Pedantius by Edward Forset act3trans
Author: Unknown
Date: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

act3transTo see a commentary note, click on a blue square. To see the Latin text, click on a green square.

Act III, scene i

PEDANTIUS, TYROPHAGUS

PEDANTIUS. Whats this? Is it true? Say it again, please.

TYROPHAGUS When his royal majesty perceived the learning and good character of your former pupil Leonidas, he conceived an affection for him and began to praise you publicly, since he is a graduate of your school. And now he summons you, so as to entrust his son to you for an equally erudite and pious upbringing, which will benefit the state. I am a servant, most eagerly carrying out this mandate entrusted to me.

PED. [To himself.] I know I was a lecturer and not a lover, born for the Court and not for courting. Why do I say born? Created thus by some god, a man to whom all the goodly arts come flocking, like men to a fair. For countless orators have been produced by my school, like soldiers emerging from the Trojan Horse.

Now I shall ply my art in the courtroom, at Court, in the sight of my fellow countrymen, in the bright daylight of our state.

TYR. Wherefore, most distinguished and well-read sir, in my kings name I beg your goodness (the most glorious of all mortal things), by your erudition (admired by one and all), do not refuse to accede to this request, nor prefer your private leisure to the welfare of the entire republic. Moreover (a word in your ear), you will be heaped with riches to your hearts content.

PED. Indeed, noble sir, if you imagine I can be ensnared by meretricious financial considerations, then you are, as they say, worlds away from the truth.

But since Ciceros dictum comes to mind that we are not born for ourselves alone, I see that in a certain sense I am crossing over to your side of the aisle.

TYR. Well done, by God, and most welcome for your Leonidas, who eagerly awaits your arrival, so as to reap the benefit of your genius and the politesse of your demeanor.

PED. I perceive you are an upright and sensible fellow. What you say is neither obtuse nor uncouth, but acute and forthright. For you praise me, which I would prefer not to happen (Im rather bashful). But praise chases after the man who shuns it.

TYR. It would be invidious not to praise the man whose renown has penetrated the royal Court, traveling from our remote Universities and their towns.

PED. I accept your answer. And now I embrace you on account of your virtue. And if my talent matched my will I would pour a sea of favors upon you.

TYR. Most austere master, now your kindness emboldens me. And so I request this one thing, that, inasmuch as you are destined to enjoy the royal favor, you remember me to him. Surely in a brief time you will be a Councilor, handling the most important matters of state, and hence I would hope you could help me from time to time.

PED. Inasmuch as Hesiod bids us give back in greater measure what we have borrowed, I shall imitate the fertile fields which return far more than they receive: thus the seeds of your kindness strike deep roots in the farm of my heart and will yield you a bountiful crop of mine own affection, mine I say. Is this the way your other great men (my colleagues) speak, or not?

TYR. You will be able to speak royally, after you have become the kings boon companion. And now the king awaits my arrival. Are you coming?

PED. Heartily greet the king in my name, friend; tell him I am prepared to do his bidding as a favor to him and for the sake of the nation. Only let him be mindful of that old but true saw (I do not know if it is older or truer), honor nourishes the arts.

TYR. But what am I to answer to Leonidas request for twenty pounds, for which he has urgent need?

PED. Oh Leonidas, you are my fruitful plant and I, your good gardener, have watered you with my most fructifying precepts. You bring forth not only leaves (which is to say words), but also fruit (i. e., deeds useful for myself).

TYR. You speak so wisely, so sweetly, that it pains me to take my leave so soon.

For assuredly Leonidas has been looking forward to this money for some time.

PED. Inasmuch as he gives twice who gives quickly, you shall straightway have the sum to carry to him. But before I take to the road, there are certain domestic (or, as the Greeks would have it, economical) matters I must settle, and I must buy a courtiers costume. For splendid clothing attests to nobility. Follow me. [Exeunt. Enter Pogglostus.]

Act III, scene ii

POGGLOSTUS [Alone.]

