PORZIABYCALE YOUNG RICE

AUTHOR OF

"A NIGHT IN AVIGNON," "YOLANDA OF CYPRUS," "CHARLES DI
TOCCA," "DAVID," "MANY GODS," "NIRVANA DAYS,"
"FAR QUESTS," "THE IMMORTAL LURE," ETC.

Garden City New York
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
MCMXIII

Copyright, 1913, by
Cale Young Rice
All rights reserved, including that of
translation into Foreign Languages,
including the Scandinavian.

To
GILBERT MURRAY
Poet, Dramatist, and Master-Interpreter of a great
literature

PREFACE

Some years ago while writing "A Night In Avignon" the thought came to meof framing two other plays that should deal respectively with theRenaissance spirit at its height and decadence, as that play had dealtwith it at its beginning. For the great human upheaval that cameintoxicatingly to Italy during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenthcenturies is so full of æsthetic contrast and glamor as to be peculiarlysuitable for the doubly exacting purposes of poetic drama.

"Giorgione," the second of these plays to be written, was published in1911 with three other plays in a volume entitled "The Immortal Lure,"and like "A Night In Avignon" was received with such kindness as toencourage me to write the third, here presented under the name of"Porzia."

This last play, whose period is that of "decadent Humanism," or asSymonds prefers to call it, of "The Catholic Reaction," is laid inNaples, where the passions of men, more than freed from the longdomination of the Church and the Hereafter, seemed to reach in theirgrasp at this life almost incredible heights and depths of excess. Andyet from amid this excess, as from a rank and unweeded garden, werespringing into flower many seeds of modern intellectual enfranchisement,as the achievements of Bruno and his contemporaries witness.

I need only add that I have sought to use materials that would be trueto the time of this final portrayal, and that I therefore trust it maybe understood as an organic member of the group to which it belongs.

C. Y. R.

Louisville, Kentucky, June, 1912.

ACT ICHARACTERS