John Marson'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.

Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday - hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster

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, the survivors mostly with better-known co-writers.  The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) appears to have been an early hit for him, a good example of the hack outdoing himself.  Hacks have their own kind of genius.

Dekker is not a great poet but he has a great ear, or perhaps an inventiveness, for speech.  The Shoemaker's Holiday has kept its interest because of its lively, outlandish speech by London’s shoemakers.

HODGE: How say’st thou, Firk, were we not merry at Old Ford?

FIRK: How, merry? why, our buttocks went jiggy-joggy like a quagmire.  Well, Sir Roger Oatmeal, if I thought all meal of that nature, I would eat nothing but bagpuddings. (IV.2, 103-4)

Firk gets a lot of the highlights.  The shoemakers generally speak in a jumpy prose, the upper-class characters, up to the king himself, in a rather less interesting verse.  Although Ralph gets a nice little verse speech for his wife when he is drafted and sent to France:

RALPH:  Thos know’st our trade makes rings for women’s heels:

Here take this pair of shoes, cut out by Hodge,

Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself,

Made up and pinked with letters for thy name.  (I.1, 65)

That is one plot, Ralph reuniting with his wife, who is pursued by a so-called gentleman.  Another is the usual romance plot – disapproving father, disguised suitor – except this time the disguise is as a Dutch shoemaker:

FIRK: … he’s some uplandish workman: hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster.  (II.3, 71)

And in the C-plot the master shoemaker becomes Mayor of London – based on a true story – resulting in the holiday and a big celebratory breakfast, attended by the king, to end the play.

EYRE: Come out, you powder-beef queans!  What, Nan!  what, Madge Mumble-crust!  Come out, you fat midriff-swag-belly-whores, and sweep me these kennels that the noisome stench offend not the noses of my neighbors.  (II.3, 69)

This is the guy who will be Mayor of London by the end of the play.

This fantasy of the Land of Cockaigne appears a few scenes before the breakfast:

FIRK:  There’s cheer for the heavens: venison-pasties walk up and down piping hot, like sergeants; beef and brewis comes marching in dry-fats [barrels], fritters and pancakes come trowling in in wheel-barrows; hens and oranges hopping in porters’-baskets, collops and eggs in scuttles, and tarts and custards come quavering in in malt-shovels.  (V.2, 124)

I have included Pieter van der Heyden print of Pieter Breugel’s “The Land of Cockaigne,” courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as an example of the kind of thing Dekker was looking at.

Not a great play but a lot of fun in its way and essential for readers looking for the London of the time.  Plenty more plays like that coming up.

Text and page numbers are from Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays (Modern Library).

Next up is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599 or 1600), a much trickier piece of business than I originally realized. 

What I Read in January 2026 – Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic.

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 SHAKESPEARE AND ALSO SHAKESPEARE

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), William Shakespeare

Every Man in His Humour (Italian version) (1598) &

Every Man in His Humour (London version) (1616), Ben Jonson – discussed here.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – More of London on the London stage.  I will write this one up momentarily.

Poems (???, earlier than 1618 anyway), Sir Walter Ralegh

Nothing Like the Sun (1964), Anthony Burgess – Shakespeare via Joyce via Burgess, with everyone enjoying their puns.  Not quite my Shakespeare, but convincing enough.  My recent reading demystified Burgess’s novel – oh, he read G. B. Harrison’s Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), just like I did.  The quotation I the title is from Ch. IV, p. 26.  Young Shakespeare has been drinking.

 

FICTION

Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh – The British at war, but it is the Phoney War, when no one knew what was going on.  Easily worth reading for its humor and details, but post-war Waugh is a more conventional writer than the author of, for example, the outrageous Put Out More Flags (1942).

The Sound of the Mountain (1949-54), Yasunari Kawabata – please see this post.

The Kindly Ones (1962), Anthony Powell – More of the same.  The war begins in the next novel, thus my turn back to Waugh.  Addendum: more of the same, but the first long chapter moves back to the author's childhood, and could with tiny changes be published as a separate novella.  It is easily my favorite part of the series so far.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), P. D. James – A fine Cambridge-set mystery often taught by Rohan Maitzen.

 

POETRY

The Shield of Achilles (1955), W. H. Auden

For the Unfallen (1959), Geoffrey Hill

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'Ignorant (1958), Philippe Jaccottet

O Hóspede de Job (The Guest of Job, 1963), José Cardoso Pires – Perhaps about the exhaustion of a dictatorship.  Not available in English.  Possibly slightly too hard for me but I fought through it. The Ballad of Dog’s Beach (1982) is easy to recommend to readers of Leonardo Sciascia and similar anti-mysteries.

Les mots (The Words, 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre – Sartre’s childhood memoir, with long sections on his love of reading and writing.  The classics came from his stern grandfather, rather more trashy stuff from his indulgent mother.  In a different life he would have been a pulp adventure writer.  Sartre, the adult, is often a repulsive character, but the childhood version is a sympathetic, charming little fellow.

I also read, while listening, the lyrics to Caetano Veloso 1968 and 1969 albums, both titled Caetano Veloso.  The former is especially rich in classics.  A valuable exercise I should do more often. 

Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain - He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery

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

The book is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain (1954, serialized 1949-54).  The sound of the mountain is a foreboding of death.  The novel is about an old man, Shingo, and his midlife crisis.  His friends are dying, his two adult children are running into marital difficulties, and he begins having vivid dreams.  The old man is in his early sixties, employed, healthy, sexually interested, if vaguely and politely so, in his daughter-in-law.  Not so old is what I am saying.