Gods faith! What a crowd of thieves in Market Square! How few men live by honest means! Now everybodys on the game, and what suits everyone else is created for me too. For I regard nothing human as alien to me. But this one point troubles me, that there are so many of our tribe that we cant all make a living. Some thieves are clergy, some are laymen. Some are skilled, others arent. Some are well off, others impoverished. Some are old, others young. Some do their work in broad daylight, some furtively. Some act by violence, others by stealth. I employ each of  em as I choose. But humanity is so stubborn that those misers who hide their wealth at home dont carry it abroad lest they occasionally be obliged to help out the poor. Which men I handle most roughly, so they may learn to share. Would that all mens coins, the worlds wealth, was crammed into a single purse, that would fall under the jurisdiction of my thumb and my knife. How happily, how adroitly Id play the cutpurse! [Enter Tyrophagus on the other side of the stage.]

Act III, scene iii

TYROPHAGUS, POGGLOSTUS

TYROPHAGUS How much I love you, most adorable purse! If you fare well, than I fare well, I am content with your contents. You, my lively little coins, I have freed from servitude to a harsh master and liberated into the daylight by means of my virtue.

POGGLOSTUS [Continuing his monologue. ] Men grow worse when we treat them kindly. But I swear by jail (my fatherland) that henceforth Im not tolerating the insults of those wicked folk who never let me touch or look at their money.

In future Ill display the ferocity of a lion. Now Ill go home to see whether my master has turned a profit in the interim, so that (begging his pardon) I might have a share. But if I chance to get my hands on anything, I keep it for myself, so that someday I may buy a farm. Ill tell him that Tyrophagus, whom he sent me to meet, wasnt at home, although I never even looked for him. I dont know who he is, nor what kind of man, nor do I care.

TYR. [Crossing over.] Im thrilled by your honorable appearance, by which Im held back even though I should be in a hurry. But lets depart and abandon this haunt of the greedy. I have shouldered a great burden.

POG. Of which Ill relieve you, and Ill load it on your partner.

TYR. God, what a witty partner! Im glad to have met such an urbane man. Are you headed for the city? Ill join you.

POG. No, Im headed for distant climes, so give me this for my traveling money.

TYR. Would that I could help you, for you seem to be a man of a right pleasant nature. But why abandon your country? Change your mind and return with me to our royal Court, where Ill load you down with honors and gifts.

POG. Since you seem to keep a fountain at home, theres no reason for denying me a few trickles. Come on, hand over the purse.

TYR. Truly you are a most amusing man, pretending to be serious.

POG. Hurry up, I say, if you have any sense. I have to be going.

TYR. You couldnt be more convincing if you were a real thief.

POG. I trust Ill act like one very convincingly indeed. If you dont comply with my request right smartly, Ill sheathe this dagger in your gut right smartly.

TYR. Im a royal servant. Watch what youre doing.

POG. Im the king himself, do as I tell you.

TYR. Let me say one word by way of preface. (He mimes a hanging.) Now I fancy youll keep off.

POG. And Ill say a word by way of rebuttal. (He produces a sword.) Now will you hand over what I ask, or not?

TYR. Enough joking, youve thoroughly terrified me. Tell me, how much did you pay for that sword? May I have a look at it?

POG. Come on, I insist. Give me your answer, will you hand it over?

TYR. You would make me most grateful if youd conduct yourself in some other way.

POG. This man is spinning jokes. Be stout of heart, Pogglostus, and be a homicide, or at least a walleticide.

TYR. Woe is me! What do I hear? Where can I flee? Crobolus, Crobolus! [Enter Crobolus.]

Act III, scene iv

CROBOLUS, TYROPHAGUS, POGGLOSTUS

CROBOLUS What are these devils at my doorway? Whos calling Crobolus?

TYROPHAGUS I am, master. This rascal you see before you has assaulted me with the greatest and most undeserved of injuries.

