SCENE IV. A street.
Enter Inuyasha, Kouga, Hiten, with five or six Maskers, Torch-bearers, and others
Inuyasha
What,
shall this speech be spoke for our excuse?
Or shall we on without
a apology?
Hiten
The date is out of such
prolixity:
We'll have no Cupid hoodwink'd with a scarf,
Bearing
a Tartar's painted bow of lath,
Scaring the ladies like a
crow-keeper;
Nor no without-book prologue, faintly spoke
After
the prompter, for our entrance:
But let them measure us by what
they will;
We'll measure them a measure, and be
gone.
Inuyasha
Give me a torch: I am not for
this ambling;
Being but heavy, I will bear the light.
Kouga
Nay,
gentle Inuyasha, we must have you dance.
Inuyasha
Not
I, believe me: you have dancing shoes
With nimble soles: I have a
soul of lead
So stakes me to the ground I cannot move.
Kouga
You
are a lover; borrow Cupid's wings,
And soar with them above a
common bound.
Inuyasha
I am too sore enpierced
with his shaft
To soar with his light feathers, and so bound,
I
cannot bound a pitch above dull woe:
Under love's heavy burden do
I sink.
Kouga
And, to sink in it, should you
burden love;
Too great oppression for a tender
thing.
Inuyasha
Is love a tender thing? it is
too rough,
Too rude, too boisterous, and it pricks like
thorn.
Kouga
If love be rough with you, be
rough with love;
Prick love for pricking, and you beat love
down.
Give me a case to put my visage in:
A visor for a visor!
what care I
What curious eye doth quote deformities?
Here are
the beetle brows shall blush for me.
Hiten
Come,
knock and enter; and no sooner in,
But every man betake him to his
legs.
Inuyasha
A torch for me: let wantons
light of heart
Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels,
For
I am proverb'd with a grandsire phrase;
I'll be a candle-holder,
and look on.
The game was ne'er so fair, and I am
done.
Kouga
Tut, dun's the mouse, the
constable's own word:
If thou art dun, we'll draw thee from the
mire
Of this sir-reverence love, wherein thou stick'st
Up to
the ears. Come, we burn daylight, ho!
Inuyasha
Nay,
that's not so.
Kouga
I mean, sir, in delay
We
waste our lights in vain, like lamps by day.
Take our good
meaning, for our judgment sits
Five times in that ere once in our
five wits.
Inuyasha
And we mean well in going
to this mask;
But 'tis no wit to go.
Kouga
Why,
may one ask?
Inuyasha
I dream'd a dream
to-night.
Kouga
And so did I.
Inuyasha
Well,
what was yours?
Kouga
That dreamers often
lie.
Inuyasha
In bed asleep, while they do
dream things true.
Kouga
O, then, I see
Amaterasu hath been with you.
She is the fairies' midwife, and she
comes
In shape no bigger than an agate-stone
On the fore-finger
of an alderman,
Drawn with a team of little atomies
Athwart
men's noses as they lie asleep;
Her wagon-spokes made of long
spiders' legs,
The cover of the wings of grasshoppers,
The
traces of the smallest spider's web,
The collars of the
moonshine's watery beams,
Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of
film,
Her wagoner a small grey-coated gnat,
Not so big as a
round little worm
Prick'd from the lazy finger of a maid;
Her
chariot is an empty hazel-nut
Made by the joiner squirrel or old
grub,
Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
And in this
state she gallops night by night
Through lovers' brains, and then
they dream of love;
O'er courtiers' knees, that dream on
court'sies straight,
O'er lawyers' fingers, who straight dream on
fees,
O'er ladies ' lips, who straight on kisses dream,
Which
oft the angry Mab with blisters plagues,
Because their breaths
with sweetmeats tainted are:
Sometime she gallops o'er a
courtier's nose,
And then dreams he of smelling out a suit;
And
sometime comes she with a tithe-pig's tail
Tickling a parson's
nose as a' lies asleep,
Then dreams, he of another
benefice:
Sometime she driveth o'er a soldier's neck,
And then
dreams he of cutting foreign throats,
Of breaches, ambuscadoes,
Dutch blades,
Of healths five-fathom deep; and then anon
Drums
in his ear, at which he starts and wakes,
And being thus frighted
swears a prayer or two
And sleeps again. This is that very
Mab
That plats the manes of horses in the night,
And bakes the
elflocks in foul sluttish hairs,
Which once untangled, much
misfortune bodes:
This is the hag, when maids lie on their
backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making
them women of good carriage:
This is she--
Inuyasha
Peace,
peace, Mercutio, peace!
Thou talk'st of nothing.
Kouga
True,
I talk of dreams,
Which are the children of an idle brain,
Begot
of nothing but vain fantasy,
Which is as thin of substance as the
air
And more inconstant than the wind, who wooes
Even now the
frozen bosom of the north,
And, being anger'd, puffs away from
thence,
Turning his face to the dew-dropping south.
Hiten
This
wind, you talk of, blows us from ourselves;
Supper is done, and we
shall come too late.
Inuyasha
I fear, too
early: for my mind misgives
Some consequence yet hanging in the
stars
Shall bitterly begin his fearful date
With this night's
revels and expire the term
Of a despised life closed in my
breast
By some vile forfeit of untimely death.
But He, that
hath the steerage of my course,
Direct my sail! On, lusty
gentlemen.
Hiten
Strike, drum.
Exeunt