Life and events are the ordinary kind.  Melodrama is minimized.  The novel was serialized over five years, which fits the pace of the story perfectly, although I fear I would have had trouble remembering who was who.  Typical events of daily life are mixed with more symbolically meaningful material.

So Kawabata gives us, for example, a page of tedious chatter:

“No, please.”  He came out on the veranda.  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I was about to change his diaper.”

“Fusako?”

“She’s gone to the post office with Satoko.”  (170)

Etc., including weather small talk.  But then a pair of American military planes fly past. “They did not see the planes, but great shadows passed over the slope” (171) which leads to thoughts and talk of air raids and how children experienced the war, rather more poignant stuff, before returning to the trivia.  This is from a longer section titled “The Kite’s House,” which features the spring return of a kite to the house.  The same kite as previous years?  A descendant?  Is the kite returning to Shingo’s house, or does Shingo live in the kite’s house?  All of this, as is the entire novel, from Shingo’s point of view.

In a sense this is really a novel about how Shingo creates meaning from the world around him.

He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery.  The butterfly wings beyond the leaves of the bush clover seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful.  (29)

Then on the next page he has one of his vivid dreams, this time about noodles.

Here are a couple of lines from different dreams.

The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it.  (205)

From his body they took a great bucketful of mosquitoes.  (238)

The style of the novel is generally quite plain, plainer than Snow Country (1948), but the frequent dreams add a level of weirdness to the prose.

To my tastes, I would like more of that, and still find Kawabata’s early, fragmented, Modernist The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) his most interesting book.  But the dreams shake things up.

The Japanese context has its own interest, the occasional post-war intrusions, for example.  If the novel were about Shingo’s son it would be about the way the war and combat affected him, but the subject is kept at a distance.  The forthrightness about suicide always makes my eyes pop.  “’A man can always find another woman to commit suicide with him’” (245) – this is said matter-of-factly by Shingo’s sensible wife, about their son-in-law.

Maybe next year I will try to find a Japanese novel that is more formally or linguistically unusual.  I do not know what that might be.  Any recommendations are welcome. 

Thanks, Meredith!

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe.  More importantly, he was a born Londoner.  His best plays are full of London. 

Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but the earliest he put in the 1616 folio of his collected works, so the earliest play he claimed as his own.  It is just a comedy of types, characters with different monomanias knocking into each other.  It is meant to be current, although the types have never left us.

I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess

By laughing at them, they deserve no less:

Which when you heartily do, there’s hope left, then,

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men.  (Prologue, 8)

The “monsters” bit is a jab at the old-fashioned plays of five years ago, Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy and plays that

                                       With three rusty swords,

And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,

Fight over York, and Lancaster’s long jars;  (7)

That old stuff.  The poetry of The Spanish Tragedy, barely a decade old at this point, is used throughout Jonson’s play as not exactly an example of bad taste, since it is obviously great for its time, but rather a refusal to keep up.

Anyway, Every Man in His Humour is about men.  It is a hodgepodge of bits of Plautus and Terence but updated to the current moment.  I mean, there is a braggart soldier, and a jealous husband, stock characters going back to Menander, to the origins of theatrical comedy.  But there are also tobacco fanatics (Ralegh sparked a tobacco craze in 1586, again about a decade earlier):

BOBADILL: I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen before, of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only.  (III.2, 72)

A long list follows of the ailments cured by tobacco.  But Jonson also gives us the anti-tobacconist:

COB:  It’s good for nothing, but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke, and embers: there were four died out of one house, last week, with taking of it, and two more the bell went for, yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne’er scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward, and downward.  (III.2, 73)

It’s bad poetry that really takes a beating, “idle poetry, / That fruitless and unprofitable art  (I.1, 9), noting that this line is from the utilitarian Kno’well, and even he is more tolerant than his friend Downright who flees when a poetry recital begins:

DOWNRIGHT: Oh, here’s no foppery!  Death, I can endure the stocks better.  [Exits]

KNO’WELL Jr.: What ails thy brother?  Can he not hold his water, at reading of a ballad?

WELLBRED: Oh, no: a rhyme to him, is worse than cheese, or a bagpipe.  (IV.1, 83)

Worse than cheese!  That’s pretty bad.  The poem turns out to be good, because it is just a plagiarized chunk of Hero and Leander.  The bad poets are not just bad, but thieves, and the play ends with the offending poems thrown in the fire.  Every Man in His Humour does not have much of a plot.

The play is a preview of Jonson’s great comedies from a decade later – Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair – lively and London-packed but structured more originally.  In a sense, the text I have been quoting is actually part of this run of plays.  In the 1598 version the characters mostly have Italian names and the setting is Italian, sort of, although a weirdly Londonate Italy.  The Italian version was a big hit, but at some point before 1616 Jonson completely rewrote it, making the setting and characters English, tightening the slacker scenes, sharpening the satire.  I find the later version superior in every way, so that is what I have been quoting.

Text and page numbers are from the 1966 New Mermaids edition.  The editor is obsessed with the idea that the jealous husband is an especially subtle portrayal, beyond his comic type, returning to the idea in note after note, as if he, the editor, has his own humour.  I will also not that if the use of commas in some of the quotations above seems odd, they belong to Jonson, who was unusually attentive to the punctuation in his 1616 folio.  What they are supposed to mean to the actor is up for interpretation.