CRO. Hey, Crobolus, what are you doing? You say this about my servant?

TYR. You keep servants such as this? He wanted to murder me.

CRO. You dared mistreat my friend, you low-down man?

POGGLOSTUS Do you believe your friend more than your servant? If so, then henceforth Ill be your friend, but not your servant.

CRO. So tell me what crime he committed against you.

POG. You ask? He sneered at me, he cursed me, he said I was the servant of a rotten man and a useless one. He said that since he is a royal servant he can kill any man he wants, and unless I had called on your aid and that of my sword, this butcher would have slaughtered me. But, as these buffoons always do, now he accuses me although he will never be able to match me in virtue.

TYR. I shall accuse you, you shameless creature, before a judges bench, unless you hold your tongue. Didnt you make an attempt on my wallet with drawn sword?

POG. Even if I did ask you to give me alms (not that Ill admit it), didnt you unkindly rebuff a suppliant?

CRO. Youre in the habit of asking alms by force of arms, you wicked fellow?

POG. Ask this man himself, didnt he say I was joking? Master, do you imagine Im a thief?

CRO. Didnt you approach this man to steal his money?

POG. Steal? Perish the thought. Perhaps I wanted to get a look at it.

TYR. Id scarcely like to have your lynx-like eyes and harpy-like hands have a look inside my wallet.

POG. This is the reward of an honest life, to be suspected unjustly? If I wished to grow through deceit and injury, I should not be living such a threadbare existence.

CRO. If you intended any harm for this fellow, you were working it against me as well.

TYR. For which I pardon you, since you hold this man responsible.

POG. I can hardly pardon you, since you were so perverse as to put up a resistence.

TYR. But in future guard against those pointed jokes. Dont you see that this wallet of mine, which you adore so much, is hanging from a pin in the regular thieves manner?

POG. Thieves manner? Pray let birds of a feather rejoice in each others company. By God, I adore that wallet so much that Id hang by a rope for its sake. Pray allow me to put an end to its hanging by means of my knife.

TYR. You distribute your favors unwisely, and upon an ingrate. For if you cut it down lest it hang, it will make you hang.

CRO. Enough now on either side. You keep the money you have. But do you understand? Not all of it, nor just by yourself, nor always. And as for you, I shall hand you over to my torturers and beadles (I mean poverty and starvation) so you may learn to keep your fingers to yourself. You, Tyrophagus, I cant let yet you go without a drink and a meal - the glue that binds friendships.

TYR. And there Ill get out of this costume. Lets go. [Exeunt.]

Act III, scene v

PEDANTIUS, DROMODOTUS, LUDIO

PED. As for myself, I dont care a fig for those snooty judges of whom you speak. I dont care a groats worth, I scorn  em, I despise  em. Is it not the case that your academics now dress up and play at being courtiers, though there are not to be compared to me in point of genius or authority? And furthermore, when in Rome do as the Romans do, where ones life is measured by ones dress, diction, manner of eating and drinking, and so forth. And the Court is a kind of Rome, and I a courtier, a sort of Roman.

DRO. You have abundantly satisfied this objection. For I am unconcerned about these accidental and extrinsic habits, as long as your motive is entirely a philosophical one. You must never be irregular, you must always display unbudging gravity. Be like a fixed star and not like our other planet-courtiers, whose orbits are eccentric, being now forward, then stationary, and then again retrograde. Let you never do anything of the sort that would derange your philosophical composure.

PED. I shall always urge that which is beneficial for the republic; I shall write histories; I shall reply eloquently to ambassadors; I shall deal amicably with noblemen, as they are my friends; but I shall provoke the ladies of the Court to playfulness and giggles. And these things will elevate me to the highest rank.

