What I Read in October 2025 – What a simple daily pleasure.

October was so long ago.  It is almost December.  Why do I write these.

MARLOWE AND SO ON

The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?), ??? – Some notes over here.

Tamburlaine, Pt. II (1587?), Christopher Marlowe – Righthere and also here.

The Spanish Tragedy (1587?), Thomas Kyd – This away and that away.

Henry VI, Pt. 2 (1590?), William Shakespeare – Just click here or here.

English Tragedy before Shakespeare (1955), Wolfgang Clemen – A deceptive title.  The focus is narrowly on the evolution of the set speech in early Elizabethan plays.  A topic of enormous interest and a book of great insight, it turned out.

POETRY

Brides of Reason (1955) &

A Winter Talent and Other Poems (1957) &

A Sequence for Francis Parkman (1961), Donald Davie

Night Watch (2025), Kevin Young

 

OTHER BOOKS IN ENGLISH

Platero and I (1914), Juan Ramón Jiménez – It occurred to me, returning from my French donkey expedition, that I had many of the classics of donkey literature but not this one, a hundred-some prose poems by the future Nobel Prize-winning poet about his beloved donkey friend.  Way too sentimental for my tastes, but with many fine moments of fine beauty or irony.  The line in the post’s title is from LVII, Promenade, p. 95 of my edition, translated by Austin, Texas, high school Spanish teacher Eloise Roach.

The Plague (1947), Albert Camus

Class Clown: The Memoirs of a Professional Wiseass (2025), Dave Barry – The American humorist.  I assume non-Americans have no idea who Barry is.  One’s taste for his humor is obviously central to enjoying this book, but this is an actual memoir, not a humor book, and the long central section about his newspaper career in the 1970s and 1980s is an extremely interesting depiction of a lost world.  We were better off back then, although there is nothing to be done to bring it back.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Primeiro Livro de Poesia (First Book of Poetry, 1991) – Poetry suitable for children from around the Lusophonic world, assembled by Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen.  I read this book three years ago when I was just starting to read in Portuguese.  Was it easier now?  Did I understand it better?  I guess.

Le coffre (The Cartopper, 2019), Jacky Schwartmann & Lucian-Dragos Bogdan – An artificial novel for the Lyon mystery festival when Romania was the special guest country, with the French author writing the Lyon chapters and the Romanian writing the Romanian writing those set in Romania.  The detectives do not share a language and can only communicate by email.  This should be a throwaway book, but it is actually pretty good.  The central mystery was all right and the characters were developed and enjoyable.  Both authors were digressive, relaxed.  The Lyon details were a treat.  Not bad, not bad.  The book was a thoughtful gift – thanks!

Retour à Birkenau (Return to Birkenau, 2019), Ginette Kolinka avec Marion Ruggieri – Birkenau survivor Kolinka became active in French Holocaust education when she became a widow in her seventies.  She accompanied groups of French schoolchildren on tours of Birkenau, thus the Return in the book’s title, an extraordinary piece of bravery.  Her 100th birthday was last February.

Avec les fées (With the Fairies, 2024), Sylvain Tesson – Travel writer Tesson tours the Celtic coast – Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, western Ireland, western Scotland, as far as the Shetlands – by sailboat, foot, and bicycle.  I enjoy his voice and humor, but this is a minor book compared to his crazy Russian adventures.  Perhaps a bit too gooey, rhetorically, but how much is there to say about the pleasures of sailing without a little goo.

Arden of Faversham, an early true-crime murder farce - Oaths are words, and words is wind, / And wind is mutable.

Arden of Faversham (c. 1591, pub. 1592) is a true-crime play, a dramatization of a famous forty-year-old murder case.  An adulterous wife, Alice, and her boyfriend hire professional killers to off her wealthy husband.  For some reason a detailed account of this murder is included in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577 / 1587), the same some work of English history that Shakespeare and all the other playwrights were looting for material for history plays, which are also full of amazing murders but of kings.  Arden was just a prominent citizen, so this is a unique example of a genre that we, or some of us, still love today.

