SparkNotes

Great Duke, be merciful to mortal men. Calm your rage, your manly rage! Calm your rage, great Duke! Dear man, calm your rage. Be lenient, dearest!

This is healthy talk. Your Honor’s is unhealthy talk.

Young though I am, I’ve been observing these three blowhards closely. I am “man”—which is to say, servant—to all three of them. Yet not one among them, if all three were to wait on me, could be my “man,” because three such fakes don’t amount to a man. Take Bardolph: he is cowardly and blustery. He acts tough, but he doesn’t fight. Pistol, meanwhile, has a lethal tongue but an inert sword. He destroys words but keeps his weapon in one piece. As for Nym, he’s heard men of valor are men of few words, so he refuses to pray lest he should be thought a coward. But he has as few good deeds as he has bad words—for he never cracked anyone’s head but his own, and that was against a post when he was drunk. They will steal anything and call it spoils. Bardolph stole a lute case, carried it for thirty-six miles, and sold it for a penny and a half. Nym and Bardolph are sworn brothers in crime, and in Calais they stole a fire shovel: I could see from that that they had no pride. They would like me to be as familiar with men’s pockets as their gloves and handkerchiefs, which goes against my manhood, because to take something from another’s pocket and put it into my own is plain stealing. I must leave them and seek some better employment. Their villainy nauseates me, and I must therefore vomit it up.