The Merry Wives of Windsor: Act 3

I most fehemently desire you, you will also look that way.

Pless my soul, how full of cholers I am, and trempling of mind! I shall be glad if he have deceived me. How melancholies I am!

To shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sings madrigals.

To shallow—
Mercy on me, I have a great dispositions to cry.

And youthful still—in your doublet and hose this raw rheumatic day?

Yonder is a most reverend gentleman who, belike having received wrong by some person, is at most odds with his own gravity and patience that ever you saw.

I think you know him: Master Doctor Caius, the renowned French physician.

Am I politic? Am I subtle? Am I a Machiavel?

Well, I will smite his noddles.

Well, I will take him, then torture my wife, pluck the borrowed veil of modesty from the so-seeming Mistress Page, divulge Page himself for a secure and willful Acteon, and to these violent proceedings all my neighbors shall cry aim.

Well, I will take him, then torture my wife, pluck the borrowed veil of modesty from the so-seeming Mistress Page, divulge Page himself for a secure and willful Acteon, and to these violent proceedings all my neighbors shall cry aim.

He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.

Well, fare you well.

We shall have the freer wooing at Master Page’s.

Go home, John Rugby. I come anon.

I see how thine eye would emulate the diamond.

I will ensconce me behind the arras.

Bethink you of some conveyance. In the house you cannot hide him. O, how have you deceived me! Look, here is a basket. If he be of any reasonable stature, he may creep in here; and throw foul linen upon him, as if it were going to bucking.

Help to cover your master, boy.—Call your men, Mistress Ford.—You dissembling knight! [Robin exits.]

Shall we send that foolish carrion Mistress Quickly to him, and excuse his throwing into the water, and give him another hope, to betray him to another punishment?

A lousy knave, to have his gibes and his mockeries!

He doth object I am too great of birth,
And that, my state being galled with my expense,
I seek to heal it only by his wealth.

I’ll make a shaft or a bolt on ’t. ’Slid, ’tis but venturing.

Ay, that I will, come cut and longtail, under the degree of a squire.

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 colors of my love
And not retire.

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 colors of my love
And not retire.

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.

Have I lived to be carried in a basket like a barrow of butcher’s offal, and to be thrown in the Thames?

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 I had been swelled!

Well, she laments, sir, for it, that it would yearn your heart to see it.

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.

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.

I quaked for fear lest the lunatic knave would have searched it, but fate, ordaining he should be a cuckold, held his hand.

I suffered the pangs of three several deaths: first, an intolerable fright to be detected with a jealous rotten bellwether; 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.