Impose some end to my incessant pain! A hundred thousand, and at last be saved! (His hands drop, his head droops; he moans) Why wert thou not a creature wanting soul? This soul should fly from me, and I be changed Unto some brutish beast! — All beasts are happy: Their souls are soon dissolved in elements: (lower, slower) But mine must live still to be plagued in hell! (With clenched fists and tense sincerity) Curs'd be the parents that engender'd me! (Struggling to his feet, his voice rising) No, Faustus, curse thyself! curse Lucifer That hath deprived thee of the joys of Heaven! (The clock begins to strike twelve. Faustus shrieks) Oh, it strikes! it strikes! Now, body, turn to air, Or Lucifer will bear thee quick to hell! (Lightning flashes, and thunder drowns out the clock. Trembling in every limb, with quavering voice, not loud) O Soul, be changed to little water-drops And fall into the ocean, ne'er be found! (The twelfth stroke booms from the bell, and a subterranean roaring begins, rumbling behind and under his feet. He kneels again in his agony, screaming) My God! My God! Look not so fierce on me! (Up-towers by his left the blaze-eyed mask and skeleton long arms of the original Mephistophilis; out-flames the Evil Angel under his right; he tries to push them away with vibrating hands) Adders and serpents, let me breathe a while! (He struggles to get up: they hold his hands) Ugly hell, gape not! (Lucifer's voice thunders behind him) Come not, Lucifer! (Lucifer's enormous hands swing high in the air behind him and descend on his shoulders, dragging him backwards off the platform) I'll burn my books! (All in a continuous shrieking crescendo, the extreme of which is now reached as in falling backwards he sees the Mephistophilis mask leering down into his face) Ah, Mephistophilis! [He disappears . . . Stillness, and a breathing-space. Chorus enters through the curtain as at the beginning. CHORUS Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight, That sometime grew within this learned man. Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits "Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus.” [And he withdraws; or perhaps remains, in his gray and gold, till the audience is quite departed, without clamorous vulgarity or calling forth of actors, marring the tragic purgation. FINIS RICARDO AND VIOLA A Romantic Comedy FRANCIS BEAUMONT Adapted from The Coxcomb In the Folio of Beaumont and Fletcher's Works, 1647 INTRODUCTION FRANCIS BEAUMONT, born about 1585, is the most poetical of Shakespeare's successors, and the most openly a disciple of Shakespeare among all the great playwrights of the early seventeenth century. His dramatic verse is the most lucid and succinct that was written in his time; and his theatrical sense - though tending, in common with his age, to extremes is the purest and freshest of the period. How much he owes to John Fletcher, his famed collaborator, a man six years his senior, we cannot tell: but every student of their joint works can guess how much John Fletcher was owing to him! Fletcher's part (the lesser part) in Philaster, The Maid's Tragedy, A King and No King - the best of their plays — is far better written and characterized than when Fletcher is working alone, or later, with a man like Massinger. Only the fellowship of Shakespeare himself in Henry VIII, 1613, elevated Fletcher to a greater achievement than Beaumont had earlier spurred him to. - Beaumont seems to have written only from about 1607 (The Woman-Hater) to about 1611 (The Knight of the Burning Pestle - his last play, seemingly quickly written, to please himself, not the public, with a girding at the romance he and Fletcher had so popularized). He married in 1613 and died on March 6, 1616, six weeks before Shakespeare. "A belated Elizabethan", Professor Baker calls him: a clear-spirited gentleman, writing "down" to the general taste: an amateur, loving the theater, adept in it, but independent of it, |