Monologue

Falstaff Monologue from Henry IV, Part 2

From Henry IV, Part 2 by William Shakespeare

male · comedic · 2:51 min

Fare you well, gentle gentlemen. On, Bardolph, lead the men away. As I return, I will fetch off these justices. I do see the bottom of Justice Shallow. Lord, Lord, how subject we old men are to this vice of lying! This same starved justice hath done nothing but prate to me of the wildness of his youth, and the feats he hath done about Turnbull Street, and every third word a lie, duer paid to the hearer than the Turk’s tribute. I do remember him at Clement’s Inn, like a man made after supper of a cheese-paring. When he was naked, he was, for all the world, like a forked radish, with a head fantastically carved upon it with a knife. He was so forlorn, that his dimensions to any thick sight were invincible. He was the very genius of famine, yet lecherous as a monkey, and the whores called him mandrake. He came ever in the rearward of the fashion, and sung those tunes to the overscutched huswives that he heard the carmen whistle, and sware they were his fancies or his good-nights. And now is this Vice’s dagger become a squire, and talks as familiarly of John a Gaunt as if he had been sworn brother to him, and I’ll be sworn he ne’er saw him but once in the tilt-yard, and then he burst his head for crowding among the marshal’s men. I saw it and told John a Gaunt he beat his own name, for you might have thrust him and all his apparel into an eel-skin; the case of a treble hautboy was a mansion for him, a court. And now has he land and beefs. Well, I’ll be acquainted with him if I return, and ’t shall go hard but I’ll make him a philosopher’s two stones to me. If the young dace be a bait for the old pike, I see no reason in the law of nature but I may snap at him. Let time shape, and there an end.

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