Wuthering
Expectations

We last saw brilliant, prickly, ambitious Ben Jonson flop badly with his Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall (1603).  A couple of years later h...

Now and again, Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge.  ( Man in the Hol...

Time to get back to the Age of Shakespeare, the non-Shakespeare parts.   Please read along if it strikes you.   Last spring’s reading list w...

Soon I will put up a fall schedule for my plunge back into non-Shakespearian plays, from say 1604 to 1614, an exciting stretch.  Middleton, ...

Oh right, I can pretend I am writing something.  Some notes on books I read in the distant past. NOT SHAKESPEARE The Dutch Courtesan (1...

MALHEUREUX  This lust is a most deadly sin, sure. FREEVILL   Nay, ‘tis a most lively sin, sure.   (I.1, 9) Now there is an efficient sta...

NOT SHAKESPEARE Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine seque...

George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread.  He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of ...

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 ...

The English theater world was deeply hostile to women, possibly until quite recently, but the late 16th and early 17th century period went a...

Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus , presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant gard...

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...

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire h...

  Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers of English literature.   Over time, many groups have greatly revised, often i...

What do I want to say about John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603, maybe 1604)?  It is unusual.  Marston is unusual, with a distinct poetic a...

London and Cornwall, St. Ives and Penzance and so on, is where.  I got some good Shakespearing in – The Tempest at the Wanamaker, the littl...