William Shakespeare: The Merry Wives of Windsor

ACT III SCENE 5. A room in the Garter Inn. (continued)

FORD.
How so, sir? did she change her determination?

FALSTAFF.
No. Master Brook; but the peaking cornuto her
husband, Master Brook, dwelling in a continual 'larum of
jealousy, comes me in the instant of our encounter, after
we had embraced, kissed, protested, and, as it were, spoke
the prologue of our comedy; and at his heels a rabble of his
companions, thither provoked and instigated by his
distemper, and, forsooth, to search his house for his wife's
love.

FORD.
What! while you were there?

FALSTAFF.
While I was there.

FORD.
And did he search for you, and could not find you?

FALSTAFF.
You shall hear. As good luck would have it, comes
in one Mistress Page; gives intelligence of Ford's approach;
and, in her invention and Ford's wife's distraction, they
conveyed me into a buck-basket.

FORD.
A buck-basket!

FALSTAFF.
By the Lord, a buck-basket! rammed me in with
foul shirts and smocks, socks, foul stockings, greasy
napkins, that, Master Brook, there was the rankest compound
of villainous smell that ever offended nostril.

FORD.
And how long lay you there?

FALSTAFF.
Nay, you shall hear, Master Brook, what I have
suffered to bring this woman to evil for your good. Being
thus crammed in the basket, a couple of Ford's knaves, his
hinds, were called forth by their mistress to carry me in
the name of foul clothes to Datchet-lane; they took me on
their shoulders; met the jealous knave their master in the
door; who asked them once or twice what they had in their
basket. I quaked for fear lest the lunatic knave would have
searched it; but Fate, ordaining he should be a cuckold,
held his hand. Well, on went he for a search, and away
went I for foul clothes. But mark the sequel, Master
Brook: I suffered the pangs of three several deaths: first,
an intolerable fright to be detected with a jealous rotten
bell-wether; next, to be compassed like a good bilbo in the
circumference of a peck, hilt to point, heel to head; and
then, to be stopped in, like a strong distillation, with
stinking clothes that fretted in their own grease: think of that;
a man of my kidney, think of that, that am as subject to
heat as butter; a man of continual dissolution and thaw: it
was a miracle to 'scape suffocation. And in the height of
this bath, when I was more than half stewed in grease, like
a Dutch dish, to be thrown into the Thames, and cooled,
glowing hot, in that surge, like a horse-shoe; think of that,
hissing hot, think of that, Master Brook!