Ben Jonson (NIVEL AVANZADO)

NIVEL AVANZADO: BEN JONSON


- Ben Jonson bibliography
 

- Esta es la otra "Ode (To Himself)" de Jonson, un elitista quejándose de la vulgaridad del teatro y de su público:
    http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/jonson/odetohimself2.htm

- En Internet podéis hojear más obras de Jonson. Por ejemplo:
The Sad Shepherd: Or, A Tale of Robin Hood (1637). Online facsimile at The Internet Archive
    http://archive.org/stream/sadshepherdorat00jonsgoog#page/n14/mode/2up

- The Alchemist, an audiobook: https://youtu.be/6X4Q3Mm7zYk



- An historical episode at the beginning of the reign of James I—The Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy by Catholic rebels or terrorists:

Christopher Marlowe (NIVEL AVANZADO)

NIVEL AVANZADO: 

Dos artículos míos sobre Marlowe:
 
- Una nota especulativa sobre Doctor Faustus—"Dr.Faustus and Mr. Marlowe"

- Y sobre la intertextualidad en Marlowe y en Shakespeare: "The Phrase that Launched a Thousand Ships"—a cuenta de la figura de Helena de Troya en Doctor Faustus.

 


A lecture on the character of Doctor Faustus:





 




- Una versión española de Edward II de Marlowe: https://youtu.be/NgPe7fj-A8w


_________________________

Christopher Marlowe

(from The Oxford Companion to English Literature)
 

Marlowe, Christopher (1564-93), son of a Canterbury shoemaker, educated at the King's School, Canterbury, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. He became a BA in 1584, and MA, after some difficulty in 1587. Though of excellent classical attainments, as his writings make clear, he seems to have been of a violent and at times criminal temperament. It is not  clear whether visits he made to the Continent related to espionage. In 1589 he was involved in a street fight in which the poet T. Watson killed a man; an injunction was brought against him by the constable of Shoreditch three years later. Early in 1592 he was deported from the Netherlands for attempting to issue forged gold coins. On 30 May 1593 he was killed by one Ingram Frizer (as Hotson discovered) in a Deptford tavern after a quarrel over the bill; Marlowe was at the time under warrant to appear before the Privy Council on unknown charges. Kyd and another friend, Richard Baines, testified after his death to his blasphemy and outrageous beliefs.

The Tragedie of Dido, Queen of Carthage, published in 1594, may have been written while Marlowe was still at Cambridge, and in collaboration with Nashe. Part I of Tamburlaine was written not later than 1587, and Part II in the following year; it was published in 1590. The next plays may have been The Jew of Malta, not published until 1633, and Edward II, published in 1594. The highly topical Massacre at Paris, which survives only in a fragmentary and undated text, and Dr Faustus, published 1604, may both belong to the last year of Marlowe's life. At various times he translated Ovid's Amores, published without date as All Ovids Elegies, together with some of Sir John Davies's 'Epigrammes'; wrote two books of an erotic narrative poem Hero and Leander, wich was completed by G. Chapman and published in 1598; made a fine blank verse rendering of Lucans First Booke, Book 1 of Lucan's Pharsalia; and wrote the song 'Come live with me and be my love', published in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599) and England's Helicon (1600), with a reply by Ralegh. In spite of his violent life Marlowe was an admired and highly influential figure: within weeks of his death Peele paid tribute to him as 'Marley, the Muses darling for thy verse'. Shakespeare's early histories are strongly influenced by Marlowe, and he paid tribute to him in As You Like It as the 'dead shepherd'. Jonson referred to 'Marlowes mighty line', and among others who praised him were Nashe, Chapman, G. Harvey, and Drayton. There are many modern editions of his plays and poems: the Revels Plays editions of the plays are to be recommended, and in the same series, Millar Maclure's edition of the Poems (1968).

—oOo—

(from Legouis:)

Marlowe added nothing to dramatic technique except that he determined the victory of blank verse. His merit is that in his short career he set the stage on fire with the flame of his passion. Less versatile than the other prominent playwrights of his day, less able than they to conceive of multitudinous feelings distinct from his own emotions, less quick than some to catch the scenic side of things, surpassed not only by the masters, but also by mediocre playwrights, as an architect of drama and constructor of supple and nimble dialogue, without any sense of the comic or sense of humour or aptitude to draw a woman, Marlowe yet possessed a supreme quality which enabled him at once to lift drama to the sphere of high literature. He was a great poet, a lyrical, personal, violently egoistical poet, who carried with him his own unique conception of man and life. In spite of his atheism, he foreshadowed Milton from afar; a little of him was in the Byron who wrote Cain, a little in Shelley. His exclusiveness produced intensity, and the English stage was in great need of intensity. Grace, wit, and fancy had been scattered on it, mingled indeed with faults of every kind, but never hitherto had it known this dash, this vehemence, animating a whole play, this rapid march, as to victory, by which drama inspires the conviction hat thus to move is to be alive.

It is, after all, a mistake to suppose that every work written for the stage must have specially dramatic qualities. To give an audience an impression of greatness, to cause them to tremble with enthusiasm and feel the rush towards an end—any end: this does as well. The fact is proved by Marlowe's work as by part of Corneille's. His immediate success and his powerful influence are unquestionable. Even when his plays had come to seem extravagant they remained popular. They first made the English public feel the pride of strength, and persuaded or deluded English drama into the belief that it equalled the sublimity of the ancients. As did the Cid, Marlowe's plays, for all their lack of patriotism, made hearts swell with a new national pride. His characters, out of scale and unnatural as they are, can dispense with probability because they have the breath of life. Their passionate declaiming co-operated with the triumph over the Armada, one year after Marlowe's first play, and the pride in distant conquests, to make English hearts drunk and giddy with triumphant strength. Together with the discoveries of the great seafarers, these figures on the stage enlarged, in men's minds, the bounds of the possible. These plays were a paean to the infinity of military power, of knowledge and of wealth. The subjects Marlowe borrowed, the heroes he moulded, were no more than his mouthpieces, voicing his exorbitant dreams. Like him they sought the infinite and like him were never sated.










