Not Shakespeare for next year - Jonson, Marston, satire, revenge

With one Marlowe play left to write up, The Massacre at Paris, next week, I am thinking about what I will read in the winter and spring.

In 1592 the London theaters a plague outbreak closed the London theaters for what turned out to be two years.  All of the old theater companies broke up and reformed.  Edward Alleyn, the biggest star, originator of all those big, bold Marlowe parts among many others, went in one direction, while his own company went in another, bringing in as partners the hot new actor Richard Burgbage and the hot new playwright William Shakespeare.  A big move.

Marlowe died in 1593, and Thomas Kyd in 1594, so there are several years where I do not see anything not by Shakespeare that looks so exciting.  But several younger new playwrights appear.  Ben Jonson, John Marston, and George Chapman are of high interest.  Thomas Dekker and Thomas Heywood look more like hacks to me, but they have long careers and collaborate with many other writers.  I remind myself that the “lost play” problem is still huge in the 1590s.  We do not have much of what was put on stage.

Young Jonson and Marston bring a new tone to the stage, more satirical, assuming the audience is tired of Marlowe’s bombast or at least in on the joke.  More sophisticated, maybe, with more plays aimed at the more expensive theaters that featured the boy’s companies.  Or perhaps decadence has already set in.

An attempt at a schedule, which takes me just out of the Elizabethan period:

I have read all of Jonson’s plays, and may well read them all again, although I have left several off of this schedule.  The Poetaster may be too much of an inside joke. I remember Sejanus, a Roman tragedy, as having many problems, but I have learned enough about the history genre that it may look different now.

I have not read Antonio’s Revenge or Hoffmann, revenge tragedies.  The Malcontent is, as I remember it, a great play, maybe the only one on this schedule.  The Dekker and Heywood plays are significant genre plays, a good way to see what kinds of things Shakespeare, Jonson, etc. were not writing.  All Fools is a comedy based on Terence, a perfect thing of its kind.  The Dutch Courtesan I do not know; it is some kind of satire.

The Elizabeth Cary play is a special case.  It is a closet drama, which does not help me much with my questions about how the theaters worked.  But it has gotten a lot of attention in the last twenty or thirty years, and, yes, it is the only play by a woman.

A selection of what else was going on in this period:

Wonderful poems, a brilliant novel-like item from Nashe, so much great Shakespeare.  There are two more Parnassus plays, more insider satires.  I will likely read them all.  John Donne’s secular poems likely belong here somewhere, as do some portion of Walter Raleigh’s poems.

The dates in these tables are somewhat more secure than those in my Age of Marlowe tables, but for most of them please mentally add “circa.”

Please suggest different plays, for the schedule or just for me, or other works, or good secondary works, or anything else that needs suggesting.  I will, with luck, be in London in March, where I hope to learn a thing or two firsthand.  Suggestions about the remnants of 16th century London are also welcome.

Joost van den Vondel's Baroque play Lucifer - from their lofty nest / They see their dreaded foe

How I find books: Andrei The Untranslated posted a list of Baroque writers from Otto Maria Carpeaux’s massive História da Literatura Ocidental (1959-66), a marvelous list of marvelous writers including a number of favorites.

I’ve read at least something by all of them.  Not Comenius, who I think of as a writer on education; no idea what someone interested in literature might want to read.  And not Vondel.  Who the heck is Vondel?

Joost van den Vondel is the greatest early modern Dutch playwright.  I know little about Dutch literature and nothing about 17th century Dutch theater.  Nothing is close to what has made it into English.  But here we have an 1898 translation, by Leonard Charles van Noppen, of Vondel’s 1654 play Lucifer.  Good enough.

A faction of angels, led by Lucifer, is afraid of and insulted by the new creature Adam.

