Act 3, Scene 1

Padua. A room in BAPTISTA'S house.

[Enter LUCENTIO, HORTENSIO, and BIANCA.]
Lucentio
1223 Fiddler, forbear; you grow too forward, sir.
1224 Have you so soon forgot the entertainment
1225 Her sister Katherine welcome'd you withal?
Hortensio
1226 But, wrangling pedant, this is
1227 The patroness of heavenly harmony:
1228 Then give me leave to have prerogative;
1229 And when in music we have spent an hour,
1230 Your lecture shall have leisure for as much.
Lucentio
1231 Preposterous ass, that never read so far
1232 To know the cause why music was ordain'd!
1233 Was it not to refresh the mind of man
1234 After his studies or his usual pain?
1235 Then give me leave to read philosophy,
1236 And while I pause serve in your harmony.
Hortensio
1237 Sirrah, I will not bear these braves of thine.
Bianca
1238 Why, gentlemen, you do me double wrong,
1239 To strive for that which resteth in my choice.
1240 I am no breeching scholar in the schools,
1241 I'll not be tied to hours nor 'pointed times,
1242 But learn my lessons as I please myself.
1243 And, to cut off all strife, here sit we down;
1244 Take you your instrument, play you the whiles;
1245 His lecture will be done ere you have tun'd.
Hortensio
1246 You'll leave his lecture when I am in tune?
[Retires.]
Lucentio
1247 That will be never: tune your instrument.
Bianca
1248 Where left we last?
Lucentio
1249 Here, madam:—
1250 Hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus;
1251 Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.
Bianca
1252 Construe them.
Lucentio
1253 'Hic ibat,' as I told you before, 'Simois,' I am Lucentio, 'hic
1254 est,' son unto Vincentio of Pisa, 'Sigeia tellus,' disguised thus
1255 to get your love, 'Hic steterat,' and that Lucentio that comes
1256 a-wooing, 'Priami,' is my man Tranio, 'regia,' bearing my port,
1257 'celsa senis,' that we might beguile the old pantaloon.
Lucentio
1258 HORTENSIO. {Returning.]
1259 Madam, my instrument's in tune.
Bianca
1260 Let's hear.—
[HORTENSIO plays.]
Bianca
1261 O fie! the treble jars.
Lucentio
1262 Spit in the hole, man, and tune again.
Bianca
1263 Now let me see if I can construe it: 'Hic ibat Simois,' I
1264 know you not; 'hic est Sigeia tellus,' I trust you not; 'Hic
1265 steterat Priami,' take heed he hear us not; 'regia,' presume not;
1266 'celsa senis,' despair not.
Hortensio
1267 Madam, 'tis now in tune.
Lucentio
1268 All but the base.
Hortensio
1269 The base is right; 'tis the base knave that jars.
1270 How fiery and forward our pedant is!
[Aside]
Hortensio
1271 Now, for my life, the knave doth court my love:
1272 Pedascule, I'll watch you better yet.
Bianca
1273 In time I may believe, yet I mistrust.
Lucentio
1274 Mistrust it not; for sure, AEacides
1275 Was Ajax, call'd so from his grandfather.
Bianca
1276 I must believe my master; else, I promise you,
1277 I should be arguing still upon that doubt;
1278 But let it rest. Now, Licio, to you.
1279 Good master, take it not unkindly, pray,
1280 That I have been thus pleasant with you both.
[To LUCENTIO]
Hortensio
1281 You may go walk and give me leave awhile;
1282 My lessons make no music in three parts.
Lucentio
1283 Are you so formal, sir?
[Aside]
Lucentio
1284 Well, I must wait,
1285 And watch withal; for, but I be deceiv'd,
1286 Our fine musician groweth amorous.
Hortensio
1287 Madam, before you touch the instrument,
1288 To learn the order of my fingering,
1289 I must begin with rudiments of art;
1290 To teach you gamut in a briefer sort,
1291 More pleasant, pithy, and effectual,
1292 Than hath been taught by any of my trade:
1293 And there it is in writing, fairly drawn.
Bianca
1294 Why, I am past my gamut long ago.
Hortensio
1295 Yet read the gamut of Hortensio.
Bianca
1296 'Gamut' I am, the ground of all accord,
1297 'A re,' to plead Hortensio's passion;
1298 'B mi,' Bianca, take him for thy lord,
1299 'C fa ut,' that loves with all affection:
1300 'D sol re,' one clef, two notes have I
1301 'E la mi,' show pity or I die.
1302 Call you this gamut? Tut, I like it not:
1303 Old fashions please me best; I am not so nice,
1304 To change true rules for odd inventions.
[Enter a SERVANT.]
Servant
1305 Mistress, your father prays you leave your books,
1306 And help to dress your sister's chamber up:
1307 You know to-morrow is the wedding-day.
Bianca
1308 Farewell, sweet masters, both: I must be gone.
[Exeunt BIANCA and SERVANT.]
Lucentio
1309 Faith, mistress, then I have no cause to stay.
[Exit.]
Hortensio
1310 But I have cause to pry into this pedant:
1311 Methinks he looks as though he were in love.
1312 Yet if thy thoughts, Bianca, be so humble
1313 To cast thy wand'ring eyes on every stale,
1314 Seize thee that list: if once I find thee ranging,
1315 Hortensio will be quit with thee by changing.
[Exit.]

