labels for the commonplace ideas ofWhat You Will nor the tenuous projections of the satiric background of the Antonio plays. In the central figure of Malevole-Altofronto, Marston has created the perfect objective correlative for his worldview. That view is embedded in the structure of The Malcontent, which continues and amalgamates Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge. Eddying between comedy and tragedy, The Malcontent employs all the Senecan sordidness, theatrical self-consciousness, and satiric commentary of its predecessors. Ostensibly, The Malcontent is a revenge play at the heart of which Altofronto, deposed duke of Genoa, assumes the disguise of Malevole in order to regain his dukedom from the usurper Pietro, who, in turn, is the tool by which the scheming Mendoza advances his own ducal ambitions. Unlike the typical revenge play, which culminates in the hero’s bloody reprisals, The Malcontent achieves a fragile harmony based on the hero’s modified goals, for this revenger seeks to reform rather than to destroy. Undeniably bitter at his dispossession, Altofronto is nevertheless driven as much by the will to rejuvenate his enemies as to reclaim his rule. A victim of deception and intrigue, Altofronto must learn to deceive his deceivers. The mask of Malevole becomes a strategy for survival in the ridiculous yet hazardous world created by fallen humanity. That world is defined by the sexual corruption of Aurelia, Pietro’s unfaithful wife; of Ferneze, her lustful lover, who competes with Mendoza for her favor; of Biancha, who distributes her favors wholesale; and of Maquerelle, the overripe procuress, no less than by the sinister plotting of Pietro and Mendoza.

Altofronto’s mask is so firmly in place from the outset that a considerable portion of the first act transpires before Malevole reveals his true identity to the “constant lord,” Celso. By this time, he has already tortured Pietro by disclosing Aurelia’s adultery with Mendoza. Liberated by the traditional role of the malcontent, Malevole will continue to castigate the corruption that he exposes. Malevole shapes the play even as he is shaped by its demands: It is in the service of reform that he spotlights human vice and folly. The essentially passive satirist, periodically intruding into other characters’ stories, now emerges as the hero of the play whose still biting commentary is crucial to its action. When Malevole, who has been hired by Mendoza to solicit Altofronto’s “widow,” Maria, and to murder Pietro, reveals the depth of Mendoza’s perfidy to the horrified Pietro, the latter disguises himself as a hermit and returns to court to announce his own death. Mendoza now moves swiftly to consolidate his rule, banishing Aurelia, sending Malevole off to urge his case to the imprisoned Maria, and hiring the hermit to poison Malevole, who in turn is ordered to poison the hermit. Forced into a horrified recognition of the depraved world that he has helped create, Pietro is not even permitted the solace of Aurelia’s sincere repentance before Malevole’s savage castigation of earth as “the very muckhill on which the sublunarie orbs cast their excrement” and man as “the slime of this dongue-pit.” This episode at court and its aftermath typify Malevole’s practice of moral surgery: positioning characters first to confront their own depravity, then to repent of it, and finally to excise it. Malevole’s manipulations fittingly culminate in the court masque that ends the play. Ordered by Mendoza to celebrate his accession to power, the masque becomes the vehicle of his undoing. The masquers reveal themselves as Mendoza’s apparent murder victims, and Malevole, again Altofronto, reclaims Maria and his dukedom. Such characters as Pietro, Aurelia, and Ferneze, truly contrite and repentant, are freely pardoned; others, such as Maquerelle and the knavish old courtier, Bilioso, are banished from court. Mendoza, reduced to cravenly begging for his life, is contemptuously, and literally, kicked out.

Altofronto’s intricate role-playing and manipulations have brought concord out of discord. By consciously delimiting his revenge, by constantly pointing to the absurdity of human action, and by the consummate theatricality not only of his gestures but also of his double role, he transforms the revenge play into a vehicle for social conciliation.

The Dutch Courtesan

In The Dutch Courtesan, Marston abandons the satiric furor and Italianate intrigues of The Malcontent for exuberant comedy. Although its dramatic material is undeniably lighter, The Dutch Courtesan is equally successful in its depiction and analysis of human nature. The play’s moral center is Freevill, who plans one last visit to Francischina, the courtesan of the title, before settling down to married life with the angelic Beatrice. Outraged by Freevill’s loose conduct, Malheureux goes along in order to admonish Francischina and dissuade his friend. A chilly, puritanical, and inexperienced young man, Malheureux is jolted from his moral complacency at first sight of the courtesan, whom he immediately longs to possess. When Francischina demands Freevill’s murder as the price of her favors, the distressed Malheureux confesses his plight to his friend. Concluding that only strong medicine can restore Malheureux to his senses, Freevill concocts a bizarre plot. The friends stage a quarrel, after which Freevill goes into hiding. Claiming Francischina’s favors as his promised reward for killing Freevill, Malheureux is deceived when she betrays him to the law. Meanwhile, Freevill has vanished, and with him, the corroborating evidence of the hoax. Condemned to hang, Malheureux is saved only at the gallows by Freevill, who justifies his friend’s anguish as the price that must be paid for moral enlightenment.

