Faustus Read Free Page B

understand.
    FAUSTUS: A good, traditional response.
    (
The
MAGUS
appears, with a flourish of drums. He carries a valise marked with a devil’s head
.)
    FAUSTUS: Selah. Who have we here? Is it the Devil… Sir, are you the Devil?
    MAGUS: His counterfeit, my lord, upon the earth.
    WIFE: (
Drawn by the sound
) Faustus, who has engaged the entertainer?
    FAUSTUS: Right welcome. Are we not told, of periodic riots of inversion, where we find license to resolve our various superfluities? Heathen societies knew it as orgy, we, their ailing, decadent descendants call it holiday. Here is the last pagan survival welcome, sir—what do you bring?
    MAGUS: Signor, we bring a carnival.
    FAUSTUS: Bravo.
    WIFE: I fear the boy unequal to the entertainment.
    FAUSTUS: Then I shall bear the shock. (
The
WIFE
retires
.) Dare we hope that you come to subvert the natural order?
    MAGUS: As you may judge. Vouchsafe the moment for our preparation, and we shall reveal the occult, and set at defiance: time, space, and logic, law, and decorum.
    FAUSTUS: Proceed—proceed, sir, are we not yours?
    (The MAGUS
performs a magical flourish, and then intones:
)
    MAGUS:
    Ecco
The carnival
Wherein, all rights reversed,
We abjure hypocrisy
O blessed traveler,
Who quits his burden as if ne’er to
Reassume it
Cast from you care, disport as before th’ invention
of remorse
The timid call themselves philosophers
The bolder libertines
Each, however, once subsumed, becomes the acolyte.
The disparate revealed as one, the whole as mosaic
As we shatter the oppressive unities til space,
matter, thought and life itself are called by the one
name
    Jubio!
    (
The
MAGUS
does a magical trick
)
    FAUSTUS: Oh, sir. Need we fear?
    MAGUS: Naught but the mysteries …
    ( FAUSTUS
applauds
.)
    FAUSTUS: All reverence to the lord of misrule. Honor, of course, to the Creator, but to the inverter, ten thousand times more. Poor ignorant folk, here below, we’ve glimpsed the world the wrong way, round, now may we stare, delighted at the back of the tapestry. Or have we gazed, all our lives, at its inversion? (
To
MAGUS ) What do you say?
    MAGUS: I have prayed for a man to understand me.
    FAUSTUS: Am I that man?
    MAGUS: From your speech, sir, I’d have took you for one of the confraternity
    FAUSTUS: No, I am but a poor projector. Yours is the core of accomplishment.
    MAGUS: The core, sir?
    FAUSTUS: Are we not told, the jesters of a wiser day, made all whole in shaking a skull at their masters? Have you heard that tale?
    MAGUS: I have, but cannot credit it.
    FAUSTUS: Nor I, for where, among the great, do we find self-depreciation? ( FAUSTUS
takes up the gazette
) Nor should one feel the need, when these exist, detractors by profession—eunuch compilers, swine … (
Reads
)“Our petted savant… fat on the leavings of a prior fame.” … Another trick, sir, loose me a diverting marvel.
    FRIEND: Shall we not await the child?
    FAUSTUS: Do not subvert the flow of the performance. Charm me, from the world.
    MAGUS: I can but conjure, sir, as I am skilled, which extends but to the distraction of the uninformed …
    FRIEND: Behold another of your confraternity: (
Of the paper
) Continue.
    MAGUS: Bid me.
    FAUSTUS: (
Of the newspaper
) Make this foul indictment disappear.
    MAGUS: (
Takes the newspaper, and, with a flourish, disappears it) Ecco
. It vanishes.
    FAUSTUS: No!
    MAGUS: Sir, to the contrary.
    FAUSTUS: Oh, bravo.
    MAGUS: I did not o’erextend my brief… ?
    FAUSTUS: Indeed you did. Well done and excellently improvised. My hand.
    MAGUS: Most honored.
    FAUSTUS: To have fooled the philosopher.
    MAGUS: One finds, in my profession, sir, the greater the intellect, the more ease in its misdirection.
    FAUSTUS: One finds the same in mine. Oh, well done. To have shrunk that canker. It lacks but the one dimension, your trick.
    MAGUS: … servant, sir.
    FAUSTUS: Cleanse it from memory.
    (
Pause
)
    MAGUS: Give me but time.
    FAUSTUS: Bravo. Bravo, sir. Well said.
    (
The
WIFE
again