Marlowe's hilarious farce The Jew of Malta - How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead

A conceptual innovator himself, Christopher Marlowe responded to other innovations.  In The Jew of Malta (1589, maybe), he wrote, following the novelty of The Spanish Tragedy, a kind of revenge tragedy.  For the first couple of acts, it does look like a revenge tragedy.  The Jews of Malta have their wealth seized to bribe the Turks, who threaten invasion.  The richest among them, Barabas, vows revenge on Malta’s Christian rulers:

And there, in spite of Malta, will I dwell,

Having Ferneze’s hand, whose heart I’ll have,

Ay, and his son’s too, or it shall go hard.

I am not of the tribe of Levi, I,

That can so soon forget an injury.  (II.3, 373)

But Barabas, it turns out, is what we now call a total psycho – “For, so I live, perish may all the world!  (V.5, 426) – so once his crazy scheme for revenge starts rolling there is no stopping (until he is caught in one of his own pointlessly elaborate traps).

Barabas is my favorite creation of Marlowe’s, because of his gusto, his boundless energy for evil that somehow surpasses even that of the world-conquering Tamburlaine; he is a miniature tyrant.

                                 Why, is not this

A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns

By treachery, and sell ‘em by deceit? (V.5, 427)

It is as if Tamburlaine were trapped on an island, where he cannot slaughter five percent of the world’s population but proportionally can get close:

BARABAS: There is no music to a Christian knell!

How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead,

That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans!  (IV.1, 398)

In the same scene Barabas is confronted by, and confounds, a pair of friars, “two religious caterpillars”:

FRIAR BARNARDINE: Remember that –

FRIAR JACOMO: Ay, remember that –

BARABAS: I must needs say that I have been a great usurer.

FRIAR BARNARDINE:  Thou hast committed –

BARABAS: Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides the wench is dead.  (IV.1, 399-400)

I had assumed that everyone loved this scene, but no, following T. S. Eliot in his 1919 “Christopher Marlowe” essay, many people actually read The Jew of Malta as an unsatisfying tragedy rather than as a hilarious farce for which “Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce.”  The humor is “terribly serious, even savage,” writes Eliot, which is certainly how I read the play.  It is nuts, Marlowe knows it is nuts, and everybody has a good time.

Richard Wilson in his chapter on “Tragedy, patronage, and power” (Ch. 13) in The Cambridge Companion to Christoper Marlowe (2004) argues that Marlowe’s works are mostly about publishing –  “and we see how this is a drama about authors’ rights and ownership of texts” (218).  I wish I had an idea half as wild as this one.  “{T]he playwright-as-hero [Barabas!] wages war on two fronts, against both the patrons who purloin his profit and the performers who sell his plots” (219).  Yes, ha ha ha, why not!

Julia Reinhard Upton’s chapter on The Jew of Malta (Ch. 9) begins with a section on the actual Jews of the actual Malta and is generally quite historicist, which is one way to rescue The Jew of Malta from its blatant anti-Semitism, by which I mean, at minimum, that Marlowe exploits a lot of standard anti-Jewish stereotypes for humor and horror without the humanist ambiguity of The Merchant of Venice.  The Jews were expelled from England in 1289 but the absence of actual people has never done much to tamper Jew-hating.  But even if contemporaries enjoyed The Jew of Malta for the wrong reasons, we can enjoy it for the right reasons.

A 1594 edition of The Jew of Malta was likely published but did not survive.  The text we have is from a 1633 revival.  The forty-year gap has caused a lot of anxiety, which I do not share, that some of the text is not by Marlowe.  Who knows.  Barabas was another big lead role and big hit, like Tamburlaine and Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, for young Edward Alleyn, the great star of his time.  Were these plays famous and important because they are especially good or innovative or because they starred Alleyn?  Who knows, who knows.

Up next is the anonymous, although attributed to everyone, Arden of Faversham (1591?), a true crime play.  I am at the 75% mark and so far it is outstanding.  Highly recommended.  I will write about it soon and thus catch up with my own arbitrary schedule.  Doctor Faustus, one of the greats, after that.

Page numbers go to the 1969 Penguin Classics Complete Plays.

This may all be a fantasy - Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Chrsitopher Marlowe

Potted bio of Christopher Marlowe: Son of a semi-literate Canterbury cobbler.  He impressed someone and became a scholarship student first at the cathedral school and then at Cambridge, where he stayed until receiving his MA.  At the university he was almost certainly recruited into Her Majesty’s Secret Service which at that point did not involve fighting SMERSH but rather infiltrating and betraying secret English Catholics, some in the pay of the Spanish who were, in fact, planning to invade England.  After Cambridge, he wrote a handful of plays that introduced numerous innovations into the new English theater, hung out with a number of young noblemen, and appeared in a number of legal records, many of them in pretty odd circumstances, until the final one, the inquest of his murder, when, in the company of some truly suspicious characters, he was stabbed in the eye with his own knife.

Stephen Greenblatt’s new 285-page biography of Christopher Marlowe has a gimmicky title – Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival – and an ugly cover, but is otherwise quite good.  I read lots of biographies of artists, but in magazine article, not book, form, so I doubt I would have read this one if I were not reading Marlowe’s plays right now.  But Greenblatt has been thinking about Marlowe for over forty years, from his earliest research.  I should see what his Marlowe looks like.

Greenblatt’s Marlowe looks like a collection of texts.  A founder of New Historicism, Greenblatt has a more expansive idea of which texts are useful than the older New Critics, but he is still a literary critic whose main tool is close reading.  He, and other scholars, are just applying the technique to court documents and the Cambridge buttery book as well as plays and poems.

And are there ever some strange texts.

Much of what we know about his life and opinions comes from the reports of spies and informants or from testimony extracted by torture.  (7)

Greenblatt is on page 7, warning me that the evidence about major aspects of Marlowe’s life is quite poor, full of gaps and riddles and unreliable narrators.

Poor Thomas Kyd.  Greenblatt begins with Kyd’s 1593 arrest and torture, which perhaps killed him within a year, essentially because he and Marlowe had been roommates (living quarters, or maybe an office?) a couple of years earlier.  Once released, he write “two desperate letters” (18-9) to one of the investigators begging him to intercede with Kyd’s patron, the powerful Lord Strange.  These letters are the most direct evidence of Marlowe’s ideas, including his blasphemous atheism and his homosexuality.  They may by accurate; they may be self-preserving slander.  Who knows?  Greenblatt does not pretend to know.

