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.

 

 

The Tragedie of Gorboduc - To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps

King Gorboduc, his head heavy from wearing the crown of England, divides his kingdom between his two sons.  One son quickly murders the other; the grieving mother (!) murders the surviving son; the outraged populace rises to murder the queen and poor, hapless King Gorboduc; England collapses into civil war. 

This sounds so exciting!  And look at all of those hints of later plays, of the history plays and King Lear.  The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1562, pub. 1565) is not exciting.  It is static and anti-dramatic.  It barely has characters. The action is presented in the dumb shows that lead each act, and in messenger speeches.  The play is mostly a mix of political speeches, advice to the king and so on, and messenger speeches.

The model is Seneca curiously mixed with English morality plays.  Seneca’s characters declaim in long set-speeches, but with an emotional intensity, building to pathos or horror, that is absent in Gorboduc, which was written by a couple of lawyers, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, for a performance before an audience of lawyers.  The warning about the dangers of a weak monarchy are the real point, the real plot, of the play.  No surprise that it was published relatively soon after its performance, that a particular audience wanted the text.

I know this sounds dull, and I do not know how it would be to sit through the play, but I found it highly readable.  I am now used to theater more undramatic than this, all kinds of crazy anti-plays, and I will note that the most produced play in America last season was Heidi Schrek’s What the Constitution Means to Me (2017).

A few scenes get close to later drama.  The queen has a two-page soliloquy about murdering her own son where she would, in Seneca or Racine, whip herself up into a frenzy.  Maybe we in the audience are horrified or somehow sympathetic:

Never, O wretch, this womb conceived thee;

Nor never bode I painful throes for thee.

Changeling to me thou art, and not my child,

Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew.

Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature’s work…  (IV.1, 67-71)

The queen is more a type than a character – she has barely been on stage before this scene – and the ideas in this speech do not really develop.  But I can see the future in it.  I can imagine Marlowe or Shakespeare reading it and wanting to fix it.  I can also imagine a less anarchically commercial English theater developing in a more Racine-like direction.

Gorboduc is the first published English play written in blank verse.  This is really why we read it.  Henry Howard’s partial translation of The Aeneid in blank verse had been published just a few years earlier.  The whole point of the exercise is that Roman poetry did not rhyme, so how can that be duplicated in English and still be interesting poetry?  Howard’s Virgil was a success, wonderful stuff, and I am not surprised that these two educated lawyers borrowed it for their pseudo-Seneca.  Their blank verse is competent, and they were right, it creates a kind of speech that sounds natural but lends itself to elaboration, that is pleasant to hear and read and not so bad for an actor to memorize.  Sackville and Norton great virtue is clarity, but they have their poetic moments:

And ye, O gods, send us the welcome death,

To shed our blood in field, and leave us not

In loathsome life to linger out our days,

To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps,

That now roll down upon the wretched land…  (V.ii, 105-10)

Almost an Anglo-Saxon poetic quality in those lines.  Compared to what Marlowe or Webster or Shakespeare will do with blank verse, sure, sure, no comparison.

I read Gorboduc in a 1974 collection titled Minor Elizabethan Tragedies which reprints a 1910 volume titled Minor Elizabethan Drama.

Next week I will glance at Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Christopher Marlowe (which I have not read) and poke at the idea of authorship. Then in two weeks we will begin reading Christopher Marlowe with what feels to me like the early, even unformed, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

The magician becomes a bureaucrat - what Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is about

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier, tr. by Pablo Medina (2017).

What is this novel about.  It is about the Haitian Revolution, although not in the sense that it is a substitute for reading The Black Jacobins (1938).

It is about – I am looking at the translator’s Afterword – “the clash of cultures and races; it is a book about overwhelming social injustice; it is, above all, a book about the good and the evil that people will inflict on one another” (133).  True up to the last item; I do not know where in the novel anyone is inflicting good.  There is certainly plenty of evil.  “Like Mark Twain before him, Carpentier tackles slavery head-on and in so doing helps us to understand the awful legacy of racial discrimination with which our society still struggles.”  I doubt anyone reading this post of mine will improve their understanding of racial discrimination at all by reading The Kingdom of This World, but maybe some readers at a much earlier point in their education will?

