The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works

Home > Fiction > The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works > Page 206
The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Works Page 206

by William Shakespeare


  BURGUNDY God save your majesty. My royal cousin, teach you our princess English?

  KING HARRY I would have her learn, my fair cousin, how perfectly I love her, and that is good English.

  BURGUNDY Is she not apt?

  KING HARRY Our tongue is rough, coz, and my condition is not smooth, so that having neither the voice nor the heart of flattery about me I cannot so conjure up the spirit of love in her that he will appear in his true likeness.

  BURGUNDY Pardon the frankness of my mirth, if I answer you for that. If you would conjure in her, you must make a circle; if conjure up love in her in his true likeness, he must appear naked and blind. Can you blame her then, being a maid yet rosed over with the virgin crimson of modesty, if she deny the appearance of a naked blind boy in her naked seeing self? It were, my lord, a hard condition for a maid to consign to.

  KING HARRY Yet they do wink and yield, as love is blind and enforces.

  BURGUNDY They are then excused, my lord, when they see not what they do.

  KING HARRY Then, good my lord, teach your cousin to consent winking.

  BURGUNDY I will wink on her to consent, my lord, if you will teach her to know my meaning. For maids, well summered and warm kept, are like flies at Bartholomew-tide: blind, though they have their eyes. And then they will endure handling, which before would not abide looking on.

  KING HARRY This moral ties me over to time and a hot summer, and so I shall catch the fly, your cousin, in the latter end, and she must be blind too.

  BURGUNDY As love is, my lord, before that it loves.

  KING HARRY It is so. And you may, some of you, thank love for my blindness, who cannot see many a fair French city for one fair French maid that stands in my way.

  KING CHARLES Yes, my lord, you see them perspectively, the cities turned into a maid—for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered.

  KING HARRY Shall Kate be my wife?

  KING CHARLES So please you.

  KING HARRY I am content, so the maiden cities you talk of may wait on her: so the maid that stood in the way for my wish shall show me the way to my will.

  KING CHARLES We have consented to all terms of reason.

  KING HARRY Is’t so, my lords of England?

  ⌈WARWICKI⌉

  The King hath granted every article:

  His daughter first, and so in sequel all,

  According to their firm proposed natures.

  EXETER

  Only he hath not yet subscribed this:

  where your majesty demands that the King of France,

  having any occasion to write for matter of grant, shall

  name your highness in this form and with this addition:

  ⌈reads⌉ in French, Notre très cher fils Henri, Roi

  d’Angleterre, Heritier de France, and thus in Latin,

  Praeclarissimus filius noster Henricus, Rex Angliae et

  Haeres Franciae.

  KING CHARLES

  Nor this I have not, brother, so denied,

  But your request shall make me let it pass.

  KING HARRY

  I pray you then, in love and dear alliance,

  Let that one article rank with the rest,

  And thereupon give me your daughter.

  KING CHARLES

  Take her, fair son, and from her blood raise up

  Issue to me, that the contending kingdoms

  Of France and England, whose very shores look pale

  With envy of each other’s happiness,

  May cease their hatred, and this dear conjunction

  Plant neighbourhood and Christian-like accord

  In their sweet bosoms, that never war advance

  His bleeding sword ’twixt England and fair France.

  ⌈ALL⌉ Amen.

  KING HARRY

  Now welcome, Kate, and bear me witness all

  That here I kiss her as my sovereign Queen.Flourish

  QUEEN ISABEL

  God, the best maker of all marriages,

  Combine your hearts in one, your realms in one.

  As man and wife, being two, are one in love,

  So be there ‘twixt your kingdoms such a spousal

  That never may ill office or fell jealousy,

  Which troubles oft the bed of blessed marriage,

  Thrust in between the paction of these kingdoms

  To make divorce of their incorporate league;

  That English may as French, French Englishmen,

  Receive each other, God speak this ‘Amen’.

  ALL Amen.

  KING HARRY

  Prepare we for our marriage. On which day,

  My lord of Burgundy, we’ll take your oath,

  And all the peers‘, for surety of our leagues.

  Then shall I swear to Kate, and you to me,

  And may our oaths well kept and prosp’rous be.

  Sennet. Exeunt

  Epilogue Enter Chorus

  CHORUS

  Thus far with rough and all-unable pen

  Our bending author hath pursued the story,

  In little room confining mighty men,

  Mangling by starts the full course of their glory.

  Small time, but in that small most greatly lived

  This star of England. Fortune made his sword,

  By which the world’s best garden he achieved, And of it left his son imperial lord.

  Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king Of France and England, did this king succeed,

  Whose state so many had the managing That they lost France and made his England bleed,

  Which oft our stage hath shown—and, for their sake,

  In your fair minds let this acceptance take. Exit

  ADDITIONAL PASSAGES

  The Dauphin/Bourbon variant, which usually involves only the alteration of speech-prefixes, has several consequences for the dialogue and structure of 4.5. There follow edited texts of the Folio and Quarto versions of this scene.

  A. FOLIOEnter the Constable, Orleans, Bourbon, the Dauphin, and Rambures

  CONSTABLE O diable!

