Page 2447 - Shakespeare - Vol. 1
P. 2447
ACT V IT
Scene I IT
Enter Holofernes, Nathaniel, and Dull.
HOLOFERNES
Satis quod sufficit.
NAT HANIEL
I praise God for you, sir. Your reasons at dinner have been sharp and
sententious, pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious
without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange [5] without
heresy. I did converse this quondam day with a companion of the King’s,
who is entitled, nominated, or called Don Adriano de Armado.
HOLOFERNES
Novi hominem tanquam te. His humour is lofty, his discourse peremptory,
his tongue filed, his eye [10] ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general
behaviour vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce,
too affected, too odd, as it were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.
NAT HANIEL
A most singular and choice epithet. [15]
He draws out his table-book.
HOLOFERNES
He draweth out the thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his
argument. I abhor such fanatical phantasimes, such insociable and point-
device companions, such rackers of orthography, as to speak ‘dout’ sine ‘b’,
when he should say ‘doubt’, ‘det’ when [20] he should pronounce ‘debt’ -
d, e, b, t, not d, e, t. He clepeth a calf ‘cauf’, half ‘hauf’; neighbour vocatur
‘nebour’, neigh abbreviated ‘ne’. This is abhominable, which he would call
‘abominable’. It insinuateth me of insanie. Ne intelligis, domine? To make
frantic, lunatic. [25]