The first thing I see in the New Mermaids edition, for example, is the actual murder house, which stands today.  How exciting!

Arden’s House today.  Arden was murdered in the ground-floor room in the centre of the photograph.  The photo was taken by the editor of the book, Martin White.

I was delighted to find that Arden is also an early example of another still-popular genre, the dark comedy about incompetent criminals:

Then SHAKEBAG falls into a ditch

SHAKEBAG: Help, Will, help!  I am almost drowned.  (Scene xii, the Arden text has scenes but no acts)

The hired killers, and this is right out of the chronicles, are Black Will and Shakebag.  The murder plot is drawn out to feature-length by their bad luck and idiocy.  There are actually two plotlines aiming at Arden’s murder – Alice has backup plans – but everyone involved is an idiot.

The play is a farce of the kind we know and love in films like Fargo (Coen, 1996), also a “true story” as we know because the opening titles say so, and why would they lie, where the criminals bumble and someone ends up in the woodchipper.  A big difference in Arden is that the mass slaughter of the characters is mostly offstage and at the hands of the executioner.

This is not so far from a modern screenplay:

GREENE:  Will you two kill him?  Here’s the angels down,

And I will lay the platform of his death.

BLACK WILL:  Plat me no platforms!  Give me the money and I’ll stab him as he stands pissing against a wall, but I’ll kill him.  (ii)

A few lines later Black Will wishes that hitman were a recognized profession.  “I should be warden of the company.”  He is in prose here, but the killers can also be lyrical.

SHAKEBAG:  Black night hath hid the pleasures of the day,

And sheeting darkness overhangs the earth

And with the black fold of her cloudy robe

Obscures us from the eyesight of the world,

In which sweet silence such as we triumph.  (v)

Arden would be entertaining in prose, but a number of poetic passages are scattered around.  This soliloquy has gotten a lot of attention (Mosby is the scheming boyfriend):

MOSBY: Disturbed thoughts drive me from company

And dries my marrow with their watchfulness.

Continual trouble of my moody brain

Feebles my body by excess of drink

And nips me as the bitter north-east wind

Doth check the tender blossoms in the spring.

Well fares the man, howe’er his cates do taste,

That tables not with foul suspicion;

And he but pines amongst his delicates

Whose troubled mind is stuffed with discontent.  (viii)

And so on, becoming increasing devious as the speech proceeds.  With no evidence besides the text, Arden of Faversham has been attributed to everyone, Kyd, Marlowe, Shakespeare, and others; sometimes, more plausibly, just this scene, or speech, is given to Shakespeare or Marlowe.  It has metaphorical language and surprising verbs and the kind of “Machiavellian” rhetoric I associate with Barabas and Richard III.  So, maybe.

Or maybe the anonymous hack was successfully imitating the star writers of his time.  That’s my guess, is that Arden is by a hack who outdid himself.  The language helps make Arden better than it could have been, but so do the surprisingly, unnecessarily complex characters, especially Alice, the wife.

ALICE  Tush, Mosby.  Oaths are words, and words is wind,

And wind is mutable.  (i)

Perhaps the author was not quite in control of the motives of his characters, but the result is a degree of ambivalence and ambiguity that elevates the story.  It is not Othello, no.  But it is pretty good.  Easy to recommend.

Next up: Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, a highlight of this entire project.

 

Marlowe's hilarious farce The Jew of Malta - How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead

A conceptual innovator himself, Christopher Marlowe responded to other innovations.  In The Jew of Malta (1589, maybe), he wrote, following the novelty of The Spanish Tragedy, a kind of revenge tragedy.  For the first couple of acts, it does look like a revenge tragedy.  The Jews of Malta have their wealth seized to bribe the Turks, who threaten invasion.  The richest among them, Barabas, vows revenge on Malta’s Christian rulers:

And there, in spite of Malta, will I dwell,

Having Ferneze’s hand, whose heart I’ll have,

Ay, and his son’s too, or it shall go hard.

