Marston modestly admits in the preface to one of his later plays that "above better desert" he has been "fortunate in these stage-pleasings." There is reason to believe that his work was usually well received …, but with The Malcontent in 1604 he momentarily achieved a wider popularity. Three quartos of this playwere required in less than six months, and the King's Men judged it to have a broad enough appeal for production at the Globe. The reasons are not hard to discover. It has an exciting plot with a multitude of surprising twists, and in the Hamlet-like title figure Marston created a fascinating role worthy of the actor who played it, Richard Burbage.

But even with Burbage and the other immortals, a production of The Malcontent in the vast open spaces of the Globe must have been unsatisfactory. The cramped, claustrophobic setting of a private theater is absolutely essential to Marston's purposes. Using techniques prophetic of German Expressionist drama of the 1920's, the play opens with a barrage of olfactory and aural effects. First, the stage direction tells us, we hear the "vilest out of tune Musicke," after which an opening dialogue between two minor characters establishes the atmosphere:

BILIOSO: Why how now? are ye mad? or drunke? or both? or what?

PRAEPASSO. Are ye building Babilon there?

BILI. Heer's a noyse in Court, you thinke you are in a Taverne, do you not?

PRAEP. You thinke you are in a brothell house doe you not? This roome is ill sented. [Enter one with a Perfume]. So; perfume; perfume; some upon me, I pray thee: The Duke is upon instant entrance; so, make place there." (I, 145)

"Heer round about is hell" (I, 204) in a "world … turnde upside downe" (I, 177).

In this heightened version of the world of What You Will, are constantly "bewitched" (I, 157) and "beseld" (I, 165) by their senses. They are helpless before those who would inflame them:

in an Italian lascivious Pallace, a Lady gardianlesse,

Left to the push of all allurement,
The strongest incitements to immodestie,
To have her bound, incensed with wanton sweetes,
Her veines fild hie with heating delicates,
Soft rest, sweete Musick, amorous Masquerers, lascivious banquets, sinne it selfe gilt ore, strong phantasie tricking up strange delights, presenting it dressed pleasingly to sence, sence leadingit unto the soule, confirmed with potent example, impudent custome inticed by that great bawd opportunitie, thus being prepar'd, clap to her easie eare, youth in good clothes, well shapt, rich, faire-spoken, promising-noble, ardent bloud-full, wittie, flattering:

Ulisses absent, O Ithaca, can chastest Penelope, hold out. (I, 179)

Through such speeches and through symbolic actions, Marston takes great pains throughout the play to create an atmosphere of overpowering, nearly irresistible corruption. Life in the palace is imaged by a symbolic dance (IV.ii.) which is far removed from Davies' heavenly ritual of love and harmony. Instead, it is a "brawle"—the pun alludes to a complex French dance—resembling in its meaningless intricacy and confusion a "maze" where "honor" is lost (I, 188).

Atmosphere and action are inextricably intertwined in this play; each infects the other. In the second act, for example, the Duke plans to catch his wife in the arms of her latest lover, having been informed of the tryst by her former lover. What could have occupied one scene is broken into three, with each of these punctuated by scenes in other parts of the palace. First we see the new lover slip into the duchess' chamber while the old lover (the worst villain in the play) exults in his imminent vengeance (II.i.). Then we hear court ladies exchange dirty jokes about cuckolding and aphrodisiacs with the Malcontent, Malevole (II.ii.), after which the scene shifts to the last-minute preparations of the group of courtiers who are to break in upon the lovers (II.iii.). Once more there is a shift to the ladies, who make amoral comments about the necessity of caring for their beauty as they sip a newly concocted "posset," a beautifier and "restorative" (II.iv.). At the end of the scene we hear music emanating from the duchess' chamber to remind us of what is going on there, and only then do we see the violent scene in which the duchess is publicly disgraced and her lover wounded (II.v.). The cause-effect relationship between these apparently disparate activities is clear. Women who have such matters on their minds will fall into such situations. When the speech about the dangers in an "Italian lascivious pallace" (quoted above) is delivered a few scenes later, its truth has already been demonstrated.

