A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 14
General
A Select Collection of Old English Plays, Volume 14
English drama
JOLLY. Ay, by my faith, continue, Master Sad, [to] give it out
you love; and call it a new love, a love never seen before; we'll
all come to it as your friends.
SAD. Gentlemen, still I love: and if she to whom I thus sacrifice
will not reward it, yet the worst malice can say is, I was
unfortunate; and misfortune, not falsehood, made me so.
JOLLY. In what chapter shall we find this written, and what
verse? you should preach with a method, Master Sad.
WID. Gentlemen, if ever he spoke so much dangerous sense before
(either of love or reason), hang me.
SAD. Madam, my love is no news, where you are: know, your scorn
has made it public; and though it could gain no return from you,
yet others have esteemed me for the faith and constancy I have
paid here.
PLEA. Did not I foretell you of his love? I foresaw this danger.
Shall I never live to see wit and love dwell together?
CAPT. I am but a poor soldier, and yet never reached to the
honour of being a lover; yet from my own observations, Master
Sad, take a truth: 'tis a folly to believe any woman loves a man
for being constant to another; they dissemble their hearts only,
and hate a man in love worse than a wencher.
JOLLY. And they have reason; for if they have the grace to be
kind, he that loves the sex may be theirs.
CARE. When your constant lover, if a woman have a mind to him,
and be blessed with so much grace to discover it, he, out of the
noble mistake of honour hates her for it, and tells it perchance,
and preaches reason to her passion, and cries: Miserable beauty,
to be so unfortunate as to inhabit in so much frailty!
CAPT. This counsel makes her hate him more than she loved before.
These are troubles those that love are subject to; while we look
on and laugh, to see both thus slaved, while we are free.
CARE. My prayers still shall be, Lord deliver me from love.
CAPT. 'Tis plague, pestilence, famine, sword, and sometimes
sudden death.
SAD. Yet I love, I must love, I will love, and I do love.
CAPT. In the present tense.
WID. No more of this argument, for love's sake.
CAPT. By any means, madam, give him leave to love: and you are
resolved to walk tied up in your own arms, with your love as
visible in your face as your mistress's colours in your hat; that
any porter at Charing Cross may take you like a letter at the
carrier's, and having read the superscription, deliver Master Sad
to the fair hands of Mistress or My Lady Such-a-one, lying at the
sign of the Hard Heart.
PLEA. And she, if she has wit (as I believe she hath), will
scarce pay the post for the packet.
WID. Treason! how now, niece? join with the enemy?
[_They give the_ CAPTAIN _wine_.
CAPT. A health, Ned: what shall I call it?
CARE. To Master Sad! he needs it that avows himself a lover.
SAD. Gentlemen, you have the advantage, the time, the place, the
company; but we may meet when your wits shall not have such
advantage as my love.
PLEA. No more of love, I am so sick on't.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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