William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition (263 page)

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Authors: William Shakespeare

Tags: #Drama, #Literary Criticism, #Shakespeare

BOOK: William Shakespeare: The Complete Works 2nd Edition
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⌈
Shouts within.
⌉
Trumpets sound
 
PISTOL
There roared the sea, and trumpet-clangour sounds!
Enter King Harry the Fifth, Prince John of Lancaster, the Dukes of Clarence and Gloucester, the Lord Chief Justice,
⌈
and others
⌉
 
SIR JOHN
God save thy grace, King Hal, my royal Hal!
PISTOL
The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!
SIR JOHN God save thee, my sweet boy!
KING HARRY
My Lord Chief Justice, speak to that vain man.
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE (
to Sir John
)
Have you your wits? Know you what ’tis you speak?
SIR JOHN
My king, my Jove, I speak to thee, my heart!
KING HARRY
I know thee not, old man. Fall to thy prayers.
How ill white hairs becomes a fool and jester!
I have long dreamt of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swelled, so old, and so profane;
But being awake, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace.
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest.
Presume not that I am the thing I was,
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turned away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots.
Till then I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evils;
And as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. (
To Lord Chief Justice
) Be it
your charge, my lord,
To see performed the tenor of our word. (To his train)
Set on!
Exeunt King Harry and his train
SIR JOHN Master Shallow, I owe you a thousand pound.
SHALLOW Yea, marry, Sir John; which I beseech you to let me have home with me.
SIR JOHN That can hardly be,, Master Shallow. Do not you grieve at this. I shall be sent for in private to him. Look you, he must seem thus to the world. Fear not your advancements. I will be the man yet that shall make you great.
SHALLOW I cannot perceive how, unless you give me your doublet and stuff me out with straw. I beseech you, good Sir John, let me have five hundred of my thousand.
SIR JOHN Sir, I will be as good as my word. This that you heard was but a colour.
SHALLOW A colour I fear that you will die in, Sir John.
SIR JOHN Fear no colours. Go with me to dinner. Come, Lieutenant Pistol; come, Bardolph. I shall be sent for soon at night.
Enter the Lord Chief Justice and Prince John, with officers
 
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE (
to officers
)
Go carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet.
Take all his company along with him.
SIR JOHN My lord, my lord!
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE
I cannot now speak. I will hear you soon.—
Take them away.
PISTOL
Si fortuna me tormenta, spero me contenta.
Exeunt all but Prince John and Lord Chief Justice
 
PRINCE JOHN
I like this fair proceeding of the King’s.
He hath intent his wonted followers
Shall all be very well provided for,
But all are banished till their conversations
Appear more wise and modest to the world.
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE And so they are.
PRINCE JOHN
The King hath called his parliament, my lord.
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE He hath.
PRINCE JOHN
I will lay odds that, ere this year expire,
We bear our civil swords and native fire
As far as France. I heard a bird so sing,
Whose music, to my thinking, pleased the King.
Come, will you hence?
Exeunt
 
Epilogue
Enter Epilogue
EPILOGUE First my fear, then my curtsy, last my speech.
My fear is your displeasure; my curtsy, my duty; and my speech to beg your pardons. If you look for a good speech now, you undo me; for what I have to say is of mine own making, and what indeed I should say will, I doubt, prove mine own marring. But to the purpose, and so to the venture. Be it known to you, as it is very well, I was lately here in the end of a displeasing play, to pray your patience for it, and to promise you a better. I did mean indeed to pay you with this; which, if like an ill venture it come unluckily home, I break, and you, my gentle creditors, lose. Here I promised you I would be, and here I commit my body to your mercies. Bate me some, and I will pay you some, and, as most debtors do, promise you infinitely.
If my tongue cannot entreat you to acquit me, will you command me to use my legs? And yet that were but light payment, to dance out of your debt. But a good conscience will make any possible satisfaction, and so would I. All the gentlewomen here have forgiven me; if the gentlemen will not, then the gentlemen do not agree with the gentlewomen, which was never seen before in such an assembly.
One word more, I beseech you. If you be not too much cloyed with fat meat, our humble author will continue the story with Sir John in it, and make you merry with fair Catherine of France; where, for anything I know, Falstaff shall die of a sweat—unless already a be killed with your hard opinions. For Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man. My tongue is weary; when my legs are too, I will bid you good night, and so kneel down before you—but, indeed, to pray for the Queen.
⌈
He dances, then kneels for applause.
⌉
Exit
 
ADDITIONAL PASSAGES
 
Along with some substantial additions, Shakespeare probably made a number of short excisions when preparing the finished version of the play. The following, present in the Quarto but entirely or substantially omitted in the later Folio text, are the most significant:
A. AFTER 2.2.22
 
And God knows whether those that bawl out the ruins of thy linen shall inherit his kingdom—but the midwives say the children are not in the fault, whereupon the world increases, and kindreds are mightily strengthened.
B. AFTER ‘LIQUORS!’, 3.1-52
 
O, if this were seen,
The happiest youth, viewing his progress through,
What perils past, what crosses to ensue,
Would shut the book and sit him down and die.
C. AFTER ‘FAMINE.’, 3.2.309
 
yet lecherous as a monkey; and the whores called him ‘mandrake’. A came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutched hussies that he heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights.
 