The upshot of the action I have just summarized is that the villainous Mendoza regains his position as the Duchess' lover and as the Duke's favorite and successor. Moreover, his cunning plot, concocted at a moment when he seemed to have been outfoxed, leadsto further success. Angered by her public humiliation, the Duchess resolves to revenge herself on her husband. In an instant she invents a plot which reveals her own high competence in the intricacies of Realpolitik:

Ile make thee Duke, we are of Medices,
Florence our friend, in court my faction
Not meanly strength-full; the Duke then dead,
We well prepar'd for change: the multitude
Irresolutely reeling: we in force:
Our partie seconded: the kingdom mazde:
No doubt of swift successe all shall be grac'd.
(I, 171)

The activities just described are normal in the palace. The "unquiet studies " of these discontented creatures, in the words of Marston's preface, "labor innovation, contempt of holy policie, reverent comely superioritie, and establisht unity" (I, 139). Politically, they engage in usurpations, domestically, in cuckolding. In the Duke's palace the two activities are connected. To gratify these linked appetites, one must be able to plot. The Duchess Aurelia's mastery of this art comes to her naturally because she is a Medici, but there are other great technicians of plotting. The form of the play can be described as a structure of progressively cunning plots; through them, the usurping Duke Pietro is usurped, and the successful usurper, Mendoza, is in turn usurped by the rightful Duke, Altofronto, who has been masking as the Malcontent, Malevole. In this atmosphere plotting is as natural as breathing.

In addition to linking atmosphere and action more profoundly than in his previous plays, Marston has also inhabited the palace with a more fully realized set of characters. The villainous Mendoza is a satiric portrait, but Marston endows him with the ability to express his physical pleasure at being a prince's favorite in remarkably vivid images: "to have a generall timerous respect, observe a man, a statefull scilence in his presence: solitarinesse in his absence, a confused hum and busie murmure of obsequious suters trayning him; the cloth held up, and waye proclaimed before him; Petitionary vassailes licking the pavement with their slavish knees, whilst some odde pallace Lampreel's that ingender with Snakes, and are full of eyes on both sides with a kinde of insinuated humblenesse fixe all their delightes upon his browe" (I, 154). In addition to reaching "the Olympus of favor" (I, 154), he is ravished by his role as the Duchess' lover. When his idealsituation is threatened, he defends himself with great cunning because he remembers precisely what it feels like to be a menial:

Shall I whose very humme, strooke all heads bare,
Whose face made scilence: creaking of whose shooe
Forc'd the most private passages flie ope,
Scrape like a servile dog at some latch'd doore?
Learne now to make a leg? and cry beseech ye,
Pray yee, is such a Lord within? be aw'd
At some odde ushers scoft formality?
First seare my braines: Unde cadis non quo refert.
(I, 163)

The Senecan tag is not a revenge play cliché. It is an association which naturally springs to the mind of a Machiavellian. Mendoza is frequently a comic figure, but he is fully imagined and credible.

The Duchess Aurelia is a much slighter portrait, but Marston successfully captures the image of a haughty, passionate aristocrat. She reacts with defiance and extravagant indifference to the public exposure of her immoral conduct and with equally extravagant contrition after she is betrayed by her lover. She dances defiantly when her husband's death is announced, but after her conversion she wears a "mourning habit" and interrupts courtly revels by reciting pious poetry (I, 211).

The weak usurper, Duke Pietro, is also conceived with some psychological subtlety. He is a puppet set up by an outside power and manipulated by Mendoza. Inept at politics, he is, fittingly, also a cuckold. It is this predicament which troubles him most, for his repentant wife's words at the end of the play confirm what we have already seen: "As the soule lov'd the body, so lov'd he" (I, 195). When Pietro is finally compelled to take vengeance, Marston does not use the situation as a pretext for stale jokes about cuckoldry. He makes him into a pitiable and sympathetic figure:

I strike but yet like him that gainst stone walles
Directs his shafts, reboundes in his owne face,
My Ladies shame is mine, O God tis mine.
Therefore I doe conjure all secrecie,
Let it be as very little as may be; pray yee, as may be?
Make frightlesse entrance, salute her with soft eyes,
Staine nought with blood—onely Ferneze dies,
But not before her browes: O Gentlemen
God knowes I love her, nothing els, but this,
I am not well.
(I, 166-167)

The request to "salute her with soft eyes" is a delicate touch; it prepares us for Pietro's eventual moral regeneration. He has been living in a fool's paradise, and he eloquently attests to the pain of learning the truth:

I am not unlike to some sickman,
That long desired hurtfull drinke; at last
Swilles in and drinkes his last, ending at once
Both life and thirst: O would I nere had knowne
My owne dishonour: good God, that men should
Desire to search out that, which being found kils all
Their joye of life: to taste the tree of Knowledge,
And then be driven out of Paradice.
(I, 174)

Pietro is a convincing combination of sensitivity and weakness. He provides a subtle contrast to the two other figures who take their turns as Duke. He lacks the passionate intensity of the one and the moral stature of the other.

