GONERIL.
My most dear Gloucester.
O, the difference of man and man!
To thee a woman’s services are due;
My fool usurps my body.
OSWALD.
Madam, here comes my lord.
[Exit.]
Enter Albany.
GONERIL.
I have been worth the whistle.
ALBANY.
O Goneril!
You are not worth the dust which the rude wind
Blows in your face! I fear your disposition;
That nature which contemns its origin
Cannot be bordered certain in itself.
She that herself will sliver and disbranch
From her material sap, perforce must wither
And come to deadly use.
GONERIL.
No more; the text is foolish.
ALBANY.
Wisdom and goodness to the vile seem vile;
Filths savour but themselves. What have you done?
Tigers, not daughters, what have you perform’d?
A father, and a gracious aged man,
Whose reverence even the head-lugg’d bear would lick,
Most barbarous, most degenerate, have you madded.
Could my good brother suffer you to do it?
A man, a prince, by him so benefitted!
If that the heavens do not their visible spirits
Send quickly down to tame these vile offences,
It will come,
Humanity must perforce prey on itself,
Like monsters of the deep.
GONERIL.
Milk-liver’d man!
That bear’st a cheek for blows, a head for wrongs;
Who hast not in thy brows an eye discerning
Thine honour from thy suffering; that not know’st
Fools do those villains pity who are punish’d
Ere they have done their mischief. Where’s thy drum?
France spreads his banners in our noiseless land;
With plumed helm thy state begins to threat,
Whilst thou, a moral fool, sitt’st still, and criest
‘Alack, why does he so?’
ALBANY.
See thyself, devil!
Proper deformity seems not in the fiend
So horrid as in woman.