George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (c. 1604, pub. 1607) is another play performed by one of London’s boys’ companies.  It is a bloody, crazy tragedy disguised as a history, a strange blend of the static Senecan and dynamic Elizabethan play.  Chapman’s verse is allusive and compact – I sure needed my edition’s notes – and in places magnificent.  It was written for an audience that wanted this kind of verse, this density of reference, and that had a sophisticated understanding of theatrical convention.  Sophisticated, jaded, I don’t know.  Anyway, they paid more than Shakespeare’s audience, and not just to sit in a theater with a roof.  No groundlings at Bussy D’Ambois. Incidentally, reading in this period (1598-1608) the importance of the adult vs boys’ company distinction.  The ambitious, highbrow, satirical, meta-textual plays were at the boys’ theater.  Jonson, Marston, Chapman, they wanted the intellectual prestige of the boys’ companies.  Meanwhile, over at the crass commercial adult company, Shakespeare was producing King Lear, so things did not work out exactly as expected.  In fairness, those adult companies also clearly churned out a lot of junk. Anyway, Bussy D’Ambois.  He is a French soldier who briefly becomes a successful courtier despite being rude, belligerent, and sarcastic.  He offends everyone around him except for the king’s brother, and eventually the king, who like that he is not the usual empty flatterer.  Everyone else hates him, though, and you can guess how the tragedy ends. The core conceit of the character is quite good.  Bussy imagines himself as a man of perfect integrity, but what if he is unconsciously as Machiavellian a schemer as anyone else at court.  He has just promised the king’s brother, Monsieur, that he will do anything to serve him but kill the King: MONSIEUR:  … and thy gall Turns all thy blood to poison, which is cause Of that Tode-poole that stands in my complextion; And makes thee (with a cold and earthie moisture, Which is the damme of putrification, As plague to thy damn’d pride) rot as thou liv’dst; To study calumnies and treacheries; To thy friends slaughters, like a Scrich-owle sing, And to all mischiefs, but to kill the King.  (III.2) Much of the verse is of this quality.  Here the love interest, Tamyra, is not debating but rather feeling, in monologue form, the conflict between her loyalty to her husband and her new love for Bussy: TAMYRA: Now all the peacefull regents of the night, Silently gliding exhalations, Languishing windes, and murmuring fals of waters, Sadnesse of heart, and ominous securenesse, Enchantments, dead sleepes, all the friends of rest, That ever wrought upon the life of man, Extend your utmost strengths…  (II.2) Marvelous stuff for actors and readers with a taste for blank verse.  I often had some doubts about what I would understand sitting in the audience. On the one hand, as the editor of my edition writes, “eight men die, a woman is tortured, a maid is stabbed, several devils are raised and a ghost appears to a roll of thunder” (p. 345).  Pretty exciting.  On the other, speeches are highly rhetorical, monologues discourse on envy and flattery and other elevating topics, often paraphrasing or translating Plutarch and others, and five of those deaths occur offstage during a three-way duel, all described in a terrific messenger scene full of Homeric metaphor – “Storme-like he fell, and hid the feare-cold Earth” (II.1) – also exciting, buy why is the duel not onstage?  It would not be onstage in Seneca. There is a deep nicke in times restlesse wheele For each mans good, when which nicke comes it strikes; As Rhetoricke, yet workes not perswasion, But only is a meane to make it worke…  (I.1) My text has been the fine, aside from the small type, Penguin Renaissance Dramatists edition of Chapman’s Plays and Poems (1998). I am currently reading another Chapman play, The Widdowes Teares, which is Bussy D’Ambois but as comedy.  But the next play from my tattered schedule is Ben Jonson’s Epicœne, or The Silent Woman (1609 or 1610).  It is likely that the main role was played by young Nathan Field, whose first big hit role was Bussy D’Ambois.

