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 setences, 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.

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.