The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

  That ere she sleep has thrice her prayers said,

  Raise up the organs of her fantasy,

  Sleep she as sound as careless infancy.

  But those as sleep and think not on their sins,

  Pinch them, arms, legs, backs, shoulders, sides, and

  shins.

  MISTRESS QUICKLY About, about!

  Search Windsor Castle, elves, within and out.

  Strew good luck, oafs, on every sacred room,

  That it may stand till the perpetual doom

  In state as wholesome as in state ‘tis fit,

  Worthy the owner, and the owner it.

  The several chairs of order look you scour

  With juice of balm and every precious flower.

  Each fair instalment, coat, and sev’ral crest

  With loyal blazon evermore be blessed;

  And nightly, meadow-fairies, look you sing,

  Like to the Garter’s compass, in a ring. 65

  Th‘expressure that it bears, green let it be,

  More fertile-fresh than all the field to see;

  And ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ write

  In em‘rald tufts, flowers purple, blue, and white,

  Like sapphire, pearl, and rich embroidery,

  Buckled below fair knighthood’s bending knee—

  Fairies use flowers for their charactery.

  Away, disperse!—But till ’tis one o’clock

  Our dance of custom, round about the oak

  Of Herne the hunter, let us not forget.

  EVANS

  Pray you, lock hand in hand; yourselves in order set;

  And twenty glow-worms shall our lanterns be

  To guide our measure round about the tree.—

  But stay; I smell a man of middle earth.

  SIR JOHN (aside)

  God defend me from that Welsh fairy,

  Lest he transform me to a piece of cheese!

  ⌈HOBGOBLIN⌉ (to Sir John)

  Vile worm, thou wast o’erlooked even in thy birth.

  MISTRESS QUICKLY (to fairies)

  With trial-fire, touch me his finger-end.

  If he be chaste, the flame will back descend,

  And turn him to no pain; but if he start,

  It is the flesh of a corrupted heart.

  ⌈HOBGOBLIN⌉

  A trial, come!

  EVANS Come, will this wood take fire ?

  They burn Sir John with tapers

  SIR JOHN O, O, O!

  MISTRESS QUICKLY

  Corrupt, corrupt, and tainted in desire.

  About him, fairies; sing a scornful rhyme;

  And, as you trip, still pinch him to your time.

  They dance around Sir John, pinching him and singing:

  FAIRIES Fie on sinful fantasy!

  Fie on lust and luxury!

  Lust is but a bloody fire,

  Kindled with unchaste desire,

  Fed in heart, whose flames aspire,

  As thoughts do blow them, higher and higher.

  Pinch him, fairies, mutually.

  Pinch him for his villainy.

  Pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about,

  Till candles and starlight and moonshine be out.

  During the song, enter Doctor Caius one way, and exit stealing away a fairy in green; enter Master Slender another way, and exit stealing away a fairy in white; enter Master Fenton, and exit stealing away Anne Page. After the song, a noise of hunting within. Exeunt Mistress Quickly, Evans, Hobgoblin, and fairies, running. Sir John rises, and starts to run away. Enter Master Page, Master Ford, Mistress Page, and Mistress Ford

  PAGE

  Nay, do not fly. I think we have watched you now.

  Will none but Herne the hunter serve your turn?

  MISTRESS PAGE

  I pray you, come, hold up the jest no higher.

  Now, good Sir John, how like you Windsor wives?

  (Pointing to Falstaff’s horns)

  See you these, husband? Do not these fair yokes

  Become the forest better than the town ?

  FORD (to Sir John) Now, sir, who’s a cuckold now? Master Brooke, Falstaff’s a knave, a cuckoldly knave. Here are his horns, Master Brooke. And, Master Brooke, he hath enjoyed nothing of Ford’s but his buck-basket, his cudgel, and twenty pounds of money which must be paid to Master Brooke; his horses are arrested for it, Master Brooke.

  MISTRESS FORD Sir John, we have had ill luck. We could never mate. I will never take you for my love again, but I will always count you my deer.

