Kernes and Gallowglasses is supplied;²

And fortune, on his damned quarry³ smiling,
Show'd like a rebel's whore.⁴ But all's too weak:

For brave Macbeth (well he deserves that name),
Disdaining fortune, with his brandish'd steel,
Which smok'd with bloody execution,
Like valour's minion,

Like valour's minion,
Carv'd out his passage, till he fac'd the slave;

And⁵ ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,
Till he unseam'd him from the nave to the chaps,

And fix'd his head upon our battlements.
Dismay'd not this

Dismay'd not this
Carv'd out his passage, till he fac'd the slave;
And⁵ ne'er shook hands, nor bade farewell to him,

Dismay'd not this
Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?

Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?
Sold. Yes;

As sparrows, eagles; or the hare, the lion.
If I say soothe,¹ I must report, they were

As sparrows, eagles; or the hare, the lion.
If I say soothe,¹ I must report, they were
As canons overcharg'd with double cracks;³

So they

So they
Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:

Doubly redoubled strokes upon the foe:
Except they meant to bathe in reeking wounds,
Or memorize another Golgotha,⁹

I cannot tell:—

I cannot tell:—
But I am faint, my gashes cry for help.

But I am faint, my gashes cry for help,
Dun. So well thy words become thee, as the

Dun. So well thy words become thee, as the
Our captains, Macbeth and Banquo?

So they

I cannot tell:—

But I am faint, my gashes cry for help,
Dun. So well thy words become thee, as the
They smock of honour both:—Go, get him sur-

They smock of honour both:—

geons.
[Exit Soldier, attended.

1 Vide Tyrwhit's Glossary to Chaucer, v. *for*; and Pege's Anecdotes of the English Language, p. 205. *For to that* means no more than *for that*, or *cause that*. The late editions erroneously point this passage, and as erroneously explain it. I follow the punctuation of the first folio.

2 i. e. supplied with armed troops so named. Of and with are indiscriminately used by our ancient writers. *Gallowglasses* were heavy-armed foot-soldiers of Ireland and the western isles: *Kernes* were the lighter armed troops.

3 *But* (but in the original *quarry* meaning:—) Thus the old copies. It was altered at Johnson's suggestion to *quarry*, which is approved and defended by Steevens and Malone. But the old copy needs no alteration. *Quarry* means the *squadron*, *escadre*, or *square* body, into which Macdonwald's troops were formed, better to receive the charge; through which Macbeth 'carved out his passage till he faced the slave.'

4 The meaning is, that Fortune, while she smiled on him, deceived him.

5 The old copy reads *trich*.

6 Sir W. D'Avenant's reading of this passage, in his alteration of the play, is a tolerable comment on it:—

*'But then this daybreak of our victory*

*Serv'd but to light us into other dangers,*

*That spring from whence our hopes did seem to rise.*

*Break not in the first folio.*

7 Truth,

8 That is, *reports*.

9 i. e. make another Golgotha as memorable as the first.

10 *That seems about to speak strange things.*

11 So in King John:—

12 By Bellona's bridegroom Shakspeare means Macbeth. *Lapp'd in proof* is defended by armour of proof.

13 Confronted him with self-comparisons. By him is meant *Norueav*, and by *self-comparisons* is meant that he gave him as good as he brought, showed that he was his equal.

14 It appears probable, as Steevens suggests, that *Swino* was only a marginal reference, which has crept

## MACBETH.

### Enter ROSSE.

Who comes here?

Mal. The worthy thane of Rosse.

Len. What a haste looks through his eyes! So should he look,

That seems to speak things strange.¹⁰

Rosse. God save the king!

Dun. Whence cam'st thou, worthy thane?

Rosse. From Fife, great king.

Where the Norweyan banners flout the sky,¹¹

And fan our people cold.

Norway himself, with terrible numbers,

Assisted by that most disloyal traitor

The thane of Cowdor, 'gan a dismal confliction:

Till that Bellona's bridegroom,¹² lapp'd in proof
Confronted him with self-comparisons,¹³

Point against point rebellious, arm 'gainst arm,
Curbing his lavish spirit: And, to conclude,

The victory fell on us;—

Dun. Great happiness!

Rosse. That now
Sweno,¹⁴ the Norways' king, craves composition;
Nor would we deign him burial of his men,

Till he disbursed, at Saint Colmes' Inch,¹⁵

Ten thousand dollars to our general use.

Dun. No more that thane of Cowdor shall deceive
Our bosom interest:—Go, pronounce his present death,

And with his former title greet Macbeth.

Rosse. I'll see it done.

Dun. What he hath lost, noble Macbeth hath won. [Exeunt.

## SCENE III. A Heath Thunder. Enter the three Witches.

1 **Witch.** Where hast thou been, sister?

2 **Witch.** Killing swine.

3 **Witch.** Sister, where thou?

1 **Witch.** A sailor's wife had chestnuts in her lap,

And mounch'd, and mounch'd, and mounch'd:—

Give me, quoth I:

Aroint thee,¹⁶ witch! the rump-fed ronyon¹⁷ cries.

Her husband's to Aleppo gone, master o' the Tiger:

But in a sieve I'll thither sail.¹⁸

into the text by mistake, and that the line originally
stood—

'That now the Norway's king craves composition.'

It was surely not necessary for Rosse to tell Duncan the name of his old enemy, the king of Norway.

15 *Colmes'* is here a dissyllable. *Colmes' Inch*, now called *Inchcomb*, is a small island, lying in the Firth of Edinburgh, with an abbey upon it dedicated to St. Colmumb. *Inch* or *inse*, in Erse, signifies an island.

16 The etymology of this imprecision is yet to seek.
*Rynt ye, for out with ye!* *stand off!* is still used in
Cheshire, where there is also a proverbial saying,
*Rynt ye, witch*, quoth Besse Locket to her mother,
Tooke thought it was from *roynous*, and might signify
'a scab or scale on thee!' Others have derived it from
the *rowan-tree*, or witch-hazle, the wood of which was
believed to be a powerful charm against witchcraft; and
every careful housewife had a churn-staff made of it.
This superstition is as old as Pliny's time, who asserts
that 'a serpent will rather creep into the fire than over
a twig of ash.' The French have a phrase of somewhat
similar sound and import—'Arry-avant, away there,
ho?!—Mr. Douce thinks that 'aroint thee' will be found
to have a Saxon origin.

17 'Rump-fed ronyon,' a scabby or mangy woman,
fed on offals; the *rumps* being formerly part of the
emoluments or kitchen fees of the cooks in great houses

18 In The Discovery of Witchcraft, by Reginald Scott, 1584, he says it was believed that witches 'could sail in an egg-shell, a cockle, or muscle-shell, through and under the tempestuous seas.' And in another pamphlet, 'Declaring the dannable Life of Doctor Flan, a notable Sorcerer, who was buried at Edenborough in Januarie last, 1591,'—'All that together went to sea, each one in a riddle or cive, and went in the same very substantially, with flagons of wine making merrie, and drinking by the way in the same riddles or cives,' &c.

Sir W. D'Avenant, in his Albovine, 1629, says—

*He sits like a witch sailing in a sieve.*
It was the belief of the times, though a witch could
assume the form of any animal she pleased, the *tail*
would still be wanting.