These are the main ingredients of the world which the hero must set right. Dispossessed of his kingdom and sentenced to exile, the rightful Duke of Genoa, Altofronto, remains at court in the disguise of a "malcontent." This term, which seems to have entered the language in the 1580's, denotes a clearly defined type. A man of some parts, developed by education and foreign travel, the malcontent was poor, usually unemployed, and obsessed by a sense of unrewarded merit; often he was melancholic. Thus he was a prime source of danger to the kingdom since he was readily available for schemes against the established order. In these, he could be relied on to employ special skills acquired in Italy for plotting and murder. As many scholars have pointed out, the malcontent was only in part a literary construction. Economic and political conditions fostered his appearance late in Elizabeth's reign, and, in fact, such men did sow some discord, as Henry Cuffe's role in the Earl of Essex's uprising illustrates. By the time of this play, the malcontent had become a stock figure on the stage. Nevertheless, there must have been special interest attached to a play with this title, written by an author with a reputation for "malcontentedness." The evidence of the preface, the "Prologus," and the Induction indicates that some members of the audienceinterpreted the play "with subtilitie (as deepe as hell)" (I, 139). Marston claimed that it was "over-cunning" (I, 139) to ferret out contemporary allusions, but … a few clear examples have survived.

Even if Marston did not conceive the play as having a specific contemporary application, this play, with its suggestively polittical title, is primarily about the conduct of politics in a world "turnde upside downe" (I, 177). From the first moments it is apparent that the Malcontent is an agent of discord. It is he who produces the "vilest out of tune Musicke" offstage, and his first speech, blurted from the same place, is the verbal equivalent of this discord: "Yaugh, godaman, what do'st thou there: Dukes Ganimed Junoes jealous of thy long stockings: shadowe of a woman, what wouldst Wee-sell? thou lambe a Court: what doost thou bleat for? a you smooth chind Catamite!" (I, 145). This clash of obscene discords seems to mirror a "soule … at variance (within her selfe)" (I, 146), as the Duke says in his character sketch of the Malcontent. Although "his speach is halterworthy at all howers," the Duke has licensed him to speak freely in order to help him to "understand those weakenesses which others flattery palliates" (I, 146). Thus the title figure with the name that means "ill will" appears to be a domesticated malcontent, a Lord of Misrule authorized to castigate the Duke and his courtiers. He goes at it with wild abandon, changing his direction at every moment:

PIETRO. But what's the common newes abroade Malevole, thou dogst rumor still.

MALEVOLE. Common newes? why common wordes are, God save yee, Fare yee well: common actions, Flattery and Cosenage: common things, Women and Cuckolds: and how do's my little Ferrard: a yee lecherous Animal, my little Ferret, he goes sucking up & downe the Pallace into every Hens nest like a Weesell: & to what doost thou addict thy time to now, more then to those Antique painted drabs that are still affected of young Courtiers, Flattery, Pride, & Venery. (I, 147)

This passage has elements of traditional Tudor satire: the abstractions of the Ship of Fools, the use of the beast fable, and moral commonplaces. But the rapid shifts and the colloquial style charge Malevole's satiric prose with a vitality Marston rarely achieved in his verse satires. In these passages, he adopts the manner of a vaudeville entertainer, stringing together a seemingly random series of jests suitable for preservation in a "table-booke," as the character Sly mentions in the Induction (I, 141). But the role of entertainer which Altofronto adopts is part of a more complicated disguise. In an original variation, Marston's figure is a true malcontent posing as a malcontent. As a dispossessed duke, Altofronto has a perfect right to the character of a malcontent. When he describes his malcontented state without his verbal disguise, there is none of Malevole's broad, gross-jawed style:

in night all creatures sleepe,
Only the Malecontent that gainst his fate,
Repines and quarrels, alas hees goodman tellclocke;
His sallow jaw-bones sincke with wasting mone, 2
Whilst others beds are downe, his pillowes stone.
(I, 178)

