More from Wuthering Expectations
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.
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.
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Jonathan Gould on how Talking Heads transformed rock music The post Once in a Lifetime appeared first on The American Scholar.
I grew up fetishizing a university education. I knew no one in my family or in my working-class neighborhood who had “gone to college,” as the common phrase had it. In my experience, that status was confined to doctors and teachers. My father was a high-school dropout. Higher education seemed like a gift reserved for the anointed, whether by wealth or genius. Naturally this inspired a strain of suspicion and resentment. After high school, I applied, without assistance, to two universities – Harvard and Bowling Green State University in Ohio. My naiveté was stunning. The state school accepted me and after three years I dropped out. It was probably my generation that first came to believe everyone should go to college. I no longer think that’s the case, especially because a university degree no longer signifies a true education. I’ve known too many degree-holding alliterates and even border-line illiterates. Robert Conquest chooses his words carefully in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1999): “Not all young, or old, people are susceptible to education.” Conquest’s analysis of education is interesting. His formal education at Oxford was excellent and he became a gifted historian, poet, novelist and all-around man of letters – a rare breed today. He bolsters his argument with allusions to Edward Gibbon and Marcus Aurelius. Some young people are, Conquest writes, “more or less uneducable. Others have had a good education by the time they are eighteen, or even younger, but have neither the desire nor the bent for ‘higher’ education.” This confirms my observation that some of the brightest, most well-read people I’ve known are degreeless. “For people can be educated, cultured and so forth without having been to university at all," Conquest writes, "as with dozens from Benjamin Franklin to Winston Churchill, from Shakespeare to Einstein, to say nothing of the great women writers of the nineteenth century. Nor is this only a matter of genius. Even erudition is possible outside academe, a point illustrated perfectly by Gibbon himself, the greatest of historians, who did indeed attend Oxford briefly when fifteen years old, from which (as he tells us) he got nothing. What all of them had was, in the first place, reading. We all know dozens of people, especially from an older generation, who are as much at home in these worlds -- except in special fields—as their Bachelored and Mastered and Doctored acquaintances.” It’s always a pleasure to meet and talk with an autodidact, a self-directed learner, as opposed to a formally educated pedant or drone. Often the former is motivated by love of learning; the latter by status, money, fashion, indifference. Of the amateur class, Conquest writes: “No doubt these were naturally inclined that way, or else brought up in circumstances where it was taken for granted. And, of course, they must have had some sort of preuniversity education that puts them above many university entrants, or exiters, these days. I think of such people (at random) as Julian Symons, or Roy Fuller, or V S. Pritchett, or Iain Hamilton, the editor of the London Spectator (who left school at sixteen to work in a clothes shop), and of other major figures in literature and journalism.”
How contemporary art reflects our waning belief in progress.
vaguely impressionistic reflections about what I've been up to + links to stuff I've enjoyed recently
Jonathan Swift often stayed at Quilca, the country home of his friend the Rev. Thomas Sheridan (1687-1738) in County Cavan, Ireland. There he wrote portions of Gulliver’s Travels. Not surprisingly, Swift was an inspired kvetcher. There’s a long tradition of English writers complaining about accommodations. Think of Smollett, Carlyle and Waugh. Three-hundred years ago today, Swift wrote a letter to Sheridan containing three poems inspired by his stays at Quilca. Here is “The Plagues of a Country Life”: “A companion with news, A great want of shoes; Eat lean meat, or choose; A church without pews. Our horses astray, No straw, oats or hay; December in May, Our boys run away, All servants at play.” By Swiftian standards, pretty mild. No scatological substrate. In the body of the letter he writes: “The ladies room smokes; the rain drops from the skies into the kitchen; our servants eat and drink like the devil, and pray for rain, which entertains them at cards and sleep; which are much lighter than spades, sledges and crows.” Another traditional complaint -- the laziness and unreliability of servants. He might also be describing the poverty typical of rural Ireland in the eighteenth century. Swift says the “maxim” of the servants is: “Eat like a Turk, Sleep like a dormouse; Be last at work, At victuals foremost.” Swift worked hard to feel gratitude for rural, in “The Blessings of a Country Life”: “Far from our debtors, No Dublin letters, Not seen by our betters.” One year earlier, Swift has written a brief prose piece titled “The Blunders, Deficiencies, Distresses,and Misfortunes of Quilca.” It’s a list of complaints. I especially like this one: “The kitchen perpetually crowded with savages.”