Honour and decency! Thieves! Ye two bound for honour and decency? Cloaks of shame! Yet even we ourselves cannot always remain bound to ours. I, yes, I, I, ‘k must sometimes put aside my piety and, out of necessity, bruise my honour, use guile and deceit, laze, skirt. But thou, with those rags and rags on thy body and with those squinting false forest cat eyes, with that grin and that stinking breath, thou art guided by honour and decency?
What honour? What decency? What claptrap! What a joke! Can decency fill our bellies? No. Can honour heal a broken leg? It can't. An arm then? No. Or a finger? No. Or a hair? No. Honour is not a surgeon. Then what is honour? A word. What is in that word? Wind, air that dissipates. Beautiful structure. Can a dead person feel honour? No. Is honour only to be found among the living? Not even that, because they spawn their honour, they blow it up, they spoil their honour with vanity, contaminate it with slander, as far as I am concerned: no, I don't need any honour!
An excerpt from the libretto of Falstaff In a translation by Sam Bogaerts.
The rehearsal photos and gossip about Falstaff libretto reading #4 you will find here and here.
