Every Man In His Humour (1598 quarto) | The Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson

Edited by David Bevington

INTRODUCTION

Although Philip Henslowe’s Diary notes a performance of ‘The comodey of Umers’ as a new play on 11 May 1597, with eleven more performances recorded by 13 July, he is apparently referring not to a play by Jonson but to George Chapman’s An Humorous Day’s Mirth. Jonson’s Every Man In His Humour seems to have been first acted in September 1598 at the Curtain theatre in Shoreditch; a letter written by Tobie Mathew to Dudley Carleton on 20 September describes how a gentleman lost 300 crowns at ‘a new play called Every man’s humour’ (CSPD, Eliz. 268:61). According to John Aubrey, writing long after the event in the later seventeenth century, Jonson, having suffered previous failures at the Curtain, ‘undertook again to write a play and hit it admirably well, viz. Every man . . . which was his first good one’ (see Electronic Edition, Early Lives).

The play was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 4 August 1600, along with As You Like It, Henry the Fifth, and Much Ado About Nothing, all of them ‘My Lord Chamberlain’s men’s plays’, with a note that publication was ‘to be stayed’. That much-debated phrase, once interpreted as a tactic used to forestall unauthorized publication, may simply hint at more mundane business reasons for a delay, which was in any case brief. The first quarto of Every Man In appeared in 1601, offering the play to the reader ‘As it hath been sundry times publicly acted by the Right Honorable the Lord Chamberlain his Servants’ (title-page). A substantially revised edition appeared in the 1616 folio, advertised on its title-page as ‘A Comedy. Acted in the year 1598. By the then Lord Chamberlain his Servants.’ (The reference here is to performance of the quarto Italian version in 1598, even if the phrasing elides the gap between it and the folio version.) A list of actors in the folio text indicates that the original performance took place ‘With the allowance of the Master of Revels’.

The fact that William Shakespeare’s name heads the list of actors in the folio version, opposite that of Richard Burbage, has fuelled speculation that Shakespeare took the part of Lorenzo Senior; Thorello has also been proposed as a possibility. Such speculations are unsubstantial, as are most attempts on the part of T. W. Baldwin and others to assign acting roles to Shakespeare on the slender basis of stage traditions that he played ‘some kingly parts in sort’ (John Davies of Hereford, 1610), along with the Ghost in Hamlet (Rowe, 1709) and ‘a decrepit old man’, presumably old Adam in As You Like It (Stevens, 1778, reporting what one of Shakespeare’s younger brothers is said to have said). The ordering of names in the folio list may have little significance. Lorenzo Senior is not a leading role. Indeed, the play is designed for an ensemble acting company, with choice roles of more or less balanced length for about nine actor–sharers: Bobadilla, Musco, Thorello, Prospero, Lorenzo Senior, Lorenzo Junior, Cob, Doctor Clement, and Giuliano. Boys would have played the women’s parts, which are, characteristically for Jonson, less dominant; the relatively minor roles of Stephano, Piso, and Peto could have been doubled, or assigned to hired men. Would Burbage, as leading man, have preferred Bobadilla, or Musco, or Thorello? Was Will Kemp, as the company’s leading clown, assigned Cob or Bobadilla? Scholarly guessswork favours Cob, because of the similarities to Bottom and Dogberry, but the fact is that we simply do not know.

Nicholas Rowe, in his Account of Shakespeare prefixed to his edition of 1709, reports a tradition, handed down by word of mouth in the theatre, that Shakespeare intervened on Jonson’s behalf when the Chamberlain’s Men had originally declined the opportunity to stage Every Man In because its author was ‘at that time altogether unknown to the world’. The persons ‘into whose hands it was put’, having ‘turned it carelessly and superciliously over’, were on the point of returning the play to Jonson ‘with an ill-advised answer, that it would be of no service to their company’, when Shakespeare, ‘luckily casting his eye upon it’, persuaded his colleagues to change their minds. ‘After this’, Rowe concludes, ‘they were professed friends, though I don’t know whether the other [i.e. Jonson] ever made him an equal return of gentleness and sincerity.’ (To be sure, the two playwrights seem to have learned from each other: Jonson may have borrowed a few touches from 1 Henry IV, whereas Shakespeare, who acted in Every Man In, must have had that play in mind when he came to write the story of the jealous Othello in 1603–4; see 1.4.178 and 3.3.14ff. and notes, and Donaldson 2001a.) The account, though unsupported by other evidence, quickly became part of a legend about differences in temperament between two authors, one of them genial and visionary, the other judgemental, envious, and classically severe.

In Aubrey’s view, Every Man In was Jonson’s first ‘good’ play. The quarto title-page advertises it as having ‘been sundry times publicly acted’. David Kay (1995) reckons that it was ‘a moderately successful play’, even though it ‘attracted no special notice when it was first produced’. When the play was favoured with a court performance by the King’s Men on 2 February 1605, the text may have been the quarto or the folio version or some intermediate stage of revision; the records of performance do not specify. At all events, the quarto was replaced on stage by the folio text, and it was in this form that the play enjoyed considerable popularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, doing much to establish Jonson’s literary reputation. See the Introduction to the folio text of Every Man in His Humour for that story (4.619ff.).

By 1598, George Chapman had already introduced the fad of the humours comedy, not only in his An Humorous Day’s Mirth (1597) but also in The Blind Beggar of Alexandria (1596), both acted by the Admiral’s Men. The term appears in Jonson’s own The Case Is Altered (1597.) The idea of humours comedy, and indeed the word ‘humour’ itself, were rapidly becoming the rage. We see evidence of this in slangy uses of the term, as in Pistol’s ‘These be good humours, indeed!’ (2H4, 2.4.130) and Nym’s refrain-like ‘That’s the humour of it’ (Wiv., 1.1.107–34, H5, 2.1.48–92). Benedick shows his fondness for the term when he vows, ‘a college of witcrackers cannot flout me out of my humour’ (Ado, 5.4.98–9), that is, cannot deter me from my determination to marry. As Benedick’s quip indicates, the term, once it had passed into such general parlance, had quickly come to mean ‘whimsy, personal inclination, idiosyncrasy’; one’s ‘humour’ could be nothing more precise than an expression of what one feels like doing at a given moment. Bottom the Weaver puts it well: ‘my chief humour is for a tyrant’ (MND, 1.2.21–2). Even in plays of the early 1590s we find this familiar locution. ‘Let him go while the humour lasts’, says Grumio of the notoriously whimsical Petruchio (Shr., 1.2.103). Love’s Labour’s Lost is filled with what we might call humours characters, like the fantastical Don Armado, of whose affectations his diminutive page says, ‘These are compliments, these are humours’ (3.1.20–1). Antonio Balladino perhaps best sums up the situation in The Case Is Altered, when he observes that ‘you shall have some now – as for example, in plays – that will have every day new tricks and write you nothing but humours. Indeed, this pleases the gentlemen, but the common sort, they care not for’t’ (1.2.70–2).

Chapman and Jonson, then, were picking up on a well-established trend, one that is reflected in Hamlet and more broadly in a general sense of a reorientation of theatrical taste at the turn of the century. This is not to denigrate the crucial importance of their original contributions in the formation of humours comedy, but simply to observe that they were making creative use of the culture in which they lived and for which they wrote. In theory, at least, ‘humours’ was understood as originally medical in concept, going back at least to Galen (c. AD 129–199) and his classification of all matter into the four elements of earth, water, air, and fire. These elements in turn were thought to be the product of various combinations of the four ‘qualities’ of the universe: hot, cold, moist, and dry. The earth was cold and dry; water, cold and moist; air, hot and moist; fire, hot and dry. Air and fire were the aspiring elements, tending upwards; earth and water were the baser elements, confined to the world in which we live. Because all human beings are microcosms of the larger universe, humans contain within themselves the four elements. As in the universe, those elements are, potentially at least, at war. The blood, like air, is hot and moist; the yellow bile or choler, like fire, is hot and dry; phlegm, like water, is cold and moist; black bile, like the earth, is cold and dry.

Ideally these four ‘humours’, or ‘complexions’, are in balance, but ordinarily they are not; usually one humour predominates. When blood is in the ascendancy, the person is likely to be ‘sanguine’, or cheerful, outgoing, and ebullient. The choleric individual is irascible, quickly angry, reckless in the face of danger. The phlegmatic personality is stolid. An excess of black bile produces melancholia.

These Galenic concepts were considered axiomatic by many doctors, who proceeded to act in accordance with the received wisdom by expunging from the body of a sick person the presumably unwanted ‘humour’ that had become excessive. The prescribed treatment was usually bleeding, or an emptying of the digestive tract by vomiting or evacuation of the bowels called purging. Medically, these procedures were violent and must have done more harm than good. As a theory of the personality, on the other hand, they encouraged some latitude. One could account for all sorts of physical and psychological states by the theory of humours, as Timothy Bright argued in his A Treatise of Melancholy (1586, 1613) and as Robert Burton was to demonstrate in his exhaustive The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621. In common parlance, the concept broadened out into a way of talking about people’s hang-ups, quirks, obsessions.

Yet even in common parlance, the idea of humours retained its quasi-medical sense of a dominant ‘humour’ in a given person. The theory lent itself, in other words, to the notion that any individual could be characterized by a particular trait, a tic, a hand gesture, an inflection of speech, a favourite phrase. The theory encouraged caricature. Caricature finds its natural home in wry comedy. Charles Dickens’s characters are usually humours types. They are often static in that they continue to amuse the reader throughout with the same distinctive mannerism or mannerisms that identify them on their first appearance. Many of Jonson’s characters are humours characters in this sense. It is no mere coincidence that Dickens loved Jonson, and most of all for Every Man In His Humour. Dickens chose to portray Bobadil with his company of theatrical amateurs in 1845. Dickens knew a good humours character when he saw one. (See Performance Calendar, Electronic Edition.)

Like Dickens after him, Jonson finds in humours comedy a congenial way of exploring the contrasts between normative and eccentric behaviour, between appropriate manners and ‘correct’ vocubulary on the one hand and, on the other, various affected mannerisms that might include the uttering of inventively new oaths, the taking of tobacco, and the affectation of melancholy. For Jonson, humorous behaviour provides much more than entertainment value; it builds into a critical reflection on current social modes, thereby both registering and responding to his audience’s sense of its own make-up as a community rather than a crowd. As Jonathan Haynes has shown, humours comedy contributes markedly to the emergence of a developing urban mentality at the end of the sixteenth century in London.

Jonson’s blueprint as dramatist, in Every Man In His Humour, is to bring together a collection of highly idiosyncratic humours characters in one place so that they can foolishly interact and also be critically observed by witty interpreters who point out for us, as audience, what is so amusing about the human foibles on display. This is to be Jonson’s plan in Every Man Out of His Humour as well, in 1599. Neither play requires much plot. What the idea demands is a vehicle for satire more than a plot. As Helen Ostovich, Anne Barton, Coburn Gum, and C. R. Baskervill have shown, Jonson seems to going back to the so-called Old Comedy of Aristophanes for his ideas about dramatic structure, rather than to the New Comedy of the Roman dramatists Plautus and Terence.

New Comedy depends on a plot, often one in which youth outwits age. It manifests itself in a neoclassical play like Ariosto’s I Suppositi (Supposes), Shakespeare’s source for his Lucentio–Bianca plot in The Taming of the Shrew. A young man disguises himself as a servant to be secretly near the young woman he adores, in order to rescue her from the clutches of an older man whom her father intends to force upon her; eventually, after many amusing and vexing complications, the young man turns out to be well-born and a fit match for the young lady after all. Aristophanes’ comedies, on the other hand, tell almost no story of this kind; they prefer comic situations, like the founding of Cloudcuckooland, in which many zany types are free to participate and argue with each other. Here the dramatist can add as many comic vignettes as he likes. The story has nowhere in particular to go, though of course the play does need an ending.

Every Man In features a vestigial plot of the New Comedy sort in Prospero’s courtship of Hesperida and his elopement with her. Then, too, young Lorenzo is involved in a familiar conflict with his father as to how he spends his time; the father is a recognizable ‘careful father’ of the New Comedy sort. Musco is the ‘clever servant’. Other character types are Plautine and neoclassical as well. Bobadilla is the braggart soldier, plainly in the tradition deriving from Plautus’s Miles Gloriosus, itself adapted evidently from some Greek original. Yet the love plot of Prospero and Hesperida, introduced late into the play, is only perfunctory, as though prompted by a concern on the part of the dramatist that he had better get things moving at last. Young Lorenzo’s troubles with his father lead nowhere other than to the father’s snooping around and then belatedly realizing that he has been too suspicious of his son. Bobadilla is a braggart soldier, no mistake about that, but deprived of Plautus’s narrative in which Pyropolynices carries off a young lady from Athens to Ephesus, where he must be hoodwinked in an elaborate stratagem by the young woman’s lover and his clever slave. Jonson’s Plautine borrowings are distinctly more oriented towards character types than towards plot.

With a primary dramatic intent of displaying character, then, Jonson constructs a slender proposition for his play. A well-born young man living with his father near Florence is invited by his city friend, Prospero, to come to him in town so that they may compare the specimens of ‘humorous’ character that each has managed to collect. They engage in a contest of wits: who can produce the most amusing models of human folly and affectation? Prospero warns young Lorenzo, in a letter sent to him in the countryside, that he, Prospero, has quite a collection already. ‘I can show thee two of the most perfect, rare, and absolute true gulls that ever thou saw’st, if thou wilt come’, he boasts in the letter (1.1.138–9).

Young Lorenzo, having been issued a challenge, is eager to rise to the occasion. Whom can be bring along to match Prospero’s vaunted pair? Looking up from his reading of the letter, Lorenzo realizes that Fortune has provided him an answer in the person of his witless country cousin, Stephano. ‘But what? My wise cousin!’ young Lorenzo reflects to himself. ‘Nay, then, I’ll furnish our feast with one gull more toward a mess. He writes to me of two, and here’s one: that’s three, i’faith. Oh, for a fourth!’ (1.2.53–5). Little effort is required to inveigle Stephano to come along with Lorenzo to Florence, for Stephano is burning with a desire to learn how to swear fashionably and wield a sword as gentlemen do. He wants to cut a figure in Florence among the gallants.

This scheme of the young wits (and of Jonson as playwright) has the immediate advantage of bringing together a country gull and two town gulls. The contrasts offer amusement and variety. Stephano is the quintessential country simpleton, like Slender in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives (one would like to know whether it was written before or after Every Man In) or Kastril in Jonson’s later The Alchemist. Stephano is anxious to learn the arts of hawking and hunting as the accomplishments of country gentlemen. He picks a stupid quarrel with a servingman, pays too much for a worthless sword, and attempts in town to acquire the colourful oath-making of Bobadilla. He is every bit as foolish as young Lorenzo could have hoped. He is the perfect exemplification of a humours character.

Prospero’s candidates for prize gulls are Bobadilla and Matheo. The first is a braggart soldier whose boastfulness and comic cowardice are as delightfully exaggerated as those of Falstaff. Matheo is a fop and a dabbler in poetry. He inclines to melancholy (a true remnant of the medical theory of humours) because, as he condescendingly explains to Stephano, ‘it’s your only best humour’. Melancholy ‘breeds your perfect fine wit’ (2.3.65–6). His clothes similarly follow what he takes to be the latest fashion, in imitation of Bobadilla, whom Matheo admires to the point of adulation and from whom he hopes to learn how to fence. The young wits, Prospero and Lorenzo Junior, think that Bobadilla and Matheo are both absurdly overdressed. Matheo’s poems, when recited aloud, turn out to be studded with lame and idiotic platitudes stolen out of Samuel Daniel and other sonneteers. Jonson was especially impatient with the poetry of Daniel. When Matheo steals lines out of Marlowe’s ‘Hero and Leander’ (3.4.49–62), young Lorenzo and Prospero are at hand to point out the plagiarism to each other and to us as audience, just in case we did not recognize the theft. Matheo approvingly quotes some ranting verses from that old warhorse, The Spanish Tragedy, a play Jonson regarded as a perfect embodiment of a flamboyant poetic style that a good writer of the late 1590s should learn to avoid at all costs.

These satirical jabs are part of a larger serious interest in poetry, as manifested in Lorenzo Senior’s complaints about his son’s inclination to the ‘humour’ of ‘idle poetry’ (1.1.17–18) and especially in the son’s eloquent defence of poesy as ‘Blessèd, eternal, and most true divine’ (5.3.262–91) – a passage that has no counterpart in the 1616 folio text. It is in the 1598 Every Man In that Jonson announces his fetishization of the poet as the arbiter of morals, and first voices his sense of his own situation as both pattern and competitor within the literary marketplace. These are themes that will run throughout Jonson’s writings as an essential part of his encompassing interest in the development of urban habits of speech and modes of thought.

In order to explore a more serious vein of humour, Jonson introduces Thorello as the jealous husband. Again, little plot is required; Thorello is so groundlessly jealous of his wife, Bianca, that he employs his loyal servant, Piso, to keep an eye on her, despite Thorello’s uncertainty as to whether he can trust Piso. The comedy in this portraiture adopts the timeless strategy of pitting one humour against another: Thorello is a jealous husband, but he is also a tight-fisted businessman who is attempting to be rational about his affairs. When these two impulses come into conflict, the result is soliloquizing that is tonally nearly tragic in its heightened and elegant blank verse, even though the serious tone is also immediately undercut by the absurdity of Thorello’s baseless fears.

Thorello’s brother-in-law, Giuliano, the older half-brother of Prospero and Bianca, is another ‘pure’ humours type in that he is choleric. Galen would say that he is hot and dry. Asked by Thorello to correct Prospero’s irresponsible behaviour as a resident in Thorello’s house, Giuliano can do little more than reply with gruff outbursts and intemperate profanity. He becomes a foil to the inane Bobadilla and Matheo, pursuing them with righteous indignation. His choleric responses are acutely balanced and contrasted with the witty, detached amusement of Prospero and young Lorenzo. Giuliano is right to despise Matheo and Bobadilla, but, from the young wits’ perspective he would do better to control his anger and avoid being obsessive about his dislikes.

Young Lorenzo and Prospero are very much at the perspectival centre of this satirical comedy of humours, along with that merry magistrate, Doctor Clement. Jonson invites us to see the absurdities of the various humours characters through the eyes of the young wits. They seem free of humours themselves. That is to say, they know who they are, and are less interested in trying to impress somebody else than in observing and laughing at la comédie humaine. Their collecting specimens seems heartless enough, but they inflict little harm on the humorous types that they gather for each other’s amusement. Even though Matheo and Bobadilla deserve to be exposed as frauds, the young wits are jovial, tolerant, detached. Their self-knowledge and relative freedom from ‘humorous’ obsessions fashion them into perfect vehicles for Jonsonian satire. They are, arguably, dramatic characters with whom the author feels some identification. They do what satirists do: observe and characterize with witty comment, and allow the folly of the world to trip itself up by its own foolishness.

Doctor Clement is their ally; so too, pre-eminently, is Musco. Nominally servant to Lorenzo Senior, Musco is, more generically, the clever servant of New Comedy. In that tradition, he is cleverer than the young men he assists. Much of the complication of the latter half of the play is inspired by Musco. At the point when a neoclassical comedy needs complication, he is there to provide it. He is a master of disguise, as a wounded veteran of the wars or as the impersonator of Doctor Clement’s legal clerk. In this latter disguise, Musco riskily impersonates an officer of the law and issues summonses in Clement’s name without the judge’s authority – a serious and criminal offence for which he has to be pardoned. Musco is the enterprising deviser of plot in the latter part of the play, and as such he too is a kind of stand-in for the dramatist. His devices and manipulations are Jonson’s devices and manipulations. He is a forebear of his more famous namesake, Mosca in Volpone, albeit of a less sinister nature. Musco is perfectly fitted to a satirical comedy of humours designed, in the words of Jonson’s later prologue for the folio text, to ‘sport with human follies, not with crimes’.

Doctor Clement forgives Musco for his wit. The cleverness of execution, and the lack of intent to do any more serious harm than to embarrass the foolish, signify to Clement that he has found an ally in Musco. Together they bring resolution to this comedy. Clement particularly is a figure of judgement, but his mode of judgement is emphatically not that of law courts, arrests, and incarceration. A judge he may be, but that does not mean he sees any point in putting people behind bars – at least not the people that are brought before him. When Bobadilla and Matheo come into his courtroom seeking an injunction against any violence that Giuliano may intend towards them, Clement’s whimsical but effective response is to castigate them as fools and cowards for seeking legal remedy rather than behaving as grown men should do. In his conversations with Cob, Bobadilla’s long-suffering landlord, Clement is positively mischievous: he threatens Cob with harsh punishment if he goes on inveighing against tobacco. Perceiving that Lorenzo Senior has been spying on his own son, Clement speaks as an old friend, urging him to be a better father and let his son live his own life. To the jealous husband, Thorello, he has similar advice: try to achieve self-knowledge and compassionate understanding.

Clement bids the contentious persons who have been summoned before him to ‘put off all discontentment’: Lorenzo Senior his ‘cares’ of overzealous fatherhood, Thorello and Bianca their ‘jealousy’, Giuliano his ‘anger’, and Prospero his ‘wit’ (5.3.373–4). In other words, he urges them to cast off their humours. If Cob and Tib were a part of the final scene, as they are in the folio text, Clement would presumably warn them too of the need to purge themselves of jealousy. The final ‘sentences’ with which Clement concludes the play are thus addressed to the curing of specific and identifiable humours. He does not attempt to bring Matheo and Bobadilla to their senses because they are incorrigible fools. Clement performs the crucial function in a satire of perceiving that some humans can be disabused of their follies by being shown how absurdly they are behaving, whereas others can only be scorned and held up to ridicule as an example to others. Satire works in these two ways, as curative and as castigating.

Doctor Clement is in many ways, then, the idealized arbiter of a humours comedy. He is good-natured, wise, and himself whimsical yet without a loss of control over his own predilections. He sees, as an authority figure, that the official justice of the state has no proper place in the judging and excoriating of human silliness. A play that wishes to sport with folly can best turn over the management of its affairs to a guiding spirit who lectures and improves those who are corrigible, humiliates those who are not (even going so far as to burn the bad verse of an incorrigible poetaster), and tidies everything up by inviting his friends to supper. Clement, and the play in which he operates, provide a useful early model of humorous satire from which Jonson will proceed to move in more experimental and complicating directions in his later plays.

