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.

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.

My summer plan was to read, short, easy books, and I almost succeeded.  I read short, difficult books in French, and accidentally read several grim, sad, violent books, alongside some playful nonsense.   FICTION The Field of Life and Death (1935), Xiao Hong – For example.  Ninety pages of classic Chinese peasant misery.  Plague, starvation, abuse, and then the Japanese invade, with a Cormac McCarthy-like level of violence in a number of places.  I had planned to breeze through this on the way to Xiao Hong’s more famous Tales of Hulan River (1942) but that will have to wait.  “For Mother Wang, her day of agony was all for naught.  A life of agony was all for naught” (p. 29 of the Howard Greenblatt translation). The Witch in the Wood (1939), T. H. White – By contrast, a marvelous piece of nonsense, a much sillier book than the preceding The Sword in the Stone.  Monty Python and the Holy Grail now seems somewhat less original. The Sheltering Sky (1949), Paul Bowles – An American couple tourist around Morocco after the war.  The husband seeks the sublime; the wife does not.  The husband is also a sociopath, and I at one point wondered how long I could stand his company, but after a crisis hits I was fine.  Existentialism can seem awfully adolescent when the only problem is ennui, but in the face of a real problem working through the ideas become interesting.  All this before the last section, the last 40 pages, as bleak a blast of despair as I have encountered in an American novel.  “She felt like saying: ‘Well, you’re crazy,’ but she confined herself to: ‘How strange.’” (Ch. XV, p. 91)  That’s how I felt! I, Robot (1950), Isaac Asimov – I have picked up the idea that people working or theorizing on computer programs that are for some reason called “artificial intelligence” take this collection of stories form the 1940s seriously.  See for example Cal Newport, a Georgetown University professor of computer science (do not look at his list of publications!) who writes in or on the New Yorker that he was “struck by its [the book’s] new relevance.”  I was struck by how irrelevant the book was, or I guess how it was exactly as relevant as it has always been.  The first story is a little chemistry problem written by a 21-year-old working on an MA in chemistry, but Asimov soon switches to philosophy.  What I think is the most famous story, “Liar!” (1941) is a simple puzzle in Kantian ethics.  In the next story, “Little Lost Robot” (1947), the characters solve problems by pushing fat robots in front of trains.  I had not realized how young Asimov was when he wrote the first Robot and Foundation stories.  If they sometimes seem a little undergraduate, well. The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), Patricia Highsmith – A regular old murderous psychopath story, good fun compared to some of these other books. Casanova's Chinese Restaurant (1960), Anthony Powell – Another installment of the higher gossip. The narrator has gotten married and spends the book writing around his new wife, so that by the end I know as little about her as at the beginning, although I learn a lot about everyone else. ’I suppose she lives now on what her first husband, Lord Warrington, left in trust.  I don’t think Charles’s father – “Boffles”, as he used to be called – had a halfpenny to bless himself with.  He used to be very handsome, and so amusing.  He looked wonderful on a horse.  He is married now to a Frenchwoman he met at a tennis tournament in Cannes, and he farms in Kenya.  Poor Amy, she has some rather odd friends.’ (Ch. 2, 89) Neither Boffles, Amy, the Frenchwoman, or the horse are ever mentioned again in the novel. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Cynthia Ozick Suzanne and Gertrude (2019), Jeb Loy Nichols – A short, sad novel about an introverted English woman who adopts a stray donkey.  Expect more donkey content here over the next few months. When These Mountains Burn (2020), David Joy – A final miserable novel, compassionate this time, but unflinching in its look at the ongoing American narcotics epidemic, this time in the North Carolina Smoky Mountains, so painful in places.  Joy has recently discovered that where he is lucky to get seven people to attend a free reading in North Carolina he can get seventy people to buy tickets to one in France.  He is joining a sadly well established American literary tradition.   HISTORY 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed (2014), Eric H. Cline – In a sense more misery, but at some distance.    POETRY The Far Field (1964) & Straw for the Fire (1943-63), Theodore Roethke Sunbelly (1973), Kenneth Fields Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1954-60), Richard Eberhart – the poems of the 1950s, really, not the whole thing. Foxglovewise (2025), Ange Mlinko – Possibly a major work.  I think I will revisit it next year when the paperback is published.  Recommended to fans of Marly Youmans.   IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE Só (Alone, 1892), António Nobre – Since Portuguese literature is often imitative, I could call Nobre a Symbolist, and he sometimes sounds like the missing link between Romanticism and Pessoa, but I thought his voice was individual.  A long poem about a stay in a sanitarium (Nobre died young of tuberculosis) should be translated; it all should be translated.  I read a school edition that says the book is recommended to 8th graders.  I have no idea how, or how often, this book is actually taught, but I would be shocked if one percent of American 8th graders are assigned such a complex book of poems. Pierrot mon ami (My Pal Pierrot, 1942), Raymond Queneau – Pure jolly fun, but between the slang and wordplay and sudden shifts in register, hard as the devil.  Sometimes it felt like I was reading a Godard film. Roberte ce soir (1954) & La Révocation de l'Édict de Nantes (1959), Pierre Klossowski – Two odd novellas.  The wife sleeps with the houseguests and the husband theorizes about why this is a good idea.  Each novella has one long scene that might be pornographic if not written in such a comically formal register.  The second book turns the first inside out, which is interesting.  Perhaps those ridiculous sex scenes, for example, are just the art-loving husband’s painting-inspired fantasies.  One curious scene describes a painting that could easily be by Pierre’s older brother Balthus.  Utterly different style than Queneau but just as difficult.  I need to find an easy French book, a Simenon novel, something like that. Contos Exemplares (1962), Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen – Not as intricate, but often a bit like Isak Dinesen.

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.