  ORLÉANS O Seigneur! Le jour est perdu, tout est perdu.

  DAUPHIN

  Mort de ma vie! All is confounded, all.

  Reproach and everlasting shame

  Sits mocking in our plumes.

  A short alarum

  O méchante fortune! Do not run away.

  ⌈Exit Rambures⌉

  CONSTABLE Why, all our ranks are broke.

  DAUPHIN

  O perdurable shame! Let’s stab ourselves:

  Be these the wretches that we played at dice for?

  ORLÉANS

  Is this the king we sent to for his ransom?

  BOURBON

  Shame, an eternall shame, nothing but shame!

  Let us die in pride. In once more, back again!

  And he that will not follow Bourbon now,

  Let him go home, and with his cap in hand

  Like a base leno hold the chamber door,

  Whilst by a slave no gentler than my dog

  His fairest daughter is contaminated.

  CONSTABLE

  Disorder that hath spoiled us, friend us now,

  Let us on heaps go offer up our lives.

  ORLÉANS

  We are enough yet living in the field

  To smother up the English in our throngs,

  If any order might be thought upon.

  BOURBON

  The devil take order now. I’ll to the throng.

  Let life be short, else shame will be too long.

  Exeunt

  B. QUARTOEnter the four French lords: the Constable, Orléans, Bourbon, and Gebon

  GEBON O diabello!

  CONSTABLE Mort de ma vie!

  ORLÉANS O what a day is this!

  BOURBON

  O jour de honte, all is gone, all is lost.

  CONSTABLE We are enough yet living in the field

  To smother up the English,

&n
bsp; If any order might be thought upon.

  BOURBON

  A plague of order! Once more to the field!

  And he that will not follow Bourbon now,

  Let him go home, and with his cap in hand,

  Like a base leno hold the chamber door,

  Whilst by a slave no gentler than my dog

  His fairest daughter is contaminated.

  CONSTABLE

  Disorder that hath spoiled us, right us now.

  Come we in heaps, we’ll offer up our lives

  Unto these English, or else die with fame.

  ⌈BOURBON⌉ Come, come along.

  Let’s die with honour, our shame doth last too long.Exeunt

  JULIUS CAESAR

  ON 21 September 1599 a Swiss doctor, Thomas Platter, saw what can only have been Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar ‘very pleasingly performed’ in the newly built Globe Theatre—‘the straw-thatched house’—on the south side of the Thames. Francis Meres does not mention the play in Palladis Tamia of 1598, and minor resemblances with works printed in the early part of 1599 suggest that Shakespeare wrote it during that year. It was first printed in the 1623 Folio.

  Julius Caesar shows Shakespeare turning from English to Roman history, which he had last used in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece. Caesar was regarded as perhaps the greatest ruler in the history of the world, and his murder by Brutus as one of the foulest crimes: but it was also recognized that Caesar had faults and Brutus virtues. Other plays, some now lost, had been written about Caesar and may have influenced Shakespeare; but there is no question that he made extensive use (for the first time in this play) of Sir Thomas North’s great translation (based on Jacques Amyot’s French version and published in 1579) of Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans by the Greek historian Plutarch, who lived from about AD 50 to 130.

  Shakespeare was interested in the aftermath of Caesar’s death as well as in the events leading up to it, and in the public and private motives of those responsible for it. So, although the Folio calls the play The Tragedy of Julius Caesar, Caesar is dead before the play is half over; Brutus, Cassius, and Antony have considerably longer roles, and Brutus is portrayed with a degree of introspection which links him more closely to Shakespeare’s other tragic heroes. Shakespeare draws mainly on the last quarter of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar, showing his fall; he also uses the Lives of Antony and Brutus for the play’s first sweep of action, showing the rise of the conspiracy against Caesar, its leaders’ efforts to persuade Brutus to join them, the assassination itself, and its immediate aftermath as Antony incites the citizens to revenge. The second part, showing the formation of the triumvirate of Antony, Lepidus, and Octavius Caesar, the uneasy alliance of Brutus and Cassius, and the battles in which Caesar’s spirit revenges itself, depends mainly on the Life of Brutus. Facts are often altered and rearranged in the interests of dramatic economy and effectiveness.

  Although Shakespeare wrote the play at a point in his career at which he was tending to use a high proportion of prose, Julius Caesar is written mainly in verse; as if to suit the subject matter, the style is classical in its lucidity and eloquence, reaching a climax of rhetorical effectiveness in the speeches over Caesar’s body (3.2). The play’s stage-worthiness has been repeatedly demonstrated; it offers excellent opportunities in all its main roles, and the quarrel between Brutus and Cassius (4.2) has been admired ever since Leonard Digges, a contemporary of Shakespeare, praised it at the expense of Ben Jonson:So have I seen, when Caesar would appear,

  And on the stage at half-sword parley were

  Brutus and Cassius; O, how the audience

  Were ravished, with what wonder they went thence,

  When some new day they would not brook a line

  Of tedious though well-laboured Catiline.

