A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions.

Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding.

I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely.

I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that.

Early Precursors
Sep. 1	1552	Ralph Roister Doister	Nicholas Udall
Sep. 8	1553	Gammer Gurton's Needle	authorship much disputed
Sep. 15	1561	Gorbuduc	Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville
Marlowe & Co.
Sep. 29	1587	Dido, Queen of Carthage	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 6	1587	Tamburlaine, Parts I & II	Christopher Marlowe
Oct. 20	1587	The Spanish Tragedy	Thomas Kyd
Nov. 3	1589	The Jew of Malta	Christopher Marlowe
Nov. 17	1591	Arden of Faversham	???
Dec. 1	1592	Doctor Faustus	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 15	1592	Edward the Second	Christopher Marlowe
Dec. 29	1593	The Massacre at Paris	Christopher Marlowe

The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen.

The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages?

Some of what else was going on:

1580s	Astrophel and Stella	Philip Sidney
	An Apology for Poetry	Philip Sidney
	Caelica	Fulke Greville
1590	Henry VI, parts 1 to 3	William Shakespeare, et. al.
	The Two Gentlemen of Verona	William Shakespeare
	The Faerie Queene I-III	Edmund Spenser
1591	The Taming of the Shrew	William Shakespeare
	The Comedy of Errors	William Shakespeare
	Richard III	William Shakespeare
	Titus Andronicus	William Shakespeare
	Complaints	Edmund Spenser
	Summer's Last Will and Testament	Thomas Nashe
1592	Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund	Sanuel Daniel
	Pierce Penniless	Thomas Nashe
1593	Idea: The Shepherd's Garland	Michael Drayton
	Venus and Adonis	William Shakespeare
	Hero and Leander	Christopher Marlowe
	The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia	Philip Sidney

 

The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598).

Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise.

In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.