[In the essay below, Foakes asserts that because Marston wrote plays for a child acting company, his revenge tragedies—Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge—are deliberate and overt parodies of the genre, in which child actors grotesquely mimic the performances of their adult peers.]

It is immediately apparent from the Induction to Antonio and Mellida that Marston was very consciously writing for children. The actors appear, parts in hand, to discuss the rôles they are to take on, protesting, “we can say our parts; but were are ignorant in what mould we must cast our Actors.” Alberto gives advice to Duke Piero, that he must frame himself to the shape of majesty, “growe big in thought,” and stalk, and he instructs Forobosco in the way to play a parasite; he also, misquoting The Spanish Tragedy, comments sharply on poor Antonio's difficulty:

FEL.
Why, what must you play?
ANT.
Faith, I know not what: an Hermaphrodite; two parts in one: my true person being Antonio … though for the love of Mellida … I take this fained presence of an Amazon, calling my selfe Florizell, and I know not what. I a voice to play a lady! I shall nere doe it.
AL.
O, an Amazon should have such a voice, virago-like. Not play two parts in one? away, away: tis common fashion. Nay if you cannot bear two subtle fronts under one hood, Ideot goe by, goe by. …

Here, as in the strutting of Piero, Marston shows his actors detached from the rôles they are to play, and matching the rôles and themselves against adult plays and players; a lady was the appropriate part for a boy to play on the public stages, and strutting in a ranting rôle becomes grotesque in a child. In other words, the Induction draws attention to the child actors, and assumes on the part of the audience a knowledge of common practice at the public theatres. The allusion to The Spanish Tragedy is followed by another to Tamburlaine, as Matzagente goes off with a bit of old-fashioned fustian on his lips:

Rampum, scampum, mount tuftie Tamburlaine,
What rattling thunderclap breakes from his lips,

says Feliche, not yet established as a satirist, but telling the audience how to react.

By the end of the Induction, in fact, it is clear that the play to follow will parody old ranting styles, make the children out-strut the adult tragedians, who were still performing the plays of Kyd and Marlowe, and burlesque common conventions. It will be a play in which the author, consciously using child actors for a special effect, will keep his audience consciously aware that they are watching children imitating adults. So Antonio and Mellida opens with the entry of Antonio, “disguised like an Amazon,” that is to say, the hero disguised as a maid, reversing the conventional transformation by disguise of the heroine into a boy; and he-she speaks at once in the “rampum scampum” mounting style of the old tragedy:

Heart, wilt not break! & thou abhorred life
Wilt thou still breath in my enraged bloud?
Vaines, synewes, arteries, why crack yee not?
Burst and divul'st with anguish of my griefe.

(I.i.1-4)

This recalls Bajazeth, about to beat out his brains,

O life, more loathsome to my vexed thoughts
Than noisome parbreak of the Stygian snakes. …

(1 Tamburlaine, V.ii.192-193)

and is a prelude to the entry of Piero, boasting in his victory in a manner reminiscent of Tamburlaine himself:

Victorious Fortune, with tryumphant hand,
Hurleth my glory 'bout this ball of earth. …
My fate is firmer then mischance can shake.

(I.i.35-41)

So Marlowe's hero claimed,

I hold the fates fast bound in iron chains,
And with my hand turn Fortune's wheel about.

(I.ii.174-175)

This swelling verse, larded, like that of The Spanish Tragedy, with snatches of Latin and Italian, is used with a degree of parody—parody of older plays that were still popular, and parody by child actors of the passion and bombast of

Tragœdia cothurnata, fitting kings,
Containing matter, and not common things.

(Spanish Tragedy, IV.ii.154-155)

The actors are given a certain detachment from their roles. Not only do characters put aside their part to comment on the play, like Feliche, “Here might be made a rare Scene of folly if the plat could beare it” (III.ii.122), or Piero, “I was mightie strong in thought we should have shut up night with an ould Comedie …” (V.i.149), but there is a good deal of play with the notions of ‘passion’ and ‘eloquence’ in the utterance of other characters, who work up their speeches to a lofty and often absurd pitch. So Antonio, discovering himself to Mellida, invites her to flee the dangerous court of her uncle Piero, and calls on her, as she begins to address him, to “leave passion”:

MELL.
                              O Antonio; my Lord, my love, my—
ANT.
                              Leave passion, sweet; for time, place, aire, & earth,
Are all our foes: feare, and be jealous; faire,
Lets fly.

