In case yesterday’s invitation was a bit abstract, here is my current sense of a twenty-play Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus that I would like to investigate beginning next fall.  I’ve read twelve of them. Please note that almost every date below should be preceded by “c.”  A few are likely quite wrong. Ralph Roister Doister (1552), Nicholas Udall Gammer Gurton's Needle (1553), authorship much disputed – start with two influential pre-Elizabethan comedies written for academic settings. Gorbuduc (1561), Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville – the first English tragedy in blank verse, performed before young Queen Elizabeth. Somewhere in the mid-1570s permanent theaters begin to succeed, and it is tempting to see what might have been on those early stages, but let’s jump to Marlowe, the great young innovator. Dido, Queen of Carthage (1587), Christopher Marlowe – not that you would know from this one, not that I remember. Tamburlaine, Parts I & II (1587), Christopher Marlowe – cheating a bit, putting the two plays together.  Now things are starting to get good. The Spanish Tragedy (1587), Thomas Kyd – the first revenge tragedy, very exciting. The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe Arden of Faversham (1591), ??? – more cheating, since this may actually be Shakespeare, not Not Shakespeare.  Or it’s Marlowe.  Or anyone. Doctor Faustus (1592), Christopher Marlowe Edward the Second (1592), Christopher Marlowe Selimus (1592), Robert Greene – one of many, many Tamburlaine knockoffs.  Static and dull, I assume. The Massacre at Paris (1593), Christopher Marlowe – Oddly, this is the only play I will mention of which I have seen a performance, an almost hilariously gory French adaptation.  It is not a good play, but it is sure an interesting one. The Old Wife's Tale (1593), George Peele – A parody of a genre of fairy tale romance plays none of which are extant, meaning this might be gibberish. Every Man in His Humour (1598), Ben Jonson – I do not remember this as a great play, but young Jonson is inventing a new kind of comedy that will pay off in his later masterpieces. The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – An early “city comedy.”  Antonio's Revenge (1600), John Marston – revenge! The Tragedy of Hoffmann (1602), Henry Chettle – revenge! Sejanus His Fall (1603), Ben Jonson – Ambitious Jonson wrote a couple of serious Roman tragedies.  I remember them as weak, but I’ll give this one another chance. A Woman Killed with Kindness (1603), Thomas Heywood – A domestic melodrama, in case you were wondering why those were not popular in the old days.  Oh, they were. The Malcontent (1603), John Marston – Really very early Jacobean, but it let’s me end the list on an unusual masterpiece, featuring one of the period’s great characters. What was going on in that five-year gap after Marlowe’s death in 1593?  I will have to investigate more.  I know one thing.  If Shakespeare, like Marlowe, had died at age 29, perhaps knifed in the same tavern fight, he would be remembered as the promising young author of Richard III.  Over the next five years he became the greatest playwright in British history.  The greatest writer?  Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Julius Caesar, Falstaff, his sonnets.  He became the center of gravity that turns everyone else into Not Shakespeare, into Shakespeare’s great predecessor or disciple or rival, something defined against Shakespeare. I am still tempted, I don’t know, by a Greatest Hits approach, which would drop a dozen of the above and continue on into the 17th century with Jonson’s great comedies, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Atheist’s Tragedy, some selection of Thomas Middleton, those two magnificent John Webster plays, A New Way to Pay Old Debts, ending with the collapse of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore a decade before the Puritans put the exhausted, decadent London theaters out of their misery.