I am not of the tribe of Levi, I,

That can so soon forget an injury.  (II.3, 373)

But Barabas, it turns out, is what we now call a total psycho – “For, so I live, perish may all the world!  (V.5, 426) – so once his crazy scheme for revenge starts rolling there is no stopping (until he is caught in one of his own pointlessly elaborate traps).

Barabas is my favorite creation of Marlowe’s, because of his gusto, his boundless energy for evil that somehow surpasses even that of the world-conquering Tamburlaine; he is a miniature tyrant.

                                 Why, is not this

A kingly kind of trade, to purchase towns

By treachery, and sell ‘em by deceit? (V.5, 427)

It is as if Tamburlaine were trapped on an island, where he cannot slaughter five percent of the world’s population but proportionally can get close:

BARABAS: There is no music to a Christian knell!

How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead,

That sound at other times like tinkers’ pans!  (IV.1, 398)

In the same scene Barabas is confronted by, and confounds, a pair of friars, “two religious caterpillars”:

FRIAR BARNARDINE: Remember that –

FRIAR JACOMO: Ay, remember that –

BARABAS: I must needs say that I have been a great usurer.

FRIAR BARNARDINE:  Thou hast committed –

BARABAS: Fornication: but that was in another country,

And besides the wench is dead.  (IV.1, 399-400)

I had assumed that everyone loved this scene, but no, following T. S. Eliot in his 1919 “Christopher Marlowe” essay, many people actually read The Jew of Malta as an unsatisfying tragedy rather than as a hilarious farce for which “Marlowe develops a tone to suit this farce.”  The humor is “terribly serious, even savage,” writes Eliot, which is certainly how I read the play.  It is nuts, Marlowe knows it is nuts, and everybody has a good time.

Richard Wilson in his chapter on “Tragedy, patronage, and power” (Ch. 13) in The Cambridge Companion to Christoper Marlowe (2004) argues that Marlowe’s works are mostly about publishing –  “and we see how this is a drama about authors’ rights and ownership of texts” (218).  I wish I had an idea half as wild as this one.  “{T]he playwright-as-hero [Barabas!] wages war on two fronts, against both the patrons who purloin his profit and the performers who sell his plots” (219).  Yes, ha ha ha, why not!

Julia Reinhard Upton’s chapter on The Jew of Malta (Ch. 9) begins with a section on the actual Jews of the actual Malta and is generally quite historicist, which is one way to rescue The Jew of Malta from its blatant anti-Semitism, by which I mean, at minimum, that Marlowe exploits a lot of standard anti-Jewish stereotypes for humor and horror without the humanist ambiguity of The Merchant of Venice.  The Jews were expelled from England in 1289 but the absence of actual people has never done much to tamper Jew-hating.  But even if contemporaries enjoyed The Jew of Malta for the wrong reasons, we can enjoy it for the right reasons.

A 1594 edition of The Jew of Malta was likely published but did not survive.  The text we have is from a 1633 revival.  The forty-year gap has caused a lot of anxiety, which I do not share, that some of the text is not by Marlowe.  Who knows.  Barabas was another big lead role and big hit, like Tamburlaine and Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy, for young Edward Alleyn, the great star of his time.  Were these plays famous and important because they are especially good or innovative or because they starred Alleyn?  Who knows, who knows.

Up next is the anonymous, although attributed to everyone, Arden of Faversham (1591?), a true crime play.  I am at the 75% mark and so far it is outstanding.  Highly recommended.  I will write about it soon and thus catch up with my own arbitrary schedule.  Doctor Faustus, one of the greats, after that.

Page numbers go to the 1969 Penguin Classics Complete Plays.

