17 September 2008

Highlights: 1 Henry IV

Act Two, Scene Four: Namecalling

Hotspur: How now, Kate? I must leave you within these two hours.

Lady Percy: O my good lord, why are you thus alone?

For what offence have I this fortnight been
A banished woman from my Harry's bed?
. . .
Some heavy business hath my lord in hand,
And I must know it, else he loves me not.

Hotspur: What ho!


Act Two, Scene Five
Falstaff: . . . If manhood, good manhood, be not forgot upon the face of the earth, then am I a shotten herring.

Act Three, Scene One: Trash Talking
Glyndŵr: Good cousin Hotspur; for by that name
As oft as Lancaster doth speak of you,
His cheek looks pale, and with a rising sigh
He wisheth you in heaven.

Hotspur: And you in hell,
As oft as he hears Owain
Glyndŵr spoke of.

Glyndŵr: I cannot blame him. At my nativity
The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes,
Of burning cressets; and at my birth
The frame and huge foundation of the earth
Shaked like a coward

Hotspur: Why, so it would have done at the same season, if
your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself
had never been born
.

Glyndŵr: I say the earth did shake when I was born.

Hotspur: And I say the earth was not of my mind
If you suppose as fearing you it shook.

Glyndŵr: The heavens were all on fire, the earth did tremble--

Hotspur: O, then the earth shook to see the heavens on fire,
And not in fear of your nativity.
Diseased nature oftentimes breaks forth
In strange eruptions; oft the teeming earth
Is with a kind of colic pinched and vexed
By the imprisoning of unruly wind
Within her womb, which for enlargement striving
Shakes the old bedlam earth, and topples down
Steeples and moss-grown towers. At your birth
Our grandam earth, having this distemp'rature,
In passion shook.

Act Three, Scene One Continued: Stay away from me

Hotspur: I had rather live
With cheese and garlic, in a windmill, far,
Than feed on cates and have him talk to me
In any summer house in Christendom.


No comments: