John Marston

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An introduction to The Plays of John Marston

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SOURCE: An introduction to The Plays of John Marston, Vol. 1, edited by H. Harvey Wood, Oliver and Boyd, 1934, pp. xv-xliv.

[Wood's three-volume edition of Marston's plays was highly influential in bringing about a resurgence of interest in the dramatist during the 1930s. In the following excerpt from his introduction to that edition, Wood stresses the difficulty of evaluating Marston's "worth" as a writer. He adds that Marston is a highly original thinker and concludes that, "with all his faults … Marston had very positive virtues to commend him."]

Marston's plays have probably disappointed more modern readers than those of any other Elizabethan dramatist. Charles Lamb's eloquent praise of Antonio and Mellida, his comparison of Andrugio and Lear, and, above all, his magnificent passage on the Prologue to Antonio's Revenge, would certainly lead the reader to expect a greater satisfaction from these plays than he is likely to experience. And Swinburne's hyperbolical essay [in The Nineteenth Century, 1888], though it is (like most of Swinburne's criticism) much more balanced than it sounds, is, at best, a rather rhapsodical piece of special pleading, illustrated by passages than can hardly be said to be representative of the text from which they are taken. The demerits of a style like Marston's are, indeed, sufficiently obvious; and in reading even the best of his plays—as, for example, The Malcontent or The Dutch Courtesan—one is exasperated and impeded again and again by what appear to be deliberate contortions of speech and affectations of style. It is not a poor style, but rather a pretentious and mannered one. One would almost prefer a modest poverty to the violent profusion, the 'battering-ram of terms' with which Marston assaults his subject and his reader. But this rather flashy opulence is not Marston's only, or his worst, fault, though it is the most obvious and the most vulgar. An apparent and creditable desire to pack his lines with significance, 'to load every rift with ore,' and, perhaps, too intensive a study of the sententious manner of Senecan tragedy, has resulted in a congested, tortuous obscurity. In Elizabethan dramatic poetry, obscurity is commonly enough encountered. There are passages in Chapman, there are, indeed, many passages in Shakespeare, which the labours of the commentator have not finally illuminated. But the compression of phrase and the packing of sense in Chapman have given a gnomic, elevated quality to his most difficult and undramatic verse: and Shakespeare's compression, though it often resulted in difficulties of sense-interpretation, was always dramatically effective, and lucid to these faculties that transcend understanding. The corresponding difficulties of Marston's style can plead no such extenuation. When he most aims at the oracular manner he is most often merely fatuous: his attempts to heighten his style betray him into the most absurd fustian: and, under emotional stress, his expression is not merely unintelligible, it is unintelligent, preposterous gibberish.

Something of the difficulty of estimating the true worth of Marston's work could be gathered (if all other evidence were lost) from the contentious judgments of his critics. Bullen, though he admits the power of certain tragic scenes in Antonio and Sophonisba, reserves his highest praise for Marston's comedy. Swinburne based his admiration, 'not on his capacity as a satirist or humourist … [but] on his occasionally triumphant success as a tragic poet.' Lamb, as far as one can see, found him all good, and Gifford, apparently, found none of him good. It might be helpful, in such a welter of opinion, to admit Marston's own opinion on the matter. Even if a writer's candid opinion of himself is not evidence of accomplishment it may be accepted as anindication of intention. When in the Prologue to Antonio and Mellida, he wrote:

O that our Muse
Had those abstruse and synowy faculties,
That with a straine of fresh invention
She might presse out the raritie of Art;

—he was indicating, in a modest way, the qualities to be looked for in the play. And if his genius proves to be rather more often muscle-bound than sinewy, it is, at any rate, always strenuous. There is no easy writing in Marston, and, it should be admitted, there is very little easy reading. If the 'raritie of Art' is not pressed out, it is not for lack of weight. It will be found, too, I think, that the most constant emphasis in all Marston's work, 'comedy, tragedy, pastoral, moral, nocturnal, or history,' is the satiric emphasis. Feliche in Antonio and Mellida, Malevole in The Malcontent, Hercules in The Fawn, are all, like Marston, professional satirists strayed on to the stage, scourging not the humours, the follies or the affectations of the age, but its vice and corruption. Few passages in the First Part of Antonio carry such conviction as Feliche's soliloquy:

