Induction, Scene 2

A bedchamber in the LORD'S house.

[SLY is discovered in a rich nightgown, with ATTENDANTS: some with apparel, basin, ewer, and other appurtenances; and LORD, dressed like a servant.]
Christopher Sly
138 For God's sake! a pot of small ale.
First Servant
139 Will't please your lordship drink a cup of sack?
Second Servant
140 Will't please your honour taste of these conserves?
Third Servant
141 What raiment will your honour wear to-day?
Christopher Sly
142 I am Christophero Sly; call not me honour nor lordship. I
143 ne'er drank sack in my life; and if you give me any conserves,
144 give me conserves of beef. Ne'er ask me what raiment I'll wear,
145 for I have no more doublets than backs, no more stockings than
146 legs, nor no more shoes than feet: nay, sometime more feet than
147 shoes, or such shoes as my toes look through the over-leather.
Lord
148 Heaven cease this idle humour in your honour!
149 O, that a mighty man of such descent,
150 Of such possessions, and so high esteem,
151 Should be infused with so foul a spirit!
Christopher Sly
152 What! would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly, old
153 Sly's son of Burton-heath; by birth a pedlar, by education a
154 card-maker, by transmutation a bear-herd, and now by present
155 profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of
156 Wincot, if she know me not: if she say I am not fourteen pence on
157 the score for sheer ale, score me up for the lyingest knave in
158 Christendom. What! I am not bestraught. Here's—
Third Servant
159 O! this it is that makes your lady mourn.
Second Servant
160 O! this is it that makes your servants droop.
Lord
161 Hence comes it that your kindred shuns your house,
162 As beaten hence by your strange lunacy.
163 O noble lord, bethink thee of thy birth,
164 Call home thy ancient thoughts from banishment,
165 And banish hence these abject lowly dreams.
166 Look how thy servants do attend on thee,
167 Each in his office ready at thy beck:
168 Wilt thou have music? Hark! Apollo plays,
[Music]
Lord
169 And twenty caged nightingales do sing:
170 Or wilt thou sleep? We'll have thee to a couch
171 Softer and sweeter than the lustful bed
172 On purpose trimm'd up for Semiramis.
173 Say thou wilt walk: we will bestrew the ground:
174 Or wilt thou ride? Thy horses shall be trapp'd,
175 Their harness studded all with gold and pearl.
176 Dost thou love hawking? Thou hast hawks will soar
177 Above the morning lark: or wilt thou hunt?
178 Thy hounds shall make the welkin answer them
179 And fetch shall echoes from the hollow earth.
First Servant
180 Say thou wilt course; thy greyhounds are as swift
181 As breathed stags; ay, fleeter than the roe.
Second Servant
182 Dost thou love pictures? We will fetch thee straight
183 Adonis painted by a running brook,
184 And Cytherea all in sedges hid,
185 Which seem to move and wanton with her breath
186 Even as the waving sedges play with wind.
Lord
187 We'll show thee Io as she was a maid
188 And how she was beguiled and surpris'd,
189 As lively painted as the deed was done.
Third Servant
190 Or Daphne roaming through a thorny wood,
191 Scratching her legs, that one shall swear she bleeds
192 And at that sight shall sad Apollo weep,
193 So workmanly the blood and tears are drawn.
Lord
194 Thou art a lord, and nothing but a lord:
195 Thou hast a lady far more beautiful
196 Than any woman in this waning age.
First Servant
197 And, till the tears that she hath shed for thee
198 Like envious floods o'er-run her lovely face,
199 She was the fairest creature in the world;
200 And yet she is inferior to none.
Christopher Sly
201 Am I a lord? and have I such a lady?
202 Or do I dream? Or have I dream'd till now?
203 I do not sleep: I see, I hear, I speak;
204 I smell sweet savours, and I feel soft things:
205 Upon my life, I am a lord indeed;
206 And not a tinker, nor Christophero Sly.
207 Well, bring our lady hither to our sight;
208 And once again, a pot o' the smallest ale.
Second Servant
209 Will't please your mightiness to wash your hands?
[Servants present a ewer, basin, and napkin.]
Second Servant
210 O, how we joy to see your wit restor'd!
211 O, that once more you knew but what you are!
212 These fifteen years you have been in a dream,
213 Or, when you wak'd, so wak'd as if you slept.
Christopher Sly
214 These fifteen years! by my fay, a goodly nap.
215 But did I never speak of all that time?
First Servant
216 O! yes, my lord, but very idle words;
217 For though you lay here in this goodly chamber,
218 Yet would you say ye were beaten out of door,
219 And rail upon the hostess of the house,
220 And say you would present her at the leet,
221 Because she brought stone jugs and no seal'd quarts.
222 Sometimes you would call out for Cicely Hacket.
Christopher Sly
223 Ay, the woman's maid of the house.
Third Servant
224 Why, sir, you know no house nor no such maid,
225 Nor no such men as you have reckon'd up,
226 As Stephen Sly, and old John Naps of Greece,
227 And Peter Turf, and Henry Pimpernell;
228 And twenty more such names and men as these,
229 Which never were, nor no man ever saw.
Christopher Sly
230 Now, Lord be thanked for my good amends!
All
231 Amen.
Christopher Sly
232 I thank thee; thou shalt not lose by it.
[Enter the PAGE, as a lady, with ATTENDANTS.]
Page (Bartholomew)
233 How fares my noble lord?
Christopher Sly
234 Marry, I fare well; for here is cheer enough.
235 Where is my wife?
Page (Bartholomew)
236 Here, noble lord: what is thy will with her?
Christopher Sly
237 Are you my wife, and will not call me husband?
238 My men should call me lord: I am your goodman.
Page (Bartholomew)
239 My husband and my lord, my lord and husband;
240 I am your wife in all obedience.
Christopher Sly
241 I know it well. What must I call her?
Lord
242 Madam.
Christopher Sly
243 Al'ce madam, or Joan madam?
Lord
244 Madam, and nothing else; so lords call ladies.
Christopher Sly
245 Madam wife, they say that I have dream'd
246 And slept above some fifteen year or more.
Page (Bartholomew)
247 Ay, and the time seems thirty unto me,
248 Being all this time abandon'd from your bed.
Christopher Sly
249 'Tis much. Servants, leave me and her alone.
250 Madam, undress you, and come now to bed.
Page (Bartholomew)
251 Thrice noble lord, let me entreat of you
252 To pardon me yet for a night or two;
253 Or, if not so, until the sun be set:
254 For your physicians have expressly charg'd,
255 In peril to incur your former malady,
256 That I should yet absent me from your bed:
257 I hope this reason stands for my excuse.
Christopher Sly
258 Ay, it stands so that I may hardly tarry so long; but I would
259 be loath to fall into my dreams again: I will therefore tarry, in
260 despite of the flesh and the blood.
[Enter a SERVANT.]
Servant
261 Your honour's players, hearing your amendment,
262 Are come to play a pleasant comedy;
263 For so your doctors hold it very meet,
264 Seeing too much sadness hath congeal'd your blood,
265 And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy:
266 Therefore they thought it good you hear a play,
267 And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,
268 Which bars a thousand harms and lengthens life.
Christopher Sly
269 Marry, I will; let them play it. Is not a commonty a
270 Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?
Page (Bartholomew)
271 No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.
Christopher Sly
272 What! household stuff?
Page (Bartholomew)
273 It is a kind of history.
Christopher Sly
274 Well, we'll see't. Come, madam wife, sit by my side and let
275 the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger.
[Flourish.]

