George Chapman's All Fools - some wit, some wealth

George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread.  He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of the Age of Shakespeare, one of the great Not Shakespeares.  His 1604 comedy All Fools gives a good idea of how he is good and why he is little read.

All Fools is a blend of two Terence plays, much like Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is a mix of two Plautus plays.  The sons want to marry for love, against the will of their fathers.  The sons are right; the fathers get their (mild) comeuppance.  In the B-plot, a jealous husband also learns his lesson.

The sons and their secret wives and girlfriends are barely distinguishable, like the romantic quartet in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  The distinctive character is Rynaldo, a younger brother, who is the trickster figure, arranging various schemes so the lovers can put one or two or more over on their gullible fathers.  He is a bit like Puck, or the Duke in Measure for Measure, “gulling” the other characters, arranging the plot behind the scenes.  Although All Fools does not have a hint of the more disturbing side of Measure for Measure.  It is essentially a pastoral, full of lovestruck shepherds wandering in the woods, although they are neither shepherds nor in a forest.

Chapman, as a poet, is a real Classicist, light and correct, elegant and lovely, but – maybe here is a reason he is less read – seldom surprising in a word or phrase the way Shakespeare so often is.  Nor is he a linguistic screwball like John Marston.  I had trouble taking notes on All Fools because the verse is so consistent, so smooth.

Here is Rynaldo soliloquizing at the beginning of Act V, where he will successfully wrap up his schemes.  I say “soliloquizing” but this might as well be a direct address to the audience:

Fortune the great commandresse of the world,

Hath divers wayes to advance her followers:

To some she gives honour without deserving,

To other some deserving without honour,

Some wit, some wealth: and some wit without wealth:

Some wealth without wit, some, not wit not wealth

But good smocke-faces: or some qualities,

By nature without judgement, with the which

They live in sensuall acceptation,

And make show onely, without touche of substance;

My fortune is to win renown by Gulling…  (V.1, 59-60)

His purpose in life is to play tricks.  The verse flows along pleasantly, smartly alliterated and assonated, varied and intelligent.  The whole play is more or less like this.  Very nice.  There are some limits, in literary style, to “very nice.”

There was a surprise at the very end of the play, when one of the lovers delivers a long satirical prose speech on the subject of horns.  I suppose the first thing, perhaps the only thing, everyone learns about Shakespearean language is that a wife’s infidelity causes the husband to grow horns, thus the endless stream of hilarious puns about horns.  All Fools ends with not with a joke but an entire Erasmus-like Menippean satire, In Praise of Horns.

For their power it is generall over the World, no Nation so barbarous, no Country so proude, but doth equall homage to the Horne.  Europa when shee was carried through the Sea by the Saturnian Bull, was said (for feare of falling) to have held by the Horne: and what is this but a plaine shewing to us, that allEurope, which took name from that Europa, should likewise hold by the Horne…  (V.2, 70)

Etc., etc.  All of this could easily be omitted from a performance.  I wonder what it is doing there.

The text and page numbers are from the 1998 Penguin  Plays and Poems.  Next fall I will read at least one more Chapman play, the tragedy Bussy D’Ambois.  If I have the strength I will spend some time with his poems this summer.   The last play of this spring will be John Marton’s The Dutch Courtesan (1604), about which I know nothing. 

 

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.

The Malcontent by John Marston - Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here

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 and dramatic sensibility.  No one else could have written it.

The Duke of Genoa has been tossed out by an usurper, so he infiltrates the court disguised as Malevole, the Malcontent of the title, not exactly a courtier, not exactly a jester, but given license by the usurper.   It is as if Diogenes (the dog man) was somehow an attendant of Alexander.

PIETRO [current Duke]:  Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here.  I give thy dogged sullenness free liberty; trot about and bespurtle whom thou pleases.

MALEVOLE: I’ll come among you, you goatish-blooded toderers, as gum into taffeta, to fret, to fret.  I’ll fall like a sponge into water, to suck up, to suck up.  Howl again.  I’ll go to church, and come to you.  (I.2, 16)

A nice example of Marston’s original language, including his taste, that Jonson mocked in The Poetaster, for obscure words with a pleasing mouth-feel.  Bespurtle.  Toderers.  The latter is a bit of a mystery, but “tod” is “fox,” if that helps.