  THE PERSONS OF THE PLAY

  The Tragedy of Julius Caesar

  1.1 Enter Flavius, Murellus, and certain commoners over the stage

  FLAVIUS

  Hence, home, you idle creatures, get you home!

  Is this a holiday? What, know you not,

  Being mechanical, you ought not walk

  Upon a labouring day without the sign

  Of your profession?—Speak, what trade art thou?

  CARPENTER Why, sir, a carpenter.

  MURELLUS

  Where is thy leather apron and thy rule?

  What dost thou with thy best apparel on?—

  You, sir, what trade are you?

  COBBLER Truly, sir, in respect of a fine workman I am but, as you would say, a cobbler.

  MURELLUS But what trade art thou? Answer me directly.

  COBBLER A trade, sir, that I hope I may use with a safe conscience, which is indeed, sir, a mender of bad soles.

  FLAVIUS

  What trade, thou knave? Thou naughty knave, what trade?

  COBBLER Nay, I beseech you, sir, be not out with me. Yet if you be out, sir, I can mend you.

  MURELLUS

  What mean’st thou by that? Mend me, thou saucy fellow?

  COBBLER Why, sir, cobble you.

  FLAVIUS Thou art a cobbler, art thou?

  COBBLER Truly, sir, all that I live by is with the awl. I meddle with no tradesman’s matters, nor women’s matters, but withal I am indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes: when they are in great danger I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat’s leather have gone upon my handiwork.

  FLAVIUS

  But wherefore art not in thy shop today?

  Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?

  COBBLER Truly, sir, to wear out their shoes to get myself into more work. But indeed, sir, we make holiday to see Caesar, and to rejoice in his triumph.

  MURELLUS

  Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?

  What tributaries follow him to Rome

  To grace in captive bonds his chariot wheels?

  You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless

  things!

  O, you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,

  Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft

  Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,

  To towers and windows, yea to chimney-tops,

  Your infants in your arms, and there have sat

  The livelong day with patient expectation

  To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.

  And when you saw his chariot but appear,

  Have you not made an universal shout,

  That Tiber trembled underneath her banks

  To hear the replication of your sounds

  Made in her concave shores?

  And do you now put on your best attire?

  And do you now cull out a holiday?

  And do you now strew flowers in his way

  That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?

  Be gone!

  Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,

  Pray to the gods to intermit the plague

  That needs must light on this ingratitude.

  FLAVIUS

  Go, go, good countrymen, and for this fault

  Assemble all the poor men of your sort;

  Draw them to Tiber banks, and weep your tears

  Into the channel, till the lowest stream

  Do kiss the most exalted shores of all.Exeunt all the commoners

  See whe’er their basest mettle be not moved.

  They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness.

  Go you down that way towards the Capitol;

  This way will I. Disrobe the images

  If you do find them decked with ceremonies.

  MURELLUS May we do so?

  You know it is the Feast of Lupercal.

  FLAVIUS

  It is no matter. Let no images

  Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. I’ll about,

  And drive away the vulgar from the streets;

  So do you too where you perceive them thick.

  These growing feathers plucked from Caesar’s wing
/>
  Will make him fly an ordinary pitch,

  Who else would soar above the view of men

  And keep us all in servile fearfulness.

  Exeunt

  1.2 ⌈Loud music.⌉ Enter Caesar, Antony stripped for the course, Calpurnia, Portia, Decius, Cicero, Brutus, Cassius, Casca, a Soothsayer, ⌈a throng of citizens⌉; after them, Murellus and Flavius

  CAESAR Calpurnia.

  CASCA Peace, ho! Caesar speaks. ⌈Music ceases⌉

  CAESAR Calpurnia.

  CALPURMA Here, my lord.

  CAESAR

  Stand you directly in Antonio’s way

  When he doth run his course.—Antonio.

  ANTONY Caesar, my lord.

  CAESAR

  Forget not in your speed, Antonio,

  To touch Calpurnia, for our elders say

  The barren, touched in this holy chase,

  Shake off their sterile curse.

  ANTONY

  I shall remember:

  When Caesar says ‘Do this’, it is performed.

  CAESAR

  Set on, and leave no ceremony out.⌈music⌉

  SOOTHSAYER Caesar!

  CAESAR Ha! Who calls?

  CASCA

  Bid every noise be still. Peace yet again.⌈Music ceases⌉

  CAESAR

  Who is it in the press that calls on me?

  I hear a tongue shriller than all the music

  Cry ‘Caesar!’ Speak. Caesar is turned to hear.

  SOOTHSAYER

  Beware the ides of March.

  CAESAR What man is that?

  BRUTUS

  A soothsayer bids you beware the ides of March.

  CAESAR

  Set him before me; let me see his face.

  CASSIUS

  Fellow, come from the throng; look upon Caesar.

  The Soothsayer comes forward

  CAESAR

  What sayst thou to me now? Speak once again.

  SOOTHSAYER Beware the ides of March.

  CAESAR

  He is a dreamer. Let us leave him. Pass!Sennet. Exeunt all but Brutus and Cassius

 

‹ Prev