SIR RADERIC'S PAGE. What, have they brought me anything? If they have not, say I take physic. [SIR RADERIC'S voice within.] Forasmuch, fiddlers, as I am of the peace, I must needs love all weapons and instruments that are for the peace, among which I account your fiddles, because they can neither bite nor scratch. Marry, now, finding your fiddles to jar, and knowing that jarring is a cause of breaking the peace, I am, by the virtue of my office and place, to commit your quarrelling fiddles to close prisonment in their cases. [The fiddlers call within.] Sha ho! Richard! Jack!
AMORETTO'S PAGE. The fool within mars our play without. Fiddlers, set it on my head. I use to size my music, or go on the score for it: I'll pay it at the quarter's end.
SIR RADERIC'S PAGE. Farewell, good Pan! sweet Thamyras,[132] adieu! Dan Orpheus, a thousand times farewell!
JACK FIDDLERS.
You swore you would pay us for our music.
SIR RADERIC'S PAGE. For that I'll give Master Recorder's law, and that is this: there is a double oath—a formal oath and a material oath; a material oath cannot be broken, the formal oath may be broken. I swore formally. Farewell, fiddlers.
PHILOMUSUS.
Farewell, good wags, whose wits praiseworth I deem,
Though somewhat waggish; so we all have been.
STUDIOSO. Faith, fellow-fiddlers, here's no silver found in this place; no, not so much as the usual Christmas entertainment of musicians, a black jack of beer and a Christmas pie.
[They walk aside from their fellows.
PHILOMUSUS.
Where'er we in the wide world playing be,
Misfortune bears a part, and mars our melody;
Impossible to please with music's strain,
Our heart-strings broke are, ne'er to be tun'd again.
STUDIOSO.
Then let us leave this baser fiddling trade;
For though our purse should mend, our credits fade.