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.
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