LIFE IS A DREAM
A monologue from the
play by Pedro
Calderón de la Barca
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NOTE: This monologue is reprinted
from Eight Dramas of Calderon. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald.
London: Macmillan & Co., 1906. |
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- KING: Rise, both of you,
- Rise to my arms, Astolfo and Estrella;
- As my two sisters' children always mine,
- Now more than ever, since myself and Poland
- Solely to you for our succession look'd.
- And now give ear, you and your several factions,
- And you, the Peers and Princes of this realm,
- While I reveal the purport of this meeting
- In words whose necessary length I trust
- No unsuccessful issue shall excuse.
- You and the world who have surnamed me "Sage"
- Know that I owe that title, if my due,
- To my long meditation on the book
- Which ever lying open overhead--
- The book of heaven, I mean--so few have read;
- Whose golden letters on whose sapphire leaf,
- Distinguishing the page of day and night,
- And all the revolution of the year;
- So with the turning volume where they lie
- Still changing their prophetic syllables,
- They register the destinies of men:
- Until with eyes that, dim with years indeed,
- Are quicker to pursue the stars than rule them,
- I get the start of Time, and from his hand
- The wand of tardy revelation draw.
- Oh, had the self-same heaven upon his page
- Inscribed my death ere I should read my life
- And, by fore-casting of my own mischance,
- Play not the victim but the suicide
- In my own tragedy!--But you shall hear.
- You know how once, as kings must for their people,
- And only once, as wise men for themselves,
- I woo'd and wedded: know too that my Queen
- In childbirth died; but not, as you believe,
- With her, the son she died in giving life to.
- For, as the hour of birth was on the stroke,
- Her brain conceiving with her womb, she dream'd
- A serpent tore her entrail. And too surely
- (For evil omen seldom speaks in vain)
- The man-child breaking from that living tomb
- That makes our birth the antitype of death,
- Man-grateful, for the life she gave him paid
- By killing her: and with such circumstance
- As suited such unnatural tragedy;
- He coming into light, if light it were
- That darken'd at his very horoscope,
- When heaven's two champions--sun and moon I mean--
- Suffused in blood upon each other fell
- In such a raging duel of eclipse
- As hath not terrified the universe
- Since that which wept in blood the death of Christ:
- When the dead walk'd, the waters turn'd to blood,
- Earth and her cities totter'd, and the world
- Seem'd shaken to its last paralysis.
- In such a paroxysm of dissolution
- That son of mine was born; by that first act
- Heading the monstrous catalogue of crime,
- I found fore-written in his horoscope;
- As great a monster in man's history
- As was in nature his nativity;
- So savage, bloody, terrible, and impious,
- Who, should he live, would tear his country's entrails,
- As by his birth his mother's; with which crime
- Beginning, he should clench the dreadful tale
- By trampling on his father's silver head.
- All which fore-reading, and his act of birth
- Fate's warrant that I read his life aright;
- To save his country from his mother's fate,
- I gave abroad that he had died with her
- His being slew; with midnight secrecy
- I had him carried to a lonely tower
- Hewn from the mountain-barriers of the realm,
- And under strict anathema of death
- Guarded from men's inquisitive approach,
- Save from the trusty few one needs must trust;
- Who while his fasten'd body they provide
- With salutary garb and nourishment,
- Instruct his soul in what no soul may miss
- Of holy faith, and in such other lore
- As may solace his life-imprisonment,
- And tame perhaps the Savage prophesied
- Toward such a trial as I aim at now,
- And now demand your special hearing to.
- What in this fearful business I have done,
- Judge whether lightly or maliciously,--
- I, with my own and only flesh and blood,
- And proper lineal inheritor!
- I swear, had his foretold atrocities
- Touch'd me alone, I had not saved myself
- At such a cost to him; but as a king,--
- A Christian king,--I say, advisedly,
- Who would devote his people to a tyrant
- Worse than Caligula fore-chronicled?
- But even this not without mis-giving,
- Lest by some chance mis-reading of the stars,
- Or mis-direction of what rightly read,
- I wrong my son of his prerogative,
- And Poland of her rightful sovereign.
- For, sure and certain prophets as the stars,
- Although they err not, he who reads them may;
- Or rightly reading--seeing there is One
- Who governs them, as, under Him, they us,
- We are not sure if the rough diagram
- They draw in heaven and we interpret here,
- Be sure of operation, if the Will
- Supreme, that sometimes for some special end
- The course of providential nature breaks
- By miracle, may not of these same stars
- Cancel his own first draft, or overrule
- What else fore-written all else overrules.
- As, for example, should the Will Almighty
- Permit the Free-will of particular man
- To break the meshes of else strangling fate--
- Which Free-will, fearful of foretold abuse,
- I have myself from my own son for-closed
- From ever possible self-extrication;
- A terrible responsibility,
- Not to the conscience to be reconciled
- Unless opposing almost certain evil
- Against so slight contingency of good.
- Well--thus perplex'd, I have resolved at last
- To bring the thing nto trial: whereunto
- Here have I summon'd you, my Peers, and you
- Whom I more dearly look to, failing him,
- As witnesses to that which I propose;
- And thus propose the doing it. Clotaldo,
- Who guards my son with old fidelity,
- Shall bring him hither from his tower by night
- Locked in a sleep so fast as by my art
- I rivet to within a link of death,
- But yet from death so far, that next day's dawn
- Shall wake him up upon the royal bed,
- Complete in consciousness and faculty,
- When with all princely pomp and retinue
- My loyal Peers with due obeisance
- Shall hail him Segismund, the Prince of Poland.
- Then if with any show of human kindness
- He fling discredit, not upon the stars,
- But upon me, their misinterpreter,
- With all apology mistaken age
- Can make to youth it never meant to harm,
- To my son's forehead will I shift the crown
- I long have wish'd upon a younger brow;
- And in religious humiliation,
- For what of worn-out age remains to me,
- Entreat my pardon both of Heaven and him
- For tempting destinies beyond my reach.
- But if, as I misdoubt, at his first step
- The hoof of the predicted savage shows;
- Before predicted mischief can be done,
- The self-same sleep that loosed him from the chain
- Shall re-consign him, not to loose again.
- Then shall I, having lost that heir direct,
- Look solely to my sisters' children twain
- Each of a claim so equal as divides
- The voice of Poland to their several sides,
- But, as I trust, to be entwined ere long
- Into one single wreath so fair and strong
- As shall at once all difference atone,
- And cease the realm's division with their own.
- Cousins and Princes, Peers and Councillors,
- Such is the purport of this invitation,
- And such is my design. Whose furtherance
- If not as Sovereign, if not as Seer,
- Yet one whom these white locks, if nothing else,
- To patient acquiescence consecrate,
- I now demand and even supplicate.
MORE MONOLOGUES BY CALDERÓN |
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