Throughout the quarto version of Every Man In, Jonson is careful to observe his setting in and near Florence. The characters’ names are Italian; so too are the place names. Precise observance of the unity of place (Florence and its immediate vicinity) and of time (a single day, clocked with exactitude as the play begins early in the morning and concludes with evening festivities) is in keeping with Italy as the home of humanistic neoclassicism. At the same time, Jonson is clearly intent (as Anne Barton has argued) upon initiating in this play a new kind of urban comedy, both for himself and for Elizabethan theatre in general. An English application is discernible throughout in Jonson’s concern with the bad state of poetry, with senseless litigiousness, and the like – Stephano, for example, is no less a typical gull than is his counterpart in EMI (F), coming to the big city like Kastril in The Alchemist to learn the latest fashions in apparel and quarrelling – even if the fictional Italian setting is for the most part studiously maintained. Jonson curiously retains English monetary currency (shillings, pence, crowns, angels) throughout the quarto text of Every Man In, despite the Italian setting, and at variance with his later practice in Volpone, where he switches to Italian currency. These English concerns suggest a kind of unfinished business in the realm of social observation. A major reason for the folio revision, probably the dominant reason, will be to move the play and its satire closer home. The folio text is laden with topical references, English place names, and English foibles. This topic is discussed in the Introduction to the folio text.

The quarto Every Man In was Jonson’s first text to be carefully printed. This quarto, entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1600, was published in 1601. Preceding the play text is a list of ‘The Number and Names of the Actors’. Very few press variants occur in the 1601 quarto. This present text is based on Q, with care being taken not to conflate it with the folio text, especially since the folio version is also included in this edition. The punctuation of Q is careless but easily corrected in the present modernized text. See Textual Essay for an expanded account.

The Number and Names of the Actors

LORENZO SENIOR: [an Italian gentleman of the family of Pazzi]
LORENZO JUNIOR: [his son]
MUSCO: [Lorenzo Sr’s servant]
STEPHANO: [Lorenzo Sr’s nephew, a country simpleton]
THORELLO: [a rich Florentine merchant] 5
BIANCA: [his wife, and sister of Prospero]
HESPERIDA: [Thorello’s sister]
PROSPERO: [a young gentleman lodging with Thorello]
GIULIANO: [a choleric older half-brother of Prospero and Bianca]
PISO: [Thorello’s servant] 10
DOCTOR CLEMENT: [a magistrate]
PETO: [his clerk]
BOBADILLA: [a braggart soldier]
MATHEO: [a dabbler in poetry]
[OLIVER] COB: [a waterbearer] 15
TIB: [Cob’s wife]

[SERVANTS and ATTENDANTS]

[THE SCENE: FLORENCE AND VICINITY]

1.1 Enter LORENZO DI PAZZI SR [and] MUSCO.

LORENZO SR

Now trust me, here’s a goodly day toward.

Musco,

Call up my son Lorenzo. Bid him rise;

Tell him I have some business to employ him in.

MUSCO

I will, sir, presently.

LORENZO SR

But hear you, sirrah: 5

If he be at study, disturb him not.

MUSCO

Very good, sir. Exit Musco.

LORENZO SR

How happy would I estimate myself

Could I by any mean retire my son

From one vain course of study he affects! 10

He is a scholar, if a man may trust

The liberal voice of double-tongued report,

Of dear account in all our academies.

Yet this position must not breed in me

A fast opinion that he cannot err. 15

Myself was once a student and, indeed,

Fed with the self-same humour he is now,

Dreaming on naught but idle poetry;

But since, experience hath awaked my spirits,

And reason taught them how to comprehend 20

The sovereign use of study.

Enter STEPHANO.

What, cousin Stephano?

What news with you, that you are here so early?

STEPHANO

Nothing but e’en come to see how you do, uncle.

LORENZO SR

That’s kindly done. You are welcome, cousin.

STEPHANO

Ay, I know that, sir; I would not have come else. How doth my 25

cousin, uncle?

LORENZO SR

Oh, well, well. Go in and see. I doubt he’s scarce stirring yet.

STEPHANO

Uncle, afore I go in, can you tell me an he have e’er a book of the

sciences of hawking and hunting? I would fain borrow it.

LORENZO SR

Why, I hope you will not a-hawking now, will you? 30

STEPHANO

No, wusse, but I’ll practise against next year. I have bought me a

hawk and bells and all; I lack nothing but a book to keep it by.

LORENZO SR

Oh, most ridiculous!

STEPHANO

Nay, look you now, you are angry, uncle. Why, you know, an a man

have not skill in hawking and hunting nowadays, I’ll not give a rush for him. 35

He is for no gentleman’s company; and, by God’s will, I scorn it, I, so I do, to be

a consort for every humdrum. Hang them, scroyles! There’s nothing in them

in the world. What do you talk on it? A gentleman must show himself like a

gentleman. Uncle, I pray you be not angry. I know what I have to do, I trow; I

am no novice. 40

LORENZO SR

Go to, you are a prodigal and self-willed fool.

Nay, never look at me; it’s I that speak.

Take ’t as you will, I’ll not flatter you.

What, have you not means enough to waste

That which your friends have left you, but you must 45

Go cast away your money on a buzzard,

And know not how to keep it when you have done?

Oh, it’s brave! This will make you a gentleman!

Well, cousin, well, I see you are e’en past hope

Of all reclaim. Ay, so, now you are told on it, 50

You look another way.

STEPHANO

What would you have me do, trow?

LORENZO SR

What would I have you do? Marry,

Learn to be wise and practise how to thrive,

That I would have you do, and not to spend 55

Your crowns on everyone that humours you.

I would not have you to intrude yourself

In every gentleman’s society

Till their affections or your own desert

Do worthily invite you to the place; 60

For he that’s so respectless in his course

Oft sells his reputation vile and cheap.

Let not your carriage and behaviour taste

Of affectation, lest, while you pretend

To make a blaze of gentry to the world, 65

A little puff of scorn extinguish it

And you be left like an unsavoury snuff

Whose property is only to offend.

Cousin, lay by such superficial forms

And entertain a perfect real substance. 70

Stand not so much on your gentility,

But moderate your expenses now at first

As you may keep the same proportion still.

Bear a low sail.

Enter a SERVINGMAN.

Soft, who’s this comes here?

SERVINGMAN

Gentlemen, God save you. 75

STEPHANO

Welcome, good friend. We do not stand much upon our gentility,

yet I can assure you mine uncle is a man of a thousand pound land a year. He

hath but one son in the world; I am his next heir, as simple as I stand here, if

my cousin die. I have a fair living of mine own, too, beside.

SERVINGMAN

In good time, sir. 80

STEPHANO

‘In good time, sir’? You do not flout, do you?

SERVINGMAN

Not I, sir.

STEPHANO

An you should, here be them can perceive it, and that quickly too.

Go to. And they can give it again soundly, an need be.

SERVINGMAN

Why, sir, let this satisfy you: good faith, I had no such intent. 85

STEPHANO

By God, an I thought you had, sir, I would talk with you.

SERVINGMAN

So you may, sir, and at your pleasure.

STEPHANO

And so I would, sir, an you were out of mine uncle’s ground, I can

tell you.

LORENZO SR

Why, how now, cousin, will this ne’er be left? 90

STEPHANO

Whoreson base fellow! By God’s lid, an ’twere not for shame, I

would –

LORENZO SR

What would you do? You peremptory ass,

An you’ll not be quiet, get you hence!

You see the gentleman contains himself 95

In modest limits, giving no reply

To your unseasoned, rude comparatives;

Yet you’ll demean yourself without respect

Either of duty or humanity.

Go, get you in! ’Fore God, I am ashamed 100

Thou hast a kinsman’s interest in me. Exit Stephano.

SERVINGMAN

I pray you, sir, is this Pazzi house?

LORENZO SR

Yes, marry, is it, sir.

SERVINGMAN

I should enquire for a gentleman here, one Signor Lorenzo di

Pazzi. Do you know any such, sir, I pray you? 105

LORENZO SR

Yes, sir, or else I should forget myself.

SERVINGMAN

I cry you mercy, sir. I was requested by a gentleman of Florence,

having some occasion to ride this way, to deliver you this letter.

[He gives a letter.]

LORENZO SR

To me, sir? What do you mean? I pray you, remember your

court’sy. [Reading.] ‘To his dear and most elected friend, Signor Lorenzo di 110

Pazzi.’ What might the gentleman’s name be, sir, that sent it? Nay, pray you,

be covered.

SERVINGMAN

Signor Prospero.

LORENZO SR

Signor Prospero? A young gentleman of the family of Strozzi, is

he not? 115

SERVINGMAN

Ay, sir, the same. Signor Thorello, the rich Florentine merchant,

married his sister.

LORENZO SR

You say very true. [Calling] Musco!

Enter MUSCO.

MUSCO

Sir?

LORENZO SR

Make this gentleman drink here. 120

[To the Servingman] I pray you, go in, sir, an’t please you.

Exeunt [Servingman and Musco].

Now, without doubt, this letter’s to my son.

Well, all is one; I’ll be so bold as read it,

Be it for the style’s sake and the phrase –

Both which, I do presume, are excellent 125

And greatly varied from the vulgar form,

If Prospero’s invention gave them life.

[He opens the letter.]

How now? What stuff is here?

[Reading.] ‘Sirrah Lorenzo, I muse we cannot see thee at Florence. ’Sblood, I

doubt Apollo hath got thee to be his ingle, that thou comest not abroad to 130

visit thine old friends. Well, take heed of him; he may do somewhat for his

household servants or so, but for his retainers, I am sure I have known some of

them that have followed him three, four, five year together, scorning the world

with their bare heels, and at length been glad for a shift – though no clean

shift – to lie a whole winter in half a sheet, cursing Charles’ Wain and the rest 135

of the stars intolerably. But quis contra divos? Well, sirrah, sweet villain, come

and see me. But spend one minute in my company and ’tis enough. I think I

have a world of good jests for thee. Oh, sirrah, I can show thee two of the most

perfect, rare, and absolute true gulls that ever thou saw’st, if thou wilt come.

’Sblood, invent some famous, memorable lie or other to flap thy father in the 140

mouth withal. Thou hast been father of a thousand in thy days; thou couldst

be no poet else. Any scurvy, roguish excuse will serve; say thou com’st but to

fetch wool for thine inkhorn. And then, too, thy father will say thy wits are

a-wool-gathering. But it’s no matter; the worse, the better. Anything is good

enough for the old man. Sirrah, how if thy father should see this now? What 145

would he think of me? Well, however I write to thee, I reverence him in my soul

for the general good all Florence delivers of him. Lorenzo, I conjure thee –

by what, let me see – by the depth of our love, by all the strange sights we

have seen in our days (ay, or nights either), to come to me to Florence this

day. Go to, you shall come, and let your muses go spin for once. If thou wilt 150

not, ’sheart, what’s your god’s name? Apollo? Ay. Apollo, if this melancholy

rogue Lorenzo here do not come, grant that he do turn fool presently, and

never hereafter be able to make a good jest or a blank verse, but live in

more penury of wit and invention than either the Hall Beadle or Poet Nuntius.’

Well, it is the strangest letter that ever I read. 155

Is this the man my son so oft hath praised

To be the happiest and most precious wit

That ever was familiar with art?

Now, by Our Lady’s blessed Son, I swear

I rather think him most infortunate 160

In the possession of such holy gifts,

Being the master of so loose a spirit.

Why, what unhallowed ruffian would have writ

With so profane a pen unto his friend?

The modest paper e’en looks pale for grief 165

To feel her virgin cheek defiled and stained

With such a black and criminal inscription.

Well, I had thought my son could not have strayed

So far from judgement as to mart himself

Thus cheaply in the open trade of scorn, 170

To jeering folly and fantastic humour.

But now I see opinion is a fool,

And hath abused my senses. – Musco!

Enter MUSCO.

MUSCO

Sir?

LORENZO SR

What, is the fellow gone that brought this letter? 175

MUSCO

Yes, sir, a pretty while since.

LORENZO SR

And where’s Lorenzo?

MUSCO

In his chamber, sir.

LORENZO SR

He spake not with the fellow, did he?

MUSCO

No, sir, he saw him not. 180

LORENZO SR

[Giving the letter] Then, Musco, take this letter and deliver it

Unto Lorenzo; but, sirrah, on your life,

Take you no knowledge I have opened it.

MUSCO

Oh, Lord, sir, that were a jest indeed! Exit Musco.

LORENZO SR

I am resolved I will not cross his journey. 185

Nor will I practise any violent mean

To stay the hot and lusty course of youth;

For youth restrained straight grows impatient

And in condition like an eager dog

Who, ne’er so little from his game withheld, 190

Turns head and leaps up at his master’s throat.

Therefore I’ll study by some milder drift

To call my son unto a happier shrift. Exit.

1.2 Enter LORENZO JR [carrying the letter,] with MUSCO.

MUSCO

Yes, sir, on my word, he opened it and read the contents.

LORENZO JR

It scarce contents me that he did so. But Musco, didst thou

observe his countenance in the reading of it, whether he were angry or

pleased?

MUSCO

Why, sir, I saw him not read it. 5

LORENZO JR

No? How knowest thou then that he opened it?

MUSCO

Marry, sir, because he charged me on my life to tell nobody that he

opened it, which, unless he had done, he would never fear to have it revealed.

LORENZO JR

That’s true. Well, Musco, hie thee in again,

Lest thy protracted absence do lend light 10

To dark suspicion. Musco, be assured

I’ll not forget this thy respective love.

Enter STEPHANO [unnoticed by Lorenzo Jr, who is occupied with reading his letter].

STEPHANO

Oh, Musco, didst thou not see a fellow here in a what-sha’-call-’em

doublet; he brought mine uncle a letter even now?

MUSCO

Yes, sir, what of him? 15

STEPHANO

Where is he, canst thou tell?

MUSCO

Why, he is gone.

STEPHANO

Gone? Which way? When went he? How long since?

MUSCO

It’s almost half an hour ago since he rid hence.

STEPHANO

Whoreson scanderbag rogue! Oh, that I had a horse! By God’s lid, 20

I’d fetch him back again, with heave and ho.

MUSCO

Why, you may have my master’s bay gelding, an you will.

STEPHANO

But I have no boots, that’s the spite on it.

MUSCO

Then it’s no boot to follow him. Let him go and hang, sir.

STEPHANO

Ay, by my troth. Musco, I pray thee, help to truss me a little. 25

Nothing angers me but I have waited such a while for him, all unlaced and

untrussed yonder, and now to see he is gone the other way!

MUSCO

[Assisting Stephano with his clothing] Nay, I pray you, stand still, sir.

STEPHANO

I will, I will. Oh, how it vexes me!

MUSCO

Tut, never vex yourself with the thought of such a base follow as he. 30

STEPHANO

Nay, to see, he stood upon points with me, too!

MUSCO

Like enough so. That was because he saw you had so few at your hose.

STEPHANO

What, hast thou done? God-a-mercy, good Musco.

MUSCO

I mar’l, sir, you wear such ill-favoured coarse stockings, having so good

a leg as you have. 35

STEPHANO

Foh! The stockings be good enough for this time of the year, but I’ll

have a pair of silk ere it be long. I think my leg would show well in a silk hose.

MUSCO

Ay, afore God would it, rarely well.

STEPHANO

In sadness, I think it would. I have a reasonable good leg.

MUSCO

You have an excellent good leg, sir. I pray you pardon me, I have a little 40

haste in, sir.

STEPHANO

A thousand thanks, good Musco. Exit [Musco].

[Lorenzo Jr laughs over his letter.]

[Aside] What? I hope he laughs not at me. An he do –

LORENZO JR

[Oblivious still of Stephano’s presence] Here is a style, indeed, for a

man’s senses to leap over ere they come at it. Why, it is able to break the shins of 45

any old man’s patience in the world. My father read this with patience? Then

will I be made an eunuch and learn to sing ballads. I do not deny but my father

may have as much patience as any other man, for he uses to take physic, and oft

taking physic makes a man a very patient creature. But, Signor Prospero, had

your swaggering epistle here arrived in my father’s hands at such an hour of 50

his patience – I mean, when he had ta’en physic – it is to be doubted whether

I should have read ‘sweet villain’ here. [Noticing Stephano, but not addressing him]

But what? My wise cousin! Nay, then, I’ll furnish our feast with one gull more

toward a mess. He writes to me of two, and here’s one: that’s three, i’faith. Oh,

for a fourth! Now, Fortune, or never, Fortune! 55

STEPHANO

[Aside] Oh, now I see who he laughed at: he laughed at somebody in

that letter. By this good light, an he had laughed at me, I would have told mine

uncle.

LORENZO JR

[Aloud] Cousin Stephano! Good morrow, good cousin. How fare

you? 60

STEPHANO

The better for your asking, I will assure you. I have been all about to

seek you; since I came, I saw mine uncle. And, i’faith, how have you done this

great while? Good Lord, by my troth, I am glad you are well, cousin.

LORENZO JR

And I am glad at your coming, I protest to you, for I am sent for by

a private gentleman, my most special dear friend, to come to him to Florence 65

this morning; and you shall go with me, cousin, if it please you, not else. I will

enjoin you no further than stands with your own consent and the condition of

a friend.

STEPHANO

Why, cousin, you shall command me an ’twere twice so far as

Florence to do you good. What, do you think I will not go with you? I protest – 70

LORENZO JR

Nay, nay, you shall not protest.

STEPHANO

By God, but I will, sir, by your leave; I’ll protest more to my friend

than I’ll speak of at this time.

LORENZO JR

You speak very well, sir.

STEPHANO

Nay, not so, neither; but I speak to serve my turn. 75

LORENZO JR

Your turn? Why, cousin, a gentleman of so fair sort as you are, of

so true carriage, so special good parts, of so dear and choice estimation, one

whose lowest condition bears the stamp of a great spirit? Nay, more, a man so

graced, gilded, or rather, to use a more fit metaphor, tinfoiled by nature (not

that you have a leaden constitution, coz, although perhaps a little inclining to 80

that temper and so the more apt to melt with pity when you fall into the fire

of rage), but for your lustre only, which reflects as bright to the world as an old

alewife’s pewter again’ a good time. And will you now with nice modesty hide

such real ornaments as these, and shadow their glory as a milliner’s wife doth

her wrought stomacher with a smoky lawn or a black cypress? Come, come, 85

for shame, do not wrong the quality of your desert in so poor a kind, but let

the idea of what you are be portrayed in your aspect, that men may read in

your looks: ‘Here within this place is to be seen the most admirable, rare, and

accomplished work of nature.’ Cousin, what think you of this?

STEPHANO

Marry, I do think of it, and I will be more melancholy and 90

gentleman-like than I have been, I do ensure you.

LORENZO JR

Why, this is well. [Aside] Now, if I can but hold up this humour in

him as it is begun, cazzo for Florence! Match him an she can! – Come, cousin.

STEPHANO

I’ll follow you.

LORENZO JR

Follow me? You must go before. 95

STEPHANO

Must I? Nay then, I pray you show me, good cousin. Exeunt.

1.3 Enter Signor MATHEO.

MATHEO

I think this be the house. [He knocks.] What ho!

To him, COB [answering the door].

COB

Who’s there? Oh, Signor Matheo! God give you good morrow, sir.

MATHEO

What, Cob? How dost thou, good Cob? Dost thou inhabit here, Cob?

COB

Ay, sir, I and my lineage have kept a poor house in our days.

MATHEO

Thy lineage, Monsieur Cob? What lineage, what lineage? 5

COB

Why, sir, an ancient lineage and a princely. Mine ance’try came from a king’s

loins, no worse man; and yet no man neither, but Herring, the king of fish,

one of the monarchs of the world, I assure you. I do fetch my pedigree and

name from the first red herring that was eaten in Adam and Eve’s kitchen. His

cob was my great, great, mighty-great grandfather. 10

MATHEO

Why mighty? Why mighty?

COB

Oh, it’s a mighty while ago, sir, and it was a mighty great cob.

MATHEO

How knowest thou that?

COB

How know I? Why, his ghost comes to me every night.

MATHEO

Oh, unsavoury jest! The ghost of a herring cob! 15

COB

Ay, why not the ghost of a herring cob as well as the ghost of Rashero

Bacono? They were both broiled on the coals. You are a scholar; upsolve me

that, now.

MATHEO

Oh, rude ignorance! Cob, canst thou show me of a gentleman, one

Signor Bobadilla, where his lodging is? 20

COB

Oh, my guest, sir, you mean?

MATHEO

Thy guest? Alas! Ha, ha!

COB

Why do you laugh, sir? Do you not mean Signor Bobadilla?

MATHEO

Cob, I pray thee, advise thyself well; do not wrong the gentleman

and thyself too. I dare be sworn he scorns thy house, he. He lodge in such a 25

base, obscure place as thy house? Tut, I know his disposition so well, he would

not lie in thy bed if thou’dst give it him.

COB

I will not give it him. Mass, I thought somewhat was in it; we could not get

him to bed all night. Well, sir, though he lie not on my bed, he lies on my bench.

An’t please you to go up, sir, you shall find him with two cushions under his 30

head and his cloak wrapped about him as though he had neither won nor lost,

and yet I warrant he ne’er cast better in his life than he hath done tonight.

MATHEO

Why, was he drunk?

COB

Drunk, sir? You hear me not say so. Perhaps he swallowed a tavern token

or some such device, sir. I have nothing to do withal; I deal with water and 35

not with wine. [Calling offstage] Give me my tankard there, ho! – God be with

you, sir. It’s six o’clock; I should have carried two turns by this. [Calling offstage]

What ho! My stopple, come!

MATHEO

Lie in a waterbearer’s house, a gentleman of his note? Well, I’ll tell him

my mind. 40

[TIB appears at the door with a tankard and stopple for Cob.]

COB

What, Tib, show this gentleman up to Signor Bobadilla.

Exit [Matheo with Tib].

Oh, an my house were the Brazen Head now! Faith, it would e’en cry, ‘Mo

fools yet!’ You should have some now would take him to be a gentleman at

the least. Alas, God help the simple! His father’s an honest man, a good fishmonger,

and so forth, and now doth he creep and wriggle into acquaintance 45

with all the brave gallants about the town, such as my guest

is – oh, my guest is a fine man! – and they flout him invincibly. He useth every day to a

merchant’s house where I serve water, one Master Thorello’s, and here’s the jest:

he is in love with my master’s sister, and calls her ‘mistress’. And there he sits

a whole afternoon sometimes, reading of these same abominable, vile – a pox 50

on them, I cannot abide them! – rascally verses, poetry, poetry, and speaking of

interludes. ’Twill make a man burst to hear him. And the wenches, they do so

jeer and tee-hee at him! Well, should they do as much to me, I’d forswear them

all, by the life of Pharaoh. There’s an oath! How many waterbearers shall you

hear swear such an oath? Oh, I have a guest, he teacheth me, he doth swear the 55

best of any man christened: ‘By Phoebus’, ‘By the life of Pharaoh’, ‘By the body

of me’, ‘As I am a gentleman and a soldier’ – such dainty oaths! And withal he

doth take this same filthy, roguish tobacco, the finest and cleanliest. It would

do a man good to see the fume come forth at his nostrils. Well, he owes me

forty shillings my wife lent him out of her purse by sixpence a time, besides 60

his lodging. I would I had it. I shall have it, he saith, next action. Helter skelter,

hang sorrow, care will kill a cat, uptails all, and a pox on the hangman!

