Template:Dsh special pleading quote

Queen: This covenant is well-drafted, but yegads! ’Tis lengthy.

Triago: (bowing unctuously): The writer shall be deemed hereinbefore obliged.

Herculio: My liege and madam, to expostulate
What brevity should be, what clarity is —
Why “day” is business day, and “time” is closing time.
’Tis buried — lost — among the cluttered syntax of this deed.

Queen: ’Twas no compliment, good Herculio, rest assured.
A crafty phrase to propitiate that noisome clerk, no more.

Herculio: Madam, I do concur!
Since brevity is the soul of wit,
And boilerplate the crutch of wretched tedium
I will be brief, where Triago, in all his trite facility, cannot.

Triago: Milady! With all due and payable respect, and interest accrued thereon
I wouldst be inclined to be supportive of dissent —

Queen: O, exasperating vapours! Whatever doth he mean?

Herculio: Triago disagrees.
“Inclined”, Triago?
“Supportive”?
As straight as that?
No deemery to wrap it round?

Triago: Aye, deemèd, perchance — I pray just such indulgence
To vouchsafe avoidance of some doubt.

Queen: Doubt, Triago?

Triago: I’ll think of something, Majesty.

Herculio: How now, good lady: doth thou now understand?

Queen: I fear I do, in that I do not.
Speak, Triago — but pray, be quick.

Triago: Celerity shall herein be mutually agreed to be — and shall be deemed to be — the watchword Madam!

Herculio: There goeth that wretched deemery —

Triago: Was it not ever not unlike a thing unsuch as this?

Queen: Damn and blast your eyes, Triago!
Have at you now!

QUEEN runs TRIAGO through with a rapier and exits

Herculio: We fold our patron’s righteous sleep in word pollution
By the chaff and shucks and hulls of convolution
And whoever buys these minty lines: understand
Lexical complexity doth, pro rata with thy budget, soon expand.

CURTAIN