Ralph Roister Doister (written c. 1550, published 1567) once had the distinction of being the first comedy in English.  Please see this 1911 edition of the play calling it “the first regular English comedy.”  I do not know what 19th century critics meant by “regular” but this was a 19th century idea, as scholars began to work seriously on figuring which plays survived from the 16th century, that Ralph Roister Doister was the first English comedy.  It is not the first, regular or otherwise.  Let’s return to this issue. A braggart soldier type (“I am sorry God made me so comely, doubtless,” Act I, Scene ii), the title character, decides, urged on by a parasite type, Matthew Merrygreek, to woo a widow, who is engaged and not very interested.  The big comic misunderstanding involves the mispunctuation of a love letter.  The result is a battle between the widow and her maids, armed with their “tools” (for sewing and weaving and so on) versus Roister Doister, a pail on his head, and his idiot servants.  Perhaps there is a goose involved: Tibet Talkapace:                                   Shall I go fetch our goose? Dame Custance:  What to do? TT:  To yonder captain I will turn her loose: An she gape and hiss at him, as she doth at me, I durst jeapord my hand she will make him flee.  (IV. viii) The battle scene is a bit vague, with lots of room for whatever gags the director can think of.  As you see, the play is written in competent rhyming couplets. The braggart soldier, and more or less the plot is from Miles Gloriosus (2nd cent. BCE) by Plautus.  The parasite is from English morality plays.  The servants, the goose, the songs, the names, and the whole tone of the thing are likely from English popular plays, whatever touring groups were performing at fairs. The names are wonderful.  Tristram Trusty, Margery Mumblecrust, Tibet Talkapace.  I’ve remembered Ralph Roister Doister’s name since I first saw it in some potted history of English theater nearly forty years ago.  The first English comedy should be titled Ralph Roister Doister. The domestic detail is also a delight.  Here are the maids early on, at work: Margery Mumblecrust: Well, ye will sit down to your work anon, I trust. Tibet Talkapace: Soft fire maketh sweet malt, good Madge Mumblecrust. MM: And sweet malt maketh jolly good ale for the nones. TT: Which will slide down the lane without any bones.   [Sings. Old brown bread-crusts must have much good mumbling, But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling.  (I.iii) The play is slackly paced giving plenty of its time to watching the maids sew and sing.  It is not exactly digressive, but like a musical.  Let’s stop and have a song or whatever: With every woman he is in some love’s pang. Then up to our lute at midnight, twangledom twang; Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps, And heigho from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps; Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop, And the howlet out of an ivy bush should whoop…  (II.i) Nicholas Udall, the likely author, was a schoolmaster.  He likely wrote this play for performance by his schoolboys.  Maybe he was the first schoolmaster to rewrite a Plautus play for his students, although I doubt it.  He may have been the first to make his rewritten Plautus so inventively English.  It could easily be much, much less English.  The Englishness is the best part. The title character is a direct ancestor of Falstaff, although, remembering the pail on Roister Doister’s head, the Falstaff of Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff in the laundry basket. The play is also a little step towards the creation of the professional boy’s companies, the aspect of Elizabethan theater I find hardest to imagine.  Fourteen year-old boys performing plays at the level of The Alchemist, how did that work?  But I can imagine them doing Ralph Roister Doister. Next Monday I will write about another early boy’s comedy, and is it ever, Gammer Gurton’s Needle.

