The Dutch Courtesan by John Marston - They sell their bodies; do not better persons sell their souls?

MALHEUREUX  This lust is a most deadly sin, sure.

FREEVILL  Nay, ‘tis a most lively sin, sure.  (I.1, 9)

Now there is an efficient statement of a theme of John Marston’s A Dutch Courtesan (performed c. 1604, published 1605).  It is the most sexually explicit Elizabethan or Jacobean play I have come across, explicit in its talk, of course, it is all talk, what do you think was happening on the English stage.  And this was again first performed for a high-paying audience by a boys company.  That is also has more flatulence jokes than – or let’s say as many – as any period play I know tells us what about the six-penny audience compared to the famous vulgar one-penny groundlings in the Shakespeare audience.  The play is also full of tags in Latin.  Perhaps that was flattering.

Free Will is getting married to a quite nice young woman, so he is giving up his fiery, beautiful Dutch prostitute, Franceshina.  His friend Unhappy spends the first scene, as we see above, lecturing Freevill about his immorality, but as soon as he meets Franceschina in scene 3 he instantly falls for her.  Meanwhile she wants revenge on Freevill for dumping her, leading to a Much Ado about Nothing-like “Kill Claudio!” moment:

FRANCESCHINA  So long as Freevill lives, I must not love.

MALHEUREUX  Then he –

FRANCESCHINA  Must –

MALHEUREUX  Die!  (II.2, 40)

So now we have the A-plot.  Meanwhile there is a B-plot in which the chaos demon Cocledemoy plays, for no real reason but a pure spirit of comedy. a series of pranks on the stick-in-the-mud vintner Mulligrub.  Cocledemoy is where Marston really indulges in his joy of English, as in “A sign of good shaving, my catastrophonical fine boy.”  (II.1, 31)  Some great nonsense from Cocledemoy.

Afore the Lord God, my knavery grows unperegal [unequaled]!  ‘Tis time to take a nap…  (IV.5, 91)

My understanding is that in the 18th and 19th century The Dutch Courtesan was adapted a number of times, with the goofy Cocledemoy prankster plot eventually taking over the entire play.

Aside from this usual Marston fun, the earthy ethics of The Dutch Courtesan is worth seeing.  The semi-satirical “In Praise of Prostitution” passage, for example, delivered by libertine Freevill:

They [prostitutes] are no ingrateful persons; they will give you quid for quo: do ye protest, they’ll swear; do you rise, they’ll fall; do you fall, they’ll rise; do you give them the French crown, they’ll give you the French – O Justus justa justum!  They sell their bodies; do not better persons sell their souls?  Nay, since all things have been sold – honor, justice, faith, nay, even God Himself –

Ay me, what base ignobleness is it

To sell the pleasure of a wanton bed?

Why do men scrape, why heap to full heaps join? 

But for his mistress, who would care for coin?  (I.1, 11)

The switch from prose to verse is a little odd, but I am sure the actor can handle it.  Here is Malheureux monologuing, arguing with himself, about killing his friend for sex:

To kill my friend!  Oh, ‘tis to kill myself!

Yet man’s but man’s excrement, man breeding man

As he does worms, or this.                       He spits.  (II.2, 42)

There is a sour, unpleasant, taste to The Dutch Courtesan that is distinct, even compared to a complex semi-comedy like Measure for Measure.

Text and page numbers are form the 1965 Regents Renaissance Drama Series.  Getting to know Marston better has been a highlight of this last tranche of plays.

I will take a break from a schedule this summer, but return in the fall with a number of the best plays of the time: peak Ben Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, early Thomas Middleton, some extraordinary revenge tragedies.  This past set of plays has perhaps been a bit like a graduate school – or let’s say advanced undergraduate – seminar – but the next stretch is full of crazy masterpieces.

What I Read in May 2026 – “These stories appeal to my sense of humor as well as my taste for formal constraints.”

NOT SHAKESPEARE

Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine sequence, with for example lines ending one poem and beginning the next.  For some reason Thomas Campion, a writer of the most beautiful songs, wrote an essay arguing that English poetry should exclude rhyme, inspiring Daniel’s great defense of rhyme.  Rhetorically great – the argument as such is something like rhyme sounds great and English poetry should sound like English no matter what the Romans did and isn’t poetry wonderful?  Simplifying a bit.

The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (1604?), Elizabeth Cary – This one is over here.

All Fools (1604?), George Chapman – And this one over there.  One more play coming up soon, John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan, and I take a break for the summer.

 

FICTION

Tales of Hulan River (1942), Xiao Hong – A year ago I read Xiao Hong’s earlier novel The Field of Life and Death (1935).  Both her novels are quite short, so they are published together in English, and I assumed I would scoot through both of them, but The Field was so relentlessly violent and miserable that I took a break.  This later, superior, novel is about the author’s childhood in a small town, presumably fictionalized.  The child’s point of view vitiates the grimness to a small degree, yet the penultimate part of the book is I think the most awful child abuse story I have ever read in a novel.  It is not the narrator who is abused, but the twelve-year-old child bride purchased by a neighbor family.  Terrible, terrible stuff.

The Family Moskat (1948), I. B. Singer – And then for a month I read Singer’s great, Tolstoyan family saga about Jewish Warsaw, beginning in 1913 and ending the minute before the Germans set foot in Warsaw. How to describe my sense of dread as 1939 approached, and then as September approached.  I tried to imagine the emotions of the original audience, reading The Family Moskat as a serial in the Forward, just a couple of years after the catastrophe, after the total destruction of almost everything in the novel, but I do not think I succeeded.  It is a bleak, bleak novel, and what else could it be?

Festival (2011), César Aira – So for a while I plan to read a lot of short, jolly nonsense, like another of Aira’s amusing explorations of the meaning of conceptual art, this time at a film festival.

Papa Bach & Other Stories (2026), Doug Skinner – The line in the title of the post is from “The Market for Typos,” p. 114.  Doug is a Friend of the Blog, often featured here, at one point, for his valuable translations of Alphonse Allais.  This is the first time I read his short fiction, and, well, see that line I quoted.

 

POETRY

Pigeons and Moles: Selected Writings (1945-72), Günter Eich – Damaged by Nazi ideas, striving for the mystic, a curious follow-up to Doctor Faustus.

Things My Grandmother Said (2026), Amit Majmudar – Perhaps a bit goopy and too wisdom-driven for my tastes, but this must be, formally, in its range, and perhaps even in its wisdom, this is an outstanding collection.  Majmudar is also a radiologist.

