What I Read in August 2025 - But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling

I have been learning a lot about Elizabethan literature.  Next month we will see what good it does me.  I am enjoying myself.  The title quotation is from Ralph Roister Doister.

I plan to put up a post about Marlowe’s first – probably his first – play, Dido, Quen of Carthage, on September 29, and in the meantime will write about some plays preceding Marlowe.

 

FICTION

Ralph Roister Doister (1552, perhaps), Nicholas Udall – enjoyed over here.

The Loved One (1948), Evelyn Waugh – amusing and minor.  Waugh briefly visited Los Angeles and imagined Disneyland (as a cemetery), just a few years before it was built.  Perceptive.

The Kingdom of This World (1949), Alejo Carpentier – Outstanding debut novel about the Haitian Revolution.  Or about the failures of Surrealism.  I should write a longer note on this one.

Franny and Zooey (1955 / 1957 / 1961), J. D. Salinger – I enjoyed Nine Stories (1953) and enjoyed “Franny” (1955) all right but boy “Zooey” (1957) was a real nerve saw.  I am amazed that New Yorker readers had so much patience for Salinger’s dialectical Buddhist fiction.

The Ballad of Beta-2 (1965), Samuel R. Delany – I found Delany’s first novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962), creative but clumsy and I suppose this novel, his fifth, is the same, but the level of creativity is even higher.  It was mostly written over four days and sometimes feels like it, but it is overflowing with exciting conceits.  The basis of the plot is literary criticism, the interpretation of the title ballad.  To do literary criticism, the protagonist must visit ruined spaceships and befriend a space monster. Delany was – let me go look this up – 22, 23 years-old.

 

POETRY

The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams

The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai (1948-89), Yehuda Amichai

Every Sound Is Not a Wolf (2025), Alberto Rios

 

PURSUIT OF THE SUBLIME / MADNESS

Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951), Maurice Herzog – enjoyed back here.

 

IN FRENCH AND PORTUGUESE

Os Escravos (1865), Castro Alves – Three abolitionist poems by a Brazilian teenager who wanted to be Victor Hugo and/or Byron and died young after introducing Romanticism to Brazilian poetry.  I have little idea how good these poems are, but this is pretty exciting.

Les voix du silence (1951), André Malraux – A work of imaginative art criticism by French literature’s great con man, in effect his successful application to be French Minister of Culture.  I really should write a longer note about this book, some of which is highly interesting.

Um estranho em Goa (2000), José Eduardo Agualusa – An Angolan writer’s autofiction about a visit to Goa, a place about which I knew nothing, which is why I read the book. Plus it is at my language level, plus it is a reasonable length, plus, I suppose, many other things.  The travel writing aspects were of high interest, the fiction less so, but fine.  I hope the plot line where Agualusa halfheartedly tries to buy, mostly out of morbid curiosity, the living heart of the local saint is fiction.  Some of Agualusa’s books have been translated into English recently but not this one.  I hope to read another someday.

 

 

Ralph Roister Doister, among the first regular English comedies - Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop

Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1550, published 1567) once had the distinction of being the first comedy in English.  Please see this 1911 edition of the play calling it “the first regular English comedy.”  I do not know what 19th century critics meant by “regular” but this was a 19th century idea, as scholars began to work seriously on figuring which plays survived from the 16th century, that Ralph Roister Doister was the first English comedy.  It is not the first, regular or otherwise.  Let’s return to this issue.

A braggart soldier type (“I am sorry God made me so comely, doubtless,” Act I, Scene ii), the title character, decides, urged on by a parasite type, Matthew Merrygreek, to woo a widow, who is engaged and not very interested.  The big comic misunderstanding involves the mispunctuation of a love letter.  The result is a battle between the widow and her maids, armed with their “tools” (for sewing and weaving and so on) versus Roister Doister, a pail on his head, and his idiot servants.  Perhaps there is a goose involved:

Tibet Talkapace:                                   Shall I go fetch our goose?

Dame Custance:  What to do?

TT:  To yonder captain I will turn her loose:

An she gape and hiss at him, as she doth at me,

I durst jeapord my hand she will make him flee.  (IV. viii)

The battle scene is a bit vague, with lots of room for whatever gags the director can think of.  As you see, the play is written in competent rhyming couplets.

The braggart soldier, and more or less the plot is from Miles Gloriosus (2^nd cent. BCE) by Plautus.  The parasite is from English morality plays.  The servants, the goose, the songs, the names, and the whole tone of the thing are likely from English popular plays, whatever touring groups were performing at fairs.

The names are wonderful.  Tristram Trusty, Margery Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace.  I’ve remembered Ralph Roister Doister’s name since I first saw it in some potted history of English theater nearly forty years ago.  The first English comedy should be titled Ralph Roister Doister.

The domestic detail is also a delight.  Here are the maids early on, at work:

Margery Mumblecrust: Well, ye will sit down to your work anon, I trust.

Tibet Talkapace: Soft fire maketh sweet malt, good Madge Mumblecrust.

MM: And sweet malt maketh jolly good ale for the nones.

TT: Which will slide down the lane without any bones.   [Sings.

Old brown bread-crusts must have much good mumbling,

But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling.  (I.iii)

The play is slackly paced giving plenty of its time to watching the maids sew and sing.  It is not exactly digressive, but like a musical.  Let’s stop and have a song or whatever:

With every woman he is in some love’s pang.

Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang;

Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps;

Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop,

And the howlet out of an ivy bush should whoop…  (II.i)

Nicholas Udall, the likely author, was a schoolmaster.  He likely wrote this play for performance by his schoolboys.  Maybe he was the first schoolmaster to rewrite a Plautus play for his students, although I doubt it.  He may have been the first to make his rewritten Plautus so inventively English.  It could easily be much, much less English.  The Englishness is the best part.

The title character is a direct ancestor of Falstaff, although, remembering the pail on Roister Doister’s head, the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff in the laundry basket.

The play is also a little step towards the creation of the professional boy’s companies, the aspect of Elizabethan theater I find hardest to imagine.  Fourteen year-old boys performing plays at the level of The Alchemist, how did that work?  But I can imagine them doing Ralph Roister Doister.

Next Monday I will write about another early boy’s comedy, and is it ever, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.