Assuming I get my writing back on track the next play will be another minor play-as-such but great London play, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

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

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 Stone and reading the monstrous Finnegans Wake (here, continuing, ending) were solid accomplishments in reading, if there are such things.  The worst book I read was the instructive I, Robot.  I do not know what the best was. 

My time with Elizabethan writers and books about them has continued to be rewarding.  For example, in December:

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Edward the Second (1592?) &

The Massacre at Paris (1592?) &

Hero and Leander (1593? / 1598), Christopher Marlowe – On Edward II; on The Massacre.

The Old Wives Tale (1593?), George Peele – An hour of fairy tale fluff, a patchwork perhaps written for a wedding.  A cousin of A Midsummer Night’s Dream; just the kind of thing I like.

Edward III (1595?), ??? – One great act.

Titus Andronicus (c. 1593), William Shakespeare

Elizabethan Plays & Players (1940), G. B. Harrison – Well written and outstanding in its use of evidence.

The Cambridge Companion to Christopher Marlowe (2004), various

Gary: A Sequel to Titus Andronicus (2019), Taylor Mac – Okay, now this thing.  Three minor (although they all have lines) characters murdered in Titus Andronicus turn out to have survived, and are given the task of cleaning up the results of the last act (“[t]here is the appearance of at least one thousand corpses on the stage,” 5).  A series of outrageous and disgusting events ensue, ending with “one of the more spectacular moments ever to be seen in the history of theater” (4), which may well have been true.  How I would love to see this travesty.  The line in the title of the post is said by Gary, played by Nathan Lane, p. 70.

FICTION

Lucifer (1654), Joost van den Vondel – Covered overhere.

Sod and Stubble (1936), John Ise – A novel of pioneer days on the Great Plains, set about 45 miles due south of Willa Cather’s Red Cloud, and globally close to the setting of Little House on the Prairie.  Strongly recommended to anyone who loves Cather and Wilder for the details of ordinary life.  It is really Ise writing up his mother’s oral memoir, as close to a primary source as fiction gets.

The Ascent of Rum Doodle (1956), W. E. Bowman – A magnificent parody of the Himalayan mountain climbing genre in a classic Wodehouse or Douglas Adams-like English style.

My Death (2004), Lisa Tuttle – A fine little paradoxical time-shift novel.

MEMOIR

Girl to Country (2025), Amy Rigby – One of our greatest living songwriters tries to make it in Nashville, and succeeds, after making it in New York, as covered in the earlier Girl to City (2019).  Making it, succeeding, artistically.  The first volume of memoirs likely has more interest to people who are not already fans, but I will testify that it has been highly rewarding, for more than thirty years now, to be an Amy Rigby fan.

POETRY

On the Slaughter (1891-1933), Hayim Nahman Bialik – Peter Cole’s new translation of Bialik’s poems, an outstanding addition to Bialik’s presence in English.

Five Senses: Selected Poems (1963), Judith Wright – Australian, full of surprises.

That Swing: Poems, 2008-2016 (2017), X. J. Kennedy

The Book of Training by Colonel Hap Thompson (2018), Percival Everett – “So, I kept saying to myself I was gonna write a novel entitled Percival Everett’s Long Overdue Slavery Novel, but this is what came out.”

The Khayyam Suite (2025), Charles Martin – Last seen here as Ovid’s translator.

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Le Château des Carpathes (1892), Jules Verne – I have gotten used to Verne rewriting Poe, but this is more of a Balzac novel, or an adventure novel with a sudden, surprising intrusion of Balzac.  Slow-paced, diffuse, thin in scientific ideas, yet highly entertaining.

L'Effraie (1953), Philippe Jaccottet – The war is over and Surrealism is over, so finally, some fresh ideas in French poetry!  Some resemblance to Rilke, maybe to James Merrill.  I read his second book, too, but it will show up in January’s list.

Uma mão cheia de nada outra de coisa nenhuma: historietas (1955), Irene Lisboa – Tiny little stories about children and their visionary moments by an important figure in Portuguese pedagogy.  These will be easy, right?  Ha ha ha, no, no.  But I guess that is good for me.

Cahiers de l'été 1944 (2025), Jean-Baptiste Duroselle – An angry essay written just before the liberation of Paris by the young man who would become the great historian of 20th century French diplomatic history, author of gigantic (“magisterial”) volumes I will likely never read.  This newly published book is an interesting companion to Marc Bloch’s L'Etrange defaite (1946, written 1940), which he could not have known.

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

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 Marlovian stuff.  Marlowe dramatizes the 1572 Paris Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the subsequent series of devious betrayals by the principle massacrists.  Just slaughter from beginning to end, as grotesque as Titus Andronicus.  Like the Shakespeare horror show, the Massacre appears to have been a big hit for a while.  Give the people what they want - murders, and plenty of  'em.

The great villain, likely the showcase part for Edward Alleyn, master of these big, loud Marlowe roles, is the Duc de Guise, a classic Machiavellian schemer, the instigator of the Massacre and many other crimes.  “[T]hen toll the bell, / And so let’s forward to the massacre,” declares the Guise in Act I, Scene 5 (p. 550), accurately describing most of the rest of the play.

Whatever his ideological motivation, once he gets going he cannot overcome his momentum, his taste for power and murder, until inevitably someone stronger takes him down.  “Enter the CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD and three MURDERERS” (V.2, 573).  And after the Guise’s death the play still has a strangulation and two stabbings to go.

