La virtù de’ strali d’Amore
Faustini’s prologue to La virtù de’ strali d’Amore
The stage represents the Palace of Caprice.
Caprice, Chorus of Caprices, Pleasure
Caprice: Here, my happy mobs, draw out, draw out the fleeting serving girls of Time, the hours so swift, only with songs and games and kisses. Whoever has his heart wounded by love in strange fashion delights in his good luck; everyone finds strange caprices through his own style and his own delight.
Chorus of Caprice: Kiss and sing and play; let your free time be beaten with this homework and let your nature sweat to imitate with willing faith the fickle genius of our King!
Caprice (to the audience): O lovely guests, o spectators, from your faces and silent amazement I understand that everyone wants to know who I am. I am he who, more lofty than any other, presumes to fly over every outworn custom with unaccustomed ways and with thought. The talkative Frenchman I compel to change his wishes, to switch his spouses in laughable excesses in a moment. Ladies, I am that which counsels you to twist your hair in a hundred guises to make yourselves seem capricious and appear as foreign women to your lovers. I am Caprice! By me you will see a work on this stage full of mishaps, and of actions first sad and later happy. Melpomene and Thalia were my muses. There will be things in it, with mortals, gods and the infernal mixed together but not confused. Now, my trusty and tuneful followers, summon forth Pleasure for our sweet listeners, so that (while you make ready the prepared scenes) he may pleasantly burden their hearts and minds with singing speech.
Chorus of Caprices: While we adorn ourselves with golden clown-shoes and bejewelled robes-of-state, while we arm ourselves with Love’s armour and arrows. Come, o Pleasure, and to this illustrious troop of spectators bring immediately sweetness to theirs souls with your song.
Pleasure: Life is a lightning-flash, a brief splendor. Born in love, it has little that is calm. O days of life! You pass by so swiftly full of holidays, happy, content among joys. Before his hair is streaked with gray, a mortal should manage to live well. Life is spattered with wormwood and gall; now, let it come to you sweetened with my honey. I am Pleasure! Follow me on and on, you that have blooms in your cheeks, until powerless sluggish and slow and later gray, you sigh in vain for lost savors. Rejoice, rejoice! With the sweetness that allures, that pleases and delights, that is as thirst quenched. In this cruel world full of deceit, nothing truly shines except what is pleasing. Embrace! Prize the healthy advice of Pleasure: Obey your lover.
—translated by Dr. James M. Pfundstein, Department of Romance and Classical Studies, College of Arts and Sciences