The Dutch Courtesan is a comic morality play whose end is psychological and social, rather than religious, salvation. It proceeds by establishing a dialectic between love and lust, defined at the outset by Freevill, who sees no moral inconsistency between his former lust for Francischina and his present love for Beatrice. Whoring, no less than marriage, is a valid expression of man’s nature. This Malheureux denies, arguing for a rigid line of demarcation between virtue and vice and thereby against the reality of the human condition. A “snowy” man of cloistered virtue, Malheureux must be brought face-to-face with an exemplum of his folly in the alluring person of Francischina. Undeniably a good man, as evidenced by his refusal to betray Freevill at Francischina’s behest, Malheureux must be brought to the foot of the scaffold to attain self-knowledge. Regarding himself as above passion, he becomes “passion’s slave”; proffering himself as Freevill’s moral tutor, he becomes his moral pupil. One of Marston’s most effective characterizations, he mirrors the playwright’s moral torment. Regarding lust as the deadliest sin, his imagination nevertheless dwells on the loose sexuality he abhors. Shocked by the moral degeneracy of the beautiful Francischina, he eddies between frantic desire and consuming guilt. In this drama of initiation, Malheureux, like his creator, must learn to recognize and control his natural desires, not to annihilate them.

These lessons are farcically reinforced in a brilliant subplot that features Cocledemoy’s gulling of the affected pseudo-Puritans, the Mulligrubs. By causing Mulligrub’s false arrest for thievery and effecting his victim’s release only at the point of execution, Cocledemoy, like Freevill, exposes and cauterizes moral absolutism. This subplot, combined with Tysefew’s bantering wooing of Beatrice’s sister, Crispinella, also functions to preserve the play’s light tone.

By introducing a purely comic subplot, by inflating Malheureux’s rhetoric, by layering Francischina’s diatribes with a thick Dutch accent, and by establishing Freevill’s beneficent control of the action, Marston invokes a world of comic absurdity as he dissipates its potential tragedy. A perceptive study in sexual psychology, The Dutch Courtesan balances and expands its author’s moral vision.

The Fawn

The Fawn, Marston’s frothiest comedy, recapitulates that vision and its modes of achievement. Like The Dutch Courtesan, it treats the perverted natural instincts resulting from repressed or misdirected sexuality; it also employs a double plot no less sophisticated than its predecessor’s. Like The Malcontent, it is set in an Italian court corroded by folly and flattery, and its hero is a disguised duke bent on reform. The Fawn’s lighter tone stems primarily from its unthreatened duke and its more farcical than sinister court intrigues.

Hercules, duke of Ferrara, appears at the court of Gonzago, duke of Urbin, disguised as Faunus, the consummate flattering courtier and a member of his son Tiberio’s retinue. Tiberio’s ostensible mission is to negotiate the marriage of Gonzago’s fifteen-year-old daughter, Dulcimel, to his sixty-four-year-old father. Actually, Duke Hercules hopes that Dulcimel’s charms will arouse his unnaturally aloof son to woo the girl for himself. To ensure that end, he monitors the action as Faunus. Because Dulcimel immediately falls in love with Tiberio and sets out to awaken the young man’s latent feelings, Faunus is freed to deal with the corruption and hypocrisy of the court; nearly half the play is devoted to providing him with appropriate occasions to practice the art of flattery on the unsuspecting courtiers. Lulled into freely confessing their follies, Faunus’s victims indirectly satirize themselves. Because vanity rather than Machiavellian intrigue marks Urbin’s court, Faunus contents himself with exposing grotesqueries rather than reviling corruption. The stuff of satire—Nymphadora’s claim to be the world’s great lover, Herod’s assertion of superiority, Dosso’s impotence and his wife Garbetza’s adultery with his brother, Zuccone’s jealousy of his estimable wife Zoya—takes the form of sexual foibles. That these sins are merely skin-deep allows Marston to turn his satiric commentator from savage railer to witty practitioner of the courtly games he plans to expose. Moreover, the sexual waywardness of the minor characters functions as an implicit comment on the sexual backwardness of Tiberio. The double plot of The Fawn therefore proceeds along parallel tracks, Faunus dealing with sexual excess, Dulcimel with sexual indifference. Successful resolution depends on the ability of Faunus and Dulcimel to awaken Gonzago to the folly around him—his own as well as his court’s.