On Marlowe's plays, from the Oxford Companion to English Literature:
__________

Dido Queene of Carthage, The Tragedie of, written by Marlowe and Nashe, possibly while they were at Cambridge together. It was performed at unknown dates by the Children of the Queen's Chapel, and published in 1594. It is closely based on Virgil's Aeneid (Bks 1, 2, and 4), depicting Dido's failure to persuade Aeneas to stay with her in Carthage and her subsequent suicide.

(from Legouis:)

Marlowe ... wrote a Dido, which was finished by Nashe and in which he dramatized the fourth book of the Aeneid. This play is less sombre in colour than his earlier work, but is marred in  places by the worst lapses of taste.





Tamburlaine the Great, a drama in blank verse by Marlowe, written not later than 1587, published 1590. It showed an immense advance on the blank verse of Gorboduc and was received with much popular approval. The material for it was taken by the author from Pedro Mexia's Spanish Life of Timur, of which an English translation had appeared in 1571.

Pt I of the drama deals with the first rise to power of the Scythian shepherd robber Tamburlaine; he allies himself with Cosroe in the latter's rebellion against his brother, the king of Persia, and then challenges him for the crown and defeats him. Tamburlaine's unbounded ambition and ruthless cruelty carry all before him. He conquers the Turkish emperor Bajazet and leads him about, a prisoner in a cage, goading him and his empress Zabina with cruel taunts till they dash out their brains against the bars of the cage. His ferocity is softened only by his love for his captive Zenocrate, the daughter of the soldan of Egypt whose life he spares in deference to the pleadings of Zenocrate when he captures Damascus.

Pt II deals with the continuation of his conquests, which extend to Babylon, whither he is drawn in a charion dragged by the kings of Trebizond and Soria, with the kings of Anatolia and Jerusalem as relay, 'pampered Jades of Asia' (a phrase quoted by Pistol in Shakespeare, 2 Henry IV, II.iv); it ends with the death of Tamburlaine himself.

____

From Legouis and Cazamian's History of English Literature:

Tamburlaine, in its two parts, of which the first appeared in 1587 and the second in 1588, astonished the public with quite other reasons than The Spanish Tragedie. Its author was Christopher Marlowe (1564-93), a young man of twenty-three, who had just left Cambridge. He was entirely without experience of the stage, but he compensated for this lack by the extraordinary spirit of defiance and revolt which animated his dramatic work. Novel though Arden of Feversham and The Spanish Tragedie were, they were plays which bore the imprint of the traditional morality. From beginning to end they denounced and condemned crime; their murders cried out for vengeance. But the new playwright dared to claim admiration for the most bloodthirsty of men, to make of him a sort of demigod.

Nothing is more characteristic of Marlowe than his choice of his first hero. He had read a translation of Tamerlane's life by the Spaniard Pedro Mexia and another life of him by Perondinus of Florence. His imagination was inflamed by the story of the career of this unmatched adventurer who from a mere shepherd became the most powerful man in all the world. There was no need to invent: to follow history was enough. What were Alexander and Caesar beside this fourteenth-century Tartar, the conqueror of Persia and Muscovy who laid Hindustan and Syria waste, vanquished the Ottomans, and died at last as he was flinging himself upon China at the head of two hundred thousand warriors? What cruelty did not seem mildness beside his, who strangled a hundred thousand captives before the walls of Delhi, and set up before Baghdad an obelisk built of ninety thousand severed heads? What symbol could strike more terror than the white tents and banners which stood, in sign of friendship, before a town on the first day of one of Tamerlane's sieges, the red tents and the second flags which were there on the second day, in sign of pillage, and the banners and tents, all black, which beset it on the third day, in sign of extermination?

All this was so grandiose that Marlowe was dazzled. The man capable of so prodigious a destiny, of such unbridled contempt for human life, seemed to him a superior being, a superman to whom the petty rules of morality did not apply. His Tamburlaine massacres wholesale, women and children as well as men, laughs at the blood he sheds, imprisons the vanquished Emperor Bajazet in a cage, has his chariot drawn by kings whom he insults, burns a town in honor of the funeral of his wife, Zenocrate, and all the while remains entirely admirable, outside and above human judgment. He is the despiser of men and gods. Marlowe endows him with the boundless arrogance of an emancipated virtuoso and philosopher of the Renascence. Tamburlaine is the great victor, the conqueror of the world. Therefore he is in the right.

Marlowe transfigures him, not by omitting or weakening any of his atrocities, but by exalting them. He sees in him the triumph of the will to power and thinks that nothing could be finer. To glorify his Tamburlaine he goes to the romances of chivalry in search of heroes moved by an unbridled appetite for glory, and there finds the poetry a mere exterminator would lack. Like those extravagant knights, Tamburlaine is capable of extraordinary love. He lays the earth at the feet of his Zenocrate and when death takes her from him he threatens heaven with his rage.

This play, which is simply Tamburlaine's life divided into scenes, expresses the strange ardours of a young scholar who had cut himself irrevocably adrift from all restraint. A libertine in both senses of the word, Marlowe prided himself on his paganism, his rebellion, not against the dogma of the Trinity only, but against the very spirit of Christianity. His ideal was the man freed from all morality who seeks the maximum of strength and enjoyment by way of impiety, sensuality and crime. What he could not declare to the public directly, he makes his Tamburlaine proclaim upon the stage. It was to the quest of the impossible that he himself aspired, and Tamburlaine is vowed to it at his first meeting with Zenocrate. She has come to him, all dishevelled and disconsolate, to ask him to pardon her father, the Sultan of Egypt. At this moment the man who had, an instant before, slaughtered the suppliant virgins of Damascus and had their corpses hoisted on pikes, utters the most lyrical of all appeals to absolute beauty, a cry of grief because he knows and declares that what he calls upon is beyond his reach.

