Triago
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A secondary character in Büchstein’s final, unpublished play Die Schweizer Heulsuse. Introduced mainly for comical effect, Triago is the court’s principal legal advisor. A blustery windbag, he is given to legnthy passages in which he says very little of substance, but with grandiloquent form.
Sample passages
Triago and Herculio discuss where credit is and is not due:
Herculio: ’Tis neither malice, spite, nor virtue
Whose ledger swells, or plucks, the seedy fruits of progress —
But mainly accident.
Lest thee with surety know aught else —
Withhold thy assignations.
Triago: Pish upon thee, nuncle. Pish!
Dost thou mean to say
Things peel this way
Through doughty misadventure?
Herculio: Peradventure —
Triago: Pish abeam!
Has thou no more to say than that?
Wouldst thou on this shaky surmise
Withhold rebuke?
Herculio: Perchance, per case, mayhap dear Triago
’Twas but a fluke?
Triago: O! This nuisant planet weighs upon my soul!
Herculio: If ’tis this and nought beside
That flies you to a vernal rage
Our fickle globe in its manifold confound’ry
Lies prettily indeed
For thy alignment.
Triago’s untimely demise.
QUEEN: This covenant is well-drafted, but yegads! ’Tis lengthy.
TRIAGO (bowing unctuously): The writer shall be deemed hereinbefore obliged.
HERCULIO: My liege and madam, to expostulate
What brevity should be, what clarity is —
Why “day” is business day, and “time” is closing time.
’Tis buried — lost — among the cluttered syntax of this deed.
QUEEN: ’Twas no compliment, good Herculio, rest assured.
A crafty phrase to propitiate that noisome clerk, no more.
HERCULIO: Madam, I do concur!
Since brevity is the soul of wit,
And boilerplate the crutch of wretched tedium
I will be brief, where Triago, in all his trite facility, cannot.
TRIAGO: Milady! With all due and payable respect, and interest accrued thereon
I wouldst be inclined to be supportive of dissent —
QUEEN: O, exasperating vapours! Whatever doth he mean?
HERCULIO: Triago disagrees.
“Inclined”, Triago? “Supportive”? As straight as that?
No deemery to wrap it round?
TRIAGO: Aye, deemèd, perchance — I pray just such indulgence
To vouchsafe avoidance of some doubt.
QUEEN: Doubt, Triago?
TRIAGO: I’ll think of something, Majesty.
HERCULIO: How now, good lady: doth thou now understand?
QUEEN: I fear I do, in that I do not.
Speak, Triago — but pray, be quick.
TRIAGO: Celerity shall herein be mutually agreed to be — and shall be deemed to be — the watchword Madam!
HERCULIO: There goeth that wretched deemery —
TRIAGO: Was it not ever not unlike a thing unsuch as this?
QUEEN: Damn and blast your eyes Triago!
Have at you now!
- QUEEN runs TRIAGO through with a rapier and exits
HERCULIO:
- We fold our patron’s righteous sleep in word pollution
- By the chaff and shucks and hulls of convolution
- And whoever buys these minty lines: understand
- Lexical complexity doth, pro rata with thy budget, soon expand.
- CURTAIN
On annihilism:
Herculio: This is the excellent foppery of man,
To defile the random stars with base and mortal patterns:
To lay the spoils of canny fortune at the altar of the state —
Yet pin guilt for our disasters upon the untam’d cosmic wilds.
How now! O blasphemy!
Aye so: would we be brutes but for our philosophy
And not because of’t?
Would there be villainy but for kindly guiding hands
And not despite them?
We are but fools, knaves, and blighters: Heav’n compels it.
Heav’n? Real heaven: th’ unvarnish’d cosmos in its native state:
Not some twee artisanal paradise of tiny minds. Unbounded space
Which moves by rules no mortal mind can fathom.
So, Nature: rage and blow, and crack your leathery cheeks!
Grind, you plates of Tecton! Shift and grate!
Eradicate the rathaus! Annihilate our spindly-buttress’d spires!
Weave your snaking lava through our mealy testaments!
Singe those pompous beards within whose peppered whiskers
Our collected, piffling, wisdom nests!