Gonzago, duke of Urbin, is one of Marston’s most inspired comic creations. Delighting in words and garrulous in conversation, he imagines himself the consummate rhetorician. His several long-winded speeches, studded with odd bits of classical lore, are designed to bolster his self-image of a learned man of ripe wisdom; instead, they reveal him as an unknowing self-flatterer and, therefore, as a potential gull. Dulcimel plays on her father’s vanity to promote the very affair he would frustrate, using him as a go-between to inform the slow Tiberio of her interest. Shamelessly flattered by his daughter, Gonzago becomes her unwitting instrument; “hee shall direct the Prince the meanes the very way to my bed.” Through four acts, Dulcimel, like Faunus, wields the weapon of flattery. In the fifth act, Faunus exploits her actions, trapping the duke in the same way that he has trapped others.

The final act is played on a two-level stage: Tiberio climbs a “tree” to join Dulcimel above, while Hercules remains below. The marriage of the young lovers presumably coincides with the several judgments rendered by Cupid’s Parliament. Symbolic of healthy and natural love, the union of Dulcimel and Tiberio implicitly condemns the courtiers, who have violated Cupid’s laws. Paraded before the court and arraigned on Faunus’s evidence, they are exposed and released. Finally, Gonzago is indicted for his pretensions to wisdom and, more serious, for his attempts to obstruct life’s natural flow. “What a slumber have I been in,” cries the duke, whose court promises to be healthier hereafter.

In its comic characterizations, in its tonal consistency, and in its technical assurance, The Fawn is a masterly achievement. Marston’s fusion of satiric force and content, apparent in The Malcontent and The Dutch Courtesan, is no less perfect in The Fawn.

Sophonisba

Sophonisba is Marston’s attempt at high Roman tragedy. Full of high moral sentiment expressed in consistently lofty verse, it impressed T. S. Eliot as Marston’s best play. Its purpose, implicit in its alternate title, The Wonder of Women, is to portray human perfection in the person of its heroine, Sophonisba. To evoke her ideal virtue, Marston employs his characteristic tactic of pitting individual honor and integrity against a corrupt world. It is in the altered relationship between character and context, however, that Sophonisba embodies Marston’s tragic design. Earlier protagonists manipulated adversaries and events; Sophonisba is victimized by them. A Malevole or a Hercules recognized surrounding evil, satirically castigated it, and finally dispersed or reformed it. Sophonisba, no less perceptive, can only reaffirm her virtue in a world whose evil she cannot alter and can evade only by suicide. The wildly chaotic settings for court intrigues have yielded to a harder, more frightening world of realpolitik.

Before the end of the second act, the main characters and the political world they inhabit are sharply defined. A note of discord is struck early, when the news that Carthage has been invaded disrupts the nuptials of Sophonisba and the famed Carthaginian general Massinissa. When she selflessly postpones marital consummation in the face of her husband’s martial duty, she elicits the first of his many expressions of awe at her character: “Wondrous creature, even fit for Gods, not men . . . a pattern/ Of what can be in woman.” Much of the remainder of the play consists of tableaux that present repeated assaults on Sophonisba’s unassailable virtue, each designed to spotlight her moral grandeur. In similar fashion, political evil surfaces in the scene immediately following Massinissa’s departure for battle. No sooner does he leave than the senators of Carthage plot to betray him and Sophonisba for an alliance with the powerful Syphax. Their treachery backfires when Syphax, driven by lust for Sophonisba, who had earlier rejected him, deserts his army in his frenzy to reach her. Syphax’s forces defeated, Massinissa and Sophonisba are reunited. Their happiness is, however, as illusory as it is brief. Syphax, his lust frustrated by Sophonisba’s virtue and his prestige tarnished by Massinissa’s victory in single combat, conceives a final act of vengeance. Arguing, ironically, that Sophonisba’s virtues of loyalty to Carthage and constancy to Massinissa will tempt the latter to break his oath of allegiance to Rome, Syphax convinces the Roman general Scipio to demand that she be delivered up to Roman captivity. Confounded by the excruciating choice of betraying his allies or his wife, Massinissa crumbles. No such dilemma exists for Sophonisba, whose immediate decision to commit suicide implicitly condemns her husband’s failure to do so. A good and courageous man, albeit Sophonisba’s moral inferior, Massinissa is reduced to mixing the poisoned wine for her supremely stoic gesture. Eulogizing her—“O glory ripe for heaven”—he measures her distance from ordinary mortals.

The meaning of Sophonisba’s suicide transcends its dramatic function of saving Massinissa by eliminating his moral dilemma. For Marston’s heroine, suicide is a welcome escape from “an abhord life” of Roman captivity; it has become virtue’s only possible response to the world’s depravity. For the playwright, her death creates a dramatic impasse. An obsessive moralist from the outset of his literary career, Marston found in satiric comedy the means of exposing, castigating, and reforming evil. Abandoning satire for pure tragedy, he traps Sophonisba in a world of omnipresent evil that she can recognize but not alter. Thus, the final outcome of the struggle of individual integrity against the corrupt world is martyrdom. After Sophonisba, Marston’s eventual desertion of the stage for the pulpit may have been the only viable extension of that struggle.