Monday, August 11, 2025

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.

2 comments:

  1. I am interested most in Doctor Faustus, but I warn you ahead of time, I’m not so good with reading plays or poetry. Still, what is having a book blog, sharing literature, if not growth beyond one’s usual boundaries?

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  2. If you're going to read just one, that is probably the one.

    You are right, that these are not necessarily the easiest reading. Still, 80 pages or so.

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