 

ARTY

Snapshots in Sound (2026), Tony Schwarz – More conceptual art.  Documents about an obsessive New York City tape recorderist.  The sample from his catalogue become a prose poem:

Holdup witness

Homage to New York

Home Remedies

Horse Sounds  (35)

The Fate of the Animals (2022), Morgan Meis – Here Meis writes about, or takes leaps from, a Franz Marc painting.  One more book to go in his trilogy before I write something about them.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'homme révolté (The Rebel, 1951), Albert Camus – Too abstract for my tastes, but does Camus ever capture his moment, or perhaps the later rebels, Vonnegut’s hero ending Cat’s Cradle with a permanently frozen obscene gesture at the universe, are just cribbing from Camus.  Good literary criticism, anyway, even if the history has likely been superseded.  Go to Gary Saul Morson’s Wonder Confronts Certainty (2025), for example, for a better treatment of the Russian rebels.

Momentos de aqui (Moments from, or of, Here, 2001), Ondjaki – An early book by the Angolan writer, more difficult than some of the later ones I read, more slippery.  A number of the stories for my tribute to a story-telling grandmother, so with Majmudar’s poems that was two grandmother-centered books this month.  The grandfathers dominated he Xiao Hong and Singer novels.  What does it mean?

Next month: shorter, sillier books.

 

George Chapman's All Fools - some wit, some wealth

George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread.  He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of the Age of Shakespeare, one of the great Not Shakespeares.  His 1604 comedy All Fools gives a good idea of how he is good and why he is little read.

All Fools is a blend of two Terence plays, much like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is a mix of two Plautus plays.  The sons want to marry for love, against the will of their fathers.  The sons are right; the fathers get their (mild) comeuppance.  In the B-plot, a jealous husband also learns his lesson.

The sons and their secret wives and girlfriends are barely distinguishable, like the romantic quartet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The distinctive character is Rynaldo, a younger brother, who is the trickster figure, arranging various schemes so the lovers can put one or two or more over on their gullible fathers.  He is a bit like Puck, or the Duke in Measure for Measure, “gulling” the other characters, arranging the plot behind the scenes.  Although All Fools does not have a hint of the more disturbing side of Measure for Measure.  It is essentially a pastoral, full of lovestruck shepherds wandering in the woods, although they are neither shepherds nor in a forest.

Chapman, as a poet, is a real Classicist, light and correct, elegant and lovely, but – maybe here is a reason he is less read – seldom surprising in a word or phrase the way Shakespeare so often is.  Nor is he a linguistic screwball like John Marston.  I had trouble taking notes on All Fools because the verse is so consistent, so smooth.

Here is Rynaldo soliloquizing at the beginning of Act V, where he will successfully wrap up his schemes.  I say “soliloquizing” but this might as well be a direct address to the audience:

Fortune the great commandresse of the world,

Hath divers wayes to advance her followers:

To some she gives honour without deserving,

To other some deserving without honour,

Some wit, some wealth: and some wit without wealth:

Some wealth without wit, some, not wit not wealth

But good smocke-faces: or some qualities,

By nature without judgement, with the which

They live in sensuall acceptation,

And make show onely, without touche of substance;

My fortune is to win renown by Gulling…  (V.1, 59-60)

His purpose in life is to play tricks.  The verse flows along pleasantly, smartly alliterated and assonated, varied and intelligent.  The whole play is more or less like this.  Very nice.  There are some limits, in literary style, to “very nice.”

There was a surprise at the very end of the play, when one of the lovers delivers a long satirical prose speech on the subject of horns.  I suppose the first thing, perhaps the only thing, everyone learns about Shakespearean language is that a wife’s infidelity causes the husband to grow horns, thus the endless stream of hilarious puns about horns.  All Fools ends with not with a joke but an entire Erasmus-like Menippean satire, In Praise of Horns.

For their power it is generall over the World, no Nation so barbarous, no Country so proude, but doth equall homage to the Horne.  Europa when shee was carried through the Sea by the Saturnian Bull, was said (for feare of falling) to have held by the Horne: and what is this but a plaine shewing to us, that allEurope, which took name from that Europa, should likewise hold by the Horne…  (V.2, 70)

Etc., etc.  All of this could easily be omitted from a performance.  I wonder what it is doing there.

The text and page numbers are from the 1998 Penguin  Plays and Poems.  Next fall I will read at least one more Chapman play, the tragedy Bussy D’Ambois.  If I have the strength I will spend some time with his poems this summer.   The last play of this spring will be John Marton’s The Dutch Courtesan (1604), about which I know nothing. 

 

What I Read in April 2026 – And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart

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 an 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 (2020), Morgan Meis – Now this book, the first of what is now a trilogy, an innovative piece of art criticism nominally about a Rubens painting, I will write about, once I have read the other books.  Strongly recommended to the kinds of people who enjoy Wuthering Expectations.

 

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.

 

Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam, the earliest extant English play by a woman - Are Hebrew women now transform’d to men?

The English theater world was deeply hostile to women, possibly until quite recently, but the late 16th and early 17th century period went a step beyond, when even female characters are played by males.  Everything with any status except, oddly, supreme sovereign of the nation is closed to women.

Feminist scholars have, in the last fifty years, done enormous work on the handful of surviving works by women writers.  I am looking at Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, a 1998 Penguin edition with three plays: a translation of Euripides by Jane, Lady Lumley, a translation of Robert Garnier by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the play at issue here, The Tragedie of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written let’s say 1604, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary, eventually Viscountess Falkland, the first extant original English play by a woman, and as far as I know the only such surviving play before the Restoration. 

The Tragedie of Mariam has understandably gotten a lot of attention.  It is a Senecan closet drama, removed from the world of the commercial theater, although it has its dramatic moments.  That Mary Sidney translation of Garnier’s The Tragedie of Antonie is a marvelous piece of English poetry, but static beyond belief, a version of the Antony and Cleopatra story where the protagonists never have a scene together.  Cary had at least seen some plays.  She has swordfights and so on.

The story is from Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, newly translated into English in 1602.  King Herod, visiting Rome, is rumored to be dead, kicking off a scramble for power among the women of his court – his wife Mariam, who hates him, his ex-wife, who hates Mariam, and his sister Salome, who everyone hates.  Herod is not dead, so his return in Act III upends everyone’s crazy schemes; Herod restores order by having most of the characters executed.

Salome makes a good over the top villain, with a number of enjoyable speeches, although many of my favorite parts of the play are attacks on her.

CONSTABARUS: She meerly is a painted sepulcher,

That is both faire, and vilely foule at once:

Though on her out-side graces garnish her,

Her mind is fild with worse than rotten bones.