The like exaltation had already been felt by Tamburlaine at the thought of being king. on the precedent of Jupiter, who ousted his father Saturn from the throne in order to reign himself, Tamburlaine regards ambition as the spontaneous act of human nature:

Still climbing after knowledge infinite,
And always moving as the restless spheres.

The same wild rapture is sustained through ten acts, for two dramas are consecrated to this one hero Tamburlaine, who is almost always on the stage and by himself is nearly the whole of either play. It is appalling to reflect on the task of Alleyn, the actor who created the part and who had to utter all this character's declamatory violence and repeated lyrical tirades. Nothing could be less dramatic or more monotonous: the same theme and same tone of passionate emphasis recur endlessly. It is true that, to captivate the sight, there are some scenes which haunted men's memories: Bajazet dying of hunger in his cage while a banquet is served to Tamburlaine, who tenders him a mouthful or two on the point of his swor; Bajazet, at the end of his endurance, braining himself against the iron bars which imprison him; his wife, Zabina, seized by madness when she sees him dead and taking her own life; above all that famous spectacle of Tamburlaine, whip in hand, drawn by two kings harnessed to his chariot to whom he cries:

Holla, ye pamper'd jades of Asia!
What, can ye draw but twenty miles a day?

It was never necessary to parody Tamburlaine: to mention it was enough. On the whole, its spectacular extravagances are dispersed, but the declamation is continuous. That men listened to this play from end to end can be exclaimed only by supposing that the fire in the heart of the young poet caught his audience. They too must have been in a state of half-delirious exalatation. The distraught rhetoric is sustained by verse of which the unfailing sonority was as new as the subject. Marlowe began his career with a superb contempt for the popular rhymesters. He makes blank verse, hitherto without brightness or ring, thunder and echo through his play like a drum that never ceases. Other heroes, from the Herod of the mysteries downwards, had already uttered fearful blasphemies and unending rodomontade, but they had had to express them in slight stanzas or frail couplets. The verse for which men had been waiting, completely formed verse, now sounded on the stage for the first time. It was a thing too enchanting to be withstood. The wits might mock at this 'spacious volubilitie of a drumming decasyllabon,' at this 'bragging blank verse,' but, whether they would or no, they had soon, in deference to the public, themselves to beat the drum as well as they could.





Jew of Malta, The, a drama in blank verse by Marlowe, performed about 1592, not published until 1633.

The grand seignior of Turkey having demanded the tribute of Malta, the governor of Malta decides that it shall be paid by the Jews of the island. Barabas, a rich Jew who resists the edict, has all his wealth impounded and his house turned into a nunnery. In revenge he indulges in an orgy of slaughter, procuring the death of his daughter Abigail's lover among others, and poisoning Abigail herself. Malta being besieged by the Turks, he betrays the fortress to them, and, as a reward, is made its governor. He now plots the destruction of the Turkish commander and his force at a banquet by means of a collapsible floor; but is himself betrayed and hurled through this same floor into a cauldron, where he dies. The prologue to the play is spoken by 'Machevil', and Barabas is one of the prototypes for unscrupulous Machiavellian villains in later Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. His praise of gold and precious stones as 'Infinite riches in a little roome' is often quoted.

(from Legouis:)

Marlowe never again found a plot which gave him so much scope [as Dr. Faustus], but even in The Jew of Malta (1589) he sometimes reveals his lyrical power. He was doubtless led to write this melodrama by the success of The Spanish Tragedie and other tragedies of atrocious vengeance. His Jew, Barabas, is unjustly deprived of his goods by Christians, and by an extraordinary series of crimes avenges himself on them, and also, becoming a monomaniac, on mankind in general. Obliged to use cunning to attain his object, he is Machiavellism incarnate. His crimes must have made the hair of audiences stand on end. They accumulate until, having first delivered Malta to the Turks and then the Turks to the Christians, he falls into a cauldron of boiling water into which he had schemed to throw his last enemies.

There is only one other character who counts in this play, and he is yet more terrible, the Moorish slave Ithamore who is Barabas's tool and and incarnation of the lust of extreme cruelty.

This melodrama opens grandly, and before the Jew becomes a criminal maniac he has, like Tamburlaine, dignity and greatness. Enormously rich, we see him first in his counding-house, with heaps of gold before him, a poet intoxicated by the immensity of his own wealth and the immense power which is its consequence. As he enumerates the countries whence his treasures come, his exaltation has a mystical greatness. Something of this remains to him when he hears the governor's order that half his estate and that of the other Jews shall be confiscated to pay the tribute to the Turks, and when only he of all his co-religionists keep his pride, remaining indignant and inflexible. It has often been said that Shakespeare dared to defy contemporary prejudice by attracting sympathy intermittently to Shylock. Yet Shakespeare's Shylock is as avaricious as he is cruel, and ridiculous through his avarice. The only true rehabilitation of the Jew is that which Marlowe attempted in his first act, where the haughty, intrepid Barabas, facing the hypocritical governor, is really a splendid figure. That he subsequently appears as a frenzied wretch is of little consequence. For a time the poet identified himself with the Jew, who may even, by the very enormity of his later crimes, have retained the strange sympathy of his creator.






Edward II, a tragedy in blank verse by Marlowe probably first performed 1592, published 1594.