Exit.

BOBADILLA discovers himself on a bench.

BOBADILLA

Hostess! Hostess!

To him, TIB.

TIB

What say you, sir?

BOBADILLA

A cup of your small beer, sweet hostess. 65

TIB

Sir, there’s a gentleman below would speak with you.

BOBADILLA

A gentleman! Godso, I am not within.

TIB

My husband told him you were, sir.

BOBADILLA

What a plague! What meant he?

MATHEO

(Within) Signor Bobadilla! 70

BOBADILLA

[Calling] Who’s there? – Take away the basin, good hostess. – Come

up, sir!

TIB

[At the door, calling as though down to Matheo] He would desire you to come up,

sir.

Enter MATHEO [with a book].

You come into a cleanly house here. 75

MATHEO

God save you, sir, God save you.

BOBADILLA

Signor Matheo, is’t you, sir? Please you sit down.

MATHEO

I thank you, good signor; you may see I am somewhat audacious.

BOBADILLA

Not so, signor. I was requested to supper yesternight by a sort of

gallants, where you were wished for and drunk to, I assure you. 80

MATHEO

Vouchsafe me by whom, good signor.

BOBADILLA

Marry, by Signor Prospero and others. — Why, hostess, a stool here

for this gentleman.

MATHEO

No haste, sir, it is very well.

BOBADILLA

Body of me, it was so late ere we parted last night I can scarce open 85

mine eyes yet; I was but new risen as you came. How passes the day abroad, sir?

You can tell.

MATHEO

Faith, some half hour to seven. Now trust me, you have an exceeding

fine lodging here, very neat and private.

BOBADILLA

Ay, sir, sit down, I pray you. 90[Exit Tib.]

Signor Matheo, in any case possess no gentleman of your acquaintance with

notice of my lodging.

MATHEO

Who, I, sir? No.

BOBADILLA

Not that I need to care who know it, but in regard I would not be

so popular and general, as some be. 95

MATHEO

True, signor, I conceive you.

BOBADILLA

For do you see, sir, by the heart of myself, except it be to some

peculiar and choice spirits to whom I am extraordinarily engaged, as yourself

or so, I would not extend thus far.

MATHEO

Oh, Lord, sir! I resolve so. 100

BOBADILLA

What new book have you there? What, ‘Go by, Hieronimo!’

MATHEO

Ay, did you ever see it acted? Is’t not well penned?

BOBADILLA

Well penned? I would fain see all the poets of our time pen such

another play as that was. They’ll prate and swagger and keep a stir of art and

devices, when, by Godso, they are the most shallow, pitiful fellows that live 105

upon the face of the earth again.

MATHEO

Indeed, here are a number of fine speeches in this book: ‘O eyes, no

eyes, but fountains fraught with tears!’ There’s a conceit! ‘Fountains fraught

with tears!’ ‘O life, no life, but lively form of death!’ Is’t not excellent? ‘O world,

no world, but mass of public wrongs!’ Oh, God’s me! ‘Confused and filled with 110

murder and misdeeds.’ Is’t not simply the best that ever you heard? Ha? How

do you like it?

BOBADILLA

’Tis good.

MATHEO

[Reciting] To thee, the purest object to my sense,

The most refinèd essence heaven covers, 115

Send I these lines, wherein I do commence

The happy state of true deserving lovers.

If they prove rough, unpolished, harsh, and rude,

Haste made that waste – thus mildly I conclude.

[Bobadilla is dressing during this recital.]

BOBADILLA

Nay, proceed, proceed. Where’s this? Where’s this? 120

MATHEO

This, sir? A toy of mine own in my nonage. But when will you come

and see my study? Good faith, I can show you some very good things I have

done of late. – That boot becomes your leg passing well, sir, methinks.

BOBADILLA

So, so. It’s a fashion gentlemen use.

MATHEO

Mass, sir, and now you speak of the fashion, Signor Prospero’s elder 125

brother and I are fallen out exceedingly. This other day I happened to enter

into some discourse of a hanger, which, I assure you, both for fashion and

workmanship was most beautiful and gentleman-like; yet he condemned it

for the most pied and ridiculous that ever he saw.

BOBADILLA

Signor Giuliano, was it not? The elder brother? 130

MATHEO

Ay, sir, he.

BOBADILLA

Hang him, rook. He? Why, he has no more judgement than a

malt-horse. By Saint George, I hold him the most peremptory, absurd clown –

one o’them – in Christendom. I protest to you, as I am a gentleman and a soldier,

I ne’er talked with the like of him. He has not so much as a good word 135

in his belly. All iron, iron – a good commodity for a smith to make hobnails

on.

MATHEO

Ay, and he thinks to carry it away with his manhood still where he

comes. He brags he will give me the bastinado, as I hear.

BOBADILLA

How, the bastinado? How came he by that word, trow? 140

MATHEO

Nay, indeed, he said ‘cudgel’ me. I termed it so for the more grace.

BOBADILLA

That may be, for I was sure it was none of his word. But when?

When said he so?

MATHEO

Faith, yesterday, they say. A young gallant, a friend of mine, told me

so. 145

BOBADILLA

By the life of Pharaoh, an ’twere my case now, I should send him a

challenge presently. The bastinado? Come hither, you shall challenge him. I’ll

show you a trick or two. You shall kill him at pleasure; the first, stoccado, if you

will, by this air.

MATHEO

Indeed, you have absolute knowledge in the mystery, I have heard, sir. 150

BOBADILLA

Of whom? Of whom, I pray?

MATHEO

Faith, I have heard it spoken of divers that you have very rare skill, sir.

BOBADILLA

By heaven, no, not I, no skill in the earth; some small science –

know my time, distance, or so. I have professed it more for noblemen and gentlemen’s

use than mine own practice, I assure you. [Calling offstage] Hostess, 155

lend us another bedstaff here quickly.

[He flourishes a bedstaff.]

Look you, sir, exalt not your point above this state at any hand, and let your

poniard maintain your defence thus.

[TIB enters with another bedstaff for Matheo.]

Give it the gentleman. [She does so.]

So, sir, come on. 160[Exit Tib.]

[They engage in fencing practice.]

Oh, twine your body more about, that you may come to a more sweet, comely,

gentleman-like guard.

[Another pass.]

So, indifferent. Hollow your body more, sir, thus.

[He demonstrates.]

Now stand fast on your left leg. Note your distance; keep your due proportion

of time. 165

[Matheo tries it.]

Oh, you disorder your point most vilely!

MATHEO

[Trying again] How is the bearing of it now, sir?

BOBADILLA

Oh, out of measure ill. A well experienced man would pass upon

you at pleasure.

MATHEO

How mean you, ‘pass upon’ me? 170

BOBADILLA

Why, thus, sir. Make a thrust at me; come in upon my time; control

your point, and make a full career at the body. The best-practised gentlemen

of the time term it the passado – a most desperate thrust, believe it.

MATHEO

Well, come, sir.

[They fence again.]

BOBADILLA

Why, you do not manage your weapons with that facility and grace 175

that you should do. I have no spirit to play with you; your dearth of judgement

makes you seem tedious.

MATHEO

But one veny, sir.

BOBADILLA

Fie, ‘veny’! Most gross denomination as ever I heard! Oh, the stoccado,

while you live, signor, note that. Come, put on your cloak, and we’ll go 180

to some private place where you are acquainted, some tavern or so, and we’ll

send for one of these fencers, where he shall breathe you at my direction, and

then I’ll teach you that trick, you shall kill him with it at the first, if you please.

Why, I’ll learn you, by the true judgement of the eye, hand, and foot, to

control any man’s point in the world. Should your adversary confront you with a 185

pistol, ’twere nothing; you should, by the same rule, control the bullet, most

certain, by Phoebus, unless it were hail-shot. What money have you about you,

sir?

MATHEO

Faith, I have not past two shillings or so.

BOBADILLA

’Tis somewhat with the least. But come. When we have done, we’ll 190

call up Signor Prospero. Perhaps we shall meet with Corydon his brother

there. Exeunt.

1.4 Enter THORELLO, GIULIANO, [and] PISO.

THORELLO

Piso, come hither. There lies a note within upon my desk; here, take

my key. It’s no matter, neither. Where’s the boy?

PISO

Within, sir, in the warehouse.

THORELLO

Let him tell over that Spanish gold and weigh it. And do you see the

delivery of those wares to Signor Bentivole; I’ll be there myself at the receipt 5

of the money anon.

PISO

Very good, sir. Exit Piso.

THORELLO

Brother, did you see that same fellow there?

GIULIANO

Ay, what of him?

THORELLO

He is e’en the honestest faithful servant that is this day in 10

Florence – I speak a proud word now – and one that I durst trust my life into

his hands, I have so strong opinion of his love, if need were.

GIULIANO

God send me never such need! But you said you had somewhat to

tell me. What is’t?

THORELLO

Faith, brother, I am loath to utter it, 15

As fearing to abuse your patience,

But that I know your judgement more direct,

Able to sway the nearest of affection –

GIULIANO

Come, come, what needs this circumstance?

THORELLO

I will not say what honour I ascribe 20

Unto your friendship, nor in what dear state

I hold your love; let my continued zeal,

The constant and religious regard

That I have ever carried to your name,

My carriage with your sister, all contest 25

How much I stand affected to your house.

GIULIANO

You are too tedious. Come to the matter, come to the matter.

THORELLO

Then, without further ceremony, thus:

My brother Prospero, I know not how,

Of late is much declined from what he was 30

And greatly altered in his disposition.

When he came first to lodge here in my house,

Ne’er trust me if I was not proud of him.

Methought he bare himself with such observance,

So true election, and so fair a form, 35

And – what was chief – it showed not borrowed in him,

But all he did became him as his own,

And seemed as perfect, proper, and innate

Unto the mind as colour to the blood.

But now his course is so irregular, 40

So loose affected and deprived of grace,

And he himself withal so far fall’n off

From his first place, that scarce no note remains

To tell men’s judgements where he lately stood.

He’s grown a stranger to all due respect, 45

Forgetful of his friends, and, not content

To stale himself in all societies,

He makes my house as common as a mart,

A theatre, a public receptacle

For giddy humour and diseasèd riot. 50

And there, as in a tavern or a stews,

He and his wild associates spend their hours

In repetition of lascivious jests,

Swear, leap, and dance, and revel night by night,

Control my servants, and indeed what not? 55

GIULIANO

Faith, I know not what I should say to him. So God save me, I am

e’en at my wits’ end. I have told him enough, one would think, if that would

serve. Well, he knows what to trust to for me. Let him spend, and spend, and

domineer till his heart ache. An he get a penny more of me, I’ll give him this

ear. 60

THORELLO

Nay, good brother, have patience.

GIULIANO

’Sblood, he mads me! I could eat my very flesh for anger. I mar’l you

will not tell him of it, how he disquiets your house.

THORELLO

Oh, there are divers reasons to dissuade me.

But, would yourself vouchsafe to travail in it, 65

Though but with plain and easy circumstance,

It would both come much better to his sense

And savour less of grief and discontent.

You are his elder brother, and that title

Confirms and warrants your authority, 70

Which, seconded by your aspect, will breed

A kind of duty in him and regard;

Whereas if I should intimate the least,

It would but add contempt to his neglect,

Heap worse on ill, rear a huge pile of hate, 75

That in the building would come tott’ring down

And in her ruins bury all our love.

Nay, more than this, brother: if I should speak,

He would be ready in the heat of passion

To fill the ears of his familiars 80

With oft reporting to them what disgrace

And gross disparagement I had proposed him;

And then would they straight back him in opinion,

Make some loose comment upon every word,

And out of their distracted fantasies 85

Contrive some slander that should dwell with me.

And what would that be, think you? Marry, this:

They would give out, because my wife is fair,

Myself but lately married, and my sister

Here sojourning a virgin in my house, 90

That I were jealous. Nay, as sure as death,

Thus they would say; and how that I had wronged

My brother purposely, thereby to find

An apt pretext to banish them my house.

GIULIANO

Mass, perhaps so. 95

THORELLO

Brother, they would, believe it. So should I,

Like one of these penurious quacksalvers,

But try experiments upon myself,

Open the gates unto mine own disgrace,

Lend bare-ribbed Envy opportunity 100

To stab my reputation and good name.

Enter BOBADILLA and MATHEO.

MATHEO

[To Bobadilla] I will speak to him.

BOBADILLA

[To Matheo] Speak to him? Away, by the life of Pharaoh! You shall

not, you shall not do him that grace. [To Thorello] The time of day to you,

gentleman. Is Signor Prospero stirring? 105

GIULIANO

How then? What should he do?

BOBADILLA

[Pointedly ignoring Giuliano] Signor Thorello, is he within, sir?

THORELLO

He came not to his lodging tonight, sir, I assure you.

GIULIANO

[To Bobadilla] Why, do you hear? You!

BOBADILLA

This gentleman hath satisfied me. I’ll talk to no scavenger. 110

[He starts to leave.]

GIULIANO

How, ‘scavenger’? Stay, sir, stay! Exeunt [Bobadilla and Matheo].

THORELLO

[Restraining hima] Nay, brother Giuliano.

GIULIANO

’Sblood, stand you away, an you love me!

THORELLO

You shall not follow him now, I pray you. Good faith, you shall not.

GIULIANO

Ha! ‘Scavenger’? Well, go to. I say little, but by this good day – God 115

forgive me I should swear – if I put it up so, say I am the rankest – that ever

pissed! ’Sblood, an I swallow this, I’ll ne’er draw my sword in the sight of man

again while I live. I’ll sit in a barn with Madge Owlet first. ‘Scavenger’? Heart,

and I’ll go near to fill that huge tumbrel slop of yours with somewhat, an I have

good luck; your Gargantua breech cannot carry it away so. 120

THORELLO

Oh, do not fret yourself thus! Never think on’t.

GIULIANO

These are my brother’s consorts, these! These are his cumrades, his

walking mates! He’s a gallant, a cavaliero too, right hangman cut! God let me

not live an I could not find in my heart to swinge the whole nest of them, one

after another, and begin with him first. I am grieved it should be said he is my 125

brother, and take these courses. Well, he shall hear on’t, and that tightly too,

an I live, i’faith.

THORELLO

But brother, let your apprehension then

Run in an easy current, not transported

With heady rashness or devouring choler, 130

And rather carry a persuading spirit,

Whose powers will pierce more gently and allure

Th’imperfect thoughts you labour to reclaim

To a more sudden and resolved assent.

GIULIANO

Ay, ay, let me alone for that, I warrant you. 135

Bell rings.

THORELLO

How now? Oh, the bell rings to breakfast. Brother Giuliano, I pray

you, go in and bear my wife company. I’ll but give order to my servants for the

dispatch of some business, and come to you presently. [Exit Giuliano.]

Enter COB [with a tankard].

What, Cob? Our maids will have you by the back, i’faith, for coming so late this

morning. 140

COB

Perhaps so, sir. Take heed somebody have not them by the belly for walking

so late in the evening. Exit.

THORELLO

Now, in good faith, my mind is somewhat eased,

Though not reposed in that security

As I could wish. Well, I must be content. 145

Howe’er I set a face on’t to the world,

Would I had lost this finger at a venture,

So Prospero had ne’er lodged in my house!

Why, ’t cannot be, where there is such resort

Of wanton gallants and young revellers, 150

That any woman should be honest long.

Is’t like that factious beauty will preserve

The sovereign state of chastity unscarred

When such strong motives muster and make head

Against her single peace? No, no. Beware 155

When mutual pleasure sways the appetite,

And spirits of one kind and quality

Do meet to parley in the pride of blood.

Well, to be plain, if I but thought the time

Had answered their affections, all the world 160

Should not persuade me but I were a cuckold.

Marry, I hope they have not got that start;

For opportunity hath balked them yet,

And shall do still, while I have eyes and ears

To attend the imposition of my heart. 165

My presence shall be as an iron bar

’Twixt the conspiring motions of desire;

Yea, every look or glance mine eye objects

Shall check occasion, as one doth his slave

When he forgets the limits of prescription. 170

Enter BIANCA with HESPERIDA.

BIANCA

Sister Hesperida, I pray you, fetch down the rose-water above in the

closet. [Exit Hesperida.]

[To Thorello] Sweetheart, will you come in to breakfast?

THORELLO

[Aside] An she have overheard me now!

BIANCA

I pray thee, good muss, we stay for you. 175

THORELLO

[Aside] By Christ, I would not for a thousand crowns.

BIANCA

What ail you, sweetheart? Are you not well? Speak, good muss.

THORELLO

Troth, my head aches extremely on a sudden.

BIANCA

[Feeling his forehead] O Jesu!

THORELLO

How now? What? 180

BIANCA

Good lord, how it burns! Muss, keep you warm. Good truth, it is this

new disease; there’s a number are troubled withal. For God’s sake, sweetheart,

come in out of the air.

THORELLO

[Aside] How simple and how subtle are her answers!

A new disease, and many troubled with it. 185

Why, true, she heard me, all the world to nothing.

BIANCA

I pray thee, good sweetheart, come in. The air will do you harm, in

troth.

THORELLO

I’ll come to you presently. It will away, I hope.

BIANCA

Pray God it do. Exit. 190

THORELLO

A new disease? I know not, new or old,

But it may well be called poor mortals’ plague,

For like a pestilence it doth infect

The houses of the brain. First it begins

Solely to work upon the fantasy, 195

Filling her seat with such pestiferous air

As soon corrupts the judgement; and from thence

Sends like contagion to the memory,

Still each of other catching the infection,

Which, as a searching vapour, spreads itself 200

Confusedly through every sensive part

Till not a thought or motion in the mind

Be free from the black poison of suspect.

Ah, but what error is it to know this,

And want the free election of the soul 205

In such extremes! Well, I will once more strive,

Even in despite of hell, myself to be,

And shake this fever off that thus shakes me. Exit.

2.1 Enter MUSCO disguised like a soldier.

MUSCO

’Sblood, I cannot choose but laugh to see myself translated thus, from

a poor creature to a creator; for now must I create an intolerable sort of lies,

or else my profession loses his grace. And yet the lie to a man of my coat is as

ominous as the fico. Oh, sir, it holds for good policy to have that outwardly

in vilest estimation that inwardly is most dear to us. So much for my 5

borrowed shape. Well, the truth is my master intends to follow his son dryfoot to

Florence this morning. Now I, knowing of this conspiracy, and the rather to

insinuate with my young master – for so must we that are blue-waiters or men

of service do, or else perhaps we may wear motley at the year’s end, and who

wears motley you know – I have got me afore in this disguise, determining 10

here to lie in ambuscado and intercept him in the midway. If I can but get his

cloak, his purse, his hat – nay, anything so I can stay his journey, rex regum, I am

made for ever, i’faith. Well, now must I practise to get the true garb of one of

these lance-knights. [He adopts a military posture.] My arm here and my – Godso,

young master and his cousin! 15

[Musco stands aside.]

Enter LORENZO JR and STEPHANO.

LORENZO JR

[To Stephano] So, sir, and how then?

STEPHANO

God’s foot, I have lost my purse, I think.

LORENZO JR

How, lost your purse? Where? When had you it?

STEPHANO

I cannot tell. – Stay!

MUSCO

[Aside] ’Slid, I am afeard they will know me. Would I could get by them! 20

LORENZO JR

What, have you it?

STEPHANO

No, I think I was bewitched, I.

LORENZO JR

Nay, do not weep. A pox on it! Hang it, let it go.

STEPHANO

[Finding the purse] Oh, it’s here. Nay, an it had been lost, I had not

cared but for a jet ring Marina sent me. 25

LORENZO JR

A jet ring? Oh, the posy, the posy?

STEPHANO

Fine, i’faith:

Though fancy sleep,

My love is deep –

meaning that though I did not fancy her, yet she loved me dearly. 30

LORENZO JR

Most excellent!

STEPHANO

And then I sent her another, and my posy was

The deeper the sweeter,

I’ll be judged, by Saint Peter.

LORENZO JR

How, ‘by Saint Peter’? I do not conceive that. 35

STEPHANO

Marry, ‘Saint Peter’ to make up the metre.

LORENZO JR

Well, you are beholding to that saint; he helped you at your need.

Thank him, thank him.

MUSCO

[Aside] I will venture, come what will. [Coming forward] Gentlemen,

please you change a few crowns for a very excellent good blade here? I am a 40

poor gentleman, a soldier, one that in the better state of my fortunes scorned

so mean a refuge, but now it’s the humour of necessity to have it so. You seem to

be gentlemen well affected to martial men, else I should rather die with silence

than live with shame. Howe’er, vouchsafe to remember it is my want speaks,

not myself. This condition agrees not with my spirit. 45

LORENZO JR

Where hast thou served?

MUSCO

May it please you, signor, in all the provinces of Bohemia, Hungaria,

Dalmatia, Poland – where not? I have been a poor servitor by sea and land any

time this fourteen years, and followed the fortunes of the best commanders

in Christendom. I was twice shot at the taking of Aleppo, once at the relief of 50

Vienna. I have been at America in the galleys thrice, where I was most dangerously

shot in the head, through both the thighs; and yet, being thus maimed,

I am void of maintenance, nothing left me but my scars, the noted marks of

my resolution.

STEPHANO

[Examining Musco’s sword] How will you sell this rapier, friend? 55

MUSCO

Faith, signor, I refer it to your own judgement. You are a gentleman;

give me what you please.

STEPHANO

True, I am a gentleman, I know that. But what though? I pray you

say what would you ask.

MUSCO

I assure you, the blade may become the side of the best prince in Europe. 60

LORENZO JR

Ay, with a velvet scabbard!

STEPHANO

Nay, an’t be mine it shall have a velvet scabbard, that is flat. I’d not

wear it as ’tis an you would give me an angel.

MUSCO

At your pleasure, signor. Nay, it’s a most pure Toledo.

STEPHANO

I had rather it were a Spaniard. But tell me, what shall I give you for 65

it? An it had a silver hilt –

LORENZO JR

Come, come, you shall not buy it. [To Musco, offering him a coin]

Hold, there’s a shilling, friend. Take thy rapier.

STEPHANO

Why, but I will buy it now because you say so. What, shall I go without

a rapier? 70

LORENZO JR

You may buy one in the city.

STEPHANO

Tut, I’ll buy this, so I will. – Tell me your lowest price.

LORENZO JR

You shall not, I say.

