Thomas Mann filled a lot of my time, alongside the non-Shakespearian stuff. Just two plays to go in this round, George Chapman’s All Fools and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan.
NOT SHAKESPEARE
Selected Poems (1593-1630), Michael Drayton – The line
in the title is from his sonnet 61, among the few that really stand with
Shakespeare’s best. How many great poems
must one write to be a great poet?
The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – The best play I
picked for this round of Not Shakespeare.
Next fall they will almost all be this good or better. Discussed over here.
A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood –
Weepy melodrama, poked at here.
The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), anonymous – Simple-minded
true crime on the London stage.
Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers (2026), Darren
Freebury-Jones – Freebury-Jones is a leading scholar in the world of
attribution – which bits of which plays belong to whom. I have avoided looking too closely at the
field, suspecting I would rather not know how it works. I may have been right. I should write about my doubts, but that
could turn into work.
FICTION
The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), L. Sprague de Camp
and Fletcher Pratt – A psychiatrist is flung into the world of the Norse myths,
and then into The Faerie Queene.
The fun of these two amusing novellas, in a move away from pulp, is the
modern hero’s attempts to figure out and apply the rules of magic in each
world. I enjoyed revisiting this book
but I wonder if I should have waited longer.
I had last read them 35 years ago; maybe 45 would have been better.
An Inspector Calls (1945), J. B. Priestly – Looked at
askance in this post.
Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann – Narrowly considered
here and here.
POETRY
Studies for and Actress and Other Poems (1973) &
Selected Poems (1944-73), Jean Garrigue
The Static Element: Selected Poems (1955-79), Nathan
Zach
ART CRITICISM
The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and
the Cracks in Reality
IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE
Dix ans sous terre (1933), Norbert Casteret –
Casteret was a great French spelunker, an expert in the caves of the Pyrenees,
who loved nothing more than plunging into an icy subterranean river to find out
if it went anywhere. Sometimes it did,
giving Casteret credit for some superb discoveries of prehistoric art among
other things. My brittle, taped-up copy
is in the photo. Highly interesting and
recommended to people who like books about madmen who do things I cannot
imagine doing. The English book Ten
Years Under the Earth is, I believe, a somewhat abridged combination of
Casteret’s first two books.
Os Cem Melhores Contos Brasileiros do Século (The Hundred
Best Brazilian Stories of the Century, 1940-59), various – A few months ago
I read the earlier stories, through the 1930s, in this valuable anthology. The stories from the next couple of decades
seemed less original, more like what was going on elsewhere in the world, but
also more difficult, so who knows how well I read them. On to the 1960s, someday.
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