The novel is about the failures of Surrealism, and it is also a positive argument for a particular kind of post-Surrealism that Carpentier calls “the marvelous real.”  Let’s look at the novel’s prose.  I’m on the second page here:

While his master was being shaved, Ti Noël was able to study carefully the four wax heads propped on the shelf by the entrance.  The wigs’ curls framed the fixed faces before spreading into a pool of ringlets on the red runner.  Those heads seemed as real – and as dead, given their motionless eyes – as the talking head that a traveling charlatan had brought to the Cap years before as a ploy to help him sell an elixir that cured toothaches and rheumatism.  By charming coincidence, the butcher shop next door displayed the skinned heads of calves, which had the same waxy quality.  (4)

I want to quote the entire page, I enjoy it so.

… Ti Noël distracted himself  by thinking that the heads of white gentlemen were being served at the same table as the discolored veal heads…  All they needed was a bed of lettuce or radishes cut in the shape of fleur-de-lys as adornment.

The novel is more or less written like this.  The point of view moves around.  There is, for example, an amusing digressive section starring Josephine Bonaparte.  Ti Noël becomes the protagonist because, essentially, he survives the violence.  Let’s see what happens to him at the end of the novel.

Tired of risky transformations, Ti Noël used his extraordinary powers to change himself into a goose and thus live among the birds that had taken residence in his domain.  (128)

Humans transforming into animals is one of the novel’s running themes.  Why, I see an example up above, way back on page 4.  Now, even within the realm of fiction it is not likely that Ti Noël transformed into a goose.  Sadly, he is rejected by the other “real” geese, because “no matter if he tried for years, he would never have access to the rites and roles of the clan” (129).

Ti Noël believes he becomes a goose, though, and given how narrative works, what is the difference between him believing he is a goose and actually being a goose.

I think you may be able to detect a little bit of Revolutionary political symbolism in the earlier passage, and the story of the geese has a parable-like quality.  The entire ending, the last three chapters, is full of marvelous symbolic writing, all with this Surrealist character, things transforming into other things, or things in illogical places for logical reasons.  Real and also marvelous.

I might have figured out Carpentier’s argument with Surrealism from the novel itself, but in the Preface he openly says all this.

By dint of wanting to elicit the marvelous at every turn, the magician becomes a bureaucrat.  Invoked by means of the usual formulas that make of certain paintings a monotonous junk pile of rubbery clocks, tailor’s mannequins, or vague phallic monuments, the marvelous never goes beyond an umbrella or a lobster or a sewing machine or whatever, lying on a dissection table inside a sad room in a rocky desert.  Imaginative poverty, Unamuno used to say, is the consequence of learning codes by heart (xiv-v).

Although there are some recognizable targets in this passage, only poor Yves Tanguy is directly attacked for his “troubling imaginative poverty” in “painting the same stony larvae under the same gray sky for twenty-five years” (xv).  The de-bureaucratizing solution, by the way, is to go to America, Haiti for example, and write about what is actually there.  “For what is the story of all of the Americas if not the chronicle of the marvelous and the real?” (xx).  Americans still believe in magic and miracles.

I will note that in the last two paragraphs of his Afterword, Medina takes up these more aesthetic ideas.  He also translated that Preface.

I will also note that, although I have not read the older translation or compared it to the Spanish at all, Medina’s translation seemed wonderful, energetic and clear.  Brightly lit, like freshly restored baroque architecture.

Carpentier’s subsequent novel, The Lost Steps (1953), strongly recommended to fans of the Pixar movie Up (2009), is also about aesthetics, Modernism versus Romanticism, say.  It is too long since I read Explosion in a Cathedral (1962) to argue that it is mostly about books, really, but now I wonder.

Carpentier praises Wilfredo Lam in the Preface so I put a contempory Lam painting, La Jungla (1943), up above.