The Malcontent sometimes feels like it should be played by Groucho Marx:

BILIOSO:  Out, ye cur! [again, a dog]

MALEVOLE: Only let’s hold together a firm correspondence. [the Groucho line]

BILIOSO:   Out!

MALEVOLE:  A mutual, friendly-reciprocal, perpetual kind of steady-unanimous-heartily-leagued –

BILISOSO:  Hence, ye gross-jawed peasantly – out, go!

MALEVOLE:  Adieu, pigeon-house!  Thou burr that only stickest to nappy fortunes; the serpigo, the strangury, an eternal, uneffectual priapism seize thee!  (II.3, 41-2)

That ends a little too obscene for a Marx Brothers joke.  The Malcontent has a number of outstanding vocabulary-expanding insult passages.

Malevole is the star part, played by Richard Burbage, Hamlet his own self.  Around the same time Burbage was also playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, another duke in disguise.  What fun to be a theater-goer in London in 1603.  Malevole is out for revenge, in some sense, and the restoration of his office, but the play takes a turn at the end of Act III when rather than shoving Duke Pietro off a cliff, he instead converts Pietro to – to what – not his cause, exactly, but to his malcontent vision of life.

PIETRO:  Lord Malevole, if this be true –

MALEVOLE:  If? Come, shade thee with this disguise.  If?  Thou shalt handle it; he shall thank thee for killing thyself.  Come, follow my directions and thou shalt see strange sleights.

PIETRO:  World, whither wilt thou?

MALEVOLE:  Why, to the devil.  (III.v, 66-7)

Soon enough this duke is disguised as a friar (exactly like Measure for Measure) and the two dukes in disguise scheme to disgrace the play’s villain,  The Malcontent is a genuine revenge comedy.  No one is murdered, the adulterous wife is forgiven, and the worst characters are barely even punished.

The Malcontent has a number of strong comic parts with their own great bits, but I think what elevates this play is the psychology of the Malcontent.  He falls into his disguise, into his role, too easily.  It is who he really is.  Similarly this is why Pietro is so easy to convert from enemy to ally, and for that matter why revenge is pointless.  Marston has found language and characters that express his, or a, view of the world, a refreshed Cynicism.

I will try one more Marston play, The Dutch Courtesan,  later this spring; I hope it is at least half as interesting, and a quarter as good.

Next up, soon I hope, is Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), which I remember as a weepy melodrama, quite interesting as a genre example but not a great play.  We’ll see.

Text and page numbers are from the New Mermaids edition. 

The Tragedy of Hoffman by Henry Chettle - The first step to revenge

His father hanged by the neck until dead for the high crime of piracy, Hoffman vows Revenge! on the duke who executed his father.  By chance the duke’s son is shipwrecked exactly where Hoffman is keeping Hoffman, Sr.’s corpse hanging on the wall of a cave, so Hoffman tortures and murders his enemy, thus ending Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman or a Revenge for a Father (1602).  Thus ending Act I, Scene 1, I mean.

LORRISQUE [A turncoat, evil servant]: He’s gone.

HOFFMAN:  Go, let him.  Come, Lorrique:

This but the prologue to the ensuing play,

The first step to revenge.  This scene is done

Father, I offer thee thy murderer’s son.    Exeunt.  (I.1, 252)

Theatrical!  He ends the first act in the same literal way: “So shut our stage up; there is one act done” (I.3, 258).  The revenge tragedy’s conventional play-within-a-play appears to take place in Hoffman’s head.

Chettle, one of the great hack playwrights of this time, messes with the revenge tragedy in many interesting ways.  One key aspect of the genre since Kyd invented it is delay; the revenger for some reason cannot just challenge his enemy to a duel or whatnot.  Shakespeare, in Hamlet, finds high psychological interest in the genre cliché.  Chettle abandons it in the first scene, and afterward his villain methodically carves through his remaining enemies until he is finally undone  by being distracted by lust:  “but I deserve it [his death] that have slacked revenge” (V.3, 324).

The revenger is typically seeks genuine justice and is delayed by the political power of his target.  Chettle’s revenger is a psychotic villain whose father was executed within a legitimate justice system for well-understood crimes.  My understanding is that this purely villainous revenger, who will become a staple of later revenge tragedies, is a genuine innovation of Chettle’s.

