The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

by William Shakespeare

  Pleased with this dainty bait, thus goes to bed.

  He sheathes his sword

  Come, tie his body to my horse’s tail.

  Along the field I will the Trojan trail.

  Exeunt, dragging the bodies

  5.10 A retreat is sounded. Enter Agamemnon, Ajax, Menelaus, Nestor, Diomedes, and the rest, marching. ⌈A shout within⌉

  AGAMEMNON

  Hark, hark! What shout is that?

  NESTOR Peace, drums.

  MYRMIDONS (within) Achilles!

  Achilles! Hector’s slain! Achilles!

  DIOMEDES

  The bruit is: Hector’s slain, and by Achilles.

  AJAX

  If it be so, yet bragless let it be.

  Great Hector was a man as good as he.

  AGAMEMNON

  March patiently along. Let one be sent

  To pray Achilles see us at our tent.

  If in his death the gods have us befriended,

  Great Troy is ours, and our sharp wars are ended.

  Exeunt ⌈marching⌉

  5.11 Enter Aeneas, Paris, Antenor, and Deiphobus

  AENEAS

  Stand, ho! Yet are we masters of the field.

  Never go home; here starve we out the night.

  Enter Troilus

  TROILUS

  Hector is slain.

  ALL THE OTHERS Hector? The gods forbid.

  TROILUS

  He’s dead, and at the murderer’s horse’s tail

  In beastly sort dragged through the shameful field.

  Frown on, you heavens; effect your rage with speed;

  Sit, gods, upon your thrones, and smite at Troy.

  I say, at once: let your brief plagues be mercy,

  And linger not our sure destructions on.

  AENEAS

  My lord, you do discomfort all the host.

  TROILUS

  You understand me not that tell me so.

  I do not speak of flight, of fear of death,

  But dare all imminence that gods and men

  Address their dangers in. Hector is gone.

  Who shall tell Priam so, or Hecuba?

  Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called

  Go into Troy and say their Hector’s dead.

  There is a word will Priam turn to stone,

  Make wells and Niobes of the maids and wives,

  Cold statues of the youth, and in a word

  Scare Troy out of itself. But march away.

  Hector is dead; there is no more to say.

  Stay yet.—You vile abominable tents

  Thus proudly pitched upon our Phrygian plains,

  Let Titan rise as early as he dare,

  I’ll through and through you! And thou great-sized

  coward,

  No space of earth shall sunder our two hates.

  I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,

  That mouldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts.

  Strike a free march! To Troy with comfort go:

  Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe.

  ⌈Exeunt marching⌉

  ADDITIONAL PASSAGES

  A. The Quarto (below) gives a more elaborate version of Thersites’ speech at 5.1.17-21.

  THERSITES Why, his masculine whore. Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, loads o’ gravel in the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of impostume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’th’ palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries.

  B. The Quarto gives a different ending to the play (which the Folio inadvertently repeats).

  Enter Pandarus

  PANDARUS But hear you, hear you.

  TROILUS

  Hence, broker-lackey. ⌈Strikes him⌉ Ignomy and shame

  Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name.

  Exeunt all but Pandarus

  PANDARUS A goodly medicine for my aching bones. O world, world, world!—thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavour be so desired and the performance so loathed? What verse for it? What instance for it? Let me see,Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing

  Till he hath lost his honey and his sting,

  And being once subdued in armèd tail,

  Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail.

  Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths:As many as be here of Pandar’s hall,

  Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall.

  Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,

  Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.

  Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,

  Some two months hence my will shall here be made.

  It should be now, but that my fear is this:

  Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.

  Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,

  And at that time bequeath you my diseases. Exit

  SONNETS AND ‘A LOVER’S COMPLAINT’

  SHAKESPEARE’S Sonnets were published as a collection by Thomas Thorpe in 1609; the title-page declared that they were ‘never before imprinted’. Versions of two of them- 138 and 144—had appeared in 1599, in The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection ascribed to Shakespeare but including some poems certainly written by other authors; and in the previous year Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia, had alluded to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’. The sonnet sequence had enjoyed a brief but intense vogue from the publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591 till about 1597. Some of Shakespeare’s plays of this period reflect the fashion: in the comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost the writing of sonnets is seen as a laughable symptom of love, and in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet both speeches of the Chorus and the lovers’ first conversation are in sonnet form. Later plays use it, too, but it seems likely that most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were first written during this period. But there are indications that some of them were revised; the two printed in The Passionate Pilgrim differ at certain points from Thorpe’s version, and two other sonnets (2 and 106) exist in manuscript versions which also are not identical with those published in the sequence. We print these as ‘Alternative Versions’ of Sonnets 2, 106, 138, and 144.