(II.i.292-294)

But almost at once he proceeds to indulge in ‘passion’ himself, composing his speech, so to speak, as he utters it:

My all, my soule; and thou and I will live
(Lets think like what) and thou and I will live
Like unmatcht mirrors of calamitie.

(II.i.307-309)

Balurdo exposes the ‘passion’ of the courtiers for what it is by aping their ‘eloquence’ and parodying their speeches, as when he attempts to match Galeatzo's rhyming couplet (IV.ii.157), or again, when he compliments himself on his own imitation of them (V.i.138).

The forced passion of many speeches in the play is shown up as deliberately humorous in other ways too, as when Marston directly lays open his main figures to melodramatic contrasts and a touch of bathos. Balurdo often reduces a fine rant in this way, but a similar effect is achieved within the dialogue of the hero and heroine. Early in the play Antonio, disguised as an Amazon, first meets Mellida, who descends from the upper stage as he soliloquises:

ANT.
                    Ador'd, amazing raritie, she comes.
O now, Antonio presse thy spirit forth
In following passion, knit thy senses close,
Heape up thy powers, double all thy man.
                                        Enter Mellida, Rossaline and Flavia.
She comes. O how her eyes dart wonder on my heart!
Mount bloode, soule to my lips, tast Hebes cup
Stand firm on decke, when beauties close fight's up.

(I.i.157-163)

Antonio appears to forget in his ‘passion’ that he is for the time being a woman, and if his blood mounts, it has to retire hastily as Mellida addresses him with the words, “Ladie, your strange habit doth beget Our pregnant thoughts …”. Another such moment occurs when Antonio, about to escape, as he thinks, with Mellida, enters suddenly to call, in Italian, for fortune's blessing on her. She has to confess, “Alas, Antonio, I have lost thy note,” and at once retires upstairs, as if to seek for it, saying, “ile straight returne.” Antonio thereupon behaves as if all is lost, flings himself on the ground, and, prostrate, determines then and there to die:

                                                                                          I pree thee let me ly;
Spight of you all, I can, and I will dy.

(III.ii.200-201)

Feliche comments that Antonio is “perverse,” and indeed he is, as with swift reversal of attitude, he jumps to his feet again a few lines later, crying “Vive esperanza.”

These indications suggest that Marston expected his audience to be entertained by the imitation of earlier fustian in the tragical rant of such lines as

Straight swarthy darkness popt out Phoebus eye,
And blurd the jocund face of bright cheekt day;

(I.i.211-212)

or

O how impatience cramps my cracked veins,
And cruddles thick my blood, with boiling rage!
O eyes, why leap you not like thunderbolts.

(II.i.208-210)

or Piero's extremity of anguish,¹

Antonio? his head, his head. Keep you the Court, the rest stand still, or runne, or goe, or shoute, or search, or scud, or call, or hang, or doe doe doe, su su su, something: I know not who who who, what I do do do, nor who who who, where I am.

          O trista traditriche, rea, ribalda fortuna.
          Negando mi vindetta mi causa fera morte.

(III.ii.181-182)

When Antonio and Mellida, in their ‘passion,’ burst into Italian, jumping from the flat “Boy, rogue, thou liest,” to the ringing “Spavento dell mio cor e dolce Mellida,” and later sinking from “Cosi, cosi, mi converra morir” to “Good sweet, scout ore the marsh …” (IV.i.181 ff.), the audience would have laughed at the absurdity of it, recalling such passages as Hieronimo's explosion into fourteen lines of Latin as he contemplates suicide (Spanish Tragedy, II.v.120ff.). As the lovers go off, a page remains on stage to apologise for the “confusion of Babell” that has fallen on them, and accounts for it as if the exchange in Italian were an interpolation of the actors: “tis an errour easier to be pardoned by the auditors, then excused by the authours.”²

So Marston consciously exploits the posturing and ‘passion’ of the main action as fantastical and matching the comic sub-plot, not only by the elements of parody and burlesque, but also by the criticism that such figures as this page, Feliche and Balurdo make of others within the play. Antonio's Revenge parodies more closely features of earlier revenge plays,³ and allows a more extreme use of “bragart passion” in the mouths of the child actors, from the opening scene, when Piero enters, “smear'd in blood, a poniard in one hand bloodie, and a torch in the other, Strotzo following him with a cord,”⁴ to boast of the murders of Feliche and Andrugio. Again the rhetoric is exposed to criticism and deflated in various ways, by conscious parody, as when Balurdo absurdly imitates a high-flown speech of Antonio's (I.ii.102ff.); by the continual recall of an earlier style in the language; by the reminders that child actors are being exploited; and by the conscious detachment of the players from their parts, as when Alberto and Pandulfo sit down to “talke as Chorus to this tragedie,” and call for music, which promptly sounds.