Innovations in art to tend towards Mannerism.  As a form matures it turns on itself, as creators, and some portion of the audience, become more interested in the form itself.  So we get more art about art.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) is young (age 22, 23) Francis Beaumont’s play about plays, where the sophisticated six-penny boys’ company audience gets to indulge in mockery of the vulgar taste of the petty bourgeois one-penny theater-goers. The play is supposed to be The London Merchant, a city comedy about ordinary Londoners where the apprentice ends up with the daughter of the merchant, something like Thomas Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday.  But a “citizen,” a “real” London merchant, and his wife, seated on the stage, demand a different play, something full of heroic adventures, and while we are changing things why shouldn’t it star the citizen’s apprentice Ralph.  WIFE: [below – the play has not started yet, and the characters are not seated]  Husband, husband! RALPH:  Peace, mistress. WIFE:  Hold thy peace, Ralph; I know what I do, I warrant ye – Husband, husband! CITIZEN:  What sayest thou, cony? WIFE:  [below]  Let him kill a lion with a pestle, husband; let him kill a lion with a pestle! So what we see is a mishmash of the London play and a separate string of episodes where Ralph, inspired by chivalric romances, becomes the “Grocer Errant,” with his own Sancho Panza although sadly, given the limits of Jacobean staging, no horse.  Meanwhile the grocer and his wife comment and demand additional changes to the play, down to changes in the music (Act II, Scene 8). If some of this sounds rather like Don Quixote, yeah, what is up with that?  Nobody knows.  Don Quixote existed (1605) but was not available in English.  Some episodes get strangely close to Cervantes.  Others do not. The grocer and his wife are seated on the stage, presumably along with actual paying customers, dressed in their finest, showing off for the audience.  Such is my understanding of the stage seating, which cost extra, which is perhaps why the actors give in to the ridiculous demands. The wife is wonderful.  She comments, she digresses, she urges violence : Break’s pate, Ralph; break’s pate, Ralph, soundly!  (II.5) … cut him I’ the leg, boys, cut him i’ the leg!  (III.2) She sometimes seems to know she is watching a play, and sometimes not.  Her attention occasionally wanders off completely: But of all the sights that ever were in London, since I was married, methinks the little child that was so fair grown about the members was the prettiest; that and the hermaphrodite.  (III.3) A magnificent comic masterpiece of a part.  Startling to think it was originally played by a teenage boy.  However good a revival might be, and how I would love to see one, it will not recapture the original performance by a company of boy actors. I find the humor The Knight of the Burning Pestle is cumulative.  The straight play is thin, the goofy scenes with the grocer-knight are amusing but not exactly surprising, and the commentary of the “real” grocer and his wife are a mix of the funny and banal.  But as the pieces trip over each other, the chaos spreads, and even the “real” play turns into a pastoral, with the characters wandering around in a forest like in As You Like It, the play becomes funnier.  It is like many plays, yet I do not know another like it. Beaumont was ahead of his time.  The Knight of the Burning Pestle was a flop.  The audience for pure satire about theater was not quite there yet.  But the Beaumont and Fletcher team became popular for a different kind of theatrical theater, tragicomedy, and the taste for city comedies grew, and the more sophisticated, or decadent, audience did develop, so Pestle became a big, much-revived, hit, too late for poor Beaumont, dead at age 32 or so, to enjoy it. My text is the 1911 Everyman’s Library Select Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher.  I borrowed the photo from a 2010 American Shakespeare Center production.  Steve Martin fans will be interested to know that the helmet with the arrow through it is in the original play.  "Enter RALPH with a forked arrow through his Head" (V.3). Next up: George Chapman wrote a series of tragedies based on recent French history.  The best known is Bussy D’Ambois, which I see I have a bit out of place in my chronology.  It was published in 1607 but likely performed in 1604 or so.  I remember it as quite good.