Gammer Gurton's Needle - it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter

 

Gammer Gurton loses her needle (solution to the mystery: distracted by her cat she forgets it in her servant Hodge’s pants).  A wandering stranger uses the hubbub to sow chaos for some reason, which gives the play a kind of plot, which for something like this is just a way to give the gags some order.  The stranger wants chaos but of course  so do we, the readers, the audience.  That is the point of comedy.

Such is Gammer Gurton’s Needle.  I date it near but somewhat after Ralph Roister Doister, so mid-1550s.  It was possibly printed in 1563 and certainly printed in 1575.  There we go.  The authorship is a total hash.  The author is one or another Cambridge don, writing a holiday entertainment performed by and for an audience of teenage boys.

They presumably found it hilarious.

Tib.  See, Hodge, what’s this may it not be within it?

Hodge. Break it, fool, with thy hand, and see an thou canst find it.

Tib. Nay, break it you, Hodge, according to your word.

Hodge.  Gog’s sides! Fie! It stinks; it is a cat’s turd!  (Act !, Scene v)

As a character says later, “An thadst seen him, Diccon, it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter” (IV.iii).  Gammer Gurton’s Needle is rather more earthy than the English comedies that would follow it.  The student of Shakespeare soon learns that anything that looks like a dirty joke probably is.  Such is true here, too.

Gammer.  For these and ill luck together, as knoweth Cock, my boy,

Have stuck away my dear neele, and robber me of my joy,

My fair long straight neele, that was mine only treasure;

The first day of my sorrow is, and last end of my pleasure!  (I.iv)

The play has an outstanding cat, Gib, who sadly never appears on stage, such were the limits of mid-16th century theatrical special effects.  In Act III, scene iv, for example, Gib “stands me gasping behind the door, as though her wind hath faileth” – has she swallowed the lost needle!  The characters debate what to do – “Groper her, ich say, methinks ich feel it; does not prick your hand?” – but the cat stays behind the door the whole time.

Whoever the author was, he knew how to have some fun with the language, which is again in rhyming couplets but with more North English rural dialect.

My guts they yawl-crawl, and all my belly rumbleth;

The puddings cannot lie still, each one over other tumbleth.  (II.i.)

Or these two old ladies screaming at each other:

Gammer.          Thou wert as good as kiss my tail!

Thou slut, thou cut, thou rakes, thou jakes! Will not shame make thee hide thee?

Chat.  Thou scald, thou bald, thou rotten, thou glutton!  I will no longer chide thee,

But I will teach thee to keep home.  (III.iii)

And the humor deepens when I remember that these are two teenage boys dressed as old women shouting these lines for an audience of teenage boys.  This is what we call classic humor.

Next week I switch to tragedy, with Gorboduc (1561) by Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, written and performed for young lawyers and full of important lessons and Classical learning and so on.  It will be a tonal shift.

What I Read in August 2025 - But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling

I have been learning a lot about Elizabethan literature.  Next month we will see what good it does me.  I am enjoying myself.  The title quotation is from Ralph Roister Doister.

I plan to put up a post about Marlowe’s first – probably his first – play, Dido, Quen of Carthage, on September 29, and in the meantime will write about some plays preceding Marlowe.

 

FICTION

Ralph Roister Doister (1552, perhaps), Nicholas Udall – enjoyed over here.

The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh – amusing and minor.  Waugh briefly visited Los Angeles and imagined Disneyland (as a cemetery), just a few years before it was built.  Perceptive.

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier – Outstanding debut novel about the Haitian Revolution.  Or about the failures of Surrealism.  I should write a longer note on this one.

Franny and Zooey (1955 / 1957 / 1961), J. D. Salinger – I enjoyed Nine Stories (1953) and enjoyed “Franny” (1955) all right but boy “Zooey” (1957) was a real nerve saw.  I am amazed that New Yorker readers had so much patience for Salinger’s dialectical Buddhist fiction.

