Marston, John | Kenneth J. E. Graham (essay date 1994)
Kenneth J. E. Graham (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: "The Mysterious Plainness of Anger: The Search for Justice in Satire and Revenge Tragedy," in The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance, Cornell, 1994, pp. 125-67.
[Here, Graham discusses Marston's handling of anger in The Scourge of Villanie, Antonio and Mellida, and Antonio's Revenge, arguing that "his work shows a plainness that questions all values, thus transforming anger from a reflection of some prior reality to pure self-expression."]
The connection of plainness to anger in satire and revenge tragedy is easily demonstrated. For many in the Renaissance, the satirist is a plainspeaker and vice versa, as John Earle illustrates in [Micro-Cosmographie; or, a Piece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters] when he says that the blunt or plain man "is as squeazy of his commendations, as his courtesie, and his good...
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