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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.

Credits: Reprinted from Eight Dramas of Calderon. Trans. Edward Fitzgerald. London: Macmillan & Co., 1906.