Here’s something I’ve been wanting to do.  I’ve been wanting to return to the plays of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson and so on.  The Spanish Tragedy, The Duchess of Malfi, The Knight of the Burning Pestle,  Bartholomew Fair.  It has been a while since I have read them, twenty years or more.  Plays are well-suited for ongoing readalongs, so in the spirit of reading the Greek and Roman plays a couple years ago, why not invite anyone interested to join in. I have been calling this idea Not Shakespeare.  What am I trying to do? 1.  The plays are so good.  Many of them.  I want to read them again. 2.  I want to learn more about the technical aspects of the innovations of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, especially the poetry and structure.  Things moved very fast for forty years. 3.  Genre, too, which appears to be where a lot of the academic attention has gone (as with fiction generally).  It is here that I am most tempted to read bad plays, and not just revenge tragedies, for which I have a strong taste. 4. I want to put a personality of some kind on more of these writers.  Some of them are easy.  Just read The Duchess of Malfi and you know John Webster well enough to get Tom Stoppard’s jokes about him in Shakespeare in Love.  I think I know Marlowe and Jonson.  But other major writers are ciphers, Thomas Middleton especially.  I don’t know if the answer is to read more of the writer, read more about the writer, or think more about them.  I hope not the latter.  I should say I mean know them as artists, not whether or not they were nice people.  Maybe I should also say that this is all a fiction, a creative collaboration between the writer and the reader. Still, Middleton, who was that guy?  If you have read a lot of Shakespeare you have likely read a lot more Middleton than you realize.  A good fifth item for this list would be to learn more about how these writers collaborated, but I fear that is hopeless.  We wish we knew.  The computer programs can only get us so far. The logistics of Not Shakespeare are a little different than the Greek plays.  The Elizabethan and Jacobean plays are longer and the English is more difficult than the modern translated English I read with the Greeks.  A play a week with the Greeks, but I think a play every two weeks makes more sense with the Not Shakespeares.  Plus that will give me more time to read other things.  The poetry of the time – John Donne, George Herbert, the sonnet craze, much more – is also tempting me.  And I want to read some secondary works, although how far that will go I do not know. It is tempting, and likely best for a readalong, to read the Twenty Greatest Hits.  But I want to go a little deeper.  How about twenty Elizabethan plays to begin, actually Elizabethan, stopping in 1603?  Marlowe, The Spanish Tragedy, Jonson finding his voice, new genres, many crazy revenge tragedies. My method was to see what New Mermaids has in print, and then poke around at Broadview and Penguin Classics, and then add this and that.  George Chapman and John Fletcher seem to be out of fashion in the classroom for some reason. Twenty Elizabethan plays in forty weeks, beginning in September, how does that sound?  In August I will rewrite this post and put up a timeline.  I do not expect anyone to read all, or most, of the plays.  Someone may well be inspired to read Shakespeare rather than Not Shakespeare, which is understandable. I am asking for advice in some sense.  Don’t miss this play; that Cambridge Companion is the really good one; so-and-so’s essay is way better than T. S. Eliot’s.  I don’t know.  Anything.  This is also a method to make myself write more.  For some reason a committed structure, however artificial, does the trick.

First, my poor email subscribers missed some of the installments of my newsletter about Anthony Powell.  If this keeps happening I will have to think of something or even do something.  Here they are: A skippable piece of throat-clearing about the roman fleuve. What I think Powell is doing in A Dance to the Music of Time, the first four novels anyways. How I think he does it. After Finnegans Wake, I only wanted short books, or easy books, or even better both, so these are those.  For a while I thought this would last all summer.  It might. FICTION Everyman and Medieval Mystery Plays (15th C.) – I am beginning preparations for my upcoming Not Shakespeare event.  Soon I will ask for advice about it.  That is Knowledge up in the post’s title, helping out Everyman, and supplying an epigram to the edition I read. The Stronghold (1940), Dino Buzzati – The new translation of The Tartar Steppes, less odd and Kafkaesque than I expected.  More plausibly about military life.  Still, somewhat odd, somewhat Kafkaesque. The Skin of Our Teeth (1942), Thornton Wilder – Wilder took up Finnegans Wake as a hobby for a couple of years, treating it a puzzle of some kind, like a crossword.  I thought I would revisit his amusing Adam-and-Eve satire that was directly inspired by – but is nothing like! – Joyce’s novel. Johnny Tremain (1943), Esther Forbes – A kid’s novel about the beginnings of the American Revolution in Boston, one of the best-selling books in American history.  It has faded, understandably, but I was happy to find that it is a real novel, with solid characters and a sensible story that is not overtly educational, a genuine American descendant of Scott’s Waverley.  Still, mostly recommended to New Englanders planning to enjoy the upcoming Sesquicentennial events. The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), Bertolt Brecht Nine Stories (1953), J. D. Salinger Mission of Gravity (1953), Hal Clement – A landmark of “hard” science fiction, where the author’s main concern is getting the math right, which does not sound so exciting, which is likely why I skipped this one long ago when I was reading more science fiction.  