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The Precarious Balance of John Marston
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
In the first act of The Malcontent, the best known play of John Marston, Pietro is informed that his wife is engaged in an adulterous relationship with the usurping duke, Mendoza. Pietro's informant is Malevole, who is not content with a simple presentation of the facts. Instead, he taunts the foolish old man with a brutal account of the infamy of cuckoldom, tortures him with a lurid description of the wife's lascivious thoughts, suggests, finally, the possibility of unwitting incest:
- Mal. Nay thinke, but thinke what may proceede of this, Adultery is often the mother of incest.
- Piet. Incest.
- Mal. Yes incest: marke, Mendozo of his wife begets perchance a daughter: Mendozo dies. His son marries this daughter. Say you? Nay tis frequent, not onely probable, but no question often acted, whilst ignorance, fearelesse ignorance claspes his owne seede.
- Piet. Hydeous imagination. (i.iii, pp. 149-150)
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Copyright
- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1952
References
1 The H. Harvey Wood edition of Marston's plays (Edinburgh, 1934-39) has been used throughout for quotations. The text is not satisfactory; but a definitive edition of Marston is yet to be issued, and meanwhile the Wood volumes are the most generally available. As there is no line numbering, page references have been supplied instead. The Bullen text (London, 1887) has been used for the non-dramatic works.
2 Bullen, i, 63.
3 “John Marston,” in Elizabethan Essays (London, 1934), pp. 190, 194. Marston's plays, once neglected and even derogated, have stimulated more favorable comments in our own time. “It has been increasingly realized,” writes Boas, Introduction to Stuart Drama (Oxford, 1946), p. 132, “that Ben Jonson's burlesque of the more vulnerable features of Marston's style in his serious plays has led to an undue depreciation of his distinctive qualities. There has been more appreciative recognition of his aims as a dramatist and of their effect on his technique and his dialogue.” One may, indeed, remark that there has been a tendency in recent years possibly to overestimate the artistic and historical importance of Marston's work. The dramatist has been romanticized, perhaps even sentimentalized. To Theodore Spencer he became the attractive symbol of the thwarted idealist. In Criterion, xiii (July 1934), 581-599, Spencer wrote: “The secret of Marston's temperament is that he was an idealist whose idealism was built on insufficient facts. When the facts hit him in the face the blow was severe, and in order to conceal how much he was hurt, he pretended that he had known about them all along, that he enjoyed them” (p. 597). Even the obscurity and eccentricities of diction receive sympathetic consideration: Marston is a founder of the metaphysical school, a writer whose “clumsy attempts to widen the poetic vocabulary marked a transition from one style of writing to another” (pp. 585, 593). Parrott and Ball, in A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), p. 158, feel that “he pierced the veil of illusion to the harsh realities of life”; while, according to Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (New York, 1939), p. 26, Marston—although he never attains complete certainty of touch—“becomes a really distinguished poet in his favorite blending of tragedy and satire.” Ellis-Fermor, in Jacobean Drama, 2nd ed., rev. (London, 1947), pp. 77-97, regards Marston as an innovator, one whose experiments with diction and theatrical situation influenced other Jacobean playwrights. For “it is Marston with his incoherence and the tumultuous confusion of thought and passion who flashes illumination,, as it were of lightning upon a distant hillside, upon roads we are to travel later with Shakespeare, with Webster or with Ford” (p. 79).