Be general leprosy. Breath infect breath,
That their society, as their friendship, may
Be merely poison. Nothing I’ll bear from thee
But nakedness, thou detestable town.
Take thou that too, with multiplying bans.
Timon will to the woods, where he shall find
Th’ unkindest beast more kinder than mankind.
The gods confound – hear me, you good gods all –
The Athenians both within and out that wall.
And grant, as Timon grows, his hate may grow
To the whole race of mankind, high and low!
Amen.
[IV, iii, 1–45] Wealth, not worth, decides status in the world of men, inveighs an angry Timon as he digs in the woods for edible roots. When he finds gold instead he is filled with satirical scorn towards this basest of metals, the ‘common whore’ of all mankind:
O blessed breeding sun, draw from the earth
Rotten humidity. Below thy sister’s orb
Infect the air! Twinn’d brothers of one womb,
Whose procreation, residence, and birth,
Scarce is dividant – touch them with several fortunes,
The greater scorns the lesser. Not nature,
To whom all sores lay siege, can bear great fortune
But by contempt of nature.
Raise me this beggar and deject that lord –
The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,
The beggar native honour.
It is the pasture lards the wether’s sides,
The want that makes him lean. Who dares, who dares,
In purity of manhood stand upright,
And say ‘This man’s a flatterer’? If one be,
So are they all, for every grise of fortune
Is smoothed by that below. The learnèd pate
Ducks to the golden fool. All’s obliquy,
There’s nothing level in our cursèd natures
But direct villainy. Therefore be abhorred
All feasts, societies, and throngs of men.
His semblable, yea, himself, Timon disdains.
Destruction fang mankind. Earth, yield me roots.
He digs
Who seeks for better of thee, sauce his palate
With thy most operant poison. What is here?
Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold?
No, gods, I am no idle votarist.
Roots, you clear heavens! Thus much of this will make
Black white, foul fair, wrong right,
Base noble, old young, coward valiant.
Ha, you gods! Why this? What, this, you gods? Why, this
Will lug your priests and servants from your sides,
Pluck stout men’s pillows from below their heads.
This yellow slave
Will knit and break religions, bless th’ accursed,
Make the hoar leprosy adored, place thieves
And give them title, knee, and approbation,
With senators on the bench. This is it
That makes the wappened widow wed again –
She whom the spital-house and ulcerous sores
Would cast the gorge at, this embalms and spices
To th’ April day again. Come, damned earth,
Thou common whore of mankind, that puts odds
Among the rout of nations, I will make thee
Do thy right nature.
King Lear
[I, ii, 1–22] What makes a bastard less worthy than his legitimate brother? Conceived on the wrong side of the blanket, Edmund, Gloucester’s bastard son, resolves that he will be no respecter of right in his own conduct:
Thou, Nature, art my goddess; to thy law
My services are bound. Wherefore should I
Stand in the plague of custom and permit
The curiosity of nations to deprive me,
For that I am some twelve or fourteen moonshines
Lag of a brother? Why bastard? Wherefore base?
When my dimensions are as well-compact,
My mind as generous, and my shape as true
As honest madam’s issue? Why brand they us
With ‘base’? with ‘baseness’? ‘bastardy’? ‘base, base’?
Who in the lusty stealth of nature take
More composition and fierce quality
Than doth, within a dull, stale, tired bed
Go to the creating a whole tribe of fops
Got ’tween asleep and wake? Well then,
Legitimate Edgar, I must have your land.
Our father’s love is to the bastard Edmund
As to the legitimate. Fine word ‘legitimate’!
Well, my ‘legitimate’, if this letter speed
And my invention thrive, Edmund the base
Shall top the legitimate. I grow. I prosper.
Now, gods, stand up for bastards!
[II, iii, 1–21] His beloved father turned against him by his bastard brother’s machinations, Edgar must flee for his life in disguise. So crazy do things seem to be that he can think of no better shape to adopt for his flight than that of a wandering, ranting Bedlam beggar:
I heard myself proclaimed,
And by the happy hollow of a tree
Escaped the hunt. No port is free, no place
That guard and most unusual vigilance
Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may ’scape
I will preserve myself; and am bethought
To take the basest and most poorest shape
That ever penury, in contempt of man,
Brought near to beast. My face I’ll grime with filth,
Blanket my loins, elf all my hair in knots,
And with presented nakedness outface
The winds and persecutions of the sky,
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numbed and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheepcotes, and mills
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers,
Enforce their charity: ‘Poor Turlygod! Poor Tom!’
