The Sacred Wood - T S Eliot

 Eliot's first book of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood, came out in 1920, and consists largely of work that had been published in journals and papers slightly earlier.    Yet there is no mention, not the slightest hint, of the war that set Europe on fire or the covid apocalypse that was currently decimating the survivors.   Instead the man who was yet to write The Waste Land gives us criticism in the style and shadow of the Victorians.   Who now cares about Swinburne or Hopkins?   Yet these are the 'moderns' he writes about whilst admitting that even in 1920 they were somewhat forgotten.   Most of the other critics he discusses are lost to us today.

And yet The Sacred Wood is well worth reading.   It may even be essential to understanding the man who broke the mould and thus dominated English poetry for more than half a century.   His references might be obscure but his reasoning is valid.   He especially stresses the critical dissociation which, certainly to me, still throws a veil over the Four Quartets.   

Eliot and I will have to disagree over William Blake.   We are, however, in accord over the Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists.   Indeed, I was surprised to find that Eliot shares my belief that Shakespeare was a team-leader rather than a singular genius.   We are in absolute accord over the genius of Dante.  We couldn't be further apart on his youthful ideas about poetic drama.   In that respect I have the advantage of hindsight, but that doesn't explain how I seem to know a great deal more about poetic drama in English in the first quartet of the Twentieth Century than he, as a London-based member of the literati seems to have done.  Where is his mention of Masefield or Yeats?   I shall have to investigate further.

The Alchemist - Ben Jonson

I have never really got on with Jonson. Too much allegedly clever cant for my taste. However, this Revels edition from the Manchester University Press managed to keep my attention and I really came to enjoy it. It's an academic edition so there are inevitably lots of footnotes. As an academic of drama as opposed to a student of language, I felt able to ignore these and concentrate on the key element of any farce (an element often overlooked), which is - is it funny? And by and large, yes it is. In this edition, rather than other versions I have tackled, the momentum is kept going and the unity of place and time underlined by using the French method of scene structure - that is to say, a new scene every time someone new comes onstage. The Alchemist is a play about coming and going, and Act V in particular would be hard going if it wasn't broken down into scenes. This way, the rather improbable ending becomes very funny indeed.

It is interesting how Jonson is able to do without many stage directions. Anything we need to know is referenced in the dialogue. Whilst we're at it, the dialogue is in verse and therefore metrical but Jonson uses broken meter to set up arguments and verbal interplay. I have to say I was impressed.

I was not at all impressed with the introduction by E H Mares. Mine is a vintage edition and the 'critical apparatus' as it is quaintly termed dates from 1967. The problem, I think, is that it predates meaningful theatre study in UK universities.  I was part of the first generation to be able to do all four of my degrees specifically in drama. That said, I was seeing a lot of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in and around 1967 and I didn't come across anyone trying to do it on a proscenium stage. Certainly, no one would countenance doing it that way now. Yet Mares goes on for page after page describing how to compromise the action onto a box set. Tedious and irrelevant, as was the history of performances in butchered formats which, from Garrick on, focussed on one of the dupes, the tobacco seller Abel Drugger, rather than the con men Subtle and Face and their moll Doll Common. Still, that's the great advantage of introductions; if they don't hit their mark they are easily ignored.

The Amorous Nightingale - Edward Marston

Edward Marston is a prolific author of historical mysteries, with several series on the go.  I read the first of his highly successful Railway Detective series a few years ago and many, many years ago I read The Merry Devils, the second of his Nicholas Bracewell/Elizabethan Theatre series.

This, though, is the second of his Christopher Redmayne series.  Redmayne is a London architect, working in the first decade of the Restoration.  This story is set in 1667, the year after the Great Fire, boom time for those in the building trade.  Christopher, however, seems able to knock off a design in a couple of shakes and spend the rest of his time as a proto-gumshoe on the King's ticket.  One of Old Rowley's many actress mistresses has been kidnapped; Redmayne and his oppo, puritan parish constable Jonathan Bale, must find her.

The theatre is inevitably a factor here, and I must admit to a problem which is not likely to trouble many.  When I read The Merry Devils I only had two drama degrees and thought it slightly under-researched in terms of the Jacobethan stage.  I now have four drama degrees and am appalled at how under-informed Marston is regarding the Restoration stage.  It's not terminal, but it's very distracting.  Still, if you write as many historical series as Marston does, over as many historical periods, how much research can you expect?

A more substantial flaw, for me, was the superficiality of the writing.  Precious little description, either personal or environmental.  You'd think an architect would take more notice of all the new buildings shooting up from the ashes.  There is pace, which is a good thing, an appropriate amount of backstory which is neatly handled, and dialogue with just enough period flavour to pass muster.  But the plot is clumsy - a villain we know nothing about, an absurdly contrived conspiracy and, the biggest hurdle to my enjoyment, scenes in which the unnamed, un-described bad guy confers with his henchpersons.  More than anything, The Amorous Nightingale suffers the lack of a coherent point of view.  I suspect I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had all been from Christopher's POV or, better still, a first-person account from the lugubrious Bale, struggling to balance his loathing of king and theatre with the peril facing Harriet Gow.