SOURCE: Baines, Barbara J. “Antonio's Revenge: Marston's Play on Revenge Plays.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900 23, No. 2 (Spring 1983): 277-94.

[In the following essay, Baines contends that Marston utilized an unconventional dramatic structure in Antonio's Revenge in an effort to parody the predictable revenge tragedy form.]

Perhaps no play of the Renaissance is more derivative and at the same time more original than Marston's Antonio's Revenge. G. K. Hunter notes that the similarities between Marston's play and Hamlet “are greater than those between either play and any other surviving Elizabethan drama.”¹ It is clear that Marston derived his characters and plot from the old plays of the public stage. The echoes from The Spanish Tragedy, Hamlet (old or new), Titus Andronicus, and Richard III have been well documented in Reavley Gair's new edition of the play.² Marston's intention, however, in patterning his play so conspicuously on those of the adult troupes is not at all clear. One explanation offered by R. A. Foakes is that he intended to capitalize on the popularity of these old plays through a parodic imitation that would appeal to the elite audience of the private theater of St. Paul's.³ But in any attempt to define the nature and function of the parodic element of this play, one must first acknowledge that Marston, and at least one perceptive contemporary, Ben Jonson, saw the play as a tragedy of high seriousness, or at least as an attempt at such.⁴ To interpret the parodic element in a way that is fundamentally incompatible with tragedy may serve, perhaps, the end of making good sense of a very confusing play and thus retrieve it from the dustbin of bad drama;⁵ but such a reading violates the intention of the playwright, who in his prologue banishes from his audience those “uncapable of weighty passion” and invites instead those “nailed to the earth with grief …, pierced through with anguish …, and stifled with true sense of misery” (lines 22-25). As Philip J. Finkelpearl observes, the audience must resemble “the anguished sensitive young lover who serves as the protagonist.”⁶ The epilogue, consisting of the last sixteen lines of the play, indicates Marston's confidence that he has achieved the aesthetic goal, “That with unused peise of style and sense / We might weigh massy in judicious scale,” set forth in the prologue (lines 29-30). Since the play in fact presents the death of Mellida, Marston is himself the muse that Antonio in the epilogue imagines—one whose style is “decked / With freshest blooms of purest elegance” (V.vi.65). Taking its cue from Antonio's last words, Marston's audience will acknowledge the play not with applause “but tears.” Invoking the sense of woe that dominates the play, the epilogue “turn[s] the play back into itself,” as George Geckle has observed.⁷ The epilogue thus underscores the play's tragic mode and its self-reflexive or metadramatic nature. The challenge of Marston's play is to provide a reading that accounts for the parodic element within the framework of tragedy. This objective can be accomplished by acknowledging that Antonio's Revenge is, first of all, a play about a particular kind of play and the audience's response to it.

Marston recognized the conventions of the old revenge tragedy as an ideal vehicle to create the sense of sorrow and woe that for the Renaissance is the essence of tragedy. He was also one of the first of the Renaissance dramatists after Kyd to become aware of the moral and psychological dilemmas inherent in the revenge tragedy of the popular stage. With the opening of the private theater of St. Paul's and the return of the children to perform for a genteel, sophisticated audience, Marston saw the opportunity to explore both the strengths and the limitations of the revenge conventions. He perceived that the source of the dramatic power of Kyd's Spanish Tragedy and Shakespeare's Titus is the tension they evoke between the emotional response and the moral judgment of the audience. Focusing on this tension, Marston deliberately drives a wedge between the audience's emotional response to and its moral judgment of the revenge protagonist.

