Tag: David Riggs

Quotation of the Week: 20 August 2018 (#54)

Marlowe didn’t join them; he wanted to beat them, I think …

BH marlowe malcontent

Marlowe increasingly seems a malcontent, fringe figure, occupying some very liminal spaces indeed on the shadowy edges of society …

Three weeks ago, I suggested that Marlowe had ‘learned too much at school‘,  contributing to his generally accepted ‘atheism’.  This week’s quote follows that, to consider his attitude to class … it also provides another useful adition to our store of understanding of why EMP writers wrote in the florid (at least to modern ears) style that they did.  Getting to grips with this is, I maintain, key to deciphering the texts.

Continue reading “Quotation of the Week: 20 August 2018 (#54)”

Nicholl: The Reckoning (review)

Our victim was brash, talented, and stabbed just above the eye before his 30th birthday …

BH the reckoning

Charles Nicholl, The Reckoning: The Murder of Christopher Marlowe (Vintage:  London, 2002)

– – –

‘I am not trying to argue that Marlowe’s death has to have a meaning.  My reading tends only to a more complex kind of meaninglessness than that of a ‘tavern brawl’.

Continue reading “Nicholl: The Reckoning (review)”

QotW: 30 July 2018 (#51)

Marlowe probably DID make a hazard of his head by easing his heart …

BH pulp

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:

Continue reading “QotW: 30 July 2018 (#51)”

The Bookshelf just keeps growing …

Books in the vault, Deck C, Folger Shakespeare Library, 9/11/09
image courtesy Folger Library

Soon there won’t be much room for customers at The Boar’s Head.

… although it still isn’t keeping pace with my book buying.  Buying books and reading books operate in entirely different dimensions, as my overflowing bookshelves will tell you.  When I hit 100 books, which isn’t far off, if you include the Arden Third editions of the plays themselves, I may have to employ an orangutan to take the bookshelf into L-space.  (GNU  Sir Terry Pratchett)

Continue reading “The Bookshelf just keeps growing …”

Quote of the Week: 07 August

BH riggs marlowe coverDavid Riggs:  The World of Christopher Marlowe (Faber and Faber:  London, 2004)

If you squint, you’ll see that this was one of the books I bought as retail therapy a short while back.  I tackled this one first owing to my commitments to teach Edward II again this coming school year – I was hoping to get a few additional nuggets about Marlowe‘s private life.

The book has turned out to be an absolute revelation …

Continue reading “Quote of the Week: 07 August”

%d bloggers like this: