Wuthering Expectations
Ben Jonsons Poetaster - Oh, terrible windy words!
Marston's poetics - foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain
John Marson's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge - Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st
Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday - hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster
What I Read in January 2026 – Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic.
Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain - He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery
You, that have so graced monsters, may like men - Every Man in His Humour
What I Read in December 2025 – We ain’t gonna eat that.
Marlowe's Massacre at Paris - And so let's forward to the massacre!
Not Shakespeare for next year - Jonson, Marston, satire, revenge
Joost van den Vondel's Baroque play Lucifer - from their lofty nest / They see their dreaded foe
Edward III - This fellow is well read in poetry
Christopher Marlowe's Edward II - And now and then stab, as occasion serves
What I Read in November 2025 – The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike
Marlowe's restless Doctor Faustus - I’ll burn my books!
What I Read in October 2025 – What a simple daily pleasure.
Arden of Faversham, an early true-crime murder farce - Oaths are words, and words is wind, / And wind is mutable.
Marlowe's hilarious farce The Jew of Malta - How sweet the bells ring now the nuns are dead
This may all be a fantasy - Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Chrsitopher Marlowe
More Henry VI - I am myself alone
Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3 - Shakespeare begins - Why, I can smile, and murder whiles I smile
History before Shakespeare - The Famous Victories of Henry V - he hath taken the great raze of ginger that Bouncing Bess with the jolly buttocks should have had
The Spanish Tragedy and Ur-Hamlet - we do as all tragedians do
The Spanish Tragedy - Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!
milk-white harts, fiery dragons, the ugly monster Death - some more Tamburlaine
Marlowe's Tamburlaine plays - Threatening the world with high astounding terms
Where I Walked in September 2025, and with Whom – The great affair is to move
What I Read in September 2025 – A hand that taught what might be said in rhyme
Christopher Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage - for I love thee not, – And yet I hate thee not.
A note on Elizabethan authorship and Stephen Greenblatt's new biography of Christopher Marlowe, which I have not read
Visiting imaginary museums with André Malraux
The Tragedie of Gorboduc - To see the hugy heaps of our unhaps
The magician becomes a bureaucrat - what Alejo Carpentier's The Kingdom of This World is about
Gammer Gurton's Needle - it would have made thee beshit thee / For laughter
What I Read in August 2025 - But good ale down your throat hath good easy tumbling
Ralph Roister Doister, among the first regular English comedies - Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poop
a fantastic universe where the presence of man was not foreseen - Maurice Herzog's Annapurna: First Conquest of an 8000-meter Peak
A readalong of Christopher Marlowe and friends - I fear they know we sent the poison'd broth
What I Read in July 2025 - books are quiet and unobtrusive, and do not try to hustle the reader
Daniel Kehlmann's G. W. Pabst novel The Director - Keeping it light. Keeping it carefree.
What I Read in June 2025 - A life of agony was all for naught.
A draft Elizabethan Not Shakespeare syllabus
Not Shakespeare - a preliminary, semi-formed invitation to read plays by Shakespeare's contemporaries
What I Read in May 2025 – “There’s the store that’s shaped like a duck,” Franca said.
Anthony Powell's style and sensibility - Life is full of internal dramas, instantaneous and sensational, played to an audience of one
How A Dance to the Music of Time works, so far - I always enjoy hearing the details of other people’s lives, whether imaginary or not
Preface to notes on the first four novels of Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time
What I Read in April 2025 – Have we cherished expectations?
Languages and literature - Finnegans Wake becomes unbeurrable from age
Some of the difficulties of Finnegans Wake - Two dreamyums in one dromium? Yes and no error.
The key to Finnegans Wake - there is a limit to all things so this will never do
Two novels titled Attila - Maximal words striving to breach an angel
What I Read in March 2025 – Some day, he thought, I must use such a scene to start a good, thick old-fashioned novel