What I Read in April 2026 – And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart

Thomas Mann filled a lot of my time, alongside the non-Shakespearian stuff.  Just two plays to go in this round, George Chapman’s All Fools and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan.

NOT SHAKESPEARE

Selected Poems (1593-1630), Michael Drayton – The line in the title is from his sonnet 61, among the few that really stand with Shakespeare’s best.  How many great poems must one write to be a great poet?

The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – The best play I picked for this round of Not Shakespeare.  Next fall they will almost all be this good or better.  Discussed over here.

A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – Weepy melodrama, poked at here.

The Yorkshire Tragedy (1608), anonymous – Simple-minded true crime on the London stage.

Shakespeare's Borrowed Feathers (2026), Darren Freebury-Jones – Freebury-Jones is a leading scholar in the world of attribution – which bits of which plays belong to whom.  I have avoided looking too closely at the field, suspecting I would rather not know how it works.  I may have been right.  I should write about my doubts, but that could turn into work.

 

FICTION

The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt – A psychiatrist is flung into the world of the Norse myths, and then into The Faerie Queene.  The fun of these two amusing novellas, in a move away from pulp, is the modern hero’s attempts to figure out and apply the rules of magic in each world.  I enjoyed revisiting this book but I wonder if I should have waited longer.  I had last read them 35 years ago; maybe 45 would have been better.

An Inspector Calls (1945), J. B. Priestly – Looked at askance in this post.

Doctor Faustus (1947), Thomas Mann – Narrowly considered here and here.

 

POETRY

Studies for and Actress and Other Poems (1973) &

Selected Poems (1944-73), Jean Garrigue

The Static Element: Selected Poems (1955-79), Nathan Zach

 

ART CRITICISM

The Drunken Silenus: On Gods, Goats, and the Cracks in Reality (2020), Morgan Meis – Now this book, the first of what is now a trilogy, an innovative piece of art criticism nominally about a Rubens painting, I will write about, once I have read the other books.  Strongly recommended to the kinds of people who enjoy Wuthering Expectations.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

Dix ans sous terre (1933), Norbert Casteret – Casteret was a great French spelunker, an expert in the caves of the Pyrenees, who loved nothing more than plunging into an icy subterranean river to find out if it went anywhere.  Sometimes it did, giving Casteret credit for some superb discoveries of prehistoric art among other things.  My brittle, taped-up copy is in the photo.  Highly interesting and recommended to people who like books about madmen who do things I cannot imagine doing.  The English book Ten Years Under the Earth is, I believe, a somewhat abridged combination of Casteret’s first two books.

Os Cem Melhores Contos Brasileiros do Século (The Hundred Best Brazilian Stories of the Century, 1940-59), various – A few months ago I read the earlier stories, through the 1930s, in this valuable anthology.  The stories from the next couple of decades seemed less original, more like what was going on elsewhere in the world, but also more difficult, so who knows how well I read them.  On to the 1960s, someday.

 

Elizabeth Cary's The Tragedie of Mariam, the earliest extant English play by a woman - Are Hebrew women now transform’d to men?

The English theater world was deeply hostile to women, possibly until quite recently, but the late 16th and early 17th century period went a step beyond, when even female characters are played by males.  Everything with any status except, oddly, supreme sovereign of the nation is closed to women.

Feminist scholars have, in the last fifty years, done enormous work on the handful of surviving works by women writers.  I am looking at Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, a 1998 Penguin edition with three plays: a translation of Euripides by Jane, Lady Lumley, a translation of Robert Garnier by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, and the play at issue here, The Tragedie of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written let’s say 1604, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary, eventually Viscountess Falkland, the first extant original English play by a woman, and as far as I know the only such surviving play before the Restoration. 

The Tragedie of Mariam has understandably gotten a lot of attention.  It is a Senecan closet drama, removed from the world of the commercial theater, although it has its dramatic moments.  That Mary Sidney translation of Garnier’s The Tragedie of Antonie is a marvelous piece of English poetry, but static beyond belief, a version of the Antony and Cleopatra story where the protagonists never have a scene together.  Cary had at least seen some plays.  She has swordfights and so on.

The story is from Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, newly translated into English in 1602.  King Herod, visiting Rome, is rumored to be dead, kicking off a scramble for power among the women of his court – his wife Mariam, who hates him, his ex-wife, who hates Mariam, and his sister Salome, who everyone hates.  Herod is not dead, so his return in Act III upends everyone’s crazy schemes; Herod restores order by having most of the characters executed.

Salome makes a good over the top villain, with a number of enjoyable speeches, although many of my favorite parts of the play are attacks on her.

CONSTABARUS: She meerly is a painted sepulcher,

That is both faire, and vilely foule at once:

Though on her out-side graces garnish her,

Her mind is fild with worse than rotten bones.

