A note on Elizabethan authorship and Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I have not read

Stephen Grennblatt’s biography of Christopher Marlowe, Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Christopher Marlowe, was just published.  I did not know this book, which has been prominently reviewed, was coming.  I perhaps should have hooked my Christopher Marlowe reading to it.  For what purpose I do not know.

There is no possible way that I will buy Greenblatt’s book, but I might read it if my library buys a copy, which I suppose they will at some point.  Marlowe’s life could hardly be more interesting.  My grumpiness is more with the current practice of biography, which glosses over the use of evidence in ways with which I have difficulty.

For example.  A piece about Greenblatt’s book in Harvard Magazine, “Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival” (8/8/2025), written by Nina Pasquini, begins with a grotesque error:

He was a radical, the inventor of blank verse, a master of internal monologue, and a victim of murder.

Marlowe did not invent blank verse.  How could the author get this idea.  Because Greenblatt said it:

But the play’s most revolutionary element was formal: the use of “this hallucinatory blank verse, which Marlowe basically invented,” Greenblatt says.

Stephen Greenblatt knows more about Gorboduc and Henry Howard’s Aeneid translation than I do, and knows what the word “invented” means, yet this is the standard.  Or perhaps the emphasis is on "hallucinatory," in other words Marlowe invented blank verse as written by Marlowe.  Gorboduc's blank verse is not hallucinatory.

In the actual book, which I looked at in a bookstore, in the three pages tagged with “blank verse” in the index, Greenblatt says nothing about “invention” but instead argues that Marlowe’s use of blank verse in the two Tamburlaine plays was so successful, artistically and commercially, that it set blank verse as the standard for tragedy and history plays.  Which seems true to me.  Eh, the book is probably good.  Please read it and let me know.

Still, the evidence.  In two weeks I will put up something about Dido, Queen of Carthage, which I think of as Marlowe’s first play.  Maybe it is, maybe it is not.  Published in 1594, soon after Marlowe’s death, the title page says:

Written by Chriftopher Marlowe, and

Thomas Nafh. Gent.

Thomas Nashe is a writer of high interest, an imaginative satirist, but heck if I can hear him anywhere in Dido.  Some scholars with better ears than me agree, some do not.  Maybe Nashe edited the play for publication?  Maybe he wrote my favorite scenes in imitation of Marlowe?  Who knows.

I think there was a lot more co-writing and script doctoring in the London theater than we will ever know.  Publishing was changing rapidly, and the notion of authorship was changing as quickly, so evidence for authorship claims, authorship in our post-Romantic sense, is chaotic.  I take The Workes of Ben Jonson (1616), the first Folio if not the First Folio, as one extreme, Jonson getting his own plays and poems into print in a way that clearly says “These are mine, I wrote these.”  But my impression now is that there is more non-Shakespeare than we will ever know in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the earlier ones, and similarly more Shakespeare in plays we attribute to other writers.  Scenes, lines, even words.

In an issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman has Shakespeare and Jonson jointly improvise the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot song and teach it to a boy to spread around London.  The first line is Shakespear’s (“remember, remember”), the second Jonson’s.  Shakespeare thinks the song will quickly be forgotten; Jonson thinks it will last a hundred years.  A little parable about publication there.  But I think it gets at the practice of the time pretty well.  All of these writers knew each other.  Many worked together professionally, but how many more workshopped passages with each other at the tavern?

I will try to keep a light hand about authorship.  But at some point I have to make my choice, just like the biographer does.  He has to tell the story of Christopher Marlowe’s career as a spy.  I would prefer the story of why we think he might have been a spy.  Most people would not.

Next week: please join me in reading Dido, Queen of Carthage.  It is a fine piece of poetry.  The week after that I will begin writing on the two Tamburlaine plays.

I am in France right now so who knows when I might respond to comments.  Please go over to my Twitter to see photographs of my traveling companions.

Hesse's proto-hippie Narcissus and Goldmund - that which was all-important to him, apart from the ecstasy of love: freedom

After the inventiveness of Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) and the first big chunk of The Man Without Qualities (1930), it was a surprise to read such an old-fashioned but contemporary book as Hermann Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund (1930, tr. Leila Vennewitz) that deliberately reached back to the 19th century German-language novella.  To Goethe and that crowd.  The first sentence describes a chestnut tree “brought back generations earlier by a pilgrim returning from Rome” (Ch. 1).  I had met that pilgrim, many times, in German literature.  Goldmund is another in that line, even if he never leaves German-speaking territory.

Goldmund is a student in a monastery who discovers that he is irresistible to women.  The secret is in his voice, apparently.  So that’s it for the monastery!  Goldmund becomes a wanderer, a tramp, really a kind of hippie.  A proto-hippie.  The reason for the Hesse boom in the 1960s was quickly obvious.  Of course dissatisfied young people wanted to read this book.

Digression – this is James Laughlin in The Way It Wasn’t (2006):

I went through it [Siddhartha] and thought it was very readable, but a little too Germanic and the message was just Buddhism with a sugar coating. I stalled but Henry [Miller] would write about every three months saying I had to publish that book.  Finally, to oblige Henry, I did.  The first year it sold only 400 copies, but sales kept growing and at the height of the Hesse boom we sold a quarter of a million copies in a year. (290)

This novel, like Siddhartha is more or less picaresque, and it was the a long episode about art that drove home Hesse’s hippie ethos.  Goldmund informally apprentices himself to a Tilman Riemenschneider-like limewood sculptor and becomes a real artist, but worries that artists are too bourgeois:

For more than three years Goldmund had sacrificed to art that which was all-important to him, apart from the ecstasy of love: freedom.  To be free, to roam wherever he pleased, to live the random life of the wayfarer, to stand on his own two feet and be independent: all this he had renounced … Art, that goddess who seemed so spiritual, required so many banalities!  It required a roof over one’s head, and tools, wood, clay, paint, gold; it demanded work and patience.  (Ch. 11, 140)

So he gives it up.

