The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath: it is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
'Tis mightiest in the mightiest: it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown;
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthroned in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.
Well, if we’re doing passages relevant to today’s geopolitical situation, here’s one from Henry V:
How yet resolves the governor of the town?
This is the latest parle we will admit;
Therefore to our best mercy give yourselves;
Or like to men proud of destruction
Defy us to our worst: for, as I am a soldier,
A name that in my thoughts becomes me best,
If I begin the battery once again,
I will not leave the half-achieved Harfleur
Till in her ashes she lie buried.
The gates of mercy shall be all shut up,
And the flesh’d soldier, rough and hard of heart,
In liberty of bloody hand shall range
With conscience wide as hell, mowing like grass
Your fresh-fair virgins and your flowering infants.
What is it then to me, if impious war,
Array’d in flames like to the prince of fiends,
Do, with his smirch’d complexion, all fell feats
Enlink’d to waste and desolation?
What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
What rein can hold licentious wickedness
When down the hill he holds his fierce career?
We may as bootless spend our vain command
Upon the enraged soldiers in their spoil
As send precepts to the leviathan
To come ashore. Therefore, you men of Harfleur,
Take pity of your town and of your people,
Whiles yet my soldiers are in my command;
Whiles yet the cool and temperate wind of grace
O’erblows the filthy and contagious clouds
Of heady murder, spoil and villany.
If not, why, in a moment look to see
The blind and bloody soldier with foul hand
Defile the locks of your shrill-shrieking daughters;
Your fathers taken by the silver beards,
And their most reverend heads dash’d to the walls,
Your naked infants spitted upon pikes,
Whiles the mad mothers with their howls confused
Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry
At Herod’s bloody-hunting slaughtermen.
What say you? will you yield, and this avoid,
Or, guilty in defence, be thus destroy’d?
And, as the counter-point to Portia, I’m fond of Shylock’s speech from Merchant
“To bait fish withal. If it will feed nothing else it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hath hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies, and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same summer and winter as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we shall resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what’s his humility? Revenge. And if a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it will go hard, but I will better the instruction.”
To bait fish withal: if it feed nothing else, it will feed my revenge. He hath disgraced me, and hindered me half a million, laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation, thwarted my bargains, cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what’s his reason? I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge! If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge! The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.
Act III, Scene 1
My Fave, too.
Substitute Jew and Christian with any other two groups and you get a good picture of what it feels like to put upon. For any reason. Still fits in today’s world, mabe now even more so.
Well, I tried to think of something uplifting and inspirational. Unfortunately, all I could think of was Monty Python’s rendition of John Gielgood’s King Lear:
KING LEAR
Act 5, Scene 6
**Gloucester. **
The trick of that voice I do well remember: Is’t not the king?
Lear.
Ay, every inch a king.
When I do stare, see how the subject quakes.
I pardon that man’s life.
What was thy cause?
Adultery?
Thou shall not die: die for adultery! No:
The wren goes to 't, and the small gilded fly
Does lecher in my sight.
Let copulation thrive; for Gloucester’s bastard son
Was kinder to his father than my daughters
Got 'tween the lawful sheets.
To’t, luxury, pell-mell! for I lack soldiers.
Behold yond simp’ring dame,
Whose face between her forks presages snow,
That minces virtue and does shake the head
To hear of pleasure’s name.
The fitchew, nor the soiled horse, goes to’t
With a more riotous appetite.
Down from the waist they are Centaurs,
Though women all above:
But to the girdle do the gods inherit,
Beneath is all the fiend’s.
There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the
sulphurous pit,
Burning, scalding, stench, consumption; fie, fie, fie! pah, pah!
Give me an ounce of civet; good apothecary,
sweeten my imagination: there’s money for thee.
On The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, they take this speech and add sound effects. One of the most hilarious parts of the album.
That St. Crispin’s Day speach is my all time favorite passage from Shakespeare. I often put in my DVD of Branaugh’s Henry V and just put that scene on.
My favorite lines from any Shakespeare monologue are those from the end of the Player’s speech in Act II, Scene II of Hamlet, as follows:
Aroused vengeance sets him new a-work;
And never did the Cyclops’ hammers fall
On Mars’s armour forged for proof eterne
With less remorse than Pyrrhus’ bleeding sword
Now falls on Priam.
DAMN! Must be painful for ol’ Priam.
After this, I’m seconding the St. Crispian’s day speech from IV.iii of Henry V and the ‘winter of our discontent’ speech from Richard II, I, i.
I’ve always liked Gertrude’s description of Ophelia’s death. Short-ish, compared to the St. Swithin’s Day and others. Anway, it’s got some beautiful imagery for a description of a suicide.
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples,
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them.