Since The Tragedy of Hoffman is available in a New Mermaids edition I thought it would be easily available in the usual places, but no, it was a bit of a pain to get.  So sorry about that, to any cheapskates (like me) chasing after a readable copy.  I ended up with the highly interesting but consumer-unfriendly Penguin edition – Five Revenge Tragedies (2012).  The other four plays are The Spanish Tragedy, Antonio’s Revenge, Hamlet, and The Revenger’s Tragedy, all terrific but do you really need another copy of The Spanish Tragedy or Hamlet?

That edition tells the story of the rise of Hoffman, though.  The book is perfect for half of a university course on revenge tragedies, or these days, if I believe the grim news, an entire semester.  What a good class.  The Tragedy of Hoffman is the dumbest play of the bunch, but I can see how it is highly teachable, especially after Hamlet, which it shamelessly loots.  Students who have worked their way through Kyd and Marston and Hamlet will dismantle and rebuild Hoffman with facility.

Hoffman, I will note, is a marvelously Gothic play, sometimes reminding me of Thomas Lovell-Beddoes’s Death’s Jest Book in its Halloween qualities.  What a great stage direction:

[Hangs up Otho’s skeleton.]  (I.3, 257)

This is from the first scene, with Hoffman talking to the corpse of his dead father:

But thou dear soul, whose nerves and arteries

In dead resoundings summon up revenge,

And thou shalt ha’t; be but appeased, sweet hearse,

The dead remembrance of my living father.  (I.i, 245)

Hoffman shamelessly rips off Hamlet, including an Ophelia-like character who goes mad but who, in an amazing and ridiculous twist, reveals Hoffman’s schemes to the other characters by leading them to the cave where Hoffman keeps his collection of corpses.  Then her sanity returns!  Wonderfully silly stuff.

Next up is John Marston’s revenge comedy The Malcontent, available everywhere, and as I remember it a great play.  I hope I do not take so long to write it up.

Ben Jonson's Sejanus His Fall - Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sejanus His Fall (1603), about the soldier who rose to rule the Roman empire, for a few years, under dissolute Emperor Tiberius, before overreaching and being crushed by the next sociopath in line.

I found Sejanus a little dull when I last read it, long ago, and I still do.  Jonson’s blank verse is expert, supple, without, likely against, Marlowe’s bombast, but also then lacking Marlowe’s (or Shakespeare’s, or satirical Jonson’s) surprise.  Jonson’s metaphysics is too rationalist, too political, to create the kind of craziness that makes for great drama.

Perhaps Jonson is too constrained by history.  The action of the fall of Sejanus, in the long last scene, is the reading in the Senate of an ironic letter from Tiberius, first praising and then condemning Sejanus.  This is what historians say happened, so what can you do, but instead of the appearance of weird, perverse Tiberius, we get proper, public letter.  In general, as in a history play but not a tragedy, characters appear and disappear according to what happened, rather than dramatic effect.

Sejanus is a solid Machiavellian villain, but the rational kind, methodically removing his enemies by poison and slander until he achieves everything except the title of Emperor:

Is there not something more, than to be Caesar?

Must we rest there?  It irks, t’have come so far,

To be so near a stay.  (V.1, 88)

My favorite part of the play is when Sejanus is executed and then torn to pieces, offstage, by the mob.  Jonson’s language takes a new grotesque turn:

These mounting at his head, these at his face,

These digging out his eyes, those with his brain,

Sprinkling themselves, their houses, and their friends… (V.6, 118)

Sejanus is practically atomized:

Now torn, and scattered, as he needs no grave,

Each little dust covers a part:

So lies he nowhere, and yet often buried!  (118-9)

A genuinely weird image.  Perhaps it helps that Jonson be satirical in this last act.  The mob is savage, the Senators a pack of corrupt flatterers, the victor over Sejanus no better, and he’ll get his violent end a few years later.  And the ruler after that is Caligula!

It does not help Jonson that Robert Graves wrote a more comical and ironic account of this history in I, Claudius (1934).

Jonson likes animal metaphors.  I enjoyed this one, at the beginning of the play, when Sejanus’s enemies lament that they are not good flatterers:

We have no shift of faces, no cleft tongues,

No soft, and glutinous bodies, that can stick,

Like snails, on painted walls… (I.1, 11)

Lots of anti-flatterer satire.  This line was an earthy surprise:

                    … ready to praise

His lordship, if he spit, or but piss fair,

Have an indifferent stool, or break wind well,

Nothing can ‘scape their catch.  (I.1, 12)

The more of that side of Jonson, the better.

The Oxford Jonson, where I read Poetaster, has Sejanus as well, but I switched to the 1966 New Mermaid for the text and page numbers because I preferred footnotes to endnotes.

In two weeks, Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, a revenge tragedy about which I know close to nothing.

Ben Jonson's Poetaster - Oh, terrible windy words!

It’s the War of the Theatres!  Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker!  Who cares!

Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) features two key scenes where Jonson, under the guise of Horace, is tormented by and then torments Marston, the bad poet of the title.  Dekker, a mere hack, gets off easy.

The play is set in Augustan Rome, and most of the characters are poets, actual poets, in both senses, meaning Ovid was a poet who actually existed and whose character in the play is the real deal:

TIBULLUS  How now, Ovid!  Law cases in verse!

OVID  In troth, I know not – they run from my pen

    Unwittingly, if they be verse.  (I.3, 15)

The play begins with Ovid reciting a poem in tribute to the Latin poets.  We are again in the theater of the boys’ company, with an educated audience that spent its teenage years reading Ovid and Horace and so on.  The actors, when not rehearsing a play, were doing the same thing.

Jonson gestures toward a melodrama about young Ovid becoming a poet rather than a lawyer, as his father demands, but then getting into trouble with the Emperor over a love affair.  That is not really a Jonson-like conceit, so no surprise that this part of Poetaster is undeveloped, earnest, and dull.

Jonson gives me two great scenes in Poetaster, both slagging Marston.  The idea is that Crispinus, the Marston-alike, wants to be a poet for the prestige but has no talent for anything but big words – “A kind of paronomosy, or agnomination, do you conceive, sir?” (III.1, 29).  Horace bumps into the nuisance Crispinus in the street and cannot shake him.  The scene is a direct stage adaptation of Horace’s Satire I.9 with some extra London detail.  I know, the setting is Rome, whatever.

The climax of the play is the arraignment of the title, where we finally get some of the poetaster’s poetry:

What, shall they lubrical and Gibbery Muse

Live as she were defunct, like punk in stews?  (V.3, 78)

Virgil himself condemns Crispinus to a purgative, which makes him spend two full pages vomiting up vocabulary words:

CRISPINUS  - puffy – inflate – turgidous – ventosity.

HORACE  Barmy froth, puffy, inflate, turgidous, and ventosity are come up.

TIBULLUS  Oh, terrible windy words!

GALLUS  The sign of a windy brain.

CRISPINUS Oh – oblatrant – obcecate – furibund – fatuate – strenuous – (84)

What, “puffy,” what’s wrong with “puffy.”  But I can imagine how this would work well on stage.  A bit earlier Virgil says “The honest satire hath the happiest soul” (81) and I believe he, and Jonson, believe it.

Text and pages are from Oxford World’s Classics, The Devil Is an Ass and Other Plays, which has plenty of background and notes.

The next play on my schedule is Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffman, but I am going to push it out because I am grumpy about the texts at hand.  So next – posting March 9 or so – will be Ben Jonson’s Roman tragedy Sejanus His Fall.

Marston's poetics - foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain

The plays that have survived from the early London stage are language-crazed.  When have so many commercial writers been poets, great poets?  When has so much commercial writing been poetry?

John Marston is among the purplest of the poet-playwrights, the most baroque.  I can imagine readers who find he goes too far.  I love it when he gets rolling.

Here, for example, Antonio reads aloud, in Latin, some consoling lines of stoical Seneca, but dismisses them:

Pish, thy mother was not lately widowed,

Thy dear affied love lately defam’d

With blemish of foul lust when thou wrot’st thus.

Thou, wrapp’d in furs, beaking thy limbs ‘fore fires

Forbid’st the frozen zone to shudder.  Ha, ha! ‘tis naught

But foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain,

Naught else but smoke.  (II.2, 33-4)

Passages like this must be great fun for actors, with the f-words overtaking the l-words.  The monologue goes on for a few more lines, more self-pitying or whining, with a few more Fs.  Marston’s genius, I suppose, is that he understands that the play has to function on stage, so it cannot be nothing but foamy bubbling of fleamy brains.