  The order in which Thorpe printed the Sonnets has often been questioned, but is not entirely haphazard: all the first seventeen, and no later ones, exhort a young man to marry; all those clearly addressed to one or more men are among the first 126, and all those clearly addressed to, or concerned with, one or more women (the ‘dark lady’) follow. Some of the sonnets in the second group appear to refer to events that prompted sonnets in the first group; it seems likely that the poems were rearranged after composition. Moreover, the volume contains ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, clearly ascribed to Shakespeare, which stylistic evidence suggests was written in the early seventeenth century and which may have been intended as a companion piece. So, printing the Sonnets in Thorpe’s order, we place them according to the likely date of their revision.

  Textual evidence suggests that Thorpe printed from a transcript by someone other than Shakespeare. His volume bears a dedication over his own initials to ‘Mr W.H.’; we do not know whether this derives from the manuscript, and can only speculate about the dedicatee’s identity. His initials are those of Shakespeare’s only known dedicatee, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, but in reverse order. We have even less clue as to the identity of the Sonnets’ other personae, who include a rival poet and a dark woman.

  Shakespeare’s Sonnets may not be autobiographical, but they are certainly unconventional: the most idealistic poems celebrating love’s mutuality are addressed by one man to another, and the poems clearly addressed to a woman revile her morals, speak ill of her appearance, and explore the poet’s self-disgust at his entanglement with her. The Sonnets inclu
de some of the finest love poems in the English language: the sequence itself presents an internal drama of great psychological complexity.

  TO.THE. ONLY.BEGETTER.OF.

  THESE.ENSUING.SONNETS.

  Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESS.

  AND.THAT.ETERNITY.

  PROMISED.

  BY.

  OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET.

  WISHETH.

  THE. WELL-WISHING.

  ADVENTURER.IN.

  SETTING.

  FORTH.

  T.T.

  Sonnets

  1

  From fairest creatures we desire increase,

  That thereby beauty’s rose might never die,

  But as the riper should by time decease,

  His tender heir might bear his memory;

  But thou, contracted to thine own bright eyes,

  Feed‘st thy light’s flame with self-substantial fuel,

  Making a famine where abundance lies,

  Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.

  Thou that art now the world’s fresh ornament

  And only herald to the gaudy spring

  Within thine own bud buriest thy content,

  And, tender churl, mak’st waste in niggarding.

  Pity the world, or else this glutton be:

  To eat the world’s due, by the grave and thee.

  2

  When forty winters shall besiege thy brow

  And dig deep trenches in thy beauty’s field,

  Thy youth’s proud livery, so gazed on now,

  Will be a tattered weed, of small worth held.

  Then being asked where all thy beauty lies,

  Where all the treasure of thy lusty days,

  To say within thine own deep-sunken eyes

  Were an all-eating shame and thriftless praise.

  How much more praise deserved thy beauty’s use

  If thou couldst answer ‘This fair child of mine

  Shall sum my count, and make my old excuse’,

  Proving his beauty by succession thine.

  This were to be new made when thou art old,

  And see thy blood warm when thou feel’st it cold.

  3

  Look in thy glass, and tell the face thou viewest

  Now is the time that face should form another,

  Whose fresh repair if now thou not renewest

  Thou dost beguile the world, unbless some mother.

  For where is she so fair whose uneared womb

  Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry?

  Or who is he so fond will be the tomb

  Of his self-love to stop posterity?

  Thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee

  Calls back the lovely April of her prime;

  So thou through windows of thine age shalt see,

  Despite of wrinkles, this thy golden time.

  But if thou live remembered not to be,

  Die single, and thine image dies with thee.

  4

  Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend

  Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?

  Nature’s bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,

  And being frank, she lends to those are free.

  Then, beauteous niggard, why dost thou abuse

  The bounteous largess given thee to give?

  Profitless usurer, why dost thou use

  So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?

  For having traffic with thyself alone,

  Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.

  Then how when nature calls thee to be gone:

  What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

  Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

  Which used, lives th’executor to be.

