No Fear Shakespeare: Measure for Measure: Act 1 Scene 4 Page 2

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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.	ISABELLA Why “her unlucky brother”? I ask, because I’m Isabella, his sister.
LUCIO 25Gentle and fair, your brother kindly greets you: Not to be weary with you, he’s in prison.	LUCIO Your brother sends you his love, sweet, pretty one. To get right to the point, he’s in prison.
ISABELLA Woe me! for what?	ISABELLA How awful! For what?
LUCIO For that which, if myself might be his judge, He should receive his punishment in thanks: 30He hath got his friend with child.	LUCIO For something which, if you ask me, he should be thanked rather than punished. He’s gotten his lover pregnant.
ISABELLA Sir, make me not your story.	ISABELLA Sir, don’t make things up.
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.	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.
ISABELLA 40You do blaspheme the good in mocking me.	ISABELLA You mock real saints by calling me one.
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.	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.