Are you meditating on virginity?

Parolles
Are you meditating on virginity?
Helen
Ay. You have some stain of soldier in you; let
me ask you a question. Man is enemy to virginity.
How may we barricado it against him?
Parolles
Keep him out.
Helen
But he assails, and our virginity, though
valiant in the defense, yet is weak. Unfold to us
some warlike resistance.
Parolles
There is none. Man setting down before you
will undermine you and blow you up.

It is not politic in the commonwealth
of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity
is rational increase, and there was never
virgin got till virginity was first lost

Helen
Bless our poor virginity from underminers and
blowers-up! Is there no military policy how virgins
might blow up men?
Parolles
Virginity being blown down, man will
quicklier be blown up. Marry, in blowing him
down again, with the breach yourselves made you
lose your city. It is not politic in the commonwealth
of nature to preserve virginity. Loss of virginity
is rational increase, and there was never
virgin got till virginity was first lost. That you
were made of is metal to make virgins. Virginity by
being once lost may be ten times found; by being
ever kept, it is ever lost. ’Tis too cold a companion.
Away with ’t.
Helen
I will stand for ’t a little, though therefore I
die a virgin.
Parolles
There’s little can be said in ’t. ’Tis against the
rule of nature. To speak on the part of virginity is
to accuse your mothers, which is most infallible
disobedience. He that hangs himself is a virgin;
virginity murders itself and should be buried in
highways out of all sanctified limit as a desperate
offendress against nature. Virginity breeds mites,
much like a cheese, consumes itself to the very
paring, and so dies with feeding his own stomach.
Besides, virginity is peevish, proud, idle, made of
self-love, which is the most inhibited sin in the
canon. Keep it not; you cannot choose but lose by
’t. Out with ’t! Within ten year it will make itself
two, which is a goodly increase, and the principal
itself not much the worse. Away with ’t!
Helen
How might one do, sir, to lose it to her own liking?
Parolles
Let me see. Marry, ill, to like him that ne’er
it likes. ’Tis a commodity will lose the gloss with
lying; the longer kept, the less worth. Off with ’t
while ’tis vendible; answer the time of request. Virginity,
like an old courtier, wears her cap out of
fashion, richly suited but unsuitable, just like the
brooch and the toothpick, which wear not now.
Your date is better in your pie and your porridge
than in your cheek. And your virginity, your old
virginity, is like one of our French withered pears:
it looks ill, it eats dryly; marry, ’tis a withered pear.
It was formerly better, marry, yet ’tis a withered
pear. Will you anything with it?
Helen
Not my virginity, yet—
There shall your master have a thousand loves,
A mother, and a mistress, and a friend,
A phoenix, captain, and an enemy,
A guide, a goddess, and a sovereign,
A counselor, a traitress, and a dear;
His humble ambition, proud humility,
His jarring concord, and his discord dulcet,
His faith, his sweet disaster, with a world
Of pretty, fond adoptious christendoms
That blinking Cupid gossips. Now shall he—
I know not what he shall. God send him well.
The court’s a learning place, and he is one—
Parolles
What one, i’ faith?
Hele
That I wish well. ’Tis pity—
Parolle
What’s pity?
Helen
That wishing well had not a body in ’t
Which might be felt, that we, the poorer born,
Whose baser stars do shut us up in wishes,
Might with effects of them follow our friends
And show what we alone must think, which never
Returns us thanks.