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Samuel R. Delany – I found Delany’s first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), creative but clumsy and I suppose this novel, his fifth, is the same, but the level of creativity is even higher.  It was mostly written over four days and sometimes feels like it, but it is overflowing with exciting conceits.  The basis of the plot is literary criticism, the interpretation of the title ballad.  To do literary criticism, the protagonist must visit ruined spaceships and befriend a space monster. Delany was – let me go look this up – 22, 23 years-old.

 

POETRY

The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1948-89), Yehuda Amichai

Every Sound Is Not a Wolf (2025), Alberto Rios

 

PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME / MADNESS

Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951), Maurice Herzog – enjoyed back here.

 

IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Os Escravos (1865), Castro Alves – Three abolitionist poems by a Brazilian teenager who wanted to be Victor Hugo and/or Byron and died young after introducing Romanticism to Brazilian poetry.  I have little idea how good these poems are, but this is pretty exciting.

Les voix du silence (1951), André Malraux – A work of imaginative art criticism by French literature’s great con man, in effect his successful application to be French Minister of Culture.  I really should write a longer note about this book, some of which is highly interesting.

Um estranho em Goa (2000), José Eduardo Agualusa – An Angolan writer’s autofiction about a visit to Goa, a place about which I knew nothing, which is why I read the book. Plus it is at my language level, plus it is a reasonable length, plus, I suppose, many other things.  The travel writing aspects were of high interest, the fiction less so, but fine.  I hope the plot line where Agualusa halfheartedly tries to buy, mostly out of morbid curiosity, the living heart of the local saint is fiction.  Some of Agualusa’s books have been translated into English recently but not this one.  I hope to read another someday.

 

 

Ralph Roister Doister, among the first regular English comedies - Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop

Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1550, published 1567) once had the distinction of being the first comedy in English.  Please see this 1911 edition of the play calling it “the first regular English comedy.”  I do not know what 19th century critics meant by “regular” but this was a 19th century idea, as scholars began to work seriously on figuring which plays survived from the 16th century, that Ralph Roister Doister was the first English comedy.  It is not the first, regular or otherwise.  Let’s return to this issue.

A braggart soldier type (“I am sorry God made me so comely, doubtless,” Act I, Scene ii), the title character, decides, urged on by a parasite type, Matthew Merrygreek, to woo a widow, who is engaged and not very interested.  The big comic misunderstanding involves the mispunctuation of a love letter.  The result is a battle between the widow and her maids, armed with their “tools” (for sewing and weaving and so on) versus Roister Doister, a pail on his head, and his idiot servants.  Perhaps there is a goose involved:

Tibet Talkapace:                                   Shall I go fetch our goose?

Dame Custance:  What to do?

TT:  To yonder captain I will turn her loose:

An she gape and hiss at him, as she doth at me,

I durst jeapord my hand she will make him flee.  (IV. viii)

The battle scene is a bit vague, with lots of room for whatever gags the director can think of.  As you see, the play is written in competent rhyming couplets.

The braggart soldier, and more or less the plot is from Miles Gloriosus (2^nd cent. BCE) by Plautus.  The parasite is from English morality plays.  The servants, the goose, the songs, the names, and the whole tone of the thing are likely from English popular plays, whatever touring groups were performing at fairs.

The names are wonderful.  Tristram Trusty, Margery Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace.  I’ve remembered Ralph Roister Doister’s name since I first saw it in some potted history of English theater nearly forty years ago.  The first English comedy should be titled Ralph Roister Doister.

The domestic detail is also a delight.  Here are the maids early on, at work:

Margery Mumblecrust: Well, ye will sit down to your work anon, I trust.

Tibet Talkapace: Soft fire maketh sweet malt, good Madge Mumblecrust.

MM: And sweet malt maketh jolly good ale for the nones.

TT: Which will slide down the lane without any bones.   [Sings.

Old brown bread-crusts must have much good mumbling,

But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling.  (I.iii)

The play is slackly paced giving plenty of its time to watching the maids sew and sing.  It is not exactly digressive, but like a musical.  Let’s stop and have a song or whatever:

With every woman he is in some love’s pang.

Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;

Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps;

Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop,

And the howlet out of an ivy bush should whoop…  (II.i)

Nicholas Udall, the likely author, was a schoolmaster.  He likely wrote this play for performance by his schoolboys.  Maybe he was the first schoolmaster to rewrite a Plautus play for his students, although I doubt it.  He may have been the first to make his rewritten Plautus so inventively English.  It could easily be much, much less English.  The Englishness is the best part.

The title character is a direct ancestor of Falstaff, although, remembering the pail on Roister Doister’s head, the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff in the laundry basket.

The play is also a little step towards the creation of the professional boy’s companies, the aspect of Elizabethan theater I find hardest to imagine.  Fourteen year-old boys performing plays at the level of The Alchemist, how did that work?  But I can imagine them doing Ralph Roister Doister.

Next Monday I will write about another early boy’s comedy, and is it ever, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen - Maurice Herzog's Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak

Books that generate other books, books that are first in the line, interest me.  Despite little interest in mountaineering, I read Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951, tr. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith) by Maurice Herzog, the subject of the book well summarized in the title, a book that led to many other books.

Annapurna was a big hit, and soon after there were books by other members of the expedition, and a parody novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle (William Ernest Bowman, 1956) and a feminist response.  That response was to climb Annapurna, but also to write a book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (Arlene Blum, 1980).  The book inspired a great deal of mountaineering, Himalayan and otherwise.  The last line, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” (311), apparently became famously inspirational  among crazy people, by which I mean mountain climbers, but I am more interested in what inspired people to write books.

The story of the 1950 French and Swiss expedition in Nepal to climb whichever 8,000-meter peak was easiest, using state-of-the-art techniques, is a terrific adventure story, “terrific” in the current sense (entertaining) but also in the old sense (terrifying, these climbers are out of their minds), and it is the latter that really surprised me.  Annapurna is study in the variety of human taste for risk, or to put it in Wuthering Expectations terms* the taste for the sublime.

“Sublime” has softened into an inelegant variation for “very beautiful,” but I again mean the old aesthetic sense of beauty that is frightening, beauty that is trying to kill you, like the view from the top of an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak. 

This was quite different [from the Alps].  An enormous gulf was between me and the world.  This was a different universe – withered, desert, lifeless; a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired.  We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward.  I thought of the famous ladder of St. Theresa of Avila.  Something clutched at my heart.  (207)

Herzog does not normally write like this.  He is typically a model of clarity.  But atop Annapurna he goes on for three pages like this, while his companion keeps insisting they head back before the bad weather hits them.

Some additional fragments:

How wonderful life would now become! (208)

Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. (209)

 Before disappearing into the couloir I gave one last look at the summit which would henceforth be all our joy and all our consolation. (210)

The latter is well into the descent which at that point has become terrible and will get much worse.  But Herzog remains captured by his sublime experience, wavering between the struggle to descend and an obliterating acceptance of imminent death.

Given the practicalities of the earlier part of the book, the organization of camps and supplies, the turn towards St. Theresa was fascinating.  It’s those camps and supplies, along with the team doctor, that save Herzog.  If you happen to have strong feelings about needles I recommend that you skip chapter 16, “The Retreat,” which is full of horrors (frostbite treatments).  Perhaps skim the next couple of chapters as well, although the worst is over.

The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly where I am still having rather a difficult time.  (11)

I suppose another reason for the rise of the mountaineering book in the is that explorers had used up other parts of the world.  The Arctic and Antarctic had been exhausted as subjects for books.  I will note that while Roald Amundsen insisted on the scientific value of his pointless feats, Herzog and his team have no illusion that climbing a Himalayan mountain has any value beyond the adventure.  The legendary Alpine guide Lionel Terray, one of the members of the team who got Herzog down off Annapurna, titled his 1961 memoir Conquistadors of the Useless.  Useless except for generating books.

Page numbers are from the first edition, which has a helpful fold-out map in the back.

 

* See this old post about Little House on the Prairie for more on the sublime.