ARTHUR, CADOR, CHORUS. ARTHUR. Come, Cador, as our friendship was most firm Throughout our age, so now let’s link as fast. Thus did we live in wars, thus let us die In peace, and arm in arm partake our fates. Our wounds, our grief, our wish, our hap alike, Our end so near: all crave each other’s help. CADOR. O king, behold the fruit of all our fame! Lo, here our pomp, consumed with ourselves: What all our age with all our wars had won, Lo, here one day hath lost it all at once! Well, so it likes the heavens: thus fortune gibes; She hoisteth up to hurl the deeper down. FIRST CHORUS. O sacred prince! what sight is this we see? Why have the fates reserved us to these woes? Our only hope, the stay of all our realm, The pillar of our state, thus sore oppress’d! O, would the gods had favour’d us so much, That as we lived partakers of your pains, And likewise joy’d the fruit of your exploits, So having thus bereft our sovereign’s bliss, They had with more indifferent doom conjoin’d The subjects’ both and sovereign’s bane in one! It now (alas) engendereth double grief, To rue your want and to bewail our woes. ARTHUR. Rue not, my Britons, what my rage hath wrought, But blame your king, that thus hath rent your realm. My meanless moods have made the fates thus fell, And too much anger wrought in me too much: For had impatient ire endured abuse, And yielded where resistance threat’ned spoil, I mought have lived in foreign coasts unfoil’d, And six score thousand men had been unmoan’d! But wrong, incensing wrath to take revenge, Preferred chance before a better choice. SECOND CHORUS. ’Twas Mordred’s wrong and too unjust deserts That justly mov’d your highness to such wrath: Your claim requir’d no less than those attempts: Your cause right good was prais’d and pray’d for most. ARTHUR. I claim’d my crown; the cause of claim was good, The means to claim it in such sort was bad. Yea, rather than my realm and native soil Should wounded fall, thus bruised with these wars, I should have left both realm and right, and all, Or dur’d the death ordain’d by Mordred’s oath. CADOR. And yet, so far as Mars could bide a mean, You hateless sought the safeguard of them all: Whereto the better cause or badder chance Did draw, you still inclin’d; preferring oft The weaker side, sometimes for love, sometimes For right (as fortune sway’d), your son, yourself. So pity spar’d what reason sought to spoil, Till all at length with equal spoil was spent.