Prologue Text

Prologue [In Original Pronunciation, with virtual background of Hollar London panorama:] I bid you welcome, gentles all, aye, and citizens too, and goodwives and apprentices, and you also of the meaner sort, to this our famous (if something unquiet and stinking) London, in the year of our redemption sixteen hundred and eleven. With your worships’ kind consent, I shall do you such service in manner of guider, or interpreter, as in my humble condition I am able. My name is Walter Tybott. I confess I am not native to this city, and indeed few are, the greater part being from away. Indeed I am by birth a Welshman, though resident in England these many years - and may perchance travail yet farther, to seek me fortune across seas and oceans – if there be some improvement in our New World plantings. But those among you that be acquainted with the customs of our theaters may call me Prologue. As many of you are new to this city – and I am told, even to this time – I shall acquaint you with certain intelligence thereof, that I hope will profit you in our travail, and remove some of the strangeness. I shall endeavor also to speak in your own strange tongue. [End Original Pronunciation, start PowerPoint] K. London, 1611. Our most royal sovereign James, by the grace of God James king of Great Britaine, France, and Ireland, he that is James VI of Treaty Scotland, has sat on the throne for eight years. In this time we have 1604 been at peace, having concluded our twenty years war with Spain by treaty in 1604, a war in which much blood was shed and treasure 9 Yrs lost (though gained for some). In the king’s Irish dominion, there has War been no serious rebellion since the defeat and Roman exile of Hugh Q. O’Neill, that traitorous Earl of Tyrone, in 1603, the last year in the Eliz. reign of her most gracious majesty Queen Elizabeth, cousin to James and last of the Tudor line. Our safety from civil strife, presently and in future, appears, God Q. willing, equally assured, in the persons of not one but three children Anne borne to his majesty by his Queen, Anne, sister to the king of Denmark. The eldest of these, the royal Prince Henry Frederick, last Prince year created Prince of Wales, is at seventeen years entering on a Henry most promising manhood. In his person there is much hope for the kingdom – the most diverse of our subjects look to him for great accomplishments (some dissatisfied murmurers and busy bodies, indeed, hope for a rather sooner than later succession; and indeed there is talk also of some rift betwixt son and father). Henry’s To some, the Prince makes a rare unity of a kind of personal art religious austerity (one cannot slander him as Puritan, though some may smell a whiff of that), a unity of this with a passionate love of the finest art that can be brought from Italy, sought out by his Shipyard agents in Florence and elsewhere. He combines also, in a manner but few can fathom, a most royal honor, with a strangely forward interest in the manual arts and artifice, as especially, shipbuilding Arts & and navigation; as well being most excellently tutored in sciences mathematics, astronomy, and music, by the finest practitioners of those arts and sciences in all of England. He is bold to test his quality in the field, and but for being stayed by his father the king, would have joined the wars of King Henry of France, in that monarch’s contest with both the King of Spain and Henry the Papist rebels of his own country who denied his right even after IV his conversion to their faith. Indeed, mourned our prince, he lost his second father, as he called King Henry, upon that king’s most desperate murder this year past, a heinous deed proven by the Parlement of Paris to be spawn of those Jesuit vipers to whom the king so charitably permitted a return to France but seven years before. La And though now we are at peace with France, the future remains, Rochelle alas, uncertain. And on this point of the European wars, I have heard, balances some of the mislike between England’s royal father Elizabeth and son: for with the Princess Elizabeth likely to be married to the Stuart German Protestant prince, the Elector Palatine, the King intends next for Prince Henry to be matched with one of the Roman Catholic powers, and thereby to advance a general religious concord on that continent. (I crave your worships’ pardon, if my speech be overbold.) In the Low Countries also, some believe that war may yet return, in Battle of despite of the 12-years truce that has been recently signed between Gibraltar their Protestant provinces and the Spanish king – wars that have embroiled our English soldiers and gentlemen ever since Elizabeth, against her own pacific desires, first permitted their levy 26 years since. Indeed, absent the might of France’s late king, there is little to Hapsburg check the Spaniard in those prosperous states, should he return in domains force, nor ought to resist any attempt from the east, by his Austrian cousins, who have granted a toleration to their Protestant subjects of Bohemia only under duress, and cannot be trusted to honor that pledge. I will say little of the religious settlement in our own blessed realm, lest my words, howsoever innocent, be mistaken. Only this: that our Pauls hotter sort of Protestant, those called by their detractors cross Precisionists, Brownists, or Puritans, remain but a small thorn in the flesh of his majesty and his majesty’s established church, much reduced in strength, or at least in noise. Of these, some have fled to the Low Countries, to the relief of the many at home who despaired of peace in the church. I have heard also, on good authority, that the new Bible, seven years Geneva in the making, is to be set in print this year, commissioned by his bible majesty upon his accession to the crown expressly to strike those insolent and Puritan elements of the old Geneva, which so offended the divine appointment of kings, and offensive indeed to God’s very ordering of the estates of man, each in due obedience to his superior. Nor have those of the Romish religion been troublesome of late, Gunpowder certainly not since the treasonous among them were taken – plot thanks due to providence divine – before they could effect their damnable plot to have blown up the whole royal family, privy council, and houses of Parliament but two years into his gracious majesty’s reign. (And though their priestcraft be forbid within the realm, it is said the king hath a certain softness for them – his wife, closeted, being one – though none speak of outright toleration.) More troublous, perhaps, to some, yet welcomed by others, are William certain new philosophies that have, as it were, besieged and taken Gilbert the minds of men in our modern time, as, for example, the & De Magnete Magnetical. Here, our late most renowned Dr. Gilbert, in his life well favored by our departed Queen, hath to the satisfaction of many and learned, demonstrated by ingenious trial the properties of the lodestone, both familiar and strange; and most strange of all, that the globe of our earth be but itself a huge – and to his teeming Copernican mind at least, a whirling – lodestone unto itself. In this he hath system allied himself with the Copernican philosophy, usurping from the earth its appointed primacy of place at the center of all, bestowing that honor instead upon the sun; and revolving both the earth and the five planets about that body. Few will credit that supposition; and yet but last year, appeared on our shore a small book from the Italian Galilei, in which he reports, Galileo by aid of a magnifying trunk or perspective glass, that Jupiter himself, like our earth, hath his own tributary moon – indeed four of them! By this our mathematicians and astronomers are much amazed and put out, for together these diverse new things call in Kepler doubt all that they once held certain. And but the year before that, the German John Kepler threw the whole of astronomy yet more topsy-turvy, some say, by a demonstration that the path of Mars traces not a perfect circle, as we have been taught for some fifteen hundred years, but rather a sort of oval or ellipse, and that there be no crystal spheres at all to hold the heavenly bodies to their places. Briggs The excellent Dr. Briggs, that shining mathematician of our city’s Amer. new Gresham College, who worked with Dr. Gilbert and now map extends that man’s magnetical philosophy into the improvement of navigation at sea, hath been himself in correspondence with Dr. Kepler, and we can scarce await his judgment. It is reported also that Master Harriot, another of our English Harriot mathematicians, hath not only been in correspondence with Kepler, but hath himself employed such a trunk as Galilei, indeed sharing its practice with diverse mathematical Welshmen before any in England had ever heard of the Italian; though Master Harriot speaks not to many, and has committed none of these trials and inventions to print. (I speak carefully here, by reason of the cloud under which this Ralegh Harriot has labored for being Sir Walter Ralegh’s man, he who hath been immured in the Tower by the King’s command these eight years.

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