How wrong I was.  This book is a scream, a seafaring adventure novel with a crew of rubbery foot-long problem-solving caterpillars.  It also has an unusually satisfying ending. Jane and Prudence (1953), Barbara Pym – I wanted to test my sense that Powell’s novels were the purest comedy of manners I had ever read.  This Pym novel is also quite pure. At Lady Molly's (1957), Anthony Powell Light Years (1975), James Salter – The quotation I put in the title is from p. 305 of the Vintage edition.  It’s a real building, the one shaped like a duck! Turtle Diary (1975), Russell Hoban – Almost too much to my tastes, in humor, sentence-level surprises, sensibility, and even romance.  I almost distrust it.  Wonderful book. The Women of Brewster Place (1982), Gloria Naylor – With these last three you can almost see me doing my second-favorite thing, browsing at the library.  I like to think reading the books is actually my favorite. The Empress of Salt and Fortune (2020), Nghi Vo – I had this Chinese-flavored fantasy novel in my hands when the owner of The Briar Patch in Bangor, Maine, a few blocks from Stephen King’s house, told me it was “really good,” obliging me to buy it.  Some really good things about it: 1) it is a hundred pages long and tells a complete story, a rarity among fantasy novels today; 2) the magical more-or-less Chinese setting is although I am sure filled with it’s own clichés still fresh to me; 3) poking around online I found complaints about the weak world-building, which is just about the highest compliment a fantasy novel can receive today.  Despite the light magical touches it turns out to be more of a spy novel.   POETRY Open House (1941) & The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948) & Words for the Wind (1958), Theodore Roethke – I’ve been wandering through Roethle’s Collected Poems alongside a curious selection from his notebooks. Stranger at Coney Island and Other Poems (1948), Kenneth Fearing – Energetic. Eternal Monday: New & Selected Poems (1971-96), György Petri – A fine, funny Hungarian poet, an accidental dissident, recommended to readers of Milosz and Herbert and so on. Shoulder Season (2010), Ange Mlinko – And a Hungarian-American poet.  I should be getting to her new book soon, but the library had this one.   LITTLE ART BOOKS Clavilux and Lumia Home Models (2025), Thomas Wilfred Some Stones are Ancient Books (2025), Richard Sharpe Shaver –The last two of the conceptual art books from the set I started last month (website).  Both, all, of real interest if you like unusual things.  The Wilfred book has an introduction by Doug Skinner, longtime friend of the blog.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Le parti pris des choses (The Part Taken by Things, 1940) & Proêmes (1948), Francis Ponge – the first book is a semi-Surrealist masterpiece, a collection of prose poems on, mostly, things, objects, turned into language.  The second book is more miscellaneous. Le petit homme d'Arkhangelsk (The Little Man from Archangelsk, 1957), Georges Simenon – A roman dur, so a crime-like event occurs.  A guy’s wife runs off, which does not bother him so much, but she takes the most valuable stamps from his collection, which does.  Police detectives will be involved at some point, but the novel is really about the psychology of the character.  It’s a sad book. Cinco Voltas Na Bahia e Um Beijo para Caetano Veloso (Five Returns to Bahia and a Kiss for Caetano Veloso, 2019), Alexandra Lucas Coelho – Maybe the Portuguese crónica system, where writers make their livings writing ephemeral essays for magazines, has some disadvantages.  This is the third book I have read this year by a veteran journalist who has trouble distinguishing interesting from dull.  Bahia is highly interesting (well, Salvador, Coelho barely leaves Salvador); Caetano Veloso is extremely interesting.  The author’s trips to the beach and book tour are not.

Nicholas Jenkins – I did not register his name at all for the entire first novel, but I know it now – goes to school, gets a job in publishing, writes a novel, gets a girlfriend, gets a job as a script writer, splits with the girlfriend, and writes another novel or two, none of which, except for getting the girlfriend, is depicted in the first four novels of A Dance to the Music of Time.  Instead, in long scenes, four or five chapters in a 200 page novel, Nick goes to parties or lunches or perhaps a bunch of characters pile into a car and drive around.  All of the school and jobs and even losing the girlfriend happens between the parties. Meeting characters in different social situations is the structural basis of Anthony Powell’s novel, perhaps even its metaphysics, the governing principle of the fictional universe: He had cropped up in my life before, and, if I considered him at all as a recurrent factor, I should have been prepared to admit that he might crop up again. (A Buyer’s Market, 1, 29) I had the idea that characters were going to recur in surprising situations, but at this point there is no surprise. I myself was curious to see what Mildred Blaides – or rather Mildred Haycock – might look like after all these years, half expecting her to be wearing her V.A.D. outfit and smoking a cigarette.  But when my eyes fell on the two of them, it was the man, not the woman, who held my attention.  Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one.  This was just such a performance.  