The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps

The fluent summer’s vein; and drizzling sleet

Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numb’d earth,

Whilst snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves

From the nak’d shuddering branch, and pills the skin

From off the soft and delicate aspects.

O now, methinks, a sullen tragic scene

Would suit the time with pleasing congruence.  (Prologue, 3)

These Romantic lines, which sound to me like something from centuries later, begin the play, but the Prologue is a place to indulge.  Marston has a terrific Gothic side to his imagination.  Here Duje Piero is at the funeral of the enemy he has murdered.

PIERO  Rot there, thou cerecloth that enfolds the flesh

Of my loath’d foe; molder to crumbling dust;

Oblivion choke the passage of thy fame!

Trophies of honor’d birth drop quickly down;

Let naught of him, but what was vicious, live.

Though thou art dead, think not my hate is dead;

I have but newly twone my arm in the curl’d locks

Of snaky vengeance.  Pale, beetle-brow’d hate

But newly bustles up.

What a weirdo.  Would Robert Browning have written this character’s mad scenery chewing so differently?  Maybe he would have written “twined” rather than “twone.”  What a great, crazy image.

Ben Jonson mocks Marston for his overdone vocabulary, as we will see when I write up Poetaster, the next play on my schedule, but Marston is perhaps more effective with this kind of line (Pandulpho’s son is also a victim of the mad Duke):

PANDULPHO:  Would’st have me cry, run raving up and down

For my son’s loss? Would’st have me turn rank mad,

Or wring my face with mimic action,

Stamp, curse, weep, rage, and then my bosom strike?

Away, ‘tis apish action, player-like.  (I.2, 23)

A little meta-fiction there when Pandulpho switches to rhyme, but what I want is a few lines later:

Listen, young blood, ‘tis not true valor’s pride,

To swagger, quarrel, swear, stamp, rave, and chide,

To stab in fume of blood, to keep loud coil,

To bandy factions in domestic broils,

To dare the act of sins whose filth excels

The blackest customs of blind infidels.

The baroque poet likes the short words, too, often in long chains.  Look at all that alliteration – plenty of f-words in this passage, too.

In my memory The Malcontent, which I plan to discuss in April, is the peak of both Marston’s plotting and poetics.  Don’t miss it.  Jonson’s Poetaster, up next here, is much more missable.

John Marston's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge - Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st

John Marston does something with the pair of plays Antonio and Mellida (1599?) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600?) that I do not think I have ever seen before.  The first play is a silly, barely coherent romantic comedy, with everything wrapped up in a happy ending.  Antonio’s Revenge is a bloody revenge with the same characters (except for the ones murdered before the first act), demolishing the earlier play.  Which one is the travesty?  Both, I guess.

Companies of school boys had performed plays of high sophistication for decades in London, but 1599 saw the opening of what were effectively commercial theaters featuring companies of boy actors.  These were “private” theaters while the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe, Shakespeare’s company, was “public.”  The public companies were repertory groups that performed almost daily, mixing old plays with a constant stream of new plays.  The private companies performed once a week – the boys were nominally in school.  A play at the Globe cost one penny; at Paul’s Theatre, where Marston’s plays were performed, six (6) pennies.  So the audience was entirely different, with the intimate, roofed boy’s companies playing to richer, more educate, more let’s use the word sophisticated audiences. 

I write this for my own benefit.  It explains a lot of what I see in these plays.  London had a sufficiently large audience that had cultivated a taste for parody and meta-theater.  Not even twenty-five years after the opening of the theaters and the decadent phase has started.  Or maybe things are getting good.  I have a strong taste for parody and meta-theater.

Both plays are full of lines from Seneca’s plays, in English and in Latin.  There are many parodies of bits of The Spanish Tragedy, the old warhorse, and of Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus, but also of Montaigne.  Antonio and Mellida begins with the boy actors carrying their scripts on stage and discussing how to play their parts.  “I a voice to play a lady!  I shall ne’er do it.”  (Induction, 64)

I am continuing to have trouble imaging what these performances of these complex plays were like.  Some of the “boys” were older teens, and a number would have longer careers on stage, but the youngest, often playing the women’s roles, were seven or eight years old.