The most interesting example of Marston's conscious deployment of parody as a main effect of the play occurs at the opening of Act II, where, after a dumbshow around the coffin of Andrugio, Piero soliloquises in rare passion. Pandulfo has just protested a stoic attitude, refusing to rant in grief for the death of Feliche, his son, saying to Alberto,

Would'st have me cry, run raving up & down,
For my sons losse? would'st have me turn rank mad,
Or wring my face with mimick action;
Stamp, curse, weepe, rage, & then my bosome strike?
Away its apish action, player-like.

(I.ii.314-318)

It is just such “apish action, player-like,” an exaggerated tragic rant, that Piero then is given.

Rot ther thou cearcloth that infolds the flesh
Of my loath'd foe; moulder to crumbling dust:
Oblivion choake the passage of thy fame. …
Though thou art deade, thinke not my hate is dead:
I have but newly twone my arme in the curld locks
Of snakie vengeance. Pale beetle-brow'd hate
But newly bustles up. Sweet wrong, I clap thy thoughts.
O let me hug my bosome, rub my breast,
In hope of what may happe. Andrugio rots:
Antonio lives: umh: how long? ha, ha; how long?
Antonio packt hence, Ile his mother wed,
Then cleare my daughter of supposed lust,
Wed her to Florence heire. O excellent.
Venice, Genoa, Florence, at my becke,
At Piero's nod. Balurdo, o ho.
O! twill be rare, all unsuspected donne.
I have bin nurst in blood, and still have suckt
The steeme of reeking gore. Balurdo, ho?

(II.i.1-18)

The melodramatic excess of these lines culminates in the nice reminder that a child is speaking them, as a Paul's boy is made to cry, “I have bin nurst in blood”. At once he calls for Balurdo, the fool, and a most inappropriate servant for a real villain, who enters, as the stage direction says, “with a beard, halfe of, halfe on.” He replies to Piero's call:

BA.
When my beard is on, most noble prince, when my beard is on.
PIER.
Why, what dost thou with a beard?
BA.
In truth, one tolde me that my wit was balde, & that a Meremaide was halfe fish and halfe flesh: and therefore to speake wisely, like one of your counsel … I must be forced to conclude the tyring man hath not glewed on my beard halfe fast enough. Gods bores, it wil not stick to fal off.

(II.i.21 ff.)

This is another echo of The Spanish Tragedy; during the preparations for the play that Hieronimo is to present to grace the betrothal of Bel-Imperia and Balthasar, Balthasar comes on with a property-chair, and Hieronimo, as director of his play, cries,

Well done, Balthasar! hang up the title:
Our scene is Rhodes. What, is your beard on?
BAL.
                              Half on; the other is in my hand.
HIER.
                              Despatch for shame; are you so long?

(V.iii.16-19)

Here it is fitting, and quite serious, that Balthasar should be dressing to play Soliman in Hieronimo's production of the play within the play; but Balurdo appears directly in the main action, and the effect is to emphasise the grotesque exaggeration of Piero's language, to remind the audience that these are actors consciously playing parts, and to generate a special kind of humour through the clash between Piero's passion and Balurdo's deflating nonsense.

The violence of passion expressed by Antonio,

Looke how I smoake in blood, reeking the steame
Of foming vengeance. …

(III.ii.82-83)

and by Piero,

                                                                                Swell plump bold heart.
For now thy tide of vengeance rowleth in:
O now Tragœdia Cothurnata mounts. …

(II.ii.218-220)

is presented in a parodistic relationship to the language of adult actors in bombastic tragedy, to that Tragœdia cothurnata of which Hieronimo spoke. Pandulfo reminds his audience of this late in the play, when he lays the corpse of Feliche athwart the seeming-dead figure of Antonio, and weeps,

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. I spake more than a god;
Yet I am lesse than a man.