Now and again, Geiser finds himself wondering what he really wants to know, what he hopes to gain from all this knowledge.  (Man in the Holocene, Max Frisch, tr. Geoffrey Skelton, p. 90) An uncomfortable sentence there. A reminder that I will return to non-Shakespeare plays any minute now, with Volpone up next Monday and The Revenger’s Tragedy a couple of weeks after that.   VICINITY OF SHAKESPEARE Utopia (1516), Thomas More – Ahead of its time. Poems (1633), John Donne – Well, I read Donne’s collected poems in a modern edition, so a later, accretive version of the 1633 book, a landmark, the first publication of most of its contents.  How Donne fell out of favor is beyond me.  His emotional, imaginative and formal range is extraordinary.  I meant to read a short selection of his hits but just kept going.   FICTION The Old Man and the Sea (1952), Ernest Hemingway – Late, or really mid, and possibly early, Hemingway has a kitsch or self-parodic tendency.  I got a taste of that early in this famous book, which I last read well over forty years ago, but soon enough Hemingway’s precision overwhelmed any reservations.  How is he going to catch that fish?  A great argument not for simplicity, since by the end the book is plenty complex, but for reduction.  How few elements are needed to tell a great story? Swords in the Mist (1968), Fritz Leiber – Various Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser stories, particularly the 1947 novella Adept’s Gambit.  Leiber is more playful with language, funnier, than most of his post-pulp peers, and is as good with weird imagery and sublime moments as any of them. Man in the Holocene (1979), Max Frisch – A Swiss man alone in his own head, the roads blocked and the electricity out.  He obsessively reads about geology and paleohistory, and clips bits out of his encyclopedia to paste on the wall.  In the centerpiece scene, he goes for a long walk.  Very very Swiss. Margarita (A Memory) (2012), César Aira – Aira at his most sentimental, or simulating the sentimental.  Newly Englished by Chris Andrews in a collection titled Five.   ART CRITICISM The Grand Valley (2025), Morgan Meis – A book about Joan Mitchell and a series of her paintings.  I will write about it soon.   POETRY A Letter from Li Po & Other Poems (1955), Conrad Aiken Journey to Love (1955), William Carlos Williams The Boatman (1957) & Welcoming Disaster (1974), Jay Macpherson – Canadian, quite funny, a bit in the vein of Stevie Smith but more formalist and more referential – lots of myths and old stories here.  Much to my taste. The Gavin Ewart Show (1971), Gavin Ewart – Some of the heaviest light verse I have ever read.  Man as animal, sexual, mortal.  Also much to my taste.  I was, and am, enjoying his Selected Poems when I thought I would try one of his books as such, which had more of the same, just as good.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE La recherche d l'Absolu (The Search for the Absolute, 1834), Honoré Balzac – This obscure Balzac novel caught my attention a decade ago because it is available in a school edition in France.  The story is about a merchant who is destroying his fortune due to his obsession with the new-fangled science of chemistry, which in his hands is not far removed from alchemy, and his devoted wife and later daughter who do what they can to save the family.  I do not think it is a great novel a Balzac goes, perhaps not even a good one, and I am curious how it is used in French schools.  It seems the history of science angle has pulled it into the curriculum.  I hope the young people on what we would call the STEM track have been enjoying it. This is the 47th Balzac work I have read. Memorial de Aires (1908), Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis – Long ago, when I had a Portuguese Literature Challenge going, I read four of the last five Machado de Assis novels, the amazing run (the short stories of the period are classics, too) when Machado somehow converted from a Romantic to something more original.  I was nervous about trying this last novel in Portuguese because the earlier novels, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas and Dom Casmurro and so on, are full of subtle narrative tricks, just the kind of thing I am likely to miss in my clumsy Portuguese reading.  And I did miss them!  Or they are not there.  I think they are not there.  Presented as an authentic diary, digressive and full of ironic comments, occasionally tedious, the narrator tells the story of the romance between a young couple he knows.  On the minor side compared to the earlier masterpieces, but well worth spending more time with Machado. This and the Raul Brandão novel I read last month are at, or beyond, my reading level, so now I am reading something easier, partly to make sure I can actually “read” Portuguese.