Reading mode

Word definitions on hover

Notes

TLN 138cultural context
“a pot of small ale”
Small ale was weak, cheaply brewed beer, the everyday drink of the working poor; sack was a strong Spanish or Canary wine, an expensive luxury drink of the wealthy. The First Servant offers Sly sack, the drink of lords; Sly demands small ale, the drink of tinkers. The contrast in a single exchange flags the whole trick: Sly answers every aristocratic courtesy in the idiom of his real station.
TLN 142cultural context
“I am Christophero Sly; call not me honour nor lordship”
Sly catalogues his true biography against the servants' flattery: a pedlar (travelling goods-seller), a card-maker (one who combs raw wool into fibres for spinning), a bear-herd (keeper of a performing bear, a common street entertainment), and now a tinker (an itinerant mender of pots and pans). Each occupation is a rung lower on the Elizabethan social ladder than the last. The list is both comic and sharp-eyed social observation.
TLN 158archaic vocab
“I am not bestraught”
'Bestraught' means distraught, driven out of one's wits. Sly insists he is not mad; the servants have been telling him his apparent common life was a delusion caused by fifteen years of lunacy. The word is a variant of 'distraught' (from Latin distractus), used interchangeably with it in Elizabethan English.
TLN 171historical topical
“the lustful bed / On purpose trimm'd up for Semiramis”
Semiramis was the legendary Assyrian queen, famous in classical tradition for extreme beauty, power, and unbounded sexual appetite. She was proverbial for luxury and lust. The Lord flatters Sly with a bed said to outshine even hers, implying a magnificence beyond all queens of the ancient world.
TLN 187classical allusion
“Io as she was a maid / And how she was beguiled and surpris'd”
Io was a priestess of Juno seduced by Jupiter, who wrapped the earth in a cloud to conceal the act from his wife; Juno, suspicious, came down and Jupiter transformed Io into a white cow. The painting shows the moment of the seduction — Io as a girl, 'beguiled and surpris'd.' The word 'beguiled' implies both deception and seduction, as the painting is 'as lively painted as the deed was done.'
TLN 190classical allusion
“Daphne roaming through a thorny wood, / Scratching her legs”
Daphne was a nymph who fled the god Apollo's pursuit until she prayed for rescue and was transformed into a laurel tree. The servant's painting adds a grim painterly detail not in Ovid: Daphne's legs bleeding from the thorns as she runs, so realistically rendered that 'one shall swear she bleeds' and 'sad Apollo weep.' The third Ovidian painting (with Adonis and Io), all three from the Metamorphoses.
classical Daphne and Apollo
TLN 201cultural context
“Am I a lord? and have I such a lady? / Or do I dream?”
This soliloquy-within-the-deception is the pivot of the Induction: Sly's senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch) briefly persuade him to accept the false identity. His wavering between 'do I dream?' and 'I am a lord indeed' is the play-within-a-play's central joke — a tinker testing the boundary between what he is and what he is told he is, in a play that will go on to make identity and performance its main theme.
historical The sleeper awakened (the beggar made a lord)
TLN 220historical topical
“present her at the leet, / Because she brought stone jugs and no seal'd quarts”
A 'leet' (or court leet) was a local manorial court with petty criminal jurisdiction, including the regulation of ale-measures. 'Sealed quarts' were measures officially stamped by the local assay officer to guarantee correct volume; selling ale in unstamped vessels cheated customers. Sly threatens to prosecute the hostess for using unlicensed stone jugs — exactly the grievance of a regular alehouse-goer who knows the law.
TLN 264cultural context
“sadness hath congeal'd your blood, / And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy”
This is humoral medicine: in Elizabethan physiology the body contained four fluids (humours) — blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile (melancholy). Excessive sadness was thought to produce black bile, which 'congealed' the blood and led to depression, then to full madness ('frenzy'). The servant gives a medically respectable reason for prescribing a comedy: laughter would warm and thin the congealed humours and restore mental balance.
TLN 269wordplay
“Is not a commonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?”
'Commonty' is Sly's mangling of 'comedy' — a malapropism that tells the audience he has never attended or understood a play. A 'Christmas gambold' was a seasonal festive game or frolic (gambols); a 'tumbling-trick' was acrobatic street performance. Sly has no framework for drama except the entertainments of the fairground and the holiday yard, which tells us exactly what social world he inhabits.
TLN 274archaic vocab
“let the world slip: we shall ne'er be younger”
'Let the world slip' means let the world go — stop worrying about the outside world and enjoy yourself. The phrase was already proverbial in Elizabethan English, used as an invitation to reckless pleasure and carpe diem. Sly's comfortable adoption of this lordly sentiment (and the royal 'we') signals that the deception has fully taken hold, right as the frame-play ends and the inner play begins.