Forget me, forget me not The post David Sokosh appeared first on The American Scholar.

King Gorboduc, his head heavy from wearing the crown of England, divides his kingdom between his two sons.  One son quickly murders the other; the grieving mother (!) murders the surviving son; the outraged populace rises to murder the queen and poor, hapless King Gorboduc; England collapses into civil war.  This sounds so exciting!  And look at all of those hints of later plays, of the history plays and King Lear.  The Tragedie of Gorboduc (1562, pub. 1565) is not exciting.  It is static and anti-dramatic.  It barely has characters. The action is presented in the dumb shows that lead each act, and in messenger speeches.  The play is mostly a mix of political speeches, advice to the king and so on, and messenger speeches. The model is Seneca curiously mixed with English morality plays.  Seneca’s characters declaim in long set-speeches, but with an emotional intensity, building to pathos or horror, that is absent in Gorboduc, which was written by a couple of lawyers, Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, for a performance before an audience of lawyers.  The warning about the dangers of a weak monarchy are the real point, the real plot, of the play.  No surprise that it was published relatively soon after its performance, that a particular audience wanted the text. I know this sounds dull, and I do not know how it would be to sit through the play, but I found it highly readable.  I am now used to theater more undramatic than this, all kinds of crazy anti-plays, and I will note that the most produced play in America last season was Heidi Schrek’s What the Constitution Means to Me (2017). A few scenes get close to later drama.  The queen has a two-page soliloquy about murdering her own son where she would, in Seneca or Racine, whip herself up into a frenzy.  Maybe we in the audience are horrified or somehow sympathetic: Never, O wretch, this womb conceived thee; Nor never bode I painful throes for thee. Changeling to me thou art, and not my child, Nor to no wight that spark of pity knew. Ruthless, unkind, monster of nature’s work…  (IV.1, 67-71) The queen is more a type than a character – she has barely been on stage before this scene – and the ideas in this speech do not really develop.  But I can see the future in it.  I can imagine Marlowe or Shakespeare reading it and wanting to fix it.  I can also imagine a less anarchically commercial English theater developing in a more Racine-like direction. Gorboduc is the first published English play written in blank verse.  This is really why we read it.  Henry Howard’s partial translation of The Aeneid in blank verse had been published just a few years earlier.  The whole point of the exercise is that Roman poetry did not rhyme, so how can that be duplicated in English and still be interesting poetry?  Howard’s Virgil was a success, wonderful stuff, and I am not surprised that these two educated lawyers borrowed it for their pseudo-Seneca.  Their blank verse is competent, and they were right, it creates a kind of speech that sounds natural but lends itself to elaboration, that is pleasant to hear and read and not so bad for an actor to memorize.  Sackville and Norton great virtue is clarity, but they have their poetic moments: And ye, O gods, send us the welcome death, To shed our blood in field, and leave us not In loathsome life to linger out our days, To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps, That now roll down upon the wretched land…  (V.ii, 105-10) Almost an Anglo-Saxon poetic quality in those lines.  Compared to what Marlowe or Webster or Shakespeare will do with blank verse, sure, sure, no comparison. I read Gorboduc in a 1974 collection titled Minor Elizabethan Tragedies which reprints a 1910 volume titled Minor Elizabethan Drama. Next week I will glance at Stephen Greenblatt’s new biography of Christopher Marlowe (which I have not read) and poke at the idea of authorship. Then in two weeks we will begin reading Christopher Marlowe with what feels to me like the early, even unformed, Dido, Queen of Carthage.

In a file cabinet is a stack of old pocket-size address books, most of them dating from my years as a newspaper reporter. When I would go to work for another paper, usually in a new city, I would buy a new book and start accumulating new names, addresses and telephone numbers. Now they read like collections of obituaries. Many of my former contacts, personal and professional, are dead. In one of the address books I find the contact information for the novelist Williamu Gaddis (d. 1998), whom I met and interviewed several times. Here is the home number of the late George Smith (d. 2014), mayor in the early eighties of Bellevue, Ohio, and a notably nice guy. Arousing fewer pleasant memories are the phone numbers of several former girlfriends.  “The plot, in spite of whatever virtues may accrue to it from the acid delineation of the characters and the vivid action pictures, is the weakest part of the work. It lacks coherence. It lacks stability.”   That’s how a literary critic might evaluate my moribund address books, as if they were some postmodern mutation of the novel. It’s how Robert Benchley reviewed the New York City telephone directory in “The Most Popular Book of the Month” (Of All Things, 1921). Benchley plays it straight, with hardly an exaggeration:   “There may be said to be two classes of people in the world; those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not. Both classes are extremely unpleasant to meet socially, leaving practically no one in the world whom one cares very much to know. This feeling is made poignant, to the point of becoming an obsession, by a careful reading of the present volume.”   Benchley was one of the first “grownup” writers I read, in such collections as Chips Off the Old Benchley (1949). Then I preferred him to such fellow New Yorker colleagues as Thurber, Perelman and Parker. In another piece from Of All Things, “The Scientific Scenario,” Benchley purports to find movies too “low-brow.” His solution:   “I would suggest as a book, from which a pretty little scenario might be made, ‘The Education of Henry Adams.’ This volume has had a remarkable success during the past year among the highly educated classes. Public library records show that more people have lied about having read it than any other book in a decade. It contains five hundred pages of mental masochism, in which the author tortures himself for not getting anywhere in his brain processes. He just simply can’t seem to get any further than the evolution of an elementary Dynamic Theory of History or a dilettante dabbling with a Law of Acceleration. And he came of a bright family, too.” Of course, Benchley himself appeared in the movies, most memorably in “The Treasurer’s Report” (1928). Benchley was born on this day, September 15, in 1889, and died in 1945 at age fifty-six.

On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed several cylindrical pits on the Moon with just the right shape to be shaded just the right amount to offer shelter from the extremes of the lunar surface. Because the Moon has no atmosphere to act as its thermostat, its temperature fluctuates dramatically as it faces and turns away from the Sun, rising to 260°F (about 127°C) in the daytime and plummeting to -280°F (about… read article

And how should we respond?