STEPHANO

By God’s lid, but I will, though I give more than ’tis worth.

LORENZO JR

Come away. You are a fool. 75

STEPHANO

Friend, I’ll have it for that word. [To Musco] Follow me.

MUSCO

At your service, signor. Exeunt.

2.2 Enter LORENZO SR.

LORENZO SR

My labouring spirit, being late oppressed

With my son’s folly, can embrace no rest

Till it hath plotted by advice and skill

How to reduce him from affected will

To reason’s manage – which while I intend, 5

My troubled soul begins to apprehend

A farther secret and to meditate

Upon the difference of man’s estate,

Where is deciphered, to true judgement’s eye,

A deep, concealed, and precious mystery. 10

Yet can I not but worthily admire

At Nature’s art, who, when she did inspire

This heat of life, placed Reason as a king

Here in the head to have the marshalling

Of our affections, and with sovereignty 15

To sway the state of our weak empery.

But as in divers commonwealths we see

The form of government to disagree,

Even so in man: who searcheth soon shall find

As much or more variety of mind. 20

Some men’s affections, like a sullen wife,

Is with her husband, Reason, still at strife.

Others, like proud arch-traitors that rebel

Against their sovereign, practise to expel

Their liege lord, Reason, and not shame to tread 25

Upon his holy and anointed head.

But as that land or nation best doth thrive

Which to smooth-fronted Peace is most proclive,

So doth that mind whose fair affections, ranged

By Reason’s rules, stand constant and unchanged. 30

Else, if the power of Reason be not such,

Why do we attribute to him so much?

Or why are we obsequious to his law

If he want spirit our affects to awe?

Oh, no, I argue weakly; he is strong, 35

Albeit my son have done him too much wrong.

Enter MUSCO [disguised still as a soldier].

MUSCO

[Aside] My master! Nay, faith, have at you. I am fleshed now I have sped so

well. – Gentleman, I beseech you, respect the estate of a poor soldier. I am

ashamed of this base course of life, God’s my comfort, but extremity provokes

me to’t. What remedy? 40

LORENZO SR

I have not for you now.

MUSCO

By the faith I bear unto God, gentleman, it is no ordinary custom, but

only to preserve manhood. I protest to you, a man I have been, a man I may be,

by your sweet bounty.

LORENZO SR

I pray thee, good friend, be satisfied. 45

MUSCO

Good signor, by Jesu, you may do the part of a kind gentleman in lending

a poor soldier the price of two cans of beer, a matter of small value. The

King of Heaven shall pay you, and I shall rest thankful, sweet signor.

LORENZO SR

Nay, an you be so importunate –

MUSCO

Oh, Lord, sir, need will have his course. I was not made to this vile use. 50

Well, the edge of the enemy could not have abated me so much. It’s hard when

a man hath served in his prince’s cause and be thus. Signor, let me derive a

small piece of silver from you; it shall not be given in the course of time.

By this good ground, I was fain to pawn my rapier last night for a poor supper;

I am a pagan else, sweet signor. 55

LORENZO SR

Believe me, I am rapt with admiration

To think a man of thy exterior presence

Should in the constitution of the mind

Be so degenerate, infirm, and base.

Art thou a man? And sham’st thou not to beg? 60

To practise such a servile kind of life?

Why, were thy education ne’er so mean,

Having thy limbs, a thousand fairer courses

Offer themselves to thy election.

Nay, there the wars might still supply thy wants, 65

Or service of some virtuous gentleman,

Or honest labour. Nay, what can I name

But would become thee better than to beg?

But men of your condition feed on sloth,

As doth the scarab on the dung she breeds in, 70

Not caring how the temper of your spirits

Is eaten with the rust of idleness.

Now, afore God, whate’er he be that should

Relieve a person of thy quality,

While you insist in this loose, desperate course, 75

I would esteem the sin not thine, but his.

MUSCO

Faith, signor, I would gladly find some other course, if so –

LORENZO SR

Ay, you’d gladly find it, but you will not seek it.

MUSCO

Alas, sir, where should a man seek? In the wars there’s no ascent by

desert in these days, but – and for service, would it were as soon purchased as 80

wished for, God’s my comfort; I know what I would say –

LORENZO SR

What’s thy name?

MUSCO

Please you: Portensio.

LORENZO SR

Portensio?

Say that a man should entertain thee now; 85

Would thou be honest, humble, just, and true?

MUSCO

Signor, by the place and honour of a soldier –

LORENZO SR

Nay, nay, I like not these affected oaths.

Speak plainly, man: what think’st thou of my words?

MUSCO

Nothing, signor, but wish my fortunes were as happy as my service 90

should be honest.

LORENZO SR

Well, follow me. I’ll prove thee, if thy deeds

Will carry a proportion to thy words.

MUSCO

Yes, sir, straight. I’ll but garter my hose. Exit Lorenzo Sr.

Oh, that my belly were hooped now! For I am ready to burst with laughing. 95

’Slid, was there ever seen a fox in years to betray himself thus? Now shall I

be possessed of all his determinations, and, consequently, my young master.

Well, he is resolved to prove my honesty; faith, and I am resolved to prove his

patience. Oh, I shall abuse him intolerably! This small piece of service will

bring him clean out of love with the soldier for ever. It’s no matter. Let the 100

world think me a bad counterfeit if I cannot give him the slip at an instant.

Why, this is better than to have stayed his journey, by half. Well, I’ll follow

him. Oh, how I long to be employed! Exit.

2.3 Enter PROSPERO, BOBADILLA, and MATHEO.

MATHEO

[To Prospero] Yes, faith, sir, we were at your lodging to seek you too.

PROSPERO

Oh, I came not there tonight.

BOBADILLA

Your brother delivered us as much.

PROSPERO

Who, Giuliano?

BOBADILLA

Giuliano. Signor Prospero, I know not in what kind you value me, 5

but let me tell you this: as sure as God, I do hold it so much out of mine honour

and reputation if I should but cast the least regard upon such a dunghill of

flesh. I protest to you, as I have a soul to be saved, I ne’er saw any gentleman-

like part in him. An there were no more men living upon the face of the earth,

I should not fancy him, by Phoebus. 10

MATHEO

Troth, nor I. He is of a rustical cut – I know not how. He doth not carry

himself like a gentleman.

PROSPERO

Oh, Signor Matheo, that’s a grace peculiar but to a few: quos aequus

amavit Jupiter.

MATHEO

I understand you, sir. 15

Enter LORENZO JR and STEPHANO.

PROSPERO

No question you do, sir. – Lorenzo! Now, on my soul, welcome! How

dost thou, sweet rascal, my genius? ’Sblood, I shall love Apollo and the mad

Thespian girls the better while I live, for this. My dear villain, now I see there’s

some spirit in thee. [Prospero and Lorenzo Jr converse out of earshot of the others.]

Sirrah, these be the two [indicating Bobadilla and Matheo] I writ to thee of. Nay, 20

what a drowsy humour is this now? Why dost thou not speak?

LORENZO JR

Oh, you are a fine gallant. You sent me a rare letter.

PROSPERO

Why, was’t not rare?

LORENZO JR

Yes, I’ll be sworn I was ne’er guilty of reading the like; match it in

all Pliny’s Familiar Epistles, and I’ll have my judgement burned in the ear for a 25

rogue. Make much of thy vein, for it is inimitable. But I mar’l what camel it

was that had the carriage of it. For doubtless he was no ordinary beast that

brought it.

PROSPERO

Why?

LORENZO JR

‘Why?’ sayest thou? Why, dost thou think that any reasonable 30

creature, especially in the morning – the sober time of the day too – would

have ta’en my father for me?

PROSPERO

’Sblood, you jest, I hope.

LORENZO JR

Indeed, the best use we can turn it to is to make a jest on’t now.

But I’ll assure you, my father had the proving of your copy some hour before 35

I saw it.

PROSPERO

What a dull slave was this! But sirrah, what said he to it, i’faith?

LORENZO JR

Nay, I know not what he said. But I have a shrewd guess what he

thought.

PROSPERO

What? What? 40

LORENZO JR

Marry, that thou art a damned, dissolute villain, and I some

grain or two better in keeping thee company.

PROSPERO

Tut, that thought is like the moon in the last quarter; ’twill change

shortly. But, sirrah, I pray thee be acquainted with my two zanies here. Thou

wilt take exceeding pleasure in them if thou hear’st them once. But Gesturing 45

[ towards Stephano] what strange piece of silence is this? The sign of the Dumb

Man?

LORENZO JR

Oh, sir, a kinsman of mine, one that may make our music the

fuller, an he please. He hath his humour, sir.

PROSPERO

Oh, what is’t? What is’t? 50

LORENZO JR

Nay, I’ll neither do thy judgement nor his folly that wrong as to

prepare thy apprehension; I’ll leave him to the mercy of the time. If you can

take him, so.

[Prospero and Lorenzo Jr join the others.]

PROSPERO

Well, Signor Bobadilla, Signor Matheo, I pray you, know this

gentleman here; he is a friend of mine and one that will well deserve your 55

affection. [To Stephano] I know not your name, signor, but I shall be glad of any good

occasion to be more familiar with you.

STEPHANO

My name is Signor Stephano, sir. I am this gentleman’s cousin, sir;

his father is mine uncle, sir. I am somewhat melancholy, but you shall

command me, sir, in whatsoever is incident to a gentleman. 60

BOBADILLA

Signor, I must tell you this: I am no general man. Embrace it

as a most high favour, for, by the host of Egypt, but that I conceive you to

be a gentleman of some parts, I love few words. You have wit; imagine.

STEPHANO

Ay, truly, sir, I am mightily given to melancholy.

MATHEO

Oh, Lord, sir, it’s your only best humour, sir. Your true melancholy 65

breeds your perfect fine wit, sir. I am melancholy myself divers times, sir, and

then do I no more but take your pen and paper presently, and write you your

half-score or your dozen of sonnets at a sitting.

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Mass, then he utters them by the gross.

STEPHANO

[To Matheo] Truly, sir, and I love such things out of measure. 70

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] I’faith, as well as in measure.

MATHEO

[To Stephano] Why, I pray you, signor, make use of my study. It’s at your

service.

STEPHANO

I thank you, sir; I shall be bold, I warrant you. Have you a close stool

there? 75

MATHEO

Faith, sir, I have some papers there, toys of mine own doing at idle

hours, that you’ll say there’s some sparks of wit in them when you shall see

them.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Would they were kindled once and a good fire

made, I might see self-love burned for her heresy. 80

STEPHANO

[To Lorenzo Jr] Cousin, is it well? Am I melancholy enough?

LORENZO JR

Oh, ay, excellent.

PROSPERO

Signor Bobadilla, why muse you so?

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] He is melancholy too.

BOBADILLA

Faith, sir, I was thinking of a most honourable piece of service 85

was performed, tomorrow being Saint Mark’s day, shall be some ten years.

LORENZO JR

In what place was that service, I pray you, sir?

BOBADILLA

Why, at the beleag’ring of Ghibeletto, where, in less than two

hours, seven hundred resolute gentlemen as any were in Europe lost their

lives upon the breach. I’ll tell you, gentlemen, it was the first but the best 90

leaguer that ever I beheld with these eyes, except the taking in of Tortosa last

year by the Genoese; but that of all other was the most fatal and dangerous

exploit that ever I was ranged in since I first bore arms before the face of the

enemy, as I am a gentleman and a soldier.

STEPHANO

[Aside] ’So, I had as lief as an angel I could swear as well as that 95

gentleman!

LORENZO JR

[To Bobadilla] Then you were a servitor at both, it seems.

BOBADILLA

Oh, Lord, sir! By Phaethon, I was the first man that entered the

breach, and, had I not effected it with resolution, I had been slain if I had had

a million of lives. 100

LORENZO JR

Indeed, sir?

STEPHANO

Nay, an you heard him discourse, you would say so. How like you

him?

BOBADILLA

[To Lorenzo Jr] I assure you, upon my salvation, ’tis true, and yourself

shall confess. 105

PROSPERO

[Aside] You must bring him to the rack first.

BOBADILLA

Observe me judicially, sweet signor: they had planted me a demiculverin

just in the mouth of the breach. Now, sir, as we were to ascend,

their master gunner – a man of no mean skill and courage, you must think –

confronts me with his linstock ready to give fire. I, spying his intendment, 110

discharged my petronel in his bosom, and with this instrument

[Indicating his weapon], my poor rapier, ran violently upon the Moors that guarded the

ordnance and put them pell-mell to the sword.

PROSPERO

To the sword? To the rapier, signor.

LORENZO JR

[To Prospero] Oh, it was a good figure observed, sir. – But did you 115

all this, signor, without hurting your blade?

BOBADILLA

Without any impeach on the earth. You shall perceive, sir, it is the

most fortunate weapon that ever rid on a poor gentleman’s thigh. Shall I tell

you, sir? You talk of Morglay, Excalibur, Durindana, or so; tut, I lend no credit

to that is reported of them. I know the virtue of mine own, and therefore I dare 120

the boldlier maintain it.

STEPHANO

I mar’l whether it be a Toledo or no?

BOBADILLA

A most perfect Toledo, I assure you, signor.

STEPHANO

I have a countryman of his here.

MATHEO

Pray you, let’s see, sir. [Examining Stephano’s weapon] Yes, faith, it is. 125

BOBADILLA

This a Toledo? Pish!

STEPHANO

Why do you ‘pish’, signor?

BOBADILLA

A Fleming, by Phoebus. I’ll buy them for a guilder apiece, and I’ll

have a thousand of them.

LORENZO JR

[To Stephano] How say you, cousin? I told you thus much. 130

PROSPERO

Where bought you it, signor?

STEPHANO

Of a scurvy rogue soldier, a pox of God on him! He swore it was a

Toledo.

BOBADILLA

A provant rapier, no better.

MATHEO

Mass, I think it be, indeed. 135

LORENZO JR

Tut, now it’s too late to look on it. [To Stephano] Put it up, put it up.

STEPHANO

Well, I will not put it up, but, by God’s foot, an e’er I meet him –

PROSPERO

Oh, it is past remedy now, sir. You must have patience.

STEPHANO

Whoreson, coney-catching rascal! Oh, I could eat the very hilts for

anger! 140

LORENZO JR

A sign you have a good ostrich stomach, cousin.

STEPHANO

A stomach? Would I had him here! You should see an I had a

stomach.

PROSPERO

It’s better as ’tis. – Come, gentlemen, shall we go?

Enter MUSCO [in his soldier’s disguise].

LORENZO JR

A miracle, cousin. Look here, look here! 145

STEPHANO

[To Musco] Oh, God’s lid, by your leave, do you know me, sir?

MUSCO

Ay, sir, I know you by sight.

STEPHANO

You sold me a rapier, did you not?

MUSCO

Yes, marry, did I, sir.

STEPHANO

You said it was a Toledo, ha? 150

MUSCO

True, I did so.

STEPHANO

But it is none.

MUSCO

No, sir, I confess it, it is none.

STEPHANO

Gentlemen, bear witness he has confessed it. – By God’s lid, an you

had not confessed it – 155

LORENZO JR

Oh, cousin, forbear, forbear.

STEPHANO

Nay, I have done, cousin.

PROSPERO

Why, you have done like a gentleman. He has confessed it; what

would you more?

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Sirrah, how dost thou like him? 160

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Oh, it’s a precious good fool! Make much on him.

I can compare him to nothing more happily than a barber’s virginals, for

everyone may play upon him.

MUSCO

[To Lorenzo Jr] Gentleman, shall I entreat a word with you?

LORENZO JR

With all my heart, sir. You have not another Toledo to sell, have 165

ye?

MUSCO

You are pleasant. [They converse privately.] Your name is Signor Lorenzo,

as I take it?

LORENZO JR

You are in the right. – ’Sblood, he means to catechize me, I think.

MUSCO

No, sir, I leave that to the curate. I am none of that coat. 170

LORENZO JR

And yet of as bare a coat. Well, say, sir.

MUSCO

Faith, signor, I am but servant to god Mars extraordinary, and indeed –

this brass varnish being washed off and three or four other tricks sublated – I

appear yours in reversion, after the decease of your good father – Musco!

[He gives Lorenzo Jr a glimpse of his identity.]

LORENZO JR

Musco! ’Sblood, what wind hath blown thee hither in this shape? 175

MUSCO

Your easterly wind, sir – the same that blew your father hither.

LORENZO JR

My father?

MUSCO

Nay, never start, it’s true. He is come to town of purpose to seek you.

LORENZO JR

[Inviting Prospero to join them] Sirrah Prospero, what shall we do,

sirrah? My father is come to the city. 180

PROSPERO

Thy father? Where is he?

MUSCO

At a gentleman’s house, yonder by Saint Anthony’s, where he but stays

my return, and then –

PROSPERO

Who’s this? Musco?

MUSCO

The same, sir. 185

PROSPERO

Why, how com’st thou transmuted thus?

MUSCO

Faith, a device, a device. Nay, for the love of God, stand not here,

gentlemen; house yourselves and I’ll tell you all.

LORENZO JR

But art thou sure he will stay thy return?

MUSCO

Do I live, sir? What a question is that? 190

PROSPERO

Well, we’ll prorogue his expectation a little. Musco, thou shalt go

with us. [He calls to the others.] Come on, gentlemen. [To Lorenzo Jr] Nay, I pray

thee, good rascal, droop not; ’sheart, an our wits be so gouty that one old, plodding

brain can outstrip us all, Lord, I beseech thee, may they lie and starve

in some miserable spital, where they may never see the face of any true spirit 195

again, but be perpetually haunted with some churchyard hobgoblin in saecula

saeculorum.

MUSCO

Amen, amen! Exeunt.

3.1 Enter THORELLO and PISO.

PISO

He will expect you, sir, within this half hour.

THORELLO

Why, what’s o’clock?

PISO

New stricken ten.

THORELLO

Hath he the money ready, can you tell?

PISO

Yes, sir. Baptista brought it yesternight.

THORELLO

Oh, that’s well. Fetch me my cloak. 5Exit Piso.

Stay, let me see: an hour to go and come,

Ay, that will be the least; and then ’twill be

An hour before I can dispatch with him,

Or very near. Well, I will say two hours.

Two hours? Ha? Things never dreamt of yet 10

May be contrived, ay, and effected too,

In two hours’ absence. Well, I will not go.

Two hours. No, fleering Opportunity,

I will not give your treachery that scope.

Who will not judge him worthy to be robbed 15

That sets his doors wide open to a thief

And shows the felon where his treasure lies?

Again, what earthy spirit but will attempt

To taste the fruit of Beauty’s golden tree,

When leaden sleep seels up the dragon’s eyes? 20

Oh, Beauty is a project of some power,

Chiefly when Opportunity attends her.

She will infuse true motion in a stone,

Put glowing fire in an icy soul,

Stuff peasants’ bosoms with proud Caesar’s spleen, 25

Pour rich device into an empty brain,

Bring youth to Folly’s gate, there train him in,

And after all extenuate his sin.

Well, I will not go; I am resolved for that.

Enter PISO [with Thorello’s cloak].

Go carry it again. Yet stay! Yet do, too! 30

I will defer it till some other time.

PISO

Sir, Signor Platano will meet you there with the bond.

THORELLO

That’s true. By Jesu, I had clean forgot it;

I must go. What’s o’clock?

PISO

Past ten, sir.

THORELLO

[Aside] Heart, then will Prospero presently be here too, 35

With one or other of his loose consorts.

I am a Jew if I know what to say,

What course to take, or which way to resolve.

My brain, methinks, is like an hourglass,

And my imaginations, like the sands, 40

Run dribbling forth to fill the mouth of time,

Still changed with turning in the ventricle.

What were I best to do? It shall be so.

Nay, I dare build upon his secrecy. –

Piso! 45

PISO

Sir?

THORELLO

[Aside] Yet, now I have bethought me, too, I will not. –

Is Cob within?

PISO

I think he be, sir.

THORELLO

[Aside] But he’ll prate too; there’s no talk of him.

No, there were no course upon the earth to this, 50

If I durst trust him; tut, I were secure.

But there’s the question now: if he should prove

Rimarum plenus, then, ’sblood, I were rooked.

The state that he hath stood in till this present

Doth promise no such change. What should I fear, then? 55

Well, come what will, I’ll tempt my fortune once. –

Piso, thou mayst deceive me, but I think

Thou lov’st me, Piso.

PISO

Sir, if a servant’s zeal and humble duty

May be termed love, you are possessed of it. 60

THORELLO

I have a matter to impart to thee,

But thou must be secret, Piso.

PISO

Sir, for that –

THORELLO

Nay, hear me, man. Think I esteem thee well

To let thee in thus to my private thoughts.

Piso, it is a thing sits nearer to my crest 65

Than thou art ware of. If thou shouldst reveal it –

PISO

Reveal it, sir?

THORELLO

Nay, I do not think thou wouldst,

But if thou shouldst –

PISO

Sir, then I were a villain.

Disclaim in me for ever if I do.

THORELLO

[Aside] He will not swear. He has some meaning, sure, 70

Else, being urged so much, how should he choose

But lend an oath to all this protestation?

He is no puritan, that I am certain of.

What should I think of it? Urge him again,

And in some other form? I will do so. – 75

Well, Piso, thou hast sworn not to disclose.

Ay, you did swear?

PISO

Not yet, sir, but I will,

So please you.

THORELLO

Nay, I dare take thy word.

But if thou wilt swear, do as you think good;

I am resolved without such circumstance. 80

PISO

By my soul’s safety, sir, I here protest,

My tongue shall ne’er take knowledge of a word

Delivered me in compass of your trust.

THORELLO

Enough, enough, these ceremonies need not.

I know thy faith to be as firm as brass. 85

Piso, come hither; nay, we must be close

In managing these actions. So it is –

[Aside] Now he has sworn, I dare the safelier speak –

I have of late by divers observations –

[Aside] But whether his oath be lawful, yea or no, ha? 90

I will ask counsel ere I do proceed. –

Piso, it will be now too long to stay;

We’ll spy some fitter time soon, or tomorrow.

PISO

At your pleasure, sir.

THORELLO

I pray you, search the books ’gainst I return, 95

For the receipts ’twixt me and Platano.

PISO

I will, sir.

THORELLO

And hear you: if my brother Prospero

Chance to bring hither any gentlemen

Ere I come back, let one straight bring me word. 100

PISO

Very well, sir.

THORELLO

Forget it not, nor be not you out of the way.

PISO

I will not, sir.

THORELLO

Or whether he come or no, if any other,

Stranger or else, fail not to send me word. 105

PISO

Yes, sir.

THORELLO

Have care, I pray you, and remember it.

PISO

I warrant you, sir.

THORELLO

But Piso, this is not the secret I told thee of.

PISO

No, sir, I suppose so. 110

THORELLO

Nay, believe me, it is not.