That’s something yet; Edgar I nothing am.
[IV, i, 1–9] Still in his mad disguise, Edgar finds he can take considerable comfort from the knowledge that he is firmly at the bottom of the social heap:
Yet better thus, and known to be contemned
Than still contemned and flattered. To be worst,
The lowest and most dejected thing of fortune,
Stands still in esperance, lives not in fear.
The lamentable change is from the best;
The worst returns to laughter. Welcome then,
Thou unsubstantial air that I embrace!
The wretch that thou hast blown unto the worst
Owes nothing to thy blasts.
[III, iv, 28–36] Brought low himself by circumstance, Lear reflects on the plight of his country’s poor:
Poor naked wretches, wheresoe’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your looped and windowed raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them
And show the heavens more just.
Macbeth
[I, v, 36–52] A single murder stands between her husband and the Scottish throne, realizes Lady Macbeth – and King Duncan is to be the guest of honour in her own home this very night:
The raven himself is hoarse
That croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan
Under my battlements. Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts,
unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose nor keep peace between
The effect and it. Come to my woman’s breasts
And take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers,
Wherever, in your sightless substances,
You wait on nature’s mischief. Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,
That my keen knife see not the wound it makes,
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark
To cry, ‘Hold, hold!’
[I, vii, 1–28] His wife having put the idea of murdering Duncan in his head, Macbeth is appalled at the enormity of the contemplated crime:
If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well
It were done quickly. If the assassination
Could trammel up the consequence, and catch,
With his surcease, success – that but this blow
Might be the be-all and the end-all! – here,
But here, upon this bank and shoal of time,
We’d jump the life to come. But in these cases
We still have judgement here – that we but teach
Bloody instructions, which being taught return
To plague the inventor. This even-handed justice
Commends the ingredients of our poisoned chalice
To our own lips. He’s here in double trust:
First, as I am his kinsman and his subject,
Strong both against the deed; then, as his host,
Who should against his murderer shut the door,
Not bear the knife myself. Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe
Striding the blast, or heaven’s cherubin, horsed
Upon the sightless curriers of the air,
Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind. I have no spur
To prick the sides of my intent, but only
Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself
And falls on the other.
[II, i, 33–64] As he steels his nerves to kill the sleeping Duncan, an all but delirious Macbeth can hardly tell where his fantasies of power leave off and murderous fact takes up the story:
Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee –
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still!
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? Or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressèd brain?
I see thee yet, in form as palpable
As this which now I draw.
Thou marshall’st me the way that I was going,
And such an instrument I was to use. –
Mine eyes are made the fools o’ the other senses,
Or else worth all the rest. – I see thee still,
And on thy blade and dudgeon, gouts of blood,
Which was not so before. There’s no such thing:
It is the bloody business which informs
Thus to mine eyes. Now o’er the one half-world
Nature seems dead, and wicked dreams abuse
The curtained sleep. Witchcraft celebrates
Pale Hecat’s offerings; and withered Murder,
Alarumed by his sentinel the wolf,
Whose howl’s his watch, thus with his stealthy pace,
With Tarquin’s ravishing strides, towards his design
Moves like a ghost. Thou sure and firm-set earth,
Hear not my steps, which way they walk, for fear
Thy very stones prate of my whereabout
And take the present horror from the time
Which now suits with it. – Whiles I threat, he lives:
Words to the heat of deeds too cold breath gives.
(A bell rings.)
I go, and it is done; the bell invites me.
Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell
That summons thee to heaven, or to hell.