This division requires maintaining the audience's emotional involvement but at the same time distancing the audience sufficiently to assure its rational response to the protagonist and his revenge. A duality of audience response necessitates a dual perspective: the audience must be caught up in the dramatic illusion and thus the emotional experience of the characters, at the same time that it perceives the highly conventional and morally irresponsible aspect of the emotional experience. The duality of audience response, at once both sympathetic and detached, requires what S. L. Bethell has called “a dual consciousness of player as player and as character.”⁸ As Michael Shapiro has observed, this dual consciousness of player/character is achieved by “actors stepping out of character, direct address to the audience, and frequent metaphorical references to actors, plays, acting, stages, and theaters.”⁹ No play of the period illustrates these dramatic devices better than Antonio's Revenge. To insure the audience's participation in the dramatic illusion and thus in the tragic dimension, Marston heightens the sensational, the macabre, and the poignant—in effect, the melodramatic aspect of the revenge-play conventions. His plot, involving the double murder of father and son and the subsequent revenge of son and father, draws on both of the early prototypes of revenge tragedy, The Spanish Tragedy and the old Hamlet. Marston amplifies the cruelty of his villain and the tyranny of his ghost at the same time that he allows his protagonist little opportunity to contemplate his actions. The suffering of the victims and the ruthlessness of the villain are given full emotional play, to the extent that the cruelty of the revenge meted out to Piero at the end of the play is emotionally gratifying to the audience. But the audience sympathizes with the revengers only to the extent that it is caught up in the dramatic illusion of the play. And it is precisely the nature of the tragic deficiency of the characters—their aesthetic consciousness that substitutes for moral consciousness—that ultimately undermines the dramatic illusion, detaches the audience from the characters, and thus makes possible the parodic dimension of the play and Marston's critical assessment of the genre to which it belongs.

Within the dramatic illusion, Marston's characters live out the conventions of revenge tragedy because they literalize, or to use Rosalie Colie's term, unmetaphor,¹⁰ the theatrum mundi trope: all the world's a stage in a play of revenge. They perceive that life has provided them with roles they are destined to play. Role-playing, in the sense of accepting one's proper part in the drama of life, defines each character's identity within the social structure. But more important, these characters are acutely aware of man's propensity to create a role that conceals his identity. This form of dissembling I will refer to as play-acting in order to distinguish it from role-playing. Marston's artistically self-conscious characters contend with reality by creating verbal and visual images and by engaging in symbolic or ritualistic actions that relate both to role-playing and play-acting. The result of this highly developed aesthetic consciousness is a cast of characters who define their existence through art. The tragic limitations of these characters become apparent when their type of “player” response, deriving from their aesthetic consciousness, becomes a substitute for moral consideration and morally accountable action. Because these characters are locked into their vision of life as drama, they are also locked into the conventions of the roles they play. Thus when they are confronted with a moral issue, their response is emotional and aesthetic rather than rational and moral.

A highly developed aesthetic sensibility of both the Machiavellian villain and the avenging protagonist is one of the prevailing characteristics of Kydian revenge tragedy. This sensibility allows the playwright to use his characters to explore such aesthetic issues as the relationship between illusion and reality (Hamlet's seeming and being) or, as in the case of Antonio's Revenge, the relationship between audience response and dramatic convention. By exaggerating the aesthetic sensibility of his characters in such a way that they perceive life in terms of art—that is, they live their lives by consciously creating dramas, poems, imaginative narratives, and emblems—Marston heightens his audience's awareness of the play as a play and thus limits its participation in the dramatic illusion. The awareness that the audience is watching a play rather than life itself makes the audience acutely conscious of the dictates of the convention and invites an assessment of the generic form. The aesthetic consciousness of the characters who view life as drama is analogous to the aesthetic consciousness of the audience which views the drama as drama. As the audience watches the deficiencies of the sensibilities of these characters, it becomes aware of the deficiencies of its own perception and response, or perhaps more specifically the deficiencies of its taste for revenge tragedy.

The play begins with Piero's sensational entrance, “unbraced, his arms bare, smeared in blood, a poniard in one hand, bloody, and a torch in the other, Strotzo following him with a cord.” The blood, poniard, and cord offer instant emblematic identification of the villain and serve as costume and stage property in the drama which Piero has just completed. He wears the blood of his victims to celebrate his theatrical accomplishment. His opening speech reflects a delight in metaphor and personification as he creates an atmosphere to suit his performance. By the end of his first speech, we recognize him as the conventional Machiavellian villain, a true descendant of Kyd's Lorenzo, Marlowe's Barabas, and Shakespeare's Richard III. Although he quickly informs the audience that his motive is revenge for unrequited love, he also makes quite apparent his delight in his art for its own sake. More important to him than the deed is the artistry with which it is accomplished and the recognition of his artistry. This self-conscious artistry sets the pattern for all of the characters of the play.

