ACT V - Scene IV Troilus and Cressida
Plains between Troy and the Grecian camp.
| Alarums: excursions. Enter Thersites. | |
| Thersites | Now they are clapper-clawing one another; I’ll go look on. That dissembling abominable varlets, Diomed, has got that same scurvy doting foolish young knave’s sleeve of Troy there in his helm: I would fain see them meet; that that same young Trojan ass, that loves the whore there, might send that Greekish whore-masterly villain, with the sleeve, back to the dissembling luxurious drab, of a sleeveless errand. O’ the t’other side, the policy of those crafty swearing rascals, that stale old mouse-eaten dry cheese, Nestor, and that same dog-fox, Ulysses, is not proved worthy a blackberry: they set me up, in policy, that mongrel cur, Ajax, against that dog of as bad a kind, Achilles: and now is the cur Ajax prouder than the cur Achilles, and will not arm to-day; whereupon the Grecians begin to proclaim barbarism, and policy grows into an ill opinion. Soft! here comes sleeve, and t’other. |
| Enter Diomedes, Troilus following. | |
| Troilus |
Fly not; for shouldst thou take the river Styx,
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| Diomedes |
Thou dost miscall retire:
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| Thersites | Hold thy whore, Grecian!—now for thy whore, Trojan!—now the sleeve, now the sleeve! Exeunt Troilus and Diomedes, fighting. |
| Enter Hector. | |
| Hector |
What art thou, Greek? art thou for Hector’s match?
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| Thersites | No, no, I am a rascal; a scurvy railing knave; a very filthy rogue. |
| Hector | I do believe thee: live. Exit. |
| Thersites | God-a-mercy, that thou wilt believe me; but a plague break thy neck for frightening me! What’s become of the wenching rogues? I think they have swallowed one another: I would laugh at that miracle: yet, in a sort, lechery eats itself. I’ll seek them. Exit. |