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ISABELLA Why ‘her unhappy brother’? let me ask,
The rather for I now must make you know
I am that Isabella and his sister.
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ISABELLA Why “her unlucky brother”? I ask, because I’m Isabella, his sister.
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LUCIO
25Gentle and fair, your brother kindly greets you:
Not to be weary with you, he’s in prison.
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LUCIO Your brother sends you his love, sweet, pretty one. To get right to the point, he’s in prison.
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ISABELLA Woe me! for what?
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ISABELLA How awful! For what?
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LUCIO For that which, if myself might be his judge,
He should receive his punishment in thanks:
30He hath got his friend with child.
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LUCIO For something which, if you ask me, he should be thanked rather than punished. He’s gotten his lover pregnant.
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ISABELLA Sir, make me not your story.
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ISABELLA Sir, don’t make things up.
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LUCIO It is true.
I would not—though ’tis my familiar sin
With maids to seem the lapwing and to jest,
35Tongue far from heart—play with all virgins so:
I hold you as a thing ensky’d and sainted.
By your renouncement an immortal spirit,
And to be talk’d with in sincerity,
As with a saint.
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LUCIO It’s true. I admit, I often play the deceiver and joker with young virgins and say things I don’t mean. But because of your religious vocation, I see you as a heavenly, spiritual being, and someone to speak to with sincerely, as I would a saint.
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ISABELLA
40You do blaspheme the good in mocking me.
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ISABELLA You mock real saints by calling me one.
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LUCIO Do not believe it. Fewness and truth, ’tis thus:
Your brother and his lover have embraced:
As those that feed grow full, as blossoming time
That from the seedness the bare fallow brings
45To teeming foison, even so her plenteous womb
Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry.
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LUCIO Don’t think that. In brief: your brother and his girl have slept together. And the same way your stomach gets full when you eat—and as a bare field, when you plant it, yields a rich harvest—her body shows the results of his plowing.
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