Philip Ball: Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything (2012)

Edition:The Bodley Head, 2012
Review number: 1488

Histories of what is known as the scientific revolution, especially those who are writing for a popular audience, tend to portray the development of modern science as something new, a break from past thought about the world rather than a continuation of it. It is as though (despite Newton's oft-quoted remark about the shoulders of giants) the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and others in other fields came out of nowhere. Inconvenient facts which show the continuing influence of earlier ideas (such as Newton's interest in alchemy) are left out or mentioned in passing in an embarrassed manner.

The purpose of Ball's book is to show something of the continuous nature of the development of the philosophical ideas which led to the seventeenth century appearance of modern science in embryonic form. Ostensibly, he does this by looking at the concept of "curiosity" - how it has changed its meaning, and how attitudes towards it changed from the common medieval opinion that it was to be discouraged as likely to lead to heretical thought if unchecked.

I say ostensibly, because even though the discussion of curiosity is important, it did not feel to me that it was the sole focus of the book. Apart from anything else, Ball is happy to go off on interesting tangents, such as the long chapter on seventeenth century ideas about the possibility of life on the moon sparked by Galileo's observations of features similar (if a certain amount of wishful thinking was used) to earthly terrain as opposed to being a featureless, perfect sphere, and by the ensuing publication of Kepler's novel Somnium. At least, it seems like that is what is happening when the reader starts the chapter; in fact, it is the first of a series of what are basically case studies, examination of some of the more popular scientific crazes of the seventeenth century - a theme which would make a fascinating book in itself.

There are occasional places where I suspect Ball assumes more knowledge in his readership than might be sensible; for example, he uses the term "Whiggish" of historical accounts without explaining its meaning. It's reasonably clear from the context, but could easily confuse anyone who hasn't an interest in the theory of historical writing - such as someone interested from the science side of things rather than the history side. (It is, by the way, a somewhat derogatory term for old fashioned narrative history, which treats the past as a novel from a one-sided point of view, especially one which paints the individuals as heroes and villains.) In general, though, the explanations of what people were doing, what they intended, how this fitted into the history of science and (especially) the development of the philosophy of science, are admirably clear.

Curiosity is well worth reading, especially if your exposure to history of early modern science is so far limited to the traditional version, with heroes and villains painted in black and white terms. The narrative might become more complicated than you had previously thought, but then the real world is like that. My rating: 8/10.

Marie Brennan: Midnight Never Come (2008)

The Elizabethan age was obsessed by Faery, something most famously seen in several Shakespeare plays (A Midsummer Night's Dream, the spirits in the Tempest, the Queen Mab speech from Romeo and Juliet, and the pretend fairies in The  Merry Wives of Windsor being just some of the best known examples), but most developed in Spenser's enormous allegory The Faery  Queen, which parallels Elizabeth with the queen of the Fae herself.

Folklore graduate student Marie Brennan has taken this thought and put together a story  of a connection of a different kind between the two queens, a pact which guarantees the security of the English realm and its fae reflection. But it is not a treaty without cost, and the queen's spymaster Francis Walsinghamn has begun to suspect that tere is an unknown player in the game with direct access to Elizabeth. He chooses one of his agents, William Deven, to investigate, knowing that the young man is already more involved than he realises: Deven has been courting Anne Marston, waiting lady to the Countess of Warwick, and known to Walsingham as a likely agent of this unknown power. And indeed Anne is a  glamour put on by Lune, a lady of the Fae Onyx court below London, to appear human so she can act as a spy for Invidiana, the Onyx Queen (the name meaning "hateful", as opposed to Elizabeth's allegorical name Gloriana, "glorious").

Atmospheric, interesting and with good characters, Midnight Never Come is well worth a read. I don't normally like books based on role playing game scenarios (I probably wouldn't have read it if I'd realised it was before borrowing it from the local library). It's biggest problem for me was the title, which comes from a play by Marlowe and which in context gives away important aspects of the ending. My rating - 7/10.


Edition: Orbit, 2008
Review number:  1409

Thomas Kyd: The Spanish Tragedy (c. 1592)

Edition: Nick Hern Books, 1997
Review number: 841

Given how many devices are new in The Spanish Tragedy, it is absolutely astounding how well it works. Written in the early 1590s, possibly not by Kyd, it was the innovative precursor of techniques used by Marlowe, Shakespeare (Hamlet might be based on another, lost, play by Kyd), and the Jacobean revenge tragedies.

The plot of The Spanish Tragedy is a complicated revenge story, which is set up by the characters of Revenge personified and the recently killed Don Andrea, watching from Hell the events which follow Andrea's death. They have little bits of dialogue between the acts, like a chorus; Andrea is keen for his death to be avenged, and continually accuses Revenge of falling down on his job. (There is good reason for the accusation - Revenge actually falls asleep during the third act.)