One reason I wanted to revisit The Massacre at Paris is because it is the only non-Shakespearian Age of Shakespeare play I have actually seen.  In a sense, because what I saw was a 2018 performance at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon of a French adaptation of the play titled Margot.  Of course the French audience is still interested in screwy English versions of French history.  The first few rows of seats were covered by plastic sheets, because the many many many stabbings were represented by the murderer-actors drinking a mouthful of dyed-red water from plastic bottles and them spraying the water as forcefully as possible all over the victim-actors.  Sometimes several people were murdered at once and the stage would explode into a cloud of red spray.  The scene of the murder of the Guise – I am confident the photo I have borrowed is form that scene – went on approximately forever, with the murderers circling the Guise, taking a swallow, spitting, circling, swallowing, spitting.  Disgusting; hilarious; in the spirit of the wreckage of the Marlowe play.

By which I mean, by the way, that the text we have is in terrible shape, maybe a quick job to cash in on Marlowe’s murder.  The play we have is too short, feels rushed, and in places does not quite make sense.  There is not enough “great and thundering speech.”  The French version is likely a better play.

I have returned to the Penguin Complete Plays for the text and page numbers.

Farewell to poor Marlowe.  In two weeks I will move into another era and write about Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) which I remember as pretty good.

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

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.

In 1592 the London theaters a plague outbreak closed the London theaters for what turned out to be two years.  All of the old theater companies broke up and reformed.  Edward Alleyn, the biggest star, originator of all those big, bold Marlowe parts among many others, went in one direction, while his own company went in another, bringing in as partners the hot new actor Richard Burgbage and the hot new playwright William Shakespeare.  A big move.

Marlowe died in 1593, and Thomas Kyd in 1594, so there are several years where I do not see anything not by Shakespeare that looks so exciting.  But several younger new playwrights appear.  Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman are of high interest.  Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood look more like hacks to me, but they have long careers and collaborate with many other writers.  I remind myself that the “lost play” problem is still huge in the 1590s.  We do not have much of what was put on stage.

Young Jonson and Marston bring a new tone to the stage, more satirical, assuming the audience is tired of Marlowe’s bombast or at least in on the joke.  More sophisticated, maybe, with more plays aimed at the more expensive theaters that featured the boy’s companies.  Or perhaps decadence has already set in.

An attempt at a schedule, which takes me just out of the Elizabethan period:

I have read all of Jonson’s plays, and may well read them all again, although I have left several off of this schedule.  The Poetaster may be too much of an inside joke. I remember Sejanus, a Roman tragedy, as having many problems, but I have learned enough about the history genre that it may look different now.

I have not read Antonio’s Revenge or Hoffmann, revenge tragedies.  The Malcontent is, as I remember it, a great play, maybe the only one on this schedule.  The Dekker and Heywood plays are significant genre plays, a good way to see what kinds of things Shakespeare, Jonson, etc. were not writing.  All Fools is a comedy based on Terence, a perfect thing of its kind.  The Dutch Courtesan I do not know; it is some kind of satire.

The Elizabeth Cary play is a special case.  It is a closet drama, which does not help me much with my questions about how the theaters worked.  But it has gotten a lot of attention in the last twenty or thirty years, and, yes, it is the only play by a woman.

A selection of what else was going on in this period:

Wonderful poems, a brilliant novel-like item from Nashe, so much great Shakespeare.  There are two more Parnassus plays, more insider satires.  I will likely read them all.  John Donne’s secular poems likely belong here somewhere, as do some portion of Walter Raleigh’s poems.

The dates in these tables are somewhat more secure than those in my Age of Marlowe tables, but for most of them please mentally add “circa.”

Please suggest different plays, for the schedule or just for me, or other works, or good secondary works, or anything else that needs suggesting.  I will, with luck, be in London in March, where I hope to learn a thing or two firsthand.  Suggestions about the remnants of 16th century London are also welcome.

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

How I find books: Andrei The Untranslated posted a list of Baroque writers from Otto Maria Carpeaux’s massive História da Literatura Ocidental (1959-66), a marvelous list of marvelous writers including a number of favorites.

I’ve read at least something by all of them.  Not Comenius, who I think of as a writer on education; no idea what someone interested in literature might want to read.  And not Vondel.  Who the heck is Vondel?

Joost van den Vondel is the greatest early modern Dutch playwright.  I know little about Dutch literature and nothing about 17th century Dutch theater.  Nothing is close to what has made it into English.  But here we have an 1898 translation, by Leonard Charles van Noppen, of Vondel’s 1654 play Lucifer.  Good enough.

A faction of angels, led by Lucifer, is afraid of and insulted by the new creature Adam.

APOLLION: I covered with my wings mine eyes and face

That I might curb my thoughts and deep delight,

When erst she filled my gaze…

                                                        Their life consists

Alone in loving and in being loved –

One swept, one mutual joy, by then indulged

Perpetually, yet e’er unquenchable.  (Act I, pp. 277-8)

The bashful angel, who by the end of the play becomes one of the lords of Hell, embarrassed by sexy Eve is adorable.  The Lucifer faction debates the possibility of rebellion.  The loyalist faction tries to dissuade them.  The first four acts are static, with a lot of declarations and debates, and without the psychological intensity of Racine.  There is likely some political interest I do not care much about.  A scene where the future devils try to calm down their Luciferian followers, who are more radical than their leaders, clearly has an edge I only glimpse.  And anyway, I am looking for Carpeaux’s promised Baroque language, hidden, I know by the translation, the usual move of turning long Alexandrines into blank verse.

