SC II
ROMEO AND JULIET
21
Take thou some new infection to thy[C 1] eye, 50 |
Rom. | Your plantain[E 1] leaf is excellent for that. |
Ben. | For what, I pray thee? |
Rom. | For your broken shin. |
Ben. | Why, Romeo, art thou mad? |
Rom. | Not mad, but bound more than a madman is; 55 Shut up in prison, kept without my food, Whipp'd and tormented, and—Good-den[C 2][E 2], good fellow. |
Serv. | God gi' good-den[C 3]. I pray, sir, can you read? |
Rom. | Ay, mine own fortune in my misery. |
Serv. | Perhaps you have learned it without book: 60 but, I pray, can you read any thing you see? |
Rom. | Ay, if I know the letters and the language. |
Serv. | Ye say honestly; rest you merry! |
Rom. | Stay, fellow; I can read.[Reads. [E 3]Signior Martino and his wife and daughters;[C 4] 65 |
- ↑ 52. plantain] So referred to, as a salve for a broken shin, in Love's Labour's Lost, III. i. 76. Romeo would turn aside Benvolio's talk of remedies for love with a jest on the popular remedy for an ailment less hard to cure than a broken heart; let us discuss broken shins, not deeper wounds.
- ↑ 57. Good-den] A corruption of "good e'en," it being now the afternoon.
- ↑ 65–73. Capell conjectured that the list of invited guests was in verse; Dyce (ed. 2) so prints it. In line 66 Anselme, a trisyllable, should perhaps, as Capell conjectured, be Anselmo. Q1 for line 71 has My faire Neece Rosaline and Livia. Is it an over-refinement to suppose that Romeo falters and delays over Rosaline's name, and that the text as printed above was so designed? Fair may be a dissyllable; but it is not so in line 74.