Death of Sardanapalus

After fussing over what to read next, this afternoon I started reading Ben Jonson's Volpone from a recent compilation entitled Seven Masterpieces of Jacobean Drama edited by Frank Kermode. The book contains a trove of other, major and minor, English Renaissance plays: Thomas Heywood's A Woman Killed With Kindness, Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger Tragedy, Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher's The Maid's Tragedy, Thomas Middleton's A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, John Webster's The Duchess of Malfi and Thomas Middleton and William Rowley's The Changeling.

Having read briefly up until Act 2, Scene 1, the play seems, so far, cleverly and masterfully plotted. A better play to read, and dramatize in the imagination, than the previous, annoying Jonson play I had to read: Poetaster.