Текст книги "William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition"

Автор книги: William Shakespeare

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5.4 ⌈Alarum.⌉Enter the Earls of Salisbury and Pembroke, and Lord Bigot

SALISBURY

I did not think the King so stored with friends.

PEMBROKE

Up once again; put spirit in the French.

If they miscarry, we miscarry too.

SALISBURY

That misbegotten devil Falconbridge,

In spite of spite, alone upholds the day.

PEMBROKE

They say King John, sore sick, hath left the field.

Enter Count Melun, wounded, ⌈led by a soldier⌉

MELUN

Lead me to the revolts of England here.

SALISBURY

When we were happy, we had other names.

PEMBROKE

It is the Count Melun.

SALISBURY Wounded to death.

MELUN

Fly, noble English, you are bought and sold.

Unthread the rude eye of rebellion,

And welcome home again discarded faith;

Seek out King John and fall before his feet,

For if the French be lords of this loud day

He means to recompense the pains you take

By cutting off your heads. Thus hath he sworn,

And I with him, and many more with me,

Upon the altar at Saint Edmundsbury,

Even on that altar where we swore to you

Dear amity and everlasting love.

SALISBURY

May this be possible? May this be true?

MELUN

Have I not hideous death within my view,

Retaining but a quantity of life,

Which bleeds away, even as a form of wax

Resolveth from his figure ‘gainst the fire?

What in the world should make me now deceive,

Since I must lose the use of all deceit?

Why should I then be false, since it is true

That I must die here, and live hence by truth?

I say again, if Louis do win the day,

He is forsworn if e’er those eyes of yours

Behold another daybreak in the east;

But even this night, whose black contagious breath

Already smokes about the burning cresset

Of the old, feeble, and day-wearied sun,

Even this ill night your breathing shall expire,

Paying the fine of rated treachery

Even with a treacherous fine of all your lives,

If Louis by your assistance win the day.

Commend me to one Hubert with your king.

The love of him, and this respect besides,

For that my grandsire was an Englishman,

Awakes my conscience to confess all this;

In lieu whereof, I pray you bear me hence

From forth the noise and rumour of the field,

Where I may think the remnant of my thoughts

In peace, and part this body and my soul

With contemplation and devout desires.

SALISBURY

We do believe thee; and beshrew my soul

But I do love the favour and the form

Of this most fair occasion; by the which

We will untread the steps of damned flight,

And like a bated and retired flood,

Leaving our rankness and irregular course,

Stoop low within those bounds we have o’erlooked,

And calmly run on in obedience

Even to our ocean, to our great King John.

My arm shall give thee help to bear thee hence,

For I do see the cruel pangs of death

Right in thine eye.—Away,my friends! New flight,

And happy newness that intends old right. Exeunt

5.5 ⌈Alarum,. retreat.⌉ Enter Louis the Dauphin, and his train

LOUIS THE DAUPHIN

The sun of heaven, methought, was loath to set,

But stayed and made the western welkin blush,

When English measured backward their own ground

In faint retire. O, bravely came we off,

When with a volley of our needless shot,

After such bloody toil, we bid good night,

And wound our tatt’ring colours clearly up,

Last in the field and almost lords of it.

Enter a Messenger

MESSENGER

Where is my prince the Dauphin?

LOUIS THE DAUPHIN Here. What news?

MESSENGER

The Count Melun is slain; the English lords

By his persuasion are again fall’n off;

And your supply which you have wished so long

Are cast away and sunk on Goodwin Sands.

LOUIS THE DAUPHIN

Ah, foul shrewd news! Beshrew thy very heart

I did not think to be so sad tonight

As this hath made me. Who was he that said

King John did fly an hour or two before

The stumbling night did part our weary powers?

MESSENGER

Whoever spoke it, it is true, my lord.

LOUIS THE DAUPHIN

Well, keep good quarter and good care tonight.

The day shall not be up so soon as I,

To try the fair adventure of tomorrow. Exeunt

5.6 Enter the Bastard ⌈With a light⌉and Hubert ⌈With a pistol⌉, severally

HUBERT

Who’s there? Speak, ho! Speak quickly, or I shoot.

BASTARD

A friend. What art thou?

HUBERT Of the part of England.

BASTARD

Whither dost thou go?

HUBERT What’s that to thee?

Why may not I demand of thine affairs

As well as thou of mine?

BASTARD Hubert, I think.

HUBERT Thou hast a perfect thought.

I will upon all hazards well believe

Thou art my friend that know’st my tongue so well.

