Machinatio

"Machinatio"

I. Setting: 16th-18th Century Europe: England, Tuscany, Papal Rome
&; Venice, at the height of the Italian and English
Renaissance
II. Characterizations: Fictional &; Historical Courtiers,
Orators/Tutors and Sir Isaac Newton at the very center of the action,
himself of reformational/revolutionary bent, all, to various degrees
and/or for sundry "reasons", weary of the incestuous relationship
between heads of state and the Church/canonical/ecclesiastical
courts;heretical in their notions that recent discoveries via
alchemical and kabbalistic researches have led to the essence of modern
"Game Theory", i.e., that no "losers", even the abjectly powerless,
need lose; indeed, that their rival Machiavelli is either a fraud, and
dismissed as such,or that he, nonetheless, has been used to such an end
to preserve the disproportionate status quo; and, in either event, that
his writings were,in effect, reactionary to this discovery, and
intended to block any &; all adversaries, hence advance the notion
that fear is superior to love in governance and all other human
relations.
III. Subtext: Comedic a la works of Tom Stoppard for their treatment of
levity
.
IV. Dramatis Personae
NOTE: The multilingual/classical Continental "Tour" of Europe, while
dangerous and often Byzantine----nation and city states/principalities
intriguing with the Vatican, each other, in other words what
Machiavelli literally chronicled---was nevertheless commonplace amongst
the elite of the British Isles (often along religious lines, Catholic
vs. Protestant) and their continental counterparts; hence, it is not
unusual to find Sir John Dee, Kit Marlowe, Anthony Bacon,Edward de
Vere, Caesar Nostradamus,and other lesser "students" of Classicism
trapsing all over Europe; it is this intellectual commerce that forms
the foundation of our humanistic revolutionary tale.

ACT ONE, SCENE ONE: Dimly lit late afternoon study/atelier of Sir Isaac
Newton at Woolsthorpe; the year is 1725, at the end of his monumental
life; a rare interview has been granted the Atlantean, a highly
controversial progressive scientific publication of the day, mostly
devoted to furthering the methods of Sir Francis Bacon; so protean has
been this life that there is scarcely a realm upon which he has not
made lasting impression, hence the keen interest in his eclat; a
brilliant young scholar of note himself---indeed a don at
Cambridge---has learned of a now obscure unpublished many-authored
almost omniscient writing of experimental scientific bent with
considerable sociopolitical implications; it is the impetus for the
wide-ranging interview.

James Waldegrave, later JW: Sir Isaac, are you well? Shall we
continue?

Newton: [He is entranced by the seeming random dynamics of the behavior
of the fish in a rude aquarium near the palladian window] Do you see
how they seem to share the meager foods? There seems to be a mechanism
at work in the unspoken world of these lower creatures........I
digress; what was the query?

JW: How did you come to postulate this 'Law of the Game as Mechanistic
Contest', as you have deemed it?

Newton: It is not mine; my pursuit was of a more celestial nature; this
was Humanistic.

JW: But the clues I have seen attributes the work to you by name as
author----"Machinamentum Econometrica" a Treatise upon the Virtuous
Mathematics of Altruism.

Newton: Dear fellow, this is why I will not allow its publication by
these mountebanks; this work is much older than I , done by those who
are, by design, lost to dusty time.

JW: I must confess, I do not understand; surely your name would but put
upon the essence of the work that imprimatur of virtue otherwise beyond
its author's hopes.

Newton: Or, more properly, serve to brand me a fancier of loose
occultist theorems, alas drowned in my own agedness as, lo, another man
of lofty stuff lulled into alchemical madness. No, my barristers and
solicitors have plainly made the knavery of its purloin from my
chambers known to the King's Bench should the inking again be so much
as put upon the type, be it the Cambridge Press or any other.

JW: Ye Gods, whence comes it that even your name could not call upon
Reason to quell such controvery!

Newton: And you Sir, do you know of the Temples habituated by my
advocates?

JW: Indeed, they are not those of Apollo, though they would doubtless
find writs in this very utterance, such being the wilfull risk I take
to gain your confidences.

Newton: This is well, as your sealed oath of same has been necessitated
by those same "Inn-keeping" idlers in the Temples that we may continue
dialogue.