The civil war of the angels and the fall of the Lucifer faction occurs between Acts IV and Act V.  The victorious angles describe the battle.  The description is superb; here, finally, is the kind of writing I was hoping to find.  An angel is describing Lucifer in battle array:

Surrounded by his staff and retinue

In green, he, wickedly impelled by hate

Irreconcilable, in golden mail,

That brightly shone upon his martial vest

Of glowing purple, mounted then his car,

Whose golden wheels with rubies were emblazed.

The lion and dragon fell, prepared

For speedy flight, with backs sown full of stars

And to the chariot joined by pearly traces,

Panted for strife, and for destruction flamed.  (V, 407-8)

Etc., etc., for many colorful, inventive pages.  The angels counterattack:

… by his command

Begin by circling wheels to soar aloft,

To gain the wind-side of their battling foe,

Who also rises, but with heavier sail,

And finally to leeward slowly drifts:

As if one heavenward a falcon saw,

Mounting with pinions bold into the sky,

Ere that the drowsing herons are aware,

Who in a wood, hard by a pleasant mead,

Tremble with fright, when from their lofty nest

They see their dreaded foe.  (V, 411)

And the metaphor of the falcon and the heron goes on for several more lines.  The aerial maneuvering of the angels is first described as, really, a sea battle, familiar to the Dutch, before they angels are turned into birds in the extended metaphor.

I would have guessed Lucifer was a closet drama, but no, it was performed twice before being banned as irreligious.  What do I know about Dutch theater.

One great act.  A fortuitous find.  A bit like reading a retelling of the Ramayana or similar epic.

Edward III - This fellow is well read in poetry

I logically followed Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with the anonymous, but see below, Edward III (published 1596).  The first two acts look like a heterosexual parody of the Marlowe play, with King Edward swerving from strong to weak king when he suddenly falls in love with a married countess and threatens to ruin the kingdom for his passion.  Luckily this plotline is resolved at the end of Act II and Edward goes on to conquer France.  The last three acts cover the Battles of Crécy and Poitiers and the episode with the Burghers of Calais and other exciting scenes we all know from Froissart’s Chronicles.  They were exciting in Froissart, at least, although they are dramatically inert here.

There is one scene, though, before the war, Act II, Scene 1.  The lovestruck king wants to write a love letter.  Enter his secretary Lodowick.

This fellow is well read in poetry

and hath a lusty and persuasive spirit.  (p. 23)

They begin composing the letter.  Lodowick has problem understanding the assignment.

LODOWICK:          Write I to a woman?

KING EDWARD:  What beauty else could triumph on me

or who but women do our love-lays greet?

What, thinkest thou I bid thee praise a horse?  (24)

Lodowick is, I suppose, thinking of the previous king, but the horse shows how the scene works, the constant comic swing from love sonnet rhetoric to its deflation.  The scene is clearly written by someone familiar with the ongoing Elizabethan sonnet craze.  It is an extended mockery of sonnet writing.

One good joke is that the secretary does not get more than two lines written, and those are useless for the king’s lustful purpose.

LODOWICK:  What is the other fault my sovereign?

KING EDWARD:  Read o’er the line again.

LODOWICK:                                                     ‘More fair and chaste’

KING EDWARD:  I did not bid thee talk of chastity

To ransack so the treasure of her mind

For I had rather have her chased than chaste.

Out with the moon line, I will none of it

and let me have her likened to the sun

say she hath thrice more splendour than the sun

that her perfections emulate the sun

that she breeds sweets as plenteous as the sun

that she doth thaw cold winter like the sun

that she doth cheer fresh summer like the sun

that she doth dazzle gazers like the sun

and in this application to the sun

bid her be free and general as the sun

who smiles upon the basest weed that grows

as lovingly as on the fragrant rose.  (25-6)

It is a brilliant, funny scene all the way through.  I read Edward III in the 1996 Eric Sams edition titled Shakespeare’s Edward III: An early play restored to the canon, where the bulk of the book is devoted to demonstrating how the entire play was written by Shakespeare.  I am not sure why he wants to give those dull – let’s say, functional – last three acts to Shakespeare, but I do not need his sections on “The Image Cluster” and “Words Beginning with ‘un-‘” and so on to remember that in Sonnet 130, the hilarious insult poem where the Dark Lady has bad breath and an annoying voice, “[m]y mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” emphasis mine, or to see that “basest weed” appear in Sonnet 94, where it “outbraves his dignity.”  And I am looking at Sonnet 94 because later in the scene the father of the Countess urges her to be virtuous by literally quoting the final line of Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (32).

If Shakespeare wrote the scene, it is an ingenious self-parody.  It is so good I would be happy to give it to him, although the "chaste / chased" pun is a little obvious for him.  But then I feel a little bad for the anonymous hack playwright who, reading some version of Shakespeare’s sonnets, circulating in manuscript, thought it would be hilarious if the moony king in the play he was working on was an incompetent sonnet writer.  It’s the best thing the poor guy ever wrote and we want to attribute it to, who else, Shakespeare.

My fundamental problem with a lot of the attribution arguments is that they do not seem to recognize that playwrights can imitate, parody, mock, and plagiarize each other.  Counting words that begin with “un-“ is thin, thin, thin evidence.  But the scene even if not by Shakespeare is highly Shakespearian, a delight to read, and recommended to anyone who likes such things.  What you do with the rest of Edward III is your business.

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

I take Doctor Faustus as Christopher Marlowe’s richest play but Edward the Second (performed 1592?, published 1594) as his best play-as-such.  Meaning structure, drama, pace, whatever we associate with the idea of the well-made play.  The pace is fast, the characters interact with each other rather than giving speeches, and the story hits plot points like a modern screenplay.  A big turn right in the middle, for example.  I believe in the 20th century it has been Marlowe’s most performed play.

