Love’s Labor’s Lost: Act III, Scene i
Love’s Labor’s Lost. Act 3, Scene 1. Berowne
(This text is featured in our interview with Bradford Cover)
Click here to open a scanned version.
Click here to open up a First Folio version
- And I forsooth in love! I that have been love’s whip,
- A very beadle to a humorous sigh,
- A critic, nay, a nightwatch constable,
- A domineering pedant o’er the boy,
- Than whom no mortal so magnificent.
- This wimpled, whining, purblind, wayward boy,
- This Signior Junior, giant dwarf, Dan Cupid,
- Regent of love rhymes, lord of folded arms,
- Th’ anointed sovereign of sighs and groans,
- Liege of all loiterers and malcontents,
- Dread prince of plackets, king of codpieces,
- Sole imperator and great general
- Of trotting paritors—O my little heart!
- And I to be a corporal of his field
- And wear his colors like a tumbler’s hoop!
- What? I love, I sue, I seek a wife?
- A woman, that is like a German clock,
- Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
- And never going aright, being a watch,
- But being watched that it may still go right.
- Nay, to be perjured, which is worst of all.
- And, among three, to love the worst of all,
- A whitely wanton with a velvet brow,
- With two pitch-balls stuck in her face for eyes.
- Ay, and by heaven, one that will do the deed
- Though Argus were her eunuch and her guard.
- And I to sigh for her, to watch for her,
- To pray for her! Go to. It is a plague
- That Cupid will impose for my neglect
- Of his almighty dreadful little might.
- Well, I will love, write, sigh, pray, sue, groan.
- Some men must love my lady, and some Joan.
[…] Click here to follow along with the text. […]