For this design. What course I mean to hold
Shall nothing benefit your knowledge, nor
Concern me the reporting.
CAMILLO
O my lord,
I would your spirit were easier for advice,
Or stronger for your need.
FLORIZEL
Hark, Perdita—
(To Camillo) I’ll hear you by and by.
CAMILLO (aside) He’s irremovable,
Resolved for flight. Now were I happy if
His going I could frame to serve my turn,
Save him from danger, do him love and honour,
Purchase the sight again of dear Sicilia
And that unhappy king, my master, whom
I so much thirst to see.
FLORIZEL
Now, good Camillo,
I am so fraught with curious business that
I leave out ceremony.
CAMILLO
Sir, I think
You have heard of my poor services i’th’ love
That I have borne your father?
FLORIZEL
Very nobly
Have you deserved. It is my father’s music
To speak your deeds, not little of his care
To have them recompensed as thought on.
CAMILLO
Well, my lord,
If you may please to think I love the King,
And through him what’s nearest to him, which is
Your gracious self, embrace but my direction,
If your more ponderous and settled project
May suffer alteration. On mine honour,
I’ll point you where you shall have such receiving
As shall become your highness, where you may
Enjoy your mistress—from the whom I see
There’s no disjunction to be made but by,
As heavens forfend, your ruin—marry her,
And with my best endeavours in your absence
Your discontenting father strive to qualify
And bring him up to liking.
FLORIZEL
How, Camillo,
May this, almost a miracle, be done?—
That I may call thee something more than man,
And after that trust to thee.
CAMILLO
Have you thought on
A place whereto you’ll go?
FLORIZEL
Not any yet.
But as th’unthought-on accident is guilty
To what we wildly do, so we profess
Ourselves to be the slaves of chance, and flies
Of every wind that blows.
CAMILLO
Then list to me.
This follows, if you will not change your purpose
But undergo this flight: make for Sicilia,
And there present yourself and your fair princess,
For so I see she must be, fore Leontes.
She shall be habited as it becomes
The partner of your bed. Methinks I see
Leontes opening his free arms and weeping
His welcomes forth; asks thee there ‘Son, forgiveness!’
As ‘twere i’th’ father’s person, kisses the hands
Of your fresh princess; o‘er and o’er divides him
‘Twixt his unkindness and his kindness. Th’one
He chides to hell, and bids the other grow
Faster than thought or time.
FLORIZEL
Worthy Camillo,
What colour for my visitation shall I
Hold up before him?
CAMILLO
Sent by the King your father
To greet him, and to give him comforts. Sir,
The manner of your bearing towards him, with
What you, as from your father, shall deliver—
Things known betwixt us three—I’ll write you down,
The which shall point you forth at every sitting
What you must say, that he shall not perceive
But that you have your father’s bosom there,
And speak his very heart.
FLORIZEL
I am bound to you.
There is some sap in this.
CAMILLO
A course more promising
Than a wild dedication of yourselves
To unpathed waters, undreamed shores; most certain,
To miseries enough—no hope to help you,
But as you shake off one, to take another;
Nothing so certain as your anchors, who
Do their best office if they can but stay you
Where you’ll be loath to be. Besides, you know,
Prosperity’s the very bond of love,
Whose fresh complexion and whose heart together
Affliction alters.
PERDITA
One of these is true.
I think affliction may subdue the cheek
But not take in the mind.
CAMILLO
Yea, say you so?
There shall not at your father’s house these seven
years
Be born another such.
FLORIZEL
My good Camillo,
She’s as forward of her breeding as
She is i’th’ rear our birth.
CAMILLO I cannot say ’tis pity
She lacks instructions, for she seems a mistress
To most that teach.
PERDITA
Your pardon, sir. For this
I’ll blush you thanks.
FLORIZEL
My prettiest Perdita!
But O, the thorns we stand upon! Camillo,
Preserver of my father, now of me,
The medicine of our house, how shall we do?
We are not furnished like Bohemia’s son,
Nor shall appear so in Sicilia.
CAMILLO My lord,
Fear none of this. I think you know my fortunes
Do all lie there. It shall be so my care
To have you royally appointed as if
The scene you play were mine. For instance, sir,
That you may know you shall not want—one word.
They speak apart.
Enter Autolycus
AUTOLYCUS Ha, ha! What a fool honesty is, and trust—his sworn brother—a very simple gentleman! I have sold all my trumpery; not a counterfeit stone, not a ribbon, glass, pomander, brooch, table-book, ballad, knife, tape, glove, shoe-tie, bracelet, horn-ring to keep my pack from fasting. They throng who should buy first, as if my trinkets had been hallowed, and brought a benediction to the buyer; by which means I saw whose purse was best in picture; and what I saw, to my good use I remembered. My clown, who wants but something to be a reasonable man, grew so in love with the wenches’ song that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words, which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears. You might have pinched a placket, it was senseless. ’Twas nothing to geld a codpiece of a purse. I could have filed keys off that hung in chains. No hearing, no feeling but my sir’s song, and admiring the nothing of it. So that in this time of lethargy I picked and cut most of their festival purses, and had not the old man come in with a hubbub against his daughter and the King’s son, and scared my choughs from the chaff, I had not left a purse alive in the whole army.