I cannot sleepe: Feliche seldome rests
In these court lodgings. I have walkt all night,
To see if the nocturnall court delights
Could force me envie their felicitie:
And by plaine troth; I will confesse plaine troth:
I envie nothing, but the Travense light.
O, had it eyes, and eares, and tongues, it might
See sport, heare speach of most strange surquedries.
O, if that candle-light were made a Poet,
He would proove a rare firking Satyrist,
And drawe the core forth of impostum'd sin.
Well, I thanke heaven yet, that my content
Can envie nothing, but poore candle-light.

The deservedly famous confession of Lampatho in What You Will is satire of a more equable, but even more deadly, sort. It is one of the little ironies of literature that these lines should have been written by Marston, who does not seem to have acquired his learning (and certainly did not carry it), with too light a hand.

Delight my spaniell slept, whilst I baus'd leaves,
Toss'd ore the dunces, por'd on the old print
Of titled words, and still my spaniell slept.
Whilst I wasted lampe oile, bated my flesh,
Shrunk up my veines, and still my spaniell slept.
And still I held converse with Zabarell
Aquinas, Scotus
, and the musty sawe
Of antick Donate, still my spaniell slept.
Still on went I; first an sit anima,
Then, and it were mortall. O hold, hold!
At that they are at braine buffets, fell by the eares,
A maine pell-mell together—still my spaniell slept.
Then whether twere Corporeall, Locall, Fixt,
Extraduce; but whether't had free will
Or no, ho Philosophers
Stood banding factions, all so strongly propt,
I staggerd, knew not which was firmer part;
But thought, quoted, read, observ'd, and pryed,
Stufft noting Bookes, and still my spaniell slept.
At length he wakt, and yawnd, and by yon skie,
For ought I know he knew as much as I.

Marston began his literary life with satires, gave his comedies and tragedies over to cynical malcontents and firking satirists, and finished, like several more famous satirists, by writing and preaching sermons. Ben Jonson told Drummond that 'Marston wrott his Father in Lawes preachings & his Father in Law his Commedies'—probably a more critical jest than Jonson quite realised at the time. Marston's moral preoccupation was always active. It imparted an asperity to his comedy, and gave to his tragic characters the inhuman, absolute qualities of the morality puppets. It follows that his sense of humour was not of the best; and this defect is responsible for lapses in his tragedy more serious than his failures in comedy. Marston's comedy has, indeed, been unjustly belittled. Shakespeare apart, how many of the Elizabethans succeeded in mingling tragedy and comedy? Marston's most tragic comedians are not as bad as those of Webster, or Massinger, or Ford; he has, even in the middle of his tragic action, scenes of easy, natural, graceful humour, like the passage of wit between Pietro and the singing-boy in The Malcontent, III, iv., and his Cocledemoy and Mulligrub have at least the vitality and profusion of great comic creations. It is rather in his relentless pursuit of a moral issue, presented by incredibly consistent and single-minded characters, conceding nothing to the impediments of chance, and the always incalculable quality of human nature, that Marston's defect proves most vital. Even Cyril Tourneur, a greater poet and a more passionate moralist than Marston, has a more normal and judicial view of human values by which to check his moral conclusions. A comparison of the last scenes of the Revenger's Tragedie and Antonio's Revenge will illustrate the distinction. In both cases, murder and corruption have been paid in kind; Vindice has wiped out his 'nest of Dukes,' and Antonio's monstrous duty of bloodshed and torture is accomplished. The almost high-spirited diablerie of Vindice's assassinations, and Antonio's revolting murder of little Julio, have an equal technical justification. We cannot quarrel with the system on which the Revenge play is built. But there is something shocking in the complacency with which the final butchery of Antonio is accepted:

I Sen. Whose hand presents this gory spectacle?
Anto. Mine.
Pan. No: mine.
Alb. No: mine.
Ant. I will not loose the glorie of the deede,
Were all the tortures of the deepest hell
Fixt to my limbs. I pearc't the monsters heart,
With an undaunted hand.
Pan. By yon bright spangled front of heaven twas I:
Twas I sluc't out his life bloode.
Alb. Tush, to say truth, twas all.
2 Sen. Blest be you all, and may your honours live
Religiously helde sacred, even for ever and ever.
Gal. (To Antonio). Thou art another Hercules to us,
In ridding huge pollution from our State.

And the blood-stained conspirators, having declined 'the cheefest fortunes of the Venice State,' retire, with some dignity, to 'live inclos'd In holy verge of some religious order.' Vindice and Hippolito are equally proud, when all is done, of their judicial murders.

Ant. Just is the Lawe above
But of al things it puts me most to wonder,
How the old Duke came murdred.
Vin. Oh, my Lord.
Ant. It was the strangeliest carried, I not hard of the like.
Hip. Twas all donne for the best my Lord.
Vin. All for your graces good; we may be bould to speake it now,
Twas some-what witty carried tho we say it.
Twas we two murdred him.
Ant. You two?
Vin. None else ifaith my Lord, nay twas well managde.
Ant. Lay hands upon those villaines.
Vin. How? on us?
Ant. Beare 'em to speedy execution.
Vin. Heart, wast not for your good my Lord?
Ant. My good! away with 'em; such an ould man as he,
You that would murder him would murder me.

And the two revengers accept the judgment with a grim, philosophical humour:

Vin. Ist come about?
Hip. Sfoote, brother, you begun.

It is a refinement of art (and justice) beyond the reach of Marston. The situation of Antonio's Revenge is remarkably close to that of Hamlet. Piero and Claudius, Maria and Gertrude, Mellida and Ophelia, and Antonio and Hamlet are (nearly enough) in equivalent situations—'Poyson the father, butcher the son, & marry the mother; ha?'—and Marston's conduct of the action is proper enough to a Revenge Tragedy, of which type, it should be remembered, Shakespeare's Hamlet is a refinement and perversion. Antonio pursues his filial duty of revenge, carries it out without compunction (as did the original Hamlet of Saxo and Belleforest, and, most probably, of the earlier English play), and his father's ghost, satisfied, declaims:

'Tis done, and now my sowle shal sleep in rest.
Sons that revenge their fathers blood, are blest.

Shakespeare and Marston, inheriting the same theme and the same situations (murder and usurpation, the ghost clamorous for vengeance, deferred opportunity, feigned madness and real cunning, unhappy love, and the last, bloody catastrophe) both attempted to heighten and transfigure a crude, barbaric history. Marston's method is one of inflation, his motto, like Antonio's epitaph, is Ne plus ultra. For the whips, the 'scourging Nemesis,' of the Spanish Tragedy, Antonio's Revenge substitutes scorpions. Shakespeare's sophistication of the theme is achieved by a translation into the terms of common life, by his 'common sense of what men were, and are,' to borrow Marston's excellent phrase. Hamlet is a revenger, and Hamlet is a malcontent, but the interest is focussed on the man, not on his function.

Not unnaturally, the sincerity of Marston's satiric attitude has often been called in question. The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image was a bad start in life for a moralist; and the very extravagance of the poet's sardonic rage has led to the belief that his cynicism was affected and his moral indignation merely the cloak for a prurient and perverted interest in the vices he chastised. That any literary satire written in the first years of the seventeenth century was spontaneous and entirely sincere, it would be dangerous to assume. It can only be said that Marston's satirical mouthpieces speak with an accent of conviction sadly lacking in his other characters, and seem, above all his other creations, to be drawn from the life. He was not merely following a satiric fashion. There is little doubt that he was deeply and sincerely interested in the vices and corruptions of his age. Further than that it would be unwise to probe, either in the case of John Marston or many another whipper of vice.