This may all be a fantasy - Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Chrsitopher Marlowe

Potted bio of Christopher Marlowe: Son of a semi-literate Canterbury cobbler.  He impressed someone and became a scholarship student first at the cathedral school and then at Cambridge, where he stayed until receiving his MA.  At the university he was almost certainly recruited into Her Majesty’s Secret Service which at that point did not involve fighting SMERSH but rather infiltrating and betraying secret English Catholics, some in the pay of the Spanish who were, in fact, planning to invade England.  After Cambridge, he wrote a handful of plays that introduced numerous innovations into the new English theater, hung out with a number of young noblemen, and appeared in a number of legal records, many of them in pretty odd circumstances, until the final one, the inquest of his murder, when, in the company of some truly suspicious characters, he was stabbed in the eye with his own knife.

Stephen Greenblatt’s new 285-page biography of Christopher Marlowe has a gimmicky title – Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival – and an ugly cover, but is otherwise quite good.  I read lots of biographies of artists, but in magazine article, not book, form, so I doubt I would have read this one if I were not reading Marlowe’s plays right now.  But Greenblatt has been thinking about Marlowe for over forty years, from his earliest research.  I should see what his Marlowe looks like.

Greenblatt’s Marlowe looks like a collection of texts.  A founder of New Historicism, Greenblatt has a more expansive idea of which texts are useful than the older New Critics, but he is still a literary critic whose main tool is close reading.  He, and other scholars, are just applying the technique to court documents and the Cambridge buttery book as well as plays and poems.

And are there ever some strange texts.

Much of what we know about his life and opinions comes from the reports of spies and informants or from testimony extracted by torture.  (7)

Greenblatt is on page 7, warning me that the evidence about major aspects of Marlowe’s life is quite poor, full of gaps and riddles and unreliable narrators.

Poor Thomas Kyd.  Greenblatt begins with Kyd’s 1593 arrest and torture, which perhaps killed him within a year, essentially because he and Marlowe had been roommates (living quarters, or maybe an office?) a couple of years earlier.  Once released, he write “two desperate letters” (18-9) to one of the investigators begging him to intercede with Kyd’s patron, the powerful Lord Strange.  These letters are the most direct evidence of Marlowe’s ideas, including his blasphemous atheism and his homosexuality.  They may by accurate; they may be self-preserving slander.  Who knows?  Greenblatt does not pretend to know.

The records of the investigation into Marlowe’s death, discovered only in 1923, have the same problems.  We have the scene in great detail, but all from the testimony of Marlowe’s killers.  They said it was self-defense.  What else would they say.  Greenblatt presents a number of different scenarios proposed by different scholars and ends with the one “[c]loser to my view” (280), as strong as his language gets.

Greenblatt is not really making any kind of case about what happened to Marlowe or what he was doing in many of the strange incidents in which he was involved.  He presents the work of other scholars and when necessary casts his vote.  Not only is this intellectually honest, but it means he tells me not one story about Marlowe but all of the stories.

With so little evidence, Greenblatt organizes Marlowe’s life around subjects where he, due to the work of other scholars, knows something.  For example, Marlowe was involved with Sir Walter Raleigh and his circle, so that is a chapter, Raleigh and friends.  An enormous amount of research has been done on Elizabethan espionage, with some remarkable surviving archival material, none of which mentions Marlowe specifically.  The amount of research on Elizabethan education, hoping to somehow explain Shakespeare, is extraordinary, and pulled together smartly by Greenblatt.

The headmaster of Marlowe’s Canterbury school had one of the largest private, non-aristocratic, libraries in England.  An inventory of his library has, amazingly, survived.  It is full of books that Marlowe read somewhere.

Students in the school are unlikely to have ordinarily been granted access to it.  Marlowe’s biographers  are united in doubting that their subject, only recently admitted to the school, got anywhere close.  (48)

This is one of the few places where Greenblatt argues a point.  The Harvard professor thinks: of course the headmaster let his most brilliant student read, or even borrow, some of his books.  “But from time to time he almost certainly encountered students who made the whole enterprise seem worthwhile” (49).  Some of Greenblatt’s evidence here is asking what he would do.   “This may all be a fantasy.”  But the rest of the evidence is in the poems and plays.  Marlowe gets so much done so quickly.  He entered the school late, so he is fifteen here.  Fourteen years later, he is dead.