So young Edward, at the death of his father, attains the throne, which means he can bring his boyfriend Gaveston back from banishment in France.  Edward’s nobility more or less rebels, assuming that the dissolute Gaveston will ruin the king, who is not that strong to begin with.  One of the rebels, the hothead young Mortimer, gets a taste for power, and goes too far.  Sympathy likely turns from the once-sensible nobles to poor King Edward, imprisoned in a filthy cell, murdered in a shocking manner.  Although the theme is a bit muted, Mortimer is where I find the usual Marlovian critique of power.  He has a point when the play begins, but the pursuit of power becomes its own goal.

Marlowe likely borrowed the “weak king” theme from Shakespeare’s Henry VI series, which were big hits; Shakespeare was clearly imitating Edward II, or so it looks to me, in Richard II (1595).

The great cost Marlowe paid for writing such a zippy play was a muting of his mighty line, his great poetry.  It is here, especially in the marvelous final act, but Edward II is more, let’s say, efficient, or maybe crisp, than the Tamburlaine plays or The Jew of Malta.

Still.  Here are a pair of minor courtiers throwing in their lot with King Edward and Gaveston.  One is a scholar, perhaps like Marlowe from Cambridge.  The weaselly striver Spenser advises him on how to succeed as a courtier:

      … you must cast the scholar off,

And learn to court it like a gentleman.

He begins with what actions do not make a courtier, for example:

Or holding of a napkin in your hand,

Or saying a long grace at table’s end…

Instead:

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

And now and then stab, as occasion serves.  (II.1, p. 462)

That last line, now that belongs in a Marlowe play.

The play begins with Gaveston, with his return to London.  He speaks in a more poetic manner.

Music and poetry is his [King Edwards’s] delight;

Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night,

Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;

And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,

Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay;

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,

With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,

To hide those parts which men delight to see,

Shall bathe him in a spring… (I.1, 436-7)

But other characters, with a show to put on, do not have time for this kind of talk, and Gaveston is killed halfway through the play for the crime of corrupting the king and being more interesting than the other characters.  Although once crushed, King Edward becomes a lot more interesting.  My imaginary Shakespeare’s realization, for Richard II, was that the last act ought to be the whole play.

I am back in The Complete Plays, the Penguin Classics edition, for the text and page numbers.

I’ll write about The Massacre at Paris in two weeks, and that is it for Marlowe.  Massacre is definitely not a well-made play, and the state of the text we have is terrible, but is it ever full of Marlowe.

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

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, 1604, the end of the Elizabethan age.  Please suggest favorites.

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Astrophil and Stella (c. 1580), Philip Sidney – Kicking off the sonnet craze.

The Jew of Malta (1589?), Christopher Marlowe – I will point you here.

Henry VI, Part 3 (1590?) &

Henry VI, Part 1 (1591?), William Shakespeare – A bit on Part 3 over here.  Part 1 is as weak as I remember.  An early quickie prequel, perhaps slapped together while Shakespeare was working on Richard III.

Arden of Faversham (1591?), ??? – Quite good, really.

Doctor Faustus A (1592?/1604) &

Doctor Faustus B (1592?/1616), Christopher Marlowe – Some notes back here.  The line in the title is from Faustus’s great last scene, the A text.  The B text replaces the commas with periods – also good.

Richard III (1592?), William Shakespeare – Some weaknesses, but so many great scenes.

Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays (2014), Lawrence & Sally-Beth MacLean Manley – I had planned to look at this book, but it was so interesting that I read it.  The use of evidence is exemplary, meaning cautious.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival (2025), Stephen Greenblatt – Briefly reviewed.

FICTION

The Death of Virgil (1945), Hermann Broch – Why make art?

The Heat of the Day (1948), Elizabeth Bowen – London during, or just after, the Blitz.  A bit of a spy story, surprisingly.  Bowen’s mix of Flaubert and James, or what I think of as Flaubert and James, is always interesting.

The One That Got Away (1992), Percival Everett & Dirk Zimmer – A picture book about cowboys and numbers, written and illustrated for little children.

Vaim (2025), Jon Fosse– Look, a new novel!  The Fosse seemed slight to me, the characters much simpler than the artist I spent so much time with in Septology.  This is the first of a trilogy, so maybe it is all going somewhere.  I enjoyed the voice of the characters; Damion Searls is an ideal translator.

Shadow Ticket (2025), Thomas Pynchon  - Another new novel.  Against the Day (2006) was the last big book I read before starting Wuthering Expectations.  I guess it exhausted me, and my interests wandered elsewhere, so I skipped the next two novels, but I am now well-rested and, since Pynchon is 88, I am amazed this book exists.  Talk about simpler, compared to, say, Gravity’s Rainbow, with which it has many connections, but anyone sympathetic to what Pynchon does should be happy with this book.  It features a number of things that glow in the dark; quite a lot of cheese, and cheez, and lots of information about the American cheezscape.  Biblioklept has put together some useful and entertaining annotations.  I hope someone from Milwaukee is doing the same for all of the Wisconsin-specific detail.  It amuses me to think of 80-some year-old Pynchon spending his time making sure he squeezes all of the good details out of 1930 Milwaukee.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Os cem melhores contos brasileiros do século (The 100 Nest Brazilian Short Stories of the Century, 1903-38), various – I read the first thirteen stories, through the 1930s.  Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos – plausibly among the best Brazilian short stories of the century, yes.  And just hard enough for my Portuguese study.

