William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition (523 page)

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Authors: William Shakespeare

Tags: #Drama, #Literary Criticism, #Shakespeare

BOOK: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
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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 advocate. 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?
SECOND GENTLEMAN No.
THIRD GENTLEMAN Then have you lost a sight which was to be seen, cannot be spoken of. There might you have beheld one joy crown another, so and in such manner that it seemed sorrow wept to take leave of them, for their joy waded in tears. There was casting up of eyes, holding up of hands, with countenance of such distraction that they were to be known by garment, not by favour. Our king being ready to leap out of himself for joy of his found daughter, as if that joy were now become a loss cries, ‘O, thy mother, thy mother!’, then asks Bohemia forgiveness, then embraces his son-in-law, then again worries he his daughter with clipping her. Now he thanks the old shepherd, which stands by like a weather-bitten conduit of many kings’ reigns. I never heard of such another encounter, which lames report to follow it, and undoes description to do it.
SECOND GENTLEMAN What, pray you, became of Antigonus, that carried hence the child?
THIRD GENTLEMAN Like an old tale still, which will have matter to rehearse though credit be asleep and not an ear open. He was torn to pieces with a bear. This avouches the shepherd’s son, who has not only his innocence, which seems much, to justify him, but a handkerchief and rings of his, that Paulina knows.
FIRST GENTLEMAN What became of his barque and his followers?
THIRD GENTLEMAN Wrecked the same instant of their master’s death, and in the view of the shepherd; so that all the instruments which aided to expose the child were even then lost when it was found. But O, the noble combat that ’twixt joy and sorrow was fought in Paulinal She had one eye declined for the loss of her husband, another elevated that the oracle was fulfilled. She lifted the Princess from the earth, and so locks her in embracing as if she would pin her to her heart, that she might no more be in danger of losing.
FIRST GENTLEMAN The dignity of this act was worth the audience of kings and princes, for by such was it acted.
THIRD GENTLEMAN One of the prettiest touches of all, and that which angled for mine eyes—caught the water, though not the fish—was when at the relation of the Queen’s death, with the manner how she came to’t bravely confessed and lamented by the King, how attentiveness wounded his daughter till from one sign of dolour to another she did, with an ‘Alas’, I would fain say bleed tears; for I am sure my heart wept blood. Who was most marble there changed colour. Some swooned, all sorrowed. If all the world could have seen’t, the woe had been universal.
FIRST GENTLEMAN Are they returned to the court?
THIRD GENTLEMAN No. The Princess, hearing of her mother’s statue, which is in the keeping of Paulina, a piece many years in doing, and now newly performed by that rare Italian master Giulio Romano, who, had he himself eternity and could put breath into his work, would beguile nature of her custom, so perfectly he is her ape. He so near to Hermione hath done Hermione that they say one would speak to her and stand in hope of answer. Thither with all greediness of affection are they gone, and there they intend to sup.
SECOND GENTLEMAN I thought she had some great matter there in hand, for she hath privately twice or thrice a day, ever since the death of Hermione, visited that removed house. Shall we thither, and with our company piece the rejoicing?

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