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[GLOBE LOGO]
G LOBE QUARTOS
T HE WITCHES OF LANCASHIRE
R ICHARD BROME and THOMAS HEYWOOD
First printed: London, 1634
This edition prepared by Gabriel Egan
G LOBE EDUCATION
and
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N ICK HERN BOOKS
L ONDON
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G LOBE QUARTOS
This edition of The Witches of Lancashire
first published in Great Britain
as a paperback original in 2001
by Nick Hern Books Limited
14 Larden Road, London W3 7ST
in association with
Globe Education
Shakespeare’s Globe, New Globe Walk
London SE1 9DT
Copyright in this edition © 2001
International Shakespeare Globe Centre Ltd
Typeset in Aldine-401 by the editor
Printed by LSL Press, Bedford MK41 0TX
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 1 85459 664 0
P REFACE
Over 400 plays written between 1567 and 1642 have survived in print. Few are now read and even fewer are performed. In 1995 Globe Education initiated a 30-year project to stage readings with professional casts of all the surviving texts so that audiences may once again hear plays by Barnes, Haughton, Shirley, Wilkins et al.
In 1997 Mark Rylance, Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, included full productions of Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy and Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside as part of the Globe Theatre’s opening season. Over 30,000 people came to hear and see the two plays.
The popularity of the readings and the productions prompted Globe Education to approach Nick Hern to publish the texts being revived at the Globe to enable more people to read, study and, ideally, to produce them. Developments in computer typesetting have enabled editions to be published economically and quickly as Globe Quartos.
The first Globe Quartos were edited in 1998 by Nick de Somogyi. In 1999 an Editorial Board, composed of David Scott Kastan, Gordon McMullan and Richard Proudfoot, was established to oversee the series.
Globe Education is indebted to all those who have helped give new life to old plays: production teams, actors, audiences, directors, editors, publishers and readers.
Patrick Spottiswoode
Director, Globe Education
E DITORIAL BOARD’S PREFACE
The aim of the series is to make once more available English plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries that have long been out of print in affordable form or have been available to readers only in scholarly editions in academic libraries. The Globe Quartos texts are based on the most reliable surviving forms of these plays (usually the first printed editions). These have been fully edited and modernized so as to make them easily usable by actors and readers today. Editorial correction and emendation are undertaken where required by the state of the original. Extra stage directions added by editors and needed to make the action clear are enclosed in square brackets. Apostrophes in verse speeches indicate elision of syllables and reflect the metrical pattern of the line. Prefatory matter includes notes from the director or co-ordinator of the production or reading of the play at the Globe and a brief factual introduction by the editor. Glossarial notes (keyed to the text by line numbers) explain difficult or obsolete usages and offer brief comment on other points of interest or obscurity. Departures from the wording of the original are recorded in textual notes that identify the source of corrections or editorial emendations. The opening page of the text in the original on which the edition is based is reproduced in reduced facsimile. Extra material relevant to the understanding of the play may occasionally be included in an Appendix.
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The editor wishes to thank his postgraduate students on the Globe Education/King’s College London MA ‘Shakespearean Studies: Text and Playhouse’ for their seminar discussions of this play. The early modern performance expertise of the Globe Education practitioners led by James Wallace brought the play to life in a staged reading that illuminated hitherto murky parts of it. Editing those parts afresh after the performance, I was glad to include a number of Wallace’s suggestions. I am grateful to the British Library for permission to reprint the first text page of one of their two copies of the 1634 quarto. The Globe Quartos general editors, past and present, each helped with one or more of the problems I encountered. Most especially, David Scott Kastan and Gordon McMullan comprehensively mixed their labour with mine not only by advising on points of interpretation and editorial procedure, but also by indicating every occasion upon which I had failed to turn this seventeenth-century play script into proper modern English. What they missed, my student Alexandra London-Thompson caught. Having promised to absorb their lessons, I am grateful to be allowed pass off these people’s improvements as my own.
This edition is dedicated to my wife, Joan Fitzpatrick.
Gabriel Egan
A NOTE ON THE STAGED READING
My first impression of this play was of an excuse for spectacle and amusement and little else. The witches are not particularly diabolical, as they are in Macbeth, nor is witchcraft placed in a social context of small-town poverty with its attendant prejudice and ignorance, as in The Witch of Edmonton. It neither frightened nor enlightened. That the real women involved were, at the time of writing, still suffering in jail for these supposed crimes seemed to add little urgency to the drama. Nathaniel Tomkyns’s ‘review’ of an early performance at the Globe in 1634 appeared accurate enough: ‘there be not in it . . . any poetical genius, or art, or language . . . or tenet of witches’, but with its ‘ribaldry’, ‘fopperies’, and songs and dances, it is still a ‘merry and excellent . . . play’.
