Rousillon. The COUNT’s palace.
[Enter BERTRAM, the COUNTESS of Rousillon,
HELENA, and LAFEU, all in black]
COUNTESS
In delivering my son from me,
I bury a second husband.
BERTRAM And I in going, madam,
weep o’er my father’s
death anew: but I must attend his
majesty’s command, to whom I am
now in ward, evermore in subjection.
LAFEU You shall find of the king a husband,
madam; you, sir, a father.
COUNTESS What hope is there
of his majesty’s amendment?
LAFEU He hath abandoned his physicians, madam;
under whose practises he hath persecuted time with hope,
and finds no other advantage in the process but only the
losing of hope by time.
COUNTESS This young gentlewoman had a father,
–O, that ‘had’! how sad a passage ’tis!–whose skill was
almost as great as his honesty; had it stretched so
far, would have made nature immortal, and death
should have play for lack of work. Would, for the
king’s sake, he were living! I think it would be
the death of the king’s disease.
LAFEU How called you the man you speak of, madam?
COUNTESS He was famous, sir, in his profession, and
it was his great right to be so: Gerard de Narbon.
LAFEU He was excellent indeed, madam: the king very
lately spoke of him admiringly and mourningly: he
was skilful enough to have lived still, if knowledge
could be set up against mortality.
BERTRAM What is it, my good lord, the king languishes of?
LAFEU A fistula, my lord.
BERTRAM I heard not of it before.
LAFEU I would it were not notorious.
Was this gentlewoman the daughter of Gerard de Narbon?
COUNTESS His sole child, my lord, and bequeathed to my
overlooking. I have those hopes of her good that her
education promises; her dispositions she inherits, in her
they are the better for their simpleness; she derives her
honesty and achieves her goodness.
LAFEU Your commendations, madam, get from her tears.
COUNTESS ‘Tis the best brine a maiden can season her praise
in. The remembrance of her father never approaches her heart
but the tyranny of her sorrows takes all livelihood from her cheek.
No more of this, Helena; go to, no more; lest it be rather thought
you affect a sorrow than have it.
HELENA I do affect a sorrow indeed, but I have it too.
LAFEU How understand we that?
Moderate lamentation is the right of the dead,
excessive grief the enemy to the living.
COUNTESS If the living be enemy to the grief,
the excess makes it soon mortal.
BERTRAM Madam, I desire your holy wishes.
COUNTESS Be thou blest, Bertram, and succeed thy father
In manners, as in shape! thy blood and virtue
Contend for empire in thee, and thy goodness
Share with thy birthright! Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use, and keep thy friend
Under thy own life’s key: be cheque’d for silence,
But never tax’d for speech. What heaven more will,
That thee may furnish and my prayers pluck down,
Fall on thy head! Farewell, my lord;
‘Tis an unseason’d courtier; good my lord,
Advise him.
LAFEU He cannot want the best
That shall attend his love.
COUNTESS Heaven bless him! Farewell, Bertram.
[Exit]
BERTRAM [To HELENA] The best wishes that can be forged in
your thoughts be servants to you! Be comfortable
to my mother, your mistress, and make much of her.
LAFEU Farewell, pretty lady: you must hold the
credit of your father.
[Exeunt BERTRAM and LAFEU]
HELENA O, were that all! I think not on my father;
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him: my imagination
Carries no favour in’t but Bertram’s.
I am undone: there is no living, none,
If Bertram be away. ‘Twere all one
That I should love a bright particular star
And think to wed it, he is so above me:
In his bright radiance and collateral light
Must I be comforted, not in his sphere.
The ambition in my love thus plagues itself:
The hind that would be mated by the lion
Must die for love. ‘Twas pretty, though plague,
To see him every hour; to sit and draw
His arched brows, his hawking eye, his curls,
In our heart’s table; heart too capable
Of every line and trick of his sweet favour:
But now he’s gone, and my idolatrous fancy
Must sanctify his reliques. Who comes here?
[Enter PAROLLES]
[Aside]
One that goes with him: I love him for his sake;
And yet I know him a notorious liar,
Think him a great way fool, solely a coward;
Yet these fixed evils sit so fit in him,
That they take place, when virtue’s steely bones
Look bleak i’ the cold wind: withal, full oft we see
Cold wisdom waiting on superfluous folly.
PAROLLES Save you, fair queen!
Are you meditating on virginity?
HELENA Ay. You have some stain of soldier in you: let me
ask you a question. Man is enemy to virginity; how
may we barricado it against him?
PAROLLES Keep him out.
HELENA But he assails; and our virginity, though valiant,
in the defence yet is weak: unfold to us some warlike resistance.
PAROLLES There is none: man, sitting down before you,
will undermine you and blow you up.
HELENA Bless our poor virginity from underminers
and blowers up!
PAROLLES It is not politic in the commonwealth of nature
to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity is rational increase and
there was never virgin got till virginity was first lost.
HELENA I will stand for ‘t a little, though therefore I die a virgin.
PAROLLES Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle,
made of self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the
canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but loose by’t:
out with ‘t! within ten year it will make itself ten, which
is a goodly increase; and the principal itself not much the
worse: away with ‘t!
HELENA How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?
PAROLLES Let me see: marry, ill, to like him that ne’er it
likes. ‘Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with
lying; the longer kept, the less worth…
Virginity, like an old courtier, wears her cap out
of fashion: richly suited, but unsuitable: just
like the brooch and the tooth-pick, which wear not
now. Your date is better in your pie and your
porridge than in your cheek; and your virginity,
your old virginity, is like one of our French
withered pears, it looks ill, it eats drily; marry,
’tis a withered pear; it was formerly better;
marry, yet ’tis a withered pear: will you anything with it?
HELENA Not my virginity yet [ ]
There shall your master have a thousand loves,
A mother and a mistress and a friend,
A phoenix, captain and an enemy,
A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,
A counsellor, a traitress, and a dear;
His humble ambition, proud humility,
His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,
His faith, his sweet disaster; with a world
Of pretty, fond, adoptious christendoms,
That blinking Cupid gossips. Now shall he–
I know not what he shall. God send him well!
The court’s a learning place, and he is one–
PAROLLES What one, i’ faith?
HELENA That I wish well. ‘Tis pity–
PAROLLES What’s pity?
HELENA That wishing well had not a body in’t,
Which might be felt; that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends,
And show what we alone must think, which never
Return us thanks.
[Enter Page]
Page Monsieur Parolles, my lord calls for you.
[Exit]
PAROLLES Little Helen, farewell; if I can remember thee,
I will think of thee at court.
HELENA Monsieur Parolles, you were born under a charitable star.
PAROLLES Under Mars, I.
HELENA I especially think, under Mars.
PAROLLES Why under Mars?
HELENA The wars have so kept you under that you
must needs be born under Mars.
PAROLLES When he was predominant.
HELENA When he was retrograde, I think, rather.
PAROLLES Why think you so?
HELENA You go so much backward when you fight.
PAROLLES That’s for advantage.
HELENA So is running away, when fear proposes the safety;
but the composition that your valour and fear makes
in you is a virtue of a good wing, and I like the wear well.
PAROLLES I am so full of businesses, I cannot answer thee
acutely. When thou hast leisure, say thy prayers; when thou
hast none, remember thy friends; get thee a good husband,
and use him as he uses thee; so, farewell.
[Exit]
HELENA Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven: the fated sky
Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.
What power is it which mounts my love so high,
That makes me see, and cannot feed mine eye?
The mightiest space in fortune nature brings
To join like likes and kiss like native things.
Impossible be strange attempts to those
That weigh their pains in sense and do suppose
What hath been cannot be: who ever strove
So show her merit, that did miss her love?
The king’s disease–my project may deceive me,
But my intents are fix’d and will not leave me.
[Exit]
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