There, on the pendant boughs her coronet weeds
Clamb’ring to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up;
Which time she chaunted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indu’d
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.
King Richard:
For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground
And tell sad stories of the death of kings,
How some have been deposed, some slain in war,
Some haunted by the ghosts they have deposed,
Some poisoned by their wives, some sleeping killed,
All murdered. For within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temple of a king
Keeps Death his court. And there the antick sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene
To monarchise, be feared, and kill with looks,
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As if this flesh which walls about our lives
Were brass impregnable. And humoured thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall and Farewell, King!
Cover your heads and mock not flesh and blood
With solemn reverence. Throw away respect,
Tradition, form, and cermonious duty,
For you have but mistook me all this while.
I live with bread, like you. Feel want,
Taste grief, need friends. Subjected thus,
How can you say to me I am a King?
That’s from memory, so I decline reponsibility for differences in punctuation between my rendering and your favorite edition.
Richard II is full to bursting with these things. Look for the scene (IV, i, I think it is) where Richard unkings himself. Practically every syllable from the middle of the scene to the end is brilliant. The King’s speeches (as in the case of V, v, quoted elsewhere in this thread) are some of the most lyrical in the canon. The '70s-era BBC production with Derek Jacobi as Richard and John Gielgud as John of Gaunt is a real treat. I need hardly mention the 1961 Caedmon 3-LP audio recording with Gielgud as the King and Leo McKern as old Gaunt, and I wouldn’t, except that I just found a pristine copy for $3 at a book fair, which replaces a lost (perhaps stolen) copy.
No, this is not from Henry IV, Part II, nor from Henry IV, Part I, as you said in your subequent “correction,” but from Henry V. Act III, scene I (following the prologue), to be precise.
I second this – Derek Jacobi rocks my personal universe. (And, nemo, I must compliment you on your exquisite taste. :D)
I’m quite heartened to see how much love the English histories are getting in this thread. Generally, they don’t get nearly enough.
Not from the English histories, but from another lesser-known Shakespeare play – this has got to be one of the best “screw you” passages in literature:
You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o’ the rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you;
And here remain with your uncertainty!
Let every feeble rumour shake your hearts!
Your enemies, with nodding of their plumes,
Fan you into despair! Have the power still
To banish your defenders; till at length
Your ignorance, which finds not till it feels,
Making not reservation of yourselves,
Still your own foes, deliver you as most
Abated captives to some nation
That won you without blows! Despising,
For you, the city, thus I turn my back:
There is a world elsewhere.
– Coriolanus, 3.3 – it’s the title character’s reaction upon being banished from Rome.
Thanks for the kind word, Katisha. You rock yourself, there, for bringing up Coriolanus. Now you’ve got me digging in my memory for a little something from Cymbeline, another maligned and neglected work.
But just at the moment I’m kind of in the mood for some JC.
preface – All of Rome is partying because they want to see Great Ceasar, rejoice in his triumph etc.
I, i
Marullus:
Wherefore rejoice? What conquest brings he home?
What tributaries grace in captive bonds his chariot-wheels?
You blocks! You stones! You worse than senseless things!
O, you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome!
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed to wall and battlements,
Windows and towers, yea, to chimneytops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.
And when you saw his chariot but appear
Have you not made an universal shout
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
===
Previous disclaimers regarding my punctuation and my imperfect memory are still in force. And I’ve never seen this play done really well and I want to. Anyone know of a decent recorded production?
MARCUS ANTONIUS:
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears;
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him.
The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interred with their bones:
So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus
Hath told you Caesar was ambitious:
If it were so, it was a grievous fault;
And grievously hath Caesar answer’d it.
Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest,–
For Brutus is an honourable man;
So are they all, all honorable men,–
Come I to speak in Caesar’s funeral.
He was my friend, faithful and just to me:
But Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
He hath brought many captives home to Rome,
Whose ransoms did the general coffers fill:
Did this in Caesar seem ambitious?
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept:
Ambition should be made of sterner stuff:
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And Brutus is an honourable man.
You all did see that on the Lupercal
I thrice presented him a kingly crown,
Which he did thrice refuse: was this ambition?
Yet Brutus says he was ambitious;
And, sure, he is an honourable man.
I speak not to disprove what Brutus spoke,
But here I am to speak what I do know.
You all did love him once,–not without cause:
What cause withholds you, then, to mourn for him?–
O judgment, thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason!–Bear with me;
My heart is in the coffin there with Caesar,
And I must pause till it come back to me.
nemo1 beat me to it: the one from Richard III, where he says, “…and with a little pin bores through his castle wall and Farewell, King!” That whole speech is one of my faves. Dick three eyes is prob’ly my fave of the plays.
From Richard II, Act 2, scene 1; spoken by John of Gaunt:
This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.