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Word definitions on hover

Notes

TLN 1231archaic vocab
“Preposterous ass, that never read so far”
'Preposterous' carried its Latin force in Shakespeare: Latin praeposterus means 'having the last first' (prae, before + posterus, coming after) — reversed, inverted, contrary to right order. Lucentio insults Hortensio not merely as foolish but as one who puts music before philosophy, which is literally putting the cart before the horse.
TLN 1240archaic vocab
“I am no breeching scholar in the schools”
A 'breeching scholar' was a schoolboy young enough to be birched (beaten with a birch rod across the seat of his breeches) for poor performance. Bianca pointedly asserts that she is not a child subject to a schoolmaster's rod — and therefore not bound by Hortensio's or Lucentio's schedules. The line is also a flash of her independence: she sets her own curriculum.
TLN 1250classical allusion
“Hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus; / Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis”
These two Latin lines come from Ovid's Heroides 1.33-34, an imagined letter from Penelope to the absent Odysseus describing the battlefield before Troy: 'Here flowed the Simois; here is the Sigeian land; here stood the lofty palace of old Priam.' Lucentio uses them as the pretext for a Latin lesson while in reality embedding his own declaration of identity: he interpolates his real name and parentage into the grammatical 'construal' of the verse.
TLN 1257cultural context
“beguile the old pantaloon”
The 'pantaloon' was a stock character of Italian commedia dell'arte comedy: a foolish, miserly old man, usually a Venetian merchant, who is perpetually duped by the young people around him. Lucentio uses the term dismissively for Gremio, the elderly suitor who is easily fooled by disguise. The word signals that the whole Padua plot belongs to the tradition of Italian comedy of mistaken identity.
TLN 1268wordplay
“All but the base. The base is right; 'tis the base knave that jars”
Lucentio complains that 'all but the base' is in tune; Hortensio turns the word back on him: the musical bass (the lowest voice-part) is perfectly in tune — but the 'base knave' (low, vile person) is the one who is discordant. The pun equates Lucentio with both an off-pitch voice and a socially inferior rogue, while Hortensio — still unaware of Lucentio's disguise — is beginning to suspect exactly that.
TLN 1274classical allusion
“AEacides / Was Ajax, call'd so from his grandfather”
Lucentio cites a classical example to reassure Bianca that 'mistrust' can give way to belief: just as 'Aeacides' is a name that sounds unfamiliar but simply means 'descendant of Aeacus' — which is Ajax — so she should trust what she is told even if it at first seems strange. Ajax the Greek hero at Troy was the grandson of Aeacus, king of Aegina; the patronymic suffix '-ides' means 'son/descendant of.'
TLN 1290cultural context
“teach you gamut in a briefer sort, / More pleasant, pithy, and effectual”
The 'gamut' was the complete musical scale as taught in Renaissance music theory, built on the Guidonian system of hexachords (six-note scales named with the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la). Each pitch was identified by both a letter name (G, A, B, C, D, E) and a solmization syllable: 'Gamut' was the name for G at the bottom of the scale. Hortensio hands Bianca a written gamut — which she reads aloud and discovers is a coded declaration of love.
TLN 1303archaic vocab
“I am not so nice, / To change true rules for odd inventions”
'Nice' here does not mean pleasant or agreeable — it meant foolish, wanton, or lasciviously trivial. Bianca says she is not so foolish as to abandon the established rules of music for Hortensio's strange novelties. The word's modern sense of 'pleasant' developed only later; in Shakespeare it almost always signals something closer to 'silly' or 'overrefined.'
TLN 1313archaic vocab
“cast thy wand'ring eyes on every stale, / Seize thee that list”
A 'stale' was a lure or decoy used in hunting and fowling — a tethered bird or dummy set to attract other birds into a trap. Hortensio, realizing he is losing Bianca to Lucentio ('the pedant'), bitterly calls Lucentio a mere lure she has been taken in by. The word also carried the secondary sense of a person used as a cat's-paw or dupe — and, in Elizabethan slang, a prostitute or discarded lover, which adds a cutting edge.