APOLLION: I covered with my wings mine eyes and face

That I might curb my thoughts and deep delight,

When erst she filled my gaze…

                                                        Their life consists

Alone in loving and in being loved –

One swept, one mutual joy, by then indulged

Perpetually, yet e’er unquenchable.  (Act I, pp. 277-8)

The bashful angel, who by the end of the play becomes one of the lords of Hell, embarrassed by sexy Eve is adorable.  The Lucifer faction debates the possibility of rebellion.  The loyalist faction tries to dissuade them.  The first four acts are static, with a lot of declarations and debates, and without the psychological intensity of Racine.  There is likely some political interest I do not care much about.  A scene where the future devils try to calm down their Luciferian followers, who are more radical than their leaders, clearly has an edge I only glimpse.  And anyway, I am looking for Carpeaux’s promised Baroque language, hidden, I know by the translation, the usual move of turning long Alexandrines into blank verse.

The civil war of the angels and the fall of the Lucifer faction occurs between Acts IV and Act V.  The victorious angles describe the battle.  The description is superb; here, finally, is the kind of writing I was hoping to find.  An angel is describing Lucifer in battle array:

Surrounded by his staff and retinue

In green, he, wickedly impelled by hate

Irreconcilable, in golden mail,

That brightly shone upon his martial vest

Of glowing purple, mounted then his car,

Whose golden wheels with rubies were emblazed.

The lion and dragon fell, prepared

For speedy flight, with backs sown full of stars

And to the chariot joined by pearly traces,

Panted for strife, and for destruction flamed.  (V, 407-8)

Etc., etc., for many colorful, inventive pages.  The angels counterattack:

… by his command

Begin by circling wheels to soar aloft,

To gain the wind-side of their battling foe,

Who also rises, but with heavier sail,

And finally to leeward slowly drifts:

As if one heavenward a falcon saw,

Mounting with pinions bold into the sky,

Ere that the drowsing herons are aware,

Who in a wood, hard by a pleasant mead,

Tremble with fright, when from their lofty nest

They see their dreaded foe.  (V, 411)

And the metaphor of the falcon and the heron goes on for several more lines.  The aerial maneuvering of the angels is first described as, really, a sea battle, familiar to the Dutch, before they angels are turned into birds in the extended metaphor.

I would have guessed Lucifer was a closet drama, but no, it was performed twice before being banned as irreligious.  What do I know about Dutch theater.

One great act.  A fortuitous find.  A bit like reading a retelling of the Ramayana or similar epic.

Edward III - This fellow is well read in poetry

I logically followed Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II with the anonymous, but see below, Edward III (published 1596).  The first two acts look like a heterosexual parody of the Marlowe play, with King Edward swerving from strong to weak king when he suddenly falls in love with a married countess and threatens to ruin the kingdom for his passion.  Luckily this plotline is resolved at the end of Act II and Edward goes on to conquer France.  The last three acts cover the Battles of Crécy and Poitiers and the episode with the Burghers of Calais and other exciting scenes we all know from Froissart’s Chronicles.  They were exciting in Froissart, at least, although they are dramatically inert here.

There is one scene, though, before the war, Act II, Scene 1.  The lovestruck king wants to write a love letter.  Enter his secretary Lodowick.

This fellow is well read in poetry

and hath a lusty and persuasive spirit.  (p. 23)

They begin composing the letter.  Lodowick has problem understanding the assignment.

LODOWICK:          Write I to a woman?

KING EDWARD:  What beauty else could triumph on me

or who but women do our love-lays greet?

What, thinkest thou I bid thee praise a horse?  (24)

Lodowick is, I suppose, thinking of the previous king, but the horse shows how the scene works, the constant comic swing from love sonnet rhetoric to its deflation.  The scene is clearly written by someone familiar with the ongoing Elizabethan sonnet craze.  It is an extended mockery of sonnet writing.

One good joke is that the secretary does not get more than two lines written, and those are useless for the king’s lustful purpose.

LODOWICK:  What is the other fault my sovereign?

KING EDWARD:  Read o’er the line again.