Greenblatt expresses his frustration most directly in a chapter in a sense about Marlowe’s contribution to the Henry VI plays, but really about his relationship with William Shakespeare.  Since we know nothing, Greenblatt turns to fiction.  “Then – to continue this imaginary conversation – Marlowe might have looked quizzically at Shakespeare and ventured on the subject of love” (144-5).  I am sure there are some cases where Greenblatt reaches past the evidence without knowing it, but I thought he was always telling me what he was doing clearly enough.

Highly recommended to anyone sympathetic to a historicized approach to literature.

More Henry VI - I am myself alone

 

More rambling around Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, Shakespeare’s first big playwriting project.

3.  As easily as I accept that large parts of the plays were written by who knows who, I was shocked to see that scholars have tried to assign the Jack Cade rebellion (“The first thing we do let’s kill all the lawyers”), Act IV of Part II, to Thomas Nashe.  This is the part, more than any other, that sounds to me like Shakespeare, later Shakespeare.  One reason is that it is full of puns.

How Shakespeare loved puns, in a way that Marlowe or as far as I can tell no one before Shakespeare had (except for Thomas Nashe, right).  Puns are a basic part of his understanding of language, and perhaps the world.

Jack Cade, the textile worker, leads a working-class rebellion against King Henry.  That he is spurred on by the money of Henry’s enemies in the nobility is one irony we recognize from recent history; that he is a communist but also a tyrant is another.  A “clothier,” he and his army are introduced with many lines of tailoring puns.

FIRST REBEL  I tell thee, Jack Cade the clothier means to dress the commonwealth, and turn it, and set a new nap upon it.

SECOND REBEL  So he had need for ‘tis threadbare…

The rebels come from different professions, each generating puns.  Jack Cade is named for “stealing a cade [barrel] of herrings.”  His wife, a “pedlar’s daughter,” is now “not able to travel with her furred pack, she washes bucks here at home” (all of this from Part 1, IV.2, 181-2).  I remind myself that in Shakespeare, if it sounds like a dirty joke it is.  The archaic vocabulary, densest in the comic scenes, is either a pleasure of Shakespeare’s language or an aggravation, or both.

              Enter a rebel with Lord SAYE

CADE  Well, he shall be beheaded for it ten times. [To SAYE] Ah, thou say, thou serge – nay, thou buckram lord!  (IV.7, 188)

Five scenes later, it never ends.  “Say” is a kind of silk. Cade’s own severed head is presented on stage three scenes later, without puns, since Shakespeare did not write that scene.

4.  The severed heads.  The Henry VI plays have so many severed heads.  The first severed head in Part 3 appears after the fourteenth line, presented by crookback Richard, who talks to it sarcastically.  But I’ll go back to Jack Cade:

         Enter two with the Lord Saye’s head and Sir James Cromer’s upon two poles

CADE  But is not this braver?  Let them kiss one another, for they loved well when they were alive.

          [The two heads are made to kiss]  (IV.7, 191)

Or how about – I cannot leave Act IV – when Queen Margaret wanders around the stage with her lover’s severed head while King Henry and his advisers have a meeting.  Later (Part 3, I.4) she gets her revenge, smearing her enemy the Duke of York with the blood of his murdered son before having him, what else, beheaded.  The blood-smearing is Shakespeare’s, or someone’s invention, an addition to the chronicle history.

These plays have a level of violence, of grotesque violence, that rivals Titus Andronicus, which Shakespeare may well have been working on around the same time.  The torture scenes in Tamburlaine, the mass slaughter and that business with the tongue in The Spanish Tragedy, and all of these prop heads – or was there a prop-master re-wigging a single head from scene to scene – how I would like to see one of these prop heads – testify to a taste for extreme violence that we have in common with the Elizabethans.  At least we do not have to walk under a row of severed heads on our way to a Coen Brothers movie, like they did.

