Epicoene; Or, The Silent Woman Part 19

DAUP: Captain He-Otter, your She-Otter is coming, your wife.

OTT: Wife! buz! t.i.tivilitium! There's no such thing in nature.

I confess, gentlemen, I have a cook, a laundress, a house-drudge, that serves my necessary turns, and goes under that t.i.tle: but he's an a.s.s that will be so uxorious to tie his affections to one circle. Come, the name dulls appet.i.te. Here, replenish again: another bout.

[FILLS THE CUPS AGAIN.]

Wives are nasty s.l.u.ttish animalls.

DAUP: O, captain.

OTT: As ever the earth bare, tribus verbis. Where's master Truewit?

DAW: He's slipt aside, sir.

CLER: But you must drink, and be jovial.

DAW: Yes, give it me.

LA-F: And me too.

DAW: Let's be jovial.

LA-F: As jovial as you will.

OTT: Agreed. Now you shall have the bear, cousin, and sir John Daw the horse, and I will have the bull still. Sound, Tritons of the Thames.

[DRUM AND TRUMPETS SOUND AGAIN.]

Nunc est bibendum, nunc pede libero--

MOR [ABOVE]: Villains, murderers, sons of the earth, and traitors, what do you there?

CLER: O, now the trumpets have waked him, we shall have his company.

OTT: A wife is a scurvy clogdogdo, an unlucky thing, a very foresaid bear-whelp, without any good fas.h.i.+on or breeding: mala bestia.

[RE-ENTER TRUEWIT BEHIND, WITH MISTRESS OTTER.]

DAUP: Why did you marry one then, captain?

OTT: A pox!--I married with six thousand pound, I. I was in love with that. I have not kissed my Fury these forty weeks.

CLER: The more to blame you, captain.

TRUE: Nay, mistress Otter, hear him a little first.

OTT: She has a breath worse than my grandmother's, profecto.

MRS. OTT: O treacherous liar! kiss me, sweet master Truewit, and prove him a slandering knave.

TRUE: I will rather believe you, lady.

OTT: And she has a peruke that's like a pound of hemp, made up in shoe-threads.

MRS. OTT: O viper, mandrake!

OTT: A most vile face! and yet she spends me forty pound a year in mercury and hogs-bones. All her teeth were made in the Black-Friars, both her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair in Silver-street. Every part of the town owns a piece of her.

MRS. OTT [COMES FORWARD.]: I cannot hold.

OTT: She takes herself asunder still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes; and about next day noon is put together again, like a great German clock: and so comes forth, and rings a tedious larum to the whole house, and then is quiet again for an hour, but for her quarters. Have you done me right, gentlemen?

MRS. OTT [FALLS UPON HIM, AND BEATS HIM.]: No, sir, I will do you right with my quarters, with my quarters.

OTT: O, hold, good princess.

TRUE: Sound, sound!

[DRUM AND TRUMPETS SOUND.]

CLER: A battle, a battle!

MRS. OTT: You notorious stinkardly bearward, does my breath smell?

OTT: Under correction, dear princess: look to my bear, and my horse, gentlemen.

MRS. OTT: Do I want teeth, and eyebrows, thou bull-dog?

TRUE: Sound, sound still.

[THEY SOUND AGAIN.]

OTT: No, I protest, under correction--

MRS. OTT: Ay, now you are under correction, you protest: but you did not protest before correction, sir. Thou Judas, to offer to betray thy princess! I will make thee an example-- [BEATS HIM.]

[ENTER MOROSE WITH HIS LONG SWORD.]

MOR: I will have no such examples in my house, lady Otter.

MRS. OTT: Ah!--

[MRS. OTTER, DAW, AND LA-FOOLE RUN OFF.]

OTT: Mistress Mary Ambree, your examples are dangerous. Rogues, h.e.l.l-hounds, Stentors! out of my doors, you sons of noise and tumult, begot on an ill May-day, or when the galley-foist is afloat to Westminster!

[DRIVES OUT THE MUSICIANS.]

A trumpeter could not be conceived but then!

DAUP: What ails you, sir?

MOR: They have rent my roof, walls, and all my windows asunder, with their brazen throats.

[EXIT.]