It deals with the recall by Edward II, on his accession, of his favourite, Piers Gaveston; the revolt of the barons and the capture and execution of Gaveston; the period during which Spenser (Hugh le Despenser) succeeded Gaveston as the king's favorite; the estrangement of Queen Isabella from her husband; her rebellion, supported by her paramour Mortimer, against the king; the caputure of the latter, his abdication of the crown, and his murder in Berkeley Castle. The play was an important influence on Shakespeare's Richard II.

(from Legouis:)

Marlowe was also able, before he died at the age of twenty-nine, to write the best of the tragedies on national history which preceded Shakespeare, his Edward the Second, first acted in 1592.

Whether because Marlowe's genius had developed, or because the exigencies of historical drama obliged him to self-effacement, this play has qualities which are properly dramatic and are found in none of its predecessors. The lyrical declamation is under a new restraint. The tirades are shorter and the dialogue is better distributed in speeches. The blank verse is less strained and more pliable, nearer to the tones of human voice. Progress in character-study is also evinced, over a numerous and diversified cast.

The subject is the veracious history of a king who is dominated by his favourites, first Gaveston and then young Mortimer. Mortimer reaches an understanding with Queen Isabella, who becomes his mistress. The betrayed king is cast into prison and put to death by the order of the two accomplices, who are in their turn executed by their victim's son.

Edward II stands for sentimental weakness, the royal baseness which cowardice can make bloodthirsty. In Mortimer, with his unbridled ambition, Marlowe returned to one of his favourite types, and it is Mortimer who connects the play with its predecessors.

Except the death of Faustus, nothing in Marlowe's plays is more poignantly pathetic than the scene of the murder of Edward II in Killingworth Castle by two ruffians. The end of the bad king is so miserable that he becomes an object of pity.

Edward the Second is better constructed than Marlowe's other plays, free from his habitual extravagance, less inhuman and less removed from hte normal drama of the time. But it shows the author's dramatic weakness the more clearly because of its very merits. This tragedy has not the lucidity necessary to character-drawing, to the weaving of a plot, and to the distribution of sympathy. it also lacks variety and dramatic progression. Of the plays developed to natinal history, it was, until Shakespeare, the most artistic, but a long distance separates it fromm the least of Shakespeare's historical dramas. The spirit of patriotism necessary to work of the kind does not breathe in it, possibly because Marlowe, a rebel against the religion and morality of his fellow-countrymen, did not share their political passions either. Again in this play, he shows himself in revolt against the common morality, when, with lyrical exaltation, he paints the unnatural love of Edward II for his favourite Piers Gaveston.






Massacre at Paris, The, a play by Marlowe written c. 1592. The undated first edition (c. 1593/4) describes it as having been acted by the Admiral's Men. It is a short and poor text, probably representing a mangled version of what Marlowe wrote. A single leaf surviving in manuscript used to be thought to be a forgery by J. P. Collier, but is now considered to be a genuine contemporary copy of part of a scene.

The play deals with the massacre of Protestants in Paris on St. Bartholomew's day, 24 Aug. 1572 (an event witnessed by P. Sidney, who was staying in Paris at the time). Its most memorable character is the Machiavellian Duke of Guise, whose high aspiring language seems to have influenced Shakespeare in his early history plays. The massacre is depicted in a series of short episodes, a notable one being that in which the rhetorician Ramus is killed after a verbal onslaught by the Guise on his emendations of Aristotle. The Guise himself is eventually murdered at the behest of Henry III, dying on the lines:

Vive la messe! Perish Hugenots!
Thus Caesar did go forth, and thus he died.

whose relationship to Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (II.ii. 10, 28, 48) has not been satisfactorily explained. Leaping over 17 years, the play concludes with the murder of Henry III and the succession of the (then) Protestant Henry of Navarre. It is difficult to tell whether the frequent comic effect of the play is authorially intended or is the result of the incompleteness of the text. Ed. H. J. Oliver (1968).

(from Legouis:)

...an unfinished play, The Massacre at Paris, on the massacre of St. Bartholomew, a subject which gave Marlowe his fill of horrors and attracted him by the boundless ambition of the Duke of Guise whom he made his hero...




Dr Faustus, The Tragical History of, a drama in blank verse and prose by Marlowe, published 1604 and , in a radically different version known as the B-text', 1616. The earliest known performance waas by the Lord Admiral's Men in 1594. It is perhaps the first dramatization of the medieval legend of a man who sold his soul to the devil, and who became identified with a Dr. Faustus, a necromancer of the 16th cent. The legend appeared in the Faustbuch, first published at Frankfurt in 1587, and was translated into English as The Historie of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. Marlowe's play follows this translation in the general outline of the story, though not in the conception of the principal character, who from a mere magician becomes, under the poet's hand, a man athirst for infinite power, ambitions to be 'great Emperor of the world'.

Faustus, weary of the sciences, turns to magic and calls up Mephistopheles, with whom he makes a compact to surrender his soul to the devil in return for 24 years of life; during these Mephistopheles shall attend on him and give him whatsoever he demands. Then follow an number of scenes in which the compact is executed, notable among them the calling up of Helen of Troy, where Faustus addresses Helen in the well-known line: 'Was this the face that launched a thousand ships . . . ' The anguish of mind of Faustus as the hour for the surrender of his soul draws near is poignantly depicted. Both in its end and in the general conception of the character of Faustus, the play thus differs greatly from the Faust of Goethe.

____

(Legouis:)

The madcap was in truth a great poet whose very extravagance was justified because it expressed his nature. He produced play after play, all continuations of his first. They were perhaps less purely the expression of his temperament, but they gained by his increasing knowledge of the stage, which did not prevent them from being stil mainly lyrical and oratorical. He was, however, leading a life of intense dissipation which hardly ever left him time to produce a complete work like Tamburlaine.  He became the improviser who flings a couple of powerful scenes into a botched play.

