Wuthering
Expectations

After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sej...

I am almost on my way to London.  Some Shakespearian and Not Shakespearian activities are on the schedule. My reading, before this trip, w...

It’s the War of the Theatres!  Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker!  Who cares! Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) f...

The plays that have survived from the early London stage are language-crazed.  When have so many commercial writers been poets, great poets?...

John Marston does something with the pair of plays Antonio and Mellida (1599?) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600?) that I do not think I have ev...

I think of Thomas Dekker as one of the great hacks of Shakespeare’s time, writing over a long career a large number of plays, mostly lost, t...

I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual.  If only I wanted to write anything.   NOT S...

Dolce Bellezza hosted her 19th Japanese Literature Challenge last month.  Once I have written this post it will be the 54th book in this ye...

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain,...

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 ...

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...

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. ...

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

I logically followed Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with the anonymous, but see below, Edward III (published 1596).  The first two acts l...

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

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,...