A monologue from the play by William Shakespeare
TITUS: Come, come, Lavinia; look, thy foes are bound.
Sirs, stop their mouths, let them not speak to me,But let them hear what fearful words I utter.O villains, Chiron and Demetrius!Here stands the spring whom you have stained with mud,This goodly summer with your winter mixed.You killed her husband, and for that vile faultTwo of her brothers were condemned to death,My hand cut off and made a merry jest;Both her sweet hands, her tongue, and that more dearThan hands our tongue, her spotless chastity,Inhuman traitors, you constrained and forced.What would you say if I should let you speak?Villains, for shame you could not beg for grace.
Hark, wretches, how I mean to martyr you.This one hand yet is left to cut your throatsWhiles that Lavinia ‘tween her stumps doth holdThe basin that receives your guilty blood.You know your mother means to feast with me,And calls herself Revenge, and thinks me mad.Hark, villains, I will grind your bones to dust,And with your blood and it I’ll make a paste,And of the paste a coffin I will rear,And make two pasties of your shameful heads,And bid that strumpet, your unhallowed dam,Like to the earth, swallow her own increase.
This is the feast that I have bid her to,And this the banquet she shall surfeit on;For worse than Philomel you used my daughter,And worse than Progne I will be revenged.And now prepare your throats. Lavinia, come,Receive the blood; and when that they are dead,Let me go grind their bones to powder smallAnd with this hateful liquor temper it;And in that paste let their vile heads be baked.Come, come, be every one officiousTo make this banquet, which I wish may proveMore stern and bloody than the Centaur’s feast.