5.  There is that scene where King Henry sits on a molehill and laments he is not a shepherd.

When this is known, then to divide the times:

So many hours must I tend my flock,

So many hours must  I take my rest,

So many hours must I contemplate,

So many hours must I sport myself,

So many days my ewes have been with young.  (Part 3, II.5, 240)

And so on, a remarkable intrusion of a kind of poetry not found elsewhere in the plays.  Henry witnesses a tableau of a father who has killed his son and a son who has killed his father, blunt and artificial, a beautiful scene of pure theater.

I will note the penultimate scene, where King Henry and the future Richard III finally meet and have a marvelous insult battle before Richard murders Henry and prepares for the next play:

I had no father, I am like no father;

I have no brother, I am like no brother;

And this word, ‘love’, which greybeards call divine,

Be resident in men like one another

And not in me – I am myself alone.  (Part 3, 5.6, 283)

A pretty good start.

Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 - Shakespeare begins - Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile

Thinking about the Elizabethan history plays sent me back to Shakespeare’s Henry VI plays, a substantial step forward – I will go ahead and call this progress – in the history of English drama, although I think of Marlowe’s Edward II as the big turning point and Richard II as the Shakespearean miracle, meaning as good as parts of Richard III are, how did he move from that to this?  No rummaging through contemporary plays will answer that question.

I will just make some notes about what I saw this time in The First Part of the Contention of the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster and The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry VI, now known as Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3.  I read them in The Norton Shakespeare: Histories (2nd ed., 2008) which for some reason uses the 1594 Quarto titles but a heavily-edited version of the 1623 Folio texts.  I read the essays about the texts with some confusion.  Who knows what I read.

The story is the War of the Roses.  Henry VI is a weak king following a strong king.  The kingdom falls apart around him; his nobility schemes against, and murder, each other; his French wife, tougher than any of them, joins right in.  The meek, pious king just wants to be a shepherd. The ferocious Queen wishes someone “[w]ould choose him Pope, and carry him to Rome” (Pt I, 1.3).

I am just going to write, although not all of it in this post, until I run out of points.

1. I am convinced that Shakespeare wrote a substantial part of these plays and had a strong hand throughout.  He was something like the head writer or show runner.  I also think Parts 2 and 3 were conceived and written together.  Ambitious!  They were a hit, thus the prequel Part 1 and the sequel Richard III.

I am looking at the introduction to the 1999 Arden Shakespeare edition of Henry VI, Part II.  It is 141 pages long and I have not read it all:

In their Introductions to the Henry VI plays Hart and Wilson argue extensively for the variously combined authorship of Greene, Peele, Nashe, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare. (116)

The entire book has about 500 pages.  It contains a scan of the First Folio pages and a table showing how the parts can be doubled.  It is an amazing object, although I found the Norton book more comfortable to actually read.

Anyway, that list is more or less every famous active playwright circa 1591, which is when I tentatively put these plays.  Stephen Greenblatt, in his new biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance, is convinced Marlowe was involved, but likely minimally.  “The resulting plays have many Marlovian phrases and touches, but they are folded into a structure that Shakespeare clearly dominates” (144).

2. That structure is still fairly close to that of the chronicle plays.  Shakespeare marches us through the major events.  Characters, even the ones not killed off quickly, have little room to grow or show their depths.  Part 3 is especially monotonous, a series of battles and betrayals.  The great betrayal has to wait for the next play, Richard III.

Richard of Gloucester, the future Richard III, has a terrific monologue (Part II, III.2, pp. 250-2) where he declaims his grievances against his enemies, his brothers, and the world in general, ending with an open declaration that he is now the official villain of the play.  He will “Deceive more slyly than Ulysses could” and “set the murderous Machiavel to school.”  At this point in theatrical history, there was nothing worse than Machiavelli.  A fun speech - I pulled the title quotation form it - but so blunt.  Maybe Marlowe wrote it.

