What I Read in September 2026 – The web-walled canyon of a dream

Look, the issue is not that I do not want to write but that the cat in the lap makes it hard to type.

September was a long time ago.

 

SHAKESPEARE’S PALS

A Book of Ayres (1601) &

Two Books of Ayres (1613?) &

The Third and Fourth Book of Ayres (1617), Thomas Campion – An unusual poet in English literature, an author of songs who is read for his lyrics, granted that many of them are adaptations of Catullus and Propertius and so on.  Such an interesting musical period.  Please recommend recordings if you have a favorite.  The Naxos volume seems plenty good to me.

The Revenger's Tragedy (1606),  ??? – Discussed back here.

FICTION

Titus Groan (1946), Mervyn Peake – I should write about this book separately.  It is a marvel.  The fragment in the title of the post is from p. 338 of the single-volume Overlook edition.

Labyrinths (1953), Jorge Luis Borges – Just the essays, actually, which I suppose in some sense are not fiction.

Sleeping Beauty (1973), Ross MacDonald – A kind Brazilian on Twitter, unhappy that so many people have such conventional top 10 favorites, gave me this one as one of his unconventional favorites.  Perhaps he was mocking me.  Anyway that is why my first MacDonald mystery is the seventeenth (not ninth, see comments) in a series of eighteen.  An offshore oil spill threatens Los Angeles, growing worse as the novel progresses.  A literal noir!  That was my favorite part of the book, the massive, blatant, but meaningful symbol hanging over it all.  I liked other parts enough that this weekend I spent two dollars on the first in the series. 

The Frog in the Throat (1985), Markus Werner – A kind reader recommended this outstanding Swiss novel, now published by NYRB Classics, about a man dealing with his grief at the loss of his difficult father.  The novel is all voice, or two voices, alternating chapters narrated by the man whose life has fallen apart and then by his quite different father, or presumably the man imagining the voice of his father.  A fine narrative feat.

 

POETRY

Canto General (1950), Pablo Neruda – Like his model Whitman an ambitious mix of lyricism, lists and occasional kitsch, the ode to Stalin being the nadir.  But there were many peaks.

Living Together: New and Selected Poems (1973) &

For Louis Pasteur (1989), Edgar Bowers – A fine formalist American poet.

The Gavin Ewart Show: Selected Poems 1939-1985 (1986), Gavin Ewart – Sometimes as good as Larkin, and often funnier.

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE & SPANISH

Alturas de Macchu Picchu (1947), Pablo Neruda -  Ha ha, many peaks, get it?  In particular, The Heights of Macchu Picchu section of Canto General, published a bit earlier.  Could I read it in Spanish?  I could.  Oughtta get my Spanish in shape.

Mémoires d'Hadrien (1951), Marguerite Yourcenar

Os melhores contos brasileiros de ficção científica (The Best Brazilian Science Fiction Stories, 1882-1997),  various – Setting aside the first two stories, an immortality fantasy by Machado de Assis and a 1930s rewrite of Poe’s “William Wilson,” this useful collection showcases Brzailian writers who got interested in prestige American science fiction – Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, that crowd.  Lots of post-nuclear apocalypse, just like in the U.S.  Quite interesting.

 

Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband! - The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont

Innovations in art to tend towards Mannerism.  As a form matures it turns on itself, as creators, and some portion of the audience, become more interested in the form itself.  So we get more art about art.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) is young (age 22, 23) Francis Beaumont’s play about plays, where the sophisticated six-penny boys’ company audience gets to indulge in mockery of the vulgar taste of the petty bourgeois one-penny theater-goers.

The play is supposed to be The London Merchant, a city comedy about ordinary Londoners where the apprentice ends up with the daughter of the merchant, something like Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.  But a “citizen,” a “real” London merchant, and his wife, seated on the stage, demand a different play, something full of heroic adventures, and while we are changing things why shouldn’t it star the citizen’s apprentice Ralph. 

WIFE: [below – the play has not started yet, and the characters are not seated]  Husband, husband!

RALPH:  Peace, mistress.

WIFE:  Hold thy peace, Ralph; I know what I do, I warrant ye – Husband, husband!

CITIZEN:  What sayest thou, cony?

WIFE:  [below]  Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband; let him kill a lion with a pestle!

So what we see is a mishmash of the London play and a separate string of episodes where Ralph, inspired by chivalric romances, becomes the “Grocer Errant,” with his own Sancho Panza although sadly, given the limits of Jacobean staging, no horse.  Meanwhile the grocer and his wife comment and demand additional changes to the play, down to changes in the music (Act II, Scene 8).

If some of this sounds rather like Don Quixote, yeah, what is up with that?  Nobody knows.  Don Quixote existed (1605) but was not available in English.  Some episodes get strangely close to Cervantes.  Others do not.

The grocer and his wife are seated on the stage, presumably along with actual paying customers, dressed in their finest, showing off for the audience.  Such is my understanding of the stage seating, which cost extra, which is perhaps why the actors give in to the ridiculous demands.

The wife is wonderful.  She comments, she digresses, she urges violence :

Break’s pate, Ralph; break’s pate, Ralph, soundly!  (II.5)

… cut him I’ the leg, boys, cut him i’ the leg!  (III.2)

She sometimes seems to know she is watching a play, and sometimes not.  Her attention occasionally wanders off completely:

But of all the sights that ever were in London, since I was married, methinks the little child that was so fair grown about the members was the prettiest; that and the hermaphrodite.  (III.3)

A magnificent comic masterpiece of a part.  Startling to think it was originally played by a teenage boy.  However good a revival might be, and how I would love to see one, it will not recapture the original performance by a company of boy actors.

I find the humor The Knight of the Burning Pestle is cumulative.  The straight play is thin, the goofy scenes with the grocer-knight are amusing but not exactly surprising, and the commentary of the “real” grocer and his wife are a mix of the funny and banal.  But as the pieces trip over each other, the chaos spreads, and even the “real” play turns into a pastoral, with the characters wandering around in a forest like in As You Like It, the play becomes funnier.  It is like many plays, yet I do not know another like it.

Beaumont was ahead of his time.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle was a flop.  The audience for pure satire about theater was not quite there yet.  But the Beaumont and Fletcher team became popular for a different kind of theatrical theater, tragicomedy, and the taste for city comedies grew, and the more sophisticated, or decadent, audience did develop, so Pestle became a big, much-revived, hit, too late for poor Beaumont, dead at age 32 or so, to enjoy it.

My text is the 1911 Everyman’s Library Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.  I borrowed the photo from a 2010 American Shakespeare Center production.  Steve Martin fans will be interested to know that the helmet with the arrow through it is in the original play.  "Enter RALPH with a forked arrow through his Head" (V.3).

Next up: George Chapman wrote a series of tragedies based on recent French history.  The best known is Bussy D’Ambois, which I see I have a bit out of place in my chronology.  It was published in 1607 but likely performed in 1604 or so.  I remember it as quite good.