Antonio and Mellida:  Venice has defeated Genoa in a sea battle.  The Duke of Genoa and his son Antonio wash ashore.  Antonio and Mellida, daughter of the Duke of Venice, are in love.  This is a comedy and a romance, so love prevails and no one is murdered.  Antonio spends most of the play disguised as an “Amazon.”  It is a comic genre mishmash with lots of room for gags and diversion and songs.

I will mention here before I forget that the clown role, a striving braggart soldier type, at one point demands that a painter make a painting of “Uh.”

BALURDO  God’s nigs, now I remember me, I ha’ the rarest device in my head that ever breathed.  Can you paint me a drivelling, reeling song and let the word be, ‘Uh’?

PAINTER  A belch?

BALURDO  O, no, no – ‘Uh’.  Paint me ‘Uh, or nothing.  (V.1, 144)

He has invented conceptual art, right there on the London stage (although this is also another reference to a line in The Spanish Tragedy).

Antonio’s Revenge:  The Duke of Venice goes back on his word and murders the Duke of Genoa and imprisons his daughter for sexual misbehavior, just before the play starts. 

PIERO          I am great in blood,

Unequal’d in revenge.  (AR, I.1, 7)

The ghost of the murdered duke urges Antonio to wreak revenge on Piero, which he eventually does, just a horrible, horrible revenge. 

ANTONIO [indicates the banquet]

Fall in, good duke.  O these are worthless cates.

You have no stomach to them.  Look, look here:

Herer lies a dish to feast thy father’s gorge.

Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st.

[He uncovers the dish containing oh no too horrible I will stop here]  (V.3, 82)

Seneca’s Thyestes is the main reference here.

Piero is a quite interesting Machiavellian, a ruler himself and more of an actual Machiavellian than the usual burlesque of Machiavelli found in other English plays.  Piero overreachs so much that Antonio does not have to seek revenge on his own but actually assembles a team, which I do not think I had ever seen in a revenge tragedy before.

I would not call Antonio and Mellida a great play; Antonio’s Revenge finds some greatness once it gets moving in lets say Act III.  I’ll bet it works well on stage.  But the important thing is the language, which I will write about tomorrow.  Marston’s language is unusual.

Text and page numbers for Antonio and Mellida are from the Manchester University Press, the 1991 Revels Plays edition; those of Antonio’s Revenge are from the 1965 University of Nebraska Press edition.

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe.  More importantly, he was a born Londoner.  His best plays are full of London. 

Like Every Man in His Humour (1598), not his first play (he did a lot of co-writing) but the earliest he put in the 1616 folio of his collected works, so the earliest play he claimed as his own.  It is just a comedy of types, characters with different monomanias knocking into each other.  It is meant to be current, although the types have never left us.

I mean such errors, as you’ll all confess

By laughing at them, they deserve no less:

Which when you heartily do, there’s hope left, then,

You, that have so graced monsters, may like men.  (Prologue, 8)

The “monsters” bit is a jab at the old-fashioned plays of five years ago, Tamburlaine and The Spanish Tragedy and plays that

                                       With three rusty swords,

And help of some few foot-and-half-foot words,

Fight over York, and Lancaster’s long jars;  (7)

That old stuff.  The poetry of The Spanish Tragedy, barely a decade old at this point, is used throughout Jonson’s play as not exactly an example of bad taste, since it is obviously great for its time, but rather a refusal to keep up.

Anyway, Every Man in His Humour is about men.  It is a hodgepodge of bits of Plautus and Terence but updated to the current moment.  I mean, there is a braggart soldier, and a jealous husband, stock characters going back to Menander, to the origins of theatrical comedy.  But there are also tobacco fanatics (Ralegh sparked a tobacco craze in 1586, again about a decade earlier):

BOBADILL: I have been in the Indies, where this herb grows, where neither myself, nor a dozen gentlemen before, of my knowledge, have received the taste of any other nutriment, in the world, for the space of one and twenty weeks, but the fume of this simple only.  (III.2, 72)

A long list follows of the ailments cured by tobacco.  But Jonson also gives us the anti-tobacconist:

COB:  It’s good for nothing, but to choke a man, and fill him full of smoke, and embers: there were four died out of one house, last week, with taking of it, and two more the bell went for, yesternight; one of them, they say, will ne’er scape it: he voided a bushel of soot yesterday, upward, and downward.  (III.2, 73)

It’s bad poetry that really takes a beating, “idle poetry, / That fruitless and unprofitable art  (I.1, 9), noting that this line is from the utilitarian Kno’well, and even he is more tolerant than his friend Downright who flees when a poetry recital begins:

DOWNRIGHT: Oh, here’s no foppery!  Death, I can endure the stocks better.  [Exits]

KNO’WELL Jr.: What ails thy brother?  Can he not hold his water, at reading of a ballad?

