That my unwillingness, my husband's love,
Your high estate, nor no respect respected,
Can be my help, but that your mightiness
Will overbear and awe these dear regards,
I bind my discontent to my content,
And what I would not I'll compel I will;
Provided that yourself remove those lets
That stand between your highness' love and mine.
Edward. Name them, fair countess, and by heaven I will.
Countess. It is their lives that stand between our love
That I would have choked up, my sovereign.
Edward. Whose lives, my lady?
Countess.My thrice loving liege,
Your queen, and Salisbury my wedded husband;
Who living have that title in our love
That we can not bestow but by their death.
Edward. Thy opposition[1] is beyond our law.
Countess. So is your desire: If the law[2]
Can hinder you to execute the one,
Let it forbid you to attempt the other:
I cannot think you love me as you say
Unless you do make good what you have sworn.
Edward. No more: thy husband and the queen shall die.
Fairer thou art by far than Hero was;
Beardless Leander not so strong as I:
He swom an easy current for his love;
But I will, through a helly spout of blood,[3]
Arrive that Sestos where my Hero lies.
- ↑ Yet another and a singular misuse of a word never so used or misused by Shakespeare.
- ↑ Qu. Why, so is your desire: If that the law, etc.?
- ↑ Sic. I should once have thought it impossible that any mortal ear could endure the shock of this unspeakable and incomparable verse, and find in the passage which contains it an echo or a trace of the "music, wit, and oracle" of Shakespeare. But in those days I had yet to learn what manner of ears are pricked up to listen "when rank Thersites opes his mastiff jaws" in criticism of Homer
