William Shakespeare - The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

ANNE

Now, Master Slender.

SLENDER

Now, good Mistress Anne. —

ANNE

What is your will?

SLENDER

My will! ‘od’s heartlings, that’s a pretty jest indeed! I ne’er made my will yet, I thank heaven; I am not such a sickly creature, I give heaven praise.

ANNE

I mean, Master Slender, what would you with me?

SLENDER

Truly, for mine own part I would little or nothing with you. Your father and my uncle hath made motions; if it be my luck, so; if not, happy man be his dole! They can tell you how things go better than I can. You may ask your father; here he comes.

[Enter PAGE and MISTRESS PAGE.]

PAGE

Now, Master Slender: love him, daughter Anne.

Why, how now! what does Master Fenton here?

You wrong me, sir, thus still to haunt my house:

I told you, sir, my daughter is dispos’d of.

FENTON

Nay, Master Page, be not impatient.

MRS. PAGE

Good Master Fenton, come not to my child.

PAGE

She is no match for you.

FENTON

Sir, will you hear me?

PAGE

No, good Master Fenton.

Come, Master Shallow; come, son Slender, in.

Knowing my mind, you wrong me, Master Fenton.

[Exeunt PAGE, SHALLOW, and SLENDER.]

QUICKLY

Speak to Mistress Page.

FENTON

Good Mistress Page, for that I love your daughter

In such a righteous fashion as I do,

Perforce, against all checks, rebukes, and manners,

I must advance the colours of my love

And not retire: let me have your good will.

ANNE

Good mother, do not marry me to yond fool.

MRS. PAGE

I mean it not; I seek you a better husband.

QUICKLY

That’s my master, Master doctor.

ANNE

Alas! I had rather be set quick i’ the earth.

And bowl’d to death with turnips.

MRS. PAGE

Come, trouble not yourself. Good Master Fenton,

I will not be your friend, nor enemy;

My daughter will I question how she loves you,

And as I find her, so am I affected.

Till then, farewell, sir: she must needs go in;

Her father will be angry.

FENTON

Farewell, gentle mistress. Farewell, Nan.

[Exeunt MRS. PAGE and ANNE.]

QUICKLY

This is my doing now: “Nay,” said I, “will you cast away your child on a fool, and a physician? Look on Master Fenton.” This is my doing.

FENTON

I thank thee; and I pray thee, once tonight

Give my sweet Nan this ring. There’s for thy pains.

QUICKLY

Now Heaven send thee good fortune!

[Exit FENTON.]

A kind heart he hath; a woman would run through fire and water for such a kind heart. But yet I would my master had Mistress Anne; or I would Master Slender had her; or, in sooth, I would Master Fenton had her; I will do what I can for them all three, for so I have promised, and I’ll be as good as my word; but speciously for Master Fenton. Well, I must of another errand to Sir John Falstaff from my two mistresses: what a beast am I to slack it!

[Exit.]

SCENE V. A room in the Garter Inn

[Enter FALSTAFF and BARDOLPH.]

FALSTAFF

Bardolph, I say, —

BARDOLPH

Here, sir.

FALSTAFF

Go fetch me a quart of sack; put a toast in ‘t.

[Exit BARDOLPH.]

Have I lived to be carried in a basket, and to be thrown in the Thames like a barrow of butcher’s offal? Well, if I be served such another trick, I’ll have my brains ta’en out and buttered, and give them to a dog for a new year’s gift. The rogues slighted me into the river with as little remorse as they would have drowned a blind bitch’s puppies, fifteen i’ the litter; and you may know by my size that I have a kind of alacrity in sinking; if the bottom were as deep as hell I should down. I had been drowned but that the shore was shelvy and shallow; a death that I abhor, for the water swells a man; and what a thing should I have been when had been swelled! I should have been a mountain of mummy.

[Re-enter BARDOLPH, with the sack.]

BARDOLPH

Here’s Mistress Quickly, sir, to speak with you.

FALSTAFF

Come, let me pour in some sack to the Thames water; for my belly’s as cold as if I had swallowed snowballs for pills to cool the reins. Call her in.

BARDOLPH

Come in, woman.

[Enter MISTRESS QUICKLY.]

QUICKLY

By your leave. I cry you mercy. Give your worship good morrow.

FALSTAFF

Take away these chalices. Go, brew me a pottle of sack finely.

BARDOLPH

With eggs, sir?

FALSTAFF

Simple of itself; I’ll no pullet-sperm in my brewage.

[Exit BARDOLPH.]

How now!

QUICKLY

Marry, sir, I come to your worship from Mistress Ford.

FALSTAFF

Mistress Ford! I have had ford enough; I was thrown into the ford; I have my belly full of ford.

QUICKLY

Alas the day! good heart, that was not her fault: she does so take on with her men; they mistook their erection.

FALSTAFF

So did I mine, to build upon a foolish woman’s promise.

QUICKLY

Well, she laments, sir, for it, that it would yearn your heart to see it. Her husband goes this morning a-birding; she desires you once more to come to her between eight and nine; I must carry her word quickly. She’ll make you amends, I warrant you.

FALSTAFF

Well, I will visit her. Tell her so; and bid her think what a man is; let her consider his frailty, and then judge of my merit.

QUICKLY

I will tell her.

FALSTAFF

Do so. Between nine and ten, sayest thou?

QUICKLY

Eight and nine, sir.

FALSTAFF

Well, be gone; I will not miss her.

QUICKLY

Peace be with you, sir.

[Exit MISTRESS QUICKLY.]

FALSTAFF

I marvel I hear not of Master Brook; he sent me word to stay within. I like his money well. O! here he comes.

[Enter FORD disguised.]

FORD

Bless you, sir!

FALSTAFF

Now, Master Brook, you come to know what hath passed between me and Ford’s wife?

FORD

That, indeed, Sir John, is my business.

FALSTAFF

Master Brook, I will not lie to you: I was at her house the hour she appointed me.

FORD

And how sped you, sir?

FALSTAFF

Very ill-favouredly, Master Brook.

FORD

How so, sir? did she change her determination?

FALSTAFF

No. Master Brook; but the peaking cornuto her husband, Master Brook, dwelling in a continual ‘larum of jealousy, comes me in the instant of our encounter, after we had embraced, kissed, protested, and, as it were, spoke the prologue of our comedy; and at his heels a rabble of his companions, thither provoked and instigated by his distemper, and, forsooth, to search his house for his wife’s love.

FORD

What! while you were there?

FALSTAFF

While I was there.

FORD

And did he search for you, and could not find you?

FALSTAFF

You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford’s approach; and, in her invention and Ford’s wife’s distraction, they conveyed me into a buck-basket.

FORD

A buck-basket!

FALSTAFF

By the Lord, a buck-basket! rammed me in with foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy napkins, that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.

FORD

And how long lay you there?

FALSTAFF

Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good. Being thus crammed in the basket, a couple of Ford’s knaves, his hinds, were called forth by their mistress to carry me in the name of foul clothes to Datchet-lane; they took me on their shoulders; met the jealous knave their master in the door; who asked them once or twice what they had in their basket. I quaked for fear lest the lunatic knave would have searched it; but Fate, ordaining he should be a cuckold, held his hand. Well, on went he for a search, and away went I for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, Master Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright to be detected with a jealous rotten bell-wether; next, to be compassed like a good bilbo in the circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that; a man of my kidney, think of that, that am as subject to heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw: it was a miracle to ‘scape suffocation. And in the height of this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease, like a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled, glowing hot, in that surge, like a horse-shoe; think of that, hissing hot, think of that, Master Brook!