  SIR JOHN I do begin to perceive that I am made an ass. ⌈He takes off the horns⌉

  FORD Ay, and an ox, too. Both the proofs are extant.

  SIR JOHN And these are not fairies? By the Lord, I was three or four times in the thought they were not fairies, and yet the guiltiness of my mind, the sudden surprise of my powers, drove the grossness of the foppery into a received belief—in despite of the teeth of all rhyme and reason—that they were fairies. See now how wit may be made a Jack-a-Lent when ’tis upon ill employment!

  EVANS Sir John Falstaff, serve Got and leave your desires, and fairies will not pinse you.

  FORD Well said, Fairy Hugh.

  EVANS And leave you your jealousies too, I pray you.

  FORD I will never mistrust my wife again till thou art able to woo her in good English.

  SIR JOHN Have I laid my brain in the sun and dried it, that it wants matter to prevent so gross o‘er-reaching as this? Am I ridden with a Welsh goat too? Shall I have a coxcomb of frieze ? ’Tis time I were choked with a piece of toasted cheese.

  EVANS Seese is not good to give putter; your belly is all putter. z to

  SIR JOHN ‘Seese’ and ‘putter’? Have I lived to stand at the taunt of one that makes fritters of English? This is enough to be the decay of lust and late walking through the realm.

  MISTRESS PAGE Why, Sir John, do you think, though we would have thrust virtue out of our hearts by the head and shoulders, and have given ourselves without scruple to hell, that ever the devil could have made you our delight?

  FORD What, a hodge-pudding, a bag of flax?

  MISTRESS PAGE A puffed man?

  PAGE Old, cold, withered, and of intolerable entrails?

  FORD And one that is as slanderous as Satan?

  PAGE And as poor as job?

  FORD And as wicked as his wife?

  EVANS And given to fornications, and to taverns, and sack, and wine, and metheglins; and to drinkings, and swearings, and starings, pribbles and prabbles?

  SIR JOHN Well, I am your theme; you have the start of me. I am dejected. I am not able to answer the Welsh flannel. Ignorance itself is a plummet o’er me. Use me as you will.

  FORD Marry, sir, we’ll bring you to Windsor, to one Master Brooke, that you have cozened of money, to whom you should have been a pander. Over and above that you have suffered, I think to repay that money will be a biting affliction.

  PAGE Yet be cheerful, knight. Thou shalt eat a posset tonight at my house, where I will desire thee to laugh at my wife that now laughs at thee. Tell her Master Slender hath married her daughter.

  MISTRESS PAGE (aside) Doctors doubt that! If Anne Page be my daughter, she is, by this, Doctor Caius’s wife.

  Enter Master Slender

  SLENDER Whoa, ho, ho, father Page!

  PAGE Son, how now? How now, son? Have you dispatched?

  SLENDER Dispatched? I’ll make the best in Gloucestershire know on’t; would I were hanged, la, else.

  PAGE Of what, son?

  SLENDER I came yonder at Eton to marry Mistress Anne Page, and she’s a great lubberly boy. If it had not been i‘th’ church, I would have swinged him, or he should have swinged me. If I did not think it had been Anne Page, would I might never stir; and ’tis a postmaster’s boy.

  PAGE Upon my life, then, you took the wrong.

  SLENDER What need you tell me that? I think so, when I took a boy for a girl. If I had been married to him, for all he was in woman�
��s apparel, I would not have had him.

  PAGE Why, this is your own folly. Did not I tell you how you should know my daughter by her garments?

  SLENDER I went to her in white and cried ‘mum’, and she cried ‘budget’, as Anne and I had appointed; and yet it was not Anne, but a postmaster’s boy.

  MISTRESS PAGE Good George, be not angry. I knew of your purpose, turned my daughter into green, and indeed she is now with the Doctor at the deanery, and there married.

  Enter Doctor Caius

  CAIUS Ver is Mistress Page? By Gar, I am cozened! I ha’ married un garçon, a boy, un paysan, by Gar. A boy! It is not Anne Page, by Gar. I am cozened.

