My lord, you do discomfort all the host.
TROILUS
You understand me not that tell me so.
I do not speak of flight, of fear of death,
But dare all imminence that gods and men
Address their dangers in. Hector is gone.
Who shall tell Priam so, or Hecuba?
Let him that will a screech-owl aye be called
Go into Troy and say their Hector’s dead.
There is a word will Priam turn to stone,
Make wells and Niobes of the maids and wives,
Cold statues of the youth, and in a word
Scare Troy out of itself. But march away.
Hector is dead; there is no more to say.
Stay yet.—You vile abominable tents
Thus proudly pitched upon our Phrygian plains,
Let Titan rise as early as he dare,
I’ll through and through you! And thou great-sized
coward,
No space of earth shall sunder our two hates.
I’ll haunt thee like a wicked conscience still,
That mouldeth goblins swift as frenzy’s thoughts.
Strike a free march! To Troy with comfort go:
Hope of revenge shall hide our inward woe.
⌈Exeunt marching⌉
ADDITIONAL PASSAGES
A. The Quarto (below) gives a more elaborate version of Thersites’ speech at 5.1.17-21.
THERSITES Why, his masculine whore. Now the rotten diseases of the south, the guts-griping, ruptures, loads o’ gravel in the back, lethargies, cold palsies, raw eyes, dirt-rotten livers, wheezing lungs, bladders full of impostume, sciaticas, lime-kilns i’th’ palm, incurable bone-ache, and the rivelled fee-simple of the tetter, take and take again such preposterous discoveries.
B. The Quarto gives a different ending to the play (which the Folio inadvertently repeats).
Enter Pandarus
PANDARUS But hear you, hear you.
TROILUS
Hence, broker-lackey. ⌈Strikes him⌉ Ignomy and shame
Pursue thy life, and live aye with thy name.
Exeunt all but Pandarus
PANDARUS A goodly medicine for my aching bones. O world, world, world!—thus is the poor agent despised. O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a work, and how ill requited! Why should our endeavour be so desired and the performance so loathed? What verse for it? What instance for it? Let me see,
Full merrily the humble-bee doth sing
Till he hath lost his honey and his sting,
And being once subdued in armèd tail,
Sweet honey and sweet notes together fail.
Good traders in the flesh, set this in your painted cloths:
As many as be here of Pandar’s hall,
Your eyes, half out, weep out at Pandar’s fall.
Or if you cannot weep, yet give some groans,
Though not for me, yet for your aching bones.
Brethren and sisters of the hold-door trade,
Some two months hence my will shall here be made.
It should be now, but that my fear is this:
Some galled goose of Winchester would hiss.
Till then I’ll sweat and seek about for eases,
And at that time bequeath you my diseases. Exit
SONNETS AND ‘A LOVER’S COMPLAINT’
SHAKESPEARE’S Sonnets were published as a collection by Thomas Thorpe in 1609; the title-page declared that they were ‘never before imprinted’. Versions of two of them- 138 and 144—had appeared in 1599, in The Passionate Pilgrim, a collection ascribed to Shakespeare but including some poems certainly written by other authors; and in the previous year Francis Meres, in Palladis Tamia, had alluded to Shakespeare’s ‘sugared sonnets among his private friends’. The sonnet sequence had enjoyed a brief but intense vogue from the publication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella in 1591 till about 1597. Some of Shakespeare’s plays of this period reflect the fashion: in the comedy of Love’s Labour’s Lost the writing of sonnets is seen as a laughable symptom of love, and in the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet both speeches of the Chorus and the lovers’ first conversation are in sonnet form. Later plays use it, too, but it seems likely that most of Shakespeare’s sonnets were first written during this period. But there are indications that some of them were revised; the two printed in The Passionate Pilgrim differ at certain points from Thorpe’s version, and two other sonnets (2 and 106) exist in manuscript versions which also are not identical with those published in the sequence. We print these as ‘Alternative Versions’ of Sonnets 2, 106, 138, and 144.
The order in which Thorpe printed the Sonnets has often been questioned, but is not entirely haphazard: all the first seventeen, and no later ones, exhort a young man to marry; all those clearly addressed to one or more men are among the first 126, and all those clearly addressed to, or concerned with, one or more women (the ‘dark lady’) follow. Some of the sonnets in the second group appear to refer to events that prompted sonnets in the first group; it seems likely that the poems were rearranged after composition. Moreover, the volume contains ‘A Lover’s Complaint’, clearly ascribed to Shakespeare, which stylistic evidence suggests was written in the early seventeenth century and which may have been intended as a companion piece. So, printing the Sonnets in Thorpe’s order, we place them according to the likely date of their revision.
Textual evidence suggests that Thorpe printed from a transcript by someone other than Shakespeare. His volume bears a dedication over his own initials to ‘Mr W.H.’; we do not know whether this derives from the manuscript, and can only speculate about the dedicatee’s identity. His initials are those of Shakespeare’s only known dedicatee, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, but in reverse order. We have even less clue as to the identity of the Sonnets’ other personae, who include a rival poet and a dark woman.
Shakespeare’s Sonnets may not be autobiographical, but they are certainly unconventional: the most idealistic poems celebrating love’s mutuality are addressed by one man to another, and the poems clearly addressed to a woman revile her morals, speak ill of her appearance, and explore the poet’s self-disgust at his entanglement with her. The Sonnets include some of the finest love poems in the English language: the sequence itself presents an internal drama of great psychological complexity.
TO.THE. ONLY.BEGETTER.OF.
THESE.ENSUING.SONNETS.
Mr.W.H. ALL.HAPPINESS.
AND.THAT.ETERNITY.
PROMISED.
BY.
OUR.EVER-LIVING.POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL-WISHING.