A draft Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus

In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them.

Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong.

Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Nicholas Udall

Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553), authorship much disputed – start with two influential pre-Elizabethan comedies written for academic settings.

Gorbuduc (1561), Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville – the first English tragedy in blank verse, performed before young Queen Elizabeth.

Somewhere in the mid-1570s permanent theaters begin to succeed, and it is tempting to see what might have been on those early stages, but let’s jump to Marlowe, the great young innovator.

Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587), Christopher Marlowe – not that you would know from this one, not that I remember.

Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587), Christopher Marlowe – cheating a bit, putting the two plays together.  Now things are starting to get good.

The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd – the first revenge tragedy, very exciting.

The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe

Arden of Faversham (1591), ??? – more cheating, since this may actually be Shakespeare, not Not Shakespeare.  Or it’s Marlowe.  Or anyone.

Doctor Faustus (1592), Christopher Marlowe

Edward the Second (1592), Christopher Marlowe

Selimus (1592), Robert Greene – one of many, many Tamburlaine knockoffs.  Static and dull, I assume.

The Massacre at Paris (1593), Christopher Marlowe – Oddly, this is the only play I will mention of which I have seen a performance, an almost hilariously gory French adaptation.  It is not a good play, but it is sure an interesting one.

The Old Wife's Tale (1593), George Peele – A parody of a genre of fairy tale romance plays none of which are extant, meaning this might be gibberish.

Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson – I do not remember this as a great play, but young Jonson is inventing a new kind of comedy that will pay off in his later masterpieces.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – An early “city comedy.” 

Antonio's Revenge (1600), John Marston – revenge!

The Tragedy of Hoffmann (1602), Henry Chettle – revenge!

Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Ambitious Jonson wrote a couple of serious Roman tragedies.  I remember them as weak, but I’ll give this one another chance.

A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – A domestic melodrama, in case you were wondering why those were not popular in the old days.  Oh, they were.

The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – Really very early Jacobean, but it let’s me end the list on an unusual masterpiece, featuring one of the period’s great characters.

What was going on in that five-year gap after Marlowe’s death in 1593?  I will have to investigate more.  I know one thing.  If Shakespeare, like Marlowe, had died at age 29, perhaps knifed in the same tavern fight, he would be remembered as the promising young author of Richard III.  Over the next five years he became the greatest playwright in British history.  The greatest writer?  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Falstaff, his sonnets.  He became the center of gravity that turns everyone else into Not Shakespeare, into Shakespeare’s great predecessor or disciple or rival, something defined against Shakespeare.

I am still tempted, I don’t know, by a Greatest Hits approach, which would drop a dozen of the above and continue on into the 17th century with Jonson’s great comedies, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Atheist’s Tragedy, some selection of Thomas Middleton, those two magnificent John Webster plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ending with the collapse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a decade before the Puritans put the exhausted, decadent London theaters out of their misery.

Not Shakespeare - a preliminary, semi-formed invitation to read plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew Fair.  It has been a while since I have read them, twenty years or more.  Plays are well-suited for ongoing readalongs, so in the spirit of reading the Greek and Roman plays a couple years ago, why not invite anyone interested to join in.

I have been calling this idea Not Shakespeare.  What am I trying to do?

1.  The plays are so good.  Many of them.  I want to read them again.

2.  I want to learn more about the technical aspects of the innovations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, especially the poetry and structure.  Things moved very fast for forty years.

3.  Genre, too, which appears to be where a lot of the academic attention has gone (as with fiction generally).  It is here that I am most tempted to read bad plays, and not just revenge tragedies, for which I have a strong taste.

4. I want to put a personality of some kind on more of these writers.  Some of them are easy.  Just read The Duchess of Malfi and you know John Webster well enough to get Tom Stoppard’s jokes about him in Shakespeare in Love.  I think I know Marlowe and Jonson.  But other major writers are ciphers, Thomas Middleton especially.  I don’t know if the answer is to read more of the writer, read more about the writer, or think more about them.  I hope not the latter.  I should say I mean know them as artists, not whether or not they were nice people.  Maybe I should also say that this is all a fiction, a creative collaboration between the writer and the reader.

Still, Middleton, who was that guy?  If you have read a lot of Shakespeare you have likely read a lot more Middleton than you realize.  A good fifth item for this list would be to learn more about how these writers collaborated, but I fear that is hopeless.  We wish we knew.  The computer programs can only get us so far.

The logistics of Not Shakespeare are a little different than the Greek plays.  The Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are longer and the English is more difficult than the modern translated English I read with the Greeks.  A play a week with the Greeks, but I think a play every two weeks makes more sense with the Not Shakespeares.  Plus that will give me more time to read other things.  The poetry of the time – John Donne, George Herbert, the sonnet craze, much more – is also tempting me.  And I want to read some secondary works, although how far that will go I do not know.

It is tempting, and likely best for a readalong, to read the Twenty Greatest Hits.  But I want to go a little deeper.  How about twenty Elizabethan plays to begin, actually Elizabethan, stopping in 1603?  Marlowe, The Spanish Tragedy, Jonson finding his voice, new genres, many crazy revenge tragedies.

My method was to see what New Mermaids has in print, and then poke around at Broadview and Penguin Classics, and then add this and that.  George Chapman and John Fletcher seem to be out of fashion in the classroom for some reason.

Twenty Elizabethan plays in forty weeks, beginning in September, how does that sound?  In August I will rewrite this post and put up a timeline.  I do not expect anyone to read all, or most, of the plays.  Someone may well be inspired to read Shakespeare rather than Not Shakespeare, which is understandable.

