style="font-size:15px;"> A god on earth thou art.
BOLINGBROKE.
But for our trusty brother-in-law and the abbot,
With all the rest of that consorted crew,
Destruction straight shall dog them at the heels.
Good uncle, help to order several powers
To Oxford, or where’er these traitors are:
They shall not live within this world, I swear,
But I will have them, if I once know where.
Uncle, farewell: and, cousin, adieu:
Your mother well hath pray’d, and prove you true.
DUCHESS.
Come, my old son: I pray God make thee new.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE IV.
Another room in the Castle.
[Enter EXTON and a Servant.]
EXTON.
Didst thou not mark the king, what words he spake?
‘Have I no friend will rid me of this living fear?’
Was it not so?
SERVANT.
These were his very words.
EXTON.
‘Have I no friend?’ quoth he: he spake it twice
And urg’d it twice together, did he not?
SERVANT.
He did.
EXTON.
And, speaking it, he wistly looked on me,
As who should say ‘I would thou wert the man
That would divorce this terror from my heart’;
Meaning the king at Pomfret. Come, let’s go.
I am the king’s friend, and will rid his foe.
[Exeunt.]
SCENE V.
Pomfret. The dungeon of the Castle.
[Enter KING RICHARD.]
KING RICHARD.
I have been studying how I may compare
This prison where I live unto the world
And for because the world is populous,
And here is not a creature but myself,
I cannot do it; yet I’ll hammer it out.
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul;
My soul the father: and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humours like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,
As thoughts of things divine, are intermix’d
With scruples, and do set the word itself
Against the word:
As thus: ‘Come, little ones’; and then again,
‘It is as hard to come as for a camel
To thread the postern of a needle’s eye.’
Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot
Unlikely wonders; how these vain weak nails
May tear a passage through the flinty ribs
Of this hard world, my ragged prison walls;
And, for they cannot, die in their own pride.
Thoughts tending to content flatter themselves
That they are not the first of fortune’s slaves,
Nor shall not be the last; like silly beggars
Who sitting in the stocks refuge their shame,
That many have and others must sit there:
And in this thought they find a kind of ease,
Bearing their own misfortunes on the back
Of such as have before endur’d the like.
Thus play I in one person many people,
And none contented: sometimes am I king;
Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,
And so I am: then crushing penury
Persuades me I was better when a king;
Then am I king’d again; and by and by
Think that I am unking’d by Bolingbroke,
And straight am nothing: but whate’er I be,
Nor I, nor any man that but man is
With nothing shall be pleas’d till he be eas’d
With being nothing.
Music do I hear? [Music.]
Ha, ha! keep time. How sour sweet music is
When time is broke and no proportion kept!
So is it in the music of men’s lives.
And here have I the daintiness of ear
To check time broke in a disorder’d string;
But, for the concord of my state and time,
Had not an ear to hear my true time broke.
I wasted time, and now doth time waste me;