Books that generate other books, books that are first in the line, interest me.  Despite little interest in mountaineering, I read Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak (1951, tr. Nea Morin and Janet Adam Smith) by Maurice Herzog, the subject of the book well summarized in the title, a book that led to many other books. Annapurna was a big hit, and soon after there were books by other members of the expedition, and a parody novel, The Ascent of Rum Doodle (William Ernest Bowman, 1956) and a feminist response.  That response was to climb Annapurna, but also to write a book, Annapurna: A Woman’s Place (Arlene Blum, 1980).  The book inspired a great deal of mountaineering, Himalayan and otherwise.  The last line, “There are other Annapurnas in the lives of men” (311), apparently became famously inspirational  among crazy people, by which I mean mountain climbers, but I am more interested in what inspired people to write books. The story of the 1950 French and Swiss expedition in Nepal to climb whichever 8,000-meter peak was easiest, using state-of-the-art techniques, is a terrific adventure story, “terrific” in the current sense (entertaining) but also in the old sense (terrifying, these climbers are out of their minds), and it is the latter that really surprised me.  Annapurna is study in the variety of human taste for risk, or to put it in Wuthering Expectations terms* the taste for the sublime. “Sublime” has softened into an inelegant variation for “very beautiful,” but I again mean the old aesthetic sense of beauty that is frightening, beauty that is trying to kill you, like the view from the top of an 8,000-meter Himalayan peak.  This was quite different [from the Alps].  An enormous gulf was between me and the world.  This was a different universe – withered, desert, lifeless; a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen, perhaps not desired.  We were braving an interdict, overstepping a boundary, and yet we had no fear as we continued upward.  I thought of the famous ladder of St. Theresa of Avila.  Something clutched at my heart.  (207) Herzog does not normally write like this.  He is typically a model of clarity.  But atop Annapurna he goes on for three pages like this, while his companion keeps insisting they head back before the bad weather hits them. Some additional fragments: How wonderful life would now become! (208) Never had I felt happiness like this – so intense and yet so pure. (209)  Before disappearing into the couloir I gave one last look at the summit which would henceforth be all our joy and all our consolation. (210) The latter is well into the descent which at that point has become terrible and will get much worse.  But Herzog remains captured by his sublime experience, wavering between the struggle to descend and an obliterating acceptance of imminent death. Given the practicalities of the earlier part of the book, the organization of camps and supplies, the turn towards St. Theresa was fascinating.  It’s those camps and supplies, along with the team doctor, that save Herzog.  If you happen to have strong feelings about needles I recommend that you skip chapter 16, “The Retreat,” which is full of horrors (frostbite treatments).  Perhaps skim the next couple of chapters as well, although the worst is over. The whole of this book has been dictated at the American Hospital at Neuilly where I am still having rather a difficult time.  (11) I suppose another reason for the rise of the mountaineering book in the is that explorers had used up other parts of the world.  The Arctic and Antarctic had been exhausted as subjects for books.  I will note that while Roald Amundsen insisted on the scientific value of his pointless feats, Herzog and his team have no illusion that climbing a Himalayan mountain has any value beyond the adventure.  The legendary Alpine guide Lionel Terray, one of the members of the team who got Herzog down off Annapurna, titled his 1961 memoir Conquistadors of the Useless.  Useless except for generating books. Page numbers are from the first edition, which has a helpful fold-out map in the back.   * See this old post about Little House on the Prairie for more on the sublime.

Please join me this fall in reading the plays of Christopher Marlowe and some of his contemporaries, if that sounds enjoyable to you.  The more I have thought about it, the more enjoyable it sounds to me.  I have many questions. Below is an attempt at a schedule, with a play every two weeks, slower than when we read all of the Greek plays.  In September, though, I will blow through some early plays the precede the commercial London theater.  They are a bit shorter and frankly I doubt that anyone else will want to read them, so let’s get on to Marlowe, right?  Marlowe is outstanding. I hope to put up a post every Monday (the dates below), with the alternating posts about some related topic: another play, perhaps even one by Shakespeare, or poetry, or criticism, or even in theory a performance although that does not seem likely. I think of these works more as poems than as plays; this will mostly be an exercise in poetics and literary history.  