Soon I will put up a fall schedule for my plunge back into non-Shakespearian plays, from say 1604 to 1614, an exciting stretch.  Middleton, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher will dominate.   SHAKESPEAREAN The Adventures of Lady Egeria (1585), W. C. – Half tedious, half confounding, this is an early English novel in a modern edition, lovingly edited by Steven Moore as part of his project to read every old novel ever written.  For a long stretch it is kind of a prosified Gorboduc, speeches in various rhetorical modes warning rulers against flatterers.  And then suddenly the character I though was the main villain is, along with his army, devoured by an enormous flock of ravens.  The novel grows more gruesome and Gothic – necromancers, incest, so much incest, what is it with the Elizabethans and incest.  The author has no idea what he is doing; his tone becomes increasingly objective, or deadened, as if he is stunned by his own story.  An amazing artifact. Antony & Cleopatra (1606?), William Shakespeare – I thought about using lines from Act IV, Scene 4 in the title of the post: “False, false.  This, this.”  What seems to be happening is that his assistant Eros (!) is putting Antony in his armor before battle, and doing something wrong.  What is psychologically interesting is that similar repetitions occur in Antony’s lines seven times in a few minutes (“Well, well,” “Rarely, rarely”) a brilliant expression of his pre-battle jitters.  He appears to shake it off and return to his confident self once his armor is on.  The pleasures of Shakespeare at his plainest. Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan (2007), Tiffany Stern – Only the first 40% of the book, covering the Shakespearian theater. Those early theater companies were putting on a new play or two every week, alongside constant rotation of older plays.  I wanted to know how that worked.  Stern squeezes everything about of the abundant but extremely fragmented evidence about rehearsals and performance.  You have read some of that evidence yourself, in the rehearsal scenes in Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  Someday I may finish the sections on Restoration and 18th century theater, especially since the book is outstanding, a model of argument and the use of evidence. FICTION Darker than You Think (1940/1948), Jack Williamson – Williamson is one of the Grand Masters of science fiction, I read here and there, but I could not name another of his books.  This one, much more of a horror novel with some science sprinkled in, I know since some later writers admire it for its genuine weirdness.  Every ordinary novelistic element of the book – characterization, exposition, pacing, prose – has problems but sometimes Williamson finds some original imagery built on a disturbing tone.  Are there evil books?  Is this one of them? Rocannon's World (1966), Ursula K. Le Guin – Her first novel, almost a light science fiction parody of The Lord of the Rings. Assumption (2011), Percival Everett – A true postmodernist, Everett loves genres, and this is a genuine mystery novel, or really three novellas, a series, as is standard in the genre, handily collected under one cover.  True mystery fans may not be so happy with where Everett ends up.  I was happy.  Aside from his short story “The Fix,” this novel is Everett’s most direct interrogation of his – I mean, his characters’, but really his – “savior complex.” Artificial Condition (2018), Martha Wells – The second Murderbot story.  Maybe a little too much about our pal Murderbot for my tastes, as opposed to just accompanying him on a sardonic adventure, but that is I suppose the cost of creating a series. Fulgentius (2020), César Aira – About a Roman general, pacifying the provinces, who is also somehow an avant-garde playwright.  Someday I may tire of Aira’s fiction about the fictionality of fiction, but not yet.  The sentence in the post’s title is on p. 152. A Flash of Darkness (2023), M. M. De Voe – A collection of weird stories, many of them in the genre we have been calling “horror” for some reason.  Smartly written and conceived.  If only I liked horror more. NOT FICTION Confluence: Merrymeeting Bay (2006), Franklin Burroughs – I live near Merrymeeting Bay and have been exploring it a bit, but I would recommend this book of essays about various aspects of this unusual meeting place of rivers and the sea to anyone who likes books about, say, Sand County, Wisconsin or places like that.  Anyone who likes turtles or ducks. The British Are Coming (2019), Rick Atkinson – It has been so long since I read a big narrative history, a history without a methodology section.  Outstanding at what it does – personalities, battles – but comfortable with the bigger picture.  At some point, long ago, I exhausted my interest in the American Revolution, but enough time has passed that it has returned, I guess.  One amusing detail is that in this big history in the tradition of Gibbon, Gibbon himself appears occasionally, commenting on events in his letters.   POETRY The Desert Music and Other Poems (1954), William Carlos Williams Ars Poeticas (2025), Juliana Spahr   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE & I GUESS SPANISH A Farsa (1903), Raul Brandão – A miserable novel about an old servant, a maid, whose life is consumed by resentment and hatred.  But it’s a life!  Full of purpose.  Brandão is a superb and unusual writer, something of a Symbolist, more concerned with image and symbol and emotional movement than narrative.  How sad this has not been translated, but who would read it? Los versos del Capitán (1952), Pablo Neruda – To my surprise I found myself reading the Spanish side of the facing-page translation.  Studying Portuguese has been good for my Spanish.  This is the Il Postino period of  Neruda’s life, in exile, in love, the ambitious Canto General completed.  These poems are extremely easy.  Maybe I should look for more easy Spanish poems. Les heures heureuses (The Happy Hours, 2023), Pascal Quignard – One of those books that is going to connect all of the things, through fiction, essay, aphorism, memoir, whatever he’s got.  Possibly too French for my tastes, meaning the rhetoric gets pretty gassy.

