• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Shew thy times learning in this dangerous time.

Thy self art bruis'd and bit with many broils,

And stratagems forepast with iron pens

Are texted in thine honorable face;

Thou art a married man in this distress,

But danger woos me as a blushing maid:

Teach me an answer to this perilous time.

AUDLEY.

To die is all as common as to live:

The one ince-wise, the other holds in chase;

For, from the instant we begin to live,

We do pursue and hunt the time to die:

First bud we, then we blow, and after seed,

Then, presently, we fall; and, as a shade

Follows the body, so we follow death.

If, then, we hunt for death, why do we fear it?

If we fear it, why do we follow it?

If we do fear, how can we shun it?

If we do fear, with fear we do but aide

The thing we fear to seize on us the sooner:

If we fear not, then no resolved proffer

Can overthrow the limit of our fate;

For, whether ripe or rotten, drop we shall,

As we do draw the lottery of our doom.

PRINCE EDWARD.

Ah, good old man, a thousand thousand armors

These words of thine have buckled on my back:

Ah, what an idiot hast thou made of life,

To seek the thing it fears! and how disgraced

The imperial victory of murdering death,

Since all the lives his conquering arrows strike

Seek him, and he not them, to shame his glory!

I will not give a penny for a life,

Nor half a halfpenny to shun grim death,

Since for to live is but to seek to die,

And dying but beginning of new life.

Let come the hour when he that rules it will!

To live or die I hold indifferent.

[Exeunt.]

ACT IV. SCENE V. The same. The French Camp.

[Enter King John and Charles.]

KING JOHN.

A sudden darkness hath defaced the sky,

The winds are crept into their caves for fear,

The leaves move not, the world is hushed and still,

The birds cease singing, and the wandering brooks

Murmur no wonted greeting to their shores;

Silence attends some wonder and expecteth

That heaven should pronounce some prophesy:

Where, or from whom, proceeds this silence, Charles?

CHARLES.

Our men, with open mouths and staring eyes,

Look on each other, as they did attend

Each other's words, and yet no creature speaks;

A tongue-tied fear hath made a midnight hour,

And speeches sleep through all the waking regions.

KING JOHN.

But now the pompous Sun, in all his pride,

Looked through his golden coach upon the world,

And, on a sudden, hath he hid himself,

That now the under earth is as a grave,

Dark, deadly, silent, and uncomfortable.

[A clamor of ravens.]

Hark, what a deadly outery do I hear?

CHARLES.

Here comes my brother Phillip.

KING JOHN.

All dismayed:

[Enter Phillip.]

What fearful words are those thy looks presage?

PHILLIP.

A flight, a flight!

KING JOHN.

Coward, what flight? thou liest, there needs no flight.

PHILLIP.

A flight.

KING JOHN.

Awake thy craven powers, and tell on

The substance of that very fear in deed,

Which is so ghastly printed in thy face:

What is the matter?

PHILLIP.

A flight of ugly ravens

Do croak and hover o'er our soldiers' heads,

And keep in triangles and cornered squares,

Right as our forces are embattled;

With their approach there came this sudden fog,

Which now hath hid the airy floor of heaven

And made at noon a night unnatural

Upon the quaking and dismayed world:

In brief, our soldiers have let fall their arms,

And stand like metamorphosed images,

Bloodless and pale, one gazing on another.

KING JOHN.

Aye, now I call to mind the prophesy,

But I must give no entrance to a fear.—

Return, and hearten up these yielding souls:

Tell them, the ravens, seeing them in arms,

So many fair against a famished few,

Come but to dine upon their handy work

And prey upon the carrion that they kill:

For when we see a horse laid down to die,

Although he be not dead, the ravenous birds

Sit watching the departure of his life;

Even so these ravens for the carcasses

Of those poor English, that are marked to die,

Hover about, and, if they cry to us,

Tis but for meat that we must kill for them.

Away, and comfort up