LODOWICK:                                                     ‘More fair and chaste’

KING EDWARD:  I did not bid thee talk of chastity

To ransack so the treasure of her mind

For I had rather have her chased than chaste.

Out with the moon line, I will none of it

and let me have her likened to the sun

say she hath thrice more splendour than the sun

that her perfections emulate the sun

that she breeds sweets as plenteous as the sun

that she doth thaw cold winter like the sun

that she doth cheer fresh summer like the sun

that she doth dazzle gazers like the sun

and in this application to the sun

bid her be free and general as the sun

who smiles upon the basest weed that grows

as lovingly as on the fragrant rose.  (25-6)

It is a brilliant, funny scene all the way through.  I read Edward III in the 1996 Eric Sams edition titled Shakespeare’s Edward III: An early play restored to the canon, where the bulk of the book is devoted to demonstrating how the entire play was written by Shakespeare.  I am not sure why he wants to give those dull – let’s say, functional – last three acts to Shakespeare, but I do not need his sections on “The Image Cluster” and “Words Beginning with ‘un-‘” and so on to remember that in Sonnet 130, the hilarious insult poem where the Dark Lady has bad breath and an annoying voice, “[m]y mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun,” emphasis mine, or to see that “basest weed” appear in Sonnet 94, where it “outbraves his dignity.”  And I am looking at Sonnet 94 because later in the scene the father of the Countess urges her to be virtuous by literally quoting the final line of Sonnet 94, “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds” (32).

If Shakespeare wrote the scene, it is an ingenious self-parody.  It is so good I would be happy to give it to him, although the "chaste / chased" pun is a little obvious for him.  But then I feel a little bad for the anonymous hack playwright who, reading some version of Shakespeare’s sonnets, circulating in manuscript, thought it would be hilarious if the moony king in the play he was working on was an incompetent sonnet writer.  It’s the best thing the poor guy ever wrote and we want to attribute it to, who else, Shakespeare.

My fundamental problem with a lot of the attribution arguments is that they do not seem to recognize that playwrights can imitate, parody, mock, and plagiarize each other.  Counting words that begin with “un-“ is thin, thin, thin evidence.  But the scene even if not by Shakespeare is highly Shakespearian, a delight to read, and recommended to anyone who likes such things.  What you do with the rest of Edward III is your business.

Christopher Marlowe's Edward II - And now and then stab, as occasion serves

I take Doctor Faustus as Christopher Marlowe’s richest play but Edward the Second (performed 1592?, published 1594) as his best play-as-such.  Meaning structure, drama, pace, whatever we associate with the idea of the well-made play.  The pace is fast, the characters interact with each other rather than giving speeches, and the story hits plot points like a modern screenplay.  A big turn right in the middle, for example.  I believe in the 20th century it has been Marlowe’s most performed play.

So young Edward, at the death of his father, attains the throne, which means he can bring his boyfriend Gaveston back from banishment in France.  Edward’s nobility more or less rebels, assuming that the dissolute Gaveston will ruin the king, who is not that strong to begin with.  One of the rebels, the hothead young Mortimer, gets a taste for power, and goes too far.  Sympathy likely turns from the once-sensible nobles to poor King Edward, imprisoned in a filthy cell, murdered in a shocking manner.  Although the theme is a bit muted, Mortimer is where I find the usual Marlovian critique of power.  He has a point when the play begins, but the pursuit of power becomes its own goal.

Marlowe likely borrowed the “weak king” theme from Shakespeare’s Henry VI series, which were big hits; Shakespeare was clearly imitating Edward II, or so it looks to me, in Richard II (1595).

The great cost Marlowe paid for writing such a zippy play was a muting of his mighty line, his great poetry.  It is here, especially in the marvelous final act, but Edward II is more, let’s say, efficient, or maybe crisp, than the Tamburlaine plays or The Jew of Malta.

