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 intermix'd / 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 small 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 king'd again: and by and by / Think that I am unking'd 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? . . .(-an excerpt from Shakespeare's Richard II)
Myspace Layouts - Myspace Editor - Image Hosting
Contact Tables