My year in books

Happy new year to all but particularly to the Alzabo Soup podcast for running a mammoth Shakespeare / Renaissance English plays readalong in 2024. Obviously a big draw for reading them all is 1. you can boast about it and 2. you can make a big list at the end. Here's mine – I've written a bit more about the entries below on Goodreads. Hope everyone has a good 2025.

Shakespeare plays ranked

1. Hamlet
2. Macbeth
3. A Midsummer Night's Dream
4. King Lear
5. As You Like It
6. Romeo & Juliet
7. Measure for Measure
8. Cymbeline
9. Richard II
10. The Two Noble Kinsmen (with John Fletcher)
11. Twelfth Night
12. Othello
13. Coriolanus
14. The Merchant of Venice
15. The Merry Wives of Windsor
16. The Tempest
17. Henry IV Part 1
18. Antony & Cleopatra
19. Much Ado About Nothing
20. Titus Andronicus (with George Peele)
21. Julius Caesar
22. Henry IV Part 2
23. All's Well That Ends Well
24. Edward III (with others)
25. The Winter's Tale
26. Henry V
27. Love's Labour's Lost
28. Richard III
29. Henry VI Part 2
30. Trolius & Cressida
31. Henry VI Part 1
32. The Comedy of Errors
33. Pericles (with George Wilkins)
34. Henry VI Part 3
35. King John
36. Timon of Athens (with Thomas Middleton)
37. Henry VIII (with John Fletcher)
38. The Taming of the Shrew
39. Two Gentlemen of Verona

Other Elizabethan / Jacobean drama ranked:

1. Thomas Kyd - The Spanish Tragedy
2. John Ford - 'Tis Pity She's A Whore
3. Christopher Marlowe - Edward II
4. John Webster - The Duchess of Malfi
5. Thomas Middleton - The Revenger's Tragedy
6. Francis Beaumont - The Knight of the Burning Pestle
7. Thomas Dekker / John Ford / William Rowley - The Witch of Edmonton
8. John Fletcher - The Woman's Prize, or The Tamer Tamed
9. Ben Jonson - Volpone
10. Thomas Middleton / William Rowley - The Changeling
11. Anonymous (perhaps Thomas Kyd) - Arden of Faversham
12. Francis Beaumont / John Fletcher - Philaster, or Love Lies a-Bleeding
13. Christopher Marlowe - The Jew of Malta
14. Thomas Dekker - The Shoemakers' Holiday
15. Ben Jonson - The Alchemist
16. John Webster - The White Devil
17. Christopher Marlowe - Doctor Faustus

Shakespeariana roughly in order of preference:

• Jonathan Bate - Soul of the Age: the Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare
• Emma Smith - This Is Shakespeare: How to Read the World's Greatest Playwright
• James Shapiro - 1599: a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
• James Shapiro - 1606: Shakespeare and the Year of Lear
• Harold Bloom - Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
• Stanley Wells - What Was Shakespeare Really Like?
• Stanley Wells - Shakespeare & Co.
• Richard Proudfoot - Shakespeare: Text, Stage & Canon
• Jan Kott - Shakespeare Our Contemporary
• David Bevington - How to read a Shakespeare play
• Germaine Greer - Shakespeare: A Very Short Introduction
• Bill Bryson - Shakespeare: the World as a Stage
• G. Wilson Knight - The Wheel of Fire
• Stephen Greenblatt - Shakespeare's Freedom
• E.M.W. Tillyard - The Elizabethan World Picture
• Katherine Rundell - Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne
• Michael Hattaway (ed.) - The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare's History Plays
• Margreta de Grazia / Stanley Wells (eds.) - The New Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare

Other non-fiction:

• Lizzy Goodman - Meet Me in the Bathroom: Rebirth and Rock and Roll in New York City 2001-2011
• David Toop - Ocean of Sound: Ambient Sound and Radical Listening in the Age of Communication
• Suzanne Ferriss - Lost in Translation (BFI Film Classics)
• Laura Ashe - Richard II: A Brittle Glory
• Anne Curry - Henry V: Playboy Prince to Warrior King
• Rosemary Horrox - Richard III: A Failed King?