DRO. But regarding the lessons of a courtier, give me a hearing. First, you must dissimulate most deeply: for the courtier this is the sum of the whole and sum of the parts.. Second, like a lesser form of being, you must defer to your superiors and be named among the inferiors. Third, in regard to everything said by the nobles, even when blatantly false (for example, if one says that the heaven remains stationary while the earth moves), you must be, as at were, a voice of approval, such as second the opinion of the speaker. Furthermore, like the sun which passes through the various signs in the Zodiac and is affected differently as it moves from one station to another, so you must comport yourself variously in the Zodiac of the Court. If you are in Scorpio, you must be one thing, if in Virgo, another, and if in Capricorn, you must exert or restrain your actions yet differently. Furthermore, as far as profit goes, you must be the most generalized of all the genera, most capacious and most rapacious. Your hands must be as self-contradictory as your words, one containing everything (extends one hand), the other nothing (stretching out the other).. Finally, you must attract some parasites to yourself, who will transform you from an inane nothing into an immense, infinite, transcendental something.

PED. Theres something in what you say, but not everything lies in this something. You havent taught me the art of kissing hands by way of greeting.

Nor that of training those sparse hairs (and frequently, at that), to which I shall give over my face in a sublime manner, bidding heaven feast its eyes upon me as I raise my countenance to the stars. Then Proteus (who is mentioned everywhere in the poets) wont have transformed himself into more shapes than I my face, having a huge beard with its superior part turned into that two-horned shape vulgarly entitled Mustaches. Oh the barbarity of a beard unworthy of brush and curling iron! Then too, I shall have a boy following my footsteps, who will carry my slippers everywhere (they are called pantofles from the Greek panta pherein, since they carry him everywhere). And finally, I shall comport myself so picturesquely that everyone shall say he perceives the very mirror of Tuscanism in this my Italianate countenance. These details are of the greatest importance, most worthy of our study.

LUDIO Here I am, most learned preceptor.

PED. Ah, see! Ludio, you sweetly eloquent lad, although I am in truth your most learned and most learning-dispensing preceptor, now, now I say, after I have been raised to higher and loftier station of dignity, you must henceforth address me in this wise: most honorable master, most worthy Maecenas, and if it please your highness. These are the amplicative formulae of the rhetoricians. Procede.

LUD. Most honorable master, my most worthy Maecenas, I shall always satisfy my every duty, or rather my pious obligation, towards you, in which I can never do enough to satisfy myself.

PED. What a most Ciceronian young man! (One must employ a vocabulary of super-Latin superlatives, to keep the child happy.) Now do you grasp the importance of gathering some more than familiar phrases from Ciceros letters to his familiars? You can see what you must do with my student Parillus in my absence: I want you to teach him some selected elegances, purple phrases, gem-like metaphors like little stars, and rhetorical tropes.

DRO. Do you mean the tropic of Cancer, or that of Capricorn? Bah, this is to creep along the surface of things, not to arrive at the subjects inmost marrow.

You possess these formalities of phraseology, but you have no substance, nor have you ever tasted from the Modalities.

PED. Immortal gods, have you alone an education? Am I not to rejoice that I have learnt something? Have you alone an education? What if you are not only uneducated, but a fool in the bargain? Your manner of speech reeks of barbarisms and solecisms.

DRO. I cannot speak in the same hifalutin way as yourself, but if you deal with me accurately in dialectical wars, from the bow of my genius Ill let fly at you with a syllogistic arrow fitted out with three feathers, which is to say three propositions.

PED. I see you are blinded by Cimmerian darkness, very much lacking the illumination of my wit.

DRO. And so your head is a wax candle.

PED. Why should I have any more to do with you? You are a cynical Diogenes. Get yourself a barrel.

DRO. Your lovesickness is your prison, your baleful barrel. But to prove you are an idiot, answer me this: dont you see the sun is two feet in size?

PED. You appear to be a foolosopher. For your speech is not well combed. You handle your arguments with unwashed hands, that is you employ a mode of expression that is like Dunce and Dorbell. In sum, youre so much straw, while Im pure ambrosia. I to like to philosophize, but with a few men, as stated in Ennius Neoptolemus, quoted by Cicero.

