24-Hour Read-a-Thon: 1:00 a.m. (Update #6)

I had four cups of coffee at 8:30 p.m. and I'm TIRED!

On the upside, I did get through the first 60 of 120 pages of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller. As far as crazy Renaissance English goes, it's not nearly as bad as "The Terrors of the Night," although it does have its moments of incomprehension. I think what also helps is how funny it is. It is a picaresque concerning the misadventures of one Jack Wilton, a rogue, knave, cavalier, expert gambler, woer of women, fountain of wit. He remorselessly sends men to ruin with his trickery, including one particularly hated army captain, whom Jack convinces to go over to the French lines as a spy and assassin, in hopes that the French will either kill him or he would be flogged and sent back to the English in disgrace.

This confession could not choose but move them all to laughter, in that he made it as light a matter to kill their King and come back, as to go to Islington and eat a mess of cream and come home again; nay, and besides he protested that he had no other intention, as if that were not enough to hang him.

I got as far as the part where Wilton's love-sick traveling companion challenges the Court of Florence to defend the beauty of his Florentine-born lady back in England. Then the narrative started to drag with drawn-out description of battle armor.

Unfortunately, the coffee has also made it difficult for me to concentrate, so for the time being I will go back to poetry, this time Wallace Stevens and T.S. Eliot.