Читать книгу The Complete Works of Shakespeare онлайн

385 страница из 942

Dum. [Aside.]

Let us confess and turn it to a jest.

Prin.

Amaz’d, my lord? Why looks your Highness sad?

Ros.

Help, hold his brows, he’ll sound! Why look you pale?

Sea-sick, I think, coming from Muscovy.

Ber.

Thus pour the stars down plagues for perjury.

Can any face of brass hold longer out?

Here stand I, lady, dart thy skill at me,

Bruise me with scorn, confound me with a flout,

Thrust thy sharp wit quite through my ignorance,

Cut me to pieces with thy keen conceit;

And I will wish thee never more to dance,

Nor never more in Russian habit wait.

O, never will I trust to speeches penn’d,

Nor to the motion of a schoolboy’s tongue,

Nor never come in vizard to my friend,

Nor woo in rhyme, like a blind harper’s song!

Taffata phrases, silken terms precise,

Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affection,

Figures pedantical—these summer flies

Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.

I do forswear them, and I here protest,

By this white glove (how white the hand, God knows!),

Henceforth my wooing mind shall be express’d