To regain his kingdom he adopts as his disguise an "affected straine" which allows him to indulge in "Free speach ":

I may speake foolishly, I knavishly,
Alwaies carelesly, yet no one thinkes it fashion
To poize my breath, "for he that laughs and strikes,
Is lightly felt, or seldome strucke againe."
(I, 150-151)

The special quality to Malevole's manner springs from the fact that he is acting: Marston makes us hear the effort it requires for him to sustain his wild and whirling words: "Sir Tristram Trimtram come aloft, Jackea-napes with a whim wham, heres a Knight of the lande of Catito shall play at trap with any Page in Europe; doe the sword daunce, with any Morris-dauncer in Christendome; ride at the Ring till the finne of his eyes looke as blew as the welkin, and runne the wilde-goose chase even with Pompey the huge" (I, 148). Through Pietro's comment, "You runne—" (I, 148), Marston suggests his own attitude toward Malevole's style. It is not the idiosyncratic manner of an amusing character like Tucca, nor the acerb commentary of a "pure" malcontent like Bosola, nor a stage version of madness. It is designed to convey a sense of the pressure on someone who is acting a part which is not natural to him and which he occasionally finds odious: "O God, how loathsome this toying is to mee, that a Duke should be forc'd to foole it: well, Stultorum plena sunt omnia, better play the foole Lord, then be the foole Lord" (I, 204). He resembles the court fool Passarello, a professional comedian who finds his job a "drudgery"(I, 160) in a world of "loose vanities" (I, 162). "Stultorum plena sunt omnia" is a true saying because if you are not a fool naturally, the world will force you to become one.

The strain and wildness of Malevole's language are justified by his personal plight and by his need for a disguise. The language has the further value of providing an ideal medium in which to express a special view of the world. Malevole is a kind of visionary who sees the waking world as a perpetual nightmare. His "dreams" are the reality which others cannot see:

PIETRO. Dreame, what dreamst?

MALEVOLE. Why me thinkes I see that Signior pawn his footcloth: that Metreza her Plate: this madam takes phisick: that that tother Mounsieur may minister to her: here is a Pander Jeweld: there is a fellow in shift of Satten this day, that could not shift a shirt tother night: here a Paris supports that Hellen: theres a Ladie Guinever bears up that sir Lancelot. Dreames, dreames, visions, fantasies, Chimeras, imaginations, trickes, conceits.

(I, 147-148)

Throughout the play, Malevole's goal is to make people see the world as his "dreams" have revealed it to him, to make them see how "strange" (to use his recurrent phrase) and vile and unnatural it is. He wants to convert them to his "faith" that, as Pietro comes to realize, "All is damnation, wickedness extreame, there is no faith in man" (I, 193). Sometimes he shows them the invisible truth by inventing an appropriate visual metaphor: "Muckhill overspread with fresh snow" (I, 147), "pigeon house … smooth, round, and white without, and full of holes and stinke within" (I, 153). Sometimes he makes people "see" by the detailed evocation of a vivid, concrete picture, as when he describes Aurelia's adultery to Pietro. To excerpt one example from a long speech, he says that even when she does yield "Hymeneall sweetes,"

the thaw of her delight
Flowes from lewde heate of apprehension,
Onely from strange imaginations rankenes,
That formes the adulterers presence in her soule,
And makes her thinke she clips the foule knaves loines.
(I, 149)

Pietro reels before Malevole's "Hydeous imagination" (I, 150), but Malevole, in a speech that constitutes one of the most famous expressions of "Jacobean melancholy," forces him to see more and greater horrors:

th' art but in danger to loose a Dukedome, thinke this: this earth is the only grave and Golgotha wherein all thinges that live must rotte: tis but the draught wherein the heavenly bodies discharge their corruption, the very muckhill on which the sublunarie orbes cast their excrement: man is the slime of this dongue-pit, and Princes are the governours of these men: for, for our soules, they are as free as Emperoures, all of one peece, there goes but a paire of sheeres betwixt an Emperoure and the sonne of a bagpiper: only the dying, dressing, pressing, glossing, makes the difference: now, what art thou like to lose?

