For when would you, my liege, or you, or you

In leaden contemplation have found out

Such fiery numbers as the prompting eyes

Of beauty’s tutors have enriched you with?

Other slow arts entirely keep the brain,

And therefore, finding barren practisers,

Scarce show a harvest of their heavy toil.

But love, first learned in a lady’s eyes,

Lives not alone immured in the brain,

But with the motion of all elements

Courses as swift as thought in every power,

And gives to every power a double power

Above their functions and their offices.

It adds a precious seeing to the eye—

A lover’s eyes will gaze an eagle blind.

A lover’s ear will hear the lowest sound

When the suspicious head of theft is stopped.

Love’s feeling is more soft and sensible

Than are the tender horns of cockled snails.

Love’s tongue proves dainty Bacchus gross in taste.

For valour, is not love a Hercules,

Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?

Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical

As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair;

And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods

Make heaven drowsy with the harmony.

Never durst poet touch a pen to write

Until his ink were tempered with love’s sighs.

O, then his lines would ravish savage ears,

And plant in tyrants mild humility.

From women’s eyes this doctrine I derive.

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire.

They are the books, the arts, the academes

That show, contain, and nourish all the world,

Else none at all in aught proves excellent.

Then fools you were these women to forswear,

Or keeping what is sworn, you will prove fools.

For wisdom’s sake—a word that all men love—

Or for love’s sake—a word that loves all men—

Or for men’s sake—the authors of these women—

Or women’s sake—by whom we men are men—

Let us once lose our oaths to find ourselves,

Or else we lose ourselves to keep our oaths.

It is religion to be thus forsworn,

For charity itself fulfils the law,

And who can sever love from charity?

KING

Saint Cupid, then, and, soldiers, to the field!

BIRON

Advance your standards, and upon them, lords.

Pell-mell, down with them; but be first advised

In conflict that you get the sun of them.

LONGUEVILLE

Now to plain dealing. Lay these glozes by.

Shall we resolve to woo these girls of France?

KING

And win them, too! Therefore let us devise

Some entertainment for them in their tents.

BIRON

First, from the park let us conduct them thither;

Then homeward every man attach the hand

Of his fair mistress. In the afternoon

We will with some strange pastime solace them,

Such as the shortness of the time can shape,

For revels, dances, masques, and merry hours

Forerun fair love, strewing her way with flowers.

KING

Away, away, no time shall be omitted

That will be time, and may by us be fitted.

BIRON

Allons, allons! Sowed cockle reaped no corn,

And justice always whirls in equal measure.

Light wenches may prove plagues to men forsworn.

If so, our copper buys no better treasure. Exeunt

5.1 Enter Holofernes the pedant, Nathaniel the curate, and Anthony Dull

HOLOFERNES Satis quid sufficit.

NATHANIEL I praise Good for you, sir. Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious, pleasant without scurrility, witty without affections, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy. I did converse this quondam day with a companion of the King’s who is intituled, nominated, or called Don Adriano de Armado.

HOLOFERNES Novi hominum tanquam te. His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.

NATHANIEL A most singular and choice epithet.

He draws out his table-book

HOLOFERNES He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasims, such insociable and point-device companions, such rackers of orthography as to speak ‘dout’, sine ‘b’, when he should say ‘doubt’; ‘det’ when he should pronounce ‘debt’—‘d, e, b, t’, not ‘d, e, t’. He clepeth a calf ‘caul’, half ‘haul’, neighbour vocatur ‘nebour’—‘neigh’ abbreviated ‘ne’. This is abhominaMe—which he would call ‘abominable’. It insinuateth me of insanire—ne intelligis, domine?—to make frantic, lunatic.

NATHANIEL Laus deo, bone intelligo.

HOLOFERNES Bone? Bon, fort bon—Priscian a little scratched-‘twill serve.

Enter Armado the braggart, Mote his boy, and Costard the clown

NATHANIEL Videsne quis venit?

xoLOFeRrrss Video, et gaudio.

ARMADO (to Mote) Chirrah.

xoLOVExNES (to Nathaniel) Quare ‘chirrah’, not ‘sirrah’?

ARMADO Men of peace, well encountered.

HOLOFERNES Most military sir, salutation!

MOTE (aside to Costard) They have been at a great feast of languages and stolen the scraps.

COSTARD (aside to Mote) O, they have lived long on the alms-basket of words. I marvel thy master hath not eaten thee for a word, for thou art not so long by the head as honorificabilitudinitatibus. Thou art easier swallowed than a flapdragon.

MOTE (aside to Costard) Peace, the peal begins.

ARMADO (to Holofernes) Monsieur, are you not lettered?

MOTE Yes, yes, he teaches boys the horn-book. What is ‘a, b’ spelled backward, with the horn on his head?