Still.  Here are a pair of minor courtiers throwing in their lot with King Edward and Gaveston.  One is a scholar, perhaps like Marlowe from Cambridge.  The weaselly striver Spenser advises him on how to succeed as a courtier:

      … you must cast the scholar off,

And learn to court it like a gentleman.

He begins with what actions do not make a courtier, for example:

Or holding of a napkin in your hand,

Or saying a long grace at table’s end…

Instead:

You must be proud, bold, pleasant, resolute,

And now and then stab, as occasion serves.  (II.1, p. 462)

That last line, now that belongs in a Marlowe play.

The play begins with Gaveston, with his return to London.  He speaks in a more poetic manner.

Music and poetry is his [King Edwards’s] delight;

Therefore I’ll have Italian masques by night,

Sweet speeches, comedies, and pleasing shows;

And in the day, when he shall walk abroad,

Like sylvan nymphs my pages shall be clad;

My men, like satyrs grazing on the lawns,

Shall with their goat-feet dance an antic hay;

Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape,

With hair that gilds the water as it glides,

Crownets of pearl about his naked arms,

And in his sportful hands an olive-tree,

To hide those parts which men delight to see,

Shall bathe him in a spring… (I.1, 436-7)

But other characters, with a show to put on, do not have time for this kind of talk, and Gaveston is killed halfway through the play for the crime of corrupting the king and being more interesting than the other characters.  Although once crushed, King Edward becomes a lot more interesting.  My imaginary Shakespeare’s realization, for Richard II, was that the last act ought to be the whole play.

I am back in The Complete Plays, the Penguin Classics edition, for the text and page numbers.

I’ll write about The Massacre at Paris in two weeks, and that is it for Marlowe.  Massacre is definitely not a well-made play, and the state of the text we have is terrible, but is it ever full of Marlowe.

What I Read in November 2025 – The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike

I only have one Marlowe play left to revisit.  I should start thinking about a set of plays for this winter.  I will likely read up to 1603, 1604, the end of the Elizabethan age.  Please suggest favorites.

MARLOWE AND SO ON

Astrophil and Stella (c. 1580), Philip Sidney – Kicking off the sonnet craze.

The Jew of Malta (1589?), Christopher Marlowe – I will point you here.

Henry VI, Part 3 (1590?) &

Henry VI, Part 1 (1591?), William Shakespeare – A bit on Part 3 over here.  Part 1 is as weak as I remember.  An early quickie prequel, perhaps slapped together while Shakespeare was working on Richard III.

Arden of Faversham (1591?), ??? – Quite good, really.

Doctor Faustus A (1592?/1604) &

Doctor Faustus B (1592?/1616), Christopher Marlowe – Some notes back here.  The line in the title is from Faustus’s great last scene, the A text.  The B text replaces the commas with periods – also good.

Richard III (1592?), William Shakespeare – Some weaknesses, but so many great scenes.

Lord Strange's Men and Their Plays (2014), Lawrence & Sally-Beth MacLean Manley – I had planned to look at this book, but it was so interesting that I read it.  The use of evidence is exemplary, meaning cautious.

Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival (2025), Stephen Greenblatt – Briefly reviewed.

FICTION

The Death of Virgil (1945), Hermann Broch – Why make art?

The Heat of the Day (1948), Elizabeth Bowen – London during, or just after, the Blitz.  A bit of a spy story, surprisingly.  Bowen’s mix of Flaubert and James, or what I think of as Flaubert and James, is always interesting.

The One That Got Away (1992), Percival Everett & Dirk Zimmer – A picture book about cowboys and numbers, written and illustrated for little children.

Vaim (2025), Jon Fosse– Look, a new novel!  The Fosse seemed slight to me, the characters much simpler than the artist I spent so much time with in Septology.  This is the first of a trilogy, so maybe it is all going somewhere.  I enjoyed the voice of the characters; Damion Searls is an ideal translator.