…

Her mouth though serpent-like it never hisses,

Yet like a serpent, poysons where it kisses. (II.4, 127)

She is a tomb full of rotten bones, not bad.  Here we see the verse, built out of four-line ABAB blocks with occasional couplets to round things off.  In this chunk Herod is describing – and speaking directly to – his own sister:

HEROD: Your selfe are held a goodly creature heere,

Yet so unlike my Mariam in your shape:

That when to her you have approached neere,

My selfe hath often tane you for an Ape.  (IV.7, 152)

Herod, in the last couple of acts, is hilarious, although this may be the peak, saying, to Salome’s face, that she looks like an ape.  He cannot decide if he should have poor Mariam executed or not, and swings wildly back and forth in what ought to be a comic performance, or I guess tragicomic.

I will pick one more attack on Salome, this one less personal although again addressed to her.  This character, Constabarus, is given, on his way to the chopping block, the most misogynistic speech in the play.  This earlier bit is mild by comparison, but I want it for my title:

CONSTABARUS:  Are Hebrew women now transform’d to men?

Why do you not as well our battels fight,

And weare our armor? suffer this, and then

Let all the world be topsie turved quite.  (I.6, 114)

I can see how the plot based on women scheming against each other, and the open misogyny of many of the men, could make this play work well with advanced undergraduates.  On stage, I have my doubts.

After this Senecan excursion into Roman history, the next play is again Roman.  It is George Chapman’s All Fools, or All Fooles (likely 1604), a mashup of two Terence comedies.  I remember it, vaguely, as good fun.

The hilarious Doctor Faustus - I am not so very fond of laughter

Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus, presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant garde aestheticism is the reason German intellectuals were so often so gullible and accepting of fascism.  Many critics, to my bafflement, have followed that path.

Zeitblom, a teacher of philology. is not a fascist, but, like many of the intellectuals the novel is about, some kind of fellow traveler or enabler.  His objection to the actual Nazis, aside from their vulgarity, is that (Zeitblom begins writing his memoir in 1943) they are losing the war to the “enfeebled democracies” (XXVI, 268), although he holds out hope for the V2 rockets, “such an admirable piece of ordnance that only sacred necessity can have inspired the genius who invented it” (XXXIII, 355).

He has many nutty views, like his suspicion, or even fear, of physics and the “so-called works of God” meaning, for example, the sun (XVIII, 159).  Or his belief that the glissando is “a musical device that , for profoundly cultural reasons, is to be employed with utmost caution and in which I have always tended to hear something anticultural, indeed anti-human, even demonic” (XXXIV, 393). Or his repeated insistence that his association with a group of Munich semi-fascist intellectuals bothered him so much that he lost fourteen pounds.  So he can’t one of them, can he?  Fourteen pounds!

As Reese from Typings notes, the novel is often quite funny, and much of the humor comes from the narrator's lack of humor and the bizarre things he believes.

On the whole he [Adrian] was more in the mood for laughter and foolishness than for metaphysical conversations…  I am not so very fond of laughter… (X, 94)

Luckily I came across A Reader’s Guide to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (2025) by Tobias Boes, available in its entirety as an open access book at JSTOR.  Boes’s book is heavily informed by years of teaching the novel to students at the University of Notre Dame, students who immediately notice Zeitblom’s repressed homosexuality, for example, which I know we are all trained to do now, sure; Boes politely, kindly, suggests that earlier scholars were somehow restrained from writing about such things.

For Doctor Faustus belongs to a class of modernist novels – Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire are other examples – in which the person telling the story is far more complex and far more interesting that the ostensible protagonist.  (Ch. 1, 12)

What was I just saying!  I have not exactly read but have poked around in Boes’s book.  I owe it for showing me that I was not the crazy one, dang it, but everyone else was.  Doctor Faustus is a dense, complex novel, open to complex arguments, but I do not see how it can be interpreted well except through the narrator, which is what Boes does.

“Why must everything appear to me as its own parody?”  (XV, 143)  That is the composer, the ironist, although I take it as Mann’s lament as well.  I knew and to some degree avoided Mann as a writer of Novels of Ideas, for which I have limited taste and am likely a poor reader, when in fact, as with The Magic Mountain he wrote parodies of Novels of Ideas.  Deep suspicion of ideas is itself an idea, yes.

Misreading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus correctly - who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul

A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend.  I will need that subtitle soon.  Near the end of the book, I was looking up I do not remember what when I discovered that after four hundred dense pages I was reading the novel wrong, completely against decades of interpretation.

The novel is supposedly about an avant-garde German composer who makes a deal with the devil, symbolically, presumably, although his biography is full of curious devil figures.  Adrian’s artistic career, which ends tragically in madness, parallels the rise of German fascism in various ways that are not at all far-fetched.  The narrator, Zeitblom, usually calls his friend “Adrian,” so I will do the same.

The narrator, yes, right there in Mann’s subtitle.  The novel is a fictionalized memoir, not a biography, of a man who was lifelong friends with an important composer.  He finds devil figures throughout Adrian’s life; he thinks Adrian made a pact with the devil; he thinks Adrian’s music, which often makes him deeply uncomfortable, somehow parallels vulgar Naziism.

No one can follow my argument here who has not experienced as I have how close aestheticism and barbarism are to each other, or who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul – though, granted, I have known this danger not of my own accord, but with the help of my friendship for a dear artist and imperiled spirit.  (XXXIV, 392)

He deflects his own desiccated, narrow, proto-fascist vision of life onto the composer, who he never understands and to whom he has always been, however much he suppresses it, sexually attracted.  This is what Doctor Faustus is actually about.

Zeitblom is a classic unreliable narrator – uncomprehending, dishonest, often close to insane.  He constantly raises doubts about his own trustworthiness  I enjoyed it when, early on, he compared his method to Tristam Shandy, but this is his peak narratorial craziness:

To what happened between Adrian and Rudolf Schwerdtfeger two days after our memorable excursion, to what happened and how it happened – I know all about it, though the objection may be raised tenfold that I could not know, that I was “not there.”  No, I was not there.  But it is a psychological fact today that I was there, because for anyone who has experienced an event, lived through it again and again as I have this one, a dreadful intimacy makes him an eye- or ear-witness of even its hidden phases.  (XLI, 455)

The chapter that follows is full of detailed dialogue and movement, including a highly unlikely digression about Zeitblom himself, all of which, as Zeitblom directly tells us, he made up out of his own tormented fantasies, his jealousy of Rudolf and Adrian’s other male friends.

Zeitblom is sincere where Adrian is ironic.  Critics of Doctor Faustus, written by a great ironist, have been sincere, taking Zeitblom’s word as Mann’s, despite warnings, often direct, in almost every chapter that Zeitblom can’t be trusted.  Had they not read The Good Soldier and Pale Fire?  Surely they read The Tin Drum (1959), where the crazy narrator’s life story is full of surprising parallels to the rise of the Nazis, the biography of Hitler, and also the biography of Günter Grass?  This all seemed so obvious to me.

Tomorrow I will catalogue some of my favorite opinions of Zeitblom and point to a new book that shows I am not alone.

I read and am referring to the Vintage International paperback in the John E. Woods translation.

Thomas Heywood's early melodrama A Woman Killed by Kindness - I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays (Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 38).  He is more like a television writer.  His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy.

It even has a clear A plot and B plot, which only connect in the first and last scenes.  A gentleman in trouble – in prison – for debt tries to prostitute his sister.  Somehow this story works out for the best for everyone.  I suppose this is the B plot.  In the A plot, another gentleman catches his wife with another man but refrains from murdering them, instead killing her with kindness.

FRANKFORD:  My words are register’d in Heaven already;

With patience hear me.  I’ll not martyr thee,

Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage

Of more humility torment thy soul,

And kill thee, even with kindness.  (IV.4, 251)

Against the title of the Penguin collection, Heywood’s play is domestic but not really a tragedy.  It is if anything a deliberate move from the tragic to the pathetic, and from a pagan to a Christian ethos.  It makes me wonder what a Puritan accommodation with the London theater might have looked like.  It is an ancestor of Samuel Richardson novels and Douglas Sirk movies.

Only the last couple of acts, maybe just the last, are especially interesting, as the melodrama really ramps up to an absurd level.

NICHOLAS:  I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad.

Why, how now eye?  What now, what’s here to do?

I am gone, or I shall straight turn baby too.  (V.3, 262)

Almost an instruction to the audience to burst into tears.  Although Heywood does include a surprising joke from this same servant at the end of the play, where the poor wife is about to die, and her husband says he wishes to die with her:

FRANKFORD:  As freely from the low depth of my soul

As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death,

I pardon thee.  I will shed tears for thee,

Pray with thee, and in mere pity

Of they weak state, I’ll wish to die with thee.

ALL: So do we all.

NICHOLAS [aside]:  So will not I;

I’ll sigh and sob, but, by my faith, not die.  (V.4, 268)

Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies also includes Arden of Faversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy (1605-8, somewhere in there), both of which are domestic true crime plays featuring shocking murders.  Where Arden is about an old murder that for some reason was written up in a popular history book, The Yorkshire Tragedy is ripped from the headlines, and feels like it.  Simple, quick, short – less than half the length of a regular five act play.  Socially interesting but artistically null.  I suspect that a large number of plays like this have been lost, never published or published in throwaway editions.

I wonder how much Heywood-style melodrama there was.  Is A Woman Killed by Kindness a rare beast, or were there dozens of these kinds of plays?  Was Heywood working from an established model, or was he an innovator, the hack who outdoes himself?  No way to know.

The next play will be The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written c. 1603, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary.  More interested in the world of the theater, I have been avoiding closet dramas, but this one is a special case.  I know very little about it.  We’ll see.

Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector? - some British culture via An Inspector Calls

 

Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers of English literature.  Over time, many groups have greatly revised, often in the name of relevance and diversity, the reading list for the GCSE, the exam British students took before graduating high school (a current or at least recent list).  But which books did teachers actually pick to teach?

The answer was, when possible, An Inspector Calls by J. B. Priestly, to the extent that I was able to calculate that a large majority of British students were tested, and have always been tested, on An Inspector Calls, no matter what other options are available.  The second place book was, by the way, Animal Farm.

So the point of the survey was that more varied contemporary options to the exam did not matter much if teachers just kept riding the same old warhorses.  My point, somewhat different, is that I was not even sure what An Inspector Calls was.  I had better read it.  I just did.

It is a popular play from 1945.  It is short – is it the shortest text on the list? – is it the easiest? 

ERIC:  My God, it’s a bit thick, when you come to think of it –  (Act I, p. 25)

Is it ever!  A bourgeois family is having a pleasant dinner celebrating the engagement of the daughter to a perfectly respectable young man when a police inspector calls with the shocking news that a young woman has committed suicide, and that (this takes a little time) every member of the family is at least a bit responsible for her death.  In another sense, none of them are at all responsible, but I suppose that idea is one of the things that makes the play teachable.  We can have a good debate about agency.

GERALD: (Crossing D. to Inspector)  Getting a bit heavy-handed, aren’t you, Inspector?  (ERIC crosses D.  to chair R. of table.)

INSPECTOR:  Possibly.  But if you’re easy with me, I’m easy with you.

GERALD: After all, y’know, we’re respectable citizens and not dangerous criminals.

INSPECTOR:  Sometimes there isn’t as much difference as you think.  Often, if it was left to me, I wouldn’t know where to draw the line.  (I, 23)

The Inspector is, like Father Brown and Columbo, as much an avenging angel as a detective, an idea that I hoped would be implicit but is instead made explicit by the end of the play.  Everything is made explicit.  This is the Inspector’s exit speech:

INSPECTOR:  One Eva Smith has gone – but there are millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, with what we think and say and do.  We don’t live alone.  We are members of one body.  We are responsible for each other.  And I tell you that the time will soon come when if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish.  We don’t live alone.  Good night.  (III, 53-4)

When An Inspector Calls premiered, Germany had just surrendered, days earlier, to the Allies; the war with Japan would go on for several more months.  I am having trouble fitting this speech into that context.  But otherwise An Inspector Calls is careful to resolve all of its mysteries.

It is a well-made play; I would love to see it performed.  But it does not look like a great national treasure to me.  Knock it off that list!  Make teachers pick something else!  Not that I wish new class preps on teachers – sorry.  And perhaps there is some kind of Chesterton’s Fence argument against removing it.

There is no equivalent in the U.S., where our educational system is chaos, or in France, where the texts for the Bac change every year.

I am likely getting much about the GCSE wrong, and sadly I will never be able to find that survey again.

Page numbers refer to the 1972 Dramatists Play Service edition.

The Malcontent by John Marston - Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here

What do I want to say about John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603, maybe 1604)?  It is unusual.  Marston is unusual, with a distinct poetic and dramatic sensibility.  No one else could have written it.

The Duke of Genoa has been tossed out by an usurper, so he infiltrates the court disguised as Malevole, the Malcontent of the title, not exactly a courtier, not exactly a jester, but given license by the usurper.   It is as if Diogenes (the dog man) was somehow an attendant of Alexander.

