[N. Matheson]

Okay, I will admit to being wrong. But you have to admit, whenever someone dies in an Elizabethan play, they have to vocally tell the audience they just got killed.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

Okay, I will admit to being wrong. But you have to admit, whenever someone dies in an Elizabethan play, they have to vocally tell the audience they just got killed.

No. It does happen, but only occasionally, and usually when the death might be otherwise unclear to the audience for any number of circumstantial reasons. I'm honestly not sure where all of these absolutes are coming from, because they're neither correct nor helpful ways of thinking about art. To wit: technically, a sonnet is fourteen lines in a consistent meter with a consistent rhyme scheme and a volta. And yet we have sonnets of different lengths with varying meters, no rhyme schemes, and no clear voltas. Guidelines and traditions? Yes. Proscriptives? Not so much.

[Christine P'legion]

Originally Posted by N. Matheson

Okay, I will admit to being wrong. But you have to admit, whenever someone dies in an Elizabethan play, they have to vocally tell the audience they just got killed.

Out of curiosity—which of Shakespeare's plays have you read? And which (if any) of his contemporaries?

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Christine P'legion

Out of curiosity—which of Shakespeare's plays have you read? And which (if any) of his contemporaries?

A related question for Shaun and other Early Modernists: Which Elizabethan plays, other than Shakespeare’s, should I put at the top of my list? I’ve seen, not read, Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi” and read the anonymous “King Leir,” which Tolstoy thought far superior to Shakespeare’s. None of them excited me as much as my Shakespearean favorites. While I sometimes think the Bard went too far by killing off Cordelia (an old debate, I know), “King Leir” ends happily with everyone still alive and kicking!

[Christine P'legion]

It's been a long time since I've dipped into these waters, but I found an old syllabus that gives a pretty broad overview:

The Spanish Tragedy (Kyd)
Endymion (Lyly)
Tamburlaine the Great, Part 1 (Marlowe)
Doctor Faustus (Marlowe)
Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (Greene)
Edward II (Marlowe)
Arden of Faversham (Anon.)
Shoemaker's Holiday (Dekker)
The Malcontent (Marston)

From another course, I can't find the syllabus but I have some old essays and particularly remember enjoying:

Women Beware Women (Middleton)
The Revenger's Tragedy (Middleton... maybe)
Love's Cure (Beaumont and Fletcher... maybe)
The Roaring Girl (Dekker and Middleton)
Ram-Alley (Barry)

The first two on this shorter list are such outrageously tragical tragedies that they wrap back around to farce; I found them extremely funny.

Edit to add: the Northon Anthology of Early English Drama has a lot of these, though not all.

[Phil Wood]

Tragic heroes: Hamlet, Lear, Othello, Macbeth
Tragic victims: Ophelia, Cordelia, Desdemona, Lady Macduff

Not great plays for female roles, but then boys played those roles. Of course, there is a historical context.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books...8E6FB11CD72568

[Simon Hunt]

Enjoying this discussion very much. Particular faves from BITD when I was sort of an academic:

all of Marlowe (esp Doctor Faustus)
Jonson, Volpone (to start with, but why stop there?)
Webster, Duchess of Malfi (love him in Shakespeare in Love)
Beaumont, Knight of the Burning Pestle (really funny, surprisingly "post-modern" satire of other plays)

[Shaun J. Russell]

It's great to see a lot of love for Marlowe and Jonson on this thread. I very much believe that, had he not been killed so young, Marlowe could have at least had equal stature to Shakespeare in the eyes of literary history. As it stands, his works have more influence than many might suspect. Whenever I read Marlowe, I'm always struck by the feeling of danger in his plays. For most other playwrights, the buildup to an event is crucial -- foreshadowing, plot development that contextualizes the event etc. But in Marlowe, surprising things happen at seemingly random. As a reader, they shock you...so I can only imagine how they would have played out on stage. All of his plays have this quality, though The Jew of Malta is the most extreme. Marlowe's supposed atheism is on full display as Jews, Turks, and Christians are all derided relatively equally. The titular Jew (Barabas) is naturally the focal point and commits the most wickedness (including killing his newly-converted daughter and her fellow nuns in a nunnery), but the schism and anarchy throughout the play is remarkable. I've often felt that Titus Andronicus feels far more like a Marlowe play than a Shakespeare play, and I chalk it up to Marlowe's influence on his colleague and collaborator.

One of my pedagogical hopes is to someday be able to teach The Jew of Malta in tandem with The Merchant of Venice (probably in an upper-level class). The plays are simultaneously extremely similar and extremely different, and exploring those stasis points would be fascinating.

[Roger Slater]

Didn't Shakespeare write Merchant because Jew of Malta was such a commercial success that he wanted to write his own "bad Jew" play? (Though the Jew of Malta was a lot badder than Shylock, of course.)

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Carl Copeland

A related question for Shaun and other Early Modernists: Which Elizabethan plays, other than Shakespeare’s, should I put at the top of my list? I’ve seen, not read, Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” and Webster’s “Duchess of Malfi” and read the anonymous “King Leir,” which Tolstoy thought far superior to Shakespeare’s. None of them excited me as much as my Shakespearean favorites. While I sometimes think the Bard went too far by killing off Cordelia (an old debate, I know), “King Leir” ends happily with everyone still alive and kicking!

(Technically Duchess of Malfi is Jacobean, not Elizabethan, but that's just me being pedantic).

Pedantry aside, I think Christine's list is great. I've read most of them, and would especially recommend Tamburlaine (though both parts -- not just Part I), which feels a bit like Antony and Cleopatra merged with Titus Andronicus. Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore is brilliant, if you can stomach actual (not implied) incest among protagonists. Fletcher and Beaumont's A King and No King has a milder version of that theme in a tragicomic context. Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy is very much a precursor to Hamlet, and is very good even if it's impossible not to read it without thinking of all the connections. Massinger's The Renegado is delicious. For comedies, Jonson is somehow underrated. Volpone and The Alchemist are brilliant. I'd also recommend Fletcher's The Island Princess.


There are others, but all of the above (and the ones I know from Christine's list) are all worthwhile.