Piero's demand for applause underscores his perception of himself as the triumphant actor: “You horrid scouts / That sentinel swart night, give loud applause / From your large palms” (I.i.18-20). Finding his imaginary audience insufficient, Piero turns to his apprentice-accomplice for a more substantial encomium. But what he hears from Strotzo falls short of the desired tribute:

                                                                                Unseasoned sycophant,
Piero Sforza is no numbed lord,
Senseless of all true touch; stroke not the head
Of infant speech till it be fully born.

(I.i.37-40)

This reprimand is itself a model of the rhetorical sophistication that he demands. The humor of the scene derives from the fact that Piero is so free with his rhetorical models that Strotzo cannot get in more than a monosyllable. As Strotzo with his simple “yes” and “no” persists in his sullen refusal to praise the master's art, Piero in exasperation makes clear his love of eloquence: “No! Yes! Nothing but ‘no’ and ‘yes,’ dull lump? / Can'st thou not honey me with fluent speech / And even adore my topless villainy?” (I.i.82-84). Piero finds that he must even point out the sensational effect of the timing of his performance: “Will I not turn a glorious bridal morn / Unto a Stygian night? Yet naught but ‘no’ and ‘yes’?” (I.i.88-89). Having thus praised himself sufficiently, Piero finally allows Strotzo a chance to inform him of Maria's imminent arrival. As he outlines the drama yet to be played, Piero responds with a bravado that is a parodic echo of Richard III:

By this warm reeking gore, I'll marry her.
Look I not now like an inamorate?
Poison the father, butcher the son, and marry the mother-ha!

(I.i.102-104)

The first scene ends as it began with Piero's consciously poetic description of his setting. Poetic sensitivity to the beauty of dawn is strikingly at odds with the moral depravity of the character.

As the other major characters are introduced (I.ii), they too reveal a sensitivity to language, a desire to achieve the proper form of expression, and an awareness of the relationship between illusion and reality. The opening dialogue between Maria and Lucio involves the appropriateness of the word “vouchsafe”; the point Maria makes is that words must accurately describe reality. In a series of neat aphorisms, she also insists that external appearance should reflect internal reality, and, like Hamlet, she has no use for the dissembling art of cosmetics (lines 56-61). With his first appearance in the play, the tragic hero, Antonio, presents the refined sensibility of the poet, dreamer, and lover. The rhetorical figures of Antonio's opening lines reflect his poetic inclinations and also establish an ironic parallel to Piero's description of the night and dawn. The horrors of the night that has just ended are known subconsciously to Antonio and manifested in his dream experience. His anxieties cannot be easily dispelled by those who would cheer him, for he intuits the relationship between man's dreaming and waking experience. Nevertheless, he puts aside his nightmare for conceits upon his forthcoming marriage to Mellida. As the poet-lover, he delights in the opportunity to describe the beauty of his bride. Galeatzo, obviously familiar with the poetic inclinations of Antonio, forestalls his encomium; “Nay, leave hyperboles” (I.iii.123).

As the court gathers beneath Mellida's window (the curtained area of the balcony stage) to greet the bride and lead her to the church, villain and hero are equally conscious of the theatrical moment. For Antonio, the drawing of the curtain is the dramatic unveiling of nature's masterpiece and an opportunity for poetic praise:

The trophy of triumphing excellence
The heart of beauty, Mellida, appears,
See, look, the curtain stirs; shine nature's pride,
Love's vital spirit, dear Antonio's bride!

But Antonio, the presenter or chorus, is as shocked as his audience when the “gory ensign” (Feliche's corpse) rather than the image of beauty is revealed. Piero, who has obviously calculated the sensational effect of his preparatory dumb show, now appears according to the stage direction, as at first—that is, costumed in his victims' blood and ready to perform. In a display of feigned moral indignation and self-righteous rage, he convinces at least part of his audience. Forobosco, responding to the madness Piero feigns, urges him to “Keep league with reason.” At the height of Piero's antics, his apprentice enters for his subordinate role. As Strotzo announces the death of Andrugio, Piero now as playwright and director coaches him in an aside: “Fut, weep, act, feign” (I.v.7). Strotzo, then, in language so contrived and affected that his lie is apparent to all but the most gullible, gives his account of Andrugio's death. Antonio's response, in the figurative language that consistently characterizes his speech, asserts the validity of his subconscious dream experience: “Why now the womb of mischief is delivered / Of the prodigious issue of the night” (lines 24-25). Pandulpho underscores the propensity of all of these characters to conceive of reality in terms of art, specifically here to conceive of life as an unfolding tragedy: “Come sit, kind nephew; come on; thou and I / Will talk as chorus to this tragedy” (lines 62-63). The tragedy referred to here is the one which Piero has just staged at Mellida's window, but it is also the one which Antonio will stage as the climax of his revenge.