Who art thou?

BASTARD Who thou wilt. An if thou please,

Thou mayst befriend me so much as to think

I come one way of the Plantagenets.

HUBERT

Unkind remembrance! Thou and eyeless night

Have done me shame. Brave soldier, pardon me

That any accent breaking from thy tongue

Should ’scape the true acquaintance of mine ear.

BASTARD

Come, come, sans compliment. What news abroad?

HUBERT

Why, here walk I in the black brow of night

To find you out.

BASTARD Brief, then, and what’s the news?

HUBERT

O my sweet sir, news fitting to the night:

Black, fearful, comfortless, and horrible.

BASTARD

Show me the very wound of this ill news;

I am no woman, I’ll not swoon at it.

HUBERT

The King, I fear, is poisoned by a monk.

I left him almost speechless, and broke out

To acquaint you with this evil, that you might

The better arm you to the sudden time

Than if you had at leisure known of this.

BASTARD

How did he take it? Who did taste to him?

HUBERT

A monk, I tell you, a resolved villain,

Whose bowels suddenly burst out. The King

Yet speaks, and peradventure may recover.

BASTARD

Who didst thou leave to tend his majesty?

HUBERT

Why, know you not? The lords are all come back,

And brought Prince Henry in their company,

At whose request the King hath pardoned them,

And they are all about his majesty.

BASTARD

Withhold thine indignation, mighty heaven,

And tempt us not to bear above our power.

I’ll tell thee, Hubert, half my power this night,

Passing these flats, are taken by the tide.

These Lincoln Washes have devoured them;

Myself, well mounted, hardly have escaped.

Away before! Conduct me to the King.

I doubt he will be dead or ere I come. Exeunt

5.7 Enter Prince Henry, the Earl of Salisbury, and Lord Bigot

PRINCE HENRY

It is too late. The life of all his blood

Is touched corruptibly, and his pure brain,

Which some suppose the soul’s frail dwelling-house,

Doth by the idle comments that it makes

Foretell the ending of mortality.

Enter the Earl of Pembroke

PEMBROKE

His highness yet doth speak, and holds belief

That being brought into the open air,

It would allay the burning quality

Of that fell poison which assaileth him.

PRINCE HENRY

Let him be brought into the orchard here.—

⌈Exit Lord Bigot⌉

Doth he still rage?

PEMBROKE He is more patient

Than when you left him. Even now, he sung.

PRINCE HENRY

O, vanity of sickness! Fierce extremes

In their continuance will not feel themselves.

Death, having preyed upon the outward parts,

Leaves them invincible, and his siege is now

Against the mind; the which he pricks and wounds

With many legions of strange fantasies,

Which in their throng and press to that last hold

Confound themselves. ’Tis strange that death should

sing.

I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,

Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death,

And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings

His soul and body to their lasting rest.

SALISBURY

Be of good comfort, Prince, for you are born

To set a form upon that indigest

Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude.

King John is brought in, ⌈with Lord Bigot attending⌉

KING JOHN

Ay marry, now my soul hath elbow-room;

It would not out at windows nor at doors.

There is so hot a summer in my bosom

That all my bowels crumble up to dust;

I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen

Upon a parchment, and against this fire

Do I shrink up.

PRINCE HENRY How fares your majesty?

KING JOHN

Poisoned, ill fare! Dead, forsook, cast off;

And none of you will bid the winter come

To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,

Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course

Through my burned bosom, nor entreat the north

To make his bleak winds kiss my parchèd lips 40

And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much;

I beg cold comfort, and you are so strait

And so ingrateful you deny me that.

PRINCE HENRY

O, that there were some virtue in my tears

That might relieve you!

KING JOHN The salt in them is hot.

Within me is a hell, and there the poison

Is, as a fiend, confined to tyrannize

On unreprievable condemned blood.

Enter the Bastard

BASTARD

O, I am scalded with my violent motion

And spleen of speed to see your majesty!

KING JOHN

O cousin, thou art come to set mine eye.

The tackle of my heart is cracked and burnt,

And all the shrouds wherewith my life should sail

Are turned to one thread, one little hair;

My heart hath one poor string to stay it by,

Which holds but till thy news be uttered,

And then all this thou seest is but a clod

And module of confounded royalty.

BASTARD

The Dauphin is preparing hitherward,

Where God He knows how we shall answer him;

For in a night the best part of my power,

As I upon advantage did remove,

Were in the Washes all unwarily

Devoured by the unexpected flood.

King John dies

SALISBURY

You breathe these dead news in as dead an ear.