WELLBRED: Oh, no: a rhyme to him, is worse than cheese, or a bagpipe.  (IV.1, 83)

Worse than cheese!  That’s pretty bad.  The poem turns out to be good, because it is just a plagiarized chunk of Hero and Leander.  The bad poets are not just bad, but thieves, and the play ends with the offending poems thrown in the fire.  Every Man in His Humour does not have much of a plot.

The play is a preview of Jonson’s great comedies from a decade later – Volpone, Epicoene, The Alchemist, and Bartholomew Fair – lively and London-packed but structured more originally.  In a sense, the text I have been quoting is actually part of this run of plays.  In the 1598 version the characters mostly have Italian names and the setting is Italian, sort of, although a weirdly Londonate Italy.  The Italian version was a big hit, but at some point before 1616 Jonson completely rewrote it, making the setting and characters English, tightening the slacker scenes, sharpening the satire.  I find the later version superior in every way, so that is what I have been quoting.

Text and page numbers are from the 1966 New Mermaids edition.  The editor is obsessed with the idea that the jealous husband is an especially subtle portrayal, beyond his comic type, returning to the idea in note after note, as if he, the editor, has his own humour.  I will also not that if the use of commas in some of the quotations above seems odd, they belong to Jonson, who was unusually attentive to the punctuation in his 1616 folio.  What they are supposed to mean to the actor is up for interpretation.

Assuming I get my writing back on track the next play will be another minor play-as-such but great London play, Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.

Marlowe's Massacre at Paris - And so let's forward to the massacre!

Saving the worst for last, it’s Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592?, published soon after), a poor play that is full of Marlovian stuff.  Marlowe dramatizes the 1572 Paris Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the subsequent series of devious betrayals by the principle massacrists.  Just slaughter from beginning to end, as grotesque as Titus Andronicus.  Like the Shakespeare horror show, the Massacre appears to have been a big hit for a while.  Give the people what they want - murders, and plenty of  'em.

The great villain, likely the showcase part for Edward Alleyn, master of these big, loud Marlowe roles, is the Duc de Guise, a classic Machiavellian schemer, the instigator of the Massacre and many other crimes.  “[T]hen toll the bell, / And so let’s forward to the massacre,” declares the Guise in Act I, Scene 5 (p. 550), accurately describing most of the rest of the play.

Whatever his ideological motivation, once he gets going he cannot overcome his momentum, his taste for power and murder, until inevitably someone stronger takes him down.  “Enter the CAPTAIN OF THE GUARD and three MURDERERS” (V.2, 573).  And after the Guise’s death the play still has a strangulation and two stabbings to go.

One reason I wanted to revisit The Massacre at Paris is because it is the only non-Shakespearian Age of Shakespeare play I have actually seen.  In a sense, because what I saw was a 2018 performance at the Théâtre des Célestins in Lyon of a French adaptation of the play titled Margot.  Of course the French audience is still interested in screwy English versions of French history.  The first few rows of seats were covered by plastic sheets, because the many many many stabbings were represented by the murderer-actors drinking a mouthful of dyed-red water from plastic bottles and them spraying the water as forcefully as possible all over the victim-actors.  Sometimes several people were murdered at once and the stage would explode into a cloud of red spray.  The scene of the murder of the Guise – I am confident the photo I have borrowed is form that scene – went on approximately forever, with the murderers circling the Guise, taking a swallow, spitting, circling, swallowing, spitting.  Disgusting; hilarious; in the spirit of the wreckage of the Marlowe play.

By which I mean, by the way, that the text we have is in terrible shape, maybe a quick job to cash in on Marlowe’s murder.  The play we have is too short, feels rushed, and in places does not quite make sense.  There is not enough “great and thundering speech.”  The French version is likely a better play.

I have returned to the Penguin Complete Plays for the text and page numbers.

Farewell to poor Marlowe.  In two weeks I will move into another era and write about Ben Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) which I remember as pretty good.

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.

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.