Imo. So man and man should be; But clay and clay differs in dignity, To seem to die, ere sick: So please you, leave me ; Stick to your journal course: the breach of custom To one not sociable: I'm not very sick, Since I can reason of it. Gui. Pray you, trust me here: I love thee; I have spoke it: How much the quantity, the weight as much, Bel. What? how? how? Arv. If it be sin to say so, sir, I yoke me Bel. [Aside. O noble strain! Arv. Imo. I wish ye sport. Arv. Brother, farewell. You health. So please you, sir. 3 Stick to your journal course: the breach of custom Is breach of all.] Keep your daily course uninterrupted; if the stated plan of life is once broken, nothing follows but confusion. Imo. [aside.] These are kind creatures. Gods, what lies I have heard! Our courtiers say, all's savage, but at court: 4 The imperious seas breed monsters; for the dish, I am sick still; heart-sick :-Pisanio, Gui. I could not stir him": He said, he was gentle, but unfortunate; Dishonestly afflicted, but yet honest. Arv. Thus did he answer me: yet said, hereafter I might know more. Bel. To the field, to the field: We'll leave you for this time; go in, and rest. Arv. We'll not be long away. Bel. Pray, be not sick, This youth, howe'er distress'd, appears, he hath had Good ancestors. Arv. How angel-like he sings! Gui. But his neat cookery! He cut our roots in characters; And sauc'd our broths, as Juno had been sick, And he her dieter. Arv. Nobly he yokes A smiling with a sigh: as if the sigh Was that it was, for not being such a smile; The imperious seas —] Imperious was used by Shakspeare for imperial. 6 5 I could not stir him ;] Not move him to tell his story. gentle, but unfortunate:] Gentle, is well-born, of birth above the vulgar. The smile mocking the sigh, that it would fly With winds that sailors rail at. Gui I do note, That grief and patience, rooted in him both, Arv. Grow, patience! And let the stinking elder, grief, untwine His perishing root, with the increasing vine! Bel. It is great morning. Come; away. Who's there? Enter CLOTEN. Clo. I cannot find those runagates; that villain Hath mock'd me:-I am faint. Bel. Those runagates! Means he not us? I partly know him; 'tis I know 'tis he:-We are held as outlaws:- Hence. Let me alone with him. Clo. [Exeunt BELARIUS and ARVIRAGUS. Soft! what are you That fly me thus? some villain mountaineers? I have heard of such.-What slave art thou? More slavish did I ne'er, than answering Clo. A thing Thou art a robber, What art thou? Have A law-breaker, a villain: Yield thee, thief. Gui. To who? to thee? not I 7 Mingle their spurs together.] Spurs are the longest and largest leading roots of trees. 8 It is great morning.] A Gallicism. Grand jour. An arm as big as thine? a heart as big? Clo. Thou villain base, Know'st me not by my clothes? Gui. Who is thy grandfather; he made those clothes, Which, as it seems, make thee. Clo. My tailor made them not. Gui. No, nor thy tailor, rascal, Thou precious varlet, Hence then, and thank The man that gave them thee. Thou art some fool; I am loath to beat thee. Clo. Thou injurious thief, What's thy name? Hear but my name, and tremble. Gui. Clo. Cloten, thou villain. Gui. Cloten, thou double villain, be thy name, I cannot tremble at it; were't toad, or adder, spider, "Twould move me sooner. Clo. Nay, to thy mere confusion, thou shalt know I'm son to the queen. Gui. So worthy as thy birth. Clo. To thy further fear, I'm sorry for't; not seeming Art not afeard? Gui. Those that I reverence, those I fear; the wise: At fools I laugh, not fear them. Die the death: Clo. I'll follow those that even now fled hence, And on the gates of Lud's town set your heads: [Exeunt, fighting. 9 Yield, rustick mountaineer.] I believe, upon examination, the character of Cloten will not prove a very consistent one. Act I. sc. iv. the lords who are conversing with him on the subject of his rencontre with Posthumus, represent the latter as having neither Enter BELARIUS and ARVIRAGUS. Bel. No company's abroad. Arv. None in the world: You did mistake him, sure. Bel. I cannot tell: Long is it since I saw him, But time hath nothing blurr'd those lines of favour Which then he wore; the snatches in his voice, And burst of speaking', were as his: I am absolute, 'Twas very Cloten. Arv. In this place we left them: I wish my brother make good time with him, You say he is so fell. Bel. Being scarce made up, I mean, to man, he had not apprehension put forth his strength or courage, but still advancing forwards to the prince, who retired before him; yet at this his last appearance, we see him fighting gallantly, and falling by the hand of Guiderius. The same persons afterwards speak of him as of a mere ass or ideot; and yet, Act III. sc. i. he returns one of the noblest and most reasonable answers to the Roman envoy: and the rest of his conversation on the same occasion, though it may lack form a little, by no means resembles the language of foily. He behaves with proper dignity and civility at parting with Lucius, and yet is ridiculous and brutal in his treatment of Imogen. Belarius describes him as not having sense enough to know what fear is (which he defines as being sometimes the effect of judgment); and yet he forms very artful schemes for gaining the affection of his mistress, by means of her attendants; to get her person into his power afterwards; and seems to be no less acquainted with the character of his father, and the ascendancy the queen maintained over his uxorious weakness. We find Cloten, in short, represented at once as brave and dastardly, civil and brutish, sagacious and foolish, without that subtilty of distinction, and those shades of gradation between sense and folly, virtue and vice, which constitute the excellence of such mixed characters as Polonius in Hamlet, and the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet. STEEVENS. And burst of speaking,] This is one of our author's strokes of observation. An abrupt and tumultuous utterance very frequently accompanies a confused and cloudy understanding. |