Not Shakespeare for next year - Jonson, Marston, satire, revenge

With one Marlowe play left to write up, The Massacre at Paris, next week, I am thinking about what I will read in the winter and spring.

In 1592 the London theaters a plague outbreak closed the London theaters for what turned out to be two years.  All of the old theater companies broke up and reformed.  Edward Alleyn, the biggest star, originator of all those big, bold Marlowe parts among many others, went in one direction, while his own company went in another, bringing in as partners the hot new actor Richard Burgbage and the hot new playwright William Shakespeare.  A big move.

Marlowe died in 1593, and Thomas Kyd in 1594, so there are several years where I do not see anything not by Shakespeare that looks so exciting.  But several younger new playwrights appear.  Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman are of high interest.  Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood look more like hacks to me, but they have long careers and collaborate with many other writers.  I remind myself that the “lost play” problem is still huge in the 1590s.  We do not have much of what was put on stage.

Young Jonson and Marston bring a new tone to the stage, more satirical, assuming the audience is tired of Marlowe’s bombast or at least in on the joke.  More sophisticated, maybe, with more plays aimed at the more expensive theaters that featured the boy’s companies.  Or perhaps decadence has already set in.

An attempt at a schedule, which takes me just out of the Elizabethan period:

I have read all of Jonson’s plays, and may well read them all again, although I have left several off of this schedule.  The Poetaster may be too much of an inside joke. I remember Sejanus, a Roman tragedy, as having many problems, but I have learned enough about the history genre that it may look different now.

I have not read Antonio’s Revenge or Hoffmann, revenge tragedies.  The Malcontent is, as I remember it, a great play, maybe the only one on this schedule.  The Dekker and Heywood plays are significant genre plays, a good way to see what kinds of things Shakespeare, Jonson, etc. were not writing.  All Fools is a comedy based on Terence, a perfect thing of its kind.  The Dutch Courtesan I do not know; it is some kind of satire.

The Elizabeth Cary play is a special case.  It is a closet drama, which does not help me much with my questions about how the theaters worked.  But it has gotten a lot of attention in the last twenty or thirty years, and, yes, it is the only play by a woman.

A selection of what else was going on in this period:

Wonderful poems, a brilliant novel-like item from Nashe, so much great Shakespeare.  There are two more Parnassus plays, more insider satires.  I will likely read them all.  John Donne’s secular poems likely belong here somewhere, as do some portion of Walter Raleigh’s poems.

The dates in these tables are somewhat more secure than those in my Age of Marlowe tables, but for most of them please mentally add “circa.”

Please suggest different plays, for the schedule or just for me, or other works, or good secondary works, or anything else that needs suggesting.  I will, with luck, be in London in March, where I hope to learn a thing or two firsthand.  Suggestions about the remnants of 16th century London are also welcome.

Joost van den Vondel's Baroque play Lucifer - from their lofty nest / They see their dreaded foe

How I find books: Andrei The Untranslated posted a list of Baroque writers from Otto Maria Carpeaux’s massive História da Literatura Ocidental (1959-66), a marvelous list of marvelous writers including a number of favorites.

I’ve read at least something by all of them.  Not Comenius, who I think of as a writer on education; no idea what someone interested in literature might want to read.  And not Vondel.  Who the heck is Vondel?

Joost van den Vondel is the greatest early modern Dutch playwright.  I know little about Dutch literature and nothing about 17th century Dutch theater.  Nothing is close to what has made it into English.  But here we have an 1898 translation, by Leonard Charles van Noppen, of Vondel’s 1654 play Lucifer.  Good enough.

A faction of angels, led by Lucifer, is afraid of and insulted by the new creature Adam.

