A must for all lovers of Gothic, aficionados of new theatre, and students of Romantic literature alike.
Published 2007 (ISBN 978-0-9556290-0-6).
| POLIDORI: | Dr. Mesmer has shown that we are subject to the ebb and flow of magnetic forces emanating from the heavenly bodies - and to walk to the cadence of cosmic magnetic tides is to walk in health and happiness... |
| BYRON: | Oh good God, not Rousseau under another name - 'We are the children of a benevolent Nature...' |
| POLIDORI: | If my lord will indulge me a moment: Dr. Mesmer shows that each person generates his or her own animal magnetism - the force of attraction and repulsion - from the median point of our bodies. |
| SHELLEY: | Exactly. Plato teaches in the 'Symposium' that the guiding force of nature is Love. Science calls it electricity, magnetism: the energy of the universe, of heaven and earth, of Life itself - it is Divine Love. And that is what Mesmer means too - animal magnetism is Love. |
| BYRON: | Sounds more like sex to me, Shiloh. A force of attraction and repulsion emanating from our midriffs? |
| CLAIRE: | That's what de Sade says: we are driven by sex. [Lightning and thunder] |
| BYRON: | Look at the lightning, Shiloh. Your pure universal energy. Look at the raw ferocity of its power. You tell me that's Love? |
| CLAIRE: | When lightning strikes, the heavens fuck the earth as fiercely as a man fucks a woman! |
| BYRON: | Claire's right, Shiloh. That's where the quest for the Sublime leads. |
| SHELLEY: | But sex is the physical manifestation of Love! |
| BYRON: | Even that old bore Burke realised that the most intense of all Sublime feelings is not Love but Terror... |
| CLAIRE: | And Pain. |
| BYRON: | But he was too British to realise what that meant. |
| MARY: | And what does it mean? |
| CLAIRE: | It means that Terror and Pain are the height of the Sublime - because they amplify sex beyond mere orgasm - beyond imagination! |
| MARY: | The sleep of reason truly brings forth monsters. |
| BYRON: | If it's the Sublime you're after - its into the realms of Terror and Pain we must go. Are you game, Shiloh? |
| CLAIRE: | We know the Tempestuous Loveliness of Terror well, don't we, Shiloh? Many's the night he's petrified Mary and I half to death with his tales and phantasms! Shelley sees ghosts, you know. And I have fits! |
| BYRON: | Fits of sublime ecstasy, eh? Excellent. Then let us seize the opportunity of this magnificent night to scale the heights of the Sublime! |
| MARY: | Or plunge the depths? [BYRON picks up a book] |
| BYRON: | I bought this the other day. 'Phantasmogoriana', German tales of Terror. A classic of its kind. Pure Gothic. The ancestral ghost who haunts the generations, blighting his descendents with a cursed kiss. The man who clasps his bride only to find he is holding a putrefying corpse... [SHELLEY looks into the shadows and starts in horror] |
| SHELLEY: | It was as if a dead and a living body had been haled together in loathsome and horrid communion... |
| MARY: | Bysshe? |
| SHELLEY: | Harriet - I saw her - there - just now - she was - rotting... |
| MARY: | My God, Albé, stop it - leave us alone! |
| BYRON: | It is too late to stop - the séance has begun and no-one can leave the circle. In each one of us our most horrific fantasy is collecting, like a pearl around a grain of sand. What do we need of these yarns? [BYRON throws the book aside] Our own nightmares are infinitely more potent. Yes, let us create our own stories to terrify the world - to prove that, in their way, the astrologers were right! You, Mary, I know will not disappoint. |
| MARY: | Why are you doing this? Shelley's Sublime soars to the heavens - exalted - illuminated. Yours... |
| CLAIRE: | Plunges the delirious darkness of Hell! |
| MARY: | Terror and pain! |
| CLAIRE: | Yes! |
| SHELLEY: | No, not pain. There your philosophy is wrong, Albé. The Sublime uplifts us - takes us beyond. Pain merely degrades. |
| BYRON: | Have you ever inflicted gratuitous pain, Shiloh? |
| SHELLEY: | No, of course not. Never! |
| BYRON: | Then let me tell you - the pleasure of causing pain is Sublime. The lash of the whip; the vampire's bite! |
| SHELLEY: | Sublime for you perhaps. But what of your victim? No- one delights in receiving pain. |
| MARY | [looking at CLAIRE]: I think you may be wrong there, Bysshe... My God, how far are you prepared to go? |
| CLAIRE: | All the way! Further! To the limits! Beyond! |
