ACT IV - Scene II Henry IV, Part I
A public road near Coventry.
| Enter Falstaff and Bardolph. | |
| Falstaff | Bardolph, get thee before to Coventry; fill me a bottle of sack: our soldiers shall march through; we’ll to Sutton Co’fil’ to-night. |
| Bardolph | Will you give me money, captain? |
| Falstaff | Lay out, lay out. |
| Bardolph | This bottle makes an angel. |
| Falstaff | An if it do, take it for thy labour; and if it make twenty, take them all; I’ll answer the coinage. Bid my lieutenant Peto meet me at town’s end. |
| Bardolph | I will, captain: farewell. Exit. |
| Falstaff | If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet. I have misused the king’s press damnably. I have got, in exchange of a hundred and fifty soldiers, three hundred and odd pounds. I press me none but good house-holders, yeoman’s sons; inquire me out contracted bachelors, such as had been asked twice on the banns; such a commodity of warm slaves, as had as lieve hear the devil as a drum; such as fear the report of a caliver worse than a struck fowl or a hurt wild-duck. I pressed me none but such toasts-and-butter, with hearts in their bellies no bigger than pins’ heads, and they have bought out their services; and now my whole charge consists of ancients, corporals, lieutenants, gentlemen of companies, slaves as ragged as Lazarus in the painted cloth, where the glutton’s dogs licked his sores; and such as indeed were never soldiers, but discarded unjust serving-men, younger sons to younger brothers, revolted tapsters and ostlers trade-fallen, the cankers of a calm world and a long peace, ten times more dishonourable ragged than an old faced ancient: and such have I, to fill up the rooms of them that have bought out their services, that you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals lately come from swine-keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I’ll not march through Coventry with them, that’s flat: nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There’s but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins tacked together and thrown over the shoulders like an herald’s coat without sleeves; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Alban’s, or the red-nose innkeeper of Daventry. But that’s all one; they’ll find linen enough on every hedge. |
| Enter the Prince and Westmoreland. | |
| Prince | How now, blown Jack! how now, quilt! |
| Falstaff | What, Hal! how now, mad wag! what a devil dost thou in Warwickshire? My good Lord of Westmoreland, I cry you mercy: I thought your honour had already been at Shrewsbury. |
| Westmoreland | Faith, Sir John, ’tis more than time that I were there, and you too; but my powers are there already. The king, I can tell you, looks for us all: we must away all night. |
| Falstaff | Tut, never fear me: I am as vigilant as a cat to steal cream. |
| Prince | I think, to steal cream indeed, for thy theft hath already made thee butter. But tell me, Jack, whose fellows are these that come after? |
| Falstaff | Mine, Hal, mine. |
| Prince | I did never see such pitiful rascals. |
| Falstaff | Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they’ll fill a pit as well as better: tush, man, mortal men, mortal men. |
| Westmoreland | Ay, but, Sir John, methinks they are exceeding poor and bare, too beggarly. |
| Falstaff | ’Faith, for their poverty, I know not where they had that; and for their bareness, I am sure they never learned that of me. |
| Prince | No I’ll be sworn; unless you call three fingers on the ribs bare. But, sirrah, make haste: Percy is already in the field. |
| Falstaff | What, is the king encamped? |
| Westmoreland | He is, Sir John: I fear we shall stay too long. |
| Falstaff |
Well,
|