JW: Surely, Sir Isaac is aware that such matters of swearing are but
the province of "priests and cowards" in noble Brutus' estimation
according to the newly reviving "Spear Shaker" mused by Athena herself
it is said by old Ben Jonson and others of great esteem.

Newton: That you are not a cleric is evidenced by the very fact of our
meeting; as you may be a coward at some indeterminate point after that
very fact, you shall so affix your seal.

JW: Deep personal as well as progenal curiosity shall be my advocate;
[signing, etc.]there, with your own quill.

Newton: Return in a fortnight at three of the clock as my advocates
will have governed my tongue.

[JW. leaves Newton to his nightly experiments, now infamous for their
secrecy and often bizarre nature, albeit no one dared utter their
common knowledge for fear of his juridical aggression]

Act One, Scene Two: [A private gaming room at JW's Gentleman's Club;
only he and an older doyenne of the Divinity faculty are at an ornate
Gothic chess board]
JW: Rev. Sharmsley, have you had occasion to observe fish in a confined
space share foodstuffs?

Rev: Is this a ploy aimed at disarming my formidable Army of the
Roses?

JW: Forgive me, my intentions are without guile.....as are those of the
fish! [He has had a revelation]

Rev: Sir, should fishes be possessed of rational properties I shudder
to contemplate the anguished "thoughts" of the kippers upon which I
breakfasted this very morn!

JW: They have rules, not terribly unlike this ancient game we
are......well, were playing; all take less so that the most
survive.

Rev: My dear fellow, even the venerable Torah of the Hebrews has very
strict, enforceable rules of behavior; it does not follow that lowly
instinctual creatures are aware of them or even that they exist!

JW: But they were created, nonetheless; do you not see, that self-same
Lawgiver of the Hebrews ordained the behavior of the fishes!

Rev: [getting up from the table in a huff] Sir, I now take my leave of
your piscene company, lest I emanate the olifaction of a herring
merchant, with whom I commend the conclusion of this Game; good eve to
you.

JW: [he is hardly aware of the Rev., much less what he may have
stated---he is deep in thought; looking at the chess board, he realizes
that he was two moves from checkmating his opponent] Eureka, the game
may not have been wasted, as I will preserve my remaining moves for
that other King, thus causing his resignation to my purpose-----to
liberate, with his willing aid, his , and all Kings' subjects; to
employ Mr. Shakspur but again, to forswear ..."the oldest kinds of sins
in the newest kinds of ways."

Act One, Scence 3: [It is the next day at the Bar of the Court of Oyer
and Terminer at special assizes in Woolsthorpe, for the benefit of
Newton himself; King's Counsel has summoned a notorious criminal gang
to receive sentence upon treason and related counterfeiting felonies;
the ringleader is one Beaudelaire de DeFuniak, an obvious false
identity, claimed to be of Norman descent; he is of high
intelligence]

King's counsel: Your Lordship, comes now the matter of the Bowler Gang,
bound for Highgate, there to be executed for High crimes against His
Majesty and the Exchequer, pursuant to charges pressed by the Lord of
the Mint, Sir Isaac Newton.

Bench: Very well, bring the prisoners forward; the Bailiff of Hundreds
will read the verdict of this Court.

Bailiff: "Oye, Oyez, Be it known that at the appointed time the
prisoners were duly tried and found wanting of innocence, the
presumption of their guilt of treason and felonious counterfeit having
prevailed, whereupon the sentence of this Court is now owing."

Bench: Do the convicted have anything to offer this Court pending such
sentence?