…

Her mouth though serpent-like it never hisses,

Yet like a serpent, poysons where it kisses. (II.4, 127)

She is a tomb full of rotten bones, not bad.  Here we see the verse, built out of four-line ABAB blocks with occasional couplets to round things off.  In this chunk Herod is describing – and speaking directly to – his own sister:

HEROD: Your selfe are held a goodly creature heere,

Yet so unlike my Mariam in your shape:

That when to her you have approached neere,

My selfe hath often tane you for an Ape.  (IV.7, 152)

Herod, in the last couple of acts, is hilarious, although this may be the peak, saying, to Salome’s face, that she looks like an ape.  He cannot decide if he should have poor Mariam executed or not, and swings wildly back and forth in what ought to be a comic performance, or I guess tragicomic.

I will pick one more attack on Salome, this one less personal although again addressed to her.  This character, Constabarus, is given, on his way to the chopping block, the most misogynistic speech in the play.  This earlier bit is mild by comparison, but I want it for my title:

CONSTABARUS:  Are Hebrew women now transform’d to men?

Why do you not as well our battels fight,

And weare our armor? suffer this, and then

Let all the world be topsie turved quite.  (I.6, 114)

I can see how the plot based on women scheming against each other, and the open misogyny of many of the men, could make this play work well with advanced undergraduates.  On stage, I have my doubts.

After this Senecan excursion into Roman history, the next play is again Roman.  It is George Chapman’s All Fools, or All Fooles (likely 1604), a mashup of two Terence comedies.  I remember it, vaguely, as good fun.

The hilarious Doctor Faustus - I am not so very fond of laughter

Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus, presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant garde aestheticism is the reason German intellectuals were so often so gullible and accepting of fascism.  Many critics, to my bafflement, have followed that path.

Zeitblom, a teacher of philology. is not a fascist, but, like many of the intellectuals the novel is about, some kind of fellow traveler or enabler.  His objection to the actual Nazis, aside from their vulgarity, is that (Zeitblom begins writing his memoir in 1943) they are losing the war to the “enfeebled democracies” (XXVI, 268), although he holds out hope for the V2 rockets, “such an admirable piece of ordnance that only sacred necessity can have inspired the genius who invented it” (XXXIII, 355).

He has many nutty views, like his suspicion, or even fear, of physics and the “so-called works of God” meaning, for example, the sun (XVIII, 159).  Or his belief that the glissando is “a musical device that , for profoundly cultural reasons, is to be employed with utmost caution and in which I have always tended to hear something anticultural, indeed anti-human, even demonic” (XXXIV, 393). Or his repeated insistence that his association with a group of Munich semi-fascist intellectuals bothered him so much that he lost fourteen pounds.  So he can’t one of them, can he?  Fourteen pounds!

As Reese from Typings notes, the novel is often quite funny, and much of the humor comes from the narrator's lack of humor and the bizarre things he believes.

On the whole he [Adrian] was more in the mood for laughter and foolishness than for metaphysical conversations…  I am not so very fond of laughter… (X, 94)

Luckily I came across A Reader’s Guide to Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus (2025) by Tobias Boes, available in its entirety as an open access book at JSTOR.  Boes’s book is heavily informed by years of teaching the novel to students at the University of Notre Dame, students who immediately notice Zeitblom’s repressed homosexuality, for example, which I know we are all trained to do now, sure; Boes politely, kindly, suggests that earlier scholars were somehow restrained from writing about such things.

For Doctor Faustus belongs to a class of modernist novels – Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier and Nabokov’s Lolita and Pale Fire are other examples – in which the person telling the story is far more complex and far more interesting that the ostensible protagonist.  (Ch. 1, 12)

What was I just saying!  I have not exactly read but have poked around in Boes’s book.  I owe it for showing me that I was not the crazy one, dang it, but everyone else was.  Doctor Faustus is a dense, complex novel, open to complex arguments, but I do not see how it can be interpreted well except through the narrator, which is what Boes does.

“Why must everything appear to me as its own parody?”  (XV, 143)  That is the composer, the ironist, although I take it as Mann’s lament as well.  I knew and to some degree avoided Mann as a writer of Novels of Ideas, for which I have limited taste and am likely a poor reader, when in fact, as with The Magic Mountain he wrote parodies of Novels of Ideas.  Deep suspicion of ideas is itself an idea, yes.

Misreading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus correctly - who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul

A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend.  I will need that subtitle soon.  Near the end of the book, I was looking up I do not remember what when I discovered that after four hundred dense pages I was reading the novel wrong, completely against decades of interpretation.

The novel is supposedly about an avant-garde German composer who makes a deal with the devil, symbolically, presumably, although his biography is full of curious devil figures.  Adrian’s artistic career, which ends tragically in madness, parallels the rise of German fascism in various ways that are not at all far-fetched.  The narrator, Zeitblom, usually calls his friend “Adrian,” so I will do the same.

The narrator, yes, right there in Mann’s subtitle.  The novel is a fictionalized memoir, not a biography, of a man who was lifelong friends with an important composer.  He finds devil figures throughout Adrian’s life; he thinks Adrian made a pact with the devil; he thinks Adrian’s music, which often makes him deeply uncomfortable, somehow parallels vulgar Naziism.