The records of the investigation into Marlowe’s death, discovered only in 1923, have the same problems.  We have the scene in great detail, but all from the testimony of Marlowe’s killers.  They said it was self-defense.  What else would they say.  Greenblatt presents a number of different scenarios proposed by different scholars and ends with the one “[c]loser to my view” (280), as strong as his language gets.

Greenblatt is not really making any kind of case about what happened to Marlowe or what he was doing in many of the strange incidents in which he was involved.  He presents the work of other scholars and when necessary casts his vote.  Not only is this intellectually honest, but it means he tells me not one story about Marlowe but all of the stories.

With so little evidence, Greenblatt organizes Marlowe’s life around subjects where he, due to the work of other scholars, knows something.  For example, Marlowe was involved with Sir Walter Raleigh and his circle, so that is a chapter, Raleigh and friends.  An enormous amount of research has been done on Elizabethan espionage, with some remarkable surviving archival material, none of which mentions Marlowe specifically.  The amount of research on Elizabethan education, hoping to somehow explain Shakespeare, is extraordinary, and pulled together smartly by Greenblatt.

The headmaster of Marlowe’s Canterbury school had one of the largest private, non-aristocratic, libraries in England.  An inventory of his library has, amazingly, survived.  It is full of books that Marlowe read somewhere.

Students in the school are unlikely to have ordinarily been granted access to it.  Marlowe’s biographers  are united in doubting that their subject, only recently admitted to the school, got anywhere close.  (48)

This is one of the few places where Greenblatt argues a point.  The Harvard professor thinks: of course the headmaster let his most brilliant student read, or even borrow, some of his books.  “But from time to time he almost certainly encountered students who made the whole enterprise seem worthwhile” (49).  Some of Greenblatt’s evidence here is asking what he would do.   “This may all be a fantasy.”  But the rest of the evidence is in the poems and plays.  Marlowe gets so much done so quickly.  He entered the school late, so he is fifteen here.  Fourteen years later, he is dead.

Greenblatt expresses his frustration most directly in a chapter in a sense about Marlowe’s contribution to the Henry VI plays, but really about his relationship with William Shakespeare.  Since we know nothing, Greenblatt turns to fiction.  “Then – to continue this imaginary conversation – Marlowe might have looked quizzically at Shakespeare and ventured on the subject of love” (144-5).  I am sure there are some cases where Greenblatt reaches past the evidence without knowing it, but I thought he was always telling me what he was doing clearly enough.

Highly recommended to anyone sympathetic to a historicized approach to literature.

More Henry VI - I am myself alone

 

More rambling around Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, Shakespeare’s first big playwriting project.

3.  As easily as I accept that large parts of the plays were written by who knows who, I was shocked to see that scholars have tried to assign the Jack Cade rebellion (“The first thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers”), Act IV of Part II, to Thomas Nashe.  This is the part, more than any other, that sounds to me like Shakespeare, later Shakespeare.  One reason is that it is full of puns.

How Shakespeare loved puns, in a way that Marlowe or as far as I can tell no one before Shakespeare had (except for Thomas Nashe, right).  Puns are a basic part of his understanding of language, and perhaps the world.

Jack Cade, the textile worker, leads a working-class rebellion against King Henry.  That he is spurred on by the money of Henry’s enemies in the nobility is one irony we recognize from recent history; that he is a communist but also a tyrant is another.  A “clothier,” he and his army are introduced with many lines of tailoring puns.

FIRST REBEL  I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap upon it.

SECOND REBEL  So he had need for ‘tis threadbare…

The rebels come from different professions, each generating puns.  Jack Cade is named for “stealing a cade [barrel] of herrings.”  His wife, a “pedlar’s daughter,” is now “not able to travel with her furred pack, she washes bucks here at home” (all of this from Part 1, IV.2, 181-2).  I remind myself that in Shakespeare, if it sounds like a dirty joke it is.  The archaic vocabulary, densest in the comic scenes, is either a pleasure of Shakespeare’s language or an aggravation, or both.

              Enter a rebel with Lord SAYE

CADE  Well, he shall be beheaded for it ten times. [To SAYE] Ah, thou say, thou serge – nay, thou buckram lord!  (IV.7, 188)

Five scenes later, it never ends.  “Say” is a kind of silk. Cade’s own severed head is presented on stage three scenes later, without puns, since Shakespeare did not write that scene.

4.  The severed heads.  The Henry VI plays have so many severed heads.  The first severed head in Part 3 appears after the fourteenth line, presented by crookback Richard, who talks to it sarcastically.  But I’ll go back to Jack Cade:

         Enter two with the Lord Saye’s head and Sir James Cromer’s upon two poles

CADE  But is not this braver?  Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive.

          [The two heads are made to kiss]  (IV.7, 191)

Or how about – I cannot leave Act IV – when Queen Margaret wanders around the stage with her lover’s severed head while King Henry and his advisers have a meeting.  Later (Part 3, I.4) she gets her revenge, smearing her enemy the Duke of York with the blood of his murdered son before having him, what else, beheaded.  The blood-smearing is Shakespeare’s, or someone’s invention, an addition to the chronicle history.

These plays have a level of violence, of grotesque violence, that rivals Titus Andronicus, which Shakespeare may well have been working on around the same time.  The torture scenes in Tamburlaine, the mass slaughter and that business with the tongue in The Spanish Tragedy, and all of these prop heads – or was there a prop-master re-wigging a single head from scene to scene – how I would like to see one of these prop heads – testify to a taste for extreme violence that we have in common with the Elizabethans.  At least we do not have to walk under a row of severed heads on our way to a Coen Brothers movie, like they did.

5.  There is that scene where King Henry sits on a molehill and laments he is not a shepherd.

When this is known, then to divide the times:

So many hours must I tend my flock,

So many hours must  I take my rest,

So many hours must I contemplate,

So many hours must I sport myself,

So many days my ewes have been with young.  (Part 3, II.5, 240)

And so on, a remarkable intrusion of a kind of poetry not found elsewhere in the plays.  Henry witnesses a tableau of a father who has killed his son and a son who has killed his father, blunt and artificial, a beautiful scene of pure theater.

