Monday, January 12, 2026

What I Read in December 2025 – We ain’t gonna eat that.

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I am not so interested in writing a longer summary of my year in reading, so I will put that here.  Finishing the massive The Story of the ...
Tuesday, December 30, 2025

Marlowe's Massacre at Paris - And so let's forward to the massacre!

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Saving the worst for last, it’s Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592?, published soon after), a poor play that is full of Marl...
Sunday, December 21, 2025

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

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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. ...
4 comments:
Saturday, December 20, 2025

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

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How I find books: Andrei The Untranslated posted a list of Baroque writers from Otto Maria Carpeaux’s massive História da Literatura Ocid...
Friday, December 19, 2025

Edward III - This fellow is well read in poetry

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I logically followed Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with the anonymous, but see below, Edward III (published 1596).  The first two acts l...
2 comments:
Monday, December 15, 2025

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

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I take Doctor Faustus as Christopher Marlowe’s richest play but Edward the Second (performed 1592?, published 1594) as his best play-as-su...
Friday, December 12, 2025

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

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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,...
5 comments:
Sunday, December 7, 2025

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

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In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the great scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of power and knowle...
Wednesday, November 26, 2025

What I Read in October 2025 – What a simple daily pleasure.

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October was so long ago.  It is almost December.  Why do I write these. MARLOWE AND SO ON The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?), ???...
2 comments:
Tuesday, November 25, 2025

Arden of Faversham, an early true-crime murder farce - Oaths are words, and words is wind, / And wind is mutable.

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Arden of Faversham (c. 1591, pub. 1592) is a true-crime play, a dramatization of a famous forty-year-old murder case.  An adulterous wife, ...
Tuesday, November 18, 2025

Marlowe's hilarious farce The Jew of Malta - How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead

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A conceptual innovator himself, Christopher Marlowe responded to other innovations.  In The Jew of Malta (1589, maybe), he wrote, following...
2 comments:
Wednesday, November 12, 2025

This may all be a fantasy - Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Chrsitopher Marlowe

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Potted bio of Christopher Marlowe: Son of a semi-literate Canterbury cobbler.  He impressed someone and became a scholarship student first a...
2 comments:
Monday, November 10, 2025

More Henry VI - I am myself alone

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  More rambling around Henry VI , Parts 2 and 3, Shakespeare’s first big playwriting project. 3.   As easily as I accept that large parts ...
2 comments:
Saturday, November 8, 2025

Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 - Shakespeare begins - Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile

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Thinking about the Elizabethan history plays sent me back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, a substantial step forward – I will go ahead and...
Friday, November 7, 2025

History before Shakespeare - The Famous Victories of Henry V - he hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had

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The establishment in the 1570s of permanent theaters just outside of the walls of London led to a massive increase in the demand for new pla...