Il marchio del diavolo Quotes

“To a blare of trumpets Peter the Apostle was dragged onto the track. He’d been arrested along with the priest Cornelius and several followers at a Christian house near the Pincian Hill. When the soldiers arrived Peter had smiled at them as if he were welcoming old friends. Pater was hauled onto a high wooden platform at the center of the racetrack for all to see and Tigellinus loudly proclaimed him to be the ringleader of the plot to destroy Rome.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“there are men who are ancient and determined enemies of the Church of Rome who live in perpetual hope of its destruction”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Go away, scum,’ Antonius shouted down at them before closing the window.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“This entrance hall, three stories high, which Nero dubbed the Millaria, would run for two kilometers along”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Extreme Unction!”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Gloria in excelsis Deoet in terra pax homínibus bonae voluntatis.Laudamus te,benedicimus te,adoramus te,glorificamus te,gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam.Glory to God in the highest,and on Earth peace to people of good will.We praise you,we bless you,we adore you,we glorify you,we give you thanks for your great glory.When”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Veni Creator Spiritus. Veni, creator Spiritusmentes tuorum visita,imple superna gratia,quae tu creasti pectora.Come, Holy Ghost, Creator blest,And in our hearts take up Thy rest;Come with Thy grace and heavenly aid,To fill the hearts which Thou hast made.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“For the crowd’s immeasurable pleasure, as Peter’s life was ebbing away, two hundred Christian men and women were dragged into the stadium, stripped naked, flogged and tied to stakes. Ravenous dogs, mad at the scent of blood, were brought in to finish them off. And that night and for nights on end Nero’s gardens were the scene of a ghastly display: Christians whom Nero had dipped in animal fat and turned into human torches to illuminate the husk of a city that had once been the great Rome.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“We have it on good authority that this man Peter and his mob were the ones who trapped Balbilus and the others,’ he told Nero. ‘My hate for them was already great,’ Nero said through clenched teeth. ‘Now it is a thousand times greater. They killed my great astrologer and have taken from us the cream of the Lemures. Members of their Church will forever be our foremost enemies. Kill them. Crush them. Damn them to eternity.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“The Palace of Whitehall was a city unto itself. It surpassed the Vatican and Versailles in sheer size and pomp and it was no small task to navigate among 1,500 rooms. To find one’s destination required prior knowledge or the good graces of a friendly gentleman or lady to take you by the hand and lead you through the labyrinth of offices and private residences.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“I’m curious about the astrological symbols depicted in the magic circle. Do they have a particular significance?’ Harris furrowed his brow at the question. ‘Stephanie, may I see the book?’ It was still on her lap. Meyer passed it carefully to him. He opened it to the title page. ‘Well, it’s the standard zodiac, I suppose. Constellations, planets. To be honest, I’ve never thought about it in a rigorous way.’ He looked up, blinking. ‘Maybe I should.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“we see the direct result of these ideas in Act 1, Scene 3 of Faustus when Faustus begins to conjure from inside his magic circle: ‘Now that the gloomy shadow of the Earth,Longing to view Orion’s drizzly look,Leaps from th’Antarctic world unto the skyAnd dims the welkin with her pitchybreath, Faustus, begin thine incantations.”’ Harris paused and smiled in a self-deprecatory way. ‘I could go on and on.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“astrology was extremely important in Marlowe’s day. The Queen had her own court astrologer, John Dee. In Faustus, Marlowe would have certainly been influenced by the classic ecclesiastical account of witchcraft, the Malleus Maleficarum, which posits – and I’m almost embarrassed to say that I’m able to quote from memory – “demons are readier to appear when summoned by magicians under the influence of the stars, in order to deceive men, thus making them suppose that the stars have divine power or actual divinity.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“As to the differences, textual differences occur in all of the five acts but the preponderance of additions lie in Act III. In the B text, Act III is far longer and becomes a rather concentrated anti-Catholic, anti-Papist tract – which in and of itself isn’t terribly surprising in the Protestant hotbed that England had become under Elizabeth. Faustus and Mephistopheles travel to Rome and observe the Pope, his cardinals, bishops and friars acting like scandalously greedy buffoons. It must have been a real crowd-pleaser in its day.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“broad sense, let me say, however, that the similarities far outweigh the differences. In both, our Doctor Faustus summons the demon Mephistopheles from the underworld and strikes a pact to have twenty-four years on Earth with Mephistopheles as his personal servant. In exchange he gives his soul over to Lucifer as payment and damns himself to an eternity in Hell. At the end of these twenty-four rather excellent and sinful years, though filled with fear and remorse, there’s nothing Faustus can do to alter his fate. He’s torn limb from limb and his soul is carried off to Hell.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“The B text omits thirty-six lines of the A text but adds 676 new lines.’ ‘Who made the changes?’ Elisabetta asked. ‘Marlowe?’ ‘That we don’t know. Perhaps he wrote a second version. Perhaps an unknown collaborator or hired hand made changes to suit the Elizabethan audience after Marlowe’s death. As a playwright of his era, Marlowe would have had nothing to do with the publication of his plays and only a very limited control over the content of the performances. Scenes could have been added or deleted by another writer, by actors – by anyone, really. Unless future handwritten manuscripts turn up we may never know.