No one can follow my argument here who has not experienced as I have how close aestheticism and barbarism are to each other, or who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul – though, granted, I have known this danger not of my own accord, but with the help of my friendship for a dear artist and imperiled spirit.  (XXXIV, 392)

He deflects his own desiccated, narrow, proto-fascist vision of life onto the composer, who he never understands and to whom he has always been, however much he suppresses it, sexually attracted.  This is what Doctor Faustus is actually about.

Zeitblom is a classic unreliable narrator – uncomprehending, dishonest, often close to insane.  He constantly raises doubts about his own trustworthiness  I enjoyed it when, early on, he compared his method to Tristam Shandy, but this is his peak narratorial craziness:

To what happened between Adrian and Rudolf Schwerdtfeger two days after our memorable excursion, to what happened and how it happened – I know all about it, though the objection may be raised tenfold that I could not know, that I was “not there.”  No, I was not there.  But it is a psychological fact today that I was there, because for anyone who has experienced an event, lived through it again and again as I have this one, a dreadful intimacy makes him an eye- or ear-witness of even its hidden phases.  (XLI, 455)

The chapter that follows is full of detailed dialogue and movement, including a highly unlikely digression about Zeitblom himself, all of which, as Zeitblom directly tells us, he made up out of his own tormented fantasies, his jealousy of Rudolf and Adrian’s other male friends.

Zeitblom is sincere where Adrian is ironic.  Critics of Doctor Faustus, written by a great ironist, have been sincere, taking Zeitblom’s word as Mann’s, despite warnings, often direct, in almost every chapter that Zeitblom can’t be trusted.  Had they not read The Good Soldier and Pale Fire?  Surely they read The Tin Drum (1959), where the crazy narrator’s life story is full of surprising parallels to the rise of the Nazis, the biography of Hitler, and also the biography of Günter Grass?  This all seemed so obvious to me.

Tomorrow I will catalogue some of my favorite opinions of Zeitblom and point to a new book that shows I am not alone.

I read and am referring to the Vintage International paperback in the John E. Woods translation.

Thomas Heywood's early melodrama A Woman Killed by Kindness - I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays (Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 38).  He is more like a television writer.  His most famous play, A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), is like a television melodrama, a weepy.

It even has a clear A plot and B plot, which only connect in the first and last scenes.  A gentleman in trouble – in prison – for debt tries to prostitute his sister.  Somehow this story works out for the best for everyone.  I suppose this is the B plot.  In the A plot, another gentleman catches his wife with another man but refrains from murdering them, instead killing her with kindness.

FRANKFORD:  My words are register’d in Heaven already;

With patience hear me.  I’ll not martyr thee,

Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage

Of more humility torment thy soul,

And kill thee, even with kindness.  (IV.4, 251)

Against the title of the Penguin collection, Heywood’s play is domestic but not really a tragedy.  It is if anything a deliberate move from the tragic to the pathetic, and from a pagan to a Christian ethos.  It makes me wonder what a Puritan accommodation with the London theater might have looked like.  It is an ancestor of Samuel Richardson novels and Douglas Sirk movies.

Only the last couple of acts, maybe just the last, are especially interesting, as the melodrama really ramps up to an absurd level.

NICHOLAS:  I’ll say you wept, I’ll swear you made me sad.

Why, how now eye?  What now, what’s here to do?

I am gone, or I shall straight turn baby too.  (V.3, 262)

Almost an instruction to the audience to burst into tears.  Although Heywood does include a surprising joke from this same servant at the end of the play, where the poor wife is about to die, and her husband says he wishes to die with her:

FRANKFORD:  As freely from the low depth of my soul

As my Redeemer hath forgiven His death,

I pardon thee.  I will shed tears for thee,

Pray with thee, and in mere pity

Of they weak state, I’ll wish to die with thee.

ALL: So do we all.

NICHOLAS [aside]:  So will not I;

I’ll sigh and sob, but, by my faith, not die.  (V.4, 268)

Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies also includes Arden of Faversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy (1605-8, somewhere in there), both of which are domestic true crime plays featuring shocking murders.  Where Arden is about an old murder that for some reason was written up in a popular history book, The Yorkshire Tragedy is ripped from the headlines, and feels like it.  Simple, quick, short – less than half the length of a regular five act play.  Socially interesting but artistically null.  I suspect that a large number of plays like this have been lost, never published or published in throwaway editions.

I wonder how much Heywood-style melodrama there was.  Is A Woman Killed by Kindness a rare beast, or were there dozens of these kinds of plays?  Was Heywood working from an established model, or was he an innovator, the hack who outdoes himself?  No way to know.

The next play will be The Tragedy of Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry (written c. 1603, published 1613) by Elizabeth Cary.  More interested in the world of the theater, I have been avoiding closet dramas, but this one is a special case.  I know very little about it.  We’ll see.