Celestina

Fernando de Rojas, John Clifford

• Publisher: Nick Hern Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781788502368
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Drama
• Index: Literature

Celestina, madam of the local brothel, is commissioned by a nobleman to help him seduce a beautiful young woman. Using all her wiles and with the help of two greedy servants she goes about weaving her spells... with tragic results.

Fernando de Rojas' play Celestina has been a pivotal work of European culture since 1499, when it was first performed, and the character of the ever resourceful procuress Celestina has inspired artists from Goya to Picasso.

This version of Celestina, translated by John Clifford, was first performed at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh, in August 2004, as part of the Edinburgh International Festival.

This edition of the play, in the Nick Hern Books Drama Classics series, includes an introduction by John Clifford.

ACT ONE

CALISTO. Melibea, in this I see the greatness of God.

MELIBEA. In what, Calisto?

CALISTO. In giving power to nature to gift you with such perfect beauty.

In showing me such generosity in my unmerit as to allow me to see you. And to see you in so opportune a place where I can make manifest to you my secret grief.

Has anyone seen, now, in this life, any human body in so great a state of glory?

For sure the saints in their glory and their delight in the vision of God cannot possibly relish so great a pleasure as I do in this sight of you.

But in this we differ, o my sadness, for they in all pureness glory and have no fear, no fear of ever losing their state of blessedness, while my pleasure is commingled with sheer terror. Terror of the exquisite torment I know your absence will cause me.

MELIBEA. You so greatly treasure this, Calisto?

CALISTO. In truth I treasure it so much that were God himself to give me a seat among his saints, I would reject it as less happy.

MELIBEA. Well then, if you continue, will I give you equivalent largesse.

CALISTO. O how my ears are blessed in all unworthiness to hear such cherished words.

MELIBEA. O how cursed when you have heard me. Because you will pay savagely for the madness of your insolence and the arrogance of your intent.

Your words, Calisto, are exactly what one might expect from a man like you but they are wasted on a woman like myself.

Remove yourself, you clumsy graceless lout. Go!

For I cannot bear even to imagine it should have occurred to any human heart to communicate me illicit love’s delight!

CALISTO. I will go as one against whom Fortune has best studied to direct her malice with most cruel hate.

Sempronio, Sempronio, Sempronio! Where is that wretch?

SEMPRONIO. Here I am, sir. Grooming the horses.

CALISTO. So why are you coming out the hall?

SEMPRONIO. The gerfalcon had flown off and I’d just recaptured it and was hooding it back on its perch.

CALISTO. I hope the devils claw you. I hope you die a sudden unexpected death carried off in a fit of rage that means you end up burning in the fires of eternal torment, and so suffer something worse than my own pain-filled calamitous death!

Despicable, profligate wretch, open up my room and make my bed ready!

SEMPRONIO. That’s soon done, sir.

CALISTO. Close the shutter and let this sad creature be companion to darkness. Let this unfortunate become one of the blind. Thoughts of misery are not worthy of light.

SEMPRONIO. Something wrong?

CALISTO. Remove yourself! Don’t speak to me!

Because otherwise perhaps just before my frenzied decease these frantic hands will bring you to sudden death!

SEMPRONIO. It seems you want to be alone. I’ll go.

CALISTO. Go and be cursed for ever!

SEMPRONIO. This is a misfortune. This is an unexpected and sudden wrong. What contrary event could have so suddenly occurred so as to rob him of all happiness? And, what’s worse, rob him of all good sense as well? Should I leave him alone, or should I go back in there with him? If I leave him, he’ll kill himself. If I go in, he’ll kill me. I’ll stay here. I won’t be concerned. It’s better he dies than me, given that living is something he detests but which I pleasure in. And if even if for no other reason than that I want to live to see my Elicia, I should take great care to keep myself from danger.

On the other hand, if he does happen to kill himself and I’m the only witness, then I’ll end up having to account for his death. I’d better go in.

CALISTO. Sempronio!

SEMPRONIO. Sir?

CALISTO. The fire that burns me is the fiercest fire in the whole wide world.

And the one who is the cause of it the most pitiless being in the infinite universe.

SEMPRONIO (aside). I was right. This master of mine’s gone mad.

CALISTO. What are you saying, Sempronio?

SEMPRONIO. Nothing.

CALISTO. No, you can tell me. Don’t be afraid.

SEMPRONIO. What I’m saying is, how can the fire that burns you, apparently, be fiercer than the fire, say, which consumes a whole city and everyone in it?

CALISTO. Because if the fire that burns me is like the fire that burns in purgatory, I would rather stay in limbo with the brutes and animals than burn up and go to heaven with the glorious saints.

SEMPRONIO (aside). So he’s not just mad. He’s also heretical.

CALISTO. I told you to speak up when you’re speaking! What are you saying?