APOLLION: I covered with my wings mine eyes and face

That I might curb my thoughts and deep delight,

When erst she filled my gaze…

                                                        Their life consists

Alone in loving and in being loved –

One swept, one mutual joy, by then indulged

Perpetually, yet e’er unquenchable.  (Act I, pp. 277-8)

The bashful angel, who by the end of the play becomes one of the lords of Hell, embarrassed by sexy Eve is adorable.  The Lucifer faction debates the possibility of rebellion.  The loyalist faction tries to dissuade them.  The first four acts are static, with a lot of declarations and debates, and without the psychological intensity of Racine.  There is likely some political interest I do not care much about.  A scene where the future devils try to calm down their Luciferian followers, who are more radical than their leaders, clearly has an edge I only glimpse.  And anyway, I am looking for Carpeaux’s promised Baroque language, hidden, I know by the translation, the usual move of turning long Alexandrines into blank verse.

The civil war of the angels and the fall of the Lucifer faction occurs between Acts IV and Act V.  The victorious angles describe the battle.  The description is superb; here, finally, is the kind of writing I was hoping to find.  An angel is describing Lucifer in battle array:

Surrounded by his staff and retinue

In green, he, wickedly impelled by hate

Irreconcilable, in golden mail,

That brightly shone upon his martial vest

Of glowing purple, mounted then his car,

Whose golden wheels with rubies were emblazed.

The lion and dragon fell, prepared

For speedy flight, with backs sown full of stars

And to the chariot joined by pearly traces,

Panted for strife, and for destruction flamed.  (V, 407-8)

Etc., etc., for many colorful, inventive pages.  The angels counterattack:

… by his command

Begin by circling wheels to soar aloft,

To gain the wind-side of their battling foe,

Who also rises, but with heavier sail,

And finally to leeward slowly drifts:

As if one heavenward a falcon saw,

Mounting with pinions bold into the sky,

Ere that the drowsing herons are aware,

Who in a wood, hard by a pleasant mead,

Tremble with fright, when from their lofty nest

They see their dreaded foe.  (V, 411)

And the metaphor of the falcon and the heron goes on for several more lines.  The aerial maneuvering of the angels is first described as, really, a sea battle, familiar to the Dutch, before they angels are turned into birds in the extended metaphor.

I would have guessed Lucifer was a closet drama, but no, it was performed twice before being banned as irreligious.  What do I know about Dutch theater.

One great act.  A fortuitous find.  A bit like reading a retelling of the Ramayana or similar epic.

Edward III - This fellow is well read in poetry

I logically followed Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with the anonymous, but see below, Edward III (published 1596).  The first two acts look like a heterosexual parody of the Marlowe play, with King Edward swerving from strong to weak king when he suddenly falls in love with a married countess and threatens to ruin the kingdom for his passion.  Luckily this plotline is resolved at the end of Act II and Edward goes on to conquer France.  The last three acts cover the Battles of Crécy and Poitiers and the episode with the Burghers of Calais and other exciting scenes we all know from Froissart’s Chronicles.  They were exciting in Froissart, at least, although they are dramatically inert here.

There is one scene, though, before the war, Act II, Scene 1.  The lovestruck king wants to write a love letter.  Enter his secretary Lodowick.

This fellow is well read in poetry

and hath a lusty and persuasive spirit.  (p. 23)

They begin composing the letter.  Lodowick has problem understanding the assignment.

LODOWICK:          Write I to a woman?

KING EDWARD:  What beauty else could triumph on me

or who but women do our love-lays greet?

What, thinkest thou I bid thee praise a horse?  (24)

Lodowick is, I suppose, thinking of the previous king, but the horse shows how the scene works, the constant comic swing from love sonnet rhetoric to its deflation.  The scene is clearly written by someone familiar with the ongoing Elizabethan sonnet craze.  It is an extended mockery of sonnet writing.

One good joke is that the secretary does not get more than two lines written, and those are useless for the king’s lustful purpose.

LODOWICK:  What is the other fault my sovereign?

KING EDWARD:  Read o’er the line again.

LODOWICK:                                                     ‘More fair and chaste’

KING EDWARD:  I did not bid thee talk of chastity

To ransack so the treasure of her mind

For I had rather have her chased than chaste.

