Soon I will put up a fall schedule for my plunge back into non-Shakespearian plays, from say 1604 to 1614, an exciting stretch. Middleton, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher will dominate. SHAKESPEAREAN The Adventures of Lady Egeria (1585), W. C. – Half tedious, half confounding, this is an early English novel in a modern edition, lovingly edited by Steven Moore as part of his project to read every old…
Oh right, I can pretend I am writing something. Some notes on books I read in the distant past. NOT SHAKESPEARE The Dutch Courtesan (1604), John Marston – Discussed long ago . Poems (1594-1612), George Chapman – A superb, innovative poet, somehow an Ovidian and an anti-Ovidian, attracted to but also shocked by human sensuality, which may be a good part of why he had much presence for a long time.…
MALHEUREUX This lust is a most deadly sin, sure. FREEVILL Nay, ‘tis a most lively sin, sure. (I.1, 9) Now there is an efficient statement of a theme of John Marston’s A Dutch Courtesan (performed c. 1604, published 1605). It is the most sexually explicit Elizabethan or Jacobean play I have come across, explicit in its talk, of course, it is all talk, what do you think was happening on the English…
NOT SHAKESPEARE Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine sequence, with for example lines ending one poem and beginning the next. For some reason Thomas Campion, a writer of the most beautiful songs, wrote an essay arguing that English poetry should exclude rhyme, inspiring Daniel’s great defense of rhyme. Rhetorically…
George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread. He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of the Age of Shakespeare, one of the great Not Shakespeares. His 1604 comedy All Fools gives a good idea of how he is good and why he is little read. All Fools is a blend of two Terence plays, much like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is a mix of two Plautus…
Thomas Mann filled a lot of my time, alongside the non-Shakespearian stuff. Just two plays to go in this round, George Chapman’s All Fools and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan . NOT SHAKESPEARE Selected Poems (1593-1630), Michael Drayton – The line in the title is from his sonnet 61 , among the few that really stand with Shakespeare’s best. How many great poems must one write to be a great poet?…
The English theater world was deeply hostile to women, possibly until quite recently, but the late 16th and early 17th century period went a step beyond, when even female characters are played by males. Everything with any status except, oddly, supreme sovereign of the nation is closed to women. Feminist scholars have, in the last fifty years, done enormous work on the handful of surviving works…
Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus , presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant garde aestheticism is the reason German intellectuals were so often so gullible and accepting of fascism. Many critics, to my bafflement, have followed that path. Zeitblom, a teacher of philology. is not a fascist, but, like many of the intellectuals the novel is…
A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend . I will need that subtitle soon. Near the end of the book, I was looking up I do not remember what when I discovered that after four hundred dense pages I was reading the novel wrong, completely against decades of interpretation. The novel is…
I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays ( Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies , p. 38). He is more like a television writer. His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy. It…
Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers of English literature. Over time, many groups have greatly revised, often in the name of relevance and diversity, the reading list for the GCSE, the exam British students took before graduating high school ( a current or at least recent list ). But which books did teachers actually pick to teach? The answer was, when possible, An…
What do I want to say about John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603, maybe 1604)? It is unusual. Marston is unusual, with a distinct poetic and dramatic sensibility. No one else could have written it. The Duke of Genoa has been tossed out by an usurper, so he infiltrates the court disguised as Malevole, the Malcontent of the title, not exactly a courtier, not exactly a jester, but given license by the…
London and Cornwall, St. Ives and Penzance and so on, is where. I got some good Shakespearing in – The Tempest at the Wanamaker, the little candle-lit theater at the Globe, and a good walk around Shoreditch and northern London, tracking down various Shakespearean sites and monuments. The Shakespeare Museum, built atop the excavated Curtain Theatre, surrounded, like, increasingly, everything in…
His father hanged by the neck until dead for the high crime of piracy, Hoffman vows Revenge! on the duke who executed his father. By chance the duke’s son is shipwrecked exactly where Hoffman is keeping Hoffman, Sr.’s corpse hanging on the wall of a cave, so Hoffman tortures and murders his enemy, thus ending Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman or a Revenge for a Father (1602). Thus ending Act…
After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sejanus His Fall (1603), about the soldier who rose to rule the Roman empire, for a few years, under dissolute Emperor Tiberius, before overreaching and being crushed by the next sociopath in line. I found Sejanus a little dull when I last read it, long ago, and…
I am almost on my way to London. Some Shakespearian and Not Shakespearian activities are on the schedule. My reading, before this trip, was again very British. THE WAR OF THE POETS Antonio and Mellida (1599?) & Antonio's Revenge (1600?), John Marston – A remarkable pair of literary objects, discussed here and here . Poetaster (1601), Ben Jonson – Jonson slags Marston, discussed here . Sejanus His…
It’s the War of the Theatres! Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker! Who cares! Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) features two key scenes where Jonson, under the guise of Horace, is tormented by and then torments Marston, the bad poet of the title. Dekker, a mere hack, gets off easy. The play is set in Augustan Rome, and most of the characters are poets, actual poets, in both…
The plays that have survived from the early London stage are language-crazed. When have so many commercial writers been poets, great poets? When has so much commercial writing been poetry? John Marston is among the purplest of the poet-playwrights, the most baroque. I can imagine readers who find he goes too far. I love it when he gets rolling. Here, for example, Antonio reads aloud, in Latin,…
John Marston does something with the pair of plays Antonio and Mellida (1599?) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600?) that I do not think I have ever seen before. The first play is a silly, barely coherent romantic comedy, with everything wrapped up in a happy ending. Antonio’s Revenge is a bloody revenge with the same characters (except for the ones murdered before the first act), demolishing the earlier…
I think of Thomas Dekker as one of the great hacks of Shakespeare’s time, writing over a long career a large number of plays, mostly lost, the survivors mostly with better-known co-writers. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) appears to have been an early hit for him, a good example of the hack outdoing himself. Hacks have their own kind of genius. Dekker is not a great poet but he has a great ear, or…
I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual. If only I wanted to write anything. NOT SHAKESPEARE AND ALSO SHAKESPEARE A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), William Shakespeare Every Man in His Humour (Italian version) (1598) & Every Man in His Humour (London version) (1616), Ben Jonson – discussed here . The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker –…
Dolce Bellezza hosted her 19th Japanese Literature Challenge last month. Once I have written this post it will be the 54th book in this year’s event. Amazing. The book is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain (1954, serialized 1949-54). The sound of the mountain is a foreboding of death. The novel is about an old man, Shingo, and his midlife crisis. His friends are dying, his two adult…
Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background. He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe. More importantly, he was a born Londoner. His best plays are full of London. Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but…
I am not so interested in writing a longer summary of my year in reading, so I will put that here. Finishing the massive The Story of the Stone and reading the monstrous Finnegans Wake ( here , continuing , ending ) were solid accomplishments in reading, if there are such things. The worst book I read was the instructive I, Robot . I do not know what the best was. My time with Elizabethan writers…
Saving the worst for last, it’s Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592?, published soon after), a poor play that is full of Marlovian stuff. Marlowe dramatizes the 1572 Paris Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the subsequent series of devious betrayals by the principle massacrists. Just slaughter from beginning to end, as grotesque as Titus Andronicus . Like the Shakespeare horror…