Page 1099 - Shakespeare - Vol. 2

O my poor kingdom, sick with civil blows!
When that my care could not withhold thy riots,
What wilt thou do when riot is thy care? [135]
O, thou wilt be a wilderness again,

Peopled with wolves, thy old inhabitants.

PRINCE
O, pardon me, my liege! But for my tears,
The moist impediments unto my speech,
I had forestalled this dear and deep rebuke [140]

Ere you with grief had spoke and I had heard
The course of it so far. There is your crown,
And He that wears the crown immortally
Long guard it yours. If I affect it more
Than as your honour and as your renown, [145]

Let me no more from this obedience rise,
Which my most inward true and duteous spirit
Teacheth, this prostrate and exterior bending.

God witness with me, when I here came in,
And found no course of breath within your majesty, [150]
How cold it struck my heart. If I do feign,
O, let me in my present wildness die
And never live to show the incredulous world

The noble change that I have purposèd.
Coming to look on you, thinking you dead, [155]
And dead almost, my liege, to think you were,

I spake unto this crown as having sense,
And thus upbraided it: ‘The care on thee depending
Hath fed upon the body of my father.
Therefore, thou best of gold art worst of gold. [160]
Other, less fine in carat, is more precious,

Preserving life in medicine potable,
But thou, most fine, most honoured, most renowned,
Hast eat thy bearer up’. Thus, my most royal liege,

Accusing it, I put it on my head, [165]
To try with it, as with an enemy
That had before my face murdered my father,
The quarrel of a true inheritor.