(To King John) My liege, my lord!—But now a king,

now thus.

PRINCE HENRY

Even so must I run on, and even so stop.

What surety of the world, what hope, what stay,

When this was now a king and now is clay?

BASTARD (to King John)

Art thou gone so? I do but stay behind

To do the office for thee of revenge,

And then my soul shall wait on thee to heaven,

As it on earth hath been thy servant still.

(To the lords) Now, now, you stars that move in your

right spheres,

Where be your powers? Show now your mended

faiths,

And instantly return with me again,

To push destruction and perpetual shame

Out of the weak door of our fainting land.

Straight let us seek, or straight we shall be sought.

The Dauphin rages at our very heels.

SALISBURY

It seems you know not, then, so much as we.

The Cardinal Pandolf is within at rest,

Who half an hour since came from the Dauphin,

And brings from him such offers of our peace

As we with honour and respect may take,

With purpose presently to leave this war.

BASTARD

He will the rather do it when he sees

Ourselves well-sinewed to our own defence.

SALISBURY

Nay, ’tis in a manner done already,

For many carriages he hath dispatched

To the sea-side, and put his cause and quarrel

To the disposing of the Cardinal,

With whom yourself, myself, and other lords,

If you think meet, this afternoon will post

To consummate this business happily.

BASTARD

Let it be so.—And you, my noble prince,

With other princes that may best be spared,

Shall wait upon your father’s funeral.

PRINCE HENRY

At Worcester must his body be interred,

For so he willed it.

BASTARD Thither shall it then, 100

And happily may your sweet self put on

The lineal state and glory of the land,

To whom with all submission, on my knee,

I do bequeath my faithful services

And true subjection everlastingly. 105

He kneels

SALISBURY

And the like tender of our love we make,

To rest without a spot for evermore.

Salisbury, Pembroke and Bigot kneel

PRINCE HENRY

I have a kind of soul that would give thanks,

And knows not how to do it but with tears.

He weeps

BASTARD ⌈rising⌉

O, let us pay the time but needful woe,

Since it hath been beforehand with our griefs.

This England never did, nor never shall,

Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror

But when it first did help to wound itself.

Now these her princes are come home again,

Come the three corners of the world in arms

And we shall shock them. Naught shall make us rue

If England to itself do rest but true.

⌈Flourish.⌉ Exeunt ⌈with the body⌉

THE MERCHANT OF VENICE

ENTRY of ‘a book of The Merchant of Venice or otherwise called The Jew of Venice’ in the Stationers’ Register on 22July 1598 probably represents an attempt by Shakespeare’s company to prevent the unauthorized printing of a popular play: it eventually appeared in print as ‘The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice’ in 1600, when it was said to have ‘been divers times acted by the Lord Chamberlain his servants’; probably Shakespeare wrote it in 1596 or 1597. The alternative title—The Jew of Venice—may reflect Shylock’s impact on the play’s first audiences.

The play is constructed on the basis of two romantic tales using motifs well known to sixteenth-century readers. The story of Giannetto (Shakespeare’s Bassanio) and the Lady (Portia) of Belmont comes from an Italian collection of fifty stories published under the title of II Pecorone (‘the big sheep’, or ‘dunce’) and attributed to one Ser Giovanni of Fiorentino. Written in the later part of the fourteenth century, the volume did not appear until 1558. No sixteenth-century translation is known, so (unless there was a lost intermediary) Shakespeare must have read it in Italian. It gave him the main outline of the plot involving Antonio (the merchant), Bassanio (the wooer), Portia, and the Jew (Shylock). The pound of flesh motif was available also in other versions, one of which, in Alexander Silvayn’s The Orator (translated 1596), influenced the climactic scene (4.1) in which Shylock attempts to exact the full penalty of his bond.

In the story from II Pecorone the lady (a widow) challenges her suitors to seduce her, on pain of the forfeiture of their wealth, and thwarts them by drugging their wine. Shakespeare more romantically shows a maiden required by her father’s will to accept only a wooer who will forswear marriage if he fails to make the right choice among caskets of gold, silver and lead. The story of the caskets was readily available in versions by John Gower (in his Confessio Amantis) and Giovanni Boccaccio (in his Decameron), and in an anonymous anthology (the Gesta Romanorum). Shakespeare added the character ofJessica, Shylock’s daughter who elopes with the Christian Lorenzo—perhaps influenced by episodes in Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta (c.1589)—and made many adjustments to the stories from which he borrowed.