But there is no reason anyone else has to read along for that. Early Precursors Sep. 1 1552 Ralph Roister Doister Nicholas Udall Sep. 8 1553 Gammer Gurton's Needle authorship much disputed Sep. 15 1561 Gorbuduc Thomas Norton & Thomas Sackville Marlowe & Co. Sep. 29 1587 Dido, Queen of Carthage Christopher Marlowe Oct. 6 1587 Tamburlaine, Parts I & II Christopher Marlowe Oct. 20 1587 The Spanish Tragedy Thomas Kyd Nov. 3 1589 The Jew of Malta Christopher Marlowe Nov. 17 1591 Arden of Faversham ??? Dec. 1 1592 Doctor Faustus Christopher Marlowe Dec. 15 1592 Edward the Second Christopher Marlowe Dec. 29 1593 The Massacre at Paris Christopher Marlowe The years are all from the chronological table in the back of The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 1990, eds. A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway.  Most of these years are marked with an asterisk meaning “best guess” so please use them skeptically.  The year of The Spanish Tragedy is especially convenient – plausible but convenient – because paired up with Tamburlaine it creates a handy Year When Everything Changed, a concentrated explosion of theatrical innovation.  But maybe it did not happen. The first London commercial theater (The Theatre) opened in 1576, the next few in 1577.  One of my puzzles is what happened in the ten years before the Tamburlaine / Spanish Tragedy revolution.  Barely more than a dozen plays survive from that period, a number of them closet dramas, not written for performance.  What the heck was on those stages? Some of what else was going on: 1580s Astrophel and Stella Philip Sidney   An Apology for Poetry Philip Sidney   Caelica Fulke Greville 1590 Henry VI, parts 1 to 3 William Shakespeare, et. al.   The Two Gentlemen of Verona William Shakespeare   The Faerie Queene I-III Edmund Spenser 1591 The Taming of the Shrew William Shakespeare   The Comedy of Errors William Shakespeare   Richard III William Shakespeare   Titus Andronicus William Shakespeare   Complaints Edmund Spenser   Summer's Last Will and Testament Thomas Nashe 1592 Delia and the Complaint of Roasmund Sanuel Daniel   Pierce Penniless Thomas Nashe 1593 Idea: The Shepherd's Garland Michael Drayton   Venus and Adonis William Shakespeare   Hero and Leander Christopher Marlowe   The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia Philip Sidney   The sonnet craze – Sidney, Greville, Daniel, Drayton – is at its peak.  Lots of great poetry of all types, really, but oh so many sonnets.  Then there is the upstart, catching up with Marlowe fast.  I remind myself that Shakespeare was two months younger than Marlowe.  The theaters are closed because of the plague in 1592, which is why Shakespeare and possibly Marlowe switched from plays to best-selling narrative poems (although Hero and Leander was not published until 1598). Please feel free to offer corrections, major or minor omissions, or really any comment at all.  I have read a lot of this stuff before but have no other expertise. In December I will think about what happens next.  But in the meantime let’s have some laughs with the hilarious comedies of Marlowe and pals.  The title quotation is from, where else, The Jew of Malta, Act 4, Scene 1.

In general, however, he [Louis XVI] preferred writing down his thoughts instead of uttering them by word of mouth; and he was fond of reading, for books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader. (Stefan Zweig, Marie Antoinette, 1932, p. 77 of the 1933 American edition, tr. Eden and Cedar Paul)   Soon I will put up a schedule of my autumn Not Shakespeare reading, just in case anyone wants to join in.  In effect it will be a lot of Christopher Marlowe with a few contemporaries.  Marlowe is a lot of fun. FICTION Love, Death, and the Ladies' Drill Team (1955), Jessamyn West – Reading Salinger’s Nine Stories (1953) I wondered what else the New Yorker readers of the time were reading along with “A Perfect Day for Bananafish.”  One answer is Jessamyn West.  These stories seemed good to me.  “The Mysteries of Life in an Orderly Manner” (1948) is easy to recommend as a sample, for one thing because it is only six pages. The Holy Innocents (1981), Miguel Delibes – A famous Spanish novel, just translated, that uses its post-Franco freedom to indulge in a little revenge on the powerful.  Modernist and unconventionally punctuated, but I do not want to say it was too surprising.  New to English – what took so long? That They May Face the Rising Sun (2003), John McGahern – I am not sure what a quiet novel is but this is likely one of those.  Irish people lives their lives.  Seasons pass.  There is agriculture.  I have not read McGahern before; my understanding is that the novels that made his names are not so quiet.  But Ireland in 2003 had quieted down a lot, which I think is one of the ideas behind the novel.  Quite good.  The American version was for some reason given the accurate but dull title By the Lake. The Director (2023), Daniel Kehlmann – Discussed over here.   NON-FICTION Brazilian Adventure (1933), Peter Fleming – A jolly, self-conscious romp written in, or let’s say approaching, the style of Evelyn Waugh.  Young Fleming’s river trip in the Amazon is more dangerous and a bit more substantive than Waugh’s Mediterranean tourism in Labels (1930), but still, useless, except for the pleasures of the resulting book. Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue (2003), Yoko Tawada – Tawada publishes fiction in both Japanese and German.  This book is an extended essay about the creative relationship between the two languages, based on Tawada’s education, travel, and writing.  