Shadow Ticket (2025), Thomas Pynchon  - Another new novel.  Against the Day (2006) was the last big book I read before starting Wuthering Expectations.  I guess it exhausted me, and my interests wandered elsewhere, so I skipped the next two novels, but I am now well-rested and, since Pynchon is 88, I am amazed this book exists.  Talk about simpler, compared to, say, Gravity’s Rainbow, with which it has many connections, but anyone sympathetic to what Pynchon does should be happy with this book.  It features a number of things that glow in the dark; quite a lot of cheese, and cheez, and lots of information about the American cheezscape.  Biblioklept has put together some useful and entertaining annotations.  I hope someone from Milwaukee is doing the same for all of the Wisconsin-specific detail.  It amuses me to think of 80-some year-old Pynchon spending his time making sure he squeezes all of the good details out of 1930 Milwaukee.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Os cem melhores contos brasileiros do século (The 100 Nest Brazilian Short Stories of the Century, 1903-38), various – I read the first thirteen stories, through the 1930s.  Machado de Assis, Lima Barreto, Graciliano Ramos – plausibly among the best Brazilian short stories of the century, yes.  And just hard enough for my Portuguese study.

Les gommes (The Erasers, 1953), Alain Robbe-Grillet – I read Robbe-Grillet’s fussy, screwball anti-mystery ages ago in English.  I enjoyed revisiting it, although I have less of a clue than ever why so many people thought this was going to be the future of the novel.  I would not have complained, but why, why?

 

Marlowe's restless Doctor Faustus - I’ll burn my books!

In Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus the great scholar sells his soul to the devil in exchange for twenty-four years of power and knowledge.  After learning and doing everything he wants he spends Acts III and IV playing an increasingly stupid series of pranks on anyone and everyone, including himself.  In Act V, in one of the great scenes of the English stage, the bill comes due and we all go home having learned an edifying moral lesson.

This is Marlowe’s richest play, really packed with ideas and conceits.  Stephen Greenblatt, in Dark Renaissance (2025), pushes a strong autobiographical reading onto this play more than any other.  He likes the idea that Marlowe sold his soul to Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth’s spymaster, and has lightly shifted his own dilemma onto Faust.

My reading is also pretty autobiographical.  Marlowe’s great subject is power, pure power in the Tamburlaine plays, wealth as power in The Jew of Malta, knowledge as power here.  In Doctor Faustus, though, he is more explicit about a subtext of the earlier plays, that the characters love the pursuit of power but have little idea of what to do with it.  The great motivation of Faustus (and Barabas, and Tamburlaine) is restlessness.  He, and they, and I suspect Marlowe, are easily bored.

We first see him with his books, leafing through Aristotle:

Sweet analytics, ‘tis thou hast ravished me.  (I.1, p. 7)

But he is now bored with philosophy, law, medicine,, theology.  Magic is just the next subject for the restless scholar to master, and then, presumably, although somehow he cannot see this, to abandon.  Mephistopheles gives him a set of books containing all the secrets of the universe, and that is that, everything he wanted to know with no effort.  What’s next?

Thus the strange middle of Doctor Faustus, where after learning grows stale Faustus resorts to pranks and tricks to keep himself entertained, foreshadowed by an earlier clown scene:

ROBIN  O, this is admirable!  Here I ha’ stolen one of Doctor Faustus’ conjuring books, and I’faith, I mean to search some circles for my own use.  Now I will make all the maidens in our parish dance naked  before me, and so by that means I shall see more than e’er I felt or saw yet.  (II.2, 26)

The brilliant Faustus has trouble coming up with uses of his endless power much more interesting than making the girls dance naked.

The prank scenes are pretty silly, and could easily be replaced by other, similar scenes, and perhaps sometimes were, but I think they carry Marlowe’s themes.

I wonder to what extent the audience for Doctor Faustus was genuinely shocked by what Marlowe put on stage.