The Spanish Tragedy was one of the first plays in English to follow the ideas of Seneca, though it did not do so completely slavishly (its four rather than five acts are quite unusual, and it doesn't have the action off stage). It includes a favourite device of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, the play within the play (in addition to the Christopher Sly-like scenes for Revenge and Don Andrea). It also has the distinction of innovating iambic pentameter blank verse, which makes the play easier to read than some of its contemporaries and seems more familiar to us than alternatives through Shakespeare's use of it.

It is clear that The Spanish Tragedy is technically innovative and accomplished, but it is more than that. Even across the gulf of over four centuries it manages to be engrossing and exciting, putting it in a class with the best drama of its time.

Judith Cook: Death of a Lady's Maid (1997)

Edition: Headline, 1997
Review number: 561

Simon Forman was a real Elizabethan doctor, prominent enough to earn an entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and a biography by A.L. Rowse which mostly disagrees with the DNB entry. The series which starts with Death of a Lady's Maid makes him a detective in addition to his medical and astrological pursuits. This is an interesting premise (though it is not by any means the only historical crime story with a real detective or with a medical detective). The plot itself has a connection to themes found in the drama of the period. It centres around a body found in the Thames which is a young woman earlier treated by Forman. He discovers through post mortem examination that she was bound before being thrown into the river, so that the death was not the suicide it appeared to be. By bringing scandal to the wealthy family which employed the young woman as a lady's maid, Forman creates an enmity which could cause him a lot of problems as one lacking in influence by comparison. He has to solve the murder before he loses his livelihood.

The problem with Death of a Lady's Maid is that despite being an academic specialising in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama, Cook has a really bland writing style. The novel is cardboard which never comes alive, and it reads like a pale imitation of Ellis Peters (who is not an author I admire). Cook is perhaps more knowledgeable about her chosen period, yet the background remains unconvincing for the same reasons that Peters' do: an inability to really think in a pre-twentieth century mindset.

Christopher Marlowe: Doctor Faustus (c. 1590)

Edition: Nick Hern Books
Review number: 530

Compared to most plays, there is a fair amount of unknown information about Doctor Faustus. It was first performed sometime between 1589 and 1593, which doesn't really place it very surely within the obscure chronology of Marlowe's brief career as a playwright. Even the text is uncertain, the first extant edition of 1604 bearing an unknown relationship to one printed in 1601 and to another very different version. It is not uncommon for there to be multiple versions of Elizabethan plays; even Hamlet also exists in a "memorial" edition (that is, one compiled from the recollections of actors rather than written sources). In the case of Doctor Faustus, it is not known which version is earlier, or whether one is a memorial. The two are quite different, both including material not present in the other. In this edition, both versions are printed, which makes for an interesting game comparing them with each other.

The story of Doctor Faustus is a simple form of the Faust legend. Faustus sells his soul to the devil Mephistopheles in return for magical powers and occult knowledge. In this version, there is no pure Margaret to be loved and to turn Faust to redemption, and Faustus believes himself irrevocably damned at the expiry of the contract (the twenty four years of its duration being the period covered by the play). Much of the dramatic tension of the play is provided by this knowledge and Faustus' attitude towards it (sometimes fatalistic, sometimes desperate). The suggestion has been made that Doctor Faustus is an answer to the medieval mystery play, important precursor of Elizabethan drama. He gets dragged off to hell at the end instead of repenting and ascending to heaven (the standard ending to a mystery play). This experimental nature, if it is indeed the case, could be seen as evidence for an early date for the play.

The play also includes farcical slapstick scenes which have often been labelled out of place and inappropriate by commentators: Faustus travels to Rome and mocks the Pope, invisibly snatching food from him as he attempts to eat; Faustus' servant steals one of his books of magic, and makes inept attempts to cast spells. These scenes are not particularly funny on the page, but they perhaps seem to fit in better with the rest of the drama today when black humour is an important part of the late twentieth century literary scene.

The general tone of the play is serious, if not downbeat, and this is why the clown scenes can seem incongruous. The subject is clearly one which pulls the write in two directions, to the horrific fate which awaits Faustus when his contract expires on the one hand, and the revelry of him enjoying his present powers (and his servant aping these powers) on the other. Marlowe's inability to integrate these aspects of the story provide the big flaws of the play - though it does help to make it interesting.

Christopher Marlowe: The Jew of Malta (c. 1589)

Edition: Nick Hern, 1994
Christopher Marlowe's play is certainly not in tune with the spirit of the second half of the twentieth century, with its portrayal of the Jew, Barabas, as the epitome of deceit and treachery. In his introduction to this edition, Peter J. Smith quotes Barry Kyle, who directed a revival in 1987, as originally thinking that the anti-Semitism would make it unstageable. He lessened the impact of this aspect of the play by using a clever trick to make the Christian leader of Malta appear to be the really unpleasant character.