Although Pandulpho conceives of the world as a stage, he, in his aloof stoicism, refuses at first to play a part. Alberto understands that the part his uncle should play is that of the grieving, angry father. Pandulpho, recalling the histrionics of Kyd's Hieronimo, refuses his part:

Wouldst have me cry, run raving up and down
For my son's loss? Wouldst have me turn rank mad,
Or wring my face with mimic action,
Stamp, curse, weep, rage, and then my bosom strike?
Away, 'tis apish action, player-like.

(lines 76-80)

For Pandulpho the concept of the world as a stage is not to be taken so literally that metaphor loses its significance and becomes a substitute for reality. Ultimately, however, Pandulpho will discover that he cannot stoically detach himself from the drama of life; he too must shed tears and take revenge. In doing so, he, like Antonio, will accept a role that is narrowly fashioned according to revenge conventions.

The comic characters, Nutriche and Balurdo, parody the aesthetic sensitivity and histrionics of the tragic characters. Nutriche's dream of the pleasures of her wedding night and her rude awakening (I.ii.31-40) are a comic parallel to Maria's anticipation of reunion with Andrugio, to Antonio's anticipation of union with Mellida, and to the subsequent cruel disappointment of mother and son. Balurdo's dream parodies Antonio's dream of the ghosts of Andrugio and Feliche, as well as Antonio's preoccupation with rhetorical figures: “methought the ground yawned and belked up the abominable ghost of a misshapen Simile, with two ugly pages, the one called Master Even-as going before, and the other Mounser Even-so, following after, whilst Signior Simile stalked most prodigiously in the midst” (I.iii.63-67). The folly of Balurdo is exemplified consistently by his adaptation and misuse of words that strike his fancy. His misuse of words becomes an art in itself and a source of pride that burlesques the artistry of the play's serious characters.¹¹ Balurdo parodies the play-acting of Piero by presenting himself to Piero in the guise of a player, “a beard half off, half on” (II.i.21). He explains, “the tiring man hath not glued on my beard half fast enough. God's bores, it will not stick to fall off” (lines 30-32). This detail involving the beard also disrupts the realistic dramatic illusion by calling attention to the actor playing the character. The audience is reminded that the player is a player, specifically a child actor engaging in a parodic imitation of the adult actor of the public theaters.¹²

Balurdo's willingness to play his part as counselor-fool sharply contrasts with Pandulpho's refusal to play the one Piero has devised for him. As Piero contrives the drama that will blame Antonio for Andrugio's death, Pandulpho identifies the role that Piero expects him to play: “My lord the clapper of my mouth's not glibbed / With court oil; 'twill not strike on both sides yet” (II.ii.50-51). As he rejects the role of court sycophant, he also instructs Piero in the proper role that a prince should play. That each is highly conscious that a prince does, in fact, play a role based on a set formula of rules is indicated by their exchange of rhymed sententia defining that role (II.ii.52-69). Pandulpho's formalized philosophy identifies him as the stoic who cannot be manipulated by the tyrant. Because he will not accept the part Piero has designed for him, Pandulpho is banished from Piero's stage.

Antonio, on the other hand, accepts the conventional role of the melancholy, alienated youth that Piero's villainy has created for him. He enters at II.iii in the conventional guise of this role: dressed in black, reading the stoic's philosophy. Like Hieronimo and Hamlet, he takes little comfort from his book. In this scene of ritualized grief he becomes the symbol of sorrow for all who have been injured by Piero. Like the audience, Antonio is conscious of the conventions of his role. But he resolves to shape that role according to the dictates of his own aesthetic sensibility: “I will not swell like a tragedian / In forced passion of affected strains” (II.iii.104-105). His form of self-expression is nevertheless both dramatic and emblematic and self-consciously so. Throwing himself upon the ground, he creates of himself an emblem of woe:

Behold a prostrate wretch laid on his tomb;
His epitaph thus: Ne plus ultra. Ho!
Let none out-woe me, mine's Herculean woe.