I will note the penultimate scene, where King Henry and the future Richard III finally meet and have a marvelous insult battle before Richard murders Henry and prepares for the next play:

I had no father, I am like no father;

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word, ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me – I am myself alone.  (Part 3, 5.6, 283)

A pretty good start.

Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 - Shakespeare begins - Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile

Thinking about the Elizabethan history plays sent me back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, a substantial step forward – I will go ahead and call this progress – in the history of English drama, although I think of Marlowe’s Edward II as the big turning point and Richard II as the Shakespearean miracle, meaning as good as parts of Richard III are, how did he move from that to this?  No rummaging through contemporary plays will answer that question.

I will just make some notes about what I saw this time in The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry VI, now known as Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3.  I read them in The Norton Shakespeare: Histories (2nd ed., 2008) which for some reason uses the 1594 Quarto titles but a heavily-edited version of the 1623 Folio texts.  I read the essays about the texts with some confusion.  Who knows what I read.

The story is the War of the Roses.  Henry VI is a weak king following a strong king.  The kingdom falls apart around him; his nobility schemes against, and murder, each other; his French wife, tougher than any of them, joins right in.  The meek, pious king just wants to be a shepherd. The ferocious Queen wishes someone “[w]ould choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome” (Pt I, 1.3).

I am just going to write, although not all of it in this post, until I run out of points.

1. I am convinced that Shakespeare wrote a substantial part of these plays and had a strong hand throughout.  He was something like the head writer or show runner.  I also think Parts 2 and 3 were conceived and written together.  Ambitious!  They were a hit, thus the prequel Part 1 and the sequel Richard III.

I am looking at the introduction to the 1999 Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry VI, Part II.  It is 141 pages long and I have not read it all:

In their Introductions to the Henry VI plays Hart and Wilson argue extensively for the variously combined authorship of Greene, Peele, Nashe, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare. (116)

The entire book has about 500 pages.  It contains a scan of the First Folio pages and a table showing how the parts can be doubled.  It is an amazing object, although I found the Norton book more comfortable to actually read.

Anyway, that list is more or less every famous active playwright circa 1591, which is when I tentatively put these plays.  Stephen Greenblatt, in his new biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance, is convinced Marlowe was involved, but likely minimally.  “The resulting plays have many Marlovian phrases and touches, but they are folded into a structure that Shakespeare clearly dominates” (144).

2. That structure is still fairly close to that of the chronicle plays.  Shakespeare marches us through the major events.  Characters, even the ones not killed off quickly, have little room to grow or show their depths.  Part 3 is especially monotonous, a series of battles and betrayals.  The great betrayal has to wait for the next play, Richard III.

Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, has a terrific monologue (Part II, III.2, pp. 250-2) where he declaims his grievances against his enemies, his brothers, and the world in general, ending with an open declaration that he is now the official villain of the play.  He will “Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could” and “set the murderous Machiavel to school.”  At this point in theatrical history, there was nothing worse than Machiavelli.  A fun speech - I pulled the title quotation form it - but so blunt.  Maybe Marlowe wrote it.

How far will I get tomorrow?  I will write about the puns, and the severed heads, and we will see what else.

History before Shakespeare - The Famous Victories of Henry V - he hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had

The establishment in the 1570s of permanent theaters just outside of the walls of London led to a massive increase in the demand for new plays.  Every available source of stories was looted.  English history proved to be especially popular or at least easy to adapt to the stage.

William Shakespeare was much more of a history specialist in the 1590s than I had understood.  Nine English history plays, plus one comic spinoff, and one Roman play, so nine or ten or eleven plays in a decade.  To the extent that they were published, the plays were generally called tragedies.  We still call Julius Caesar a tragedy rather than a history, but the plays with British subjects were moved into the category of histories in the First Folio, so that The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry VI became Henry VI, Part 3.  For example.

Since the Henry VI plays were more sophisticated than the history plays that preceded them, and Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II even more so, scholars have categorized older plays with subjects from British history as “chronicles.”  Before Shakespeare and After Shakespeare is what they mean.  But I thought I had better read at least one of the chronicles.

I picked The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?)*, authors unknown.  I am rarely sure what people mean when they talk about their “reading experience” but this was, for me, a strange reading experience.  The short play in twenty scenes races through the events of three familiar Shakespeare plays, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V.  Interspersed with the history scenes are clown scenes, a vehicle for Richard Tarlton, the greatest comic actor of his time.  So it was like reading a poor prose summary of Shakespeare with unrelated comic scenes mixed in.  Odd.

As I understand it, the real difference between the chronicles and the histories is that the chronicle plays more or less just march through the key episodes.  That is what Famous Victories does (plus the comedy).

So for example in scene vi, wild Prince Hal reconciles with his dying father.  He hands the King his dagger.  King Henry pardons his son. This is from the historical accounts.  I will go straight into scene vii to show the contrast.

HENRY IV  Stand up my son; and do not think thy father, but at the request of thee, my son, I will pardon thee.  And God bless thee, and make thee his servant.

PRINCE  Thanks, good my Lord.  And no doubt but this day, even this day, I am born new again.

HENRY IV  Come, my son, and lords, take me by the hands.

                                                                                            Exeunt omnes.

Scene vii

DERICK  Thou art a stinking whore; and a whoreson stinking whore.  (vii, 168)

The effect was often this jarring.  Shakespeare made dull and undramatic followed by something rather more vigorous.

The scene where Hal renounces the Falstaff character is almost totally flat.  It is one of the most moving scenes in Shakespeare.  Here it is another checkmark from the list of episodes.  Shakespeare knew this play and borrowed a few things from it, but there is not much hint of his Falstaff here.

Let’s have another bit of Derick the clown.  Here he has dragged Cutbert Cutter the thief into court:

Oh, masters, stay there!  Nay, let’s never belie the man! For he hath not beaten and wounded me also, but he hath beaten and wounded my pack, and hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had.  That grieves me most.  (iv, 158)

And how about this amusing French captain, in the Henry V section of Famous Victories.

CAPTAIN 

Why, take and Englishman out of his warm bed and his stale drink, but one month, and, alas, what will become of him?  But give the Frenchman a radish root, and he will live with it all the days of his life.  (xiii, 186)

No wonder the French lost so badly.  This speech, a note tells me, comes right out of the source chronicle, lightly paraphrased, although the English author added the radish root.  The British theater audience wants to learn history, and here it is.