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
 
Much Ado About Nothing
is not mentioned in the list of plays by Shakespeare given by Francis Meres in his
Palladis Tamia,
published in the autumn of 1598. Certain speech-prefixes of the first edition, published in 1600, suggest that as Shakespeare wrote he had in mind for the role of Dogberry the comic actor Will Kemp, who is believed to have left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men during 1599. Probably Shakespeare wrote the play between summer 1598 and spring 1599.
The action is set in Sicily, where Don Pedro, Prince of Aragon, has recently defeated his half-brother, the bastard Don John, in a military engagement. Apparently reconciled, they return to the capital, Messina, as guests of the Governor, Leonato. There Count Claudio, a young nobleman serving in Don Pedro’s army, falls in love with Hero, Leonato’s daughter, whom Don Pedro woos on his behalf. The play’s central plot, written mainly in verse, shows how Don John maliciously deceives Claudio into believing that Hero has taken a lover on the eve of her marriage, causing Claudio to repudiate her publicly, at the altar. This is a variation on an old tale that existed in many versions; it had been told in Italian verse by Ariosto, in his
Orlando Furioso
(1516, translated into English verse by Sir John Harington, 1591), in Italian prose by Matteo Bandello in his
Novelle
(1554, adapted into French by P. de Belleforest, 1569), in English prose by George Whetstone (
The Rock of Regard
, 1576), in English verse by Edmund Spenser (
The Faerie Queene,
Book 2, canto 4, 1590), and in a number of plays including Luigi Pasqualigo’s
II Fedele
(1579), adapted into English—perhaps by Anthony Munday—as
Fedele and Fortunio
(published in 1583). Shakespeare, whose plot is an independent reworking of the traditional story, seems to owe most to Ariosto and Bandello, perhaps indirectly.
Don John’s deception, with its tragicomical resolution, is offset by a parallel plot written mainly in prose, portraying another, more light-hearted deception, by which Hero’s cousin, Beatrice, and Benedick—friend of Don Pedro and Claudio—are tricked into acknowledging, first to themselves and then to each other, that they are in love. This part of the play seems to be of Shakespeare’s invention: the juxtaposition of this clever, sophisticated, apparently unillusioned pair with the more naive Claudio and Hero recalls Shakespeare’s earlier contrast of romantic and antiromantic attitudes to love and marriage in
The Taming of the Shrew
. The play’s third main strand is provided by Constable Dogberry, his partner Verges, and the Watchmen, clearly English rather than Sicilian in origin. Although Benedick and Beatrice are, technically, subordinate characters, they have dominated the imagination of both readers and playgoers.
 
THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY
 
Much Ado About Nothing
 
1.1
Enter Leonato, governor of Messina, Hero his daughter, and Beatrice his niece, with a Messenger
 
LEONATO I learn in this letter that Don Pedro of Aragon comes this night to Messina.
MESSENGER He is very near by this. He was not three leagues off when I left him.
LEONATO How many gentlemen have you lost in this action?
MESSENGER But few of any sort, and none of name.
LEONATO A victory is twice itself when the achiever brings home full numbers. I find here that Don Pedro hath bestowed much honour on a young Florentine called Claudio.
MESSENGER Much deserved on his part, and equally remembered by Don Pedro. He hath borne himself beyond the promise of his age, doing in the figure of a lamb the feats of a lion. He hath indeed better bettered expectation than you must expect of me to tell you how.
LEONATO He hath an uncle here in Messina will be very much glad of it.
MESSENGER I have already delivered him letters, and there appears much joy in him—even so much that joy could not show itself modest enough without a badge of bitterness.
LEONATO Did he break out into tears?
MESSENGER In great measure.
LEONATO A kind overflow of kindness, there are no faces truer than those that are so washed. How much better is it to weep at joy than to joy at weeping!
BEATRICE I pray you, is Signor Montanto returned from the wars, or no?
MESSENGER I know none of that name, lady. There was none such in the army, of any sort.
LEONATO What is he that you ask for, niece?
HERO My cousin means Signor Benedick of Padua.

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