PIETRO [current Duke]:  Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here.  I give thy dogged sullenness free liberty; trot about and bespurtle whom thou pleases.

MALEVOLE: I’ll come among you, you goatish-blooded toderers, as gum into taffeta, to fret, to fret.  I’ll fall like a sponge into water, to suck up, to suck up.  Howl again.  I’ll go to church, and come to you.  (I.2, 16)

A nice example of Marston’s original language, including his taste, that Jonson mocked in The Poetaster, for obscure words with a pleasing mouth-feel.  Bespurtle.  Toderers.  The latter is a bit of a mystery, but “tod” is “fox,” if that helps.

The Malcontent sometimes feels like it should be played by Groucho Marx:

BILIOSO:  Out, ye cur! [again, a dog]

MALEVOLE: Only let’s hold together a firm correspondence. [the Groucho line]

BILIOSO:   Out!

MALEVOLE:  A mutual, friendly-reciprocal, perpetual kind of steady-unanimous-heartily-leagued –

BILISOSO:  Hence, ye gross-jawed peasantly – out, go!

MALEVOLE:  Adieu, pigeon-house!  Thou burr that only stickest to nappy fortunes; the serpigo, the strangury, an eternal, uneffectual priapism seize thee!  (II.3, 41-2)

That ends a little too obscene for a Marx Brothers joke.  The Malcontent has a number of outstanding vocabulary-expanding insult passages.

Malevole is the star part, played by Richard Burbage, Hamlet his own self.  Around the same time Burbage was also playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, another duke in disguise.  What fun to be a theater-goer in London in 1603.  Malevole is out for revenge, in some sense, and the restoration of his office, but the play takes a turn at the end of Act III when rather than shoving Duke Pietro off a cliff, he instead converts Pietro to – to what – not his cause, exactly, but to his malcontent vision of life.

PIETRO:  Lord Malevole, if this be true –

MALEVOLE:  If? Come, shade thee with this disguise.  If?  Thou shalt handle it; he shall thank thee for killing thyself.  Come, follow my directions and thou shalt see strange sleights.

PIETRO:  World, whither wilt thou?

MALEVOLE:  Why, to the devil.  (III.v, 66-7)

Soon enough this duke is disguised as a friar (exactly like Measure for Measure) and the two dukes in disguise scheme to disgrace the play’s villain,  The Malcontent is a genuine revenge comedy.  No one is murdered, the adulterous wife is forgiven, and the worst characters are barely even punished.

The Malcontent has a number of strong comic parts with their own great bits, but I think what elevates this play is the psychology of the Malcontent.  He falls into his disguise, into his role, too easily.  It is who he really is.  Similarly this is why Pietro is so easy to convert from enemy to ally, and for that matter why revenge is pointless.  Marston has found language and characters that express his, or a, view of the world, a refreshed Cynicism.

I will try one more Marston play, The Dutch Courtesan,  later this spring; I hope it is at least half as interesting, and a quarter as good.

Next up, soon I hope, is Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), which I remember as a weepy melodrama, quite interesting as a genre example but not a great play.  We’ll see.

Text and page numbers are from the New Mermaids edition. 

What I Read & Where I Went in March 2026 - the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich

London and Cornwall, St. Ives and Penzance and so on, is where.  I got some good Shakespearing in – The Tempest at the Wanamaker, the little candle-lit theater at the Globe, and a good walk around Shoreditch and northern London, tracking down various Shakespearean sites and monuments.  The Shakespeare Museum, built atop the excavated Curtain Theatre, surrounded, like, increasingly, everything in north London, by dubious modern high-rises, looks like it will open any minute now.

 

 

TRAVEL

The Living Stones: Cornwall (1957), Ithell Colquhon – A painter who, like many, fell in love with Cornwall, Colquhon was also a genuine mystic, attracted to Cornwall’s almost unbelievable number of magical rocks, piled up or simply set on end.  Her book is a journey around Cornwall’s weirdness, extremely interesting while I was right there, presumably somewhat less interesting at a distance.  Some especially weird sentences excepted, Colquhon writes in the British house style of the time, light, witty, deft at quick sketches of people and places.  I saw some of her paintings at the St. Ives Tate, and would like to see more.

 

SHAKESPEARE-ADJACENT

The Tragedy of Hoffman (1602), Henry Chettle – Somehow I finally wrote about this one.

The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990) – Highly useful.

 

NOVELS

He Knew He Was Right (1868-9), Anthony Trollope – His longest novel, perfect for international travel.  The A-plot, or really the protagonists of the A-plot seemed a little thin from the beginning, but soon enough other plots and characters tangle their way around the central story that I did not care much.  I sometimes have to resist the modern impulse to dismiss a tragedy by thinking “This guy needs a psychotherapist,” but that this novel is actually a quite early example of that notion, pathetic rather than tragic.  And, as is usual with Trollope, mostly comic.  Look at this beauty:

We are often told in our newspapers that England is disgraced by this and by that; by the unreadiness of  our army, by the unfitness of our navy, by the irrationality of our laws, by the immobility of our prejudices, and what not; but the real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich,-- that whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot.  (Ch. XXXVII)

Crome Yellow (1921), Aldous Huxley – Now this is what I meant by post-WWI “house style”; Huxley practically invents it with this talky, digressive little sad sack of a novel.  Virginia Woolf was not quite right when she wrote that everything changed in 1910 – 1920 is more like it.  I was surprised how much Huxley imitated Thomas Love Peacock’s talky, digressive novels, like Nightmare Abbey (1818).

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), Vladimir Nabokov – In which the author, having written a Russian masterpiece, switches to English.  The narrator is writing the biography of his half-brother, a famous writer.  Many curious tricks are played.  I am reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (1947), which given how different the books are is also weirdly similar.

The Singularity (1960), Dino Buzzati – The first third of this novella is a scientist’s journey to a mysterious research facility, devoted to shhh-it’s-a-secret.  Then the next two-thirds are – I guess skip this if you do not want to know the secret, but I now I cannot see why it matters – a good science fiction story about artificial intelligence.  Not a great one!  Minor compared to The Tartar Steppes or heaven knows The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.

Not to Disturb (1971), Muriel Spark – What  a strange book.

 

POETRY

Selected Poems (1818-48), Thomas Lovell Beddoes – Chettle’s Gothic, skeleton-filled play sent me to Lovell Beddoes.  The Carcanet collection is one-third excerpts from his crazy play Death’s Jest Book, which I should read again in full.

Selected Poems (1946-71), Salvador Espriu – A grim, mystical Catalan poet.