The text and page numbers are from The Oldcastle Controversy (1991) which also includes Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1, which I have not read but perhaps should.  If you somehow have a particular chronicle play to recommend, please do.  The early version of King Leir (pre-1594) is tempting.

* Published in 1598, presumably because of the success of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.

The Spanish Tragedy and Ur-Hamlet - we do as all tragedians do

I gotta get this train back on the tracks.  Let’s see.  I’ll write this bit about The Spanish Tragedy, then something about the Henry V and Henry VI plays I’ve been reading, then get to Christopher Marlowe’s hilarious farce The Jew of Malta.  Somewhere I will fit in something about Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Marlowe which, happily, is excellent.

The crazy revenge scheme of The Spanish Tragedy is famously a play-within-a-play in which three people die of stabbing (Stab him… Stab him… Stab herself) while the idiot nobility in the audience nod along, thinking it is acting.

HIERONIMO  Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts,

That this is fabulously counterfeit,

And that we do as all tragedians do  (IV.iv, 117)

Before the scene ends, two more people are stabbed (plus there is the business with the tongue).  It is like a combination of Hamlet’s last scene and its own play-within-a-play.

Which may be what it is, if Thomas Kyd wrote the legendary lost Ur-Hamlet, and if Ur-Hamlet precedes The Spanish Tragedy, in which case Ur-Hamlet invented the revenge tragedy and The Spanish Tragedy is its generic sequel.

Fredson Bowers, writing in Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy: 1587-1642 (1940) is sure both of those things are true.  He for some reason really wants Ur-Hamlet to come first, so it does.  In Chapter III, “The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet,” Bowers provides a detailed, scene-by-scene synopsis of Ur-Hamlet, showing how it led to The Spanish Tragedy and eventually Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It is a fascinating chapter, mostly because Ur-Hamlet does not exist, in any form.  Two words have survived (“Hamlet, revenge!”, spoken by the ghost).  Bowers just makes the whole thing up.  He takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the French novella that is Kyd’s source (probably) and kind of plots a midpoint.

The Spanish Tragedy has no known source, which bothers Bowers.  It would be a rarity for the period if the story during this plundering period were original.  But I am okay with the idea; also the idea that Kyd did not write Ur-Hamlet and that it was written after The Spanish Tragedy.  Brian Vickers has recently led an effort to massively expand the attributions to Kyd – see The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd and the biography Thomas Kyd: A Dramatist Restored, but boy does the evidence look thin to me, very close to nothing in most cases.  The attribution of Ur-Hamlet to Kyd is based on interpreting a pun-filled line by Thomas Nashe.

The literary history of this period is of the highest interest.  Much of the interest is figuring out how we know things.

I’ll give poor, dim, Balthazar the last word.

BALTHAZAR  Hieronimo, methinks a comedy were better.

HIERONONIMO  A comedy?

    Fie, comedies are fit for common wits  (IV.i, 109)

But revenge is too much fun.

The Spanish Tragedy - Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

Poor Hieronimo.  His son Horatio, a war hero and lover of the daughter of a duke, is murdered by the woman’s Machiavellian brother as part of some crazy scheme not worth going into.  How will Hieronimo find justice against such a powerful person?  Perhaps some other crazy revenge scheme will do the trick.

The crazier the better.  Thus Thomas Kyd, in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587*) invents the revenge tragedy, which will have an amazing forty-year run, producing many insane masterpieces, until it collapses from exhaustion just before the Puritans finally get the wicked theaters closed for good.

(7) The action is bloody and deaths are scattered through the play.  Ten characters are killed, eight of these on-stage (72)

The mass slaughter is only the seventh most notable aspect of “the basic Kydian formula for the tragedy of revenge” (71)!  I am quoting from the invaluable Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940) by Fredson Bowers, still a standard reference which I will write a bit more about later.

Seneca’s plays were full of revenge and murder, but nobody had pushed the genre as far as this.

Enter HIERONIMO with a book in his hand (III.xiii, 85)

That book, from which Hieronimo intermittently quotes, is a collection of Seneca’s plays.

And to conclude, I will revenge his death!

But how? Not as the vulgar wits of men,

With open, but inevitable ills,

As by a secret, yet a certain mean,

Which under kinship will be cloaked best.  (86)

Seneca’s example not only convinces him that revenge is good and necessary but that it demands a crazy, secret scheme.

Kyd is rarely the poet that Marlowe is, although that passage seems good to me.  And sometimes, almost always in Hieronimo’s monologues, he sets his own standard (The Spanish Tragedy, like Tamburlaine, has only one great character, the star of the show).

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;

O life, no life, but lively form of death;

O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

O sacred heavens!  if this unhallowed deed,

If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,

If this incomparable murder thus

Of mine, but now no more my son,

Shall unrevealed and unrevenged pass,

How should we term your dealings to be just

If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?

[skipping ten lines - night, day, hell, dreams]

Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night, and day,

See, search, show, send some man, some mean, that may –

                                                                 A letter falleth  (III.ii, 53-4)

This is a famous soliloquy, famous – parodied – at the time, a masterpiece of rhetorical devices (like the address to the heavens) that often grow stale quickly but here are full of life, of meaning to the character.  Then those last two lines feel new to me.  They are not the kind of poetry Marlowe writes.  I wonder how much of the audience really followed the eyes, life, world, etc. all the way to the line where they all return together.  Twenty-two lines in between is a lot!  Perhaps the actor also repeated some big gestures.

Please note the “men / mean” pairing returns in the first speech I quoted, eleven scenes later, with the plea for “some mean” turning into the discovery of a “certain mean.”

I’ll write at least one more post on The Spanish Tragedy.

Page numbers from the 1970 New Mermaids edition.