FAUSTUS  [Cuts his arm.] Lo, Mephistopheles, for love of thee

I cut my arm, and with my proper blood

Assure my soul to be great Lucifer’s.  (II.1, 22)

I imagine there was a shiver of real danger here.  The English at one point had plenty of devils hopping around the stage in the old miracle plays, all banned at this point as too dangerously Catholic, but were there, in scenes like this, any sense that maybe we should not be seeing such a thing, even in a play?  A number of good theater stories about Doctor Faustus have survived. The actors realizing that there is an extra devil on the stage, that sort of thing.

My shivers are more modern, but they are right there in the text.

FAUSTUS  Where are you damned?

MEPHISTOPHELES  In hell.

FAUSTUS  How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?

MEPHISTOPHELES  Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.  (I.3, 17)

Mephistopheles is an existentialist.  Faustus is a materialist, but then so in Mephistopheles.

FAUSTUS  Come, I think hell’s a fable.

MEPHISTOPHELES  Ay, think so still, till experience change thy mind.  (II.1, 24)

An amusing conceit of Marlowe’s is that the devil is always honest with Faustus.

I wonder, almost, if I overrate Doctor Faustus because of the superb last scene – the last two pages – where we watch Faustus in his last hour along with a ticking clock.  It is a great piece of dramatic psychology.  I wonder how fast various actors have taken it.

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damned.

O, I’ll leap up to my God!  Who pulls me down?  (V.2, 52)

Until the last minute:

Ugly hell, gape not!  Come not, Lucifer!

I’ll burn my books!  Ah, Mephistopheles!  (V.2, 53)

Only in his last breath will he give up those books.

Doctor Faustus appeared in or near 1593, and survived in two texts, A (1604) and B (1616), with B substantially longer, and with both showing evidence of post-Marlowe tinkering.  I read them both in the 2005 Norton Critical Edition, source of the page references above.  All of my quotes are, arbitrarily, from the A text.

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.

The Spanish Tragedy and Ur-Hamlet - we do as all tragedians do

I gotta get this train back on the tracks.  Let’s see.  I’ll write this bit about The Spanish Tragedy, then something about the Henry V and Henry VI plays I’ve been reading, then get to Christopher Marlowe’s hilarious farce The Jew of Malta.  Somewhere I will fit in something about Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Marlowe which, happily, is excellent.

The crazy revenge scheme of The Spanish Tragedy is famously a play-within-a-play in which three people die of stabbing (Stab him… Stab him… Stab herself) while the idiot nobility in the audience nod along, thinking it is acting.

HIERONIMO  Haply you think, but bootless are your thoughts,

That this is fabulously counterfeit,

And that we do as all tragedians do  (IV.iv, 117)

Before the scene ends, two more people are stabbed (plus there is the business with the tongue).  It is like a combination of Hamlet’s last scene and its own play-within-a-play.

Which may be what it is, if Thomas Kyd wrote the legendary lost Ur-Hamlet, and if Ur-Hamlet precedes The Spanish Tragedy, in which case Ur-Hamlet invented the revenge tragedy and The Spanish Tragedy is its generic sequel.

Fredson Bowers, writing in Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy: 1587-1642 (1940) is sure both of those things are true.  He for some reason really wants Ur-Hamlet to come first, so it does.  In Chapter III, “The Spanish Tragedy and the Ur-Hamlet,” Bowers provides a detailed, scene-by-scene synopsis of Ur-Hamlet, showing how it led to The Spanish Tragedy and eventually Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

It is a fascinating chapter, mostly because Ur-Hamlet does not exist, in any form.  Two words have survived (“Hamlet, revenge!”, spoken by the ghost).  Bowers just makes the whole thing up.  He takes Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the French novella that is Kyd’s source (probably) and kind of plots a midpoint.