I am asking for advice in some sense.  Don’t miss this play; that Cambridge Companion is the really good one; so-and-so’s essay is way better than T. S. Eliot’s.  I don’t know.  Anything. 

This is also a method to make myself write more.  For some reason a committed structure, however artificial, does the trick.

What I Read in May 2025 – “There’s the store that’s shaped like a duck,” Franca said.

First, my poor email subscribers missed some of the installments of my newsletter about Anthony Powell.  If this keeps happening I will have to think of something or even do something.  Here they are:

A skippable piece of throat-clearing about the roman fleuve.

What I think Powell is doing in A Dance to the Music of Time, the first four novels anyways.

How I think he does it.

After Finnegans Wake, I only wanted short books, or easy books, or even better both, so these are those.  For a while I thought this would last all summer.  It might.

FICTION

Everyman and Medieval Mystery Plays (15^th C.) – I am beginning preparations for my upcoming Not Shakespeare event.  Soon I will ask for advice about it.  That is Knowledge up in the post’s title, helping out Everyman, and supplying an epigram to the edition I read.

The Stronghold (1940), Dino Buzzati – The new translation of The Tartar Steppes, less odd and Kafkaesque than I expected.  More plausibly about military life.  Still, somewhat odd, somewhat Kafkaesque.

The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Thornton Wilder – Wilder took up Finnegans Wake as a hobby for a couple of years, treating it a puzzle of some kind, like a crossword.  I thought I would revisit his amusing Adam-and-Eve satire that was directly inspired by – but is nothing like! – Joyce’s novel.

Johnny Tremain (1943), Esther Forbes – A kid’s novel about the beginnings of the American Revolution in Boston, one of the best-selling books in American history.  It has faded, understandably, but I was happy to find that it is a real novel, with solid characters and a sensible story that is not overtly educational, a genuine American descendant of Scott’s Waverley.  Still, mostly recommended to New Englanders planning to enjoy the upcoming Sesquicentennial events.

The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), Bertolt Brecht

Nine Stories (1953), J. D. Salinger

Mission of Gravity (1953), Hal Clement – A landmark of “hard” science fiction, where the author’s main concern is getting the math right, which does not sound so exciting, which is likely why I skipped this one long ago when I was reading more science fiction.  How wrong I was.  This book is a scream, a seafaring adventure novel with a crew of rubbery foot-long problem-solving caterpillars.  It also has an unusually satisfying ending.

Jane and Prudence (1953), Barbara Pym – I wanted to test my sense that Powell’s novels were the purest comedy of manners I had ever read.  This Pym novel is also quite pure.

At Lady Molly's (1957), Anthony Powell

Light Years (1975), James Salter – The quotation I put in the title is from p. 305 of the Vintage edition.  It’s a real building, the one shaped like a duck!

Turtle Diary (1975), Russell Hoban – Almost too much to my tastes, in humor, sentence-level surprises, sensibility, and even romance.  I almost distrust it.  Wonderful book.

The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Gloria Naylor – With these last three you can almost see me doing my second-favorite thing, browsing at the library.  I like to think reading the books is actually my favorite.

The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), Nghi Vo – I had this Chinese-flavored fantasy novel in my hands when the owner of The Briar Patch in Bangor, Maine, a few blocks from Stephen King’s house, told me it was “really good,” obliging me to buy it.  Some really good things about it: 1) it is a hundred pages long and tells a complete story, a rarity among fantasy novels today; 2) the magical more-or-less Chinese setting is although I am sure filled with it’s own clichés still fresh to me; 3) poking around online I found complaints about the weak world-building, which is just about the highest compliment a fantasy novel can receive today.  Despite the light magical touches it turns out to be more of a spy novel.

 

POETRY

Open House (1941) &

The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) &

Words for the Wind (1958), Theodore Roethke – I’ve been wandering through Roethle’s Collected Poems alongside a curious selection from his notebooks.

Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems (1948), Kenneth Fearing – Energetic.

Eternal Monday: New & Selected Poems (1971-96), György Petri – A fine, funny Hungarian poet, an accidental dissident, recommended to readers of Milosz and Herbert and so on.

Shoulder Season (2010), Ange Mlinko – And a Hungarian-American poet.  I should be getting to her new book soon, but the library had this one.

 

LITTLE ART BOOKS

Clavilux and Lumia Home Models (2025), Thomas Wilfred

Some Stones are Ancient Books (2025), Richard Sharpe Shaver –The last two of the conceptual art books from the set I started last month (website).  Both, all, of real interest if you like unusual things.  The Wilfred book has an introduction by Doug Skinner, longtime friend of the blog.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Le parti pris des choses (The Part Taken by Things, 1940) &

Proêmes (1948), Francis Ponge – the first book is a semi-Surrealist masterpiece, a collection of prose poems on, mostly, things, objects, turned into language.  The second book is more miscellaneous.

Le petit homme d'Arkhangelsk (The Little Man from Archangelsk, 1957), Georges Simenon – A roman dur, so a crime-like event occurs.  A guy’s wife runs off, which does not bother him so much, but she takes the most valuable stamps from his collection, which does.  Police detectives will be involved at some point, but the novel is really about the psychology of the character.  It’s a sad book.

Cinco Voltas Na Bahia e Um Beijo para Caetano Veloso (Five Returns to Bahia and a Kiss for Caetano Veloso, 2019), Alexandra Lucas Coelho – Maybe the Portuguese crónica system, where writers make their livings writing ephemeral essays for magazines, has some disadvantages.  This is the third book I have read this year by a veteran journalist who has trouble distinguishing interesting from dull.  Bahia is highly interesting (well, Salvador, Coelho barely leaves Salvador); Caetano Veloso is extremely interesting.  The author’s trips to the beach and book tour are not.