Join Bryn Boice (CSC’s Associate Artistic Director) in this monthly podcast, as she breaks down and shakes down Shakespeare’s most interesting speeches, from the most famous to the most obscure. This month, we return from a summer hiatus with a DOUBLE EPISODE with Bryn breaking down Emilia’s Act 4 Scene 3 monologue from “Othello” and Paulina’s Act 3 Scene 2 monologue from “The Winter’s Tale”! Flip through the pages of the Folio with her and see what treasures there are to uncover!
Hosted by Bryn Boice
Produced and Edited by Corey Cadigan
EMILIA: But I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall: say that they slack their duties,
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us; or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite;
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is: and doth affection breed it?
I think it doth: is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too: and have not we affections,
Desires for sport, and frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so.
PAULINA: What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels, racks, fires? What flaying, boiling
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst? Thy tyranny,
Together working with thy jealousies –
Fancies too weak for boys, too green and idle
For girls of nine – O think what they have done,
And then run mad indeed, stark mad, for all
Thy bygone fooleries were but spices of it.
That thou betrayed’st Polixenes, ‘twas nothing;
That did but show thee, of a fool, inconstant,
And damnable ingrateful. Nor was’t much
Thou wouldst have poisoned good Camillo’s honour,
To have him kill a king – poor trespasses,
More monstrous standing by; whereof I reckon
The casting forth to crows thy baby daughter
To be or none or little, though a devil
Would have shed water out of fire ere done’t.
Nor is’t directly laid to thee the death
Of the young prince, whose honourable thoughts –
Thoughts high for one so tender – cleft the heart
That could conceive a gross and foolish sire
Blemished his gracious dam. This is not, no,
Laid to thy answer. But the last – O lords,
When I have said, cry woe! The queen, the queen,
The sweetest, dearest creature’s dead, and vengeance for’t
Not dropped down yet.