DRO. I pity your bestiality. You have a fund of words but no foundation in philosophy. I may inexorably conclude against you, your absurdities are like meteorites, imperfectly compounded, concocted out of the vapors of your speechifying. Therefore the more you wax wordy, the more absurd you become.

Whats the point? Either refute some proposition, or make some terminological distinction - if you can.

PED. I shall return to your argument in a while. Now I shall indulge briefly in some continuous prose. Ahem. I should suffer your abuse with a heavy and troubled mind, if I, if you, if your …

DRO. I shall not tolerate such subterfuge. Answer me briefly.

PED. I know the king is awaiting my arrival. Nevertheless, since I do with you to puff up your feathers, understand it thus. Your reasoning is weak and feeble, though something lurks in it that is not obvious. Furthermore, your propositions are broken straws. Finally, this is not a syllogism: seek your conclusion in the final term.

DRO. These are pure chattering and verbal noises. What to you say thats cogent and to the point? If you cannot answer this, Ill try something else.

PED. Youre pretty sharp in disputation. I would prefer to conquer by retreating.

LUD. Indeed, most deserving Dominie, it is base and shameful to be conquered, to fall, to err, to be deceived, and this ill suits your sublimity. This man to win the palm from you? Surely if you wish you can reduce him to ashes by the heat and ardor of your ability.

DRO. If you were possessed of a nature that was malleable and mollifiable, instead of being rendered dense and thick-skulled by ignorance, I should introduce you to every one of philosophys inscrutable delvings.

PED. Because you celebrate a triumph before gaining your victory, thus I sound my bugle once again. Why is the genitive of potus not poti, as that of cibus is cibi.? But if you prefer, Ill pass this by, keeping my foot dry.

DRO. In truth, this wrangling between us is not an argument by contraries, since you are a puny rhetorician and I a student of natural philosophy, and you oppose me with your subordinate science rather than by contradiction. And therefore (since nothing violent should last forever) I shall now break off taxing you so terribly, especially not that you are promoted into the royal favor as into the third region of the air. If that Lydia of yours were to know this one thing, perhaps shed immediately soften and regard you as an appetitable object.

PED. Now Ill marry her, even if men and gods should oppose me. I shall press her with written injunctions from the king. But do I see her coming out? Now I think Ive mounted to the fourth region of the empyrean.

DRO. To the fourth region of the empyrean? Pray attend. On the spur of the moment a certain substantial subtlety occurs to me: youre mounting to fire, which in the opinion of the commentator is nothing other than hot air. [Enter Lydia.]

Act III, scene vi

LYDIA, PEDANTIUS, DROMODOTUS, LUDIO

LYDIA Ah Fortune, you cheat me in wondrous wise. For as often as I think on marriage, my mind is tossed yet more by uncertain hope.

PEDANTIUS And so here is a stable for your mind, in which you can rest, as in some opportune caravansary.

LYD. I hope you never find any rest, since youre forever bothering me.

PED. Really? Such dark words from such bright lips? How long, Lydia, will you abuse my patience? Oh my girl (you who are my goad), at long last throw open the portals of your habituation, that I may finally enter into the royal palace of your most worthy heart, for I have often besought the immortal gods that I might consume many bushels of salt together with you, and now I hope for this with prayers far more ardent. Indeed your blazing brilliance has wielded the heavy hatchet of love most harshly upon my humble little heart. Wherefore, darling of humanity, very essence of Suasion, in the name of my amorous folly and of your graciousness, as a humble suppliant at your knees I most abjectly beg that, after so many stormy times, you deign to look upon your candid candidate (a courtroom expression) with eyes that are not livid but rather with eyes that are Lydias.

LYD. Would that my eyes would now see you breathing your last breath!

PED. Do you persist in spewing forth the venom of your bitterness? He who removed Pedantius from this life would remove the sun from this universe.