Out with the moon line, I will none of it

and let me have her likened to the sun

say she hath thrice more splendour than the sun

that her perfections emulate the sun

that she breeds sweets as plenteous as the sun

that she doth thaw cold winter like the sun

that she doth cheer fresh summer like the sun

that she doth dazzle gazers like the sun

and in this application to the sun

bid her be free and general as the sun

who smiles upon the basest weed that grows

as lovingly as on the fragrant rose.  (25-6)

It is a brilliant, funny scene all the way through.  I read Edward III in the 1996 Eric Sams edition titled Shakespeare’s Edward III: An early play restored to the canon, where the bulk of the book is devoted to demonstrating how the entire play was written by Shakespeare.  I am not sure why he wants to give those dull – let’s say, functional – last three acts to Shakespeare, but I do not need his sections on “The Image Cluster” and “Words Beginning with ‘un-‘” and so on to remember that in Sonnet 130, the hilarious insult poem where the Dark Lady has bad breath and an annoying voice, “[m]y mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” emphasis mine, or to see that “basest weed” appear in Sonnet 94, where it “outbraves his dignity.”  And I am looking at Sonnet 94 because later in the scene the father of the Countess urges her to be virtuous by literally quoting the final line of Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (32).

If Shakespeare wrote the scene, it is an ingenious self-parody.  It is so good I would be happy to give it to him, although the "chaste / chased" pun is a little obvious for him.  But then I feel a little bad for the anonymous hack playwright who, reading some version of Shakespeare’s sonnets, circulating in manuscript, thought it would be hilarious if the moony king in the play he was working on was an incompetent sonnet writer.  It’s the best thing the poor guy ever wrote and we want to attribute it to, who else, Shakespeare.

My fundamental problem with a lot of the attribution arguments is that they do not seem to recognize that playwrights can imitate, parody, mock, and plagiarize each other.  Counting words that begin with “un-“ is thin, thin, thin evidence.  But the scene even if not by Shakespeare is highly Shakespearian, a delight to read, and recommended to anyone who likes such things.  What you do with the rest of Edward III is your business.

Christopher Marlowe's Edward II - And now and then stab, as occasion serves

I take Doctor Faustus as Christopher Marlowe’s richest play but Edward the Second (performed 1592?, published 1594) as his best play-as-such.  Meaning structure, drama, pace, whatever we associate with the idea of the well-made play.  The pace is fast, the characters interact with each other rather than giving speeches, and the story hits plot points like a modern screenplay.  A big turn right in the middle, for example.  I believe in the 20th century it has been Marlowe’s most performed play.

So young Edward, at the death of his father, attains the throne, which means he can bring his boyfriend Gaveston back from banishment in France.  Edward’s nobility more or less rebels, assuming that the dissolute Gaveston will ruin the king, who is not that strong to begin with.  One of the rebels, the hothead young Mortimer, gets a taste for power, and goes too far.  Sympathy likely turns from the once-sensible nobles to poor King Edward, imprisoned in a filthy cell, murdered in a shocking manner.  Although the theme is a bit muted, Mortimer is where I find the usual Marlovian critique of power.  He has a point when the play begins, but the pursuit of power becomes its own goal.

Marlowe likely borrowed the “weak king” theme from Shakespeare’s Henry VI series, which were big hits; Shakespeare was clearly imitating Edward II, or so it looks to me, in Richard II (1595).

The great cost Marlowe paid for writing such a zippy play was a muting of his mighty line, his great poetry.  It is here, especially in the marvelous final act, but Edward II is more, let’s say, efficient, or maybe crisp, than the Tamburlaine plays or The Jew of Malta.

Still.  Here are a pair of minor courtiers throwing in their lot with King Edward and Gaveston.  One is a scholar, perhaps like Marlowe from Cambridge.  The weaselly striver Spenser advises him on how to succeed as a courtier:

      … you must cast the scholar off,

And learn to court it like a gentleman.

He begins with what actions do not make a courtier, for example:

Or holding of a napkin in your hand,

Or saying a long grace at table’s end…

Instead:

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

And now and then stab, as occasion serves.  (II.1, p. 462)

That last line, now that belongs in a Marlowe play.

The play begins with Gaveston, with his return to London.  He speaks in a more poetic manner.

