Brick Shakespeare: The Comedies—A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew (56 page)

BENEDICK

Why, that’s spoken like an honest drovier: so they sell bullocks. But did you think the prince would have served you thus?

CLAUDIO

I pray you, leave me.

BENEDICK

Ho! now you strike like the blind man: ’twas the boy that stole your meat, and you’ll beat the post.

CLAUDIO

If it will not be, I’ll leave you.

BENEDICK

Alas, poor hurt fowl! now will he creep into sedges.

But that my Lady Beatrice should know me, and not know me! The prince’s fool! Ha? It may be I go under that title because I am merry. Yea, but so I am apt to do myself wrong; I am not so reputed: it is the base, though bitter, disposition of Beatrice that puts the world into her person and so gives me out. Well, I’ll be revenged as I may.

DON PEDRO

Now, signior, where’s the count? did you see him?

BENEDICK

Troth, my lord, I have played the part of Lady Fame.

I found him here as melancholy as a lodge in a warren: I told him, and I think I told him true, that your grace had got the good will of this young lady; and I offered him my company to a willow-tree, either to make him a garland, as being forsaken, or to bind him up a rod, as being worthy to be whipped.

DON PEDRO

To be whipped! What’s his fault?

BENEDICK

The flat transgression of a schoolboy, who, being overjoyed with finding a birds’ nest, shows it his companion, and he steals it.

DON PEDRO

Wilt thou make a trust a transgression? The transgression is in the stealer.

BENEDICK

Yet it had not been amiss the rod had been made, and the garland too; for the garland he might have worn himself, and the rod he might have bestowed on you, who, as I take it, have stolen his birds’ nest.

DON PEDRO

I will but teach them to sing, and restore them to the owner.

BENEDICK

If their singing answer your saying, by my faith, you say honestly.

DON PEDRO

The Lady Beatrice hath a quarrel to you: the gentleman that danced with her told her she is much wronged by you.

BENEDICK

O, she misused me past the endurance of a block! an oak but with one green leaf on it would have answered her; my very visor began to assume life and scold with her. She told me, not thinking I had been myself, that I was the prince’s jester, that I was duller than a great thaw; huddling jest upon jest with such impossible conveyance upon me that I stood like a man at a mark, with a whole army shooting at me.