*  Or much earlier, or somewhat later.  Published 1592, with no author.  1587 puts The Spanish Tragedy alongside Tamburlaine the Great, making the year a turning point for the London theater, an enjoyable fiction that might even be true.

milk-white harts, fiery dragons, the ugly monster Death - some more Tamburlaine

The first character we see in Tamburlaine the Great is the king of Persia, but he lacks “a great and thundering speech,” so he is soon crushed by Tamburlaine.  Great and thundering speech is his superpower.  The real-life conqueror was also a tactician of genius, but the battles in Marlowe’s plays are mostly offstage, so what we get is speech.  Tamburlaine declares what will happen and then it does, although his terms are more metaphorical.  Here he is wooing the princess he has just captured, Zenocrate, promising her not the moon but just about everything else:

TAMBURLAINE: A hundred Tartars shall attend on thee,

Mounted on steeds swifter than Pegasus;

Thy garments shall be made of Median silk,

Enchas’d with precious jewels of mine own,

More rich and valorous than Zenocrate’s;

With milk-white harts upon an ivory sled

Thou shalt be drawn amidst the frozen pools,

And scale the icy mountains’ lofty tops,

Which with thy beauty will be soon resolv’d.  (Part I, I.2, 114)

We are at the beginning of the play, when Tamburlaine is merely a successful bandit, so those harts and that sled are particularly fanciful.  Zenocrate never does get them, but this is how Tamburlaine thinks about everything.  He is always talking about what will happen.  In another play this might be a sign of his hubris which will eventually do him in.  Not in this one!  His imagery is exaggerated, but not his deeds.

But, since I exercise a greater name,

The Scourge of God and terror of the world,

I must apply myself to fit those terms,

In war, in blood, in death, in cruelty,

And plague such peasants as resist in me

The power of Heaven’s eternal majesty.  (Part II, IV.1, 230-1)

The “peasants” he is addressing are the last set of kings and emperors he has crushed who will next be seen, in one of the play’s astounding bits if pure theater, dragging Tamburlaine around the stage in a chariot, bits in their mouths.  Tamburlaine has also just murdered one of his sons, onstage, for playing cards during a battle.  That is what I mean when I say the battles are offstage.  Onstage, we watch this character play cards with his servant.

Anyway, Tamburlaine:

And, till by vision or by speech I hear

Immortal Jove say ‘Cease, my Tamburlaine,’

I will persist a terror to the world,

Making the meteors that, like armed men,

Are seen to march upon the towers of heaven,

Run tilting round the firmament,

And break their burning lances in the air,

For honour of my wondrous victories.  (Pt. II, IV.i, 232)

This is the pure Marlovian theme again, where the motivation is power, but power to destroy.

In the last post I claimed that Tamburlaine “develops” in Part II; this is what I mean.  His metaphors become more cosmic and grandiose, more meteors and heavens, “flying dragons, lightning, fearful thunder-claps” (Pt. II, III.2, 211), as he begins to believe – or as I realize he has always believed – that he is an avatar of divine power, a force he calls “Jove,” sent to earth to overthrow kings, empires, and religions.

Part I has a terrifying scene where a group of Damascene women plead for mercy from Tamburlaine.  He shows them his sword.  What do you see?  “Nothing but fear and fatal steel, my lord.”

TAMBURLAINE:  Your fearful minds are thick and misty, then,

For there sits Death; there sits imperious Death,

Keeping his circuit by the slicing edge.  (Pt. I, V.2, 165-6)

He orders the slaughter of the women – “charge these dames, and shew my servant Death.”

Meant as metaphor, perhaps, but decades later, in Part II, sick and old, I take Tamburlaine at his word:

See, where my slave, the ugly monster Death,

Shaking and quivering, pale and wan for fear,

Stands aiming at me with his murdering dart,

Who flies away at every glance I give,

And, when I look away, comes stealing on!

Villain, away, and hie thee to the field!

I and mine army come to load thy bark

With souls of thousand mangled carcasses.

Look, where he goes!  But, see, he comes again,

Because I stay!  Techelles, let us march,

And weary Death with bearing souls to hell.  (V.3, 251-2)

But the days of slaughter are over.  Just one more soul for hell.  I did not really need that whole passage here, but it is so good, and obviously huge fun for an actor.

Let’s see.  It is Part II where Marlowe really begins to pour out the place names.  Like Milton eighty years later, he loves the poetic effect of exotic, multi-syllable names.  The scene where Tamburlaine explains siegecraft to his sons is historically curious.  The scene where Tamburlaine has a gigantic map brought on stage to show his conquests is really curious.

Next week – in a few days – I will move on to The Spanish Tragedy, utterly different, poetically, dramatically.  Then two weeks after that I will be back to Marlowe, to The Jew of Malta.

Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays - Threatening the world with high astounding terms

In Christopher Marlowe’s two Tamburlaine the Great plays (performed c. 1587, published 1590) the great Central Asian conqueror Tamburlaine moves from success to success, defeating a series of opponents and committing a series of atrocities.  He is never even wounded in battle.  He dies, in the final scene, after decades of wars, of natural causes, some kind of illness.

I am not sure what “drama” means, but I am pretty sure for most people this is not it.  Tamburlaine does not struggle much to reach his goals and is not a tragic figure, destroyed by, say, his hubris. In the first play he is narrow (in the second part he does develop), and the other characters are hardly deeper. He murders his son, he blasphemes, he slaughters, and lives a long life of ever-increasing power surrounded by devout followers.  What is the conflict?

Mycetes, the king of Persia but a weakling, is the first king Tamburlaine, a glorified bandit, defeats:

MYCETES:  Brother Cosroe, I find myself agriev’d;

Yet insufficient to express the same,

For it requires a great and thundering speech.  (Part I, I.1, 105)

That’s what Tamburlaine has.  Every time he comes onto the stage he brings a great and thundering speech with him.  How theater-goers loved those magnificent blank verse speeches as delivered by the great Edward Alleyn (was he really only 21 at the time?).  People performed them in taverns.  Blank verse became the default poetry for tragedies.  Imitations and parodies followed for about a decade.

The action, the drama, is in a sense a series of speeches.  What is new compared to say Gorboduc, aside from Marlowe being a much better poet, is that the speeches are less pure rhetorical exercises and instead reveal character, even if the character is a weirdo like Tamburlaine:

Nature…

Doth teach us all to have aspiring minds.

Our souls, whose faculties can comprehend

The wondrous architecture of the world,

And measure every wandering planet’s course,

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,

And always moving as the restless spheres,

Wills us to wear ourselves and never rest,

Until we reach the ripest fruit of all,

That perfect bliss and sweet felicity,

The sweet fruition of an earthly crown.  (Pt. I, II.7, 133)

Pure Marlowe, as I understand him.  Doctor Faustus or perhaps even the Jew of Malta could have given this speech although they would substitute something else for the crown in the last line.  That is new, too, that the drama reveals not just the nature of the characters onstage but the nature of the author.

