Mucedorus - Free Audiobook

SCENE VI. Another part of the field

Enter Humber.

HUMBER.
Where may I find some desert wilderness,
Where I may breath out curse as I would,
And scare the earth with my condemning voice;
Where every echoes repercussion
May help me to bewail mine overthrow,
And aide me in my sorrowful laments?
Where may I find some hollow uncoth rock,
Where I may damn, condemn, and ban my fill
The heavens, the hell, the earth, the air, the fire,
And utter curses to the concave sky,
Which may infect the airy regions,
And light upon the Brittain Locrine’s head?
You ugly sprites that in Cocitus mourn,
And gnash your teeth with dolorous laments:
You fearful dogs that in black Laethe howl,
And scare the ghosts with your wide open throats:
You ugly ghosts that, flying from these dogs,
Do plunge your selves in Puryflegiton:
Come, all of you, and with your shriking notes
Accompany the Brittains’ conquering host.
Come, fierce Erinnis, horrible with snakes;
Come, ugly Furies, armed with your whips;
You threefold judges of black Tartarus,
And all the army of you hellish fiends,
With new found torments rack proud Locrine’s bones!
O gods, and stars! damned be the gods & stars
That did not drown me in fair Thetis’ plains!
Curst be the sea, that with outrageous waves,
With surging billows did not rive my ships
Against the rocks of high Cerannia,
Or swallow me into her watery gulf!
Would God we had arrived upon the shore
Where Poliphemus and the Cyclops dwell,
Or where the bloody Anthrophagie
With greedy jaws devours the wandering wights!

Enter the ghost of Albanact.

But why comes Albanact’s bloody ghost,
To bring a corsive to our miseries?
Is’t not enough to suffer shameful flight,
But we must be tormented now with ghosts,
With apparitions fearful to behold?

GHOST.
Revenge! revenge for blood!

HUMBER.
So nought will satisfy your wandering ghost
But dire revenge, nothing but Humber’s fall,
Because he conquered you in Albany.
Now, by my soul, Humber would be condemned
To Tantal’s hunger or Ixion’s wheel,
Or to the vulture of Prometheus,
Rather than that this murther were undone.
When as I die I’ll drag thy cursed ghost
Through all the rivers of foul Erebus,
Through burning sulphur of the Limbo-lake,
To allay the burning fury of that heat
That rageth in mine everlasting soul.

GHOST.
Vindicta, vindicta.

[Exeunt.]