TRIOLUS AND CRESSIDA

ULYSSES ON DEGREE (I, iii, 83-124)

“Degree being vizarded, (wearing a mask)

The unworthiest shows as fairly in the mask. (a masked ball)

The heavens themselves, the planets and this center,

Observe degree, priority, and place.

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form, (regularity)

Office, and custom, in all line of order.

And therefore is the glorious planet Sol

In noble eminence enthroned and sphered

Amidst the other, whose medicinable eye

Corrects the ill aspects of planets evil,

And posts like the commandment of a king, (rides fast)

Sans check to good and bad. But when the planets

In evil mixture to disorder wander,

What plagues and what portents, what mutiny,

What raging of the sea, shaking of earth,

Commotion in the winds, frights, changes, horrors,

Divert and crack, rend and deracinate,

The unity and married calm of states

Quite from their figure! Oh, when degree is shaked,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

The enterprise is sick! How could communities,

Degrees in schools and brotherhoods in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogenitive and due of birth

Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark, what discord follows! Each thing meets

In mere oppugnancy. The bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe.

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead.

Force should be right, or rather, right and wrong,

Between whose endless jar justice resides,

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite,

And appetite, a universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce a universal prey,

And last eat up himself.