The fiancé was…  (At Lady Molly’s, 1, 42) But I am in the fourth novel here, so the surprise would be if the much younger, much gossiped over fiancé were not “the horribly memorable Kenneth Widmerpool” who has been the “recurrent factor” since the third chapter of the first novel.  I will be shocked if a novel goes by without Widmerpool.  John Banville is the source of “horribly memorable,” and also “in all his egregious awfulness,” but at this point Widmerpool, a narrow, clumsy social striver, is not quite awful.  He strives towards awfulness but does not seem quite competent enough to reach it.  I will enjoy seeing his awfulness increase as the series progresses.  Some people think of him as one of the great comic characters of English fiction, although at this point he is more like Wodehouse’s Gussie Fink-Nottle than Waugh’s Basil Seal.  Now that is a character with some egregious awfulness. Please search that Banville review for Waugh.  Since I brought up the subject, let’s have some samples of Powell’s style.  This is Widmerpool, from above: Like a huge fish swimming into a hitherto unexplored and unexpectedly exciting aquarium, he sailed resolutely forward: yet not a real fish, a fish made of rubber or some artificial substance. (ALM, 1, 42) Widmerpool generally has (we are two full novel earlier) a “piscine cast of countenance, projecting the impression that he swam, rather than walked, through the rooms he haunted” (ABM, 1, 28).  Powell’s metaphors are specific and imaginative, among the greatest pleasures of the novels: “He made a sweeping movement with his hands, as if driving chickens before him in a farmyard…” (A Question of Upbringing, 4, 189). It is unlikely that many people, writing up their life, would remember such a thing, but that is Nick.  I do not have to suspend disbelief; our narrator is the rare bird who would remember this detail when writing his memoir twenty-five years after the fact.  He is a stylist, a fussy one – I believe some of the fussiness is visible in the quotations I have used – hardly as original as Waugh or his friend Henry Green but attentive.  Some of his aphoristic lines seem blatantly wrong.  But the sensibility is Powell’s own.  The sensibility, and the sentences, keep me reading, and will likely keep me interested through the twelfth novel.

My writing here is often about what surprised me or did not.  So let’s have that about the first four novels of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, the twelve volume sequence published from 1951 to 1975 and covering a refracted version of Powell’s life from his later schooldays in the 1920s up to somewhere close to the completion of the series, if not to the narrator’s actual death, although why not, really  (“And now I am a ghost dictating to a terrified typist”).  Four volumes, 1951 to 1957, gets me up to the mid-1930s in the novel’s timeline.  World War II will get going two or three novels later.  That ought to be interesting. “Interesting” is an interesting word as applied to A Dance.  It is the purest comedy of manners I have ever read.* For my own part, I always enjoy hearing the details of other people’s lives, whether imaginary or not, so that I found this side of Lovell agreeable. (At Lady Molly’s, Ch. 5, 185) Like its direct forebear In Search of Lost Time, parts of the novels are patience-testing, particularly some of the party business.  One of the lessons Powell learned from his beloved Proust was the endless novelistic uses of parties: I can recall a brief conversation with a woman – not pretty, though possessing excellent legs – on the subject of cheese, which she alleged to be unprocurable at the buffet. (A Buyer’s Market, 2, 139) That line is a good test of Powell’s humor.  Those who find it hilarious may find A Dance to be a favorite book; those like me who find it more amusing than funny will want to keep reading the novels (this party is in the second book); no comment on those who do not see why this might be called humor. But my point is that the humor, the interest, and I am becoming convinced the point of this sequence of novels is all of the interconnected minutiae.  Writing a roman fleuve, allowing time to pass, in the novel and perhaps in real life, increases the complexity of the connections. The “details of other people’s lives” accumulate. I suppose, given the debt to Proust, that Powell would have more of a metaphysics or at least aesthetics, but it is not that kind of book.  He does have a metaphysics.  He is searching for truth in some sense: I began to brood on the complexity of writing a novel about English life, a subject difficult enough to handle with authenticity even of a crudely naturalistic sort, even more to convey the inner truth of the things observed…  Intricacies of social life make English habits unyielding to simplification, while understatement and irony – in which all classes of this island converse – upset the normal emphasis of reported speech.  (The Acceptance World, 2, 32) A Dance has plenty of irony, but at this point I do not sense much distance between the narrator, a novelist, and author in passages like this. Not that I know a thing about the narrator’s novels.  Another trick Powell learned form Proust is to skip all kinds of seemingly life-changing events that would be major features of conventional Bildungromans: I was then at the time of life when one has written a couple of novels, and moved from a firm that published art books to a company that produced second-feature films.  (ALM, 1, 16) You know, that time of life. I want to write about that narrator tomorrow, his style and temperament.  By the end of this thing I will have spent 2,500 pages with him. *  On a hunch, I have begun Barbara Pym’s Jane and Prudence (1953) to test this idea of the pure comedy of manners.  I’ve never read Pym.  Forty pages in, it is awful pure.