I live distain’d, thou undishonoured.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
Plead you to me, fair dame? I know you not.
In Ephesus I am but two hours old,
As strange unto your town as to your talk,
Who, every word by all my wit being scann’d,
Wants wit in all one word to understand.
LUCIANA.
Fie, brother, how the world is chang’d with you.
When were you wont to use my sister thus?
She sent for you by Dromio home to dinner.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
By Dromio?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
By me?
ADRIANA.
By thee; and this thou didst return from him,
That he did buffet thee, and in his blows
Denied my house for his, me for his wife.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
Did you converse, sir, with this gentlewoman?
What is the course and drift of your compact?
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
I, sir? I never saw her till this time.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
Villain, thou liest, for even her very words
Didst thou deliver to me on the mart.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
I never spake with her in all my life.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
How can she thus, then, call us by our names?
Unless it be by inspiration.
ADRIANA.
How ill agrees it with your gravity
To counterfeit thus grossly with your slave,
Abetting him to thwart me in my mood;
Be it my wrong, you are from me exempt,
But wrong not that wrong with a more contempt.
Come, I will fasten on this sleeve of thine.
Thou art an elm, my husband, I a vine,
Whose weakness, married to thy stronger state,
Makes me with thy strength to communicate:
If aught possess thee from me, it is dross,
Usurping ivy, brier, or idle moss,
Who all, for want of pruning, with intrusion
Infect thy sap, and live on thy confusion.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
To me she speaks; she moves me for her theme.
What, was I married to her in my dream?
Or sleep I now, and think I hear all this?
What error drives our eyes and ears amiss?
Until I know this sure uncertainty
I’ll entertain the offer’d fallacy.
LUCIANA.
Dromio, go bid the servants spread for dinner.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
O, for my beads! I cross me for a sinner.
This is the fairy land; O spite of spites!
We talk with goblins, owls, and sprites;
If we obey them not, this will ensue:
They’ll suck our breath, or pinch us black and blue.
LUCIANA.
Why prat’st thou to thyself, and answer’st not?
Dromio, thou drone, thou snail, thou slug, thou sot.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
I am transformed, master, am I not?
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
I think thou art in mind, and so am I.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
Nay, master, both in mind and in my shape.
ANTIPHOLUS OF SYRACUSE.
Thou hast thine own form.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
No, I am an ape.
LUCIANA.
If thou art chang’d to aught, ’tis to an ass.
DROMIO OF SYRACUSE.
’Tis true; she rides me, and I long for grass.
’Tis so, I am an ass; else it could never be
But I should know her as well as she knows me.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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