  PAGE Why, did you take her in green?

  CAIUS Ay, be Gar, and ’tis a boy. Be Gar, I’ll raise all Windsor.

  FORD This is strange. Who hath got the right Anne?

  Enter Master Fenton and Anne

  PAGE

  My heart misgives me: here comes Master Fenton.—

  How now, Master Fenton?

  ANNE

  Pardon, good father. Good my mother, pardon.

  PAGE

  Now, mistress, how chance you went not with Master Slender?

  ⌈MISTRESS⌉ PAGE

  Why went you not with Master Doctor, maid?

  FENTON

  You do amaze her. Hear the truth of it.

  You would have married her, most shamefully,

  Where there was no proportion held in love.

  The truth is, she and I, long since contracted,

  Are now so sure that nothing can dissolve us.

  Th’offence is holy that she hath committed,

  And this deceit loses the name of craft,

  Of disobedience, or unduteous title,

  Since therein she doth evitate and shun

  A thousand irreligious cursed hours

  Which forced marriage would have brought upon her.

  FORD (to Page and Mistress Page)

  Stand not amazed. Here is no remedy.

  In love the heavens themselves do guide the state;

  Money buys lands, and wives are sold by fate.

  SIR JOHN I am glad, though you have ta’en a special stand to strike at me, that your arrow hath glanced.

  PAGE

  Well, what remedy? Fenton, heaven give thee joy I

  What cannot be eschewed must be embraced.

  SIR JOHN

  When night-dogs run, all sorts of deer are chased.

  MISTRESS PAGE

  Well, I will muse no further. Master Fenton,

  Heaven give you many, many merry days!

  Good husband, let us every one go home,

  And laugh this sport o’er by a country fire,

  Sir John and all.

  FORD Let it be so, Sir John.

  To Master Brooke you yet shall hold your word,

  For he tonight shall lie with Mistress Ford. Exeunt

  2 HENRY IV

  2 Henry IV, printed in 1600 as The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, was not reprinted until it was included in somewhat revised form in the 1623 Folio, with the same title. Shakespeare may have started to write it in 1597, directly after I Henry IV, but have laid it aside while he composed The Merry Wives of Windsor. As in I Henry IV, he drew on The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, Holinshed’s Chronicles, and Samuel Daniel’s Four Books of the Civil Wars, along with other, minor sources; but the play contains a greater proportion of non-historical material apparently invented by Shakespeare. In this play Shakespeare seems from the start to have accepted the change of Sir John’s surname to Falstaff which had been enforced upon him in I Henry IV.

  Like I Henry IV, Part Two draws on the techniques of comedy, but its overall tone is more sombre. At its start, the Prince seems to have regressed from his reformed state at the end of Part One; his father still has many causes for anxiety, has not made his expiatory pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and is again the victim of rebellion, led this time by the Earl of Northumberland, the Archbishop of York, and the Lords Hastings and Mowbray. Again Henry’s public responsibilities are exacerbated by anxieties about Prince Harry’s behaviour; the climax of their relationship comes after Harry, discovering his sick father asleep and thinking him dead, tries on his crown; after bitterly upbraiding him, Henry accepts his son’s assertions of good faith, and, recalling the devious means by which he himself came to the throne, warns Harry that he may need to protect himself against civil strife by pursuing ‘foreign quarrels’-the campaigning against France depicted in Henry V. The King dies in the Jerusalem Chamber of Westminster Abbey, the closest he will get to the Holy Land.

  In this play the Prince spends less time than in Part One with Sir John, who is shown much in the company of Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet at the Boar’s Head tavern in Eastcheap and later in Gloucestershire on his way to and from the place of battle. Shakespeare never excelled the bitter-sweet comedy of the passages involving Falstaff and his old comrade Justice Shallow. The play ends in a counterpointing of major and minor keys as the newly crowned Henry V rejects Sir John and all that he has stood for.

  THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

  The Second Part of Henry the Fourth

  Induction Enter Rumour ⌈in a robe⌉ painted full of tongues

  RUMOUR

  Open your ears; for which of you will stop

  The vent of hearing when loud Rumour speaks?

