Cymbeline

1 Enter Posthumus.
2 POSTHUMUS.
3 Is there no way for men to be, but women
4 Must be half-workers? We are all bastards,
5 And that most venerable man which I
6 Did call my father was I know not where
7 When I was stamp’d. Some coiner with his tools
8 Made me a counterfeit; yet my mother seem’d
9 The Dian of that time. So doth my wife
10 The nonpareil of this. O, vengeance, vengeance!
11 Me of my lawful pleasure she restrain’d,
12 And pray’d me oft forbearance; did it with
13 A pudency so rosy, the sweet view on’t
14 Might well have warm’d old Saturn; that I thought her
15 As chaste as unsunn’d snow. O, all the devils!
16 This yellow Iachimo in an hour, was’t not?
17 Or less; at first? Perchance he spoke not, but,
18 Like a full-acorn’d boar, a German one,
19 Cried “O!” and mounted; found no opposition
20 But what he look’d for should oppose and she
21 Should from encounter guard. Could I find out
22 The woman’s part in me! For there’s no motion
23 That tends to vice in man but I affirm
24 It is the woman’s part. Be it lying, note it,
25 The woman’s; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
26 Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
27 Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
28 Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
29 All faults that man may name, nay, that hell knows,
30 Why, hers, in part or all; but rather all;
31 For even to vice
32 They are not constant, but are changing still
33 One vice but of a minute old for one
34 Not half so old as that. I’ll write against them,
35 Detest them, curse them. Yet ’tis greater skill
36 In a true hate to pray they have their will:
37 The very devils cannot plague them better.
38 [_Exit._]