Page 2207 - Shakespeare - Vol. 1

’Tis true, ’tis true; witness my knife’s sharp point.
He stabs the empress.

SAT URNINUS

Die, frantic wretch, for this accursed deed

Kills Titus.

LUCIUS

Can the son’s eye behold is father bleed?
There’s meed for meed, death for a deadly deed.

Kills Saturninus.

MARCUS

You sad-faced men, people and sons of Rome,
By uproars severed, as a flight of fowl
Scattered by winds and high tempestuous gusts,
O, let me teach you how to knit again [70]
This scattered corn into one mutual sheaf,
These broken limbs again into one body;
Lest Rome herself be bane unto herself,
And she whom mighty kingdoms curt’sy to,
Like a forlorn and disperate castaway,
Do shameful execution on herself.
But if my frosty signs and chaps of age,
Grave witnesses of true experience,
Cannot induce you to attend my words,
Speak, Rome’s dear friend, as erst our ancestor, [80]
When with his solemn tongue he did discourse
To love-sick Dido’s sad attending ear
The story of that baleful burning night,
When subtle Greeks surprised King Priam’s Troy.
Tell us what Sinon hath bewitched our ears,
Or who hath brought the fatal engine in
That gives our Troy, our Rome, the civil wound.
My heart is not compact of flint nor steel,
Nor can I utter all our bitter grief.
But floods of tears will drown my oratory, [90]
And break my utt’rance, even in the time
When it should move ye to attend me most,
And force you to commiseration.
Here’s Rome’s young captain, let him tell the tale,