How far will I get tomorrow?  I will write about the puns, and the severed heads, and we will see what else.

History before Shakespeare - The Famous Victories of Henry V - he hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had

The establishment in the 1570s of permanent theaters just outside of the walls of London led to a massive increase in the demand for new plays.  Every available source of stories was looted.  English history proved to be especially popular or at least easy to adapt to the stage.

William Shakespeare was much more of a history specialist in the 1590s than I had understood.  Nine English history plays, plus one comic spinoff, and one Roman play, so nine or ten or eleven plays in a decade.  To the extent that they were published, the plays were generally called tragedies.  We still call Julius Caesar a tragedy rather than a history, but the plays with British subjects were moved into the category of histories in the First Folio, so that The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York and the Good King Henry VI became Henry VI, Part 3.  For example.

Since the Henry VI plays were more sophisticated than the history plays that preceded them, and Marlowe’s Edward II and Shakespeare’s Richard II even more so, scholars have categorized older plays with subjects from British history as “chronicles.”  Before Shakespeare and After Shakespeare is what they mean.  But I thought I had better read at least one of the chronicles.

I picked The Famous Victories of Henry V (1580s?)*, authors unknown.  I am rarely sure what people mean when they talk about their “reading experience” but this was, for me, a strange reading experience.  The short play in twenty scenes races through the events of three familiar Shakespeare plays, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V.  Interspersed with the history scenes are clown scenes, a vehicle for Richard Tarlton, the greatest comic actor of his time.  So it was like reading a poor prose summary of Shakespeare with unrelated comic scenes mixed in.  Odd.

As I understand it, the real difference between the chronicles and the histories is that the chronicle plays more or less just march through the key episodes.  That is what Famous Victories does (plus the comedy).

So for example in scene vi, wild Prince Hal reconciles with his dying father.  He hands the King his dagger.  King Henry pardons his son. This is from the historical accounts.  I will go straight into scene vii to show the contrast.

HENRY IV  Stand up my son; and do not think thy father, but at the request of thee, my son, I will pardon thee.  And God bless thee, and make thee his servant.

PRINCE  Thanks, good my Lord.  And no doubt but this day, even this day, I am born new again.

HENRY IV  Come, my son, and lords, take me by the hands.

                                                                                            Exeunt omnes.

Scene vii

DERICK  Thou art a stinking whore; and a whoreson stinking whore.  (vii, 168)

The effect was often this jarring.  Shakespeare made dull and undramatic followed by something rather more vigorous.

The scene where Hal renounces the Falstaff character is almost totally flat.  It is one of the most moving scenes in Shakespeare.  Here it is another checkmark from the list of episodes.  Shakespeare knew this play and borrowed a few things from it, but there is not much hint of his Falstaff here.

Let’s have another bit of Derick the clown.  Here he has dragged Cutbert Cutter the thief into court:

Oh, masters, stay there!  Nay, let’s never belie the man! For he hath not beaten and wounded me also, but he hath beaten and wounded my pack, and hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had.  That grieves me most.  (iv, 158)

And how about this amusing French captain, in the Henry V section of Famous Victories.

CAPTAIN 

Why, take and Englishman out of his warm bed and his stale drink, but one month, and, alas, what will become of him?  But give the Frenchman a radish root, and he will live with it all the days of his life.  (xiii, 186)

No wonder the French lost so badly.  This speech, a note tells me, comes right out of the source chronicle, lightly paraphrased, although the English author added the radish root.  The British theater audience wants to learn history, and here it is.

The text and page numbers are from The Oldcastle Controversy (1991) which also includes Sir John Oldcastle, Part 1, which I have not read but perhaps should.  If you somehow have a particular chronicle play to recommend, please do.  The early version of King Leir (pre-1594) is tempting.

* Published in 1598, presumably because of the success of Shakespeare’s Henry IV plays.