SF (mostly) shorts:

Jack Vance - The Dragon Masters

Jack Vance - The Last Castle

Jack Vance - The Miracle Workers

Jack Vance - The Star King

Jack Vance - 'Abercrombie Station' / 'Chowell's Chickens'

Jack Vance - 'The Mitr'

Jack Vance - 'The Moon Moth'

Jack Vance - 'Ullward's Retreat'

George R.R. Martin - 'A Song for Lya'

Michael Moorcock - Stormbringer

Michael Moorcock - 'The Stealer of Souls' / 'Kings in Darkness' / 'The Flame Bringers'

Kelly Link - 'The Faery Handbag' / 'Stone Animals' / 'Magic For Beginners'

Mariella Frostrup (ed.) - Darkest Desire

Iain Banks - The Wasp Factory

Comics:

Becky Cloonan / Tula Lotay - Somna

Brian Azzarello / Maria Llovet - Faithless, vols. 1 & 2

Kazuo Umezz - The Drifting Classroom, Perfect Edition vol. 1

Edward Ross - Gamish: A Graphic History of Gaming

Richard Corben - DEN vols 1 & 2

Emily Carroll - Through the Woods

K. Briggs - Macbeth

Matt Fraction / Chip Zdarsky - Just the Tips

Kieron Gillen / Jim Rossignol / Jeff Stokely - Ludocrats

Georges Pichard - Marie-Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope

The Wheel of Fire

The Wheel of Fire by George Wilson Knight
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Extremely idiosyncratic takes on Shakespeare, written with such whirling enthusiasm that it can be hard to maintain a grasp of the argument. Wilson Knight is dismissive of critical approaches that focus on character and intention (which cards on the table I'm amenable to), preferring to look at the symbolic significance of the plays and something that today might perhaps uncharitably be described as their general vibe. Most valuable for me were the readings of Measure for Measure and Trolius and Cressida, which the critical consensus interprets as satirical if not farcical in tone, but Wilson Knight takes more seriously. I thought it was impossible to see Duke Vincentio as a hero, but Wilson Knight shows that there can be positive readings of the character, showing in turn how Shakespeare's skill in balancing perspectives is evident even in plays that today's readers are liable to only interpret in a certain direction.

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The Alchemist

The Alchemist by Ben Jonson
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Despite Jonson’s interest in seeing this play printed and read, it still belongs best on the stage, where the rapid-fire back and forth and madcap pace is more evident. The plot starts fast and gets faster, as the various gulls first get introduced and then pile up on each other, with the con men having to think of ever more extravagant tricks to separate them from their money. Quite a bit of it is pretty turgid on the page. The jokes need great performances to bring them alive.

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Philaster: Or, Love Lies A-Bleeding

Philaster: Or, Love Lies A-Bleeding by Francis Beaumont
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The dramatic trick this keeps playing is to bring characters to the edge of death and then pulling back. The subtitle ‘Love Lies a-Bleeding” gestures towards that – the main couple are both near mortally wounded but recover and are united at the end through a twist that makes less sense the more you think about it. The blood that is shed is proof of their honour. The most radical aspect of the play is that it is the intervention of the people against a tyrannical king that delivers the happy ending. Shakespeare borrowed some elements of this play for Cymbeline and improved on them in almost every way.

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The Tempest

The Tempest by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is a strange one. Prospero starts the play as a revenger, and his authoritarian disposition towards his daughter, Ariel and Caliban provides plenty of scope for modern day readers to see the character as an upholder of patriarchy, colonialism and racism. But at the end of the play, there’s a swerve away from revenge and towards high-minded forgiveness. Prospero overcomes his baser nature – which the play elsewhere associates with conspiring courtiers, drunken louts and 'savage' men in faraway lands. He is the stage manager as hero, whereas in most Shakespeare plays the stage-manager tends to be the villain (see in particular Iago and Edmund). He is not as compromised as the 'Duke of Dark Corners' in Measure for Measure – whereas that play's ending descends into farce, The Tempest strikes a more wistful tone. Prospero's magic engineers a happy ending – a restoration of the natural order, with natural slaves put in their place and the rightful rulers reassuming theirs. Shakespeare's contemporary audience may have accepted this at face value. A modern audience may find it harder to do so.

