I found it! My favorite passage from Shakespeare's Richard II. Actually, one of my favorite passages period, from anything.
Was ever woman in this humour woo'd?
Was ever woman in this humour won?
I'll have her; but I will not keep her long.
What! I, that kill'd her husband and his father:
To take her in her heart's extremest hate,
With curses in her mouth, tears in her eyes,
The bleeding witness of her hatred by,
Having God, her conscience, and these bars against me,
And I nothing to back my suit at all,
But the plain devil and dissembling looks,
And yet to win her, all the world to nothing!
HA!
[I.ii.232-43]
I used to have a ton of poems and passages memorized: some of the "dark lady" sonnets, Edgar Allen Poe's The Bells, Gollums riddles from The Hobbit, and more stuff I don't even remember anymore, all good for hanging out around campfires, which if you know anything about my high school years I did more often than not. But now I don't even remember what it was I used to know, let alone the words themselves. Except maybe for this one, it stuck for some reason. Digging through some old stuff I came across a little plastic envelope with a bunch of scraps of paper in it. It was a collection of the stuff I was trying to learn, or had just learned, including the passage above. So, while I may never find the e.e. cummings style parody of the "summer rose" sonnet, at least I have this, which really is my favorite. It's like a rape fantasy played out in the mainstream entertainment of it's day. Fuck the FCC.
Update: I found the notebook with my complete collection and have started a podcast, Spoken by Firelight. To listen to a reading of this passage go to Was ever woman? Act 1, Scene II of Richard III
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