BdD: May it please this Court and your Lordship, I have been asked to
speak for my associates; I will do only as I have seen done here in
this august chamber, Your Lordship, that is to say, invoke authority
for that which I am about to proffer, to wit: we have been branded
traitors for what we have done and, as Sir Harington hath, in himself
invoking the noble Seneca, reminded us all, 'treason doth never
prosper: what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it
treason.' Men of honour circumscribe their actions with what you
genteely name virtue, the self-same commodity men such as me----and, it
would appear, that same Seneca----know as successful and fortunate
crime! 'Well, honour is the subject of my story'----as it was that of
the noble Cassius in the Rome, whose law we defer to, of old
Seneca----like him, 'I cannot tell what you and other men think of this
life; but, as for my single self, I had as lief not be as live to be in
awe of such a thing as I myself.' In this world, where Fortune is the
realm of such Machiavellian power as flows neither from intrinsic merit
nor the egalitarian law of Nature, we are all guilty of Treason to her
Truest State, that of her ultimate majesty and her laws of sublime
mathematics known to you and, with the utmost of irony, Sir Isaac
himself! [There is cheering from the usual mob of idlers in the Court
including the convicts for whom he has spoken, whilst he points like a
bloodhoud to the balcony where Newton sits bemusedly] It was for you
and he alone that the Chartae Libertatum, both the Charta Magna and de
Foresta, were made, liberties for the "noble" libertine!

Bench: Order! Clear this Court; scrivener, have you got all such
blasphemous ravings in court-hand? Good; were your sentence not that of
Death by public hanging you sir, and your ilk, would stand yet here
again on other charges!

BdD: Yea, I demand that the court-hand be printed for all the world to
render judgment of you and your ilk; then would I go to those gallows a
thousand times over.

Bench: Remove the prisoners; [in a sotto voce aside]scrivener, bring
the great and small court-hand record to me in my camera at once, no
copies to be produced, you understand?

ACT TWO, SCENCE ONE: [Newton's Study at Woolsthorpe; it is two weeks
later, the appointment made by he and JW]
Newton: You wish to speak the lingua franca of experimental science?
[JW has punctually appeared, carrying several tomes of some apparent
antiquity]

JW: My Lord, only if you will consent to acting as its oracle. I have
plumbed the depths of the Bodlean and come upon many of the mighty Sir
John Dee's original library!

Newton: Hold, hold; it is my solicitors who have given me voice. I
refer you to them and their brother, the hangman, for my repute as to
those who would seek to utter counterfeits---one such hung from hemp
this very eve.

JW: Good riddance to such scum as would devalue the very coin of the
realm

Newton: And yet one must admire the mind, albeit housed in a reprobate,
which, being of such calibre, was wont to speak the sort of truths not
conjured by the most solemn swearing of sacerdotal oaths----do not
worry, I make no reference to our lawyer's business, done----are we
indeed the victims of his unjust acts or is he but thus, of OURS?

JW: You defend whom you have rightly condemned!

Newton: Only the postulate that "he" is the extrapolate and unnecessary
wastage of an unscientific system we choose to nominate civilization;
but is civilization "civilized"?

JW: My lord, you refer, as I had hoped, to my very inquiry: is there a
high mathematic to Bacon's "New Atlantis"?

Newton: Indeed, .......there well may be; hand me that dusty relic
there [he motions for the oldest-looking of the four volumes brought by
JW] The Mathematical Preface, have you studied it?

JW: Assiduously; it purports a system of knowledge built upon
mathematical language.

Newton: Master Dee, noble voyager upon the great ocean of truth,
undiscovered by most not to the exclusion of myself; yet, there have
been giants' shoulders upon which I have been privileged to at least
glimpse that limitless body; his were perhaps the strongest among
these, in retrospective.

JW: But Lord, he was but a conjurer and fraudster, together with
Kelley......[he catches himself in the act anticipated by Newton at
their first meeting] my humblest apologies; I did forget myself and the
progressive view I hold for open science, yet here I sit spouting the
fear-mongerings of a latter day Vatican prelate; please continue.

Newton: Very well; you must not so harshly condemn yourself for your
particular fear of ridicule; it is never to be forgot that the Staus
Quo carries the name of an ancient tongue for a quite good reason:
freethinking is the ultimate challenge to those few who would---indeed,
they rather insist upon it, if you take my meaning----deign to do it
for the many; this has ever been a dear price of what we call
civilization. I, too, have held back publication due to bedevillment of
wat we name fear, and always with an insalubrious outcome----calumny,
furtive sabotage, even moral questioning! For my own trepidation, Herr
Leibniz and I have been both attributed with the Calculus, when it is
without dispute that twas mine many years before he came upon it quite
apart from my work. Hence, "Nec spe, nec metu" [neither in hope nor
fear, mechanically translated by JW. aloud by didactic habit.]