The preparation for, and the experience of, rehearsal and performance of a staged reading revealed much more. The prologue’s modest claim that a lack of foreign news was the occasion for a dramatization of domestic issues is disingenuous: Heywood was known for his domestic drama and, like his master Ben Jonson, Brome used realistic characters in contemporary local settings. Conscious art, not default, selected the dramatists’ material. In all likelihood the labour was divided thus: Heywood wrote the spectacles of witch mischief and ancient village ritual, and Brome wrote about the inversion of social order in the Seely household, which is similar to the fun he had in The Antipodes. Brome’s characteristic humour arising from character interplay is evident also in the subtly-executed scenes of the three young gallants. Whetstone is no caricature of a boasting fool but rather is fully developed, and the differing reactions to him from other characters and from the audience repay careful exploration. Master Generous too revealed more depth than expected. An audience is apt first to regard him as a pompous bore, but will become increasingly engaged with his struggle to think and act in accordance with God’s law for the preservation of a Christian soul. The repentance of Mistress Generous is genuinely moving and her subsequent betrayal is all the more shocking for the effect she produced by her plausible act of contrition. The play is full of ideas about belief and disbelief, lies and truth, appearance and reality, and honest speaking and flattery. Over-credulity can spring from vice (the foolish Whetstone) or virtue (the good-hearted Generous).
Not witchcraft but witch-hunting is the play’s serious matter. Doughty moves from scepticism to determination (his name suits both conditions) when frustrated in his lust for Moll Spencer, whose quarto name ‘Mal’ I kept for its connotation of maleficence. The play darkens with this witch-finder’s zeal to see all the witches ‘handsomely hanged’, and we should credit the dramatists’ observation of the psychosexual impulses underlying the witch-hunting craze.
Witchcraft shares with dramatic performance a concern for fortuitous timing, and our staged reading gained knife-edge immediacy by the presence, hot-foot from the Globe stage, of the First Witch from the Globe Theatre’s 2001 season production of Macbeth. This provided an appropriate analogue to the link between the two King’s men’s plays which was clearly in the dramatists’ conception of their work. The long theatrical tradition of bad luck associated with uttering the ‘Scottish play’ appears to have begun with The Witches of Lancashire: merely mentioning ‘the Scottish wayward sisters’ (as the quarto spelling has it) gives Winny Seely impaired vision and a ‘hiccup’ of the heart. Since they are all from Lancashire, the characters should logically all have northern accents, and I instructed the actors accordingly. The dramatists, however, chose to give only Lawrence and Parnell the necessary and nearly incomprehensible accents. Those wishing to reconstruct the early performances are referred for this detail to the 1634 quarto’s difficult but amusing representation of dialect.
In performance it becomes clear that this is not simply an anti-witch play, since their victims suffer little physical harm. Millers were notoriously corrupt and here one is tied naked to his sails (on a very cold night) and another is pinched and scratched; such indignities scarcely exceed the likely fantasies of their customers. For these misdemeanours the witches suffer a variety of excesses from beating and amputation to arrest and threatened execution. In performance the final scene chilled those on stage and in the audience as the historical reality became immediate. Brome and Heywood explicitly name ‘mercy’ in their epilogue and throughout they present witchcraft unseriously while attending to the excessive response of state power. Perhaps this made a difference: unlike their unfortunate predecessors of 1612, there is no evidence that these Pendle witches were executed.