Les gommes (The Erasers, 1953), Alain Robbe-Grillet – I read Robbe-Grillet’s fussy, screwball anti-mystery ages ago in English.  I enjoyed revisiting it, although I have less of a clue than ever why so many people thought this was going to be the future of the novel.  I would not have complained, but why, why?

 

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

In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the great scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of power and knowledge.  After learning and doing everything he wants he spends Acts III and IV playing an increasingly stupid series of pranks on anyone and everyone, including himself.  In Act V, in one of the great scenes of the English stage, the bill comes due and we all go home having learned an edifying moral lesson.

This is Marlowe’s richest play, really packed with ideas and conceits.  Stephen Greenblatt, in Dark Renaissance (2025), pushes a strong autobiographical reading onto this play more than any other.  He likes the idea that Marlowe sold his soul to Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, and has lightly shifted his own dilemma onto Faust.

My reading is also pretty autobiographical.  Marlowe’s great subject is power, pure power in the Tamburlaine plays, wealth as power in The Jew of Malta, knowledge as power here.  In Doctor Faustus, though, he is more explicit about a subtext of the earlier plays, that the characters love the pursuit of power but have little idea of what to do with it.  The great motivation of Faustus (and Barabas, and Tamburlaine) is restlessness.  He, and they, and I suspect Marlowe, are easily bored.

We first see him with his books, leafing through Aristotle:

Sweet analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravished me.  (I.1, p. 7)

But he is now bored with philosophy, law, medicine,, theology.  Magic is just the next subject for the restless scholar to master, and then, presumably, although somehow he cannot see this, to abandon.  Mephistopheles gives him a set of books containing all the secrets of the universe, and that is that, everything he wanted to know with no effort.  What’s next?

Thus the strange middle of Doctor Faustus, where after learning grows stale Faustus resorts to pranks and tricks to keep himself entertained, foreshadowed by an earlier clown scene:

ROBIN  O, this is admirable!  Here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and I’faith, I mean to search some circles for my own use.  Now I will make all the maidens in our parish dance naked  before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw yet.  (II.2, 26)

The brilliant Faustus has trouble coming up with uses of his endless power much more interesting than making the girls dance naked.

The prank scenes are pretty silly, and could easily be replaced by other, similar scenes, and perhaps sometimes were, but I think they carry Marlowe’s themes.

I wonder to what extent the audience for Doctor Faustus was genuinely shocked by what Marlowe put on stage.

FAUSTUS  [Cuts his arm.] Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee

I cut my arm, and with my proper blood

Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s.  (II.1, 22)

I imagine there was a shiver of real danger here.  The English at one point had plenty of devils hopping around the stage in the old miracle plays, all banned at this point as too dangerously Catholic, but were there, in scenes like this, any sense that maybe we should not be seeing such a thing, even in a play?  A number of good theater stories about Doctor Faustus have survived. The actors realizing that there is an extra devil on the stage, that sort of thing.

My shivers are more modern, but they are right there in the text.

FAUSTUS  Where are you damned?

MEPHISTOPHELES  In hell.

FAUSTUS  How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHELES  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.  (I.3, 17)

Mephistopheles is an existentialist.  Faustus is a materialist, but then so in Mephistopheles.

FAUSTUS  Come, I think hell’s a fable.

MEPHISTOPHELES  Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.  (II.1, 24)

An amusing conceit of Marlowe’s is that the devil is always honest with Faustus.

I wonder, almost, if I overrate Doctor Faustus because of the superb last scene – the last two pages – where we watch Faustus in his last hour along with a ticking clock.  It is a great piece of dramatic psychology.  I wonder how fast various actors have taken it.

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

O, I’ll leap up to my God!  Who pulls me down?  (V.2, 52)

Until the last minute:

Ugly hell, gape not!  Come not, Lucifer!

I’ll burn my books!  Ah, Mephistopheles!  (V.2, 53)

Only in his last breath will he give up those books.

Doctor Faustus appeared in or near 1593, and survived in two texts, A (1604) and B (1616), with B substantially longer, and with both showing evidence of post-Marlowe tinkering.  I read them both in the 2005 Norton Critical Edition, source of the page references above.  All of my quotes are, arbitrarily, from the A text.

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

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?), ??? – Some notes over here.

Tamburlaine, Pt. II (1587?), Christopher Marlowe – Righthere and also here.

The Spanish Tragedy (1587?), Thomas Kyd – This away and that away.

Henry VI, Pt. 2 (1590?), William Shakespeare – Just click here or here.

English Tragedy before Shakespeare (1955), Wolfgang Clemen – A deceptive title.  The focus is narrowly on the evolution of the set speech in early Elizabethan plays.  A topic of enormous interest and a book of great insight, it turned out.

POETRY

Brides of Reason (1955) &

A Winter Talent and Other Poems (1957) &

A Sequence for Francis Parkman (1961), Donald Davie

Night Watch (2025), Kevin Young

 

OTHER BOOKS IN ENGLISH

Platero and I (1914), Juan Ramón Jiménez – It occurred to me, returning from my French donkey expedition, that I had many of the classics of donkey literature but not this one, a hundred-some prose poems by the future Nobel Prize-winning poet about his beloved donkey friend.  Way too sentimental for my tastes, but with many fine moments of fine beauty or irony.  The line in the post’s title is from LVII, Promenade, p. 95 of my edition, translated by Austin, Texas, high school Spanish teacher Eloise Roach.