It is perhaps especially fresh because English plays so little part in the book. How the Classics Made Shakespeare (2019), Jonathan Bate – Outstanding preparation for my upcoming reading.  The title describes the book exactly. Marie Antoinette (1932), Stefan Zweig – Just the first 80 or 90 pages.  I have wondered what Zweig’s biographies, still much read in France, were like, and now I know a little better.  Not for me.  Badly sourced and rhetorically dubious.  Obtrusive!  At times trying to hustle me!   POETRY Selected Poems (1952-68), Vasko Popa Helen of Troy, 1993 (2025), Maria Zoccola – This Helen lives in Sparta, Tennessee.  The up-to-date formal poems are interesting: American sonnets, and golden shovels, a form invented in 2010, incorporating lines from Robert Fagle’s Iliad.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE La rage de l'expression (1952), Francis Ponge – More thing poems. Literatura Portuguesa (1971), Jorge de Sena – Long encyclopedia entries on Portuguese and Brazilian literature now published as a little book.  So useful. A Bicicleta Que Tinha Bigodes (The Bicycle that Has a Moustache, 2011), Ondjaki – An Angolan boy wants to win a bicycle by borrowing a story from his famous fiction-writing uncle.  Specifically by borrowing the letters that he combs from his moustache.  That’s not how it works, kid. A Biblioteca: Uma segunda casa (The Library: A Second Home, 2024), Manuel Carvalho Coutinho – I have now read all the books I brought home from Portugal last year.  This one is literally a series of four-page profiles of Portuguese municipal libraries.  Why did I buy it (aside from loving libraries)?  It is at times as dull as it sounds, but sometimes, caused by the authors skilled or desperate attempt to write a less dull book, shimmered with the possibility of another book, a Calvino-like book, Invisible Libraries.  Visit the library full of obsolete technology, the library with books no one wants, the library for tourists, the library, most unlikely of all, where everyone goes to read books.

Daniel Kehlmann’s previous novel, Tyll (2017), was about a magical clown wandering through the hellscape of the Thirty Years’ War.  Apparently that was not grim enough for him so his new novel, The Director (2023), although there is some early hopeful Hollywood sunshine, is about G. W. Pabst’s life and work in Nazi Germany. If the idea of a novel about a great German director making films under the thumb of the Nazis sounds interesting, well, this novel is highly interesting, although I will warn the kind of reader who is bothered by such things that Kehlmann writes fiction. Chapters hop around from character to character and from style to style.  Sometimes the style is an imitation of German Expressionist filmmaking or lightly Kafkaesque.  Ross Benjamin does a wonderful job capturing these stylistic shifts, or inventing them out of nothing, or for all I know he suppresses even more dazzling stuff, how would I know, I don’t read German.  Seems good to me! Pabst and his crew have just been interrupted by “two men in leather coats” while discussing a new film over dinner: “But seriously,” says Karsunke.  “Enough of the funny business.” “Yes, seriously,” says Basler.  “Which of the gentleman here is…” He falls silent and looks at his colleague.  The other pulls a notepad out of his pocket, taps his finger on the tip of his tongue, and squints as he flips through the pages once, twice, three times. “Just kidding,” says Karsunke. “Keeping it light,” says Basler.  “Keeping it carefree.”  (209-10) They are Gestapo agents from The Castle doing a comedy routine. As the variety of the chapters accumulated, I became more impressed with what Kehlmann was doing with the novel.  Any resistance finally vanished in the amazing “German Literature” chapter, where Frau Pabst is invited to join a highly connected book club.  Yes, Nazi book club satire, a perfect mix of the lowest stakes with the highest.  Is this subtle or blatant? “Where did you get these beautiful porcelain cups?” asked Gritt Borger.  “If I’m not mistaken, they weren’t here last time.” “An antique shop on Feldmochinger Strasse,” said Else Buchholz.  “A whole set.  Eighty-five reichsmarks.” Everyone fell silent.  Outside on the street two men could be heard talking to each other.  The coughing start of a car engine was audible, as well as the splashing of the coffee Maria Lotropf was pouring into her cup.  (163) I cannot prove that those two men are Karsunke and Basler passing by.  Their car engine starts on p. 212 but does not cough. The Director is a study of compromised creativity, but Pabst is not a monster.  What choice does he have?  It is always at least a question. “I have no intention of making any more films.” “Wrong answer,” said the Minister.  “Wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer, wrong answer.” Both were silent. Pabst took a breath, but the Minister interrupted before he could speak: “Now it would be good if the right answer came.” (147) He has some choice.  A chapter narrated by P. G. Wodehouse (which “has been substantially revised for the present English translation,” curious) is about the same issue. Lousie Brooks, Greta Garbo, P. G. Wodehouse, Leni Riefenstahl – a superb use of Riefenstahl – plus artful technical detail about film editing, lighting, and acting, plus a Nazi book club. Good stuff.