Such was the composition of The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus (1588), for which he drew on one of the most fruitful of legends, but merely built an admirable framework about scenes hardly written, and clowning which reads as though the actors had been invited to fill it in as they chose.

Once more faithful to the custom of his country's stage, Marlowe divided the German legend of Faust, as he had read it, into scenes. His forceful egoism is projected into the character of the necromancer who vows himself to the devil in return for sovereign knowledge and sovereign power, and who is thus able for twenty-four years to satisfy his appetites. They are poor and coarse enough in the legend, leading him mainly to play practical jokes on the great ones of his day, the pope and the cardinals, and to make poor wretches the butt of his magic. Marlowe takes little interest in these distractions, which he barely outlines. But when Faustus evokes the spirits of the past and obtains a vision of the Greek Helen, the poet, imagining her supreme beauty, is rapt to incomparable lyricism.

Retribution follows: Faustus has to keep his bargain with Lucifer, and tremblingly awaits death and hell. Marlowe, the atheist, alone in a Christian world, must also, at times, have felt to the full the horror of his denials and his blasphemies. He was too near faith to be indifferent. The very vehemence of his professions of impiety was a sign that his emancipation was incomplete. He shook his fist at heaven and feared at the same moment that heaven might fall and crush him. The last scenes of Faustus are among the most pathetic and most grandiose in Renaissance drama. They stand by themselves, distinct from all the rest of the drama. They are insurpassable, even by Shakespeare. Marlowe, incapable of a complete masterpiece, yet had genius to reach, here and there, the sublime beauty which had no degrees. When Goethe took the same legend for the basis of one of the chief accomplishments of modern poetry, he could not eclipse the poignant greatness of his forerunner's scenes. He, who did not know how the impious tremble, could not recapture that anguish of horror.







Hero and Leander, the tragic history of Leander's love for Hero, the priestess of Aphrodite: he is drowned while swimming to her at night across the Hellespont, and she then in despair throws herself into the sea. This story has been made the subject of poems by Marlowe and T. Hood, and of a burlesque by T. Nashe in his Lenten Stuffe.





Passionate Pilgrim, The, an unauthorized anthology of poems by various authors, published by Jaggard in 1599, and attributed on the title-page to Shakespeare, but containing only a few authentic poems by him.





England's Helicon, a miscellany of Elizabethan verse, published in 1600, with additions in 1613, edited by H. E. Rollins (1935). It is the best collection of lyrical and pastoral poetry of the Elizabethan age, and includes pieces by Sidney, Spenser, Drayton, R. Greene, T. Lodge, Ralegh, Marlowe, and others.

El Shakespeare de Victor Hugo

Some Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists (NIVEL AVANZADO)

Some Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists:

This was a rich age for drama. DON'T memorize all these titles! But reading them may give you a wider idea of the drama of the age of Shakespeare. We may mention some of these dramatists in passing, but our choice examples are Kyd, Jonson and Webster.


GEORGE CHAPMAN (1559?-1634?)

(English dramatist and elitist poet, b. Hertfordshire? st. Oxford, l. London)

_____. The Shadow of Night. Poem. London, 1594.
_____. Blind Beggar of Alexandria. Comedy. Acted Feb. 1595.
_____, trans. Seven Books of the Iliad. With a critical introduction. 1598.
_____. Humorous Day's Mirth. Comedy. 1599.
_____. All Fools. Comedy. 1605.
_____. The Gentleman Usher. Comedy. 1606.
_____. Monsieur D'Olive. Comedy. 1606.
_____. Bussy D'Ambois. Tragedy. ¿?1604-1607. (On Henry III of France and the Duke of Guise).
_____. Caesar and Pompey. Tragedy. 1607.
_____. The Conspiracy of Charles, Duke of Byron. Drama. 2 parts. 1608.
_____. The Revenge of Bussy D'Ambois. Tragedy. 1613.
_____. Masque of the Middle Temple and Lincoln's Inn. 1613.
_____. Prefaces to The Complete Works of Homer. 1616.
_____. Hesiod's Georgics. 1618.
_____. Alphonsus, Emperor of Germany. Tragedy.
_____. Revenge for Honour. Tragedy.

Ben Jonson, John Marston and George Chapman. Eastward Ho. Comedy. 1605.
John Fletcher, George Chapman, Ben Jonson and Philip Massinger (?). Rollo: or the Bloody Brother. Oxford, 1638.
Christopher Marlowe. Hero and Leander. Unfinished poem. Completed by George Chapman. 1598.



THOMAS DEKKER (1570?-1632)

(English playwright and realist prose writer, London; over 40 plays lost)

_____. Phaeton. Drama. Acted 1597.
_____. Orestes Furius. Drama. Acted 1598.
_____. Triplicity of Cuckolds. Drama. Acted 1598.
_____. Bear a Brain. Drama. Acted 1599.
_____. The Gentle Craft. Drama. Acted 1599.
_____. Truth's Supplication to Candle-light. Drama. Acted 1599.
_____. The Shoemaker's Holiday. Comedy. 1600.
_____. Old Fortunatus. Comedy. 1600.
_____. Satiromastix or the Untrussing of the Humorous Poet. Drama. Acted 1602. (vs. Ben Jonson).
_____. Christmas Comes but Once a Year. Drama. Acted 1602.
_____. Medicine for a Curst Wife. Drama. Acted 1602.
_____. The Batchelor's Banquet, wherein is prepared sundry Dainty Dishes, &c. pleasantly discoursing the variable Humours of Women, &c. 1603.
_____. Magnificent Entertainment given to King James, Queen Anne his Wife, and Henry Frederick Prince of Wales, with the Speeches and Songs in the Pageants. Tract. 1604.
_____. The Second Part of the Honest Whore; with the Humours of the Patient Man and the Impatient Wife, &c. Comedy. 1630.
_____. Match Me In London. Tragicomedy. 1631.
_____. The Spanish Soldier. Tragedy. Acted 16 May 1631.
_____. The Jew of Venice.
_____. The Sun's Darling. Masque. With John Ford.