James Wallace
T HE WITCHES OF LANCASHIRE
Cast of the staged reading co-ordinated by James Wallace at the Globe Education Centre on 12 August 2001
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Prologue |
Liza Hayden |
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Arthur, a young gentleman |
Nicholas Rowe |
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Tom Shakestone, a young gentleman |
Tom Cornford |
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Bantam, a young gentleman |
Dan Hawksford |
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Whetstone, nephew to Generous |
Richard Lumsden |
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Generous, a wealthy squire |
David Delve |
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Mistress Generous, Generous’s wife and a witch |
Beverley Klein |
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Robert, Generous’s groom |
Tony Bell |
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Mal Spencer, Robert’s sweetheart and a witch |
Lou Gish |
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Meg Johnson, a witch |
Cherry Morris |
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Mawd Hargreave, a witch |
Olivia MacDonald |
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Gillian Dickinson, a witch |
Caroline Harris |
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Doughty |
Michael Cronin |
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Seely, a wealthy squire whose household is bewitched |
Robert Wilby |
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Gregory Seely, his son |
James Wallace |
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Lawrence, his servant |
Mike Rogers |
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Joan Seely, his wife |
Virginia Denham |
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Winny Seely, his daughter |
Karen Hayley |
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Parnell, his serving-woman |
Sabina Netherclift |
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Soldier |
Karl Stimpson |
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Miller |
James Marsh |
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Boy, the Miller’s son |
Nicholas Kollgaard |
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Epilogue |
Liza Hayden |
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Spirits, Musicians, Country Rustics and Officers played by members of the company |
E DITOR’S INTRODUCTION
On 16 August 1634 Nathaniel Tomkyns wrote a business letter to his acquaintance Sir Robert Phelips, and to lighten the tone at the end Tomkyns turned to some ‘merriment’ which he thought might interest Phelips. In London, he wrote, ‘hath been lately a new comedy at the Globe called The Witches of Lancashire, acted by reason of the great concourse of people three days together’. For a repertory company like the King’s men to perform a play three times in succession indicates enormous popularity, and Tomkyns explained that the subject matter was sensational: ‘the slights and passages done or supposed to be done by these witches sent from thence hither’, and moreover the supposed witches were ‘still visible and in prison here’. Unlike most drama of the period, the play was about contemporary, indeed ongoing, events: the apprehension, conviction, and summoning to London for sentencing of four women from Pendle Forest in Lancashire found guilty of witchcraft at the Lancaster assizes. Tomkyns’s 400-word eyewitness account of the Globe performance is reproduced in Appendix 1.
While the Lancashire women languished in jail in London in the summer of 1634, two seasoned dramatists, Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, planned a play based on the case. Somehow they obtained transcripts of the witness’s and defendants’ depositions which were intended only for privy council use, and they drew upon these for journalistic details. One of these depositions, as published in 1677, is Appendix 2. When their play was nearly ready, the King’s men successfully petitioned the lord chamberlain to prevent other companies performing witch plays, so preserving their ‘scoop’, and on 11, 12, or 13 August (we cannot be sure which), The Witches of Lancashire opened at the Globe.
In the autumn of 1634 a quarto of the play appeared under the title The Late Lancashire Witches, the word ‘late’ indicating that this was the recent story of Pendle witches, not a similar case originating from the same place in 1612. One of the British Library copies of this 1634 quarto, whose running header ‘The Witches of Lancashire’ confirms the play’s proper title, is the control text for this edition. Brome and Heywood’s play effectively takes the prosecution’s side in the case, showing the women to be guilty of witchcraft and showing those who doubt this or worse, doubt the existence of witchcraft altogether, to be naïve. The most sustained bewitching of which they are guilty is the inversion of social order within the Seely household so that son and daughter (Gregory and Winny) bully their parents but are in turn bullied by their servants (Lawrence and Parnell). Although all the characters are from Lancashire, the dramatists chose to give only Lawrence and Parnell distinctive northern, provincial accents, represented in the quarto by inconsistent use of almost indecipherably non-standard spelling. It seems that a London audience could be expected to delight in regional stereotyping, at least among low class characters.
The Witches of Lancashire is the only surviving collaboration by Brome. Heywood had been writing plays for more than thirty years but Brome’s rise was relatively recent, having had two hits in his first year writing for the stage, 1629: The Lovesick Maid and The Northern Lass, both for the King’s men. To the partnership Heywood brought not only his extensive dramatic experience (he claimed to already have written or contributed to some 220 plays) but also his knowledge of witch-lore. The topsy-turvydom of the Seely household is an exploration of the comedy of inversion which Brome was to develop fully in his The Antipodes.
The play is highly comic but for a modern spectator or reader, knowledge of the serious predicament of the real subjects – most of whom denied the charges – can darken the atmosphere of its reception. Such qualms seem not to have troubled Tomkyns, for whom it was merely ‘full of ribaldry’, ‘fopperies to provoke laughter’, and ‘diverse songs and dances’, making in all a ‘merry and excellent new play’. The historical record of the accused women fades into obscurity; although their accuser confessed to inventing his story, no pardon is recorded and the women were still in jail when they disappear from our view in 1637. Tomkyns’s end is better recorded: on 5 July 1643 he was hanged for counter-parliamentary treason.
