William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing

ACT 1. 1. Scene I. Before LEONATO'S House. (continued)

CLAUDIO.
If my passion change not shortly. God forbid it should be otherwise.

DON PEDRO.
Amen, if you love her; for the lady is very well worthy.

CLAUDIO.
You speak this to fetch me in, my lord.

DON PEDRO.
By my troth, I speak my thought.

CLAUDIO.
And in faith, my lord, I spoke mine.

BENEDICK.
And by my two faiths and troths, my lord, I spoke mine.

CLAUDIO.
That I love her, I feel.

DON PEDRO.
That she is worthy, I know.

BENEDICK.
That I neither feel how she should be loved nor know how she should
be worthy, is the opinion that fire cannot melt out of me: I will die
in it at the stake.

DON PEDRO.
Thou wast ever an obstinate heretic in the despite of beauty.

CLAUDIO.
And never could maintain his part but in the force of his will.

BENEDICK.
That a woman conceived me, I thank her; that she brought me up, I
likewise give her most humble thanks; but that I will have a recheat
winded in my forehead, or hang my bugle in an invisible baldrick, all
women shall pardon me. Because I will not do them the wrong to mistrust
any, I will do myself the right to trust none; and the fine is,--for
the which I may go the finer,--I will live a bachelor.

DON PEDRO.
I shall see thee, ere I die, look pale with love.

BENEDICK.
With anger, with sickness, or with hunger, my lord; not with love: prove
that ever I lose more blood with love than I will get again with
drinking, pick out mine eyes with a ballad-maker's pen and hang me up at
the door of a brothel-house for the sign of blind Cupid.