  I from the orient to the drooping west,

  Making the wind my post-horse, still unfold

  The acts commenced on this ball of earth.

  Upon my tongues continual slanders ride,

  The which in every language I pronounce,

  Stuffing the ears of men with false reports.

  I speak of peace, while covert enmity

  Under the smile of safety wounds the world;

  And who but Rumour, who but only I,

  Make fearful musters and prepared defence

  Whiles the big year, swoll’n with some other griefs,

  Is thought with child by the stern tyrant war,

  And no such matter?Rumour is a pipe

  Blown by surmises, Jealousy’s conjectures,

  And of so easy and so plain a stop

  That the blunt monster with uncounted heads,

  The still-discordant wav’ring multitude,

  Can play upon it. But what need I thus

  My well-known body to anatomize

  Among my household? Why is Rumour here?

  I run before King Harry’s victory,

  Who in a bloody field by Shrewsbury

  Hath beaten down young Hotspur and his troops,

  Quenching the flame of bold rebellion

  Even with the rebels’ blood. But what mean I

  To speak so true at first? My office is

  To noise abroad that Harry Monmouth fell

  Under the wrath of noble Hotspur’s sword,

  And that the King before the Douglas’ rage

  Stooped his anointed head as low as death.

  This have I rumoured through the peasant towns

  Between that royal field of Shrewsbury

  And this worm-eaten hold of raggèd stone,

  Where Hotspur’s father, old Northumberland,

  Lies crafty-sick. The posts come tiring on,

  And not a man of them brings other news

  Than they have learnt of me. From Rumour’s

  tongues

  They bring smooth comforts false, worse than true

  wrongs. Exit

  1.1 Enter Lord Bardolph at one door. ⌈He crosses the stage to another door⌉

  LORD BARDOLPH

  Who keeps the gate here, ho?

  Enter Porter ⌈above⌉

  Where is the Earl?

  PORTER

  What shall I say you are?

  LORD BARDOLPH Tell thou the Earl

  That the Lord Bardolph doth attend him here.

  PORTER

  His lordship is walked forth into the orchard.

  Please
it your honour knock but at the gate,

  And he himself will answer.

  Enter the Earl Northumberland ⌈at the other door⌉, as sick, with a crutch and coif

  LORD BARDOLPH Here comes the Earl.

  ⌈Exit Porter⌉

  NORTHUMBERLAND

  What news, Lord Bardolph? Every minute now

  Should be the father of some stratagem.

  The times are wild; contention, like a horse

  Full of high feeding, madly hath broke loose,

  And bears down all before him.

  LORD BARDOLPH Noble Earl,

  I bring you certain news from Shrewsbury.

  NORTHUMBERLAND

  Good, an God will.

  LORD BARDOLPH As good as heart can wish.

  The King is almost wounded to the death;

  And, in the fortune of my lord your son,

  Prince Harry slain outright; and both the Blunts

  Killed by the hand of Douglas; young Prince John

  And Westmorland and Stafford fled the field;

  And Harry Monmouth’s brawn, the hulk Sir John,

  Is prisoner to your son. O, such a day,

  So fought, so followed, and so fairly won,

  Came not till now to dignify the times

  Since Caesar’s fortunes!

  NORTHUMBERLAND How is this derived?

  Saw you the field? Came you from Shrewsbury?

  LORD BARDOLPH

  I spake with one, my lord, that came from thence,

  A gentleman well bred and of good name,

  That freely rendered me these news for true.

  Enter Travers

  NORTHUMBERLAND

  Here comes my servant Travers, who I sent

  On Tuesday last to listen after news.

  LORD BARDOLPH

  My lord, I overrode him on the way,

  And he is furnished with no certainties

  More than he haply may retail from me.

  NORTHUMBERLAND

  Now, Travers, what good tidings comes with you?

  TRAVERS

  My lord, Lord Bardolph turned me back

  With joyful tidings, and being better horsed

  Outrode me. After him came spurring hard