Scene
V
Another apartment in the same palace.
Enter Cardinal and Ferdinand with a letter.
Ferdinand
I have this night digg’d up a mandrake.
Cardinal
Say you?
Ferdinand
And I am grown mad with’t.
Cardinal
What’s the prodigy?
Ferdinand
Read there—a sister damn’d: she’s loose i’ the hilts;
Grown a notorious strumpet.
Cardinal
Speak lower.
Ferdinand
Lower!
Rogues do not whisper’t now, but seek to publish’t
(As servants do the bounty of their lords)
Aloud; and with a covetous searching eye,
To mark who note them. O, confusion seize her!
She hath had most cunning bawds to serve her turn,
And more secure conveyances for lust
Than towns of garrison for service.
Cardinal
Is’t possible?
Can this be certain?
Ferdinand
Rhubarb, O, for rhubarb
To purge this choler! Here’s the cursed day
To prompt my memory; and here’t shall stick
Till of her bleeding heart I make a sponge
To wipe it out.
Cardinal
Why do you make yourself
So wild a tempest?
Ferdinand
Would I could be one,
That I might toss her palace ’bout her ears,
Root up her goodly forests, blast her meads,
And lay her general territory as waste
As she hath done her honours.
Cardinal
Shall our blood,
The royal blood of Arragon and Castile,
Be thus attainted?
Ferdinand
Apply desperate physic:
We must not now use balsamum, but fire,
The smarting cupping-glass, for that’s the mean
To purge infected blood, such blood as hers.
There is a kind of pity in mine eye—
I’ll give it to my handkercher; and now ’tis here,
I’ll bequeath this to her bastard.
Cardinal
What to do?
Ferdinand
Why, to make soft lint for his mother’s wounds,
When I have hew’d her to pieces.
Cardinal
Curs’d creature!
Unequal nature, to place women’s hearts
So far upon the left side!
Ferdinand
Foolish men,
That e’er will trust their honour in a bark
Made of so slight weak bulrush as is woman,
Apt every minute to sink it!
Cardinal
Thus ignorance, when it hath purchas’d honour,
It cannot wield it.
Ferdinand
Methinks I see her laughing—
Excellent hyena! Talk to me somewhat quickly,
Or my imagination will carry me
To see her in the shameful act of sin.
Cardinal
With whom?
Ferdinand
Happily with some strong-thigh’d bargeman,
Or one o’ th’ wood-yard that can quoit the sledge
Or toss the bar, or else some lovely squire
That carries coals up to her privy lodgings.
Cardinal
You fly beyond your reason.
Ferdinand
Go to, mistress!
’Tis not your whore’s milk that shall quench my wildfire,
But your whore’s blood.
Cardinal
How idly shows this rage, which carries you,
As men convey’d by witches through the air,
On violent whirlwinds! This intemperate noise
Fitly resembles deaf men’s shrill discourse,
Who talk aloud, thinking all other men
To have their imperfection.
Ferdinand
Have not you
My palsy?
Cardinal
Yes, [but] I can be angry
Without this rupture. There is not in nature
A thing that makes man so deform’d, so beastly,
As doth intemperate anger. Chide yourself.
You have divers men who never yet express’d
Their strong desire of rest but by unrest,
By vexing of themselves. Come, put yourself
In tune.
Ferdinand
So I will only study to seem
The thing I am not. I could kill her now,
In you, or in myself; for I do think
It is some sin in us heaven doth revenge
By her.
Cardinal
Are you stark mad?
Ferdinand
I would have their bodies
Burnt in a coal-pit with the ventage stopp’d,
That their curs’d smoke might not ascend to heaven;
Or dip the sheets they lie in in pitch or sulphur,
Wrap them in’t, and then light them like a match;
Or else to-boil their bastard to a cullis,
And give’t his lecherous father to renew
The sin of his back.
Cardinal
I’ll leave you.
Ferdinand
Nay, I have done.
I am confident, had I been damn’d in hell,
And should have heard of this, it would have put me
Into a cold sweat. In, in; I’ll go sleep.
Till I know who [loves] my sister, I’ll not stir:
That known, I’ll find scorpions to string my whips,
And fix her in a general eclipse.
Exeunt.