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The Changeling

The Changeling: Full Text and Introduction by Thomas Middleton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Bit of an odd one. There are thematic connections to be made between the largely unconnected main plot and sub-plot, but they are rather flimsy. Middleton’s moralistic policing of female chastity is quite an unattractive trait, but the villainous De Flores, obsessed with bedding the beautiful Beatrice-Joanna even if it kills him, is a fun role.

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The Witch of Edmonton

The Witch of Edmonton by Thomas Dekker
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A play full of ambiguities. To what extent is the titular witch created by the prejudices of her community? How much agency does she really have? She is both a scapegoat and a revenger. The play revels in the fascination with witchcraft while at the same time portraying Mother Sawyer as a victim. Both her and Frank Thorney are pressured into doing evil by the fraught economic circumstances they find themselves in. Both get sent to the gallows, but while Mother Sawyer goes out cursing, Frank is penitent – a slightly heavy-handed insistence by the dramatists on the importance of forgiveness. The most ambiguous character of all is of course the satanic talking dog, who either inspires or encourages the chaos that engulfs Edmonton. In the end he is beaten an away by the good-natured simpleton Cuddy Banks – a Bottom-like figure who consorts with demons but can’t be corrupted by them. It is another one of the play’s ironies that the most heroic character is the clown.

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle

The Knight of the Burning Pestle by Francis Beaumont
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It is a testament to the rapid evolution of the theatre in Renaissance England that basically within 20 years of the medium establishing itself we get deconstructions like this. Here a rote city comedy with shades of Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday is disrupted by a grocer family who park themselves on the stage and insist on the addition of a heroic adventure subplot (heavily influenced by Don Quixote). Their interjections provide a meta commentary on the different tastes and expectations of the audience, although the jokes do start to wear a bit thin towards the end. The author’s preface seems to be a defence against accusations of snobbery – the play is written to “please all, and be hurtful to none”. It’s certainly a delight.

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The Revenger's Tragedy

The revenger's tragedy by Cyril Tourneur
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Takes the revenge tragedy genre established by Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy to its limit and beyond – stripping out any potential for pathos or catharsis and replacing it with farce. Middleton (more likely to have been the dramatist than Tourneur) was best known for acerbic heavily-plotted city comedies, and those inclinations are present here – with disguises creating absurd situational comedy and the revengers deploying wildly inventive methods of murder. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus had a similar blackly comic tone, but The Revenger’s Tragedy refines the formula and introduces a contempt for the machinations of courtly life that points towards Webster’s nihilistic White Devil and Duchess of Malfi. A lot of fun.

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Hamlet

Hamlet by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The last time I read Hamlet I came away thinking it was a play haunted by depression and suicide rather than revenge. This time around, what struck me was how the Ghost sets up a theological mystery that Hamlet needs to investigate. It is only with the staging of the play within the play that Hamlet can see the Ghost is honest and the King is a regicide. But that reveals his hand, and gets him packed off to England. Revenge is deferred because of Hamlet’s probing at the workings of heaven. It is after seeing Fortinbras marching with his army to fight over “an eggshell” that he lets go and surrenders to what may be. The sea voyage turns him into a creature of impulse – “the readiness is all”. In the final scene the deaths feel random. Providence takes over and resolves the feud where Hamlet’s intellectualising could not. His antic disposition enters a new lighter mode in Act 5. The angst is replaced by a sense of comic absurdism, where weighty matters of death are treated as skulls to be thrown about. But in his last moments he suddenly starts caring about his reputation, contradicting his earlier claim that not knowing what might happen after death means he is ready for it. Fundamentally this character fascinates more than any other not just because of the poetry he is capable but because of the several transformations he undergoes.