A jaylers office to keepe men in bonds,
Whilst toyle and treason, all lifes good confounds.
(I, 197)

This is the generality to which every detail in the play has been contributing; it is a moving elaboration of Antonio's realization in Antonio's Revenge that men are "vermine bred of putrifacted slime" (I, 118). Nor do any subsequent events in the play, not even the "happy" ending, modify its force. Nevertheless, for Malevole, the "Golgotha" speech is also a piece of rhetoric designed to induce Pietro to give up his claim to the dukedom. He responds correctly: "I heere renounce for ever Regency: O Altofront, I wrong thee to supplant thy right" (I, 197). Step by step, the Malcontent has educated the usurper to recognize the worthlessness of his office in order that he, Altofronto, may regain it. The only difference between an emperor and a bagpiper is "a paire of sheeres," but Altofronto prefers his own clothes.

Thus the "Golgotha" speech is true, but it is also cunning. It illustrates an art which Altofronto has acquired and mastered. He had lost his dukedom, he explains, because

I wanted those old instruments of state,
Dissemblance and suspect: I could not time it Celso,
My throane stood like a point in midd'st of a circle,
To all of equall neerenesse, bore with none:
Raind all alike, so slept in fearlesse vertue,
Suspectles, too suspectles: till the crowde:
(Still liquerous of untried novelties)
Impatient with severer government:
Made strong with Florence: banisht Altofront.
(I, 151)

Since then he has learned to "time it" by waiting for his chance and by prodding his enemies toward their ruin. The experience has taught him that "we are all Philosophicall Monarkes or naturall fooles" (I, 152). Either you stand stiffly aloof from the world, a Stoic sage, speaking sententiously like Altofronto and his impregnable, virtuous wife while your kingdom is stolen away, or you immerse yourself in the world with all its degradation and horror and become nature's fool. To paraphrase, "the Emperor Aurelius may be a model for a Philosophicall Monarke, but don't live in an Italian lascivious pallace without Machiavelli."

Thus it is that Malevole can improve on one of Mendoza's plots so impressively that he inspires the unabashed compliment: "Ô unpeerable invention, rare, Thou God of pollicie! it hunnies me" (I, 183). Malevole has indeed become the "unpeerable" god of policy in a contest with masters. He can exchange aphrodisiac recipes with court ladies and Machiavellian aphorisms with Mendoza, he can convert Pietro and Aurelia, insult Bilioso with obscene jokes, and, most importantly, he can fool Mendoza "most powerfully" (I, 180) with his disguise. But after bragging about this last accomplishment, he betrays an interesting confusion (whether in Marston or in Altofronto, it is impossible to say). He says caustically that Mendoza

Obviously Altofronto is doing the same thing. He is putting on an affected "gracelessness" for a "second cause" which he has shown to be "vilde": the regaining of his "jaylers office" as duke.

Whether or not Marston intended Altofronto's remark to be an unwitting partial self-condemnation, other passages suggest that Altofronto's left hand has different values from his right. After Pietro has relinquished the dukedom, Altofronto comments on his act in a speech which begins with pious platitudes and ends with a Machiavellian sententia:

Who doubts of providence,
That sees this change, a heartie faith to all:
He needes must rise, who can no lower fall,
For still impetuous Vicissitude
Towzeth the world, then let no maze intrude
Upon your spirits: wonder not I rise,
For who can sincke, that close can temporize?
The time growes ripe for action, Ile detect
My privat'st plot, lest ignorance feare suspect:
Let's cloase to counsell, leave the rest to fate,
Mature discretion is the life of state.
(I, 198)

Altofronto's position shifts with each sentence. He first claims that Pietro's conversion should buttress faith in a presiding moral order, but then uses his own rise to demonstrate Fortune's continuing influence on events in this world; he was so low that vicissitude had no direction in which to push him but upward! Earlier in the play, speaking in the guise of an amoral malcontent, he had said to Mendoza, "only busie fortune towses, and the provident chaunces blends them together; Ile give you a symilie: did you ere see a Well with 2. buckets, whilst one comes up full to be emptied, another goes downe emptie to be filled; such is the state of all humanitie" (I, 181). One man rises at the expense of another: Pietro up, Altofronto down; Mendoza up, Pietro down; Altofronto up, Mendoza down. "This Genoas last yeares Duke" (I, 151) gets another turn. But more important than the power of Fortune is his own recent acquisition of "mature discretion." He has learned how to "time it."