Music and poetry is his [King Edwards’s] delight;

Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night,

Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;

And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,

Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay;

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,

With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,

To hide those parts which men delight to see,

Shall bathe him in a spring… (I.1, 436-7)

But other characters, with a show to put on, do not have time for this kind of talk, and Gaveston is killed halfway through the play for the crime of corrupting the king and being more interesting than the other characters.  Although once crushed, King Edward becomes a lot more interesting.  My imaginary Shakespeare’s realization, for Richard II, was that the last act ought to be the whole play.

I am back in The Complete Plays, the Penguin Classics edition, for the text and page numbers.

I’ll write about The Massacre at Paris in two weeks, and that is it for Marlowe.  Massacre is definitely not a well-made play, and the state of the text we have is terrible, but is it ever full of Marlowe.

What I Read in November 2025 – The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike

I only have one Marlowe play left to revisit.  I should start thinking about a set of plays for this winter.  I will likely read up to 1603, 1604, the end of the Elizabethan age.  Please suggest favorites.

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Astrophil and Stella (c. 1580), Philip Sidney – Kicking off the sonnet craze.

The Jew of Malta (1589?), Christopher Marlowe – I will point you here.

Henry VI, Part 3 (1590?) &

Henry VI, Part 1 (1591?), William Shakespeare – A bit on Part 3 over here.  Part 1 is as weak as I remember.  An early quickie prequel, perhaps slapped together while Shakespeare was working on Richard III.

Arden of Faversham (1591?), ??? – Quite good, really.

Doctor Faustus A (1592?/1604) &

Doctor Faustus B (1592?/1616), Christopher Marlowe – Some notes back here.  The line in the title is from Faustus’s great last scene, the A text.  The B text replaces the commas with periods – also good.

Richard III (1592?), William Shakespeare – Some weaknesses, but so many great scenes.

Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays (2014), Lawrence & Sally-Beth MacLean Manley – I had planned to look at this book, but it was so interesting that I read it.  The use of evidence is exemplary, meaning cautious.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival (2025), Stephen Greenblatt – Briefly reviewed.

FICTION

The Death of Virgil (1945), Hermann Broch – Why make art?

The Heat of the Day (1948), Elizabeth Bowen – London during, or just after, the Blitz.  A bit of a spy story, surprisingly.  Bowen’s mix of Flaubert and James, or what I think of as Flaubert and James, is always interesting.

The One That Got Away (1992), Percival Everett & Dirk Zimmer – A picture book about cowboys and numbers, written and illustrated for little children.

Vaim (2025), Jon Fosse– Look, a new novel!  The Fosse seemed slight to me, the characters much simpler than the artist I spent so much time with in Septology.  This is the first of a trilogy, so maybe it is all going somewhere.  I enjoyed the voice of the characters; Damion Searls is an ideal translator.

Shadow Ticket (2025), Thomas Pynchon  - Another new novel.  Against the Day (2006) was the last big book I read before starting Wuthering Expectations.  I guess it exhausted me, and my interests wandered elsewhere, so I skipped the next two novels, but I am now well-rested and, since Pynchon is 88, I am amazed this book exists.  Talk about simpler, compared to, say, Gravity’s Rainbow, with which it has many connections, but anyone sympathetic to what Pynchon does should be happy with this book.  It features a number of things that glow in the dark; quite a lot of cheese, and cheez, and lots of information about the American cheezscape.  Biblioklept has put together some useful and entertaining annotations.  I hope someone from Milwaukee is doing the same for all of the Wisconsin-specific detail.  It amuses me to think of 80-some year-old Pynchon spending his time making sure he squeezes all of the good details out of 1930 Milwaukee.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Os cem melhores contos brasileiros do século (The 100 Nest Brazilian Short Stories of the Century, 1903-38), various – I read the first thirteen stories, through the 1930s.  Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos – plausibly among the best Brazilian short stories of the century, yes.  And just hard enough for my Portuguese study.

Les gommes (The Erasers, 1953), Alain Robbe-Grillet – I read Robbe-Grillet’s fussy, screwball anti-mystery ages ago in English.  I enjoyed revisiting it, although I have less of a clue than ever why so many people thought this was going to be the future of the novel.  I would not have complained, but why, why?