SEMPRONIO. I’m saying God would never want that. Because what you just said is a kind of heresy.

CALISTO. Why?

SEMPRONIO. Because what you are saying contradicts the Christian religion.

CALISTO. What’s that to me?

SEMPRONIO. Well, aren’t you Christian?

CALISTO. I am Melibean. I adore Melibea, I believe in Melibea, I worship Melibea.

SEMPRONIO. Now I know which leg you have that’s limping. I’ll cure you.

CALISTO. You are promising the unimaginable and the non-conceived.

SEMPRONIO. No. Something easy. Because to know the origin of the disease is to begin to be able to cure it.

CALISTO. How can any good counsel benefit someone who inside himself lacks all order, all counsel, and every consolation?

SEMPRONIO (aside). Ha ha ha! So this is the fire that burns Calisto! This is what afflicts him! As if he was the only person in the world love had ever hit with his arrows! O almighty God, how deep are your mysteries! What coercive powers you gave love when you made it needful for the lover to endure such turbation! Rarely did you set a limit to their suffering! The lover always feels like he’s being left behind. So they hurtle forward, these lovers, pricked and speared like bulls in a bullfight. There’s no stopping them. They jump over every barricade. Dear God, you ordered man for the sake of woman to forsake father and mother and now not only that but even your own laws are forsaken by lovers such as Calisto who now abandons you.

And I don’t marvel at that, because love makes everyone abandon everything, even wise men and prophets and saints.

CALISTO. Sempronio!

SEMPRONIO. Sir?

CALISTO. Don’t leave me.

SEMPRONIO (aside). O so now he’s starting to change his tune!

CALISTO. What do you think of my affliction?

SEMPRONIO. You love Melibea.

CALISTO. And nothing else?

SEMPRONIO. It is more than bad enough to have your will held captive by a single cause.

CALISTO. But you so value singing the praises of your lover Elicia. And that means you are giving me advice you don’t follow yourself and that’s dishonest.

SEMPRONIO. You do the good things I tell you. Not the bad things I do.

CALISTO. So why do you reproach me?

SEMPRONIO. For submitting your dignity as a man to the rank imperfection of a feeble woman.

CALISTO. Not to a woman, you gross man! To God. God!

SEMPRONIO. Do you believe that? Or are you joking me?

CALISTO. How could I joke? I believe her to be God. I acknowledge her Divinity. And I do not believe there is any other God in heaven and that as God she dwells among us here on earth.

SEMPRONIO (aside). Ha, ha, ha! Do you hear that blasphemy? Do you see that blindness?

CALISTO. What are you laughing at?

SEMPRONIO. I am laughing because I didn’t think it possible to invent a worse sin than the sin of Sodom.

CALISTO. How?

SEMPRONIO. Because they wanted to abominably fornicate with unknown angels and you want to fornicate with the one you call God!

CALISTO. Curse you. You made me laugh and I never thought I’d laugh again.

SEMPRONIO. So? Are you going to cry for the whole of the rest of your life?

CALISTO. Yes.

SEMPRONIO. Why?

CALISTO. Because I love she before whom I so unworthily stand that I know I shall never attain her.

SEMPRONIO (aside). You pusillanimous son of a filthy whore!

CALISTO. I didn’t properly hear what you said then. Come back, tell me.

SEMPRONIO. I said that you who have more heart than the great Alexander, and even Nimrod, and you still despair of ever attaining a woman when most of them have fornicated with brutes and animals. Haven’t you heard of Pasiphae and the bull? Haven’t you heard of Minerva and the dog?

CALISTO. I don’t believe it. They’re just stories.

SEMPRONIO. And what about your grandmother and the ape? Was that just a story?

A witness to that is your grandfather’s knife.

CALISTO. Curse this idiot fool. The excrement spilling out of his mouth.

SEMPRONIO. Did I prick you? Read the histories. Study the philosophers. Look at the poets. The books are full of vile bad instances of women and the deceits suffered by those like you who trusted them.

Who could possibly do justice to their mendacity and lies?

Their constant trafficking, their inconstant mutability, their fickleness, their lewdness, their little fits of tears. Their agitation, their hysteria, their crazy rashness, their lack of deliberation. Their dissimulation, the sharpness of their deceitful tongues. Their forgetfulness, when it suits them, and their cold indifference. Their inconstancy, their ingratitude, their bearing of false witness. Their provocations. Their denials. Their presumptiveness and pride. The way they get elated, the way they get depressed. In their craziness. Their disdain. The way they want to dominate. The way they want to submit. The way they never stop talking! Their filthy lustfulness, their greed. Their rashness and their fearfulness. Their enchantments and deceits. The way they taunt, deride, and ridicule. Their pimping and their procuring. Their foul-mouthedness and their lack of shame.