The Merchant of Venice is a natural development from Shakespeare’s earlier comedies, especially The Two Gentlemen of Verona, with its heroine disguised as a boy and its portrayal of the competing demands of love and friendship. But Portia is the first of his great romantic heroines, and Shylock his first great comic antagonist. Though the play grew out of fairy tales, its moral scheme is not entirely clear cut: the Christians are open to criticism, the Jew is true to his own code of conduct. The response of twentieth-century and later audiences has been complicated by racial issues; in any case, the role of Shylock affords such strong opportunities for an actor capable of arousing an undercurrent of sympathy for a vindictive character that it has sometimes unbalanced the play in performance. But the so-called trial scene (4.1) is unfailing in its impact on audiences, and the closing episodes modulate skilfully from romantic lyricism to high comedy, while sustaining the play’s concern with true and false values.

THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

ANTONIO, a merchant of Venice

BASSANIO, his friend and Portia’s suitor

LEONARDO, Bassanio’s servant

SHYLOCK, a Jew

JESSICA, his daughter

TUBAL, a Jew

LANCELOT, a clown, first Shylock’s servant and then Bassanio’s

GOBBO, his father

PORTIA, an heiress

NERISSA, her waiting-gentlewoman

DUKE of Venice

Magnificoes of Venice

A jailer, attendants, and servants

The Comical History of the Merchant of Venice, or Otherwise Called the Jew of Venice

1.1 Enter Antonio, Salerio, and Solanio

ANTONIO

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad.

It wearies me, you say it wearies you,

But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,

What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,

I am to learn;

And such a want-wit sadness makes of me

That I have much ado to know myself.

SALERIO

Your mind is tossing on the ocean,

There where your argosies with portly sail,

Like signors and rich burghers on the flood—

Or as it were the pageants of the sea—

Do overpeer the petty traffickers

That curtsy to them, do them reverence,

As they fly by them with their woven wings.

SOLANIO (to Antonio)

Believe me, sir, had I such venture forth

The better part of my affections would

Be with my hopes abroad. I should be still

Plucking the grass to know where sits the wind,

Peering in maps for ports and piers and roads,

And every object that might make me fear

Misfortune to my ventures out of doubt

Would make me sad.

SALERIO My wind cooling my broth

Would blow me to an ague when I thought

What harm a wind too great might do at sea.

I should not see the sandy hour-glass run

But I should think of shallows and of flats,

And see my wealthy Andrew, decks in sand,

Vailing her hightop lower than her ribs

To kiss her burial. Should I go to church

And see the holy edifice of stone 30

And not bethink me straight of dangerous rocks

Which, touching but my gentle vessel’s side,

Would scatter all her spices on the stream,

Enrobe the roaring waters with my silks,

And, in a word, but even now worth this,

And now worth nothing? Shall I have the thought

To think on this, and shall I lack the thought

That such a thing bechanced would make me sad?

But tell not me. I know Antonio

Is sad to think upon his merchandise.

ANTONIO

Believe me, no. I thank my fortune for it,

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,

Nor to one place; nor is my whole estate

Upon the fortune of this present year.

Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.

SOLANIO

Why then, you are in love.

ANTONIOFie, fie.

SOLANIO

Not in love neither? Then let us say you are sad

Because you are not merry, and ’twere as easy

For you to laugh, and leap, and say you are merry

Because you are not sad. Now, by two-headed Janus,

Nature hath framed strange fellows in her time:

Some that will evermore peep through their eyes

And laugh like parrots at a bagpiper,

And other of such vinegar aspect

That they’ll not show their teeth in way of smile

Though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.

Enter Bassanio, Lorenzo, and Graziano

Here comes Bassanio, your most noble kinsman,

Graziano, and Lorenzo. Fare ye well.

We leave you now with better company.

SALERIO

I would have stayed till I had made you merry

If worthier friends had not prevented me.

ANTONIO

Your worth is very dear in my regard.

I take it your own business calls on you,

And you embrace th’occasion to depart.

SALERIO Good morrow, my good lords. 65

BASSANIO

Good signors both, when shall we laugh? Say, when?

You grow exceeding strange. Must it be so?

SALERIO

We’ll make our leisures to attend on yours.

Exeunt Salerio and Solanio

LORENZO

My lord Bassanio, since you have found Antonio,

We two will leave you; but at dinner-time

I pray you have in mind where we must meet.

BASSANIO I will not fail you.

GRAZIANO

You look not well, Signor Antonio.

You have too much respect upon the world.

