The Winter's Tale eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 141 pages of information about The Winter's Tale.

Leontes
To your own bents dispose you:  you’ll be found,
Be you beneath the sky. [Aside] I am angling now. 
Though you perceive me not how I give line. 
Go to, go to!

[Observing Polixenes and Hermione]

How she holds up the neb, the bill to him! 
And arms her with the boldness of a wife
To her allowing husband!

[Exeunt Polixenes, Hermione, and Attendants.]

Gone already! 
Inch-thick, knee-deep, o’er head and ears a fork’d one!—­
Go, play, boy, play:—­thy mother plays, and I
Play too; but so disgrac’d a part, whose issue
Will hiss me to my grave:  contempt and clamour
Will be my knell.—­Go, play, boy, play.—­There have been,
Or I am much deceiv’d, cuckolds ere now;
And many a man there is, even at this present,
Now while I speak this, holds his wife by the arm
That little thinks she has been sluic’d in his absence,
And his pond fish’d by his next neighbour, by
Sir Smile, his neighbour; nay, there’s comfort in’t,
Whiles other men have gates, and those gates open’d,
As mine, against their will:  should all despair
That hath revolted wives, the tenth of mankind
Would hang themselves.  Physic for’t there’s none;
It is a bawdy planet, that will strike
Where ’tis predominant; and ’tis powerful, think it,
From east, west, north, and south:  be it concluded,
No barricado for a belly:  know’t;
It will let in and out the enemy
With bag and baggage.  Many thousand of us
Have the disease, and feel’t not.—­How now, boy!

Mamillius
I am like you, they say.

Leontes
                         Why, that’s some comfort.—­
What!  Camillo there?

Camillo
Ay, my good lord.

Leontes
Go play, Mamillius; thou’rt an honest man.—­

[Exit Mamillius.]

Camillo, this great sir will yet stay longer.

Camillo
You had much ado to make his anchor hold: 
When you cast out, it still came home.

Leontes
                        Didst note it?

Camillo
He would not stay at your petitions; made
His business more material.

Leontes
                            Didst perceive it?—­
[Aside.] They’re here with me already; whispering, rounding,
‘Sicilia is a so-forth.’  ’Tis far gone
When I shall gust it last.—­How came’t, Camillo,
That he did stay?

Camillo
                  At the good queen’s entreaty.

Leontes
At the queen’s be’t:  ‘good’ should be pertinent;
But so it is, it is not.  Was this taken
By any understanding pate but thine? 
For thy conceit is soaking, will draw in
More than the common blocks:—­not noted, is’t,
But of the finer natures? by some severals
Of head-piece extraordinary? lower messes
Perchance are to this business purblind? say.

Copyrights
Project Gutenberg
The Winter's Tale from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.