Archive of Desire (2025), Robin Coste Lewis – A recent poetic response to the poems and life of Constantine Cavafy.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Les chants du crépuscule (1835), Victor Hugo – It was Romantic poetry month, apparently.  This particular Hugo collection is highly political for the first half, Hugo haranguing or praising a range of French figures I do not know for reasons I do not understand.  I began to worry, but thankfully the second half takes a lyrical turn, and is full of beautiful French poetry.

Folhas Caídas (1853), Almeida Garrett – Another Romantic, this little book is nothing but love lyrics, mostly pretty pathetic.  Nice to be able to read this.

The Tragedy of Hoffman by Henry Chettle - The first step to revenge

His father hanged by the neck until dead for the high crime of piracy, Hoffman vows Revenge! on the duke who executed his father.  By chance the duke’s son is shipwrecked exactly where Hoffman is keeping Hoffman, Sr.’s corpse hanging on the wall of a cave, so Hoffman tortures and murders his enemy, thus ending Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman or a Revenge for a Father (1602).  Thus ending Act I, Scene 1, I mean.

LORRISQUE [A turncoat, evil servant]: He’s gone.

HOFFMAN:  Go, let him.  Come, Lorrique:

This but the prologue to the ensuing play,

The first step to revenge.  This scene is done

Father, I offer thee thy murderer’s son.    Exeunt.  (I.1, 252)

Theatrical!  He ends the first act in the same literal way: “So shut our stage up; there is one act done” (I.3, 258).  The revenge tragedy’s conventional play-within-a-play appears to take place in Hoffman’s head.

Chettle, one of the great hack playwrights of this time, messes with the revenge tragedy in many interesting ways.  One key aspect of the genre since Kyd invented it is delay; the revenger for some reason cannot just challenge his enemy to a duel or whatnot.  Shakespeare, in Hamlet, finds high psychological interest in the genre cliché.  Chettle abandons it in the first scene, and afterward his villain methodically carves through his remaining enemies until he is finally undone  by being distracted by lust:  “but I deserve it [his death] that have slacked revenge” (V.3, 324).

The revenger is typically seeks genuine justice and is delayed by the political power of his target.  Chettle’s revenger is a psychotic villain whose father was executed within a legitimate justice system for well-understood crimes.  My understanding is that this purely villainous revenger, who will become a staple of later revenge tragedies, is a genuine innovation of Chettle’s.

Since The Tragedy of Hoffman is available in a New Mermaids edition I thought it would be easily available in the usual places, but no, it was a bit of a pain to get.  So sorry about that, to any cheapskates (like me) chasing after a readable copy.  I ended up with the highly interesting but consumer-unfriendly Penguin edition – Five Revenge Tragedies (2012).  The other four plays are The Spanish Tragedy, Antonio’s Revenge, Hamlet, and The Revenger’s Tragedy, all terrific but do you really need another copy of The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet?

That edition tells the story of the rise of Hoffman, though.  The book is perfect for half of a university course on revenge tragedies, or these days, if I believe the grim news, an entire semester.  What a good class.  The Tragedy of Hoffman is the dumbest play of the bunch, but I can see how it is highly teachable, especially after Hamlet, which it shamelessly loots.  Students who have worked their way through Kyd and Marston and Hamlet will dismantle and rebuild Hoffman with facility.

Hoffman, I will note, is a marvelously Gothic play, sometimes reminding me of Thomas Lovell-Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book in its Halloween qualities.  What a great stage direction:

[Hangs up Otho’s skeleton.]  (I.3, 257)

This is from the first scene, with Hoffman talking to the corpse of his dead father:

But thou dear soul, whose nerves and arteries

In dead resoundings summon up revenge,

And thou shalt ha’t; be but appeased, sweet hearse,

The dead remembrance of my living father.  (I.i, 245)

Hoffman shamelessly rips off Hamlet, including an Ophelia-like character who goes mad but who, in an amazing and ridiculous twist, reveals Hoffman’s schemes to the other characters by leading them to the cave where Hoffman keeps his collection of corpses.  Then her sanity returns!  Wonderfully silly stuff.

Next up is John Marston’s revenge comedy The Malcontent, available everywhere, and as I remember it a great play.  I hope I do not take so long to write it up.

Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall - Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sejanus His Fall (1603), about the soldier who rose to rule the Roman empire, for a few years, under dissolute Emperor Tiberius, before overreaching and being crushed by the next sociopath in line.

I found Sejanus a little dull when I last read it, long ago, and I still do.  Jonson’s blank verse is expert, supple, without, likely against, Marlowe’s bombast, but also then lacking Marlowe’s (or Shakespeare’s, or satirical Jonson’s) surprise.  Jonson’s metaphysics is too rationalist, too political, to create the kind of craziness that makes for great drama.

Perhaps Jonson is too constrained by history.  The action of the fall of Sejanus, in the long last scene, is the reading in the Senate of an ironic letter from Tiberius, first praising and then condemning Sejanus.  This is what historians say happened, so what can you do, but instead of the appearance of weird, perverse Tiberius, we get proper, public letter.  In general, as in a history play but not a tragedy, characters appear and disappear according to what happened, rather than dramatic effect.

Sejanus is a solid Machiavellian villain, but the rational kind, methodically removing his enemies by poison and slander until he achieves everything except the title of Emperor:

Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

Must we rest there?  It irks, t’have come so far,

To be so near a stay.  (V.1, 88)

My favorite part of the play is when Sejanus is executed and then torn to pieces, offstage, by the mob.  Jonson’s language takes a new grotesque turn:

These mounting at his head, these at his face,

These digging out his eyes, those with his brain,

Sprinkling themselves, their houses, and their friends… (V.6, 118)

Sejanus is practically atomized:

Now torn, and scattered, as he needs no grave,

Each little dust covers a part:

So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried!  (118-9)

A genuinely weird image.  Perhaps it helps that Jonson be satirical in this last act.  The mob is savage, the Senators a pack of corrupt flatterers, the victor over Sejanus no better, and he’ll get his violent end a few years later.  And the ruler after that is Caligula!

It does not help Jonson that Robert Graves wrote a more comical and ironic account of this history in I, Claudius (1934).

Jonson likes animal metaphors.  I enjoyed this one, at the beginning of the play, when Sejanus’s enemies lament that they are not good flatterers:

We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,

No soft, and glutinous bodies, that can stick,

Like snails, on painted walls… (I.1, 11)

Lots of anti-flatterer satire.  This line was an earthy surprise:

                    … ready to praise

His lordship, if he spit, or but piss fair,

Have an indifferent stool, or break wind well,

Nothing can ‘scape their catch.  (I.1, 12)

The more of that side of Jonson, the better.