Collaborations:

Ben Jonson, Dekker, and Henry Chettle. Robert the Second, King of Scottes. Drama. c. 1599. (Lost).
Henry Chettle, T. Dekker and William Houghton. Patient Grissel. Drama. Dec. 1599, printed 1603.
Henry Chettle, T. Dekker, T. Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and John Webster. Lady Jane. 2 parts. Nov. 1602.
Thomas Dekker, and John Webster. Westward Hoe. Comedy. 1607.
_____. Northward Hoe. Comedy. 1607.
_____. Wyat's History. 1607.
Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, and Anthony Munday. The Two Harpies. Drama. Acted May 1602. (Not printed)
Thomas Dekker and John Day. Guy of Warwick. Drama. Acted 15 Jan. 1619.
Philip Massinger and Thomas Dekker. The Virgin Martyr. Tragedy. Printed 1622.
Middleton, Thomas, and Thomas Dekker. The Roaring Girl, or Moll Cutpurse. Comedy. Written 1604-10. Pub. 1611.
_____. The Honest Whore, with the Humours of the Patient Man and the Longing Wife. Comedy. Part 1. Acted as The Converted Courtezan. 1602.
Rowley, William, Thomas Dekker and John Ford. The Witch of Edmonton. Tragicomedy. 1621, printed 1658. (Partly based on Elizabeth Sawyer).



THOMAS HEYWOOD (c. 1574-1641)

(English dramatist, b. Lincolnshire, st. Peterhouse, Cambridge; l. London. Wrote wholly or in part c. 220 plays, most of them lost. No relation of John Heywood or Jasper Heywood)

_____.  The Four Prentices of London. Written c. 1600. Pub. 1615.
_____. A Woman Killed with Kindness. Drama. Acted 1603, printed 1607.
_____. The Rape of Lucrece. Drama.
_____. The Fair Maid of the West. Drama. Acted before 1610, printed 1631.
_____. Edward IV. Drama.
_____. The English Traveller. Drama.
_____. An Apology for Actors. Discourse. 1612.
_____. Gunaikeion. Or. Nine Bookes of Various History. Concerning Women: Inscribed by ye names of the Nine Muses. Written by Thom. Heywoode. London, 1624. Reissued as The Generall History of Women by Edward Phillips. 1657.
_____. Englands Elizabeth. Prose. 1631.
_____. The English Traveller. Drama. Printed 1633.
_____. The Life of Merlin. London, 1641.
_____. Love's Mistress. Drama.
_____. The Wise Woman of Hogsdon. Drama.
_____. The Royal King and Loyal Subject. Drama.
_____. The Exemplary Lives and Memorable Acts of Nine the Most Worthy Women of the World. Prose. London, 1640.
_____. The Famovs and Remarkable History of Sir Richard Whittington. Narrative. 1656.
_____, trans. Catiline. By Sallust.

Chettle, Henry, T. Dekker, T. Heywood, Wentworth Smith, and John Webster. Lady Jane. 2 parts. Nov. 1602.
Rowley, William, and Thomas Heywood. Fortune by Land and Sea. Comedy.


THOMAS MIDDLETON (1580-1627)

(English dramatist, b. London; st. Gray's Inn; "Chronologer of the City of London, and Inventor of Its Honourable Entertainments" 1620; d. Newington Butts).

_____.  The Phoenix. Tragedy. 1607.
_____. The Family of Love. Comedy. 1607.
_____. (Anon., attr.). (Middleton or Tourneur). The Revenger's Tragedy. Printed 1607.
_____. A Mad World, My Masters. Comedy. 1608.
_____. The Witch. Tragedy. Written 1609-16; printed 1778.
_____. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. Comedy. c. 1611, pub. 1630.
_____. The Mask of Cupid. Acted Jan. 1613.
_____. The Triumph of Truth. Pageant. 1613.
_____. Women Beware Women. Tragedy. Written 1620-7, pub. 1657.
_____. A Game at Chess. Satirical drama. 1625.

Middleton, Thomas, and William Rowley. The Old Law. Rev. Massinger. Drama. 1599.
_____. A Fair Quarrel. Tragicomedy. 1615-16, printed 1617.
_____. The World's Toss'd at Tennis. Masque.
_____. The Spanish Gipsy. Comedy (based on Cervantes). 1625.
_____. The Changeling. Tragedy. 1622, printed 1653. The plot of The Changeling: http://vanityfea.blogspot.com.es/2012/10/the-changeling.html

Middleton also collaborated with Shakespeare in Macbeth and in Timon of Athens.



JOHN FORD (c. 1586-c.1640)

(English dramatist; b. Islington, Devonshire; gentry, st. Middle Temple, lawyer)

_____. 'Tis Pity She's a Whore. Tragedy. Ante 1623, printed 1633. (Incest).
_____. The Lover's Melancholy. Drama. 1629.
_____. The Broken Heart. Drama. Printed 1633.
_____. Love's Sacrifice. Drama. 1633.
_____. The Chronicle History of Perkin Warbeck. Drama. 1634.
_____. Fancies, Chaste and Noble. Comedy. Printed 1638.
_____. The Lady's Trial. 1639.

William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford. The Witch of Edmonton. Tragicomedy. 1621, printed 1658.


Para una visión de estos autores que no estudiamos en el programa, podéis ir a la Cambridge History of English Literature (The drama to 1642, Part II). http://www.bartleby.com/216/




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Ópera (NIVEL AVANZADO)

La ópera italiana tendría una influencia creciente sobre el teatro inglés a lo largo del siglo XVII, y dominó absolutamente en el XVIII. Aquí la que muchas veces se considera la primera ópera, L'Orfeo, de Monteverdi (1607), en una producción que imita las producciones históricas del siglo XVII.










