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Messenger

Your honor's players, hearing your amendment,    
Are come to play a pleasant comedy,
For so your doctors hold it very meet,    
Seeing too much sadness hath congealed your blood,    
And melancholy is the nurse of frenzy.    
Therefore they thought it good you hear a play
And frame your mind to mirth and merriment,    
Which bars a thousand harms, and lengthens life.    

Messenger

Which bars a thousand harms, and lengthens life.    

Sly

Marry, I will. Let them play it. Is not a comonty a     
Christmas gambold or a tumbling-trick?    

Page

No, my good lord; it is more pleasing stuff.

Sly

What, household stuff?    

Page

It is a kind of history.

Sly

Am I a lord, and have I such a lady?
Or do I dream? Or have I dreamed till now?
I do not sleep — I see, I hear, I speak;    
I smell sweet savours and I feel soft things.
Upon my life, I am a lord indeed,
And not a tinker nor Christopher Sly.
Well, bring our lady hither to our sight,    
And once again, a pot o’ th’ smallest ale.

Sly

These fifteen years! By my fay, a goodly nap.    
But did I never speak of all that time?    

First Servant

O, yes, my lord, but very idle words.
For though you lay here in this goodly chamber,    
Yet would you say ye were beaten out of door,    
And rail upon the hostess of the house,    
And say you would present her at the leet,    
Because she brought stone jugs and no sealed quarts.

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