The morality which Altofronto is forced to adopt sounds like Mendoza's, but the parallel Marston develops more fully is that between Malevole and the most immoral figure in the play, the bawd Maquerelle. After Mendoza has gained power in Act V, Malevole asks her what she thinks of "this transformation of state now" (I, 201). Her reply is the sexual equivalent of his political metaphor of the two buckets: "wee women always note, the falling of the one, is the rising of the other: … as for example, I have two court dogges, the most fawning curres … now I, like lady Fortune, sometimes love this dog, sometimes raise that dog" (I, 201-202). She plays Lady Fortune in sexual matters, having brought an uncountable number of "maidenheads … to the blocke" (I, 203), just as Malevole manipulates political fortunes. She is the "God of pollicie" in her realm, with her cunning advances in the technology of adultery (I, 161), her possets and resoratives, her tricks for seduction. She is a Machiavelli of the bedchamber who constantly counsels "discretion" (for example, I, 186) and mastery of the art of "timing it" (for example, I, 202). As early as the first act, Malevole hints at some kind of relationship between himself and Maquerelle (I, 148), and in the last act he excuses an action bysaying that he did it "as baudes go to Church, for fashion sake" (I, 197). A successful politician, Marston shows, must be something of a bawd.

This parallel makes it clear that the Malcontent is a more complicated figure than he is often thought to be. He is not merely an upholder of virtue whose disguise allows him to satirize everyone at will in an extension of the author's manner. Despite his high moral standards, he has learned the black arts required to manipulate men, as his final plot demonstrates. In an original variant on the formulaic concluding masque of the revenge play, all but one of the masquers whom Malevole employs are apparent murder victims of Mendoza. The villain's response, consistent with the theme Marston has been developing, emphasizes that Altofronto has succeeded in turning dreams into reality:

Are we surprizde? What strange delusions mocke
Our sences, do I dreame? or have I dreamt
This two daies space? where am I?
(I, 213)

The reign of the devil has been overthrown, the good are redeemed, the bad are punished. But it is important to notice that Marston does not make extravagant claims for the effect of the experience on the lascivious palace creatures. The courtier Ferneze had been the first of Mendoza's victims after having succeeded him as the Duchess' lover. Rescued by Malevole, he was treated to a moral sermon on the evil effects of lust. During the masque of the revengers he dances with the dissolute Bianca, and his first act on returning to the court is to try to seduce her. With Maquerelle instantly involving herself in the transaction as she had in his earlier effort at seduction, Ferneze's regeneration is not a conspicous success.

Nevertheless, we are back in the virtuous and rational reign of Duke Altofronto, as we see from his just but merciful meting out of punishment. Turning to the arch-villain, Mendoza, he refuses to kill him, explaining that a true monarch, someone with a "glorious soule," disdains to hurt a peasant "prostrat at my feete" (I, 214). Aside from a few hasty lines to tuck in loose ends, the private theater text concludes on this note of self-satisfied grandeur. However, when Marston lengthened the play for public theater performance, he added thirteen lines to Altofronto's speech. These lines are important because they discuss directly the central political problem of the play, how to be both "good" and a "king."Altofronto begins by moralizing about the action of the play:

O, I have seen strange accidents of state!—
The flatterer like the Ivy clip the Oke,
And wast it to the hart: lust so confirm'd
That the black act of sinne it selfe not shamd
To be termde Courtship.
(I, 214)

Mendoza had made his way by a combination of flattery and lust, as had the courtier Bilioso. But since such activity was not unknown in courts closer than Genoa, Altofronto aims the rest of his oracular speech at the great and sinful rulers of the world:

O they that are as great as be their sinnes,
Let them remember that th' inconstant people,
Love many Princes meerely for their faces,
And outward shewes: and they do covet more
To have a sight of these men then of their vertues,
Yet thus much let the great ones still conceale,
When they observe not Heavens imposed conditions,
They are no Kings, but forfeit their commissions.
(I, 214)

The people are not loyal to a prince because he is virtuous. As Altofronto has learned to his cost, they are "Impatient with severer government" (I, 151) and want "outward shewes," impressive appearances. But a king cannot commit immoral acts with impunity. He must be a moral ruler, or Heaven will see to his fall. The problem is how to square the requirements of Heaven with those of politics. Altofronto's answer is centered on the word "conceale," the crucial importance of which is often obscured by an emendation (to "conceive") for which there is no textual justification. Altofronto has learned that however virtuous you are, you must conceal it. You can be a philosophical monarch only if you act like a natural fool. You must temporize and pretend to play the game even if it means becoming something of a bawd.

