SERVANT. He did. 

 EXTON. And speaking it, he wishtly 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 Richard.

Richard

 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 intermixed 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 endured 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 kinged again, and by and by Think that I am unkinged by Bolingbroke, And straight am nothing. But whate’er I be, Nor I nor any man that but man is With nothing shall be pleased till he be eased 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 disordered 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 

 Prev. P 62/66 next