"Doctor Faustus" (excerpts) by Christopher Marlowe (poetry reading)

This is a rant and I'm at a disadvantage because I can't do rants in full-cry and blood-curdlng volume. I don't want my neighbours to think I'm crazier than they already suspect, nor frighten passers-by into calling the cops. I usually do these while my wife making the school-run. I expect I have now sacrificed some of my mystique.

Poor Kit Marlowe - he was only a boy - look at his crazy hair - what a pity that somebody knifed him in a pub. But doesn't he sound like Shakespeare though? It makes you wonder....

The Unit of Beauty was defined by Doctor Faustus to describe Helen of Troy and now known as the millihelen, abbreviated to mh, that being the wow-factor it takes to launch just one ship.

By launching a thousand ships, Helen's beauty rated 1000mh, but I wouldn't push out a small coracle for Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Helen of 1863 nor for Anthony Frederick Sandys' Helen of 1867, although I have nothing against ginger bints in general.

"O lente lente currite noctis equi" means "O, horses of night, run slowly, slowly" Latin has no specific word order, it just depends what you want to emphasise. The line's from Ovid and Marlowe did the best translations of his poems. .Loosely, it's a wish for time to pass slowly. When Ovid says it it's because he's in bed with his girlfriend. In one of the Sherlock Holmes stories, Dr. Watson sees it engraved on a sundial.

The Helen I decided on is Evelyn de Morgan's Helen of Troy. of 1898.

Doctor Faustus is a famous etching by Rembrandt of 1650

Hell is by Hans Memling 1485, but deformed even more hideously by my use of Paint Shop Pro.

The Devils are part of The Last Judgement by Michaelangelo 1537

Mephistophilis actually is me - as you probably guessed - but I was painted as one of Two Satyrs by Pieter Paul Rubens in 1618 with remarkable foresight. My wife recognised me immediately.