ROSALINE.
Which of the visors was it that you wore?
BEROWNE.
Where, when, what visor? Why demand you this?
ROSALINE.
There, then, that visor; that superfluous case
That hid the worse and showed the better face.
KING.
We are descried. They’ll mock us now downright.
DUMAINE.
Let us confess and turn it to a jest.
PRINCESS.
Amazed, my lord? Why looks your Highness sad?
ROSALINE.
Help! Hold his brows! He’ll swoon. Why look you pale?
Seasick, I think, coming from Muscovy.
BEROWNE.
Thus pour the stars down plagues for perjury.
Can any face of brass hold longer out?
Here stand I, lady; dart thy skill at me.
Bruise me with scorn, confound me with a flout,
Thrust thy sharp wit quite through my ignorance,
Cut me to pieces with thy keen conceit,
And I will wish thee never more to dance,
Nor never more in Russian habit wait.
O, never will I trust to speeches penned,
Nor to the motion of a school-boy’s tongue,
Nor never come in visor to my friend,
Nor woo in rhyme like a blind harper’s song.
Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,
Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,
Figures pedantical: these summer flies
Have blown me full of maggot ostentation.
I do forswear them, and I here protest,
By this white glove—how white the hand, God knows!—
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.
And, to begin: wench, so God help me, law,
My love to thee is sound, sans crack or flaw.
ROSALINE.
Sans “sans,” I pray you.
BEROWNE.
Yet I have a trick
Of the old rage. Bear with me, I am sick;
I’ll leave it by degrees. Soft, let us see:
Write “Lord have mercy on us” on those three.
They are infected; in their hearts it lies;
They have the plague, and caught it of your eyes.
These lords are visited. You are not free,
For the Lord’s tokens on you do I see.