The Tamburlaine plays were published together in 1590, just a few years after performance, the only Marlowe texts published during his lifetime.  The state of Marlowe’s texts is a nightmare, and these are likely the best we have, and even here the lawyerly publisher wrote in a prefatory note that he “omitted and left out some fond and frivolous gestures… far unmeet for the matter” (Laurie E. Maguire, “Marlovian texts and authorship,” The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe, 2004, p. 42).  In other words he apparently cut the comic scenes promised in Marlowe’s Preface:

From jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits,

And such conceits as clownage keeps in pay,

We’ll lead you to the stately tent of war,

Where you shall hear the Scythian Tamburlaine

Threatening the world with high astounding terms,

And scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. (105)

So now we have ten acts of “high astounding terms” and little clownage.  I will look at some more high astounding terms tomorrow.

Page references are to The Complete Plays, Penguin Classics, 1969.

Where I Walked in September 2025, and with Whom – The great affair is to move

I walked about a third of the Chemin de Stevenson in southern France, accompanied by eight other intrepid Mainers and three jolly donkeys.  Here we are, on the last of our six days, leaving the summit of Mont Lozère, the highest point we reached.

Why any one should desire to visit either Luc or Cheylard is more than my much-inventing spirit can suppose.  For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go.  I travel for travel's sake.  The great affair is to move; to feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly; to come down off this feather-bed of civilisation, and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints.  (“Cheylard and Luc”)

This is Robert Louis Stevenson writing in Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879).  I have now been to Luc and Cheylard.  Many people go to Luc and Cheylard.  Why?  Because Stevenson went there and put them in his book.  Ironic!  Although this is in the preceding paragraph, about the route from Cheylard to Luc:

It was like the worst of the Scottish Highlands, only worse; cold, naked, and ignoble, scant of wood, scant of heather, scant of life.

We followed Stevenson’s path but through a delightful fairy-like forest full of mushrooms and mushroom pickers gathering the mushrooms we had eaten the night before in Cheylard (with pasta) and would eat that night in Luc (in a tarte).  It is hard to imagine the landscape Stevenson saw, the forest eradicated by centuries of woodcutting.  It is much nicer now.

Young Stevenson thought his third book would concentrate more on the history of the region, especially the small-scale but brutal religious war of the early 18th century.  He designed and commissioned a gigantic sleeping bag that was so heavy he had to buy a donkey (Modestine) to carry it and the rest of his gear.  A good writer, he quickly realized that his struggle with the donkey was most interesting thing that happened, and the book shifted.  It’s a good book.

The French embraced the book – the French, in general, embrace books – and eventually developed the trail for hikers.  Farms rent donkeys to people who want them.  Hotels and villages and abbeys have paddocks and hay. Walking this trail with a donkey or two is an ordinary French tourist activity.  A recent movie set on the Chemin de Stevenson, Antoinette dans les Cévennes (2020), has perhaps made the hike more “fashionable,” as Emma told us, but everyone already knew what it was.  Everyone in France I mean; we talked to a young Scottish couple said they had trouble, despite Stevenson’s fame, finding anyone in Scotland who knew the trail existed.

Our trainer.  An hour or two of instructions, mush of it about packing the panniers, and off we go.  We were the only people on our part of the trail with donkeys.  They do complicate the hike.  I wonder what it is like in August.  More hikers, more donkeys, more flies.

Donkeys, or at least ours, are fine companions and a source of great pleasure, except for the occasions when they are not.  They now carry a lot less weight (that is why we had three of them) and are better treated in every way than poor Modestine.

What else.  The Abbey de Notre Dame des Neiges, Our Lady of the Snows, was a monastery when Stevenson visited, but is now run by nuns who have embraced the mission of housing and feeding hikers.  Here we see Flocond (Snowflake), their socil media star, and the bicycle of the nun who manages the hostel.  The donkeys are in a paddock just to the left, their snouts plunged into an immense pile of hay.  Now I am just putting up vacation snaps.

What I Read in September 2025 – A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme

My writing on Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great plays has been hampered by an apparent post-France short circuit in my ability to write.  So I will put up some easier posts to remind myself how to write.

I had two major projects this month, one ongoing, one returned to its stable.

 

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Songes and Sonettes Written By the Ryght Honorable Lord Henry Howard, late Earle of Surrey, Thomas Wyatt the Elder and others (1557), various – Better known as Tottel’s Miscellany, an enormously important poetry anthology that was much-looted by the great Elizabethan poets.  Thomas Wyatt brought the Petrarchan sonnet into English, in a mix of translation, imitation, and original poems.  Henry Howard was also a superb sonnet writer and basically invented English blank verse, although you will have to go to another book, like the invaluable Five Courtier Poets of the English Renaissance (1969), to see his blank verse Virgil translations.

Howard is a romantic, novelistic figure, who is presumably more famous now than he has been for a while because of the interest in the reign of Henry VIII as a subject for novels and television soap opera.  I hope that has sent some people to his poems.  The bit in the title of the post if from Howard’s epitaph for Wyatt, “Wyatt resteth here…”

Gorboduc (1561), Thomas Sackville & Thomas Norton – We covered this one here.

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587) &

Tamburlaine the Great, Pt. I (1587? / 1590), Christopher Marlowe – A post on Dido is over here; something on Tamburlaine is in slow progress.

The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1500-1600 (2000) – Always more to learn.

 

TRAVELS WITH THREE DONKEYS IN THE CÉVENNES

The three donkeys, enjoying having their packs off, as was I.

Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson

Le Chemin de Stevenson (2023) &

Le Jura... à pied (2023), TopoGuides

Tomorrow I will put up more donkey photos.  Some people may have seen them on Twitter or Bluesky.  It was a good trip.  The Jura book was for the post-donkey wind-down.

 

NOVELS

Guilt (1936), László Németh – This Hungarian novel looks like some kind of social realism but then wanders into stranger visionary territory at times.  The protagonist is a version of the naif character that László Krasznahorkai often uses.  The prose style is utterly different but Krasznahorkai readers will find many interesting things here.

The Ponder Heart (1953), Eudora Welty – Pure Welty comedy in a short novel I had for some reason not read before.

Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down (1969), Ishmael Reed – Highly, highly recommended to Percival Everett readers.  Well, not to most Everett readers, now that there are so many.  Not as rich a book as Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo (1972) but how many are.

