Time to get back to the Age of Shakespeare, the non-Shakespeare parts.   Please read along if it strikes you.   Last spring’s reading list w...

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 Hol...

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, ...

NOT SHAKESPEARE Poems and a Defence of Ryme (1592-1605), Samuel Daniel – Author of the “Delia” sequence of fifty sonnets, a genuine seque...

MALHEUREUX  This lust is a most deadly sin, sure. FREEVILL   Nay, ‘tis a most lively sin, sure.   (I.1, 9) Now there is an efficient sta...

Thomas Mann filled a lot of my time, alongside the non-Shakespearian stuff.  Just two plays to go in this round, George Chapman’s All Fools ...

George Chapman has the funny distinction of being famous, courtesy of Keats, but unread.  He was one of the finest poets and playwrights of ...

Zeitblom, the narrator of Doctor Faustus , presents an interpretation of his composer friend Adrian Leverkühn suggesting that his avant gard...

A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a...

I have called Thomas Dekker and Henry Chettle hacks, but Thomas Heywood was the greatest hack of the Age of Shakespeare, having “an entire h...

Several years ago I came across a survey of British teachers of English literature.   Over time, many groups have greatly revised, often i...

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 a...

London and Cornwall, St. Ives and Penzance and so on, is where.  I got some good Shakespearing in – The Tempest at the Wanamaker, the littl...

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...

It’s the War of the Theatres!  Ben Jonson feuding with John Marston and Thomas Dekker!  Who cares! Poetaster, or the Arraignment (1601) f...

The plays that have survived from the early London stage are language-crazed.  When have so many commercial writers been poets, great poets?...

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 ev...

I think of Thomas Dekker as one of the great hacks of Shakespeare’s time, writing over a long career a large number of plays, mostly lost, t...

Ben Jonson was, like Shakespeare, an actor-playwright from a modest background.  He had a better education, of which he was enormously vain,...

Dolce Bellezza hosted her 19th Japanese Literature Challenge last month.  Once I have written this post it will be the 54th book in this ye...

I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual.  If only I wanted to write anything.   NOT S...