What enormous hats they wear and what a tiny brain they have beneath them!

Think of what goes on under their little skirts. Under those gorgeous dresses and puffed-up sleeves.

Think of those beautifully painted exteriors: underneath they run with filth, like sewers.

Of them it is said: ‘Weapon of the devil, source of all sin, destroyers of paradise.’

They ask you in and send you out again. In one minute they call you darling and the next they don’t want to know you. One minute they love you to pieces and the next they loathe and detest you. One minute they’re all lovey-dovey and the next they’re screaming with rage. What a plague they are! What a total disaster! How dull it is to have to talk to them for more than the one minute it takes to get pleasure out of them!

CALISTO. How do you know this? Who taught you all this?

SEMPRONIO. They did. As soon as they go naked in front of you they lose all shame. Then they manifest all this to men and more.

CALISTO. But in everything you have recounted me, still in everything, without comparison or doubt, Melibea is the better.

I start with the hair.

Have you seen the skeins of fine gold they spin in Arabia? Her hair is lovelier, and shines no less. Unbound, its length reaches to the soles of her feet, dressed and tied with the fine ribbon she uses to bind it, it is enough to transform all who look into very stones.

SEMPRONIO (aside). You mean donkeys.

CALISTO. What do you say?

SEMPRONIO. I’m saying such hair doesn’t grow on donkeys.

CALISTO. How crude and dense and foolish a similitude!

SEMPRONIO (aside). And I suppose you’re wise?

CALISTO. The eyes are wide and shaped like almonds; the eyelashes long; the eyebrows thin and arched, the nose most perfectly proportioned; the mouth is small, the teeth are white and perfectly formed. The lips cherry coloured and of a delicate fullness; in shape the face has more circularity than length. The bosom is high; and as for the roundness and perfection of her breasts, who could possibly describe them? For a man when he looks must fall into deep despair! Her skin is smooth and lustrous; her body dazzles and outshines the snow; her complexion is mingled in the colours she chooses for her own self.

SEMPRONIO (aside). The fool’s demented!

CALISTO. The hands are smooth, medium in dimension, their flesh is soft, their fingers long. The nails are elongated, coloured red; they seem like rubies scattered among pearls. I needs must pass over in silence the perfection of her private parts.

SEMPRONIO. Is that you then?

CALISTO. I have spoken with all the brevity I could muster.

SEMPRONIO. Even supposing all this to be true, then still as a man you are more worthy.

CALISTO. In what way?

SEMPRONIO. Because she is imperfect and so desires you who are not. Haven’t you read your Aristotle? Remember where he says: ‘As material desires to take form, so does the woman desire the man.’

CALISTO. O my sadness. And when can this be true of me and Melibea?

SEMPRONIO. It could happen.

CALISTO. O what wonder for me to hear this, though I have no hope it could occur!

SEMPRONIO. I’ll make it happen. For sure.

CALISTO. The brocade waistcoat I wore yesterday is yours.

SEMPRONIO (aside). God prosper you and make this the first of many that you give me!

CALISTO. Don’t you be negligent.

SEMPRONIO. Nor you neither. Idle masters make for idle servants too.

CALISTO. How do you think you can achieve this thing?

SEMPRONIO. I’ll tell you.

At the very limit of this neighbourhood there lives an old woman I have known for many months and days. A bearded woman called Celestina, a cunning sorceress and astute. An expert in wrongdoing. I’ve heard that in this city she has made and unmade more than five thousand virginities. By her hand and by her authority. If she set her will to it, she could provoke even the hardest stone to concupiscence and lust.

CALISTO. Could I speak to her?

SEMPRONIO. I’ll bring her to this very spot. So. Smarten yourself, be gracious to her. Be generous. And while I’m away, you be thinking of how to tell her your pain in as excellent a way as she will use to cure it.

CALISTO. Why the delay?

SEMPRONIO. I’m gone. God be with you.

CALISTO. And go with you too.

(alone) O all powerful and perdurable God! You who guide the lost, you who guided the Orient Kings to Bethlehem and then safely back to their own country, I humbly beg you, guide my Sempronio in such a way as he is able to transform my sadness and pain into joy and delight and so that I, unworthy though I be, come to reach the end I so heartfully desire. Amen.

CELESTINA. Elicia, good news! Elicia, look, Sempronio, Sempronio!

ELICIA. No no no!

CELESTINA. What’s wrong?

ELICIA. I got Crito in here.

CALISTO. Then put him in the broom cupboard! Quick! Tell him your cousin’s come.

ELICIA. Crito, get out of here! My cousin’s coming! I’m done for!

SEMPRONIO. Holy mother, I am so full of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Contents
• Introduction
• For Further Reading
• De Rojas: Key Dates
• Characters
• Celestina
• Copyright and Performing Rights Information