Someday, like the Furies, your insults will come back to you and will be your tormentors, more horrible than vipers, since because of you my vitality perishes, and because you have long been hurling ardent mountains of monstrous malice against me.

LUDIO Honorable Maecenas, it would seem this woman is slanderous and chatterous.

Since this does not suit your nobility, do you wish me to heap her with insults culled out of Cicero and Terence?

DRO. My girl, do you perceive that this man has been rendered all but a lunatic by your nocturnal radiation? For you are the moon to him, and create fluxions and refluxions in his intellect. In him you may see an infinitude of love conjoined with a universitude of sorrow. And what if from the mutual concretization and coagulation of these two things is generated a certain destructive privation of his vital spirits? Would you suffer this organic member of our republic to perish for the love of you? So pray dispense with your dyspepsia with respect to him who seeks you as his comfortative restorative.

LYD. I do not understand what youre saying, nor whether he loves me or not.

PED. If this is the state of our controversy, victory is now in my grasp. By heaven, let the very walls proclaim how much I love you! I thirst after your sweetness as once Tantalus did for his waters (a familiar myth, containing much allegory), and if I did not judge this unsuitable for a disputation such as this (as occasionally occurs in debates over matters of state), I should swear by Jove and the gods of the household that I am afire with incredible zeal for acquiring you, and that I feel what I say. But because I am aware that you delight in having conclusions, I conclude thusly. Am I a rational animal? Then assuredly I love you, you are my goal, target, happiness, summum bonum, and ultimate object.

DRO. Now listen to a few commentary notes on his remarks, but only in summary form. When he calls you his object, in the first place he is confessing that he places you before his honor. For the object is more important than the things which pertain to the object. Next, he testifies that he always regards you naturally and properly, and hence intrinsically, and with a certain devoted intentionality. For just as the philosopher loves philosophy as his object, and the orator eloquence (not to discover anything otherwise in other pursuits), thus he loves your selfsame selfhood as his perfect object, wholly in the whole, and in this, that you are his objects, and, in sum, his object of objects.

LYD. I understand your loves well enough: at the same time you manage to wax ardent and frigid.

DRO. His love is not conceived confusedly, but rather is postulated fixedly and contains within itself the inherent immutability of fidelity.

LUD. You think other men inconstant while you are yourself the most inconstant of all. For a woman is more fickle than the wind. What is more so than a woman?

Nothing.

PED. Show favor, you Muses my patronesses, and you also, lord Apollo. I must speak about the greatest thing in the world, my constancy. By God (oh Philosophy yourself, and my eloquence!), I am not round but square, and my love is immutable, as has already been prudently remarked by this very grave gentleman.

In testimony of which, of for your sake my body were now pent in the bull of Phalaris, the fire beneath kindled, I should surely say how pleasant this is!

Ice will turn into flaming fire, dark shadows will become the wandering stars of heaven, a heavy weight will go flying in mid-air like a bird and the light feather will shake the empty winds, Jupiter will hate his bovine Io, wisdoms mother Pallas will hate me, before I abandon you.

LYD. All right. Am I therefore to bestow myself on any man who happens to love me?

DRO. We do not wish this. That would be tantamount to making anything out of any substance in accordance with Anaxagoras absurd view, which would produce monstrous results. But, saving your reverence, this man here is your match in all respects: he is endowed with goods of body, intellect, and fortune. Bodily, inasmuch as his body is, as it were, a microcosm. Intellectual, because he is endowed with speculation (which suffers no binding by the senses) and practical activity (which allows him no sleep his whole life long), as if by the sun and the moon. Fortune, because all things belong to the gods: wise men such as he is are friends to the gods, and all that friends own is common property. Therefore he possesses everything.

LUD. Most worthy Maecenas, even if you should scorn this girl, the king will give you a wife worthy of your preeminence. [To Lydia.] But you, truly dimwitted for refusing this proffered gold, he would have supplied you with everything, as if with a divining rod.

