What lusty trumpet thus doth summon us?
Enter the Bastard, attended.
BASTARD.
According to the fair play of the world,
Let me have audience; I am sent to speak,
My holy lord of Milan, from the King
I come to learn how you have dealt for him;
And, as you answer, I do know the scope
And warrant limited unto my tongue.
PANDULPH.
The Dauphin is too wilful-opposite,
And will not temporize with my entreaties;
He flatly says he’ll not lay down his arms.
BASTARD.
By all the blood that ever fury breath’d,
The youth says well. Now hear our English king,
For thus his royalty doth speak in me:
He is prepar’d, and reason too he should.
This apish and unmannerly approach,
This harness’d masque and unadvised revel,
This unhair’d sauciness and boyish troops,
The King doth smile at; and is well prepar’d
To whip this dwarfish war, these pigmy arms,
From out the circle of his territories.
That hand which had the strength, even at your door,
To cudgel you and make you take the hatch,
To dive like buckets in concealed wells,
To crouch in litter of your stable planks,
To lie like pawns lock’d up in chests and trunks,
To hug with swine, to seek sweet safety out
In vaults and prisons, and to thrill and shake
Even at the crying of your nation’s crow,
Thinking this voice an armed Englishman;
Shall that victorious hand be feebled here
That in your chambers gave you chastisement?
No! Know the gallant monarch is in arms
And like an eagle o’er his aery towers
To souse annoyance that comes near his nest.—
And you degenerate, you ingrate revolts,
You bloody Neroes, ripping up the womb
Of your dear mother England, blush for shame!
For your own ladies and pale-visag’d maids
Like Amazons come tripping after drums,
Their thimbles into armed gauntlets change,
Their needles to lances, and their gentle hearts
To fierce and bloody inclination.
LOUIS.
There end thy brave, and turn thy face in peace;
We grant thou canst outscold us. Fare thee well;
We hold our time too precious to be spent
With such a brabbler.
PANDULPH.
Give me leave to speak.
BASTARD.
No, I will speak.
LOUIS.
We will attend to neither.
Strike up the drums; and let the tongue of war,
Plead for our interest and our being here.
BASTARD.
Indeed, your drums, being beaten, will cry out;
And so shall you, being beaten. Do but start
And echo with the clamour of thy drum,
And even at hand a drum is ready brac’d
That shall reverberate all as loud as thine.
Sound but another, and another shall,
As loud as thine, rattle the welkin’s ear
And mock the deep-mouth’d thunder. For at hand,
Not trusting to this halting legate here,
Whom he hath us’d rather for sport than need,
Is warlike John; and in his forehead sits
A bare-ribb’d death, whose office is this day
To feast upon whole thousands of the French.