The Oxford Jonson, where I read Poetaster, has Sejanus as well, but I switched to the 1966 New Mermaid for the text and page numbers because I preferred footnotes to endnotes.

In two weeks, Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, a revenge tragedy about which I know close to nothing.

What I Read in February 2026 – Mouek mouek mouek… Ma-a-a-a… Ma-aa-a… said Saha

I am almost on my way to London.  Some Shakespearian and Not Shakespearian activities are on the schedule.

My reading, before this trip, was again  very British.

 

THE WAR OF THE POETS

Antonio and Mellida (1599?) &

Antonio's Revenge (1600?), John Marston – A remarkable pair of literary objects, discussed here and here.

Poetaster (1601), Ben Jonson – Jonson slags Marston, discussed here.

Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Post forthcoming.

Caelica (1633), Fulke Greville – Sonnets and sestets, fifty years of poems.  So many great poets from this period.  Unlike so many courtier poets, Fulke Greville dodged the executioner and lived to a good old age, although his death was still horrible.  Do not look it up.

Worldly Goods (1996), Lisa Jardine – A diversion into the non-English Renaissance with this superb classic of material history.  To think that this approach, looking at contracts and printers and so on, was once controversial.  I would love to read an England-centered descendant, which I am sure exists.  Recommendations welcome.

 

NOVELS & POETRY

The Ill-Made Knight (1940), T. H. White – We will visit Cornwall, so here is a gesture towards Cornwall, White’s Lancelot novel.  The shift in tone from The Sword in the Stone, from a boy’s book to something with sex and tragedy, is impressive.

The Moving Toyshop (1946), Edmund Crispin – We will visit Oxford, so here is a gesture towards that, although given all of the chase scenes down specific streets I perhaps should have saved it for after.  Among the British mysteries thought of as great classics, this one must be the silliest.

Eighty-Five Poems (1959), Louis MacNeice – A “selected poems” chosen by MacNeice.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

A Abóbada (1839) &

O Alcaide de Santarém (1845), Alexandre Herculano – The Walter Scott of Portugal.  The first story, The Dome  or The Vault, is much much much taught to, I believe, 10th graders.  If you take the bus tour north out of Lisbon you will visit the setting, the spectacular Batalha Monastery.

La chatte (1932), Colette – A couple marries young and gets to know each other, resulting in uncomfortable, realistic friction.  Plus the husband has a cat who he understand better than his wife, who hates the cat.  Almost plotless, but the one thing that happens is a doozy.  That’s the cat, Saha, up there in the title.

La Jalousie (Jealousy, or The Window Blind, 1957), Alain Robbe-Grillet – Talk about plotless.  The precision and repetition and playing around with the narrator is all very much to my tastes, but still I do not understand the brief delusion that this sort of thing would be the future of the novel.  The image is from a 1937 edition of Nouveau Petit Larousse Illustré.

Comedias para se Ler na Escola (Comedies to Read in School, 2001), Luis Fernando Verissimo – What a dreary title, but this was a good book, a collection of newspaper shorts, stories and gags, by one of Brazil’s best comic writers.  He appeared on Wuthering Expectations long ago as the author of the entertaining Borges and the Eternal Orangutan.  Some of these crônicas have a light Borgesian touch.

Ben Jonson's Poetaster - Oh, terrible windy words!

It’s the War of the Theatres!  Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker!  Who cares!

Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) features two key scenes where Jonson, under the guise of Horace, is tormented by and then torments Marston, the bad poet of the title.  Dekker, a mere hack, gets off easy.

The play is set in Augustan Rome, and most of the characters are poets, actual poets, in both senses, meaning Ovid was a poet who actually existed and whose character in the play is the real deal:

TIBULLUS  How now, Ovid!  Law cases in verse!

OVID  In troth, I know not – they run from my pen

    Unwittingly, if they be verse.  (I.3, 15)

The play begins with Ovid reciting a poem in tribute to the Latin poets.  We are again in the theater of the boys’ company, with an educated audience that spent its teenage years reading Ovid and Horace and so on.  The actors, when not rehearsing a play, were doing the same thing.

Jonson gestures toward a melodrama about young Ovid becoming a poet rather than a lawyer, as his father demands, but then getting into trouble with the Emperor over a love affair.  That is not really a Jonson-like conceit, so no surprise that this part of Poetaster is undeveloped, earnest, and dull.

Jonson gives me two great scenes in Poetaster, both slagging Marston.  The idea is that Crispinus, the Marston-alike, wants to be a poet for the prestige but has no talent for anything but big words – “A kind of paronomosy, or agnomination, do you conceive, sir?” (III.1, 29).  Horace bumps into the nuisance Crispinus in the street and cannot shake him.  The scene is a direct stage adaptation of Horace’s Satire I.9 with some extra London detail.  I know, the setting is Rome, whatever.

The climax of the play is the arraignment of the title, where we finally get some of the poetaster’s poetry:

What, shall they lubrical and Gibbery Muse

Live as she were defunct, like punk in stews?  (V.3, 78)

Virgil himself condemns Crispinus to a purgative, which makes him spend two full pages vomiting up vocabulary words:

CRISPINUS  - puffy – inflate – turgidous – ventosity.

HORACE  Barmy froth, puffy, inflate, turgidous, and ventosity are come up.

TIBULLUS  Oh, terrible windy words!

GALLUS  The sign of a windy brain.

CRISPINUS Oh – oblatrant – obcecate – furibund – fatuate – strenuous – (84)

What, “puffy,” what’s wrong with “puffy.”  But I can imagine how this would work well on stage.  A bit earlier Virgil says “The honest satire hath the happiest soul” (81) and I believe he, and Jonson, believe it.

Text and pages are from Oxford World’s Classics, The Devil Is an Ass and Other Plays, which has plenty of background and notes.

The next play on my schedule is Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, but I am going to push it out because I am grumpy about the texts at hand.  So next – posting March 9 or so – will be Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall.

Marston's poetics - foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain

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

John Marston is among the purplest of the poet-playwrights, the most baroque.  I can imagine readers who find he goes too far.  I love it when he gets rolling.

Here, for example, Antonio reads aloud, in Latin, some consoling lines of stoical Seneca, but dismisses them:

Pish, thy mother was not lately widowed,

Thy dear affied love lately defam’d

With blemish of foul lust when thou wrot’st thus.

Thou, wrapp’d in furs, beaking thy limbs ‘fore fires

Forbid’st the frozen zone to shudder.  Ha, ha! ‘tis naught

But foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain,

Naught else but smoke.  (II.2, 33-4)

Passages like this must be great fun for actors, with the f-words overtaking the l-words.  The monologue goes on for a few more lines, more self-pitying or whining, with a few more Fs.  Marston’s genius, I suppose, is that he understands that the play has to function on stage, so it cannot be nothing but foamy bubbling of fleamy brains.