The Poacher's Son (2010), Paul Doiron – A Maine detective novel, the first in what is now a long series, featuring a game warden “detective.”  For most of the book, it is barely a detective novel at all, but rather a story about a complicated father-son relationship that takes a turn when the difficult father becomes a murder suspect.  It is quite a sad book, actually.  To my limited knowledge, it captures the landscape and ethos of its portion of Maine quite well.

 

POETRY

How the Stones Came to Venice (2021), Gary Lawless – Lawless owns a bookstore, Gulf of Maine Books, in Brunswick, Maine that features an astounding wall of poetry.  He is also devoted to rescue donkeys, although they do not feature in this curious hybrid book.

Blood Wolf Moon (2025), Elise Paschen

 

IN PORTUGUESE

Zilda (1924), Alfredo Cortez – An important piece of Portuguese theater, I am told.

Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage - for I love thee not, – And yet I hate thee not.

Dido, Queen of Carthage by Christopher Marlowe, a romantic comedy* based on Book IV of The Aeneid, is Marlowe’s first play, or his last, or from somewhere in the middle.  I will say what I imagine it to be.

Marlowe translated Ovid’s Amores (published as Ovid’s Elegies in 1599) as a teenager (probably), and I take Dido, Queen of Carthage, or let’s say some early version of it, as another work of the prodigious young classicist.  A substantial number of lines are translations or paraphrases of Virgil, which is suggestive.  Marlowe likely returned to the play – polished, completed – when he became involved with the London theater.

The play was at some point performed by one of the boy’s companies, and published in 1594, soon after Marlowe’s death, with Thomas Nashe as co-author, which he may well have been, or not.  Maybe Nashe fixed it up for performance.

So, the first play, but then again not.

Dido is a marvelous little play, a deft piece of poetry that works as drama, if a little underbaked.  Queen Dido is the only major character who approaches “real.”  She has just been nipped by Cupid’s arrow so that she will fall in love with Aeneas.  Dido and Aeneas have been a bit flirty but now Dido tips:

AENEAS: O, happy shall he be whom Dido loves!

DIDO: Then never say that thou art miserable,

Because, it may be, thou shalt be my love.

Yet boast not of it, for I love thee not, –

And yet I hate thee not. – O, if I speak,

I shall betray myself! – Aeneas, come:

We two shall go a-hunting in the woods;

But not so much for thee, – thou art but one, –

As for Achates and his followers.  (III,ii, 168-76)

The declaration that is too direct, the retraction, the reversal of the retraction, the aside, the date but with friends – the uncaring, manipulative gods have reduced a powerful woman to a teenager with a crush.  The language expresses – I am thinking back to Gorboduc – not just a declaration of a position but emotions as they change, as they are experienced. 

Dido gets most of the language like that (although see below).  She steals the show.

Two other scenes.  The play opens with Jupiter “dandling GANYMEDE upon his knee”, an outrageous, openly homosexual beginning to an otherwise conventionally heterosexual story.  I remind myself that every character was played by a teenage boy.  The scene, not from Virgil, is just a couple of pages.

Another scene, not even two pages, that is Marlowe’s invention is Act IV, Scene 5.  Love-crazed Dido, hoping to keep Aeneas and his crew from leaving Carthage, has directed a servant to kidnap Ascanius, Aeneas’s son, and hide him in the countryside:

NURSE: No, thou shall go with me unto my house.

I have an orchard that hath store of plums,

Brown almonds, services, ripe figs, and dates,

Dewberries, apples, yellow oranges; (ll. 3-6)

And so on, a little blank verse pastoral poem.  Neither Dido nor the Nurse know that Ascanius is actually Cupid in disguise.  Whether it is Cupid’s trick or the effect of his aura, the nurse’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love:

O what mean I to have such foolish thoughts?

Foolish is love, a toy. – O sacred love!

If there be any heaven in earth, ‘tis love,

Especially in women of your years. –

Blush, blush for shame! Why shouldst thou think of love?

A grave, and not a lover, fits thy age. –

A grave! Why, I may live a hundred years;

Fourscore is but a girl’s age: love is sweet. –

My veins are wither’d, and my sinews dry:

Why do I think of love, now I should die?  (ll. 25-34)

Perhaps the idea was to make fun of a comic old lady (played by a boy), but the effect has a lot of pathos, and the back-and-forth of the language, not a speech but more like a dialogue, the nurse changing as she overhears herself, is how it is done.  The great playwrights did not need more than a page to create these terrific minor characters.

My text of Dido is from the 1969 Penguin Classics Marlowe, The Complete Plays.

Next week, the big one, Tamburlaine.  Both parts if plans go well.

I am still walking in France with a donkey but will respond to comments when feasible.

* For the first four-and-a-half scenes.

A note on Elizabethan authorship and Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I have not read

Stephen Grennblatt’s biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, was just published.  I did not know this book, which has been prominently reviewed, was coming.  I perhaps should have hooked my Christopher Marlowe reading to it.  For what purpose I do not know.

There is no possible way that I will buy Greenblatt’s book, but I might read it if my library buys a copy, which I suppose they will at some point.  Marlowe’s life could hardly be more interesting.  My grumpiness is more with the current practice of biography, which glosses over the use of evidence in ways with which I have difficulty.

For example.  A piece about Greenblatt’s book in Harvard Magazine, “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival” (8/8/2025), written by Nina Pasquini, begins with a grotesque error:

He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder.

Marlowe did not invent blank verse.  How could the author get this idea.  Because Greenblatt said it:

But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says.

Stephen Greenblatt knows more about Gorboduc and Henry Howard’s Aeneid translation than I do, and knows what the word “invented” means, yet this is the standard.  Or perhaps the emphasis is on "hallucinatory," in other words Marlowe invented blank verse as written by Marlowe.  Gorboduc's blank verse is not hallucinatory.

In the actual book, which I looked at in a bookstore, in the three pages tagged with “blank verse” in the index, Greenblatt says nothing about “invention” but instead argues that Marlowe’s use of blank verse in the two Tamburlaine plays was so successful, artistically and commercially, that it set blank verse as the standard for tragedy and history plays.  Which seems true to me.  Eh, the book is probably good.  Please read it and let me know.