{SUDDENLY, THE BACKLIGHTING FADES DOWN BY 1/2 OR SO, SO THAT THE
AUDIENCE CAN STILL SEE THE GESTURING AND OTHERWISE INTERPLAY BETWEEN
THE TWO PLAYERS; WITHIN A STERILE LASERLIKE LIGHT NOW STANDS, AS
LOWERED IN WITH OBVIOUS HUMOUROUS EFFECT, STAGE RIGHT A HUMANOID
ANDROGYNOUS FIGURE, WEARING SKIN TIGHT OUTER GARMENT OF THE SORT OF
EXPRRESSIONIST COLORATION AS IS PORTRAYED IN "THE SHRIEK" BY MUNCH;
"IT" IS NONDESCRIPT SAVE A STYLIZED GRECO-DRAMATIC MASQUE IMPARTIAL
UNBLINKING CERTITUDE-----"ALL WILL BE WELL, IF YOU BUT AWAKEN"}

D.E.M.: A bit tedious, yes? Apart from other more traditional duties
necessity has assigned me hereinafter, I, your postmodern deus ex
machina -------call me DEM-O-------will be your computational
calculatory connector along that circle you call "time"; in colloquium
my name is DEEMO----Northern Italian----and I shall be your "Server"
tonight! Let us,then, speak of things---and persons-----Italian; one
such you know as Niccolo Machiavelli, a curiously misunderstood patriot
to a nation yet unborn save in his heart and mind; from his
understandable lust for Italy for the Italians you have, or have
allowed others, to make him a synonym for might equals right and other
such brutal shibboleths of fear. Lend these players your rational ear
and you shall have Proofs----yea, Mathematica at that, which today are
employed in your very bourses and houses of capital to avoid their
employers' loss in ANY eventuality---- How dou say, a WIN-WIN
situation----/ that long ago was known and knowable to those conversant
with the universal tongue the proper path of power AND peace whose
destination was----and is----such that no relative loser need dwell
there; Hence, a new Golden Rule for then AND now, tis more to profit
with all as friend than as the sated sou!

{THE LIGHTING OF THE BACKGROUND NOW RETURNS AS IT WAS BEFORE, WITH OUR
LITTLE DEUS EX MACHINA NOW, COMICALLY, HOISTED AS OF OLD UP AND
OUT!}

ACT TWO, SCENE 2: We are at the Court of Elizabeth I, at the time of
the seemingly miraculous victory of both the British and, mostly the
channel weather, over King Philip's Armada; it is widely believed that
John Dee has placed a curse upon the Spanish fleet and has coined the
term Brittania, and generally fostered much of the folklore of British
hegemony, including that of their monarch, whose astrologist he
was.....a multitalented fellow at work in all sorts of realms, material
and spiritual;among these enterprises was his renowned translation of
Euclid and manufacture of many related geometric applications; he is
entertaining visiting continental counterparts, notably scientific
colleagues from the University of Paris, where he has been offered a
high post; the setting is of course his estate at Mortlake]

ACT TWO, SCENE 2: We are at the Court of Elizabeth I, at the time of
the seemingly miraculous victory of both the British and, mostly the
channel weather, over King Philip's Armada; it is widely believed that
John Dee has placed a curse upon the Spanish fleet and has coined the
term Brittania, and generally fostered much of the folklore of British
hegemony, including that of their monarch, whose astrologist he
was.....a multitalented fellow at work in all sorts of realms, material
and spiritual;among these enterprises was his renowned translation of
Euclid and manufacture of many related geometric applications; he is
entertaining visiting continental counterparts, notably scientific
colleagues from the University of Paris, where he has been offered a
high post; the setting is of course his estate at Mortlake]

Attendant: Melord, a message from her Majesty! Tis sealed and her
officers will await its reply.

Dee: [He speaks to his guests in Latin] Gentlemen, official duties
summon me; repose yourselves for my speedy return; my servant will see
to your needs.

Paracelsus: [Speaking to the retinue of continental Hermetic
philosophers] My brothers, surely you have heard of the strange
documents which have come to Master Dee by way of the descendant of
Signore Vespucci, Niccolo's colleague at the Medici government; it is
of the utmost confidentiality, hence our meeting here, away from the
seats of power to which Master Dee owes this very estate.

.....to be continued....