(IV.ii.70-75)

The peculiar tone of the Antonio plays is largely generated through the exploitation of the clash between the “infant weaknesse” of the boys and their “passion”; they speak more than gods, and, at the same time, Marston does not let his audience forget that they are less than men.

The features of the plays to which attention is drawn here have generally gone unregarded. It has been assumed that Marston's intentions in his writing were entirely serious. He has been seen as setting out to write in the first part of Antonio and Mellida “a ‘tragedie’ along the lines of Richard III,”⁵ and, in the second part, a revenge play in “the pure Kydian tradition.”⁶ Alternatively, Antonio and Mellida has been regarded as an attempt at comical satire, aimed at exposing, largely through the agency of Feliche and Rossaline, human folly and corruption—an attempt which fails because of Marston's inadequacies as a dramatist.⁷ In either case, there is pretty wide agreement that the plays are clumsy and bad,⁸ a badness ingeniously explained by T. S. Eliot on the supposition that Marston despised the form in which he was writing, and wrote badly to relieve his feelings.⁹

If the plays are seen simply as serious essays in moral satire or in tragedy, the end of Antonio's Revenge is likely to be found unpleasant or “nothing short of sadistic.”¹⁰ There is a violent death scene, when Piero is bound, his tongue is plucked out, and then he is stabbed by a group of conspirators led by Antonio; after boasting and wrangling about which of them actually murdered Piero, the killers are greeted, to their amazement, as saviours by some senators, and they finally go off to live

                                                                                                    inclos'd
In holy verge of some religious order.

(V.ii.150-151)

If the general tone of the plays is borne in mind the degree to which Marston is deliberately parodying, deliberately seeking a grotesque effect, then perhaps a different interpretation of this butchery may be made. The plays work from the beginning as vehicles for child actors consciously ranting in oversize parts, and we are not allowed to take their passions or motives seriously. Their grand speeches are undermined by bathos or parody, and spring from no developed emotional situation, so that we are not moved by them, and do not take them seriously enough to demand justice at the end. In reading the plays it is possible to dwell on serious speeches without paying much attention to their context; but in action the plays unfold as a sequence in time, and the element of burlesque would tend to affect them as wholes. Even in this final scene of Antonio's Revenge, Balurdo appears comically as one of the maskers preparing to kill Piero, and joins in stabbing, and in abusing him with his absurd phrase, “Thou most retort and obtuse rascall” (V.ii.99); in addition, the whole business of the murder is an inflated imitation of Hieronimo's vengeance in The Spanish Tragedy, deliberately outraging in its calculated enormity a conventional ending which would have punished Antonio.¹¹

A recognition of the extent to which the tone of the plays is controlled by exaggeration, parody and bathos perhaps helps to reconcile two recent accounts of Marston's drama which are both intelligent and penetrating, and yet arrive at conclusions that appear to be contradictory. G. K. Hunter thinks of Marston as engaged, like Machiavelli or Bacon, with “what men were, and are” (Prologue to Antonio's Revenge):

the interest of the author is in the cold realities of power, revealed in detached satiric portraiture, and in philosophic stances which comment on one another, but never really engage or necessarily issue into action. Given this lack of momentum, all the events in the play are equally surprising; the central actions seem as accidental as the others (Mellida's death is a case in point), and the conclusion completes nothing but the thematic picture of a world of Hobbesian individualism. Clearly this is what Marston cared about, and it is certainly what his successors borrowed from him.¹²

This was a “new vision,” to be realised better in The Malcontent than in the imperfect Antonio plays. Robert Ornstein, on the other hand, concludes that “the ethical intention of Antonio's Revenge is not confused but rather as peripheral as that of Titus Andronicus. Incapable of Fletcher's frivolity, Marston approached tragedy with as serious purpose as Chapman, but he aspired to a ‘Senecan’ ideal that was, if anything, less sophisticated than Kyd's and that equated tragic grandeur with rhetorical bombast and gruesome melodrama.”¹³ Hunter finely describes the central novelty of the plays as forerunners of later tragedies, but presents an image of them that seems altogether too earnest, too much a result of hindsight; and Ornstein, beginning from a similar standpoint, comes to feel that the ethical intention of the plays is marginal, and that they end up merely as bombast.