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The Tragic Law

From McAlindon's English Renaissance Tragedy (38-39):

In Doctor Faustus, Marlowe shows all the sensitivity to the theological and symbolic implications of this legend that one would expect from a former student of divinity. Having denied God's love and grace, Faustus becomes enchanted with stellar gods and mythological fables and commits himself to a demon whose name, Lucifer, is that of a Babylonian tyrant in 'Jerome's Bible' (Isa.14:12; Doctor Faustus, I.i.38); he is easily persuaded that 'Marriage is but a ceremonial toy' (II.i.147), and finally seals his damnation by embracing the succubine Helen. But Marlowe's great achievement was to have seized on the legend's core of universal truth and tragic irony. What his play communicates with terrible force is that there can be no such thing as autonomy of action in the real world: every act either confirms an existing bond or creates a new one; it has binding consequences and is a deed in two senses of the world. Thus the tragic design of Doctor Faustus turns on the appalling peripeteia whereby the rejection of a bond whose grant of limited freedom (the freedom of the sons of God) has begun to seem intolerably constricting and servile leads not to liberty and power but to a condition of claustrophobic and degrading servitude: the hero becomes the deed's creature, a prisoner of what he himself has willed.

This tragic law is operative in plays as diverse as Macbeth, Othello, The White Devil, and The Changeling, its presence signalled by the symbolism of the demonic pact or marriage, or by the Marlovian pun on 'deed' and 'will'. Even in the pagan context of King Lear its presence is keenly felt at the outset. The 'hideous rashness' (I.i.150) which thrusts Lear into 'the tyrannous night' (III.iv.147) involves a ritual abjuring of love, grace, and benison (I.i.265), a brutal attempt to prevent a marriage of true minds, and an act of fatal submission to the will of two women who seem to fetch their nature from 'the mysteries of Hecat and the night' (l. 109).

Nevertheless the paradigm of ordered and disordered relationships that deeply affects Renaissance tragedy as a whole is the cosmological and not the theological one. The bonds undone in Lear are not—or not primarily—those between men and gods. As in The Spanish Tragedy, they are familial, matrimonial, and national bonds, as well as the bonds of service and hospitality; and, as in Kyd's play, their universal model is the union of contrary elements in a just and fruitful relationship where individuality and mutuality are simultaneously acknowledged. Here the sign of catastrophe is the sudden eruption of a fiery, primordial hatred which would consume its opposite or consign it to the void: 'No contraries hold more antipathy / Than I and such a knave'; 'as a stranger to my heart and me / Hold thee from this for ever' (II.ii.82-3; I.i.114-15). Here too the experience of Hell is the discovery that a human bond of incomparable value has been violently and irrevocably broken: 'Thou'lt come no more, / Never, never, never, never, never' (V.iii.306-7).

Tragedia y dinámica de fuerzas

—oOo—

The University Wits (NIVEL AVANZADO)

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

John Lyly

Lyly, John (?1554-1606), the grandson of William *Lily. He was educated possibly at the King's School, Canterbury, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He studied also at Cambridge. He was MP successively for Hindon, Aylesbury, and Appleby (1589-1601), and supported the cause of the bishops in the *Martin Marprelate controversy in a satirical pamphlet, *Pappe with an Hatchet (1589). The first part of his *Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit appeared in 1578, and the second part, Euphues and His England, in 1580. Its peculiar style came to be known as 'Euphuism'. Among Lyly's plays, all of which were written for performance by boy actors to courtly audiences, are Alexander, Campaspe and Diogenes (see under Campaspe, its later title); Sapho and Phao (1584); Endimion (1591); Midas (1592), Mother Bombie (1594, see under Bumby). The attractive songs in the plays, including such well-known lyrics as 'Cupid and my Campaspe played', were first printed in Blount's collected edition of 1632; it is doubtful to what extent they are the work of Lyly. Although Euphues was Lyly's most popular and influential work in the Elizabethan period, his plays are now admired for their flexible use of dramatic prose and the elegant patterning of their construction. R. W. Bond edited Lyly's works in 1902, and there is a good study of him by G. K. Hunter, John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier (1962).


George Peele

Peele, George (1556-96), the son of James Peele, clerk of Christ's Hospital and author of city pageants and books on accountancy. He was educated at *Christ's Hospital, Broadgates Hall (Pembroke College), and Christ Church, Oxford. From about 1581 he was mainly resident in London, and pursuing an active and varied literary career. He was an associate of many other writers of the period, such as Thomas *Watson and Robert *Greene. His works fall into three main categories: plays, pageants, and 'gratulatory' and miscellaneous verse. His surviving plays are *The Araygnement of Paris (1585), Edward I (1593), *The Battle of Alcazar (1594); *The Old Wives Tale (1595); and *David and Fair Bethsabe (1599). His miscellaneous verse includes *Polyhymnia (1590) and The Honour of the Garter (1593), a gratulatory poem to the Earl of Northumberland. Peele's work is dominated by courtly and patriotic themes, and his technical achievements include extending the range of non-dramatic blank verse. The jest book The Merrie Conceited Jests of George Peele (1607) seems to bear little relation to Peele's actual personality. His Life and Works were edited by C. T. Prouty (3 vols, 1952-70).