In some ways, the Jewishness of Barabas is not important. He is explicitly meant to be someone who follows the teachings of Machiavelli (who appears in the prologue as Machevill, "Make-Evil"), whose analysis of politics was thought to be subversive and diabolical. On the surface, there is no particular reason whey the practitioner of his theories needs to be a Jew. In fact, the major reason in the plot for Barabas' faith is to provide the way in which he is put into the position of desiring revenge - through a discriminatory tax confiscating large amounts of his property to pay tribute to the Turks. His faith is clearly important to him, at least at the beginning of the play, because he refuses to become a Christian to avoid the tax, unlike the other Jews on the island (and unlike Shylock who reluctantly accepts baptism at the end of The Merchant of Venice).

In the end, there is really no escaping the anti-Semitism in this play. English people should perhaps not forget which country it was that first forced Jews to wear a yellow star and then expelled them, which country it was that had major anti-Jewish riots following accusations of ritual murder of children - this was medieval England. We should face up to our past, and the most positive way we can respond to this play is to let it shame us.

Molière: Don Juan (1665)

Translation: John Wood, 1953
Edition: Penguin, 1984
Review number: 158

Molière's version of the Don Juan story is cast as a comedy, however bizarre that may sound to those more familiar with the Mozart opera than any other treatment of the tale. The grim material - Don Juan being dragged off to hell when he refuses to repent of his lust even after warnings received from an animated statue - doesn't really fit into a comedy, but does at least provide a change from Molière's standard plot.

The main comic elements used by Molière are the stereotyped device of the imprtinent serving man (in this case aghast at his master's lifestyle but lacking the courage to say so to his face) and Juan's attempt to seduce two very rustic peasant girls simultaneously. Unfortunately, these scenes make the play seem like a poor imitation of a Shakespeare tragedy with the clown scenes particularly inappropriate to the main plot. Basically, for Molière to attempt this was an interesting experiment, but which moved out of his realm of genius.

This may sound like I've been saying that Molière should have written something outside the genre of commedia dell'arte plays, but then I condemn a play which is about as far removed from this genre as is possible. However, Molière was clearly gifted in the style of comedy which he made his own; his greatest plays are those where he subverts the genre and goes beyond its standard plot and character elements, which he usually did by creating a monstrous central character (like Harpagon in The Miser) who completely overbalanced and dominated the play. Don Juan is rather different; it is so far outside the genre, it cannot be said to be transcending it; it is more ignoring it completely.

Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon: No Bed for Bacon (1941)

Edition: New English Library, 1964
Review number: 120

Caryl Brahms & S.J. Simon wrote four humorous historical novels together; and this is probably both the silliest and funniest. They have taken a sort of general idea of the Elizabethan period, as though culled from second-rate popular histories and a good knowledge of the literature and stirred it all together as though everything in the period happened in a rush rather than during a reign of over forty years. Characters from the 1560s rub shoulders with others from the 1600s and later (playwrights right through until the closing of the theatres in the 1640s are often described as Elizabethan).

The plot is dominated by the two best known parts of Elizabethan society, the theatre and the court. Francis Bacon is desperate to be given a secondhand bed by the queen, a sign of great preferment. He commissions Shakespeare to write a play to be performed for the queen and court, to captivate her. (Shakespeare holds out for a fee of £40 when, as Bacon points out, you can get Beaumont and Fletcher for a ten pound note, and there are two of them.) Meanwhile, new lady-in-waiting Viola Compton has annoyed the queen by an accurate imitation of Mary Queen of Scots; she has discovered the stage. As in many stories dealing with the theatre of the time (I can think of two novels and a play without even trying), she disguises herself as a boy to become an actor in Shakespeare's company. (The commoness of the theme is probably because it is prompted by the many girls who disguise themselves as boys in Shakespeare's own plays.)

Across the town, the rival theatre company of Philip Henslowe sets out to destroy the Burtbages and Shakespeare, with various ham-fisted attempts to destroy their theatre: inciting the Puritans to close it down, sending out bravos to burn it - they get lost and burn down Henslowe's theatre instead, and finally sabotaging the props for a performance of Henry VIII. (In fact, the Globe did burn down after an accident with cannon in Henry VIII.)

It's the small touches that make this book so successful - the nightwatchman with ambition, Shakespeare's continual attempts to begin his masterpiece Love's Labour Won, Raleigh's potato tasting and so on. It helps if you know something about Elizabethan history and drama, but the novel is still riotously funny even if you don't know that much. The tone of the whole thing is a little like a student revue (up to including a "Warning to scholars: This book is fundamentally unsound" at the beginning), but it is a good student revue.

Christopher Morris: The Tudors (1972)

Edition: Fontana

This book forms part of a series surveying English history not by cataloguing political events or analysing economic and social trends but by attempting to fathom the personalities of the kings and queens. The Tudors form one of the best periods of English history to understand with this approach, with rulers of strong personality better documented than in preceding centuries, who had real power with which they made immense changes to the country.

The book is on a popular level and is easy to read. It manages to be so without being patronising or losing its academic rigour. Christopher Morris does not sentimentalise his flamboyant subjects, nor does he succumb to the propoganda written by and about them in their lifetimes. Clearly, it can only offer an overview, covering five major figures in only 170 pages. An extensive bibliography means that further reading is easy to find for those who want greater detail.