The face that launch’d a thousand ships

Christopher Marlowe

Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships,
And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?
Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.
Her lips suck forth my soul: see where it flies!
Come, Helen, come, give me my soul again.
Here will I dwell, for heaven is in these lips,
And all is dross that is not Helena.
I will be Paris, and for love of thee,
Instead of Troy, shall Wittenberg be sack’d;
And I will combat with weak Menelaus,
And wear thy colours on my plumed crest;
Yea, I will wound Achilles in the heel,
And then return to Helen for a kiss.
O, thou art fairer than the evening air
Clad in the beauty of a thousand stars;
Brighter art thou than flaming Jupiter
When he appear’d to hapless Semele;
More lovely than the monarch of the sky
In wanton Arethusa’s azur’d arms;
And none but thou shalt be my paramour!

Doctor Faustus. Shakespeare’s Globe 2011

 

How all ocasions do inform against me

William Shakespeare

Act 4 Scene 4 (Spoken by Hamlet)

How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

Happy B-Day Will!

 

‘The Royal Hunt of the Sun’ by Peter Shaffer

I was in Cajamarca, Peru,  a couple of weeks ago and my friends and I were at the main square when I just started wondering how things had really happened for the last king of the Incas in that vey place some centuries ago. Then my friend Sara Walker asked me if I had read Peter Shaffer’s play about the last days of the Inca empire. I told her that everyhing I knew about Peter Shaffer was Amadeus, because of the film. A few days after arriving from Peru I received a pack with the book -  Sara’s present.

I really would like to watch a performance of the play, but for a while I’ll have to do with just reading it, which was already a intriguing experience. Along the pages I had to force myself to see Cajamarca in the 16th century at the same time that images of our days there kept popping up in my mind.

It is a short but complex play, without clear-cut division between good and evil, conqueror and conquered. I confess that I almost pitied Pizzarro at the end and quite despised Atahuallpa for being so naive, vain and irresponsible towards his people. Of course, post-colonial readings here are almost a must, but I wouldn’t limit myself to them since power relations are entangled with strong psychologic dependence among characters making psychoanalytical criticism and cultural materialism also valid ways to approach the text.

OLD MARTIN:  I went out into the night – the cold high night of the Andes, hung with stars like crystal apples – and dropped my first tears as a man. My first and last. That was my first and last worship too. Devotion never came again.’

Shaffer, P. (1981) The Royal Hunt of the Sun. London: Penguin.