Robert Greene

Greene, Robert (1558-92), born in Norwich, educated at St John's College and Clare Hall, Cambridge, from 1575 until 1583, and incorporated at Oxford in 1588. From about 1585 he lived mainly in London. Although he liked to stress his connections with both universities, his later literary persona was that of a feckless drunkard, who abandoned his wife and children to throw himself on the mercies of tavern hostesses and courtesans; writing pamphlets and plays was supposedly a last resort when his credit failed. He is said to have died of a surfeit of Rhenish wine and pickled herrings, though it may more likely have been plague, of which there was a severe outbreak in 1592. Greene was attacked at length by Gabriel *Harvey in Foure Letters (1592) as the 'Ape of Euphues' and 'Patriarch of shifters'; *Nashe defended him in Strange Newes in the same year, acknowledging Greene to have been a drunkard and a debtor, but claiming that 'Hee inherited more vertues than vices.' Greene's 37 publications, progressing from moral dialogues to prose romances, romantic plays, and finally realistic accounts of underworld life, bear out Nashe's assertion that printers were only too glad 'to pay him deare for the very dregs of his wit'. The sententious moral tone of his works suggests that his personal fecklessness and deathbed repentance may have been partly a pose.

Among the more attractive of his romances are the Lylyan sequel Euphues his Censure to Philautus (1587); *Pandosto: The Triumph of Time and Perimedes the Blacke-Smith (1588); *Menaphon (1589). Among his 'repentance' pamphlets are Greenes Mourning Garment and Greenes Never too Late (1590) and the work attributed to him *Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte (1592). Greenes Vision (1592) is a fictionalized acccount of his deathbed repentance in which he receives advice from *Chaucer, *Gower, and King Solomon. The low-life pamphlets include A Notable Discover of Coosenage (1591) and three 'conny-catching' pamphlets in the same years 1591-2. His eight plays were all published posthumously. The best known are Orlando furioso (1595), *Frier Bacon and Frier Bongay (1594) and *James the Fourth (1598), of which there are editions by J. A. Lavin and N. Sanders.

Greene is now best known for his connections with Shakespeare. The attack on him in the Groats-Worth of Witte (below) as an 'upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers' is the first reference to Shakespeare as a London dramatist, and his Pandosto provided Shakespare with the source for *The Winter's Tale. The voluminousness of Greene's works and the supposed profligacy of his life have caused him to be identified with the typical Elizabethan hack writer; he probably provided a name and a model for the swaggering Nick Greene in Virginia *Woolf's Orlando (1928) . Greene's works were edited in 15 volumes by *Grosart (1881-6).

Greenes Groats-Worth of Witte, Bought with a Million of Repentance, a prose tract attributed to Robert *Greene, but edited and perhaps written by Henry *Chettle, published 1592.

It begins with the death of the miser Gorinius, who leaves the bulk of his large fortune to his elder son Lucanio, and only 'an old groat' to the younger, Roberto (i.e. the author), 'wherewith I wish him to buy a groatsworth of wit'. Roberto conspires with a courtesan to fleece his brother, but the courtesan betrays him, subsequently ruining Lucanio for her sole profit. The gradual degradation of Roberto is then narrated, and the tract ends with the curious 'Address' to his fellow playwrights *Marlowe, *Lodge, and *Peele, urging them to spend their wits to better purpose than the making of plays. It contains the well-known passage about the 'upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers', the *'Johannes fac totum¡, who 'is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey', which probably refers to Shakespeare as a non-graduate dramatist newly arrived in London.


Thomas Lodge

Lodge, Thomas  (1558-1625), son of Sir Thomas Lodge, lord mayor of London, educated at Merchant Taylors' School, London, and Trinity College, Oxford. He was a student of Lincoln's Inn in 1578. In 1579 he pubished an anonymous Defence of Poetry, Music, and Stage Plays, a reply to *Gosson's Schoole of Abuse, and in 1584 An Alarum against Usurers (dedicated to Sir Philip *Sidney), depicting the danger that moneylenders present to young spendthrifts. Appended to it was a prose romance Forbonius and Prisceria. *Scillaes Metamorphosis, an Ovidian verse fable, was published in 1589. In about 1586 Lodge sailed on a privateering expedition to the Terceras and the Canaries, and in 1591-3 to South America. On the earlier voyage he wrote his best-known romance *Rosalynde (1590), 'hatcht in the stormes of the Ocean, and feathered in the surges of many perillous seas'. After four more minor prose romances he published Phillis: Honoured with Pastorall Sonnets, Elegies, and Amorous Delights (1593), including many poems adapted from Italian and French models , to which was appended 'The Complaynt of Elstred', the story of the unhappy mistress of King *Locrine. His play The Wounds of Civill War (1594), about Marius and Sulla, had been performed by the Lord Admiral's Men; he also wrote A Looking Glasse for London and England (1594), in collaboration with Robert *Greene. It is not clear whether he wrote any other plays. A Fig for Momus (1595) was a miscellaneous collection of satirical poems including epistles addressed to Samuel *Daniel and Michael *Drayton. Wits Miserie, and the Worlds Madnesse: Discovering the Devils Incarnate of this Age was published in 1596, as was a remarkable romance, *A Margarite of America, written during his second voyage, under Thomas Cavendish, while they were near the Magellan Straits. Lodge soon after this became a Roman Catholic, and studied medicine at Avignon; he was incorporated MD at Oxford in 1602, and in the next year published A Treatise of the Plague. He completed two major works of translation: The Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus (1602), which was frequently reprinted, and The Workes of Lucius Annaeus Seneca (1614). His last work was a translation of Goulart's commentary on *Du Bartas (1621). Lodge is now mainly remembered for Rosalynde and for the lyrics scattered throughout his romances. His works were edited by E. *Gosse (4 vols, 1883).





Other "University Wits":

Thomas Nashe 

Thomas Watson

Thomas Kyd

Christopher Marlowe


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Nivel avanzado: 

- Un capítulo de Legouis sobre The Drama until Shakespeare.

- Un artículo mío sobre Robert Greene, "Glass Prospective: La televisión medieval en el drama isabelino"