The Arden 3rd edition’s textual notes are excellent. A lot of the introduction and appendixes focus on the decision to present the different versions of the play separately, rather than conflating them. That is new and interesting, but it leaves less room to explore the historical context and staging history of the play.

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The Spanish Tragedy

The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The first big hit of Elizabethan drama, and still absolutely captivating. The scene constructions and rhetorical flourishes may strike some readers as offputtingly artificial. I thought they were impressively thought out, and rich in interpretative possibilities. Kyd gives us a play within a play within a play. The personification of Revenge orchestrates the action, coming to embody the protagonist Hieronimo who in turn stages a play that enacts his revenge. The pivotal scene in which he discovers the letter revealing the murderers of his son, which can feel quite arbitrary, can be staged in such a way that has Revenge come in to press his thumb on the scale and kickstart the revenge plot. The guiding hand of providence makes good in the end, delivering a sense of poetic and dramatic justice. It must have felt powerfully cathartic to an audience who were used to burying their children to have a figure embody and enact extra-worldly justice on the stage, although the disaster that ensues might complicate the response of a modern audience. Anyone interested in Shakespeare or the theatre of his day needs to read this play.

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The White Devil

The White Devil by John Webster
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Extremely plot-heavy to its detriment. Webster doesn’t have his characters explain themselves to the audience in soliloquy so it’s often hard to determine why they are doing what they are doing. The general sense conveyed is of courtiers and lovers driven to hysteria and madness as a result of serving the whims of their powerful patrons. Poison pervades the court and few escape it. The sham trial in the middle of the play is its finest moment. The ending is very confused.

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The Duchess of Malfi

The Duchess of Malfi by John Webster
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Hard to find a character in literature that embraces chaos more than Bosola – a scholar and a soldier who turns himself into a spy and assassin before rediscovering a sense of morality at the end, when it’s too late. The play continually makes reference to the melancholic humour of the characters – a kind of worldly depressive attitude that leads to ethical nihilism. It is the Duchess who provides an alternative model of being – confident in asserting her desires and dutiful towards her family. She is a shining light in the darkness, and cannot survive the maniacal melancholics who surround her. This play is not quite as outrageous as John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity, but it comes close. I’m all for it.

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The Tamer Tamed

The Tamer Tamed by John Fletcher
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A rare case where the sequel improves on the original, showing that The Taming of the Shrew’s dodgy sexual politics were questioned even in Shakespeare’s day. Fletcher turns the tables on the flamboyant “wife-breaker” by having the women in the play group together to go on strike and demand conditions for better treatment. There’s a bit of balancing there, as some of the demands seem then as now quite frivolous – Maria making free with her husband’s wealth in a way that doesn’t quite square with the responsible management of the household. But arguably this is just another ploy to “break” Petruchio’s will. Once achieved, Maria promises mutuality and obedience, although as the play’s beginning suggests, these promises at a play’s end don’t always last a marriage.

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The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Solidifies my theory that Shakespeare didn’t write any great plays in the first seven years of his career, with the possible exception of Love’s Labour’s Lost (and even then I find that play hard to like). Emma Smith makes a good case for the fundamental ambiguity of whether Katherine is in fact tamed by Petrucio – the text leaves options open for different stagings. For what it’s worth, Katherine’s extended capitulation speech at the end of the play suggests to me an acceptance of her fate, rather than an ironic and hostile attitude to it. Shakespeare would grow out of the urge to humble his active and opinionated heroines, and his plays became better for it.

