You almost feel sorry for the Spanish …
Today marks the day when the undeniably mighty Armada, reeling from a night attack by fireships and blocked from retreating down the Channel, was pummelled by English ships and scattered northwards by storms. Unable to regroup, they tried – and many failed – to get home the hard way, via Scotland and Ireland.
PTS read-through: The Merchant of Venice, Act IV
Sooner or later, it’s perhaps inevitable that readers of The Merchant of Venice confront one question: is this an anti-Semitic play? In fact, lots of people seem to have a view without having seen or read the play.
The answer is yes – and no.
Marlowe probably DID make a hazard of his head by easing his heart …
The more I read about Marlowe, the more I like and sympathise with him – arrogant, frustrated genius, malcontent, morally questionable, and attention-whore as he may have been. I sense a kindred spirit: my best friend would say the same about me – perhaps with a lot more arrogance and a lot less genius. As I get older, I like to think that my moral code is finally begining to crystallise, where it was entirely fluid 25 years ago, but then Marlowe never had the opportunity to mellow …
Increasingly, I see Marlowe as the kind of ‘mis-shape‘ Jarvis Cocker sung about in 1995:
Where Marlowe went when he should have been at Uni …
George Carleton, A Thankfull Remembrance of God’s Mercie (1630)
Much as I’d like a copy of this on the Boar’s Head Bookshelf, I’ve been playing with a facsimile copy I got from www.archive.org. I think it was mentioned in one of the episodes of BBC’s wonderful Shakespeare’s Restless World – which I recommend to anyone remotely interested in Shakespeare, Marlowe and their contemporaries.
As usual, I have one eye on anything that could be interesting or useful to my A Level students, so whilst I’d like to dwell on some of the pretty hilarious vitriol this man of the cloth (Bishop of Winchester, to be exact) reserves for the Catholic faith, I’ve something a little quotable for the students of Marlowe.
The Boar's Head, Eastcheap 