  5

  Those hours that with gentle work did frame

  The lovely gaze where every eye doth dwell

  Will play the tyrants to the very same,

  And that unfair which fairly doth excel;

  For never-resting time leads summer on

  To hideous winter, and confounds him there,

  Sap checked with frost, and lusty leaves quite gone,

  Beauty o’er-snowed, and bareness everywhere.

  Then were not summer’s distillation left

  A liquid prisoner pent in walls of glass,

  Beauty’s effect with beauty were bereft,

  Nor it nor no remembrance what it was.

  But flowers distilled, though they with winter meet,

  Lose but their show; their substance still lives sweet.

  6

  Then let not winter’s ragged hand deface

  In thee thy summer ere thou be distilled.

  Make sweet some vial, treasure thou some place

  With beauty’s treasure ere it be self-killed.

  That use is not forbidden usury

  Which happies those that pay the willing loan:

  That’s for thyself to breed another thee,

  Or ten times happier, be it ten for one;

  Ten times thyself were happier than thou art,

  If ten of thine ten times refigured thee.

  Then what could death do if thou shouldst depart,

  Leaving thee living in posterity?

  Be not self-willed, for thou art much too fair

  To be death’s conquest and make worms thine heir.

  7

  Lo, in the orient when the gracious light

  Lifts up his burning head, each under eye

  Doth homage to his new-appearing sight,

  Serving with looks his sacred majesty,

  And having climbed the steep-up heavenly hill,

  Resembling strong youth in his middle age,

  Yet mortal looks adore his beauty still,

  Attending on his golden pilgrimage.

  But when from highmost pitch, with weary car,

  Like feeble age he reeleth from the day,

  The eyes, ’‘fore duteous, now converted are

  From his low tract, and look another way.

  So thou, thyself outgoing in thy noon,

  Unlooked on diest unless thou get a son.

  8

  Music to hear, why hear‘st thou music sadly?

  Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy.

  Why lov’st thou that which thou receiv‘st not gladly,

  Or else receiv’st with pleasure thine annoy?

  If the true concord of well-tuned sounds

  By unions married do offend thine ear,

  They do but sweetly chide thee, who confounds

  In singleness the parts that thou shouldst bear.

  Mark how one string, sweet husband to another,

  Strikes each in each by mutual ordering,

  Resembling sire and child and happy mother,

  Who all in one one pleasing note do sing;

  Whose speechless song, being many, seeming one,

  Sings this to thee: ‘Thou single wilt prove none.’

  9

  Is it for fear to wet a widow’s eye

  That thou consum’st thyself in single life?

  Ah, if thou issueless shalt hap to die,

  The world will wail thee like a makeless wife.

  The world will be thy widow, and still weep

  That thou no form of thee hast left behind,

  When every private widow well may keep

  By children’s eyes her husband’s shape in mind.

  Look what an unthrift in the world doth spend

  Shifts but his place, for still the world enjoys it;

  But beauty’s waste hath in the world an end,

  And kept unused, the user so destroys it.

  No love toward others in that bosom sits

  That on himself such murd’rous shame commits.

  10

  For shame deny that thou bear‘st love to any,

  Who for thyself art so unprovident.

  Grant, if thou wilt, thou art beloved of many,

  But that thou
none lov’st is most evident;

  For thou art so possessed with murd‘rous hate

  That ’gainst thyself thou stick’st not to conspire,

  Seeking that beauteous roof to ruinate

  Which to repair should be thy chief desire.

  O, change thy thought, that I may change my mind!

  Shall hate be fairer lodged than gentle love?

  Be as thy presence is, gracious and kind,

  Or to thyself at least kind-hearted prove.

  Make thee another self for love of me,

  That beauty still may live in thine or thee.

  11

  As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou grow‘st

  In one of thine from that which thou departest,

  And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow’st

  Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth

  convertest.

  Herein lives wisdom, beauty, and increase;

  Without this, folly, age, and cold decay.

  If all were minded so, the times should cease,

  And threescore year would make the world away.

  Let those whom nature hath not made for store,

  Harsh, featureless, and rude, barrenly perish.

  Look whom she best endowed she gave the more,

  Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish.

  She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby

  Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.

  12

  When I do count the clock that tells the time,

  And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

  When I behold the violet past prime,

  And sable curls ensilvered o’er with white;

  When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,

  Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

  And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

  Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard:

  Then of thy beauty do I question make

  That thou among the wastes of time must go,

  Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,