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“The first B text wasn’t published until 1616. That quarto is similar to yours in that it’s the first to use the now famous woodcut on the title page that shows Faustus raising the Devil while he, Faustus, stays inside his magic circle. That copy is in the British Museum. The next edition to surface is a 1619 one, essentially the same as the one from 1616. There is a single known copy in the hands of an American collector in Baltimore. Then we come to yours, the 1620 edition. Here, curiously, there’s a misprint on the title page – printers were notorious for misprints back then – the word “History” is printed as “Hiftoy”. There’s a single copy in the British Library. We know that three copies have appeared in the saleroom in the past forty years. All of them have been lost to follow-up. Until now, I’d say. Yours is undoubtedly one of them.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“the first known publication of the A-text quarto was in 1604, well after his death. There was a second publication in 1609 and a third in 1611. All told there are only five known original copies of A text in existence, one at the Bodelian Library in Oxford, two at the Huntington Library in California, one in the Hamburg State Library and one at the National Trust’s Petworth House in West Sussex. They’re all essentially the same, so one might be tempted to say that they represent the earliest stage versions, but that would be a supposition.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Since 1547 our state religion has changed three times, from the English Catholicism of Henry, to the radical Protestantism of Edward, to the radical Catholicism of Mary and now to the Protestantism of Elizabeth. The seeds of confusion among the populace have yielded many strange trees.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“And the third is less of a theological nature and more of a mathematical and philosophical one. It is: The mathematical order of material things is ingeniously maintained by Pythagoras, but more ingenious is the interaction of ideas maintained by Plato. What say you?”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“I have three questions we might put to him. The first: In the sight of God sins are then truly venial when they are feared by men to be mortal.’ The committee nodded. ‘The second: The love of God does not find, but creates that which is pleasing to it.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“The six Nicholas Bacon Scholars came next. Marlowe sat at the adjacent table with the remaining scholars, including his Parker lot. The Pensioners, all rich lads, filled out the tables in the rest of the hall. Unlike the Scholars, they paid their own commons and other expenses. Their interest in the academic life was generally marginal; their lot in life was to drink, play tennis and accumulate just enough education to return to their country seats as Justices of the Peace. Rounding out the student mix were the Sizars, poor lads who were clever enough to attend university but not meritorious enough to receive scholarships. They had to wait on their fellow students for their tuition, bed and board.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“At the dining hall, the 120 faculty and students of Benet College habitually sat with their own kind. The dirty leaded windows filtered some of the early evening light but as it was spring, the Sizars had no need to light the candles yet. At the far end of the hall the Master and Fellows sat at High Table on a raised platform. The four Bible Clerks, holding the most prestigious scholarships with the highest stipends, sat directly beneath the Master.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Mister Marlowe,’ the Master began. ‘Here is the final thesis subject of your baccalaureate. We wish you to consider the following and commence your disputation without delay: According to the law of God, good and evil are directly opposed to one another. You may begin.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“If the first-century dating was ever going to be in doubt, this settled it. We’ve found several so far.’ Elisabetta took the bag. It contained a large silver coin. The bust on the obverse showed a flat-nosed man with curly hair who was wearing a laurel wreath. The inscription read ‘NERO CLAVDIVS CAESAR’. She flipped the bag over. The reverse was an elaborate arch flanked by the letters S and C – Senatus Consulto, the Senatorial mint mark. ‘The lost arch of Nero,’ she said. ‘AD 54.’ ‘Precisely,’ Trapani said, visibly impressed by the nun’s acumen. ‘But this isn’t a typical columbarium, is it?’ she said, glancing at the tarps. ‘Hardly.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“The diggers of the Liberian Area catacombs were only a few swipes of the pickax away from the surprise of their lives.’ ‘It is a columbarium, isn’t it?’ Elisabetta said. ‘Just as you suggested during your student days,’ De Stefano agreed, ‘it does appear to be an underground funeral chamber for pre-Christians. The above-ground monument was probably razed and likely disappeared before the catacombs were built.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“But tomb robbers followed and over the next two centuries most marble and precious artifacts disappeared until, in 1852, the Church put all Christian catacombs under the protection of the newly created Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archeology.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Yet their preservation would last only so long and by the ninth century relics were transferred with increased frequency to churches within the city walls. The catacombs were doomed to a form of extinction. Their entrances became overgrown by vegetation and they were lost in time, completely forgotten until the sixteenth century when Antonio Bosio, the Christopher Columbus of subterranean Rome, rediscovered one, then another, then thirty of them, and systematically began their study.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Though Christianity’s early history was troubled, fortune eventually favored the new religion when, in the fourth century AD, the Emperor Constantine himself converted to it, banned the persecution of Christians and returned confiscated Church properties. Gradually, the remains of the Popes and important martyrs were removed from catacombs and buried in consecrated ground within the grounds of churches. The sack of Rome by the Goths in AD 410 put an end to the use of the catacombs for fresh burials, though for centuries pilgrims continued to visit them and Popes did their best to preserve and even embellish the important vaults.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come

“Perhaps their names were inscribed in the stone, perhaps not. Loved ones left behind the holy symbols of their new religion, the fish, the anchor, the dove and the chi-rho cross. As time went on, the galleries were extended into multi-level mazes, miles of tunnels to accommodate hundreds of thousands of the dead faithful.”
― Glenn Cooper, The Devil Will Come