The Same. Another Room in the Same. | |
| |
Enter POSTHUMUS. | |
| Post. Is there no way for men to be, but women | |
| Must be half-workers? We are all bastards; all, | 4 |
| And that most venerable man which I | |
| Did call my father was I know not where | |
| When I was stamp’d; some coiner with his tools | |
| Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seem’d | 8 |
| The Dian of that time; so doth my wife | |
| The nonpareil of this. O! vengeance, vengeance; | |
| Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d | |
| And pray’d me oft forbearance; did it with | 12 |
| A pudency so rosy the sweet view on ’t | |
| Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her | |
| As chaste as unsunn’d snow. O! all the devils! | |
| This yellow Iachimo, in an hour,—was ’t not? | 16 |
| Or less—at first?—perchance he spoke not, but | |
| Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one, | |
| Cried ‘O!’ and mounted; found no opposition | |
| But what he look’d for should oppose and she | 20 |
| Should from encounter guard. Could I find out | |
| The woman’s part in me! For there’s no motion | |
| That tends to vice in man but I affirm | |
| It is the woman’s part; be it lying, note it, | 24 |
| The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers; | |
| Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers; | |
| Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain, | |
| Nice longing, slanders, mutability, | 28 |
| All faults that man may name, nay, that hell knows, | |
| Why, hers, in part, or all; but rather, all; | |
| For even to vice | |
| They are not constant, but are changing still | 32 |
| One vice but of a minute old for one | |
| Not half so old as that. I’ll write against them, | |
| Detest them, curse them. Yet ’tis greater skill | |
| In a true hate to pray they have their will: | 36 |
| The very devils cannot plague them better. [Exit. | |
