The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works
Page 369
AUTOLYCUS O, that’s the case of the shepherd’s son. Hang him, he’ll be made an example.
CLOWN (to the Old Shepherd) Comfort, good comfort. We must to the King, and show our strange sights. He must know ’tis none of your daughter, nor my sister. We are gone else. (To Autolycus) Sir, I will give you as much as this old man does when the business is performed, and remain, as he says, your pawn till it be brought you.
AUTOLYCUS I will trust you. Walk before toward the seaside. Go on the right hand. I will but look upon the hedge, and follow you.
CLOWN (to the Old Shepherd) We are blessed in this man, as I may say, even blessed.
OLD SHEPHERD Let’s before, as he bids us. He was provided to do us good. Exit with the Clown
AUTOLYCUS If I had a mind to be honest, I see fortune would not suffer me. She drops booties in my mouth. I am courted now with a double occasion: gold, and a means to do the Prince my master good, which who knows how that may turn back to my advancement? I will bring these two moles, these blind ones, aboard him. If he think it fit to shore them again, and that the complaint they have to the King concerns him nothing, let him call me rogue for being so far officious, for I am proof against that title, and what shame else belongs to’t. To him will I present them. There may be matter in it.
Exit
5.1 Enter Leontes, Cleomenes, Dion, and Paulina
CLEOMENES (to Leontes)
Sir, you have done enough, and have performed
A saint-like sorrow. No fault could you make
Which you have not redeemed, indeed, paid down
More penitence than done trespass. At the last
Do as the heavens have done, forget your evil.
With them, forgive yourself.
LEONTES
Whilst I remember
Her and her virtues I cannot forget
My blemishes in them, and so still think of
The wrong I did myself, which was so much
That heirless it hath made my kingdom, and
Destroyed the sweet‘st companion that e’er man
Bred his hopes out of. True?
PAULINA
Too true, my lord.
If one by one you wedded all the world,
Or from the all that are took something good
To make a perfect woman, she you killed
Would be unparalleled.
LEONTES
I think so. Killed?
She I killed? I did so. But thou strik’st me
Sorely to say I did; it is as bitter
Upon thy tongue as in my thought. Now, good now,
Say so but seldom.
CLEOMENES
Not at all, good lady.
You might have spoke a thousand things that would
Have done the time more benefit, and graced
Your kindness better.
PAULINA
You are one of those
Would have him wed again.
DION
If you would not so
You pity not the state, nor the remembrance
Of his most sovereign name, consider little
What dangers, by his highness’ fail of issue,
May drop upon his kingdom and devour
Incertain lookers-on. What were more holy
Than to rejoice the former queen is well?
What holier, than for royalty’s repair,
For present comfort and for future good,
To bless the bed of majesty again
With a sweet fellow to’t?
PAULINA
There is none worthy
Respecting her that’s gone. Besides, the gods
Will have fulfilled their secret purposes.
For has not the divine Apollo said?
Is’t not the tenor of his oracle
That King Leontes shall not have an heir
Till his lost child be found? Which that it shall
Is all as monstrous to our human reason
As my Antigonus to break his grave
And come again to me, who, on my life,
Did perish with the infant. ’Tis your counsel
My lord should to the heavens be contrary,
Oppose against their wills.
(To Leontes) Care not for issue.
The crown will find an heir. Great Alexander
Left his to th’ worthiest, so his successor
Was like to be the best.
LEONTES
Good Paulina,
Who hast the memory of Hermione,
I know, in honour—O, that ever I
Had squared me to thy counsel! Then even now
I might have looked upon my queen’s full eyes,
Have taken treasure from her lips.
PAULINA
And left them
More rich for what they yielded.
LEONTES
Thou speak’st truth.
No more such wives, therefore no wife. One worse,
And better used, would make her sainted spirit
Again possess her corpse, and on this stage,
Where we offenders mourn, appear soul-vexed,
And begin, ‘Why to me?’
PAULINA
Had she such power
She had just cause.
LEONTES
She had, and would incense me
To murder her I married.
PAULINA
I should SO.
Were I the ghost that walked I’d bid you mark
Her eye, and tell me for what dull part in’t
You chose her. Then I’d shriek that even your ears
Should rift to hear me, and the words that followed
Should be, ‘Remember mine’.
LEONTES
Stars, stars,
And all eyes else, dead coals! Fear thou no wife.
I’ll have no wife, Paulina.
PAULINA
Will you swear
Never to marry but by my free leave?
LEONTES
Never, Paulina, so be blest my spirit.
PAULINA
Then, good my lords, bear witness to his oath.