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Othello

Othello by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Othello's constant vows to heaven and his romantic view of himself sets up his marriage to Desdemona in such idealised terms that they demand interrogation – which the villainously sceptical Iago is more than happy to provide. The play was written in close proximity to Measure for Measure, which is very interested in how moral purity turns people into hypocrites – Angelo and Isabella are maneuvered by the 'Duke of dark corners' into sordid compromises. In Othello, sexual jealousy is the rotten apple in the barrel. Othello and Desdemona are more sympathetic figures than Angelo and Isabella, and Iago is more straightforwardly evil than Duke Vincentio, but there's a similar dynamic of heavenly ideals being dragged by the devil into hell. Iago's resentment is the driving factor in this process – all ideals must be torn down as a result of being overlooked for promotion. The real hero in the story is his wife Emilia, who betrays and exposes him in the end, but also shows Desdemona a more realistic attitude to love and marriage, one that reflects Rosalind's lectures to Orlando in As You Like It. Between heaven and hell is the world, and to live in it requires abandoning the absolutist attitudes that destroy the couple in the play.

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The Merchant of Venice

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Reading this play after The Jew of Malta does give an insight into Shakespeare’s temperament in my view. Marlowe’s villain is a caricature that nonetheless delights the audience with the audacity of his evil plots. Marlowe’s flamboyant personality and unorthodox opinions shine through. Shylock is also clearly a villain, but Shakespeare cannot help but fill out the sense of grievance that motivates his desire for revenge. He is in successive scenes abhorrent, pitiful and a figure of fun. Shakespeare is a man that sees all the angles. The ambiguity of his depictions in his plays I suspect reveals the reticence of his judgements in real life.

The Merchant of Venice isn’t quite as finely balanced as more political plays like Richard II or Julius Caesar. Antonio, the titular Merchant, is clearly a more heroic figure than Shylock, even if he does spit at and berate him. The play contrasts the self-interested practice of usury with Antonio and Bassanio’s open-hearted generosity. The financial metaphors for love that abound in the play ironise this liberality, but ultimately the play celebrates it. Shylock’s greatest sin may be his miserliness. It is incumbent on the fortunate to give and forgive freely.

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The Jew of Malta

The Jew of Malta: Christopher Marlowe by Stephen Bevington
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a tragedy in name only. Part of the appeal then and now is Barabas’s gleeful plotting to trick and murder anyone who crosses him. The language is clear and pacy, and the bodies pile up very quickly. It’s so cartoonish it’s difficult to take seriously. Shakespeare undoubtedly took that model but pushed it into more unsettling territory with Richard III and Titus Andronicus. The Jew of Malta is a simple black comedy in comparison, with very little depth to Barabas’s character. Yes, Ferneze gets him in the end, and is arguably a more authentically successful Machiavellian, but he’s hardly positioned as the real villain of the piece. The play nods to the prejudice the Jews face, but doesn’t suggest it is a motivating factor for Barabas’s murder spree. Shakespeare’s finely balanced viewpoints are not Marlowe’s style. His heroes are bombastic charismatics who break all the rules and delight audiences in doing so, even if conventional morality demands that they are punished at the end.

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Measure for Measure

Measure for Measure by William Shakespeare
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I do think that Shakespeare here abandons some of the ambiguity that is a signature of his work. It’s just very difficult to take the conniving and duplicitous duke seriously as a force for moral and political instruction. His enthusiasm for manipulation tips the scales of sympathy against him, and it’s very clear how his whims have made a mockery of the laws of Vienna. The way he twists a tragic situation towards a comic resolution offends all sense of justice, and pushes the play towards satire. One wonders what James I would have thought of it. This may be Shakespeare at his most rancid and disillusioned, and it’s one of his finest statements on political decay and corruption.

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Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This probably works really well on stage but I found it a bit of a slog to read – it felt like an awful long time for love's labours to get lost. The feel of the play is close to The Importance of Being Earnest via Jane Austen – gentility trading witty barbs and wasting time on dressing up and playing silly games. Woudhuysen's introduction in the Arden third edition provides a comprehensive guide to the way the jokes comment on the instability inherent to the use of language. Shakespeare is poking fun at booksmart narcissists, and engineers an ending that defers the marriages and undermines the expectations of the comic genre. Death and reality gatecrash the party and leave conclusions open. It should feel like a more radical break than it does, maybe because all the characters are so unserious that you can't invest much in their fates. The problem plays this gestures towards have higher stakes and are more effective in discomforting the audience.

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