Gabriel Egan
T HE
W ITCHES
OF
L ANCASHIRE
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D RAMATIS PERSONAE |
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The Persons in the Play |
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[PROLOGUE] |
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ARTHUR |
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SHAKESTONE |
three young gentlemen, and friends |
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BANTAM |
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GENEROUS |
a wealthy and generous squire |
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MISTRESS GENEROUS |
Generous’s wife, and a witch |
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WHETSTONE |
her dimwitted young nephew |
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ROBERT |
Generous’s groom |
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MOLL Spencer |
Robert’s sweetheart, and a witch |
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GILLIAN Dickinson |
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MAWD Hargreave |
three witches |
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MEG Johnson |
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SEELY |
a wealthy squire whose household is bewitched |
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DOUGHTY |
his friend |
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JOAN |
Seely’s wife |
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GREGORY |
Seely’s son |
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WINNY |
Seely’s daughter |
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LAWRENCE |
Gregory’s servant |
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PARNELL |
Winny’s servant |
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MILLER |
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BOY |
the Miller’s son |
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SOLDIER |
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RABBLE of hoydens |
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Piper, Drummer, Demon-child, Constable, and Officers |
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[Enter] the P ROLOGUE |
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Corrantoes failing, and no foot-post late |
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Possessing us with news of foreign state, |
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No accidents abroad worthy relation |
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Arriving here, we are forc’d from our own nation |
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To ground the scene that’s now in agitation. |
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The project unto many here well known, |
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Those witches the fat jailer brought to town, |
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An argument so thin, persons so low, |
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Can neither yield much matter, nor great show. |
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Expect no more than can from such be rais’d, |
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So may the scene pass pardon’d, though not prais’d . [Exit] |
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A CT 1, SCENE 1 |
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Enter ARTHUR, SHAKESTONE, and |
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- BANTAM, as from hunting
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Arthur |
Was ever sport of expectation |
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Thus cross’d in th’ height? |
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Shakestone |
Tush, these are accidents |
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All game is subject to. |
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Arthur |
So you may call them |
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Chances or crosses or what else you please, |
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But for my part I’ll hold them prodigies, |
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As things transcending Nature. |
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Bantam |
Oh, you speak this |
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Because a hare hath cross’d you. |
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Arthur |
A hare? |
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A witch, or rather a devil, I think! |
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For tell me, gentlemen, was’t possible |
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In such a fair course and no covert near, |
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We in pursuit and she in constant view, |
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Our eyes not wandering but all bent that way, |
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The dogs in chase, she ready to be ceas’d, |
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And at the instant, when I durst have laid |
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My life to gage my dog had pinch’d her, then |
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To vanish into nothing? |
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Shakestone |
Somewhat strange, |
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But not as you enforce it. |
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Arthur |
Make it plain |
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That I am in an error! Sure I am |
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That I about me have no borrow’d eyes; |
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They are mine own and matches. |
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Bantam |
She might find |
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Some muse as then not visible to us |
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And escape that way. |
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Shakestone |
- Perhaps some fox had
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Earth’d there, and though it be not common, |
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For I seldom have known or heard the like, |
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There squat herself, and so her ’scape appear |
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But natural which you proclaim a wonder. |
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Arthur |
Well, well, gentlemen, |
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Be you of your own faith, but what I see |
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And is to me apparent, being in sense, |
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My wits about me, no way toss’d or troubled, |
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To that will I give credit. |
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Bantam |
Come, come, all men |
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Were never of one mind, nor I of yours. |
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Shakestone |
To leave this argument, are you resolv’d |
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Where we shall dine today? |
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Arthur |
Yes, where we purpos’d. |
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Bantam |
That was with Master Generous. |
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Arthur |
True, the same, |
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And where a loving welcome is presum’d, |
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Whose liberal table’s never unprepar’d, |
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Nor he of guests unfurnish’d. Of his means, |
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There’s none can bear it with a braver port |
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And keep his state unshaken. One who sells not |
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Nor covets he to purchase, holds his own |
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Without oppressing others, always press’d |
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To endear to him any known gentleman |
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In whom he finds good parts. |
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Bantam |
A character |
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Not common in this age. |
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Arthur |
I cannot wind him up |
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Unto the least part of his noble worth; |
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’Tis far above my strength. |
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Enter WHETSTONE |
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Shakestone |
See who comes yonder: |
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A fourth to make us a full mess of guests |
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At Master Generous’ table. |
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Arthur |
Tush, let him pass. |
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He is not worth our luring – a mere coxcomb. |
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It is a way to call our wits in question |
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To have him seen amongst us. |
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Bantam |
He hath spied us; |
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There is no way to evade him. |
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Arthur |
That’s my grief. |
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A most notorious liar: out upon him! |
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Shakestone |
Let’s set the best face on’t. |
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Whetstone |
What, gentlemen? All mine old acquaintance? A |
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whole triplicity of friends together? Nay then, ’tis |
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three to one we shall not soon part company. |
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Shakestone |
Sweet Master Whetstone! |
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Bantam |
Dainty Master Whetstone! |
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Arthur |
Delicate Master Whetstone! |
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Whetstone |
You say right! Master Whetstone I have been, |
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Master Whetstone I am, and Master Whetstone I |
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shall be, and those that know me know withal |
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that I have not my name for nothing. I am he |
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whom all the brave blades of the country use to |
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whet their wits upon. Sweet Master Shakestone, |
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dainty Master Bantam, and dainty Master |
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Arthur! And how? And how? What, all lustick? |
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All froligozone? I know you are going to my |
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uncle’s to dinner, and so am I too. What, shall we |
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all make one rendezvous there? You need not |
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doubt of your welcome. |
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Shakestone |
No doubt at all, kind Master Whetstone, but we |
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have not seen you of late – you are grown a great |
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stranger amongst us. I desire sometimes to give |
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you a visit. I pray, where do you lie? |
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Whetstone |
Where do I lie? Why, sometimes in one place and |
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then again in another – I love to shift lodgings but |
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most constantly. Wheresoever I dine or sup, there |
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do I lie! |
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Arthur |
[aside] I never heard that word proceed from him |
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I durst call truth till now. |
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Whetstone |
But wheresoever I lie, ’tis no matter for that – I |
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pray you say, and say truth, are not you three now |
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going to dinner to my uncle’s? |
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Bantam |
I think you are a witch, Master Whetstone. |
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Whetstone |
How! A witch, gentlemen? I hope you do not |
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mean to abuse me, though at this time (if report |
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be true) there are too many of them here in our |
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country. But I am sure I look like no such ugly |
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creature. |
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Shakestone |
It seems, then, you are of opinion that there are |
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witches. For mine own part, I can hardly be |
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induced to think there is any such kind of people. |
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Whetstone |
No such kind of people? I pray you tell me |
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gentlemen, did never any one of you know my |
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mother? |
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Arthur |
Why, was your mother a witch? |
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Whetstone |
I do not say as witches go nowadays, for they for |
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the most part are ugly old beldams, but she was a |
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lusty young lass and, by her own report, by her |
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beauty and fair looks bewitched my father. |
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Bantam |
It seems then your mother was rather a young |
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wanton wench than an old withered witch. |
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Whetstone |
You say right, and know withal I come of two |
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ancient families, for as I am a Whetstone by the |
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mother side, so I am a By-blow by the father’s. |
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Arthur |
It appears then, by your discourse, that you came |
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in at the window. |
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Whetstone |
I would have you think I scorn, like my |
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grandam’s cat, to leap over the hatch. |
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Shakestone |
[To ARTHUR] He hath confess’d himself to be a bastard. |
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Arthur |
[To SHAKESTONE] And I believe’t as a notorious truth. |
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Whetstone |
Howsoever I was begot, here you see I am. And if |
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my parents went to it without fear or wit, what |
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can I help it? |
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Arthur |
[To SHAKESTONE] Very probable, for as he was |
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got without fear, so it is apparent he was born |
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without wit. |
120 |
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Whetstone |
Gentlemen, it seems you have some private |
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business amongst yourselves which I am not |
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willing to interrupt. I know not how the day goes |
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with you, but for mine own part my stomach is |
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now much upon twelve. You know what hour my |
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uncle keeps, and I love ever to be set before the |
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first grace. I am going before. Speak, shall I |
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acquaint him with your coming after? |
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Shakestone |
We mean this day to see what fare he keeps. |
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Whetstone |
And you know it is his custom to fare well, and in |
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that respect I think I may be his kinsman. And so |
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farewell gentlemen. I’ll be your forerunner to give |
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him notice of your visit. |
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Bantam |
And so entire us to you. |
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Shakestone |
Sweet Master Whetstone! |
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Arthur |
Kind Master By-blow! |
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Whetstone |
I see you are perfect both in my name and |
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surname. I have been ever bound unto you, for |
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which I will at this time be your noverint and give |
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him notice that you universi will be with him per |
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præsentes , and that I take to be presently. Exit |
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Arthur |
Farewell As in præsenti. |
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Shakestone |
It seems he’s piece of a scholar. |
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Arthur |
What, because he hath read a little scrivener’s |
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