CLEOMENES
You tempt him over-much.
PAULINA
Unless another
As like Hermione as is her picture
Affront his eye—
CLEOMENES
Good madam, I have done.
PAULINA
Yet if my lord will marry—if you will, sir;
No remedy but you will—give me the office
To choose your queen. She shall not be so young
As was your former, but she shall be such
As, walked your first queen’s ghost, it should take joy
To see her in your arms.
LEONTES
My true Paulina,
We shall not marry till thou bidd’st us.
PAULINA
That
Shall be when your first queen’s again in breath.
Never till then.
Enter a Servant
SERVANT
One that gives out himself Prince Florizel,
Son of Polixenes, with his princess—she
The fairest I have yet beheld—desires access
To your high presence.
LEONTES
What with him? He comes not
Like to his father’s greatness. His approach,
So out of circumstance and sudden, tells us
’Tis not a visitation framed, but forced
By need and accident. What train?
SERVANT
But few,
And those but mean.
LEONTES
His princess, say you, with him?
SERVANT
Ay, the most peerless piece of earth, I think,
That e’er the sun shone bright on.
PAULINA
O, Hermione,
As every present time doth boast itself
Above a better, gone, so must thy gr
ave
Give way to what’s seen now!
(To the Servant) Sir, you yourself
Have said and writ so; but your writing now
Is colder than that theme. She had not been
Nor was not to be equalled—thus your verse
Flowed with her beauty once. ’Tis shrewdly ebbed
To say you have seen a better.
SERVANT
Pardon, madam.
The one I have almost forgot—your pardon!
The other, when she has obtained your eye,
Will have your tongue too. This is a creature,
Would she begin a sect, might quench the zeal
Of all professors else; make proselytes
Of who she but bid follow.
PAULINA
How? Not women!
SERVANT
Women will love her that she is a woman
More worth than any man; men, that she is
The rarest of all women.
LEONTES
Go, Cleomenes.
Yourself, assisted with your honoured friends,
Bring them to our embracement.
Exit Cleomenes
Still ’tis strange
He thus should steal upon us.
PAULINA
Had our prince,
Jewel of children, seen this hour, he had paired
Well with this lord. There was not full a month
Between their births.
LEONTES
Prithee no more, cease. Thou know’st
He dies to me again when talked of. Sure,
When I shall see this gentleman thy speeches
Will bring me to consider that which may
Unfurnish me of reason. They are come.
Enter Florizel, Perdita, Cleomenes, and others
Your mother was most true to wedlock, Prince,
For she did print your royal father off,
Conceiving you. Were I but twenty-one,
Your father’s image is so hit in you,
His very air, that I should call you brother,
As I did him, and speak of something wildly
By us performed before. Most dearly welcome,
And your fair princess—goddess! O, alas,
I lost a couple that ’twixt heaven and earth
Might thus have stood, begetting wonder, as
You, gracious couple, do; and then I lost—
All mine own folly—the society,
Amity too, of your brave father, whom,
Though bearing misery, I desire my life
Once more to look on him.
FLORIZEL
By his command
Have I here touched Sicilia, and from him
Give you all greetings that a king at friend
Can send his brother; and but infirmity,
Which waits upon worn times, hath something seized
His wished ability, he had himself
The lands and waters ’twixt your throne and his
Measured to look upon you, whom he loves—
He bade me say so—more than all the sceptres,
And those that bear them, living.
LEONTES
O, my brother!
Good gentleman, the wrongs I have done thee stir
Afresh within me, and these thy offices,
So rarely kind, are as interpreters
Of my behindhand slackness. Welcome hither,
As is the spring to th‘earth! And hath he too
Exposed this paragon to th’ fearful usage—
At least ungentle—of the dreadful Neptune
To greet a man not worth her pains, much less
Th’adventure of her person?
FLORIZEL
Good my lord,
She came from Libya.
LEONTES
Where the warlike Smalus,
That noble honoured lord, is feared and loved?
FLORIZEL
Most royal sir, from thence; from him whose daughter
His tears proclaimed his, parting with her. Thence,
A prosperous south wind friendly, we have crossed,
To execute the charge my father gave me
For visiting your highness. My best train
I have from your Sicilian shores dismissed;
Who for Bohemia bend, to signify
Not only my success in Libya, sir,
But my arrival, and my wife’s, in safety
Here where we are.
LEONTES
The blessed gods
Purge all infection from our air whilst you
Do climate here! You have a holy father,
A graceful gentleman, against whose person,
So sacred as it is, I have done sin,
For which the heavens, taking angry note,
Have left me issueless; and your father’s blessed,
As he from heaven merits it, with you,
Worthy his goodness. What might I have been,
Might I a son and daughter now have looked on,
Such goodly things as you?
Enter a Lord
LORD
Most noble sir,
That which I shall report will bear no credit
Were not the proof so nigh. Please you, great sir,
Bohemia greets you from himself by me;
Desires you to attach his son, who has,
His dignity and duty both cast off,
Fled from his father, from his hopes, and with
A shepherd’s daughter.
LEONTES
Where’s Bohemia? Speak.
LORD
Here in your city. I now came from him.
I speak amazedly, and it becomes
My marvel and my message. To your court
Whiles he was hast’ning—in the chase, it seems,
Of this fair couple—meets he on the way
The father of this seeming lady and
Her brother, having both their country quitted
With this young prince.
FLORIZEL
Camillo has betrayed me,
Whose honour and whose honesty till now
Endured all weathers.
LORD
Lay’t so to his charge.
He’s with the King your father.
LEONTES
Who, Camillo?
LORD
Camillo, sir. I spake with him, who now
Has these poor men in question. Never saw I
Wretches so quake. They kneel, they kiss the earth,
Forswear themselves as often as they speak.
Bohemia stops his ears, and threatens them
With divers deaths in death.
PERDITA
O, my poor father!
The heaven sets spies upon us, will not have
Our contract celebrated.
LEONTES
You are married?
FLORIZEL
We are not, sir, nor are we like to be.
The stars, I see, will kiss the valleys first.
The odds for high and low’s alike.
LEONTES
My lord,
Is this the daughter of a king?
FLORIZEL
She is,
When once she is my wife.
LEONTES
That ‘once’, I see, by your good father’s speed
Will come on very slowly. I am sorry,
Most sorry, you have broken from his liking
Where you were tied in duty; and as sorry
Your choice is not so rich in worth as beauty,
That you might well enjoy her.
FLORIZEL (to Perdita)
Dear, look up.
Though fortune, visible an enemy,
Should chase us with my father, power no jot
Hath she to change our loves.—Beseech you, sir,
Remember since you owed no more to time
Than I do now. With thought of such affections,
Step forth mine advoca
te. At your request
My father will grant precious things as trifles.
LEONTES
Would he do so, I’d beg your precious mistress,
Which he counts but a trifle.
PAULINA
Sir, my liege,
Your eye hath too much youth in’t. Not a month
Fore your queen died she was more worth such gazes
Than what you look on now.
LEONTES
I thought of her
Even in these looks I made.
(To Florizel) But your petition
Is yet unanswered. I will to your father.
Your honour not o’erthrown by your desires,
I am friend to them and you. Upon which errand
I now go toward him. Therefore follow me,
And mark what way I make. Come, good my lord.
Exeunt
5.2 Enter Autolycus and a Gentleman
AUTOLYCUS Beseech you, sir, were you present at this relation?
FIRST GENTLEMAN I was by at the opening of the fardel, heard the old shepherd deliver the manner how he found it; whereupon, after a little amazedness, we were all commanded out of the chamber. Only this, methought I heard the shepherd say he found the child.
AUTOLYCUS I would most gladly know the issue of it.
FIRST GENTLEMAN I make a broken delivery of the business, but the changes I perceived in the King and Camillo were very notes of admiration. They seemed almost, with staring on one another, to tear the cases of their eyes. There was speech in their dumbness, language in their very gesture. They looked as they had heard of a world ransomed, or one destroyed. A notable passion of wonder appeared in them, but the wisest beholder, that knew no more but seeing, could not say if th’importance were joy or sorrow. But in the extremity of the one, it must needs be.
Enter another Gentleman
Here comes a gentleman that happily knows more. The news, Ruggiero!
SECOND GENTLEMAN Nothing but bonfires. The oracle is fulfilled. The King’s daughter is found. Such a deal of wonder is broken out within this hour, that ballad-makers cannot be able to express it.
Enter another Gentleman
Here comes the Lady Paulina’s steward. He can deliver you more.—How goes it now, sir? This news which is called true is so like an old tale that the verity of it is in strong suspicion. Has the King found his heir?
THIRD GENTLEMAN Most true, if ever truth were pregnant by circumstance. That which you hear you’ll swear you see, there is such unity in the proofs. The mantle of Queen Hermione’s, her jewel about the neck of it, the letters of Antigonus found with it, which they know to be his character; the majesty of the creature, in resemblance of the mother; the affection of nobleness which nature shows above her breeding, and many other evidences proclaim her with all certainty to be the King’s daughter. Did you see the meeting of the two kings?