(II.iii.131-33)

The Renaissance audience would certainly have recognized Antonio's conscious creation of himself as an emblem, since his motto, Ne plus ultra, is a variation of a familiar heraldic device derived from the alleged inscription on the pillars of Hercules.¹³ Since the Globe theater was traditionally associated with Hercules through his labor of supporting the globe, “Herculean woe” is a logical allusion to the tragedies of the Globe. “Let none out-woe me” is Marston's vaunt that calls attention to the fact that he is striving for heightened emotional effect. The likelihood that Marston's line refers to the rivalry of the theaters is reinforced by Shakespeare's allusion to the rivalry between the child and the adult troupes: to Hamlet's question, “Do the boys carry it away,” Rosencrantz responds, “Ay, that they do, my lord—Hercules and his load too” (II.ii.360-61). By enumerating the conventions of his role, Antonio clearly defines himself as a player of revenge tragedy:

Yes mother, I do sigh and wring my hands,
Beat my poor breast and wreathe my tender arms.
Hark ye, I'll tell you wondrous strange, strange news.
.....I am not mad, I run not frantic, ha?

(II.iv.7-13)

When Antonio appears again in III.i at his father's tomb, his histrionic display invokes the ghost of Andrugio. Contrary to his earlier assertion, Antonio manifests madness as he accepts without question the mandate for revenge. He relinquishes his will and judgment, and thus his identity as an individual, to the role of revenger. He is instructed by the ghost to “Invent some stratagem of vengeance / Which, but to think on, may like lightning glide / With horror through thy breast” (III.i.48-50). In keeping with the ghost's instructions, the stratagem that Antonio invents for Piero is borrowed from the ultimate in revenge tragedy, Seneca's Thyestes: “I'll force him feed on life / Till he shall loathe it. This shall be the close / Of vengeance' strain” (III.ii.89-91). Antonio's language here, “the close / Of vengeance' strain,” indicates an aesthetic consciousness of form and convention within the role that he is to play. His drama of revenge, in the Senecan school, takes its form from primitive, pagan ritual of the sacrifice of the innocent and a blood offering to appease the ghost of his father. Antonio's vision of mankind (III.ii.57-73) reflects the negative detachment and cynicism characteristic of the malcontent who sees the world as a stage where man enacts his damnation. Because in his vision life is a tragedy of damnation, Antonio accepts his role as a murderer and becomes morally indistinguishable from the spirit of revenge tragedy, Andrugio's ghost.

Antonio's role-fulfillment is ironically very similar to the play-acting or dissembling of Piero. While Antonio accepts the mandate for revenge and thinks on “the close / Of vengeance' strain,” Piero devises the drama to restore Mellida's honor and destroy Antonio. Together Piero and his accomplice-apprentice Strotzo rehearse the dialogue and the action of their performance (II.v.1-36) and calculate its emotional effect upon their court audience. Piero's promise of reward to Strotzo, to “mount thee straight to state,” shows again Piero's delight in his use of language. His play on the word “mount” becomes clear later (IV.iii.55-65) in the performance of his plot: as Strotzo figuratively mounts the acting platform by playing his part as the penitent who confesses and incriminates Antonio, he also mounts the hangman's scaffold. Their rehearsal complete, Piero acknowledges the generic conventions of his dramatic art with an allusion to The Spanish Tragedy: “O now Tragoedia Cothurnata mounts” (II.v.45). Ironically, the grim enactment we immediately witness is not Piero's play but the first stage or act of Antonio's revenge, the murder of little Julio.

The ironic parallel between Antonio's fulfillment of his role as revenger and Piero's play-acting or dissembling is particularly striking when Antonio, after murdering the young son of Piero, enters, “his arms bloody, [bearing] a torch and a poniard” (III.v.13). He is a mirror image of the villain in the opening scene of the play, after Piero has murdered Feliche and Andrugio.¹⁴ The parallel between hero and villain is also conspicuous when Antonio counters the dissembling of Piero with a dissemblance of his own. He has prepared us for his play-acting with his earlier statement, “Thou that wants power, with dissemblance fight” (II.iv.27).