[V, v, 17–28] On hearing the news of his lady’s death, Macbeth retreats into a world of his own to reflect upon the meaningless futility of all he has fought and killed for:
She should have died hereafter;
There would have been a time for such a word –
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
[IV, xiv, 44–54] Having parted at odds with his Egyptian lover, Antony is broken by the news of her death (though it will turn out to be untrue). He will himself commit suicide, he resolves, and they will be reconciled in the next life, like the Carthaginian Queen Dido and the Trojan hero Aeneas:
I will o’ertake thee, Cleopatra, and
Weep for my pardon. So it must be, for now
All length is torture; since the torch is out,
Lie down, and stray no farther. Now all labour
Mars what it does; yea, very force entangles
Itself with strength. Seal then, and all is done.
Eros! – I come, my queen – Eros! Stay for me.
Where souls do couch on flowers, we’ll hand in hand,
And with our sprightly port make the ghosts gaze:
Dido and her Aeneas shall want troops,
And all the haunt be ours.
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
[I, i, 122–43] Pericles is horror-struck – and terrified – when he realizes that his intended bride has been the incestuous lover of her father, the great king Antiochus:
How courtesy would seem to cover sin,
When what is done is like an hypocrite,
The which is good in nothing but in sight.
If it be true that I interpret false,
Then were it certain you were not so bad
As with foul incest to abuse your soul;
Where now you’re both a father and a son
By your untimely claspings with your child,
Which pleasures fits a husband, not a father,
And she, an eater of her mother’s flesh
By the defiling of her parents’ bed;
And both like serpents are, who though they feed
On sweetest flowers, yet they poison breed.
Antioch, farewell, for wisdom sees those men
Blush not in actions blacker than the night
Will shun no course to keep them from the light.
One sin, I know, another doth provoke.
Murder’s as near to lust as flame to smoke.
Poison and treason are the hands of sin,
Ay, and the targets to put off the shame.
Then, lest my life be cropped to keep you clear,
By flight I’ll shun the danger which I fear.
[II, i, 1–11] Pericles harangues the storm that has wrecked his ship: it has shown its mastery, now he wishes it would leave him to die in peace:
Yet cease your ire, you angry stars of heaven!
Wind, rain, and thunder, remember earthly man
Is but a substance that must yield to
you,
And I, as fits my nature, do obey you.
Alas, the seas hath cast me on the rocks,
Washed me from shore to shore, and left my breath
Nothing to think on but ensuing death.
Let it suffice the greatness of your powers
To have bereft a prince of all his fortunes,
And, having thrown him from your watery grave
Here to have death in peace is all he’ll crave.
Coriolanus
[IV, iv, 12–26] Exiled from Rome himself as an enemy of the people, Coriolanus now finds himself in Antium, an ‘enemy’ state. ‘City, ’tis I who made thy widows,’ he wryly recalls, as he sets off in search of his old adversary, Aufidius:
O world, thy slippery turns! Friends now fast sworn,
Whose double bosoms seems to wear one heart,
Whose hours, whose bed, whose meal and exercise
Are still together, who twin, as ’twere, in love
Unseparable, shall within this hour,
On a dissension of a doit, break out
To bitterest enmity. So fellest foes,
Whose passions and whose plots have broke their sleep
To take the one the other, by some chance,
Some trick not worth an egg, shall grow dear friends
And interjoin their issues. So with me.
My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon
This enemy town. I’ll enter. If he slay me,
He does fair justice: if he give me way,
I’ll do his country service.
The Winter’s Tale
[III, iii, 58–76] King Leontes of Bohemia, having taken it into his head that his queen, Hermione, has been unfaithful, orders that their infant child – her bastard, he believes – be taken out and abandoned in the wilderness. Fortunately for the baby, an aged shepherd comes bumbling along, pondering as he goes the follies of youth:
I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest: for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. Hark you now: would any but these boiled brains of nineteen and two-and-twenty hunt this weather? They have scared away two of my best sheep, which I fear the wolf will sooner find than the master. If anywhere I have them, ’tis by the sea-side, browsing of ivy. Good luck, an’t be thy will!
He sees the child
What have we here? Mercy on’s, a barne! A very pretty barne. A boy or a child, I wonder? A pretty one, a very pretty one. Sure, some scape. Though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting gentlewoman in the scape: this has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work. They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I’ll take it up for pity – yet I’ll tarry till my son come: he hallowed but even now. Whoa-ho-hoa!