The Spanish Tragedy has no known source, which bothers Bowers.  It would be a rarity for the period if the story during this plundering period were original.  But I am okay with the idea; also the idea that Kyd did not write Ur-Hamlet and that it was written after The Spanish Tragedy.  Brian Vickers has recently led an effort to massively expand the attributions to Kyd – see The Collected Works of Thomas Kyd and the biography Thomas Kyd: A Dramatist Restored, but boy does the evidence look thin to me, very close to nothing in most cases.  The attribution of Ur-Hamlet to Kyd is based on interpreting a pun-filled line by Thomas Nashe.

The literary history of this period is of the highest interest.  Much of the interest is figuring out how we know things.

I’ll give poor, dim, Balthazar the last word.

BALTHAZAR  Hieronimo, methinks a comedy were better.

HIERONONIMO  A comedy?

    Fie, comedies are fit for common wits  (IV.i, 109)

But revenge is too much fun.

The Spanish Tragedy - Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

Poor Hieronimo.  His son Horatio, a war hero and lover of the daughter of a duke, is murdered by the woman’s Machiavellian brother as part of some crazy scheme not worth going into.  How will Hieronimo find justice against such a powerful person?  Perhaps some other crazy revenge scheme will do the trick.

The crazier the better.  Thus Thomas Kyd, in The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587*) invents the revenge tragedy, which will have an amazing forty-year run, producing many insane masterpieces, until it collapses from exhaustion just before the Puritans finally get the wicked theaters closed for good.

(7) The action is bloody and deaths are scattered through the play.  Ten characters are killed, eight of these on-stage (72)

The mass slaughter is only the seventh most notable aspect of “the basic Kydian formula for the tragedy of revenge” (71)!  I am quoting from the invaluable Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy (1940) by Fredson Bowers, still a standard reference which I will write a bit more about later.

Seneca’s plays were full of revenge and murder, but nobody had pushed the genre as far as this.

Enter HIERONIMO with a book in his hand (III.xiii, 85)

That book, from which Hieronimo intermittently quotes, is a collection of Seneca’s plays.

And to conclude, I will revenge his death!

But how? Not as the vulgar wits of men,

With open, but inevitable ills,

As by a secret, yet a certain mean,

Which under kinship will be cloaked best.  (86)

Seneca’s example not only convinces him that revenge is good and necessary but that it demands a crazy, secret scheme.

Kyd is rarely the poet that Marlowe is, although that passage seems good to me.  And sometimes, almost always in Hieronimo’s monologues, he sets his own standard (The Spanish Tragedy, like Tamburlaine, has only one great character, the star of the show).

O eyes, no eyes, but fountains fraught with tears;

O life, no life, but lively form of death;

O world, no world, but mass of public wrongs,

Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!

O sacred heavens!  if this unhallowed deed,

If this inhuman and barbarous attempt,

If this incomparable murder thus

Of mine, but now no more my son,

Shall unrevealed and unrevenged pass,

How should we term your dealings to be just

If you unjustly deal with those that in your justice trust?

[skipping ten lines - night, day, hell, dreams]

Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night, and day,

See, search, show, send some man, some mean, that may –

                                                                 A letter falleth  (III.ii, 53-4)

This is a famous soliloquy, famous – parodied – at the time, a masterpiece of rhetorical devices (like the address to the heavens) that often grow stale quickly but here are full of life, of meaning to the character.  Then those last two lines feel new to me.  They are not the kind of poetry Marlowe writes.  I wonder how much of the audience really followed the eyes, life, world, etc. all the way to the line where they all return together.  Twenty-two lines in between is a lot!  Perhaps the actor also repeated some big gestures.

Please note the “men / mean” pairing returns in the first speech I quoted, eleven scenes later, with the plea for “some mean” turning into the discovery of a “certain mean.”

I’ll write at least one more post on The Spanish Tragedy.

Page numbers from the 1970 New Mermaids edition.

*  Or much earlier, or somewhat later.  Published 1592, with no author.  1587 puts The Spanish Tragedy alongside Tamburlaine the Great, making the year a turning point for the London theater, an enjoyable fiction that might even be true.