Amateur Reader (Tom)
George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread. He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of the Age of Shakespeare, one of the great Not Shakespeares. His 1604 comedy All Fools gives a good idea of how he is good and why he is little read. All...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire hand or at least the main finger” in “two hundred and twenty” (!) plays (Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, p. 38). He is more like a television writer. ...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
What do I want to say about John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603, maybe 1604)? It is unusual. Marston is unusual, with a distinct poetic and dramatic sensibility. No one else could have written it. The Duke of Genoa has been tossed out by an usurper, so he infiltrates the court disguised as...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
His father hanged by the neck until dead for the high crime of piracy, Hoffman vows Revenge! on the duke who executed his father. By chance the duke’s son is shipwrecked exactly where Hoffman is keeping Hoffman, Sr.’s corpse hanging on the wall of a cave, so Hoffman tortures and murders his...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
After triumphantly beating up John Marston, Ben Jonson indulged in some Shakespeare envy and wrote a history play, or perhaps a tragedy, Sejanus His Fall (1603), about the soldier who rose to rule the Roman empire, for a few years, under dissolute Emperor Tiberius, before overreaching and being...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
It’s the War of the Theatres! Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker! Who cares! Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) features two key scenes where Jonson, under the guise of Horace, is tormented by and then torments Marston, the bad poet of the title. Dekker, a mere hack, gets...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
The plays that have survived from the early London stage are language-crazed. When have so many commercial writers been poets, great poets? When has so much commercial writing been poetry? John Marston is among the purplest of the poet-playwrights, the most baroque. I can imagine readers who...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
John Marston does something with the pair of plays Antonio and Mellida (1599?) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600?) that I do not think I have ever seen before. The first play is a silly, barely coherent romantic comedy, with everything wrapped up in a happy ending. Antonio’s Revenge is a bloody...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background. He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain, and had a Horatian, satirical temperament, compared to the Ovidian Shakespeare and Marlowe. More importantly, he was a born Londoner. His best plays are...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
Saving the worst for last, it’s Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris (1592?, published soon after), a poor play that is full of Marlovian stuff. Marlowe dramatizes the 1572 Paris Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the subsequent series of devious betrayals by the principle massacrists. ...
Amateur Reader (Tom)
With one Marlowe play left to write up, The Massacre at Paris, next week, I am thinking about what I will read in the winter and spring. In 1592 the London theaters a plague outbreak closed the London theaters for what turned out to be two years. All of the old theater companies broke up and...