With all his faults, faults of affectation, pedantry, harshness and obscurity, Marston had very positive virtues to commend him. If his verse, by too great and frequent infusion of argument, was often turgid and cramped, he did, on occasion, write with an almost metaphysical heat and vigour.

Conceipt you me. As having clasp't a rose
Within my palme, the rose being tane away,
My hand retaines a little breath of sweete:
So may mans trunke; his spirit slipt awaie,
Hold still a faint perfume of his sweet ghest.
Tis so; for when discursive powers flie out,
And rome in progresse, through the bounds of heaven,
The soule it selfe gallops along with them,
As chiefetaine of this winged troope of thought,
Whilst the dull lodge of spirit standeth waste,
Untill the soule returne …

His power of description, when he is content to write English instead of the absurd jargon he so often affects, is evidence of the same close application and study that saves even his most undramatic verse from being contemptible. The description of the cave of the dreadful enchantress, Erictho, the hermit-duke's description of his sea-vext cave:

My Cell tis Lady, where insteed of Maskes,
Musicke, Tilts, Tournies, and such courtlike shewes,
The hollow murmure of the checklesse windes
Shall groane againe, whilst the unquiet sea
Shakes the whole rocke with foamy battery:
There Usherlesse the ayre comes in and out:
The reumy vault will force your eyes to weepe,
Whilst you behold true desolation:
A rocky barrennesse shall pierce your eyes,
Where all at once one reaches, where he stands,
With browes the roofe, both walles with both his handes.

—and such brief images as occur, for instance, in the Malcontent's invocation to night:

O thou pale sober night,
Thou that in sluggish fumes all sence dost steepe:
Thou that gives all the world full leave to play,
Unbendst the feebled vaines of sweatie labour;
The Gally-slave, that all the toilesome day,
Tugges at his oare against the stubborne wave,
Straining his rugged veines, snores fast.
The stooping Sitheman that doth barbe the field
Thou makest winke sure …

—reveal Marston as a sensitive, observant and imaginative writer. And all former editors of Marston have remarked on the dignified, exalted rhetoric spoken by so many of his characters—Sophonisba, Gelosso, Andrugio and Pandulpho. Andrugio's deservedly famous lines:

Why man, I never was a Prince till now …
[Antonio and Mellida. Act IV, Scene i.]

and the defeated philosophy of Pandulpho:

Man will breake out, despight Philosophie.

Why, all this while I ha but plaid a part,
Like to some boy, that actes a Tragedie,
Speakes burly words, and raves out passion:
But, when he thinks upon his infant weaknesse,
He droopes his eye.
[Antonio's Revenge, Act IV, Scene v.].

—passages like these have an easy, unaffected eloquence and dignity, and do much to atone for Marston's many faults of style, and deficiencies as a constructive dramatist.

The best of Marston's comedies and tragedies, and his great tragi-comedy, The Malcontent, have striking and original qualities. The dramatist who painted the passionate, murderous courtesan, Franceschina, and the humours of Cocledemoy and Mulligrub into the same scene was no contemptible workman. The Malcontent is one of the most original plays of its period, and left its mark on greater plays than itself, Webster's Dutchesse of Malfy for one. If it must be admitted that Marston was, in general, too much of a theorist in his creation of character, and that his situations, in consequence, are too academic and inhuman, yet it should also be admitted that he had original and inventive qualities, a high conception of his dramatic function, and an occasional ability, both in tragedy and comedy, to write eloquent, earnest, passionate and thoughtful verse. His first published work he dedicated 'To everlasting Oblivion,' and, his playwriting and preaching done, he was buried, according to Antony Wood, 'under the Stone which hath written on it Oblivioni sacrum.' That a succession of editors and readers have seen fit to deny him that oblivion is probably the highest testimony to his positive merits as a dramatist and a poet.

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