When Marston wrote these plays he was a new dramatist, working for a new children's company, which performed in a new, small, indoor theatre, with artificial light. The children had not been seen for almost ten years when the Paul's boys recommenced playing at the end of 1599. It would be surprising if Marston had not attempted something new, and he did so, consciously exploiting the child actors against the audience's knowledge of adult acting and of favourite old plays. In other words, I think that parody, and a sardonic or grotesque humour were predominant in the playwright's conception, and much of the so-called clumsiness, nonsense, and bad writing are there for deliberate effect. At the same time, it is going too far to describe the ethical intention of the plays as “peripheral,” for Hunter has accurately described a quality that has made many critics see a latent power in the plays. What I am suggesting is that this power or seriousness is realised, so far as it is made effective, through, sometimes in spite of, a design that was primarily parodistic and grotesque.

It is, after all, an aspect of this parodistic technique that simultaneously inflates, in tragic hyperbole, and diminishes, in the figures of child-actors ranting, the stock hero and villain. It is an aspect of this technique that Andrugio, Pandulfo and Antonio fortify themselves in calamity with expressions of stoical resignation, and reject this pose for ‘passion’ and revenge; Marston was here mocking conventional tragic attitudes, as Antonio, entering with a book of Seneca's philosophical writing, is parodying Hieronimo's entry with a book of Seneca's plays: Antonio rejects Seneca's preaching of patience in De Providentia, preferring to be “fyred with impatience,” while Hieronimo rejected the exhortations of Agamemnon to “strike home”, preferring to subject his “heart to patience.”¹⁴ It is also as an aspect of this technique that “cold realities of power” are revealed, accepted values distorted, and the heroic certainties, the clear oppositions of a play like Hamlet, are made to seem old-fashioned. With our hindsight it is easy to see here the possibilities for serious drama that were to be developed within a few years in other plays; but these were not Marston's immediate concern, and do not constitute the main impact of his plays, which is melodramatic and satirical—a satire directed not so much against folly and vice, though there is a strong element of this in the comic subplots, as against conventional literary and theatrical modes and attitudes.

At the end of the prologue to Antonio's Revenge a child actor is made to wish

That with unused paize of stile and sense
We might weigh massy in judicious scale.

The exaggeration of the rest of the prologue, and of the play, suggests that these lines again measure child against adult player (who “weighs massy”), and make a conventional appeal for the favour of the audience. They can be overstressed as a desire for serious attention, and lead to a judgment such as that of Ben Jonson, who evidently did not appreciate Marston's humour at this time, and displayed him as Crispinus, one who “pens high, loftie, in a new stalking straine … hee will teach thee to teare and rand” (Poetaster, III.iv.161). The “new stalking straine” is inflated from an old stalking strain of verse, spiced with parody, and with imitations of a recent success on the adult stage, Hamlet, sequences from which Marston was to burlesque in several other plays, including The Malcontent.¹⁵ Altogether, there is reason to accept the phrase Marston himself offered in description of his work; in the mock-dedication of Antonio and Mellida to “the most honourably renowned No-body”, he says “it hath flow'd with the current of my humorous bloode, to affect (a little too much) to be seriously fantasticall.” The word fantastical meant, in common use, quaint, eccentric, or grotesque, as in Much Ado About Nothing, where Beatrice speaks good-humouredly of the “first suit” in love as “like a Scotch jig, and full as fantastical” (II.i.65). Marston glosses the word in his satires, when describing a foppish hanger-on:¹⁶

But ho! what Ganimede is that doth grace
The gallants heeles? One who for two daies space
Is closely hyred. Now who dares not call
This Æsops crow—fond, mad, fantasticall?
Why, so he is; his clothes do sympathize,
And with his inward spirit humorize.
An open asse, that is not yet so wise
As his derided fondnes to disguise.
Why, thou art Bedlam mad, starke lunatick,
And glori'st to be counted a fantastick;
That neither art, nor yet will seem to be
Heirs to some vertuous praised qualitie.

This is the foolish fantastical; the serious fantastical is exemplified in the Antonio plays, in which children were made to posture and rant for a special purpose. They may be seen not as failed tragedies, or clumsy and ineffective moral satires, but as grotesque plays, or, in a word, Marston's fantasticalities.

