Duke. I’ll force it from your hands. [LUCRETIA runs.

Luc. Help, help, or I am ravished! help, for heaven’s sake!

  HIPPOLITA, LAURA, and VIOLETTA, within, at several places.

Within. Help, help Lucretia! they bear away Lucretia by force.

Duke. I think there’s a devil in every corner.

  Enter VALERIO.

Val. Sir, the design was laid on purpose for you, and all the women placed to cry.  Make haste away; avoid the shame, for heaven’s sake.

Duke. [going.] O, I could fire this monastery!

  Enter FREDERICK and ASCANIO.

  [FREDERICK, entering, speaks as to some behind him.]

Fred. Pain of your lives, let none of you presume to enter but myself.

Duke. My son!—­O, I could burst with spite, and die with shame, to be thus apprehended! this is the baseness and cowardice of guilt:  an army now were not so dreadful to me as that son, o’er whom the right of nature gives me power.

Fred. Sir, I am come—­

Duke. To laugh at first, and then to blaze abroad, The weakness and the follies of your father.

Val. Sir, he has men in arms attending him.

Duke. I know my doom then.  You have taken a popular occasion; I am now a ravisher of chastity, fit to be made prisoner first, and then deposed.

Fred. You will not hear me, sir.

Duke. No, I confess I have deserved my fate;
For, what had these grey hairs to do with love? 
Or, if the unseemly folly would possess me,
Why should I chuse to make my son my rival?

Fred. Sir, you may add, you banished me from Rome, And, from the light of it, Lucretia’s eyes.

Duke. Nay, if thou aggravat’st my crimes, thou giv’st
Me right to justify them:  thou doubly art my slave,
Both son and subject.  I can do thee no wrong,
Nor hast thou right to arraign or punish me: 
But thou inquir’st into thy father’s years;
Thy swift ambition could not stay my death,
But must ride post to empire.  Lead me now;
Thy crimes have made me guiltless to myself,
And given me face to bear the public scorn. 
You have a guard without?

Fred. I have some friends.

Duke. Speak plainly your intent. 
I love not a sophisticated truth,
With an allay of lie in’t.

Fred. [Kneeling.]
This is not, sir, the posture of a rebel,
But of a suppliant; if the name of son
Be too much honour to me. 
What first I purpos’d, I scarce know myself. 
Love, anger, and revenge, then rolled within me,
And yet, even then, I was not hurried farther
Than to preserve my own.

Duke. Your own!  What mean you?

Fred. My love, and my Lucretia, which I thought,
In my then boiling passion, you pursued
With some injustice, and much violence;
This led me to repel that force by force. 
’Twas easy to surprise you, when I knew
Of your intended visit.