Oh right, I can pretend I am writing something.  Some notes on books I read in the distant past. NOT SHAKESPEARE The Dutch Courtesan (1604), John Marston – Discussed long ago. Poems (1594-1612), George Chapman – A superb, innovative poet, somehow an Ovidian and an anti-Ovidian, attracted to but also shocked by human sensuality, which may be a good part of why he had much presence for a long time.  I mean, compare to sexy John Donne.  Please see Chapman’s long poem Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) for a demonstration.  There is the other problem – rather than write sonnets and epigrams and other things we, for some sense of we, still like to read, he wrote long, complex philosophical about aesthetics. FICTION The Unnamable (1953), Samuel Beckett – The fragment in the post’s title is from the last page. Officers and Gentlemen (1955), Evelyn Waugh – The second volume of Waugh’s trilogy about World War II, including a long account of the defense and retreat from Crete that is especially good, although the earlier scenes of pointless training on a remote Scottish island are outstanding in an older Wavian comic vein.  Put Out More Flags (1942), written immediately after the Cretan disaster, stills looks to me like the greater work of art. The Haunting of Hill House (1959), Shirley Jackson – A neurotic young woman puts herself in an environment, nominally a haunted house, perfectly made to maximize her neuroses.  Not at all what I was expecting.  Not much of a reader of ghost stories, I long ago was surprised by how often they are comic, so it was not surprising when, about two-thirds in, this ghost story takes a huge comic swerve. The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1970), George V. Higgins – Checking in with my neighbors in Boston. Nine Princes in Amber (1970), Roger Zelazny – Something I should have read when I was ten years-old, but I do not remember ever seeing a copy.  Superhero heroic fantasy. A History of the Afircan-American People [Proposed] by Strom Thurmond (as told to Percival Everett and James Kincaid) (2004), Percival Everett & James Kincaid – That title (which is accurate).  It sounds like a satire of the racial politics of twenty years ago, but is really mostly a satire of publishing twenty years ago, and for both the jokes are either outdated or timeless; I am not sure.  It’s the funniest Evertt novel I have read so far.   SOMEHOW NOT FICTION No Picnic on Mount Kenya (1953), Felice Benuzzi –  An Italian prisoner of war in Kenya is so bored that he and some pals break out of prison, climb a mountain, and then break back into prison.  Benuzzi eventually writes this marvelous book about crazy people, and becomes an important Italian diplomat.   POETRY Pleasing the Diners (86-103), Martial, tr. R. L. Barth – Barth has been working on Martial for decades, his whole life as a poet.  These are the ones he thinks he got to work.  They do work.  The Country of a Thousand Years of Peace (1959), James Merill The Boy in the Well and Other Poems (1995), Daniel Mark Epstein – I read a poem in a magazine and then went to see what my library had.  Smart formal allusive poems.   ARTY Research (2025), Charles Fort Library of the Paranormal (2025), Jackie Gleason – More art book esoterica. IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE A Sereia Verde (The Green Mermaid, 1941), Dinah Silveira de Queiroz – Short stories by an author famous in Brazil for at least a couple of stories (not these) that have had multiple film and television adaptations.  A bit melodramatic for my tastes.  The title novella is about a pair of cousins who, competing for the affections of their grandmother, develop a lifelong conflict.  Or perhaps the one just hates the other.  The title refers to a sublime moment when the protagonist learns that a dream-like childhood memory was actually in some sense real.  Best part of the book. Le square (1955), Marguerite Duras – Two characters on a park bench discuss the meaning of life.  Mostly dialogue.  Dry.  I find it dry. Les trésors de la mer Rouge (The Treasures of the Red Sea, 1971), Romain Gary – A tiny little travel book to Djibouti and then Yemen.  The Yemen trip is mostly filler, but at that point Djibouti was the last bit of colonial French Africa, governed by Dominique Ponchardier, among other unlikely things author of dozens of spy novels starring “The Gorilla,” so there is a lot for Gary to do.  He visits the future setting of Beau Travail (Denis, 1999), for example. Next month, meaning this month: more of the same.