PISO

I do believe you, sir.

THORELLO

By heaven, it is not; that’s enough.

Marry, I would not thou shouldst utter it

To any creature living; yet I care not. 115

Well, I must hence. Piso, conceive thus much:

No ordinary person could have drawn

So deep a secret from me. I mean not this,

But that I have to tell thee; this is nothing, this.

Piso, remember, silence buried here. 120

[Aside] No greater hell than to be slave to fear. Exit Thorello.

PISO

‘Piso, remember, silence buried here’?

Whence should this flow of passion, trow, take head? Ha?

Faith, I’ll dream no longer of this running humour,

For fear I sink. The violence of the stream 125

Already hath transported me so far

That I can feel no ground at all. But soft –

Enter COB [unaware at first of Piso].

Oh, it’s our waterbearer. Somewhat has crossed him now.

COB

Fasting days: what tell you me of your fasting days? Would they were all on a

light fire for me! They say the world shall be consumed with fire and brimstone 130

in the latter day, but I would we had these Ember weeks and these villainous

Fridays burnt in the meantime, and then –

PISO

Why, how now, Cob, what moves thee to this choler, ha?

COB

Collar, sir? ’Swounds, I scorn your collar. I, sir, am no collier’s horse, sir;

never ride me with your collar. An you do, I’ll show you a jade’s trick. 135

PISO

Oh, you’ll slip your head out of the collar. Why, Cob, you mistake me.

COB

Nay, I have my rheum, and I be angry as well as another, sir.

PISO

Thy rheum? Thy humour, man; thou mistakest.

COB

‘Humour’? Mack, I think it be so, indeed. What is this ‘humour’? It’s some

rare thing, I warrant. 140

PISO

Marry, I’ll tell thee what it is, as ’tis generally received in these days: it is a

monster bred in a man by self-love and affectation, and fed by folly.

COB

How? Must it be fed?

PISO

Oh, ay, humour is nothing if it be not fed. Why, didst thou never hear of

that? It’s a common phrase, ‘Feed my humour.’ 145

COB

I’ll none on it. Humour, avaunt! I know you not; be gone. Let who will make

hungry meals for you; it shall not be I. Feed you, quoth he? ’Sblood, I have

much ado to feed myself, especially on these lean rascal days too. An’t had been

any other day but a fasting day – a plague on them all, for me! By this light, one

might have done God good service and have drowned them all in the flood two 150

or three hundred thousand years ago. Oh, I do stomach them hugely! I have a

maw, now, an ’twere for Sir Bevis’s horse.

PISO

Nay, but I pray thee, Cob, what makes thee so out of love with fasting days?

COB

Marry, that that will make any man out of love with them, I think: their bad

conditions, an you will needs know. First, they are of a Flemish breed, I am 155

sure on’t, for they raven up more butter than all the days of the week beside.

Next, they stink of fish miserably. Thirdly, they’ll keep a man devoutly hungry

all day, and at night send him supperless to bed.

PISO

Indeed, these are faults, Cob.

COB

Nay, an this were all, ’twere something. But they are the only known enemies 160

to my generation. A fasting day no sooner comes but my lineage goes to

rack. Poor cobs, they smoke for it, they melt in passion, and your maids too

know this, and yet would have me turn Hannibal and eat my own fish and

blood!

Pulls out a red herring [and addresses it].

My princely coz, fear nothing. I have not the heart to devour you, an I might 165

be made as rich as Golias. Oh, that I had room for my tears! I could weep salt

water enough now to preserve the lives of ten thousand of my kin; but I may

curse none but these filthy almanacs, for, an ’twere not for them, these days of

persecution would ne’er be known. I’ll be hanged an some fishmonger’s son

do not make on them, and puts in more fasting days than he should do because 170

he would utter his father’s dried stockfish.

PISO

’Soul, peace! Thou’lt be beaten like a stockfish else. [Seeing an approaching group]

Here is Signor Matheo. Now must I look out for a messenger to my

master. Exeunt Cob and Piso.

3.2 Enter MATHEO, PROSPERO, LORENZO JR, BOBADILLA, STEPHANO, [and] MUSCO. [Prospero, Lorenzo Jr, and Musco converse privately among themselves. The rest have pipes and equipment for smoking.]

PROSPERO

Beshrew me, but it was an absolute good jest, and exceedingly well

carried.

LORENZO JR

Ay, and our ignorance maintained it as well, did it not?

PROSPERO

Yes, faith; but was’t possible thou shouldst not know him?

LORENZO JR

’Fore God, not I, an I might have been joined patent with one of 5

the Nine Worthies for knowing him. ’Sblood, man, he had so writhen himself

into the habit of one of your poor desperviews here, your decayed, ruinous,

worm-eaten gentlemen of the round, such as have vowed to sit on the skirts

of the city (let your provost and his half-dozen of halberdiers do what they

can), and have translated begging out of the old hackney pace to a fine, easy 10

amble, and made it run as smooth off the tongue as a shove-groat shilling. Into

the likeness of one of these lean Pirgos had he moulded himself so perfectly,

observing every trick of their action – as varying the accent, swearing with an

emphasis, indeed all with so special and exquisite a grace – that, hadst thou

seen him, thou wouldst have sworn he might have been the Tamburlaine or 15

the Agamemnon of the rout.

PROSPERO

Why, Musco, who would have thought thou hadst been such a

gallant?

LORENZO JR

I cannot tell; but unless a man had juggled begging all his lifetime

and been a weaver of phrases from his infancy for the apparelling of it, I think 20

the world cannot produce his rival.

PROSPERO

Where got’st thou this coat, I mar’l?

MUSCO

Faith, sir, I had it of one of the devil’s near kinsmen: a broker.

PROSPERO

That cannot be, if the proverb hold, ‘A crafty knave needs no broker.’

MUSCO

True, sir, but I need a broker, ergo, no crafty knave. 25

PROSPERO

Well put off, well put off.

LORENZO JR

Tut, he has more of these shifts.

MUSCO

And yet, where I have one, the broker has ten, sir.

Enter PISO.

PISO

[Calling] Francisco! Martino! – Ne’er a one to be found now. What a

spite’s this? 30

PROSPERO

How now, Piso? Is my brother within?

PISO

No, sir, my master went forth e’en now, but Signor Giuliano is within.

[Calling] Cob! What, Cob! – Is he gone too?

PROSPERO

Whither went thy master, Piso, canst thou tell?

PISO

I know not; to Doctor Clement’s, I think, sir. [Calling] Cob! 35Exit Piso.

LORENZO JR

Doctor Clement – what’s he? I have heard much speech of him.

PROSPERO

Why, dost thou not know him? He is the gonfaloniere of the state here,

an excellent rare civilian and a great scholar, but the only mad, merry old fellow

in Europe. I showed him you the other day.

LORENZO JR

Oh, I remember him now. Good faith, and he hath a very strange 40

presence, methinks. It shows as if he stood out of the rank from other men.

I have heard many of his jests in Padua. They say he will commit a man for

taking the wall of his horse.

PROSPERO

Ay, or wearing his cloak of one shoulder, or anything, indeed, if it

come in the way of his humour. 45

Enter PISO.

PISO

[Calling] Gasper, Martino, Cob! – ’Sheart, where should they be, trow?

BOBADILLA

Signor Thorello’s man, I pray thee, vouchsafe us the lighting of

this match.

[He hands a match to Piso.]

PISO

A pox on your match! No time but now to ‘vouchsafe’? [Calling] Francisco!

Cob! 50Exit.

BOBADILLA

[Taking out a tobacco box] Body of me, here’s the remainder of seven

pound since yesterday was sevennight. It’s your right Trinidado. Did you

never take any, signor?

STEPHANO

No, truly, sir, but I’ll learn to take it now, since you commend it so.

BOBADILLA

Signor, believe me, upon my relation, for what I tell you the world 55

shall not improve. I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where

neither myself nor a dozen gentlemen more, of my knowledge, have received

the taste of any other nutriment in the world for the space of one-and-twenty

weeks but tobacco only. Therefore, it cannot be but ’tis most divine. Further,

take it in the nature, in the true kind so, it makes an antidote that, had you 60

taken the most deadly poisonous simple in all Florence, it should expel it

and clarify you with as much ease as I speak. And for your green wound, your

balsamum and your – are all mere gulleries and trash to it, especially your

Trinidado. Your Nicotian is good, too. I could say what I know of the virtue

of it for the exposing of rheums, raw humours, crudities, obstructions, with 65

a thousand of this kind, but I profess myself no quacksalver. Only thus much,

by Hercules: I do hold it and will affirm it before any prince in Europe to be

the most sovereign and precious herb that ever the earth tendered to the use

of man.

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Oh, this speech would have done rare in a 70

pothecary’s mouth!

Enter PISO and COB.

PISO

[To Cob] Ay, close by Saint Anthony’s: Doctor Clement’s.

COB

Oh, oh!

BOBADILLA

[To Piso] Where’s the match I gave thee?

PISO

’Sblood, would his match, and he, and pipe, and all were at Sancto 75

Domingo! Exit.

COB

By God’s deynes, I mar’l what pleasure or felicity they have in taking this

roguish tobacco. It’s good for nothing but to choke a man and fill him full of

smoke and embers. There were four died out of one house last week with taking

of it, and two more the bell went for yesternight. One of them, they say, will 80

ne’er scape it; he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward and downward.

By the stocks, an there were no wiser men than I, I’d have it present death, man

or woman, that should but deal with a tobacco pipe. Why, it will stifle them

all in th’end, as many as use it; it’s little better than ratsbane.

[Bobadilla cudgels Cob.]

Enter PISO.

ALL

Oh, good signor, hold, hold! 85

BOBADILLA

You base cullion, you! [He is restrained.]

PISO

[Handing the lighted match back to Bobadilla] Sir, here’s your match. [To Cob]

Come, thou must needs be talking, too.

COB

Nay, he will not meddle with his match, I warrant you. Well, it shall be a

dear beating, an I live. 90

BOBADILLA

[Menacing Cob] Do you prate?

LORENZO JR

[To Bobadilla] Nay, good signor, will you regard the humour of a

fool? [To Cob] Away, knave!

PROSPERO

Piso, get him away. Exit Piso, and Cob.

BOBADILLA

A whoreson, filthy slave, a turd, an excrement! Body of Caesar, but 95

that I scorn to let forth so mean a spirit, I’d have stabbed him to the earth.

PROSPERO

Marry, God forbid, sir.

BOBADILLA

By this fair heaven, I would have done it.

STEPHANO

[To himself] Oh, he swears admirably! ‘By this fair heaven’, ‘body of

Caesar’ – I shall never do it, sure. ‘Upon my salvation’ – no, I have not the right 100

grace.

[They smoke.]

MATHEO

[Offering Lorenzo Jr tobacco] Signor, will you any? By this air, the most

divine tobacco as ever I drunk.

LORENZO JR

I thank you, sir.

STEPHANO

[To himself] Oh, this gentleman doth it rarely too, but nothing like 105

the other. [He practises to a post.] ‘By this air!’ ‘As I am a gentleman!’ ‘By Phoebus!’

Exeunt Bobadilla and Matheo.

MUSCO

[To Lorenzo Jr] Master, glance, glance! – Signor Prospero!

STEPHANO

As I have a soul to be saved, I do protest –

PROSPERO

[Aside] That you are a fool.

LORENZO JR

[To Stephano] Cousin, will you any tobacco? 110

STEPHANO

[Taking tobacco] Ay, sir, upon my salvation.

LORENZO JR

How now, cousin?

STEPHANO

I protest, as I am a gentleman, but no soldier, indeed.

PROSPERO

No, signor? As I remember, you served on a great horse last general

muster. 115

STEPHANO

Ay, sir, that’s true. – Cousin, may I swear ‘as I am a soldier’ by that?

LORENZO JR

Oh, yes, that you may.

STEPHANO

Then, as I am a gentleman and a soldier, it is divine tobacco.

PROSPERO

But soft, where’s Signor Matheo? Gone?

MUSCO

No, sir, they went in here. 120

PROSPERO

Oh, let’s follow them. Signor Matheo is gone to salute his mistress.

[To Lorenzo Jr] Sirrah, now thou shalt hear some of his verses, for he never comes

hither without some shreds of poetry. – Come, Signor Stephano, Musco.

STEPHANO

Musco? Where? Is this Musco?

LORENZO JR

Ay, but peace, cousin, no words of it at any hand. 125

STEPHANO

Not I, by this fair heaven, as I have a soul to be saved, by Phoebus.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Oh, rare! Your cousin’s discourse is simply suited,

all in oaths.

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Ay, he lacks nothing but a little light stuff to draw

them out withal, and he were rarely fitted to the time. 130Exeunt.

3.3 Enter THORELLO with COB.

THORELLO

Ha! How many are there, sayest thou?

COB

Marry, sir, your brother, Signor Prospero.

THORELLO

Tut, beside him: what strangers are there, man?

COB

Strangers? Let me see: one, two – mass, I know not well, there’s so many.

THORELLO

How? So many? 5

COB

Ay, there’s some five or six of them at the most.

THORELLO

[Aside] A swarm, a swarm!

Spite of the devil, how they sting my heart! –

How long hast thou been coming hither, Cob?

COB

But a little while, sir. 10

THORELLO

Didst thou come running?

COB

No, sir.

THORELLO

Tut, then, I am familiar with thy haste.

[Aside] Bane to my fortunes! What meant I to marry?

I that before was ranked in such content, 15

My mind attired in smooth, silken peace,

Being free master of mine own free thoughts,

And now become a slave? What, never sigh;

Be of good cheer, man, for thou art a cuckold.

’Tis done, ’tis done. Nay, when such flowing store, 20

Plenty itself, falls in my wife’s lap,

The cornucopiae will be mine, I know. – But Cob,

What entertainment had they? I am sure

My sister and my wife would bid them welcome, ha?

COB

Like enough, yet I heard not a word of welcome. 25

THORELLO

[Aside] No, their lips were sealed with kisses, and the voice,

Drowned in a flood of joy at their arrival,

Had lost her motion, state, and faculty. –

Cob, which of them was’t that first kissed my wife?

My sister, I should say. My wife! Alas, 30

I fear not her. Ha? Who was it, say’st thou?

COB

By my troth, sir, will you have the truth of it?

THORELLO

Oh, ay, good Cob, I pray thee.

COB

God’s my judge, I saw nobody to be kissed, unless they would have kissed

the post in the middle of the warehouse. For there I left them all at their 35

tobacco – with a pox!

THORELLO

How? Were they not gone in, then, ere thou cam’st?

COB

Oh, no, sir.

THORELLO

Spite of the devil! What do I stay here, then?

Cob, follow me. 40Exit Thorello.

COB

Nay, soft and fair! I have eggs on the spit; I cannot go yet, sir. Now am

I for some divers reasons hammering, hammering revenge. Oh, for three or

four gallons of vinegar to sharpen my wits! Revenge, vinegar revenge, russet

revenge! Nay, an he had not lain in my house, ’twould never have grieved me.

But being my guest – one that, I’ll be sworn, my wife has lent him her smock 45

off her back while his own shirt ha’ been at washing, pawned her neckerchers

for clean bands for him, sold almost all my platters to buy him tobacco – and

yet to see an ingratitude wretch strike his host! Well, I hope to raise up an host

of furies for’t. Here comes Master Doctor.

Enter DOCTOR CLEMENT, LORENZO SR, [and] PETO.

CLEMENT

What,’s Signor Thorello gone? 50

PETO

Ay, sir.

CLEMENT

Heart of me, what made him leave us so abruptly? [Seeing Cob] How

now, sirrah, what make you here? What would you have, ha?

COB

An’t please Your Worship, I am a poor neighbour of Your Worship’s.

CLEMENT

A neighbour of mine, knave? 55

COB

Ay, sir, at the sign of the water-tankard, hard by the Green Lattice. I have

paid scot and lot there any time this eighteen years.

CLEMENT

What, at the Green Lattice?

COB

No, sir, to the parish. Marry, I have seldom scaped scot-free at the Lattice.

CLEMENT

So. But what business hath my neighbour? 60

COB

An’t like Your Worship, I am come to crave the peace of Your Worship.

CLEMENT

Of me, knave? Peace of me, knave? Did I e’er hurt thee? Did I ever

threaten thee? Or wrong thee? Ha?

COB

No, God’s my comfort, I mean Your Worship’s warrant for one that hath

wronged me, sir. His arms are at too much liberty. I would fain have them 65

bound to a treaty of peace, an I could by any means compass it.

LORENZO SR

Why, dost thou go in danger of thy life for him?

COB

No, sir, but I go in danger of my death every hour by his means; an I die

within a twelvemonth and a day, I may swear by the laws of the land that he

killed me. 70

CLEMENT

How, how, knave? Swear he killed thee? What pretext, what colour

hast thou for that?

COB

Marry, sir, both black and blue – colour enough; I warrant you. I have it here

to show Your Worship.

[He shows his bruises.]

CLEMENT

What is he that gave you this, sirrah? 75

COB

A gentleman in the city, sir.

CLEMENT

A gentleman? What call you him?

COB

Signor Bobadilla.

CLEMENT

Good. But wherefore did he beat you, sirrah? How began the quarrel

’twixt you, ha? Speak truly, knave, I advise you. 80

COB

Marry, sir, because I spake against their vagrant tobacco as I came by them;

for nothing else.

CLEMENT

Ha? You speak against tobacco? – Peto, his name.

PETO

What’s your name, sirrah?

COB

Oliver Cob, sir. Set Oliver Cob, sir. 85

CLEMENT

[To Peto] Tell Oliver Cob he shall go to the jail.

PETO

Oliver Cob, Master Doctor says you shall go to the jail.

COB

Oh, I beseech Your Worship, for God’s love, dear Master Doctor!

CLEMENT

Nay, God’s precious, an such drunken knaves as you are come to

dispute of tobacco once, I have done. – Away with him! 90

COB

Oh, good Master Doctor! [To Lorenzo Sr] Sweet gentleman!

LORENZO SR

Sweet Oliver, would I could do thee any good. – Master Doctor,

let me entreat, sir.

CLEMENT

What? A tankard-bearer, a threadbare rascal, a beggar, a slave that

never drunk out of better than pisspot metal in his life? And he to deprave and 95

abuse the virtue of an herb so generally received in the courts of princes, the

chambers of nobles, the bowers of sweet ladies, the cabins of soldiers? Peto,

away with him, by God’s passion. I say, go to.

COB

Dear Master Doctor!

LORENZO SR

Alas, poor Oliver! 100

CLEMENT

Peto, ay, and make him a warrant. – He shall not go; I but fear the

knave.

COB

Oh, divine doctor! Thanks, noble doctor, most dainty doctor, delicious

doctor! Exeunt Peto with Cob.

CLEMENT

Signor Lorenzo, God’s pity, man, be merry, be merry, leave these 105

dumps.

LORENZO SR

Troth, would I could, sir; but enforcèd mirth,

In my weak judgement, has no happy birth.

The mind, being once a prisoner unto cares,

The more it dreams on joy, the worse it fares. 110

A smiling look is to a heavy soul

As a gilt bias to a leaden bowl,

Which in itself appears most vile, being spent

To no true use, but only for ostent.

CLEMENT

Nay, but good signor, hear me a word, hear me a word. Your cares are 115

nothing; they are like my cap, soon put on and as soon put off. What, your son

is old enough to govern himself; let him run his course. It’s the only way to

make him a staid man. If he were an unthrift, a ruffian, a drunkard, or a

licentious liver, then you had reason, you had reason to take care; but being none of

these, God’s passion, an I had twice so many cares as you have, I’d drown them 120

all in a cup of sack. Come, come. I muse your parcel of a soldier returns not all

this while. Exeunt.

3.4 Enter GIULIANO with BIANCA.

GIULIANO

Well, sister, I tell you true, and you’ll find it so in the end.

BIANCA

Alas, brother, what would you have me to do? I cannot help it; you see,

my brother Prospero, he brings them in here; they are his friends.

GIULIANO

His friends? His fiends! ’Sblood, they do nothing but haunt him up

and down like a sort of unlucky sprites, and tempt him to all manner of villainy 5

that can be thought of. Well, by this light, a little thing would make me play

the devil with some of them. An ’twere not more for your husband’s sake than

anything else, I’d make the house too hot for them. They should say and swear

hell were broken loose ere they went. But, by God’s bread, ’tis nobody’s fault

but yours. For, an you had done as you might have done, they should have been 10

damned ere they should have come in, e’er a one of them!

BIANCA

God’s my life, did you ever hear the like? What a strange man is this!

Could I keep out all them, think you? I should put myself against half a dozen

men, should I? Good faith, you’d mad the patient’st body in the world to hear

you talk so, without any sense or reason. 15

Enter MATHEO [holding papers], with HESPERIDA [and] BOBADILLA, [followed at a distance by] STEPHANO, LORENZO JR, PROSPERO, [and] MUSCO.

HESPERIDA

[To Matheo] Servant, in troth, you are too prodigal

Of your wit’s treasure, thus to pour it forth

Upon so mean a subject as my worth.

MATHEO

You say well, you say well.

GIULIANO

Hoyday, here is stuff! 20

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Oh, now stand close. Pray God she can get him to

read it.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Tut, fear not. I warrant thee, he will do it of

himself with much impudency.

HESPERIDA

[Indicating Matheo’s papers] Servant, what is that same, I pray you? 25

MATHEO

Marry, an elegy, an elegy, an odd toy.

GIULIANO

Ay, to mock an ape withal. O Jesu!

BIANCA

Sister, I pray you, let’s hear it.

MATHEO

Mistress, I’ll read it, if you please.

HESPERIDA

I pray you do, servant. 30

Exit.

GIULIANO

Oh, here’s no foppery! ’Sblood, it frets me to the gall to think on it.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Oh, ay, it is his condition. Peace, we are fairly rid

of him.

MATHEO

Faith, I did it in an humour. I know not how it is, but, please you, come

near, signor. This gentleman [indicating Stephano] hath judgement; he knows 35

how to censure of a —. [To Stephano] I pray you, sir, you can judge.

STEPHANO

Not I, sir – as I have a soul to be saved; as I am a gentleman.

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Nay, it’s well, so long as he doth not forswear

himself.

BOBADILLA

[To Matheo] Signor, you abuse the excellency of your mistress and 40

her fair sister. Fie, while you live, avoid this prolixity.

MATHEO

I shall, sir. Well, incipere dulce.

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] How? Insipere dulce? ‘A sweet thing to be a fool’,

indeed.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] What, do you take ‘incipere’ in that sense? 45

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] You do not, you? ’Sblood, this was your villainy,

to gull him with a mot.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Oh, the benchers’ phrase: pauca verba, pauca verba.

