[Exit Bigot.]
PEMBROKE.
He is more patient
Than when you left him; even now he sung.
PRINCE HENRY.
O vanity of sickness! Fierce extremes
In their continuance will not feel themselves.
Death, having prey’d upon the outward parts,
Leaves them invisible, and his siege is now
Against the mind, the which he pricks and wounds
With many legions of strange fantasies,
Which, in their throng and press to that last hold,
Confound themselves. ’Tis strange that death should sing.
I am the cygnet to this pale faint swan,
Who chants a doleful hymn to his own death
And from the organ-pipe of frailty sings
His soul and body to their lasting rest.
SALISBURY.
Be of good comfort, prince; for you are born
To set a form upon that indigest
Which he hath left so shapeless and so rude.
Enter Bigot and Attendants, who bring in King John in a chair.
KING JOHN.
Ay, marry, now my soul hath elbow-room
It would not out at windows nor at doors.
There is so hot a summer in my bosom
That all my bowels crumble up to dust.
I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
Upon a parchment, and against this fire
Do I shrink up.
PRINCE HENRY.
How fares your majesty?
KING JOHN.
Poison’d, ill fare; dead, forsook, cast off,
And none of you will bid the winter come
To thrust his icy fingers in my maw,
Nor let my kingdom’s rivers take their course
Through my burn’d bosom, nor entreat the north
To make his bleak winds kiss my parched lips
And comfort me with cold. I do not ask you much,
I beg cold comfort; and you are so strait,
And so ingrateful, you deny me that.
PRINCE HENRY.
O, that there were some virtue in my tears
That might relieve you!
KING JOHN.
The salt in them is hot.
Within me is a hell; and there the poison
Is, as a fiend, confin’d to tyrannize
On unreprievable condemned blood.