In addition to its general political relevance, this passage was apparently understood to have a contemporary political meaning. In the corrected version of the third quarto, the words "Princes" and "Kings" were changed to "men," the censor suppressing what must have been interpreted as a blow at King James. The claim that kings forfeit their commissions when they fail to observe Heaven's conditions would have sounded like a clear rejection of James'scherished doctrine of Divine Right. Marston's attitude must have been nurtured in the nursery of liberty where he was residing; certainly it would have been approved by many in his audience. With this play Marston began to skirmish in very dangerous territory, as a brief passage from the first quarto demonstrates:

BEAN[CHA]. And is not sinnior S. Andrew Iaques a gallant fellow now.

MAQUERELLE. By my maiden-head la, honour and hee agrees aswell together, as a satten sute and wollen stockings.

That this was a hit at James, and a brutal one at that, is confirmed by the elimination of "Iaques" in the second quarto, which thus changed the passage to a general indictment of the Scots. At the same time that "Iaques " was eliminated, Marston inserted verses (after the "Epilogus" in the second quarto and designated as the "Prologue" in the third quarto) which attack "too nice-brained cunning" for wresting "each hurt-lesse thought to private sence" (p. 216). These two revisions of the first quarto suggest that The Malcontent has a place in the series of politically indiscreet plays for which the Children of the Queen's Revels became notorious.

This is not to suggest that The Malcontent was in any important way an attack on the monarch, but its political theme does constitute advice in the "Mirror for Magistrates" tradition to which so many Inns of Court writers had contributed. This political theme did not require the overt statement of the added lines; it is visible in the shorter, private theater version. Early in the first act Malevole mentions the importance of temporizing, and in the world which Marston depicts, only cunning and concealed virtue can survive. Malevole's disguise guards him from real danger, but this does not diminish the insidious nature of the atmosphere he is combating. His role is exemplary. As a satirist and teacher, he shows what the world is; as a god of policy, he shows how to cope with it. It is a joke on the world that an outsider has mastered its tricks, but he can do nothing to eliminate the atmosphere or to regenerate the vermin who pollute it and are in turn polluted by it.

I have been discussing the political and moral implications of The Malcontent, but it was through a theatrical innovation that Marston made these moral complexities appear convincing and relevant. He transformed the convention of the disguised revenger by endowingits separate halves with essentially distinct personalities; Malevole-Altofronto has many of the characteristics of a "double" figure. I do not know how much is gained by describing these two halves as the "superego" and the "id"; nonetheless, some signs of that eternal struggle are perceptible, indeed are exploited as part of the total pattern of the play. Thus Malevole-Altofronto impinges on our consciousness at a deeper level than most of Marston's intellectually conceived characters. A further contribution to the richness of the theatrical experience—particularly apparent with the addition of John Webster's Induction in the third quarto, where Burbage appears onstage before the play begins—results from the employment of Malevole as an actor playing the role of an actor. There is no Pirandello-like metaphysics in this device. Role-playing is shown to be a physical necessity for moral man in an immoral society. The pestilential atmosphere communicated through the charged rhetoric and the "Expressionist" stage techniques constitutes Marston's most successful representation of a morally debilitated world. He had shown a comic version of it in What You Will, but there the characters tend to be mouthpieces of simple ideas. In the Antonio plays, the satiric background is very imperfectly linked to the concerns of the main characters. The Malcontent achieves a meaningful union of these components. It possesses the immediacy and credibility of a nightmare.

Because of the play's symbolic and dreamlike atmosphere, its relationship to Marston's audience is not as clear as usual. For example, his protagonist, for the first time, is not a young man. But its ultimate relevance to this audience is of the same order as in most of his plays because its substructure is that of the initiation ritual. It is a demonstration of what it must cost the morally innocent to participate in a degraded society. In this play, Marston's terms are political, but with some exceptions he confines his treatment to general matters of conduct and ethics. In contrast, when he next wrote a play with a disguised duke in an Italian palace, The Fawne (1606), his aims were far more immediate and specific. As he learned more about "S. Andrew Iaques," his speech became like Malevole's, immediate and specific. As he learned more about "S. Andrew Iaques," his speech became like Malevole's, "halterworthy at al howers."