MATHEO

[Reads] Rare creature, let me speak without offence.

Would God my rude words had the influence 50

To rule thy thoughts, as thy fair looks do mine;

Then shouldst thou be his prisoner who is thine.

LORENZO jr

[Aside to Prospero] ’Sheart, this is in Hero and Leander!

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Oh, ay, peace. We shall have more of this.

MATHEO

Be not unkind and fair. Misshapen stuff 55

Is of behaviour boisterous and rough –

PROSPERO

[To Stephano] How like you that, signor?

[Stephano shakes his head vigorously up and down.]

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] ’Sblood, he shakes his head like a bottle, to feel

an there be any brain in it.

MATHEO

But observe the catastrophe now: 60

And I in duty will exceed all other

As you in beauty do excel Love’s mother.

[He presents the verses to Hesperida.]

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] Well, I’ll have him free of the brokers, for he

utters nothing but stol’n remnants.

PROSPERO

[Aside to Lorenzo Jr] Nay, good critic, forbear. 65

LORENZO JR

[Aside to Prospero] A pox on him, hang him, filching rogue! Steal

from the dead? It’s worse than sacrilege.

PROSPERO

[To Hesperida] Sister, what have you here? Verses? I pray you, let’s see.

[Prospero takes the verses from Hesperida and examines them.]

BIANCA

Do you let them go so lightly, sister?

HESPERIDA

Yes, faith, when they come lightly. 70

BIANCA

Ay, but if your servant should hear you, he would take it heavily.

HESPERIDA

No matter. He is able to bear.

BIANCA

So are asses.

HESPERIDA

So is he.

PROSPERO

Signor Matheo, who made these verses? They are excellent good. 75

MATHEO

Oh, God, sir, it’s your pleasure to say so, sir. Faith, I made them extempore

this morning.

PROSPERO

How, extempore?

MATHEO

I would I might be damned else. Ask Signor Bobadilla. He saw me

write them at the – pox on it! – the Mitre yonder. 80

MUSCO

[Aside to Prospero and Lorenzo Jr] Well, an the Pope knew he cursed the

mitre, it were enough to have him excommunicated all the taverns in the

town.

STEPHANO

Cousin, how do you like this gentleman’s verses?

LORENZO JR

Oh, admirable! The best that ever I heard. 85

STEPHANO

By this fair heavens, they are admirable, the best that ever I heard.

Enter GIULIANO.

GIULIANO

[To himself] I am vexed. I can hold never a bone of me still! ’Sblood,

I think they mean to build a tabernacle here. Well?

PROSPERO

[To Hesperida] Sister, you have a simple servant here, that crowns

your beauty with such encomions and devices. You may see what it is to be the 90

mistress of a wit that can make your perfections so transparent that every blear

eye may look through them and see him drowned over head and ears in the

deep well of desire. – Sister Bianca, I marvel you get you not a servant that can

rhyme and do tricks, too.

GIULIANO

[To himself] Oh, monster! Impudence itself? Tricks? 95

BIANCA

[To Prospero] Tricks, brother? What tricks?

HESPERIDA

Nay, speak, I pray you, what tricks?

BIANCA

Ay, never spare anybody here, but say, what tricks?

HESPERIDA

Passion of my heart! ‘Do tricks’?

PROSPERO

’Sblood, here’s a trick, vied and revied. Why, you monkeys, you, 100

what a caterwauling do you keep! Has he not given you rhymes and verses

and tricks?

GIULIANO

[To himself] Oh, see the devil!

PROSPERO

[To Hesperida] Nay, you lamp of virginity, that take it in snuff

so, come and cherish this tame poetical fury in your ‘servant’; you’ll be begged 105

else shortly for a concealment. Go to, reward his muse. You cannot give him

less than a shilling, in conscience, for the book he had it out of cost him a

teston at the least. – How now, gallants, Lorenzo, Signor Bobadilla? What, all

sons of silence? No spirit?

GIULIANO

[Aloud, to Prospero] Come, you might practise your ruffian tricks somewhere 110

else and not here, iwis. This is no tavern, nor no place for such exploits.

PROSPERO

’Sheart, how now?

GIULIANO

Nay, boy, never look askance at me for the matter. I’ll tell you of it,

by God’s bread! Ay, and you and your companions, mend yourselves when I

have done. 115

PROSPERO

My companions?

GIULIANO

Ay, your companions, sir, so I say. ’Sblood, I am not afraid of you

nor them neither. You must have your poets and your cavaliers and your fools

follow you up and down the city, and here they must come to domineer and

swagger? [To Matheo] Sirrah, you ballad-singer, and Slops, your fellow there, 120

get you out! Get you out or, by the will of God, I’ll cut off your ears, go to.

PROSPERO

[To Matheo and Bobadilla, as they shy away] ’Sblood, stay. Let’s see what

he dare do. [To Giuliano] Cut off his ears? You are an ass. Touch any man here

and, by the Lord, I’ll run my rapier to the hilts in thee.

GIULIANO

Yea, that would I fain see, boy. 125

They all draw. The women make a great cry.

BIANCA

Oh, Jesu! Piso, Matheo, murder!

HESPERIDA

Help, help, Piso!

Enter PISO and some more of the house to part them.

LORENZO JR

Gentlemen! Prospero! Forbear, I pray you.

BOBADILLA

[To Giuliano] Well, sirrah, you Holofernes: by my hand, I will

pink thy flesh full of holes with my rapier for this, I will, by this good heaven! 130

They offer to fight again and are parted.

Nay, let him come, let him come, gentlemen; by the body of Saint George, I’ll

not kill him.

PISO

Hold, hold! Forbear.

GIULIANO

[To Bobadilla] You whoreson bragging coistrel!

Enter THORELLO.

THORELLO

Why, how now? What’s the matter? What stir is here? 135

Whence springs this quarrel? Piso! Where is he? –

Put up your weapons and put off this rage.

My wife and sister, they are cause of this. –

What, Piso! – Where is this knave?

PISO

Here, sir. 140

PROSPERO

[To Lorenzo Jr and the rest] Come, let’s go. This is one of my brother’s

ancient humours, this.

STEPHANO

I am glad nobody was hurt by this ancient humour.

Exeunt Prospero, Lorenzo Jr, Musco, Stephano, Bobadilla, [and] Matheo.

THORELLO

Why, how now, brother, who enforced this brawl?

GIULIANO

A sort of lewd rakehells, that care neither for God nor the devil. And 145

they must come here to read ballads and roguery and trash. I’ll mar the knot of

them ere I sleep, perhaps, especially Signor Pythagoras, he that’s all manner of

shapes, and Songs and Sonnets, his fellow there.

HESPERIDA

Brother, indeed, you are too violent,

Too sudden in your courses; and you know 150

My brother Prospero’s temper will not bear

Any reproof, chiefly in such a presence

Where every slight disgrace he should receive

Would wound him in opinion and respect.

Exit.

GIULIANO

Respect? What talk you of respect ’mongst such as had neither spark 155

of manhood nor good manners? By God, I am ashamed to hear you. Respect?

HESPERIDA

Yes, there was one, a civil gentleman,

And very worthily demeaned himself.

THORELLO

Oh, that was some love of yours, sister.

HESPERIDA

A love of mine? In faith, I would he were 160

No other’s love but mine.

BIANCA

Indeed, he seemed to be a gentleman of an exceeding fair disposition,

and of very excellent good parts. Exit Hesperida [with] Bianca.

THORELLO

[Aside] Her love, by Jesu! My wife’s minion!

‘Fair disposition’? ‘Excellent good parts’? 165

’Sheart, these phrases are intolerable.

‘Good parts’? How should she know his parts? Well, well,

It is too plain, too clear. – Piso, come hither.

What, are they gone?

PISO

Ay, sir, they went in. 170

THORELLO

Are any of the gallants within?

PISO

No, sir, they are all gone.

THORELLO

Art thou sure of it?

PISO

Ay, sir, I can assure you.

THORELLO

Piso, what gentleman was that they praised so? 175

PISO

One they call him Signor Lorenzo, a fair, young gentleman, sir.

THORELLO

[Aside] Ay, I thought so; my mind gave me as much.

’Sblood, I’ll be hanged if they have not hid him in the house

Somewhere! I’ll go search. – Piso, go with me.

Be true to me and thou shalt find me bountiful. 180Exeunt.

3.5 Enter COB.

COB

[Knocking] What, Tib! Tib, I say!

TIB

[Within] How now, what cuckold is that knocks so hard?

To him, TIB.

Oh, husband, is’t you? What’s the news?

COB

Nay, you have stunned me, i’faith! You have given me a knock on the forehead

will stick by me. Cuckold? ’Swounds, cuckold? 5

TIB

Away, you fool! Did I know it was you that knocked? Come, come, you may

call me as bad when you list.

COB

May I? ’Swounds, Tib, you are a whore.

TIB

’Sheart, you lie in your throat.

COB

How, the lie? And in my throat too? Do you long to be stabbed, ha? 10

TIB

Why, you are no soldier.

COB

Mass, that’s true. When was Bobadilla here? That rogue, that slave, that

fencing Burgullian! I’ll tickle him, i’faith.

TIB

Why, what’s the matter?

COB

Oh, he hath basted me rarely, sumptuously! But I have it here will sauce 15

him. Oh, the doctor, the honestest old Trojan in all Italy! I do honour the very

flea of his dog. A plague on him, he put me once in a villainous, filthy fear.

Marry, it vanished away like the smoke of tobacco, but I was smoked soundly

first, I thank the devil and his good angel, my guest. Well, wife, or Tib, which

you will, get you in and lock the door, I charge you, let no body into you 20

– not Bobadilla himself, nor the devil in his likeness. You are a woman; you have

flesh and blood enough in you; therefore, be not tempted; keep the door shut

upon all comers.

TIB

I warrant you, there shall no body enter here without my consent.

COB

Nor with your consent, sweet Tib; and so I leave you. 25

TIB

It’s more than you know, whether you leave me so.

COB

How?

TIB

Why, sweet.

COB

Tut, sweet or sour, thou art a flower.

Keep close thy door; I ask no more. 30Exeunt.

3.6 Enter LORENZO JR, PROSPERO, STEPHANO, [and] MUSCO [disguised as a soldier. They confer out of Stephano’s hearing].

LORENZO JR

Well, Musco, perform this business happily and thou makest a

conquest of my love for ever.

PROSPERO

[To Musco] I’faith, now let thy spirits put on their best habit. But, at

any hand, remember thy message to my brother, for there’s no other means to

start him. 5

MUSCO

I warrant you, sir, fear nothing. I have a nimble soul that hath waked

all my imaginative forces by this time and put them in true motion. What you

have possessed me withal, I’ll discharge it amply, sir. Make no question.

PROSPERO

That’s well said, Musco. Exit Musco.

[To Lorenzo Jr] Faith, sirrah, how dost thou approve my wit in this device? 10

LORENZO JR

Troth, well, howsoever, but excellent if it take.

PROSPERO

Take, man? Why, it cannot choose but take, if the circumstances

miscarry not. But tell me zealously: dost thou affect my sister Hesperida, as

thou pretendest?

LORENZO JR

Prospero, by Jesu! 15

PROSPERO

Come, do not protest, I believe thee. I’faith, she is a virgin of good

ornament and much modesty. Unless I conceived very worthily of her, thou

shouldst not have her.

LORENZO JR

Nay, I think it a question whether I shall have her, for all that.

PROSPERO

’Sblood, thou shalt have her, by this light thou shalt. 20

LORENZO JR

Nay, do not swear.

PROSPERO

By Saint Mark, thou shalt have her. I’ll go fetch her presently;

point but where to meet, and, by this hand, I’ll bring her.

LORENZO JR

Hold, hold. What, all policy dead? No prevention of mischiefs

stirring? 25

PROSPERO

Why, by – what shall I swear by? Thou shalt have her, by my soul.

LORENZO JR

I pray thee, have patience. I am satisfied. Prospero, omit no

offered occasion that may make my desires complete, I beseech thee.

PROSPERO

I warrant thee. Exeunt.

4.1 Enter LORENZO SR [and] PETO, meeting MUSCO [disguised as a soldier].

PETO

Was your man a soldier, sir?

LORENZO SR

Ay, a knave. I took him up begging upon the way,

This morning as I was coming to the city.

[Seeing Musco.] Oh, here he is. – Come on, you make fair speed.

Why, where on God’s name have you been so long? 5

MUSCO

Marry, God’s my comfort, where I thought I should have had little

comfort of Your Worship’s service.

LORENZO SR

How so?

MUSCO

Oh, God, sir! Your coming to the city, and your entertainment of me,

and your sending me to watch – indeed, all the circumstances are as open to 10

your son as to yourself.

LORENZO SR

How should that be? Unless that villain Musco

Have told him of the letter and discovered

All that I strictly charged him to conceal? ’Tis so.

MUSCO

I’faith, you have hit it; ’tis so, indeed. 15

LORENZO SR

But how should he know thee to be my man?

MUSCO

Nay, sir, I cannot tell, unless it were by the black art. Is not your son a

scholar, sir?

LORENZO SR

Yes, but I hope his soul is not allied

To such a devilish practice. If it were, 20

I had just cause to weep my part in him

And curse the time of his creation.

But where didst thou find them, Portensio?

MUSCO

Nay, sir, rather you should ask where they found me, for I’ll be sworn I

was going along in the street, thinking nothing, when of a sudden one calls, 25

‘Signor Lorenzo’s man!’; another, he cries ‘Soldier!’; and thus half a dozen of

them, till they had got me within doors, where I no sooner came but out flies

their rapiers and, all bent against my breast, they swore some two or three hundred

oaths, and all to tell me I was but a dead man if I did not confess where

you were, and how I was employed, and about what. Which, when they could 30

not get out of me – as God’s my judge, they should have killed me first – they

locked me up into a room in the top of a house, where by great miracle, having

a light heart, I slid down by a bottom of packthread into the street and so

scaped. But master, thus much I can assure you, for I heard it while I was locked

up: there were a great many merchants and rich citizens’ wives with them at a 35

banquet, and your son, Signor Lorenzo, has pointed one of them to meet anon

at one Cob’s house, a waterbearer’s, that dwells by the wall. Now there you

shall be sure to take him, for fail he will not.

LORENZO SR

Nor will I fail to break this match, I doubt not.

Well, go thou along with Master Doctor’s man, 40

And stay there for me. At one Cob’s house, say’st thou?

MUSCO

Ay, sir, there you shall have him. Exit [Lorenzo Sr].

[Aside] When, can you tell? Much wench or much son! ’Sblood, when he has

stayed there three or four hours, travailing with the expectation of somewhat,

and at the length be delivered of nothing – Oh, the sport that I should then 45

take to look on him if I durst! But now I mean to appear no more afore him in

this shape; I have another trick to act yet. Oh, that I were so happy as to light

upon an ounce now of this doctor’s clerk! [To Peto] God save you, sir.

PETO

I thank you, good sir.

MUSCO

I have made you stay somewhat long, sir. 50

PETO

Not a whit, sir. I pray you, what, sir, do you mean? You have been lately in

the wars, sir, it seems.

MUSCO

Ay, marry, have I, sir.

PETO

Troth, sir, I would be glad to bestow a pottle of wine of you, if it please you

to accept it – 55

MUSCO

Oh, Lord, sir!

PETO

But to hear the manner of your services and your devices in the wars. They

say they be very strange, and not like those a man reads in the Roman histories.

MUSCO

Oh, God, no, sir. Why, at any time when it please you I shall be ready to

discourse to you what I know. [Aside] And more too, somewhat. 60

PETO

No better time than now, sir. We’ll go to the Mermaid. There we shall have

a cup of neat wine. I pray you, sir, let me request you.

MUSCO

I’ll follow you, sir. [Aside] He is mine own, i’faith. Exeunt.

[4.2] Enter BOBADILLA, LORENZO JR, MATHEO, [and] STEPHANO.

MATHEO

[To Lorenzo Sr] Signor, did you ever see the like clown of him where we

were today, Signor Prospero’s brother? I think the whole earth cannot show

his like, by Jesu.

LORENZO JR

We were now speaking of him. Signor Bobadilla tells me he is

fallen foul of you two. 5

MATHEO

Oh, ay, sir, he threatened me with the bastinado.

BOBADILLA

Ay, but I think I taught you a trick this morning for that. You shall

kill him, without all question, if you be so minded.

MATHEO

Indeed, it is a most excellent trick.

[He practises fencing.]

BOBADILLA

Oh, you do not give spirit enough to your motion. You are too dull, 10

too tardy. Oh, it must be done like lightning. Hay!

[He practises at a post.]

MATHEO

Oh, rare!

BOBADILLA

Tut, ’tis nothing, an’t be not done in a –

LORENZO JR

Signor, did you never play with any of our masters here?

MATHEO

Oh, good sir! 15

BOBADILLA

Nay, for a more instance of their preposterous humour, there came

three or four of them to me at a gentleman’s house, where it was my chance to

be resident at that time, to entreat my presence at their schools, and withal

so much importuned me that – I protest to you, as I am a gentleman – I was

ashamed of their rude demeanour out of all measure. Well, I told them that 20

to come to a public school, they should pardon me, it was opposite to my

humour; but if so they would attend me at my lodging, I protested to do them

what right or favour I could, as I was a gentleman, et cetera.

LORENZO JR

So, sir, then you tried their skill?

BOBADILLA

Alas, soon tried! You shall hear, sir. Within two or three days after, 25

they came, and, by Jesu, good signor, believe me, I graced them exceedingly,

showed them some two or three tricks of prevention hath got them since

admirable credit. They cannot deny this. And yet now they hate me; and why?

Because I am excellent, and for no other reason on the earth.

LORENZO JR

This is strange and vile as ever I heard. 30

BOBADILLA

I will tell you, sir. Upon my first coming to the city they assaulted

me, some three, four, five, six of them together, as I have walked alone in divers

places of the city, as upon the Exchange, at my lodging, and at my ordinary,

where I have driven them afore me the whole length of a street in the open view

of all our gallants, pitying to hurt them, believe me. Yet all this lenity will not 35

depress their spleen; they will be doing with the pismire, raising a hill a man

may spurn abroad with his foot at pleasure. By my soul, I could have slain them

all, but I delight not in murder. I am loath to bear any other but a bastinado for

them, and yet I hold it good policy not to go disarmed, for, though I be skilful,

I may be suppressed with multitudes. 40

LORENZO JR

Ay, by Jesu, may you, sir, and in my conceit our whole nation

should sustain the loss by it, if it were so.

BOBADILLA

Alas, no. What’s a peculiar man to a nation? Not seen.

LORENZO JR

Ay, but your skill, sir.

BOBADILLA

Indeed, that might be some loss, but who respects it? I will tell you, 45

signor, in private, I am a gentleman and live here obscure and to myself. But

were I known to the duke, observe me, I would undertake, upon my head and

life, for the public benefit of the state, not only to spare the entire lives of his

subjects in general, but to save the one half – nay, three parts – of his yearly

charges in holding wars generally against all his enemies. And how will I do 50

it, think you?

LORENZO JR

Nay, I know not, nor can I conceive.

BOBADILLA

Marry, thus: I would select nineteen more to myself throughout

the land; gentlemen they should be of good spirit, strong and able constitution.

I would choose them by an instinct, a trick that I have. And I would 55

teach these nineteen the special tricks – as your punto, your reverso, your

stoccato, your imbroccato, your passado, your montanto – till they could all play very

near or altogether as well as myself. This done, say the enemy were forty thousand

strong: we twenty would come into the field the tenth of March or thereabouts

and would challenge twenty of the enemy. They could not in their honour 60

refuse the combat. Well, we would kill them; challenge twenty more, kill

them; twenty more, kill them; twenty more, kill them too. And thus would

we kill every man his twenty a day, that’s twenty score; twenty score, that’s

two hundred; two hundred a day, five days a thousand. Forty thousand – forty

times five, five times forty – two hundred days kills them all, by computation. 65

And this will I venture my life to perform, provided there be no treason practised

upon us.

LORENZO JR

Why, are you so sure of your hand at all times?

BOBADILLA

Tut, never mistrust, upon my soul.

LORENZO JR

Mass, I would not stand in Signor Giuliano’s state, then, an you 70

meet him, for the wealth of Florence.

BOBADILLA

Why, signor, by Jesu, if he were here now, I would not draw my

weapon on him. Let this gentleman do his mind, but I will bastinado him, by

heaven, an ever I meet him.

MATHEO

Faith, and I’ll have a fling at him. 75

Enter GIULIANO [not seeing them].

LORENZO JR

Look, yonder he goes, I think.

GIULIANO

[To himself] ’Sblood, what luck have I! I cannot meet with these bragging

rascals. And goes out again.

BOBADILLA

It’s not he, is it?

LORENZO JR

Yes, faith, it is he. 80

MATHEO

I’ll be hanged, then, if that were he.

LORENZO JR

Before God, it was he. You make me swear.

STEPHANO

Upon my salvation, it was he.

BOBADILLA

Well, had I thought it had been he, he could not have gone so. But

I cannot be induced to believe it was he yet. 85

Enter GIULIANO.

GIULIANO

[To Bobadilla] Oh, gallant, have I found you? Draw; to your tools.

Draw! Or, by God’s will, I’ll thrash you.

BOBADILLA

Signor, hear me!

GIULIANO

Draw your weapons, then.

BOBADILLA

Signor, I never thought on it till now: body of Saint George, I have a 90

warrant of the peace served on me even now as I came along, by a waterbearer.

This gentleman saw it – Signor Matheo. Matheo runs away.

GIULIANO

The peace? ’Sblood, you will not draw?

He beats him and disarms him.

LORENZO JR

Hold, signor, hold! Under thy favour, forbear!

GIULIANO

[To Bobadilla] Prate again as you like this, you whoreson cowardly 95

rascal! You’ll control the point, you? Your consort, he is gone? Had he stayed,

he had shared with you, in faith.

Exit Giuliano [mistakenly leaving his cloak behind him].

BOBADILLA

Well, gentlemen, bear witness I was bound to the peace, by Jesu.

LORENZO JR

Why, and though you were, sir, the law allows you to defend

yourself. That’s but a poor excuse. 100

BOBADILLA

I cannot tell. I never sustained the like disgrace, by heaven. Sure I

was struck with a planet then, for I had no power to touch my weapon.

LORENZO JR

Ay, like enough. I have heard of many that have been beaten under

a planet. Go, get you to the surgeon’s. ’Sblood, an these be your tricks, your

passados and your montantos, I’ll none of them. Exit [Bobadilla]. 105

Oh, God, that this age should bring forth such creatures! – Come, cousin.

STEPHANO

[Taking up Giuliano’s cloak] Mass, I’ll have this cloak.

LORENZO JR

God’s will, it’s Giuliano’s.