They lose it that do buy it with much care.

Believe me, you are marvellously changed.

ANTONIO

I hold the world but as the world, Graziano—

A stage where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

GRAZIANO Let me play the fool.

With mirth and laughter let old wrinkles come,

And let my liver rather heat with wine

Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.

Why should a man whose blood is warm within

Sit like his grandsire cut in alabaster,

Sleep when he wakes, and creep into the jaundice

By being peevish? I tell thee what, Antonio—

I love thee, and ‘tis my love that speaks—

There are a sort of men whose visages

Do cream and mantle like a standing pond,

And do a wilful stillness entertain

With purpose to be dressed in an opinion

Of wisdom, gravity, profound conceit,

As who should say ‘I am Sir Oracle,

And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark.’

O my Antonio, I do know of these

That therefore only are reputed wise

For saying nothing, when I am very sure,

If they should speak, would almost damn those ears

Which, hearing them, would call their brothers fools.

I’ll tell thee more of this another time.

But fish not with this melancholy bait

For this fool gudgeon, this opinion.—

Come, good Lorenzo.—Fare ye well a while.

I’ll end my exhortation after dinner.

LORENZO (to Antonio and Bassanio)

Well, we will leave you then till dinner-time. 105

I must be one of these same dumb wise men,

For Graziano never lets me speak.

GRAZIANO

Well, keep me company but two years more

Thou shalt not know the sound of thine own tongue.

ANTONIO

Fare you well. I’ll grow a talker for this gear.

GRAZIANO

Thanks, i’faith, for silence is only commendable

In a neat’s tongue dried and a maid not vendible.

Exeunt Graziano and Lorenzo

ANTONIO Yet is that anything now?

BASSANIO Graziano speaks an infinite deal of nothing,

more than any man in all Venice. His reasons are as

two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff: you

shall seek all day ere you find them, and when you

have them they are not worth the search.

ANTONIO

Well, tell me now what lady is the same

To whom you swore a secret pilgrimage,

That you today promised to tell me of.

BASSANIO

’Tis not unknown to you, Antonio,

How much I have disabled mine estate

By something showing a more swelling port

Than my faint means would grant continuance,

Nor do I now make moan to be abridged

From such a noble rate; but my chief care

Is to come fairly off from the great debts

Wherein my time, something too prodigal,

Hath left me gaged. To you, Antonio,

I owe the most in money and in love,

And from your love I have a warranty

To unburden all my plots and purposes

How to get clear of all the debts I owe.

ANTONIO

I pray you, good Bassanio, let me know it,

And if it stand as you yourself still do,

Within the eye of honour, be assured

My purse, my person, my extremest means

Lie all unlocked to your occasions.

BASSANIO

In my schooldays, when I had lost one shaft,

I shot his fellow of the selfsame flight

The selfsame way, with more advised watch,

To find the other forth; and by adventuring both,

I oft found both. I urge this childhood proof

Because what follows is pure innocence.

I owe you much, and, like a wilful youth,

That which I owe is lost; but if you please

To shoot another arrow that self way

Which you did shoot the first, I do not doubt,

As I will watch the aim, or to find both

Or bring your latter hazard back again,

And thankfully rest debtor for the first.

ANTONIO

You know me well, and herein spend but time

To wind about my love with circumstance;

And out of doubt you do me now more wrong

In making question of my uttermost

Than if you had made waste of all I have.

Then do but say to me what I should do

That in your knowledge may by me be done,

And I am pressed unto it. Therefore speak.

BASSANIO

In Belmont is a lady richly left,

And she is fair, and, fairer than that word,

Of wondrous virtues. Sometimes from her eyes

I did receive fair speechless messages.

Her name is Portia, nothing undervalued

To Cato’s daughter, Brutus’ Portia;

Nor is the wide world ignorant of her worth,

For the four winds blow in from every coast

Renowned suitors, and her sunny locks

Hang on her temples like a golden fleece,

Which makes her seat of Belmont Colchis’ strand,

And many Jasons come in quest of her.

O my Antonio, had I but the means

To hold a rival place with one of them,

I have a mind presages me such thrift

That I should questionless be fortunate

ANTONIO

Thou know’st that all my fortunes are at sea,

Neither have I money nor commodity

To raise a present sum. Therefore go forth—

Try what my credit can in Venice do;

That shall be racked even to the uttermost

To furnish thee to Belmont, to fair Portia.

Go presently enquire, and so will I,

Where money is; and I no question make

To have it of my trust or for my sake.

Exeunt [severally]