The Plague (1947), Albert Camus

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass (2025), Dave Barry – The American humorist.  I assume non-Americans have no idea who Barry is.  One’s taste for his humor is obviously central to enjoying this book, but this is an actual memoir, not a humor book, and the long central section about his newspaper career in the 1970s and 1980s is an extremely interesting depiction of a lost world.  We were better off back then, although there is nothing to be done to bring it back.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Primeiro Livro de Poesia (First Book of Poetry, 1991) – Poetry suitable for children from around the Lusophonic world, assembled by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.  I read this book three years ago when I was just starting to read in Portuguese.  Was it easier now?  Did I understand it better?  I guess.

Le coffre (The Cartopper, 2019), Jacky Schwartmann & Lucian-Dragos Bogdan – An artificial novel for the Lyon mystery festival when Romania was the special guest country, with the French author writing the Lyon chapters and the Romanian writing the Romanian writing those set in Romania.  The detectives do not share a language and can only communicate by email.  This should be a throwaway book, but it is actually pretty good.  The central mystery was all right and the characters were developed and enjoyable.  Both authors were digressive, relaxed.  The Lyon details were a treat.  Not bad, not bad.  The book was a thoughtful gift – thanks!

Retour à Birkenau (Return to Birkenau, 2019), Ginette Kolinka avec Marion Ruggieri – Birkenau survivor Kolinka became active in French Holocaust education when she became a widow in her seventies.  She accompanied groups of French schoolchildren on tours of Birkenau, thus the Return in the book’s title, an extraordinary piece of bravery.  Her 100th birthday was last February.

Avec les fées (With the Fairies, 2024), Sylvain Tesson – Travel writer Tesson tours the Celtic coast – Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, western Ireland, western Scotland, as far as the Shetlands – by sailboat, foot, and bicycle.  I enjoy his voice and humor, but this is a minor book compared to his crazy Russian adventures.  Perhaps a bit too gooey, rhetorically, but how much is there to say about the pleasures of sailing without a little goo.

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

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, Alice, and her boyfriend hire professional killers to off her wealthy husband.  For some reason a detailed account of this murder is included in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577 / 1587), the same some work of English history that Shakespeare and all the other playwrights were looting for material for history plays, which are also full of amazing murders but of kings.  Arden was just a prominent citizen, so this is a unique example of a genre that we, or some of us, still love today.

The first thing I see in the New Mermaids edition, for example, is the actual murder house, which stands today.  How exciting!

Arden’s House today.  Arden was murdered in the ground-floor room in the centre of the photograph.  The photo was taken by the editor of the book, Martin White.

I was delighted to find that Arden is also an early example of another still-popular genre, the dark comedy about incompetent criminals:

Then SHAKEBAG falls into a ditch

SHAKEBAG: Help, Will, help!  I am almost drowned.  (Scene xii, the Arden text has scenes but no acts)

The hired killers, and this is right out of the chronicles, are Black Will and Shakebag.  The murder plot is drawn out to feature-length by their bad luck and idiocy.  There are actually two plotlines aiming at Arden’s murder – Alice has backup plans – but everyone involved is an idiot.

The play is a farce of the kind we know and love in films like Fargo (Coen, 1996), also a “true story” as we know because the opening titles say so, and why would they lie, where the criminals bumble and someone ends up in the woodchipper.  A big difference in Arden is that the mass slaughter of the characters is mostly offstage and at the hands of the executioner.

This is not so far from a modern screenplay:

GREENE:  Will you two kill him?  Here’s the angels down,

And I will lay the platform of his death.

BLACK WILL:  Plat me no platforms!  Give me the money and I’ll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall, but I’ll kill him.  (ii)

A few lines later Black Will wishes that hitman were a recognized profession.  “I should be warden of the company.”  He is in prose here, but the killers can also be lyrical.

SHAKEBAG:  Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,

And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth

And with the black fold of her cloudy robe

Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,

In which sweet silence such as we triumph.  (v)

Arden would be entertaining in prose, but a number of poetic passages are scattered around.  This soliloquy has gotten a lot of attention (Mosby is the scheming boyfriend):

MOSBY: Disturbed thoughts drive me from company

And dries my marrow with their watchfulness.

Continual trouble of my moody brain

Feebles my body by excess of drink

And nips me as the bitter north-east wind

Doth check the tender blossoms in the spring.

Well fares the man, howe’er his cates do taste,

That tables not with foul suspicion;

And he but pines amongst his delicates

Whose troubled mind is stuffed with discontent.  (viii)

And so on, becoming increasing devious as the speech proceeds.  With no evidence besides the text, Arden of Faversham has been attributed to everyone, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others; sometimes, more plausibly, just this scene, or speech, is given to Shakespeare or Marlowe.  It has metaphorical language and surprising verbs and the kind of “Machiavellian” rhetoric I associate with Barabas and Richard III.  So, maybe.

Or maybe the anonymous hack was successfully imitating the star writers of his time.  That’s my guess, is that Arden is by a hack who outdid himself.  The language helps make Arden better than it could have been, but so do the surprisingly, unnecessarily complex characters, especially Alice, the wife.

ALICE  Tush, Mosby.  Oaths are words, and words is wind,

And wind is mutable.  (i)

Perhaps the author was not quite in control of the motives of his characters, but the result is a degree of ambivalence and ambiguity that elevates the story.  It is not Othello, no.  But it is pretty good.  Easy to recommend.

Next up: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a highlight of this entire project.