The disguise he adopts and the character he chooses to play find disfavor with Maria and Alberto, his supporting players. A manifestation of their aesthetic sensibilities, their objections derive from a concept of decorum: the disguise as a fool is “unsuiting” (IV.i.2) to the nature or “elate spirit” of Antonio, and incompatible with the elevated action which he must perform. Antonio defends his decision to play the fool by pointing out the conventions associated with this role:

O, he hath a patent of immunities,
Confirmed by custom, sealed by policy,
As large as spacious thought.

(lines 13-15)

By playing the fool, Antonio hopes to gain not only freedom of speech but freedom from the horror of his true role in life, for the fool cannot “thus run mad / As one confounded in a maze of mischief” (IV.i.54-55).

Obviously the danger of this kind of dissembling is the loss of one's true identity. As Antonio adopts the disguise of the fool, he acknowledges that he relinquishes the relationships that give meaning to his life:

Alberto, see you straight rumour me dead.
Leave me, good mother; leave me, Lucio;
Forsake me all.

(IV.i.64-66)

The ultimate price Antonio pays for his disguise and the rumor of his death is the actual death of his beloved, Mellida, with whom he was to share his identity. As Antonio here plays the part of the fool, Balurdo in the fifth act plays the part of the revenger. This exchange in which revenger becomes fool, and fool, revenger is part of Marston's parodic yet tragic treatment of his revenge protagonist.

The conscious artistry of Marston's characters is nowhere more apparent than in the scene of Piero's mock trial of Mellida (IV.iii). The characters first present a series of symbolic images or emblems designed either to conceal or reveal reality. Piero begins the mock trial and drama, that he and Strotzo have earlier rehearsed, by commanding Mellida to appear in her bridal dress, “That she may blush t'appear so white in show / And black in inward substance” (IV.ii.10-11). Ironically, the image of hypocrisy which he thus envisions defines his own nature and sets the stage for his subsequent performance. Mellida, like her father, conceives of herself in this drama as a symbolic image without words. She is the icon, the emblem picture without motto or epigram. Her defense is not through words because Piero, a Satanic father of lies, has corrupted the word; she testifies instead “With tears, with blushes, sighs and clasped hands, / With innocent upreared arms to heaven, / With my unnooked simplicity” (IV.iii.22-24). Antonio, disguised as the fool blowing soap bubbles around Piero's lies, provides a choric commentary on the world of play-acting (IV.ii.28-30). As the drama to be played by Piero and Strotzo begins, Strotzo defines his role emblematically by entering on cue, “a cord around his neck.” Antonio, whose asides throughout the scene emphasize the theatrical performance of Piero and Strotzo, wonders “What villainy are they decocting now?” Piero and Strotzo play out their parts according to rehearsal until Piero, to Strotzo's dismay, begins to improvise. Like Pedringano in The Spanish Tragedy, Strotzo discovers that his performance concludes ironically in the reality of death. Even Antonio, who has all along understood that he was audience to a performance staged by Piero, is astounded by the audacity and ingenuity of Piero's plot. When Alberto, according to Antonio's instructions, suddenly announces that Antonio is drowned, Antonio, commenting in an aside on the spectacle of Strotzo's murder, responds, “In an inundation of amazement.” He clearly recognizes that he has been upstaged by Piero's improvisation. But with the announcement of Antonio's death, it is Piero's turn to serve as audience while Alberto, Antonio's apprentice/accomplice, gives his narrative of Antonio's death:

Distraught and raving, from a turret's top
He threw his body in the high-swollen sea,
And as he headlong topsy-turvy dinged down
He still cried “Mellida!”

(IV.iii.81-84)

The absurdity of the language of this narrative and of the image it creates constitutes a satiric commentary on the inclination of these characters to make of their lives a poignant fiction or drama. Mellida, deficient in the art of dissembling, takes Alberto's narrative as reality and dies of a broken heart. As one who cannot dissemble and cannot recognize dissembling, she is ill-equipped in her innocence for a world of players.

Antonio's mourning (IV.iv) for Mellida reveals a concern with formal expression appropriate to his self-conscious aesthetic sensibility. His lament is as conventional as it is poignant. Acknowledging that she was “all heavenly” and but loaned to him for a little time, he accepts with restrained passion her loss as the will of God. Because he has surrendered his moral sensibility to the tyranny of revenge and the conventions of his role as revenger, he fails to see that his play-acting is primarily responsible for Mellida's death. Instead, he again (as in II.iii) creates of himself an emblematic image of woe and calls attention to the image he creates (IV.iv.12-23).

