Replies

FALSTAFF
Stand here by me, Master Robert Shallow; I will
make the king do you grace: I will leer upon him as
a’ comes by; and do but mark the countenance that he
will give me.

PISTOL
God bless thy lungs, good knight.

FALSTAFF
Come here, Pistol; stand behind me. O, if I had had
time to have made new liveries, I would have
bestowed the thousand pound I borrowed of you. But
‘tis no matter; this poor show doth better: this
doth infer the zeal I had to see him.

SHALLOW
It doth so.

FALSTAFF
It shows my earnestness of affection,—

SHALLOW
It doth so.

FALSTAFF
My devotion,—

SHALLOW
It doth, it doth, it doth.

FALSTAFF
As it were, to ride day and night; and not to
deliberate, not to remember, not to have patience
to shift me,—

SHALLOW
It is best, certain.

FALSTAFF
But to stand stained with travel, and sweating with
desire to see him; thinking of nothing else,
putting all affairs else in oblivion, as if there
were nothing else to be done but to see him.

PISTOL
‘Tis ‘semper idem,’ for ‘obsque hoc nihil est:’
‘tis all in every part.

SHALLOW
‘Tis so, indeed.

PISTOL
My knight, I will inflame thy noble liver,
And make thee rage.
Thy Doll, and Helen of thy noble thoughts,
Is in base durance and contagious prison;
Haled thither
By most mechanical and dirty hand:
Rouse up revenge from ebon den with fell
Alecto’s snake,
For Doll is in. Pistol speaks nought but truth.

FALSTAFF
I will deliver her.

Shouts within, and the trumpets sound

PISTOL
There roar’d the sea, and trumpet-clangor sounds.

Enter KING HENRY V and his train, the Lord Chief- Justice among them

FALSTAFF
God save thy grace, King Hal! my royal Hal!

PISTOL
The heavens thee guard and keep, most royal imp of fame!

FALSTAFF
God save thee, my sweet boy!

KING HENRY IV
My lord chief-justice, speak to that vain man.
Lord Chief-Justice Have you your wits? know you what ‘tis to speak?

FALSTAFF
My king! my Jove! I speak to thee, my heart!

KING HENRY IV
I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;
How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!
I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,
So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;
But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.
Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;
Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape
For thee thrice wider than for other men.
Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:
Presume not that I am the thing I was;
For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,
That I have turn’d away my former self;
So will I those that kept me company.
When thou dost hear I am as I have been,
Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,
The tutor and the feeder of my riots:
Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,
As I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile.
For competence of life I will allow you,
That lack of means enforce you not to evil:
And, as we hear you do reform yourselves,
We will, according to your strengths and qualities,
Give you advancement. Be it your charge, my lord,
To see perform’d the tenor of our word. Set on.