[From the “Battle of Alcazar, a Tragedy,” 1594.]
Muly Mahamet, driven from his throne into a desart, robs the Lioness to feed his fainting Wife Calipolis.
Muly. Hold thee, Calipolis; feed, and faint no more.
This flesh I forced from a Lioness;
Meat of a Princess, for a Princess’ meat.
Learn by her noble stomach to esteem
Penury plenty in extremest dearth;
Who, when she saw her foragement bereft,
Pined not in melancholy or childish fear;
But, as brave minds are strongest in extremes,
So she, redoubling her former force,
Ranged through the woods, and rent the breeding vaults
Of proudest savages, to save herself.
Feed then, and faint not, fair Calipolis;
For, rather than fierce famine shall prevail
To gnaw thy entrails with her thorny teeth.
The conquering Lioness shall attend on thee,
And lay huge heaps of slaughter’d carcases
As bulwarks in her way to keep her back.
I will provide thee of a princely Ospray,
That, as she flieth over fish in pools,
The fish shall turn their glistering bellies up,
And thou shall take the liberal choice of all.
Jove’s stately Bird with wide-commanding wing
Shall hover still about thy princely head.
And eat down fowls by shoals into thy lap.
Feed then, and faint not, fair Calipolis.[117]
[From the “Seven Champions of Christendom,” by John Kirk, acted 1638.]
Calib, the Witch, in the opening Scene, in a Storm.
Calib. Ha! louder a little; so, that burst was well.
Again; ha, ha! house, house your heads, ye fear-struck
mortal fools, when Calib’s consort plays
A hunts-up to her. How rarely doth it languell
In mine ears! these are mine organs; the toad,
The bat, the raven, and the fell whistling bird,
Are all my anthem-singing quiristers.
Such sapless roots, and liveless wither’d woods,
Are pleasanter to me than to behold
The jocund month of May, in whose green head of youth
The amorous Flora strews her various flowers,
And smiles to see how brave she has deckt her girl.
But pass we May, as game for fangled fools,
That dare not set a foot in Art’s dark, sec-
-ret, and bewitching path, as Calib has.
Here is my mansion
Within the rugged bowels of this cave,
This crag, this cliff, this den; which to behold
Would freeze to ice the hissing trammels of Medusa.
Yet here enthroned I sit, more richer in my spells
And potent charms, than is the stately Mountain Queen,
Drest with the beauty of her sparkling gems,
To vie a lustre ’gainst the heavenly lamps.
But we are sunk in these antipodes; so choakt
With darkness is great Calib’s cave, that it
Can stifle day. It can?—it shall—for we do loath the light;
And, as our deeds are black, we hug the night.
But where’s this Boy, my George, my Love, my Life,
Whom Calib lately dotes on more than life?
I must not have him wander from my love
Farther than summons of my eye, or beck,
Can call him back again. But ’tis my fiend-
-begotten and deform’d Issue[118], misleads him:
For which I’ll rock him in a storm of hail.
And dash him ’gainst the pavement on the rocky den;
He must not lead my Joy astray from me.
The parents of that Boy, begetting him,
Begot and bore the issue of their deaths;
Which done[119], the Child I stole,
Thinking alone to triumph in his death,
And bathe my body in his popular gore:
But dove-like Nature favour’d so the Child,
That Calib’s killing knife fell from her hand;
And, ’stead of stabs, I kiss’d the red-lipt Boy.
[From “Two Tragedies in One,” by Robert Yarrington, who wrote in the reign of Elizabeth.]
Truth, the Chorus, to the Spectators.