Still, the evidence.  In two weeks I will put up something about Dido, Queen of Carthage, which I think of as Marlowe’s first play.  Maybe it is, maybe it is not.  Published in 1594, soon after Marlowe’s death, the title page says:

Written by Chriftopher Marlowe, and

Thomas Nafh. Gent.

Thomas Nashe is a writer of high interest, an imaginative satirist, but heck if I can hear him anywhere in Dido.  Some scholars with better ears than me agree, some do not.  Maybe Nashe edited the play for publication?  Maybe he wrote my favorite scenes in imitation of Marlowe?  Who knows.

I think there was a lot more co-writing and script doctoring in the London theater than we will ever know.  Publishing was changing rapidly, and the notion of authorship was changing as quickly, so evidence for authorship claims, authorship in our post-Romantic sense, is chaotic.  I take The Workes of Ben Jonson (1616), the first Folio if not the First Folio, as one extreme, Jonson getting his own plays and poems into print in a way that clearly says “These are mine, I wrote these.”  But my impression now is that there is more non-Shakespeare than we will ever know in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the earlier ones, and similarly more Shakespeare in plays we attribute to other writers.  Scenes, lines, even words.

In an issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman has Shakespeare and Jonson jointly improvise the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot song and teach it to a boy to spread around London.  The first line is Shakespear’s (“remember, remember”), the second Jonson’s.  Shakespeare thinks the song will quickly be forgotten; Jonson thinks it will last a hundred years.  A little parable about publication there.  But I think it gets at the practice of the time pretty well.  All of these writers knew each other.  Many worked together professionally, but how many more workshopped passages with each other at the tavern?

I will try to keep a light hand about authorship.  But at some point I have to make my choice, just like the biographer does.  He has to tell the story of Christopher Marlowe’s career as a spy.  I would prefer the story of why we think he might have been a spy.  Most people would not.

Next week: please join me in reading Dido, Queen of Carthage.  It is a fine piece of poetry.  The week after that I will begin writing on the two Tamburlaine plays.

I am in France right now so who knows when I might respond to comments.  Please go over to my Twitter to see photographs of my traveling companions.

Visiting imaginary museums with André Malraux

 

André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence (The Voices of Silence, 1951) is a synthetic, imaginative art omnihistory, an application (successful) to be Charles de Gaulle’s Minister of Culture, and at the same time an implicit apology for his brief career as a looter of Cambodian art.  Terrible, terrible.  Please see his 1930 novel La Voie royale (The Royal Way) for the fascinating details.

Actually Malraux, a true con man, likely thought he did nothing wrong and was not apologizing in any way.  I am just trying to give him credit.

The first fifth of the book, “Le Musée Imaginaire” / “The Imaginary museum,” for some reason retitled “Museum Without Walls” by Stuart Gilbert in his 1953 translation, is in particular a terrific piece of imaginative art criticism.  Inspired by the great improvements in the reproduction of artworks and the flood of high quality art books, Malraux constructs, and argues we are all free to construct, a museum in our heads, or our libraries, containing all art from all time, in a way that was never possible before.

Not that Giotto or Fra Angelico did not do all right with their much smaller museum.  Malraux has interesting things to say about that.  Perhaps knowing everything about everything is not good for art.

But in the meantime Malraux juxtaposes works freely across time and space, with productive results:

This 13th century French angel and 4th century Gandharan Buddha are on pp. 158-9 of the French text, pp. 160-1 of the English.  About forty percent of Les voix du silence is illustrations, so if you enjoy this kind of thing there is a lot more to see.

I was doing a little “imaginary museum” exercise back in this piece about visiting actual Paris museums.  Malraux was obviously as inspired by the variety of the collections in the ever-growing range of Paris museums.  Think how exciting the Paris museum world must have been just after the war, with civilization coming back to life, and the collections coming out of hiding.

The rest of the book is not so original, I do not think, although I would be interested in what a historian of art history thinks of it.  The third of the book titled “La Création Artistique” / “The Creative Process” is a wide-ranging study of high-level creativity that is knowledgeable and open-minded.  His idea of creativity is more formalist than most people's, although not mine. I just have doubts about how original it is.  That “imaginary museum” stuff, that is Malraux’s.

Let’s have some prose and see Malraux’s extremely French mix of insight, lyricism, clarity, and hot air.  I read this book in French, but since the online edition had, ironically, terrible reproductions, I also used an English edition for the illustrations.  So I will use Gilbert’s translation, not mine.

Malraux is writing about the difficulty of fitting objects like Melanesian masks into our art appreciation frame.  “[A]fter seeing a hundred New Ireland figures, we prefer to isolate two or three and toy with the illusion that they are the work of some great mythical sculptor (of no time, yet a little of ours).”

Those colors of the New Hebrides, intense or muted, are employed by dressmakers and theatrical designers; indeed when a great number of these figures are brought together in a museum, we have a sudden feeling of being invited to se a haute couture of Death.  These glittering ghosts really belong to poetry, which is why the Surrealists make so much of them.  But Surrealism, far from proposing to further culture, repudiates it in favor of the dream.  Our artistic culture, however, does not repudiate the dream, but seeks to annex it to itself.  Our Middle Ages, too, suggest to us what the festival deriving from the prehistoric ages may have been; but once his Carnival was over, medieval man fell to building cathedrals, and his rulers had not “ancestors” but forebears.  (575 English)

Gilbert’s decisions, when I took a look, often puzzled me.  He has a tendency to over-expand.  But he has a heck of a task.  That last clause in French is:

… mais son Carnaval terminé, il construisait des cathedrals, et ses chefs n’avaient pas d’ancêtres, ils avaient des aïeux. (573)

… but his Carnival having ended, he was building cathedrals, and his rulers did not have ancestors, they had ancestors.  (me, trying to be literal)

You see the expansion, a simple “il” turning into “medieval man,” and “fell to” fussily solving a verb issue.  But I have no idea what subtlety separates “ancêtres” from “aïeux” – I think they are synonyms – so I have no idea what Malraux is trying to say.  My translation is obviously wrong.  Gilbert at least takes a shot at it, even adding some extra quotation marks, although I do not think he knows either.  He had to do this on page after page.

If this all sounds interesting but maybe too full of hot air, the big sections are available separately.  Just read the “Museum Without Walls” section, which is also available as its own book, and see how that goes.

In the old days I would have written about this rich, enjoyable, exasperating book for a week.