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.