Notes

1. The effect is repeated at III.ii.272 ff.; cf. Hieronimo's lesser passions, Spanish Tragedy, III.ii.22, “Eyes, life, world, heavens, hell, night and day, / See, search, shew, send some man, some mean, that may—.”

2. This has usually been treated as a serious attempt by Marston at a “conventional noble effect”, and T. S. Eliot complains, fairly enough on such a view, that “it is difficult to explain, by any natural action of mediocrity, the absurd dialogue in Italian in which Antonio and Mellida suddenly express themselves” (Elizabethan Essays [London, 1934], p. 182).

3. See Fredson Thayer Bowers, Elizabethan Revenge Tragedy, 1587-1642 (Princeton, 1940), pp. 118-119.

4. Outdoing Hieronimo's entrance “with a poniard in one hand and a rope in the other” (Spanish Tragedy, III.xii).

5. John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford, 1956), p. 222; cf. U. M. Ellis-Fermor, Jacobean Drama (London, 1936), p. 77, and A. José Axelrad, Un Malcontent Elizabethain: John Marston (Paris, 1955), p. 60, “Ces deux tragédies par lesquelles il débute [i.e. the Antonio plays] constituent une seule et même histoire en deux parties, le dénouement heureux de la première n'étant qu'un trompe-l'oeil destiné à créer, avec le début de la seconde, un contrast affreux.”

6. Bowers, p. 118; cf. O. J. Campbell, Comicall Satyre and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (San Marino, Calif., 1938), p. 151.

7. Campbell, pp. 136 ff.; cf. Samuel Schoenbaum, “The Precarious Balance of John Marston,” PMLA LXVII (1952), 1071.

8. Axelrad, p. 64, “Ces deux pièces sont franchement mauvaises”; cf. Schoenbaum, p. 1077; Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy (University of Wisconsin Press, 1960), p. 155.

9. Elizabethan Essays, p. 182; cf. G. K. Hunter, “English Folly and Italian Vice. The Moral Landscape of John Marston,” in Jacobean Theatre (Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 1, edited J. R. Brown and Bernard Harris, 1960), p. 91, “As an author he [Marston] is notoriously careless and probably contemptuous of his means of expression.”

10. Harbage, Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, (New York, 1952), p. 171; cf. Schoenbaum, p. 1072.

11. An interpretation of the last scene similar to this was proposed, and simultaneously withdrawn, by Robert Ornstein, The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, p. 155: “If we did not see in Marston's other plays a lack of discipline and a willingness to sacrifice artistic unity for immediate dramatic effect, we might well suspect that the closing scene of Antonio's Revenge is a sardonic travesty of Christian sentiment.” In fact, Ornstein regards The Malcontent as a fine play, and does not illustrate this “lack of discipline”; he perhaps withdrew his suggestion about the ending of Antonio's Revenge because he could not rid himself of the traditional image of Marston as a serious writer who “very slenderly knew his literary purposes” (p. 154). As usual, he cites The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image as evidence of Marston's uncertainty, but it seems clear that the poet was trying there, as later in the Antonio plays, to satirise conventional modes of writing, by an exaggerated imitation of them.

12. “English Folly and Italian Vice,” loc. cit., p. 91. Hunter argues from the lines in the Prologue to Antonio's Revenge that “It is … as an image of the ‘realities’ of power (i.e. Realpolitik) that Marston defends his Antonio and Mellida, and it is in this respect that we ought to see the newness of his play” (p. 88). In fact, the prologue goes on to say that the play is one not for the clearsighted, but for the wretched:

                                                                                                        if a breast,
    Nail'd to the earth with griefe: if any heart
    Pierc't through with anguish, pant within this ring:
    If there be any blood, whose heate is choakt
    And stifled with true sense of misery:
    If ought of these straines fill this consort up,
    Th'arrive most welcome.

    The exaggerated gloom of the prologue as a whole suggests that it is an advertisement for the horrors of the play, rather than a statement of beliefs.

13. The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy, p. 155.

14. Antonio's Revenge, II.ii.44 ff.; The Spanish Tragedy, III.xiii. Hieronimo in fact cites several passages, and begins from the Bible.

15. D. J. McGinn, Shakespeare's Influence on the Drama of his Age Studied in Hamlet (Rutgers University Press, 1938), pp. 116-21.

16. Works, ed. J. O. Halliwell (London, 1856), III, 224.