Page 1450 - Shakespeare - Vol. 3

IAGO

I am about it, but indeed my invention [125]
Comes from my pate as birdlime does from frieze,
It plucks out brain and all: but my Muse labours,

And thus she is deliver’d:
If she be fair and wise, fairness and wit;
The one’s for use, the other using it. [130]

DESDEMONA
Well prais’d! How if she be black and witty?

IAGO
If she be black, and thereto have a wit,
She’ll find a white, that shall her blackness hit.

DESDEMONA

Worse and worse.

EMILIA

How if fair and foolish? [135]

IAGO
She never yet was foolish, that was fair,
For even her folly help’d her, to an heir.

DESDEMONA
These are old paradoxes, to make fools laugh i’ the alehouse; what miserable

praise hast thou for her that’s foul and foolish? [140]

IAGO

There’s none so foul, and foolish thereunto,
But does foul pranks, which fair and wise ones do.

DESDEMONA
O heavy ignorance, that praises the worst best: but what praise couldst thou
bestow on a deserving woman indeed? one that in the authority of [145] her
merits did justly put on the vouch of very malice itself?