STEPHANO

Nay, but ’tis mine now; another might have ta’en it up as well as I.

I’ll wear it, so I will. 110

LORENZO JR

How an he see it? He’ll challenge it, assure yourself.

STEPHANO

Ay, but he shall not have it. I’ll say I bought it.

LORENZO JR

Advise you, cousin, take heed he give not you as much. Exeunt.

[4.3] Enter THORELLO, PROSPERO, BIANCA, [and] HESPERIDA.

THORELLO

Now trust me, Prospero, you were much to blame

T’incense your brother and disturb the peace

Of my poor house; for there be sentinels

That every minute watch to give alarums

Of civil war, without adjection 5

Of your assistance and occasion.

PROSPERO

No harm done, brother, I warrant you. Since there is no harm done, anger

costs a man nothing, and a tall man is never his own man till he be angry.

To keep his valour in obscurity is to keep himself, as it were, in a cloakbag.

What’s a musician unless he play? What’s a tall man unless he fight? For, 10

indeed, all this my brother stands upon absolutely, and that made me fall in

with him so resolutely.

BIANCA

Ay, but what harm might have come of it!

PROSPERO

Might? So might the good warm clothes your husband wears be

poisoned, for anything he knows, or the wholesome wine he drunk even now 15

at the table.

THORELLO

Now, God forbid! [Aside] Oh, me, now I remember:

My wife drunk to me last and changed the cup,

And bade me wear this cursèd suit today.

See if God suffer murder undiscovered! – 20

I feel me ill. Give me some mithridate;

Some mithridate and oil, good sister, fetch me.

Oh, I am sick at heart! I burn, I burn.

If you will save my life, go fetch it me.

PROSPERO

Oh, strange humour! My very breath hath poisoned him. 25

HESPERIDA

[To Thorello] Good brother, be content. What do you mean?

The strength of these extreme conceits will kill you.

BIANCA

Beshrew your heart-blood, brother Prospero,

For putting such a toy into his head!

PROSPERO

Is a fit simile a toy? Will he be poisoned with a simile? – Brother 30

Thorello, what a strange and vain imagination is this! For shame, be wiser.

Of my soul, there’s no such matter.

THORELLO

Am I not sick? How am I then not poisoned?

Am I not poisoned? How am I then so sick?

BIANCA

If you be sick, your own thoughts make you sick. 35

PROSPERO

His jealousy is the poison he hath taken.

Enter MUSCO like the Doctor’s man [Peto].

MUSCO

Signor Thorello, my master, Doctor Clement, salutes you and desires to

speak with you with all speed possible.

THORELLO

No time but now? Well, I’ll wait upon His Worship. – Piso! Cob!

[Aside] I’ll seek them out and set them sentinels till I return. – Piso! Cob! Piso! 40

Exit.

PROSPERO

[Conferring privately with Musco] Musco, this is rare. But how got’st

thou this apparel of the Doctor’s man?

MUSCO

Marry, sir, my youth would needs bestow the wine of me to hear some

martial discourse, where I so marshalled him that I made him monstrous

drunk. And because too much heat was the cause of his distemper, I stripped 45

him stark naked, as he lay along asleep, and borrowed his suit to deliver this

counterfeit message in, leaving a rusty armour and an old brown bill to watch

him till my return – which shall be when I have pawned his apparel and spent

the money, perhaps.

PROSPERO

Well, thou art a mad knave, Musco. His absence will be a good 50

subject for more mirth. I pray thee, return to thy young master Lorenzo and

will him to meet me and Hesperida at the friary presently; for here, tell him,

the house is so stirred with jealousy that there is no room for love to stand

upright in. But I’ll use such means she shall come thither, and that, I think,

will meet best with his desires. Hie thee, good Musco. 55

MUSCO

I go, sir. Exit.

Enter THORELLO [oblivious of the presence of Bianca and Prospero].

THORELLO

Ho, Piso! Cob! Where are these villains, trow?

[Enter] to him, PISO. [They converse apart.]

Oh, art thou there? Piso, hark thee here:

Mark what I say to thee. I must go forth.

Be careful of thy promise. Keep good watch; 60

Note every gallant, and observe him well,

That enters in my absence to thy mistress.

If she would show him rooms, the jest is stale.

Follow them, Piso, or else hang on him,

And let him not go after. Mark their looks; 65

Note if she offer but to see his band

Or any other amorous toy about him,

But praise his leg or foot, or if she say

The day is hot, and bid him feel her hand,

How hot it is – oh, that’s a monstrous thing! 70

Note me all this, sweet Piso; mark their sighs,

And if they do but whisper, break them off.

I’ll bear thee out in it. Wilt thou do this?

Wilt thou be true, sweet Piso?

PISO

Most true, sir.

THORELLO

Thanks, gentle Piso. Where is Cob, now? – Cob! 75Exit Thorello.

BIANCA

He’s ever calling for Cob. I wonder how he employs Cob so.

PROSPERO

Indeed, sister, to ask how he employs Cob is a necessary question for

you that are his wife, and a thing not very easy for you to be satisfied in. But this

I’ll assure you: Cob’s wife is an excellent bawd, indeed, and oftentimes your

husband haunts her house – marry, to what end I cannot altogether accuse 80

him. Imagine you what you think convenient. But I have known fair hides have

foul hearts ere now, I can tell you.

BIANCA

Never said you truer than that, brother. – Piso, fetch your cloak and

go with me; I’ll after him presently. I would to Christ I could take him there,

i’faith! 85Exeunt Piso and Bianca.

PROSPERO

So, let them go; this may make sport anon. – Now, my fair sister

Hesperida: ah, that you knew how happy a thing it were to be fair and

beautiful!

HESPERIDA

That toucheth not me, brother.

PROSPERO

That’s true; that’s even the fault of it. For, indeed, beauty stands 90

a woman in no stead unless it procure her touching. But sister, whether it

touch you or no, it touches your beauties, and I am sure they will abide the

touch. An they do not, a plague of all ceruse, say I! And it touches me too in

part, though not in the –. Well, there’s a dear and respected friend of mine,

sister, stands very strongly affected towards you, and hath vowed to inflame 95

whole bonfires of zeal in his heart in honour of your perfections. I have already

engaged my promise to bring you where you shall hear him confirm much

more than I am able to lay down for him. Signor Lorenzo is the man. What say

you, sister? Shall I entreat so much favour of you for my friend as to direct and

attend you to his meeting? Upon my soul, he loves you extremely. Approve it, 100

sweet Hesperida, will you?

HESPERIDA

Faith, I had very little confidence in mine own constancy if I durst

not meet a man. But brother Prospero, this motion of yours savours of an old

knight–adventurer’s servant, methinks.

PROSPERO

What’s that, sister? 105

HESPERIDA

Marry, of the squire.

PROSPERO

No matter, Hesperida, if it did. I would be such an one for my friend.

But say, will you go?

HESPERIDA

Brother, I will, and bless my happy stars.

Enter CLEMENT and THORELLO.

CLEMENT

Why, what villainy is this? My man gone on a false message, and run 110

away when he has done? Why, what trick is there in it, trow?

[A clock strikes:] 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

THORELLO

How? Is my wife gone forth? Where is she, sister?

HESPERIDA

She’s gone abroad with Piso.

THORELLO

Abroad with Piso? Oh, that villain dors me!

He hath discovered all unto my wife. 115

Beast that I was to trust him! Whither went she?

HESPERIDA

I know not, sir.

PROSPERO

I’ll tell you, brother, whither I suspect she’s gone.

THORELLO

Whither, for God’s sake?

PROSPERO

To Cob’s house, I believe; but keep my counsel. 120

THORELLO

I will, I will. To Cob’s house? Doth she haunt Cob’s?

She’s gone o’purpose now to cuckold me

With that lewd rascal, who, to win her favour,

Hath told her all. Exit.

CLEMENT

But did you, mistress, see my man bring him a message? 125

PROSPERO

That we did, Master Doctor.

CLEMENT

And whither went the knave?

PROSPERO

To the tavern, I think, sir.

CLEMENT

What, did Thorello give him anything to spend for the message he

brought him? If he did, I should commend my man’s wit exceedingly if he 130

would make himself drunk with the joy of it. Farewell, lady. Keep good rule,

you two, I beseech you now. By God’s marry, my man makes me laugh! Exit.

PROSPERO

What a mad doctor this is! Come, sister, let’s away. Exeunt.

[4.4] Enter MATHEO and BOBADILLA.

MATHEO

I wonder, signor, what they will say of my going away, ha?

BOBADILLA

Why, what should they say, but as of a discreet gentleman, quick,

wary, respectful of nature’s fair lineaments, and that’s all?

MATHEO

Why, so, but what can they say of your beating?

BOBADILLA

A rude part, a touch with soft wood, a kind of gross battery used, 5

laid on strongly, borne most patiently, and that’s all.

MATHEO

Ay, but would any man have offered it in Venice?

BOBADILLA

Tut, I assure you, no. You shall have there your nobilis, your gentilezza,

come in bravely upon your reverse, stand you close, stand you firm,

stand you fair, save your retricato with his left leg, come to the assalto with the 10

right, thrust with brave steel, defy your base wood. But wherefore do I awake

this remembrance? I was bewitched, by Jesu! But I will be revenged.

MATHEO

Do you hear? Is’t not best to get a warrant, and have him arrested and

brought before Doctor Clement?

BOBADILLA

It were not amiss. Would we had it! 15

Enter MUSCO [disguised as the Doctor’s clerk, Peto].

MATHEO

Why, here comes his man. Let’s speak to him.

BOBADILLA

Agreed. Do you speak.

MATHEO

[To Musco] God save you, sir.

MUSCO

With all my heart, sir.

MATHEO

Sir, there is one Giuliano hath abused this gentleman and me, and we 20

determine to make our amends by law. Now, if you would do us the favour to

procure us a warrant for his arrest of your master, you shall be well considered,

I assure, i’faith, sir.

MUSCO

Sir, you know my service is my living. Such favours as these gotten of my

master is his only preferment, and therefore you must consider me as I may 25

make benefit of my place.

MATHEO

How is that?

MUSCO

Faith, sir, the thing is extraordinary, and the gentleman may be of great

account. Yet, be what he will, if you will lay me down five crowns in my hand,

you shall have it; otherwise, not. 30

[Matheo and Bobadilla converse apart.]

MATHEO

How shall we do, signor? You have no money?

BOBADILLA

Not a cross, by Jesu.

MATHEO

Nor I, before God, but two pence, left of my two shillings in the morning

for wine and cakes. Let’s give him some pawn.

BOBADILLA

Pawn? We have none to the value of his demand. 35

MATHEO

Oh, Lord, man, I’ll pawn this jewel in my ear, and you may pawn your

silk stockings, and pull up your boots. They will ne’er be missed.

BOBADILLA

Well, an there be no remedy, I’ll step aside and put them off.

[He takes off his stockings as Matheo removes his earring.]

MATHEO

[To Musco] Do you hear, sir? We have no store of money at this time, but

you shall have good pawns – look you, sir, this jewel and this gentleman’s silk 40

stockings – because we would have it dispatched ere we went to our chambers.

MUSCO

I am content, sir. I will get you the warrant presently. What’s his name,

say you? Giuliano?

MATHEO

Ay, ay, Giuliano.

MUSCO

What manner of man is he? 45

MATHEO

A tall, big man, sir. He goes in a cloak most commonly of silk russet,

laid about with russet lace.

MUSCO

’Tis very good, sir.

MATHEO

Here, sir, here’s my jewel.

BOBADILLA

And here are stockings. 50

[They present their pawn.]

MUSCO

Well, gentlemen, I’ll procure this warrant presently and appoint you a

varlet of the city to serve it. If you’ll be upon the Rialto anon, the varlet shall

meet you there.

MATHEO

Very good, sir. I wish no better. Exeunt Bobadilla and Matheo.

MUSCO

This is rare! Now will I go pawn this cloak of the Doctor’s man at the 55

broker’s for a varlet’s suit, and be the varlet myself, and get either more pawns

or more money of Giuliano for my arrest. Exit.

5.1 Enter LORENZO SR.

LORENZO SR

Oh, here it is. I am glad I have found it now.

[He knocks] Ho! Who is within here?

Enter TIB [opening the door a crack].

TIB

I am within, sir. What’s your pleasure?

LORENZO SR

To know who is within besides yourself.

TIB

Why, sir, you are no constable, I hope? 5

LORENZO SR

Oh, fear you the constable? Then I doubt not

You have some guests within deserve that fear.

I’ll fetch him straight.

TIB

I’God’s name, sir!

LORENZO SR

Go to. Tell me, is not the young Lorenzo here?

TIB

Young Lorenzo? I saw none such, sir, of mine honesty. 10

LORENZO SR

Go to, your honesty flies too lightly from you.

There’s no way but fetch the constable.

TIB

The constable? The man is mad, I think.

Claps to the door. [Lorenzo Sr starts to leave.]

Enter PISO and BIANCA. [Lorenzo Sr stands aside, unobserved by them.]

PISO

Ho! Who keeps house here?

LORENZO SR

[Aside] Oh, this is the female copesmate of my son. 15

Now shall I meet him straight.

BIANCA

Knock, Piso, pray thee.

PISO

[Knocking] Ho, good wife!

TIB

[Within] Why, what’s the matter with you?

BIANCA

Why, woman, grieves it you to ope your door?

Belike you get something to keep it shut.

Enter TIB.

TIB

What mean these questions, pray ye? 20

BIANCA

So strange you make it?

Is not Thorello, my tried husband, here?

LORENZO SR

[Aside] Her husband?

TIB

I hope he needs not to be tried here.

BIANCA

No, dame, he doth it not for need, but pleasure. 25

TIB

Neither for need nor pleasure is he here.

LORENZO SR

[Aside] This is but a device to balk me withal. Soft, who’s this?

Enter THORELLO [in his cloak. Bianca runs to him].

BIANCA

Oh, sir, have I forestalled your honest market?

Found your close walks? You stand amazed now, do you?

I’faith, I am glad I have smoked you yet at last. 30

What’s your jewel, trow? In, come, let’s see her.

[To Tib] Fetch forth your huswife, dame! [To Thorello] If she be fairer,

In any honest judgement, than myself,

I’ll be content with it. But she is change,

She feeds you fat, she soothes your appetite, 35

And you are well? Your wife, an honest woman,

Is meat twice sod to you, sir? Ah, you treacher!

LORENZO SR

[Aside] She cannot counterfeit this palpably.

THORELLO

[To Bianca] Out on thee, more than strumpet’s impudency!

Steal’st thou thus to thy haunts? And have I taken 40

Thy bawd and thee and thy companion, [Pointing to Lorenzo Sr]

This hoary-headed lecher, this old goat,

Close at your villainy? And wouldst thou ’scuse it

With this stale harlot’s jest, accusing me?

[To Lorenzo Sr] Oh, old incontinent, dost thou not shame, 45

When all thy powers’ inchastity is spent,

To have a mind so hot, and to entice

And feed the enticements of a lustful woman?

BIANCA

Out! I defy thee, I, dissembling wretch!

THORELLO

Defy me, strumpet? [He points to Piso.] Ask thy pander here. 50

Can he deny it? [Pointing to Lorenzo Sr] Or that wicked elder?

LORENZO SR

Why, hear you, signor –

THORELLO

Tut, tut, never speak.

Thy guilty conscience will discover thee.

LORENZO SR

What lunacy is this that haunts this man?

Enter GIULIANO.

GIULIANO

Oh, sister, did you see my cloak? 55

BIANCA

Not I, I see none.

GIULIANO

God’s life, I have lost it, then. Saw you Hesperida?

THORELLO

Hesperida? Is she not at home?

GIULIANO

No, she is gone abroad, and nobody can tell me of it at home.

Exit.

THORELLO

O heaven! Abroad? What, light? A harlot too? 60

Why, why? Hark you, hath she, hath she not a brother,

A brother’s house to keep, to look unto,

But she must fling abroad? My wife hath spoiled her.

She takes right after her; she does, she does.

[To Tib] Well, you goody bawd and – 65

Enter COB. [He is unobserved at first.]

That make your husband such a hoddy-doddy!

[To Piso and Lorenzo Sr] And you, young apple-squire, and old cuckold- maker,

I’ll have you every one before the Doctor.

Nay, you shall answer it. I charge you, go.

LORENZO SR

Marry, with all my heart; I’ll go willingly. 70

How have I wronged myself in coming here!

BIANCA

[To Thorello] Go with thee? I’ll go with thee to thy shame, I warrant thee.

COB

Why, what’s the matter? What’s here to do?

THORELLO

[Seeing Cob] What, Cob, art thou here? Oh, I am abused,

And in thy house. Was never man so wronged! 75

COB

’Slid, in my house? Who wronged you in my house?

THORELLO

Marry, young-lust-in-old and old-in-young, here.

Thy wife’s their bawd; here have I taken them.

COB

[To Tib] Do you hear? Did I not charge you keep your doors shut here, and do

you let them lie open for all comers? 80

Cob beats his wife. [She fights back.]

Do you scratch?

LORENZO SR

Friend, have patience. If she have done wrong in this, let her

answer it afore the magistrate.

COB

[To Tib] Ay, come, you shall go afore the Doctor.

TIB

Nay, I will go. I’ll see an you may be allowed to beat your poor wife thus at 85

every cuckoldly knave’s pleasure. The devil and the pox take you all for me!

Why do you not go now?

THORELLO

A bitter quean. Come, we’ll have you tamed. Exeunt.

[5.2] Enter MUSCO alone [disguised as a city sergeant, with a badge of office].

MUSCO

Well, of all my disguises yet, now am I most like myself, being in this

varlet’s suit. A man of my present profession never counterfeits till he lay hold

upon a debtor and says he ’rests him, for then he brings him to all manner

of unrest. A kind of little kings we are, bearing the diminutive of a mace made

like a young artichoke that always carries pepper and salt in itself. Well, I know 5

not what danger I undergo by this exploit. Pray God I come well off.

Enter BOBADILLA and MATHEO.

MATHEO

See, I think yonder is the varlet.

BOBADILLA

Let’s go in quest of him.

MATHEO

[To Musco] God save you, friend. Are not you here by the appointment

of Doctor Clement’s man? 10

MUSCO

Yes, an please you, sir. He told me two gentlemen had willed him to procure

an arrest upon one Signor Giuliano by a warrant from his master, which

I have about me.

MATHEO

It is honestly done of you both. And see where he comes you must

arrest. Upon him, for God’s sake, before he be ware! 15

Enter STEPHANO [wearing Giuliano’s cloak].

BOBADILLA

Bear back, Matheo!

MUSCO

Signor Giuliano, I arrest you, sir, in the Duke’s name.

STEPHANO

Signor Giuliano? Am I Signor Giuliano? I am one Signor Stephano,

I tell you, and you do not well, by God’s lid, to arrest me, I tell you truly. I am

not in your master’s books, I would you should well know. Ay, and a plague of 20

God on you for making me afraid thus!

MUSCO

Why, how are you deceived, gentlemen?

BOBADILLA

He wears such a cloak, and that deceived us. But see, here ’a comes.

Officer, this is he.

Enter GIULIANO.

GIULIANO

[To Stephano] Why, how now, Signor Gull, are you turned filcher of 25

late? Come, deliver my cloak.

STEPHANO

Your cloak, sir? I bought it even now in the market.

MUSCO

Signor Giuliano, I must arrest you, sir.

GIULIANO

Arrest me, sir? At whose suit?

MUSCO

At these two gentlemen’s. 30

GIULIANO

I obey thee, varlet; but for these villains –

MUSCO

Keep the peace, I charge you, sir, in the Duke’s name, sir.

GIULIANO

What’s the matter, varlet?

MUSCO

You must go before Master Doctor Clement, sir, to answer what these

gentlemen will object against you. Hark you, sir, I will use you kindly. 35

MATHEO

[To Giuliano] We’ll be even with you, sir. – Come, Signor Bobadilla,

we’ll go before and prepare the Doctor. – Varlet, look to him.

BOBADILLA

The varlet is a tall man, by Jesu.

GIULIANO

Away, you rascals! Exeunt Bobadilla and Matheo.

[To Stephano] Signor, I shall have my cloak. 40

STEPHANO

Your cloak? I say once again I bought it, and I’ll keep it.

GIULIANO

You will keep it?

STEPHANO

Ay, that I will.

GIULIANO

[To Musco] Varlet, stay! Here’s thy fee. Arrest him.

[He gives Musco money.]

MUSCO

Signor Stephano, I arrest you. 45

STEPHANO

Arrest me? There, take your cloak; I’ll none of it.

GIULIANO

Nay, that shall not serve your turn. – Varlet, bring him away. I’ll go

with thee now to the Doctor’s. And carry him along.

STEPHANO

Why, is not here your cloak? What would you have?

GIULIANO

I care not for that. 50

MUSCO

I pray you, sir.

GIULIANO

Never talk of it. I will have him answer it.

MUSCO

Well, sir, then I’ll leave you. I’ll take this gentleman’s word for his

appearance, as I have done yours.

GIULIANO

Tut, I’ll have no words taken. Bring him along to answer it. 55

MUSCO

Good sir, I pity the gentleman’s case. Here’s your money again.

GIULIANO

God’s bread, tell not me of my money. Bring him away, I say.

MUSCO

I warrant you, he will go with you of himself.

GIULIANO

Yet more ado?

MUSCO

[Aside] I have made a fair mash of it. 60

STEPHANO

Must I go? Exeunt.

[5.3] Enter DOCTOR CLEMENT, THORELLO, LORENZO SR, BIANCA, PISO, TIB, [and] a SERVANT or two of the Doctor’s.

CLEMENT

Nay, but stay, stay. Give me leave. [To a Servant] My chair, sirrah. – You,

Signor Lorenzo, say you went thither to meet your son?

LORENZO SR

Ay, sir.

CLEMENT

But who directed you thither?

LORENZO SR

That did my man, sir. 5

CLEMENT

Where is he?

LORENZO SR

Nay, I know not now. I left him with your clerk, and appointed

him to stay here for me.

CLEMENT

About what time was this?

LORENZO SR

Marry, between one and two, as I take it. 10

CLEMENT

So, what time came my man with the message to you, Signor

Thorello?

THORELLO

After two, sir.

CLEMENT

Very good. – But lady, how that you were at Cob’s, ha?

BIANCA

An please you, sir, I’ll tell you. My brother Prospero told me that Cob’s 15

house was a suspected place.

CLEMENT

So it appears, methinks. But on.

BIANCA

And that my husband used thither daily.

CLEMENT

No matter, so he use himself well.

BIANCA

True, sir, but you know what grows by such haunts oftentimes. 20

CLEMENT

Ay, rank fruits of a jealous brain, lady. But did you find your husband

there in that case, as you suspected?

