Not Shakespeare for the fall - Ben Jonson's best, plenty of revenge, and the New Shakespeareans

Time to get back to the Age of Shakespeare, the non-Shakespeare parts.  Please read along if it strikes you.  Last spring’s reading list was a bit of a trip to graduate school; this fall’s syllabus is nothing but masterpieces of one kind or another.

A new king was in London, and a new court, with new tastes, and more importantly for my purposes some new writers, the best of them deeply influenced by William Shakespeare.  The London theater audience had perhaps grown a little tired of the endless revivals of The Spanish Tragedy and had developed a sophisticated sub-audience interested in new voices.

Here is my plan, which I will surely meet occasionally, a new play every other Monday, with some other related topic on the other Mondays:

I have previously read all of these but The Roaring Girl.  Jonson hits his peak, one great, original comedy after another, with one more to come in 1614.  Two great revenge tragedies, the name of the one suggesting that we are at a turning point for the genre.  Chapman’s play is a historical tragedy.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle is another unique comedy, full of surprises, easy to recommend to everyone (Jonson can get a little obscure).  This soon becomes the age of “Beaumont & Fletcher,” the age of tragicomedy.  I picked A Maid’s Tragedy almost arbitrarily, out of many outstanding candidates.

The Shakespeare-influenced new writers are John Fletcher, Thomas Middleton, and John Webster.  Two would collaborate with Shakespeare, and the other hung around Shakespeare’s theater company when he was a dirty street urchin.  I hope to read several more Middleton plays from this period but his peak, by reputation is in the next decade.

Here is a bit of what else was happening in English theater:

All of the years, I should point out, are approximate, but they are likely a lot more accurate than the last time I did this exercise.

The expanded second edition of Francis Bacon’s Essays appeared in 1612.  The best lyric poet of the period, John Donne, published The First Anniversary in 1611, but was otherwise utterly uninterested in publication.  The other best poet, Ben Jonson, would start publishing in a few years, but not quite yet.

Jonson also wrote for the courtly masques of Inigo Jones, the great innovator of spectacle, of pure theater.  I have read a handful of Jonson’s masques, and they are often poetic marvels.  I hope to read many more soon.

Any requests?  I can take requests.  This is exciting set of plays.

What I Read in July 2026 – Some links found verbal form, others remained mere promises, mist, soft approximations of thought.

Soon I will put up a fall schedule for my plunge back into non-Shakespearian plays, from say 1604 to 1614, an exciting stretch.  Middleton, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher will dominate.

 

SHAKESPEAREAN

The Adventures of Lady Egeria (1585), W. C. – Half tedious, half confounding, this is an early English novel in a modern edition, lovingly edited by Steven Moore as part of his project to read every old novel ever written.  For a long stretch it is kind of a prosified Gorboduc, speeches in various rhetorical modes warning rulers against flatterers.  And then suddenly the character I though was the main villain is, along with his army, devoured by an enormous flock of ravens.  The novel grows more gruesome and Gothic – necromancers, incest, so much incest, what is it with the Elizabethans and incest.  The author has no idea what he is doing; his tone becomes increasingly objective, or deadened, as if he is stunned by his own story.  An amazing artifact.

Antony & Cleopatra (1606?), William Shakespeare – I thought about using lines from Act IV, Scene 4 in the title of the post: “False, false.  This, this.”  What seems to be happening is that his assistant Eros (!) is putting Antony in his armor before battle, and doing something wrong.  What is psychologically interesting is that similar repetitions occur in Antony’s lines seven times in a few minutes (“Well, well,” “Rarely, rarely”) a brilliant expression of his pre-battle jitters.  He appears to shake it off and return to his confident self once his armor is on.  The pleasures of Shakespeare at his plainest.

Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2007), Tiffany Stern – Only the first 40% of the book, covering the Shakespearian theater. Those early theater companies were putting on a new play or two every week, alongside constant rotation of older plays.  I wanted to know how that worked.  Stern squeezes everything about of the abundant but extremely fragmented evidence about rehearsals and performance.  You have read some of that evidence yourself, in the rehearsal scenes in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Someday I may finish the sections on Restoration and 18th century theater, especially since the book is outstanding, a model of argument and the use of evidence.

FICTION

Darker than You Think (1940/1948), Jack Williamson – Williamson is one of the Grand Masters of science fiction, I read here and there, but I could not name another of his books.  This one, much more of a horror novel with some science sprinkled in, I know since some later writers admire it for its genuine weirdness.  Every ordinary novelistic element of the book – characterization, exposition, pacing, prose – has problems but sometimes Williamson finds some original imagery built on a disturbing tone.  Are there evil books?  Is this one of them?

Rocannon's World (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin – Her first novel, almost a light science fiction parody of The Lord of the Rings.

Assumption (2011), Percival Everett – A true postmodernist, Everett loves genres, and this is a genuine mystery novel, or really three novellas, a series, as is standard in the genre, handily collected under one cover.  True mystery fans may not be so happy with where Everett ends up.  I was happy.  Aside from his short story “The Fix,” this novel is Everett’s most direct interrogation of his – I mean, his characters’, but really his – “savior complex.”

Artificial Condition (2018), Martha Wells – The second Murderbot story.  Maybe a little too much about our pal Murderbot for my tastes, as opposed to just accompanying him on a sardonic adventure, but that is I suppose the cost of creating a series.

Fulgentius (2020), César Aira – About a Roman general, pacifying the provinces, who is also somehow an avant-garde playwright.  Someday I may tire of Aira’s fiction about the fictionality of fiction, but not yet.  The sentence in the post’s title is on p. 152.

A Flash of Darkness (2023), M. M. De Voe – A collection of weird stories, many of them in the genre we have been calling “horror” for some reason.  Smartly written and conceived.  If only I liked horror more.

NOT FICTION

Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay (2006), Franklin Burroughs – I live near Merrymeeting Bay and have been exploring it a bit, but I would recommend this book of essays about various aspects of this unusual meeting place of rivers and the sea to anyone who likes books about, say, Sand County, Wisconsin or places like that.  Anyone who likes turtles or ducks.

The British Are Coming (2019), Rick Atkinson – It has been so long since I read a big narrative history, a history without a methodology section.  Outstanding at what it does – personalities, battles – but comfortable with the bigger picture.  At some point, long ago, I exhausted my interest in the American Revolution, but enough time has passed that it has returned, I guess.  One amusing detail is that in this big history in the tradition of Gibbon, Gibbon himself appears occasionally, commenting on events in his letters.

 

POETRY

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

Ars Poeticas (2025), Juliana Spahr

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE & I GUESS SPANISH

A Farsa (1903), Raul Brandão – A miserable novel about an old servant, a maid, whose life is consumed by resentment and hatred.  But it’s a life!  Full of purpose.  Brandão is a superb and unusual writer, something of a Symbolist, more concerned with image and symbol and emotional movement than narrative.  How sad this has not been translated, but who would read it?

Los versos del Capitán (1952), Pablo Neruda – To my surprise I found myself reading the Spanish side of the facing-page translation.  Studying Portuguese has been good for my Spanish.  This is the Il Postino period of  Neruda’s life, in exile, in love, the ambitious Canto General completed.  These poems are extremely easy.  Maybe I should look for more easy Spanish poems.

Les heures heureuses (The Happy Hours, 2023), Pascal Quignard – One of those books that is going to connect all of the things, through fiction, essay, aphorism, memoir, whatever he’s got.  Possibly too French for my tastes, meaning the rhetoric gets pretty gassy.