The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps

The fluent summer’s vein; and drizzling sleet

Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numb’d earth,

Whilst snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves

From the nak’d shuddering branch, and pills the skin

From off the soft and delicate aspects.

O now, methinks, a sullen tragic scene

Would suit the time with pleasing congruence.  (Prologue, 3)

These Romantic lines, which sound to me like something from centuries later, begin the play, but the Prologue is a place to indulge.  Marston has a terrific Gothic side to his imagination.  Here Duje Piero is at the funeral of the enemy he has murdered.

PIERO  Rot there, thou cerecloth that enfolds the flesh

Of my loath’d foe; molder to crumbling dust;

Oblivion choke the passage of thy fame!

Trophies of honor’d birth drop quickly down;

Let naught of him, but what was vicious, live.

Though thou art dead, think not my hate is dead;

I have but newly twone my arm in the curl’d locks

Of snaky vengeance.  Pale, beetle-brow’d hate

But newly bustles up.

What a weirdo.  Would Robert Browning have written this character’s mad scenery chewing so differently?  Maybe he would have written “twined” rather than “twone.”  What a great, crazy image.

Ben Jonson mocks Marston for his overdone vocabulary, as we will see when I write up Poetaster, the next play on my schedule, but Marston is perhaps more effective with this kind of line (Pandulpho’s son is also a victim of the mad Duke):

PANDULPHO:  Would’st have me cry, run raving up and down

For my son’s loss? Would’st have me turn rank mad,

Or wring my face with mimic action,

Stamp, curse, weep, rage, and then my bosom strike?

Away, ‘tis apish action, player-like.  (I.2, 23)

A little meta-fiction there when Pandulpho switches to rhyme, but what I want is a few lines later:

Listen, young blood, ‘tis not true valor’s pride,

To swagger, quarrel, swear, stamp, rave, and chide,

To stab in fume of blood, to keep loud coil,

To bandy factions in domestic broils,

To dare the act of sins whose filth excels

The blackest customs of blind infidels.

The baroque poet likes the short words, too, often in long chains.  Look at all that alliteration – plenty of f-words in this passage, too.

In my memory The Malcontent, which I plan to discuss in April, is the peak of both Marston’s plotting and poetics.  Don’t miss it.  Jonson’s Poetaster, up next here, is much more missable.

John Marston's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge - Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st

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 ever seen before.  The first play is a silly, barely coherent romantic comedy, with everything wrapped up in a happy ending.  Antonio’s Revenge is a bloody revenge with the same characters (except for the ones murdered before the first act), demolishing the earlier play.  Which one is the travesty?  Both, I guess.

Companies of school boys had performed plays of high sophistication for decades in London, but 1599 saw the opening of what were effectively commercial theaters featuring companies of boy actors.  These were “private” theaters while the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe, Shakespeare’s company, was “public.”  The public companies were repertory groups that performed almost daily, mixing old plays with a constant stream of new plays.  The private companies performed once a week – the boys were nominally in school.  A play at the Globe cost one penny; at Paul’s Theatre, where Marston’s plays were performed, six (6) pennies.  So the audience was entirely different, with the intimate, roofed boy’s companies playing to richer, more educate, more let’s use the word sophisticated audiences. 

I write this for my own benefit.  It explains a lot of what I see in these plays.  London had a sufficiently large audience that had cultivated a taste for parody and meta-theater.  Not even twenty-five years after the opening of the theaters and the decadent phase has started.  Or maybe things are getting good.  I have a strong taste for parody and meta-theater.

Both plays are full of lines from Seneca’s plays, in English and in Latin.  There are many parodies of bits of The Spanish Tragedy, the old warhorse, and of Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus, but also of Montaigne.  Antonio and Mellida begins with the boy actors carrying their scripts on stage and discussing how to play their parts.  “I a voice to play a lady!  I shall ne’er do it.”  (Induction, 64)

I am continuing to have trouble imaging what these performances of these complex plays were like.  Some of the “boys” were older teens, and a number would have longer careers on stage, but the youngest, often playing the women’s roles, were seven or eight years old.

Antonio and Mellida:  Venice has defeated Genoa in a sea battle.  The Duke of Genoa and his son Antonio wash ashore.  Antonio and Mellida, daughter of the Duke of Venice, are in love.  This is a comedy and a romance, so love prevails and no one is murdered.  Antonio spends most of the play disguised as an “Amazon.”  It is a comic genre mishmash with lots of room for gags and diversion and songs.

I will mention here before I forget that the clown role, a striving braggart soldier type, at one point demands that a painter make a painting of “Uh.”

BALURDO  God’s nigs, now I remember me, I ha’ the rarest device in my head that ever breathed.  Can you paint me a drivelling, reeling song and let the word be, ‘Uh’?

PAINTER  A belch?

BALURDO  O, no, no – ‘Uh’.  Paint me ‘Uh, or nothing.  (V.1, 144)

He has invented conceptual art, right there on the London stage (although this is also another reference to a line in The Spanish Tragedy).

Antonio’s Revenge:  The Duke of Venice goes back on his word and murders the Duke of Genoa and imprisons his daughter for sexual misbehavior, just before the play starts. 

PIERO          I am great in blood,

Unequal’d in revenge.  (AR, I.1, 7)

The ghost of the murdered duke urges Antonio to wreak revenge on Piero, which he eventually does, just a horrible, horrible revenge. 

ANTONIO [indicates the banquet]

Fall in, good duke.  O these are worthless cates.

You have no stomach to them.  Look, look here:

Herer lies a dish to feast thy father’s gorge.

Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st.

[He uncovers the dish containing oh no too horrible I will stop here]  (V.3, 82)

Seneca’s Thyestes is the main reference here.

Piero is a quite interesting Machiavellian, a ruler himself and more of an actual Machiavellian than the usual burlesque of Machiavelli found in other English plays.  Piero overreachs so much that Antonio does not have to seek revenge on his own but actually assembles a team, which I do not think I had ever seen in a revenge tragedy before.

I would not call Antonio and Mellida a great play; Antonio’s Revenge finds some greatness once it gets moving in lets say Act III.  I’ll bet it works well on stage.  But the important thing is the language, which I will write about tomorrow.  Marston’s language is unusual.

Text and page numbers for Antonio and Mellida are from the Manchester University Press, the 1991 Revels Plays edition; those of Antonio’s Revenge are from the 1965 University of Nebraska Press edition.