THORELLO

I found her there, sir.

CLEMENT

Did you so? That alters the case. Who gave you knowledge of your

wife’s being there? 25

THORELLO

Marry, that did my brother Prospero.

CLEMENT

How? Prospero first tell her, then tell you after? Where is Prospero?

THORELLO

Gone with my sister, sir, I know not whither.

CLEMENT

Why, this is a mere trick, a device. You are gulled in this most grossly.

[To Tib] Alas, poor wench, wert thou beaten for this? 30

Enter [a SERVANT,] one of the Doctor’s men.

How now, sirrah, what’s the matter?

SERVANT

Sir, there’s a gentleman in the court without desires to speak with

Your Worship.

CLEMENT

A gentleman? What’s he?

SERVANT

A soldier, sir, he saith. 35

CLEMENT

A soldier? Fetch me my armour, my sword quickly! A soldier speak

with me? Why, when, knaves? [He arms himself.] Come on, come on, hold my cap

there, so; give me my gorget, my sword. [To Lorenzo Sr, Thorello, Bianca] Stand by.

I will end your matters anon. [To the Servant] Let the soldier enter.

[The Servant goes to the door.]

Enter BOBADILLA and MATHEO.

Now, sir, what have you to say to me? 40

BOBADILLA

By Your Worship’s favour –

CLEMENT

[To Matheo] Nay, keep out, sir, I know not your pretence. [To Bobadilla]

You send me word, sir, you are a soldier; why, sir, you shall be answered

here; here be them have been among soldiers. Sir, your pleasure.

BOBADILLA

Faith, sir, so it is: This gentleman and myself have been most 45

violently wronged by one Signor Giuliano, a gallant of the city here. And for my

own part, I protest, being a man in no sort given to this filthy humour of

quarrelling, he hath assaulted me in the way of my peace, despoiled me of mine

honour, disarmed me of my weapons, and beaten me in the open streets, when

I not so much as once offered to resist him. 50

CLEMENT

Oh, God’s precious! Is this the soldier? [To his Servant] Here, take my

armour quickly; ’twill make him swoon, I fear. He is not fit to look on’t that

will put up a blow.

MATHEO

An’t please Your Worship, he was bound to the peace.

CLEMENT

Why, an he were, sir, his hands were not bound, were they? 55

Enter [a] SERVANT.

SERVANT

There is one of the varlets of the city has brought two gentlemen here

upon arrest, sir.

CLEMENT

Bid him come in. Set by the picture.

[Bobadilla is led aside; a Servant goes to the door.]

Enter MUSCO [disguised as an arresting sergeant] with GIULIANO and STEPHANO.

Now, sir, what? Signor Giuliano? Is’t you that are arrested at Signor

Freshwater’s suit here? 60

GIULIANO

I’faith, Master Doctor, and here’s another brought at my suit.

CLEMENT

[To Stephano] What are you, sir?

STEPHANO

A gentleman, sir. [Seeing Lorenzo Sr] Oh, uncle!

CLEMENT

Uncle? Who, Lorenzo?

LORENZO SR

Ay, sir. 65

STEPHANO

God’s my witness, uncle, I am wronged here monstrously! He chargeth

me with stealing of his cloak, and would I might never stir if I did not find

it in the street by chance.

GIULIANO

Oh, did you find it, now? You said you bought it erewhile.

STEPHANO

And you said I stole it. Nay, now my uncle is here I care not. 70

CLEMENT

Well, let this breathe a while. [To Bobadilla] You that have cause to

complain there, stand forth. Had you a warrant for this arrest?

BOBADILLA

Ay, an’t please Your Worship.

CLEMENT

Nay, do not speak in passion so. Where had you it?

BOBADILLA

Of your clerk, sir. 75

CLEMENT

That’s well, an my clerk can make warrants and my hand not at them!

Where is the warrant? Varlet, have you it?

MUSCO

No, sir, Your Worship’s man bid me do it for these gentlemen, and he

would be my discharge.

CLEMENT

Why, Signor Giuliano, are you such a novice to be arrested and never 80

see the warrant?

GIULIANO

Why, sir, he did not arrest me.

CLEMENT

No? How then?

GIULIANO

Marry, sir, he came to me and said he must arrest me and he would

use me kindly, and so forth. 85

CLEMENT

Oh, God’s pity, was it so, sir? He must arrest you? [To a Servant] Give

me my long-sword there! Help me off, so. – Come on, sir varlet.

[Musco kneels as Doctor Clement flourishes over him with his long-sword.]

I must cut off your legs, sirrah. Nay, stand up; I’ll use you kindly. I must cut off

your legs, I say.

MUSCO

Oh, good sir, I beseech you! Nay, good Master Doctor. Oh, good sir! 90

CLEMENT

I must do it; there is no remedy. I must cut off your legs, sirrah; I must

cut off your ears, you rascal, I must do it. I must cut off your nose; I must cut

off your head.

MUSCO

Oh, for God sake, good Master Doctor!

CLEMENT

Well, rise. 95

[Musco rises.]

How dost thou now? Dost thou feel thyself well? Hast thou no harm?

MUSCO

No, I thank God, sir, and Your good Worship.

CLEMENT

Why, so. I said I must cut off thy legs, and I must cut off thy arms, and

I must cut off thy head, but I did not do it. So you said you must arrest

this gentleman, but you did not arrest him. You knave, you slave, you rogue! 100

Do you say you ‘must’ arrest?[To a Servant] Sirrah, away with him to the jail! [To Musco]

I’ll teach you a trick for your ‘must’.

MUSCO

Good Master Doctor, I beseech you, be good to me.

CLEMENT

Marry o’ God! Away with him, I say!

MUSCO

[Aside] Nay, ’sblood, before I go to prison, I’ll put on my old brazen face 105

and disclaim in my vocation. I’ll discover, that’s flat. An I be committed, it shall

be for the committing of more villainies than this. Hang me an I lose the least

grain of my fame.

CLEMENT

Why, when, knave? By God’s marry, I’ll clap thee by the heels, too.

[Servants attempt to lead Musco off.]

MUSCO

Hold, hold, I pray you! 110

CLEMENT

What’s the matter? [To the Servants] Stay there.

MUSCO

Faith, sir, afore I go to this house of bondage, I have a case to unfold to

Your Worship. Which, that it may appear the more plain unto Your Worship’s

view, I do thus first of all uncase [Throwing off his disguise] and appear in mine

own proper nature: servant to this gentleman [Indicating Lorenzo Sr] and known 115

by the name of Musco.

LORENZO SR

Ha? Musco!

STEPHANO

Oh, uncle, Musco has been with my cousin and I all this day!

CLEMENT

Did not I tell you there was some device?

MUSCO

Nay, good Master Doctor, since I have laid myself thus open to Your 120

Worship, now stand strong for me till the progress of my tale be ended. And then

if my wit do not deserve your countenance, ’slight, throw it on a dog and let

me go hang myself.

CLEMENT

Body of me, a merry knave! Give me a bowl of sack.

[A Servant brings him drink.]

Signor Lorenzo, I bespeak your patience in particular, marry, your ears in 125

general.

[Offering a toast to Musco.]

Here, knave, Doctor Clement drinks to thee.

MUSCO

I pledge, Master Doctor, an ’twere a sea, to the bottom.

CLEMENT

Fill his bowl for that, fill his bowl.

[Musco’s drink is replenished.]

So, now speak freely. 130

MUSCO

[Drinks.] Indeed, this is it will make a man speak freely. But to the point:

know then that I, Musco, being somewhat more trusted of my master than

reason required, and knowing his intent to Florence, did assume the habit of a

poor soldier in wants. And, minding by some means to intercept his journey in

the midway, ’twixt the grange and the city I encountered him. Where, begging 135

of him in the most accomplished and true garb, as they term it, contrary to all

expectation he reclaimed me from that bad course of life, entertained me into

his service, employed me in his business, possessed me with his secrets – which

I no sooner had received but, seeking my young master and finding him at this

gentleman’s house [Indicating Prospero], I revealed all most amply. This done, by 140

the device of Signor Prospero and him together I returned (as the raven did to

the ark) to mine old master again, told him he should find his son, in what

manner he knows, at one Cob’s house – where indeed he never meant to come.

Now my master, he, to maintain the jest, went thither, and left me with Your

Worship’s clerk, who, being of a most fine, supple disposition (as most of your 145

clerks are), proffers me the wine which I had the grace to accept very easily, and

to the tavern we went. There, after much ceremony, I made him drunk in kindness,

stripped him to his shirt, and, leaving him in that cool vein, departed

frolic, courtier-like, having obtained a suit. Which suit fitting me exceedingly

well, I put on, and, usurping your man’s phrase and action, carried a message 150

to Signor Thorello in your name. Which message was merely devised but to

procure his absence while Signor Prospero might make a conveyance of

Hesperida to my master.

CLEMENT

Stay. fill me the bowl again.

[His wine is replenished.]

Here. ’Twere pity of his life would not cherish such a spirit! I drink to thee. 155

[They drink.] Fill him wine. [To Thorello] Why, now do you perceive the trick of it?

THORELLO

Ay, I perceive well we were all abused.

LORENZO SR

Well, what remedy?

CLEMENT

Where is Lorenzo and Prospero? Canst thou tell?

MUSCO

Ay, sir, they are at supper at the Mermaid, where I left your man. 160

CLEMENT

[To a Servant] Sirrah, go warn them hither presently before me, and if

the hour of your fellow’s resurrection be come, bring him too. Exit Servant.

But forward, forward. When thou hadst been at Thorello’s –

MUSCO

Marry, sir, coming along the street, these two gentlemen

[Indicating Bobadilla and Matheo] meet me and, very strongly supposing me to be Your 165

Worship’s scribe, entreated me to procure them a warrant for the arrest of Signor

Giuliano. I promised them upon some pair of silk stockings or a jewel or so to

do it, and to get a varlet of the city to serve it; which varlet I appointed should

meet them upon the Rialto at such an hour. They no sooner gone but I, in a

mere hope of more gain by Signor Giuliano, went to one of Satan’s old ingles, a 170

broker, and there pawned your man’s livery for a varlet’s suit, which, here with

myself, I offer unto Your Worship’s consideration.

CLEMENT

Well, give me thy hand. Pro superi! Ingenium magnum quis nosset

Homerum, Ilias aeternum si latuisset opus? I admire thee, I honour thee, and, if thy master

or any man here be angry with thee, I shall suspect his wit while I know 175

him for it. – Do you hear, Signor Thorello, Signor Lorenzo, and the rest of my

good friends? I pray you, let me have peace when they come. I have sent for the

two gallants and Hesperida. God’s marry, I must have you friends. [A noise is heard.]

How now? What noise is there?

Enter [a] SERVANT, then PETO [dressed in armour].

SERVANT

Sir, it is Peto is come home. 180

CLEMENT

Peto? Bring him hither, bring him hither.

[Peto is brought forward.]

What, how now, Signor Drunkard, in arms against me, ha? Your reason, your

reason for this?

PETO

I beseech Your Worship to pardon me.

CLEMENT

[To the Servant] Well, sirrah, tell him I do pardon him. 185

PETO

Truly, sir, I did happen into bad company by chance and they cast me in a

sleep and stripped me of all my clothes.

CLEMENT

Tut, this is not to the purpose. Touching your armour: what might

your armour signify?

PETO

Marry, sir, it hung in the room where they stripped me, and I borrowed it 190

of one of the drawers now in the evening to come home in, because I was loath

to come through the street in my shirt.

Enter LORENZO JR, PROSPERO, [and] HESPERIDA.

CLEMENT

[To the Servant] Well, disarm him. But it’s no matter; let him stand by.

Who be these? – Oh, young gallants, welcome, welcome, and you, lady. Nay,

never scatter such amazed looks amongst us. Qui nil potest sperare, desperet nihil. 195

PROSPERO

Faith, Master Doctor, that’s even I; my hopes are small and my

despair shall be as little. – Brother, sister, brother: what, cloudy, cloudy? And

will no sunshine on these looks appear? Well, since there is such a tempest

toward, I’ll be the porpoise; I’ll dance. [To Hesperida] Wench, be of good cheer;

thou hast a cloak for the rain yet. Where is he? [To Lorenzo Jr] ’Sheart, how 200

now, the picture of the Prodigal? Go to, I’ll have the calf dressed for you at my

charges.

LORENZO SR

Well, son Lorenzo, this day’s work of yours hath much deceived

my hopes, troubled my peace, and stretched my patience further than became

the spirit of duty. 205

CLEMENT

Nay, God’s pity, Signor Lorenzo, you shall urge it no more. Come,

since you are here, I’ll have the disposing of all. But first, Signor Giuliano, at

my request take your cloak again.

GIULIANO

[Taking his cloak] Well, sir, I am content.

CLEMENT

Stay, now let me see. Oh, Signor Snow-Liver, I had almost forgotten 210

him. And your Genius there, what, doth he suffer for a good conscience too?

Doth he bear his cross with patience?

MUSCO

Nay, they have scarce one cross between them both to bear.

CLEMENT

Why, dost thou know him? What is he? What is he?

MUSCO

Marry, search his pockets, sir, and they’ll show you he is an author, sir. 215

CLEMENT

Dic mihi, Musa, virum. Are you an author, sir? Give me leave a little.

Come on, sir. I’ll make verses with you now in honour of the gods and the goddesses

for what you dare, extempore. And now I begin:

Mount thee, my Phlegon muse, and testify

How Saturn, sitting in an ebon cloud, 220

Disrobed his podex, white as ivory,

And through the welkin thundered all aloud.

There’s for you, sir.

PROSPERO

Oh, he writes not in that height of style.

CLEMENT

No? We’ll come a step or two lower, then: 225

From Catadupa and the banks of Nile,

Where only breeds your monstrous crocodile,

Now are we purposed for to fetch our style.

PROSPERO

Oh, too far-fetched for him still, Master Doctor.

CLEMENT

Ay, say you so? Let’s entreat a sight of his vein, then. 230

PROSPERO

[To Matheo] Signor, Master Doctor desires to see a sight of your vein.

Nay, you must not deny him.

[They search Matheo’s pockets.]

CLEMENT

What, all this verse? Body of me, he carries a whole realm, a commonwealth

of paper, in his hose! Let’s see some of his subjects.

[He reads.] Unto the boundless ocean of thy beauty235

Runs this poor river, charged with streams of zeal,

Returning thee the tribute of my duty,

Which here my youth, my plaints, my love reveal.

Good! Is this your own invention?

MATHEO

No, sir, I translated that out of a book called Delia. 240

CLEMENT

Oh, but I would see some of your own, some of your own.

MATHEO

Sir, here’s the beginning of a sonnet I made to my mistress.

CLEMENT

That, that. [Looking at the dedication] Who? ‘To Madonna Hesperida.’

Is she your mistress?

PROSPERO

It pleaseth him to call her so, sir. 245

CLEMENT

[Reads] ‘In summertime, when Phoebus’ golden rays’ –

You translated this too, did you not?

PROSPERO

No, this is invention. He found it in a ballad.

MATHEO

Faith, sir, I had most of the conceit of it out of a ballad, indeed.

CLEMENT

Conceit? [To a Servant] Fetch me a couple of torches, sirrah, I may see 250

the conceit. Quickly; it’s very dark.

GIULIANO

Call you this poetry?

LORENZO JR

Poetry? Nay, then call blasphemy religion,

Call devils angels and sin piety;

Let all things be preposterously transchanged. 255

LORENZO SR

Why, how now, son? What, are you startled now?

Hath the breeze pricked you? Ha! Go to. You see

How abjectly your poetry is ranked

In general opinion.

LORENZO JR

Opinion? Oh, God, let gross opinion 260

Sink and be damned as deep as Barathrum!

If it may stand with your most wished content,

I can refel opinion and approve

The state of poesy, such as it is,

Blessèd, eternal, and most true divine. 265

Indeed, if you will look on poesy

As she appears in many – poor and lame,

Patched up in remnants and old worn rags,

Half-starved for want of her peculiar food,

Sacred invention – then I must confirm 270

Both your conceit and censure of her merit.

But view her in her glorious ornaments,

Attirèd in the majesty of art,

Set high in spirit with the precious taste

Of sweet philosophy, and, which is most, 275

Crowned with the rich traditions of a soul

That hates to have her dignity profaned

With any relish of an earthly thought:

Oh, then, how proud a presence doth she bear!

Then is she like herself, fit to be seen 280

Of none but grave and consecrated eyes.

Nor is it any blemish to her fame

That such lean, ignorant, and blasted wits,

Such brainless gulls, should utter their stol’n wares

With such applauses in our vulgar ears, 285

Or that their slubbered lines have current pass

From the fat judgements of the multitude,

But that this barren and infected age

Should set no difference ’twixt these empty spirits

And a true poet – than which reverend name 290

Nothing can more adorn humanity.

Enter [SERVANTS] with torches.

CLEMENT

Ay, Lorenzo, but election is now governed altogether by the influence

of humour, which, instead of those holy flames that should direct and light the

soul to eternity, hurls forth nothing but smoke and congested vapours that

stifle her up and bereave her of all sight and motion. But she must have store 295

of hellebore given her to purge these gross obstructions. [To the Servants] Oh,

that’s well said! Give me thy torch; come, lay this stuff together. So, give fire.

[They burn Matheo’s verses.]

There, see, see, how our poet’s glory shines brighter and brighter! Still, still

it increaseth! Oh, now it’s at the highest, and now it declines as fast. You may

see, gallants, Sic transit gloria mundi. [To Bobadilla and Matheo] Well, now, my two 300

Signor Outsides, stand forth and lend me your large ears to a

sentence, to a sentence. First, you, signor, shall this night to the cage, and so shall you, sir.

[To Matheo] From thence tomorrow morning, you, signor, shall be carried to

the market cross and be there bound; [To Bobadilla] and so shall you, sir, in a

large motley coat with a rod at your girdle; [To Matheo] and you in an old suit of 305

sackcloth and the ashes of your papers – save the ashes, sirrah – shall mourn all

day; and at night both together sing some ballad of repentance very piteously,

which you shall make to the tune of ‘Who list to lead and a soldier’s life’.

[To Peto] Sirrah billman, embrace you this torch and light the gentlemen to their

lodgings, and because we tender their safety, you shall watch them tonight; 310

you are provided for the purpose. Away, and look to your charge with an open

eye, sirrah.

BOBADILLA

Well, I am armed in soul against the worst of fortune.

MATHEO

Faith, so should I be, an I had slept on it.

PETO

I am armed too, but I am not like to sleep on it. 315

MUSCO

[Aside] Oh, how this pleaseth me!

Exeunt [Bobadilla, Matheo, and Peto].

CLEMENT

Now, Signor Thorello, Giuliano, Prospero, Bianca.

STEPHANO

And not me, sir?

CLEMENT

Yes, and you, sir. I had lost a sheep an he had not bleated. I must have

you all friends. [To Prospero and Bianca] But first, a word with you, young gallant, 320

and you, lady.

GIULIANO

Well, brother Prospero, by this good light that shines here, I am

loath to kindle fresh coals, but, an you had come in my walk within these two

hours, I had given you that you should not have clawn off again in haste. By

Jesus, I had done it; I am the arrant’st rogue that ever breathed else! But now, 325

beshrew my heart if I bear you any malice in the earth.

PROSPERO

Faith, I did it but to hold up a jest and help my sister to a husband.

But brother Thorello, and sister, you have a spice of the yealous yet, both of

you – in your hose, I mean. Come, do not dwell upon your anger so much. Let’s

all be smooth-foreheaded once again. 330

THORELLO

He plays upon my forehead, brother Giuliano. I pray you, tell me

one thing I shall ask you: is my forehead anything rougher than it was wont to

be?

GIULIANO

Rougher? Your forehead is smooth enough, man.

THORELLO

[Aside] Why should he then say ‘Be smooth-foreheaded’ 335

Unless he jested at the smoothness of it?

And that may be, for horn is very smooth;

So are my brows. By Jesu, smooth as horn!

BIANCA

[To Prospero] Brother, had he no haunt thither, in good faith?

PROSPERO

No, upon my soul. 340

BIANCA

[To Thorello] Nay then, sweetheart, nay, I pray thee, be not angry. Good

faith, I’ll never suspect thee any more. Nay, kiss me, sweet muss.

THORELLO

Tell me, Bianca, do not you play the woman with me?

BIANCA

What’s that, sweetheart?

THORELLO

Dissemble. 345

BIANCA

Dissemble?

THORELLO

Nay, do not turn away. But say, i’faith, was it not a match appointed

’twixt this old gentleman [Indicating Lorenzo Sr] and you?

BIANCA

A match?

THORELLO

Nay, if it were not, I do not care. Do not weep, I pray thee, sweet 350

Bianca. Nay, so, now. By Jesus, I am not jealous, but resolved I have the faithfull’st

wife in Italy!

For this I find: where jealousy is fed,

Horns in the mind are worse than on the head.

See what a drove of horns fly in the air, 355

Winged with my cleansèd and my credulous breath!

Watch them, suspicious eyes, watch where they fall:

See, see, on heads that think they have none at all!

Oh, what a plen’uous world of this will come!

When air rains horns, all men be sure of some. 360

CLEMENT

Why, that’s well. Come, then, what say you? Are all agreed? Doth

none stand out?

PROSPERO

None but this gentleman [Indicating Lorenzo Sr], to whom in my own

person I owe all duty and affection, but most seriously entreat pardon for

whatsoever hath passed in these occurrents that might be contrary to his most 365

desired content.

LORENZO SR

Faith, sir, it is a virtue that pursues

Any save rude and uncomposèd spirits

To make a fair construction, and indeed

Not to stand off when such respective means 370

Invite a general content in all.

CLEMENT

Well, then, I conjure you all here to put off all discontentment. First

you, Signor Lorenzo, your cares; [To Thorello and Bianca] you and you, your

jealousy; [To Giuliano] you, your anger; [To Prospero] and you, your wit, sir. And

for a peace-offering, here’s one willing to be sacrificed upon this altar. Say, do 375

you approve my motion?

PROSPERO

We do. I’ll be mouth for all.

CLEMENT

Why, then, I wish them all joy. And now, to make our evening happiness

more full, this night you shall be all my guests, where we’ll enjoy the very

spirit of mirth and carouse to the health of this heroic spirit [Indicating Musco], 380

whom to honour the more I do invest in my own robes, desiring you two,

Giuliano and Prospero, to be his supporters; the train to follow. Myself will

lead, ushered by my page here, with this honourable verse: Claudite iam rivos,

pueri, sat prata biberunt. [Exeunt in procession.]

FINIS

The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson

Every Man In His Humour, quarto version (1598)

Edited by David Bevington

INTRODUCTION

The Number and Names of the Actors