The novel is set during the 14th or 15th century.  Is there a pandemic in it?  There sure is.  The plague arrives in Chapter 13, and Goldmund lives, with some other refugees, in an isolated forest idyll.  “There being no bread, they adopted another goat, and they also discovered a small field of turnips” (Ch. 13, 169).  This lasts until the world intrudes.  Hesse is unsparing about the horrors of the plague, and the horrors of people during the plague.

Narcissus, up there in the title, is a monk, priest, teacher and friend of Goldmund’s who appears only in the opening and closing episodes.  Hesse apparently found the form of the novel insufficient for his ideas, because both of these sections include philosophical dialogues of dubious value.  They seemed artless, and the ideas expressed shallow.  Philosophy for twelve-year-olds.  Well, they need philosophy, too.  But the scenes, the action of the novel, and Goldmund’s responses to what he found out in the world, good and bad, expressed ideas, too, and with more art.

I borrowed the image of the Riemenschneider sculpture from the Museum für Franken in Würzburg.

Frankfurt dispatch - notes on the Frankfurt Book Fair

The Frankfurt Book Fair originated soon after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.  I recently browsed through a history of early modern publishing that used the Fair’s records to quantify 16th century international publishing, the early years, circa let’s say 1570, when Venetian publishers brought a total of forty books to the fair, and Dutch publishers brought another thirty, and so on, an international book fair with a hundred books.

Now, well, this is one of three floors of the English-language building, with the enormous Harper-Collins campus sort of visible in the upper right.  Or maybe fortress is the right word, since it was the least welcoming space at the Fair.  The books were present as samples for the salespeople to use.  The fortress was full of little tables, each one the site of some kind of meeting.

The Frankfurt Book Fair exists for the purpose of facilitating meetings, at which the rights to publish books are sold.  Not books, but the rights to books.  Deeply interested in literature but not so much in books, I experienced the Fair as a great mystery, less of a glimpse behind the veil than a sustained look at the veil.  I still don’t really understand what is behind it.

But if I wonder why was this book translated instead of that one, why is this book available in the U.S. but not in England, why does this book exist at all, much of the answer was there in Frankfurt.  A Random House rep met with a Catalonian publisher, and said yes to this book and no to the rest of the pile.  Who, away from that little table, really knows why.  Lots of reasons.  At the Fair, I got to see all of this without understanding it.

Three big floors of English-language publishers, two floors (plus) of German publishers, two floors (plus) of the rest of the world.  And additional areas for scientific publishing, education, religion, travel, maps, greeting cards, and an endlessly interesting area filled with nothing but art book publishers, including the strange subset of publishers of facsimile editions covered in gold and jewels.

Part of why it was so interesting to me was that I did not need so much German among the art books, I admit that.  The Fair would have been a lot more fun if I had German.  This is also why I kept returning to the food and cooking area, where there were samples, wine, and a demonstration kitchen where the default language was English.  Plus, I mentioned samples?

The biggest celebrity I saw just wandering around was Dany Laferrière, the only Academician I have seen in real life.  I saw Péter Nádas being interviewed for a television program, and stumbled across Wim Wenders plugging his new book.  Meine Frau came across Reinhold Messner, who beats the others, I think, as a celebrity.

More pleasurable was meeting Lisa of Lizok’s Bookshelf, who was at the Fair fighting the good fight for Russian translations.  Thanks for the time and conversation, Lisa!

Tocqueville: properly speaking, no literature

"The inhabitants of the United States have, then, at present, properly speaking, no literature". Pt. II, Book I, Chapter 13.

Tocqueville published this in 1840, when it was no longer true. Emerson, Poe, Longfellow and Hawthorne had all published major work by this time. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast came out the same year.

But Tocqueville's visit to the United States took place in 1831 and 1832. Poe and Hawthorne had published, but to no audience. The big names we still read were William Cullen Bryant, James Fennimore Cooper, Washington Irving. Bryant wrote at least one perfect poem ("To a Waterfowl") and Irving wrote at least one perfect story ("The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"), but none of these writers are quite central to US literature any more. There was certainly a lot of publishing, much of it religious and political, but also novels and poetry. Anyone who can make it through Joel Barlow's epic Columbiad, or the selected poems of Washington Allston or Philip Freneau is made of tougher stuff than I.* See the Library of America anthology, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, Volume 1, for mind-numbing samples.

Tocqueville compares America's democratic literature to France's aristocratic literature, the mass audience to the select. He has a real insight - what America (or democracies in general) lose in refinement will be made up in volume. In other words, even if a massive amount of trash is produced, there will also occasionally be writers as good as Racine or Voltaire, just as a matter of probability. This seems pretty canny to me.

I am not sure what Tocqueville means when he talks about aristocratic literature - my guess is the 17th century classics like Racine and Corneille, but he never says. While he is in America, while he is writing Democracy in America, there is a real boom period in French literature and theater - Balzac, Hugo, de Musset, de Vigny. These writers, certainly vulgar Balzac, must be part of the democratization of French literature, part of the same phenomenon Tocqueville sees in America.

* Barlow's "Advice to a Raven in Russia" is actually pretty great.