 

Marlowe's restless Doctor Faustus - I’ll burn my books!

In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the great scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of power and knowledge.  After learning and doing everything he wants he spends Acts III and IV playing an increasingly stupid series of pranks on anyone and everyone, including himself.  In Act V, in one of the great scenes of the English stage, the bill comes due and we all go home having learned an edifying moral lesson.

This is Marlowe’s richest play, really packed with ideas and conceits.  Stephen Greenblatt, in Dark Renaissance (2025), pushes a strong autobiographical reading onto this play more than any other.  He likes the idea that Marlowe sold his soul to Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, and has lightly shifted his own dilemma onto Faust.

My reading is also pretty autobiographical.  Marlowe’s great subject is power, pure power in the Tamburlaine plays, wealth as power in The Jew of Malta, knowledge as power here.  In Doctor Faustus, though, he is more explicit about a subtext of the earlier plays, that the characters love the pursuit of power but have little idea of what to do with it.  The great motivation of Faustus (and Barabas, and Tamburlaine) is restlessness.  He, and they, and I suspect Marlowe, are easily bored.

We first see him with his books, leafing through Aristotle:

Sweet analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravished me.  (I.1, p. 7)

But he is now bored with philosophy, law, medicine,, theology.  Magic is just the next subject for the restless scholar to master, and then, presumably, although somehow he cannot see this, to abandon.  Mephistopheles gives him a set of books containing all the secrets of the universe, and that is that, everything he wanted to know with no effort.  What’s next?

Thus the strange middle of Doctor Faustus, where after learning grows stale Faustus resorts to pranks and tricks to keep himself entertained, foreshadowed by an earlier clown scene:

ROBIN  O, this is admirable!  Here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and I’faith, I mean to search some circles for my own use.  Now I will make all the maidens in our parish dance naked  before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw yet.  (II.2, 26)

The brilliant Faustus has trouble coming up with uses of his endless power much more interesting than making the girls dance naked.

The prank scenes are pretty silly, and could easily be replaced by other, similar scenes, and perhaps sometimes were, but I think they carry Marlowe’s themes.

I wonder to what extent the audience for Doctor Faustus was genuinely shocked by what Marlowe put on stage.

FAUSTUS  [Cuts his arm.] Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee

I cut my arm, and with my proper blood

Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s.  (II.1, 22)

I imagine there was a shiver of real danger here.  The English at one point had plenty of devils hopping around the stage in the old miracle plays, all banned at this point as too dangerously Catholic, but were there, in scenes like this, any sense that maybe we should not be seeing such a thing, even in a play?  A number of good theater stories about Doctor Faustus have survived. The actors realizing that there is an extra devil on the stage, that sort of thing.

My shivers are more modern, but they are right there in the text.

FAUSTUS  Where are you damned?

MEPHISTOPHELES  In hell.

FAUSTUS  How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHELES  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.  (I.3, 17)

Mephistopheles is an existentialist.  Faustus is a materialist, but then so in Mephistopheles.

FAUSTUS  Come, I think hell’s a fable.

MEPHISTOPHELES  Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.  (II.1, 24)

An amusing conceit of Marlowe’s is that the devil is always honest with Faustus.

I wonder, almost, if I overrate Doctor Faustus because of the superb last scene – the last two pages – where we watch Faustus in his last hour along with a ticking clock.  It is a great piece of dramatic psychology.  I wonder how fast various actors have taken it.

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

O, I’ll leap up to my God!  Who pulls me down?  (V.2, 52)

Until the last minute:

Ugly hell, gape not!  Come not, Lucifer!

I’ll burn my books!  Ah, Mephistopheles!  (V.2, 53)

Only in his last breath will he give up those books.

Doctor Faustus appeared in or near 1593, and survived in two texts, A (1604) and B (1616), with B substantially longer, and with both showing evidence of post-Marlowe tinkering.  I read them both in the 2005 Norton Critical Edition, source of the page references above.  All of my quotes are, arbitrarily, from the A text.