Thus Suffolk alleging the futility of bad language in apology for the backwardness in its use with which he has just been reproached by the ungentle queen of Henry VI., exclaims,
Would curses kill, as doth the mandrake’s groan,
I would invent as bitter-searching terms,
As curst, as harsh, and horrible to hear,
Deliver’d strongly through my fixed teeth,
With full as many signs of deadly hate,
As lean-fac’d Envy in her loathsome cave.
And poor Juliet enumerates among the horrors of the charnel-house,
Shrieks like mandrakes’ torn out of the earth,
That living mortals hearing them, run mad.