PED. So much for apologetics, now I must turn to the genre of encomiastics. Oh, my Helen! For just as Menelaus once aroused all Greece for her recovery, so that I might acquire you I have marshaled all the Latinity of the Roman people into my battle line. Although self-praise tastes sour in ones own mouth, nevertheless, since I know I am enjoying poetic license, I shall approach the subject, embracing it briefly, far less so than so great a subject allows. For I am not one among many, but rather one above many. Though everything is full of nincompoops, you must always make an exception in the case of Pedantius, whom all men say with once voice to be Natures wonder. If I were to expound on my virtues, a day would not suffice. There are no fewer arts lodged in my brain than hairs on this head. Who is in agreement in his grammar? Pedantius, not so?

Who is florid in the garden of the poets? Pedantius, not so? Who is mighty in rhetorical display? Pedantius, not so?

LYD. Hey nonny nonny no, Pedantius.

DRO. Now accept your husband. He is a trifle scrawny, but for that reason procreative. He is scrawny of arm but gross and muscular of leg. On your wedding night he will without qualification generate a masculine child.

LUD. If you were aware what manner of children he could beget, you would never refuse him. From Day One his son will be a pure Cicero, a pure Terence; in the first hour of his birth he will cry for his book.

DRO. In the very first moment, even before he sucks his maternal milk, the nutritive cause of an infant, the preservative of life, the primal substance of the augmentative quantity.

LYD. Was your mother accustomed to eat paper, that you would suck books out of her tits?

DRO. Assuredly if a woman eats paper, this is a symptom that she suffers from the hysterical disease, which arises from an obstruction of the liver and makes her gnaw upon coal and other non-nutritive things.

LUD. Back home my sister is quite wan, and the poor thing often licks at ashes.

Doctor said she should get a husband.

DRO. What if I were now to perform an anatomy or dissection of this divisible man (for with all his inherent parts he is wholly an integral thing)? I should thus show all the nerves, cartilage, and musculature of art bound up in him, but most of all the aqueous humor of eloquence in his minds eye. Then you would put nothing before Pedantius, although now you put nothing behind him. You can discover that he is born for great and lofty things, first, because he has a Persian nose; next, because the king (who is the Prime Mover in his our political body) is about to entrust the soul of his son to this man to be crammed full of learning. Wherefore (inasmuch as you possess no other instrument of perception save for your senses and your intellect), as far as your five senses go, let this man be your object forever; regarding your intellect, let him be your active intelligence, and you his passive one. Thus let him, who has long been an object of your perception, not at length become a content of your intellectuation. For my sake, consider him.

LYD. In truth, he is less welcome and acceptable to me because he has you for such an inept assistant.

PED. Most splendid Lydia, you see me even more splendid than usual. Henceforth your Pedantius will be most nobly engaged in the turmoil of the courtroom. If it please the gods, he will be a Privy Councilor, and your bridegroom.

LYD. Pray be silent at long length, and receive this answer: you can never persuade my mind to love you. So dont be a nuisance any more.

PED. A nuisance? Now I dont consider you silly (as I often do), nor naughty (as I always do), but I shall pronounce you demented and insane in your personal dealings. If I value myself as I ought, you are not worthy to soil my shoes.

Take care lest my sovereign loathe you worse than dog or snake. But why converse longer with this Amazon, who has no breasts of mercy, being enamored with the bow of cruelty? Thus you have it. Farewell. May you live with that louse-ridden clown.

LYD. Now I hope I am freed from this fools great importunity, for then everything else will run more smoothly. I shall let my Crobolus know, as soon as I can. [Exit.]

DRO. In all this habitable zone of ours there is nothing more diametrically opposite to myself than womankind. For we who study intermundane physics, scrutinizing Natures atoms, deem those mundane houseflies to be pure vanities and absurdities, situated beyond the horizon of our understanding. I have elected to add this corollary to my stated opinion, if some confused freshman should ask me about this subject. Now I shall go away and teach Parillus.

Go to Act IV