This time the scene of woe is augmented by Pandulpho, who places Feliche's body, wrapped in its shroud, across the prone body of Antonio. Pandulpho thus presents Feliche's corpse as an emblem of woe that surpasses the prone figure of Antonio. Although Pandulpho reiterates the stoic philosophy that defines his identity to this point, he is so moved by the image of woe lying before him that philosophy gives way to grief. He who would not express his grief earlier for fear of appearing “player-like” now ironically describes his stoicism with the theatrum mundi trope:

Man will break out, despite philosophy.
Why, all this while I ha' but played a part,
Like to some boy that acts a tragedy,
Speaks burly words and raves but passion;
But when he thinks upon his infant weakness,
He droops his eye.

(IV.v.46-51)

By alluding to the child actor, Marston adds a new dimension to the theatrum mundi trope. The metaphor of man as the child actor who plays the tragedy becomes particularly significant in this play written for the Children of St. Paul's. The child actor playing the part of the old man, Pandulpho, compares himself to what in fact he is: a “boy that acts a tragedy … and raves but passion.” By calling attention to his artifice, Marston distances his audience from the dramatic illusion and thus makes possible a degree of emotional objectivity.

Pandulpho's self-conscious assessment leads to the conclusion, “I am the miserablest soul that breathes” (line 53). Antonio, who has already defined himself as the quintessential image (ne plus ultra) of woe, takes offense at being up-staged, or, to use his own dramaturgical term, “out-mounted” by Pandulpho:

'Slid, sir, ye lie! By th'heart of grief, thou liest!
I scorn't that any wretched should survive
Outmounting me in that superlative,
Most miserable, most unmatched in woe.
Who dare assume that, but Antonio?

(lines 54-58)

Who, indeed, but perhaps Romeo or Hamlet in his most theatrical moments. Until Pandulpho literalizes the theatrum mundi trope by dramatizing his woe and conceiving of his former stoicism as a part that he played, he serves as a foil to the emotional excesses of Antonio. Prior to Pandulpho's assumption of the theatrical perspective, he, in fact, provides the moral sensibility that is absent in Antonio. As he abandons his philosophical position and surrenders to his suffering, the audience is inclined to do the same. But the histrionic rivalry coming at this moment of grief also results in a parodic reduction of both characters to actors playing parts. The result is again an aesthetic detachment in the audience precisely at the moment of the intensification of emotional response. This dual response of the audience is made possible through a consciousness of the actors as characters who behave as actors.

The aesthetic consciousness and histrionics of Antonio, Pandulpho, and Alberto intensify as they are mutually absorbed in the desire for revenge. Ritual and decorum govern the burial of Feliche and the commitment to their common cause. With an allusion to The Spanish Tragedy and Hieronimo's digging at the ground with his sword, Pandulpho says, “Let's dig the grave with that shall dig the heart, / Liver and entrails of the murderer” (IV.v.63-64). At this point, according to the stage direction, the revengers “strike the stage with their daggers and the grave openeth.” By calling attention to the stage through the use of the trap door for special effect, Marston again reminds his audience that it is watching a play. And by imitating the action of The Spanish Tragedy, Marston calls attention to the conventions of his dramatic form. Like Hieronimo, Pandulpho is concerned with the decorum of the dirge for his son; he too will say a dirge rather than sing it (IV.v.72), for the harmony of music, to use Hieronimo's words, “fits not this case” (II.v.66, Philip Edwards's edition). By wreathing their arms in a “Gordian knot of love” (IV.v.88) the three allies create a visual image of their commitment to revenge. Marston underscores this symbolic action by having the revengers exit a second time (at the end of V.iii) “twined together.” This “Gordian knot of love” emphasizes the common cause of revenge and thus prepares for the concept that the murder of Piero is a form of social justice and not exclusively the private revenge of a single individual. Thus in one sense this action is designed to encourage the audience's sympathy with the revengers who set about to destroy one who threatens the entire social order. At the same time, these in-unison, choreographed exits define revenge as a staged performance by characters who are conscious of their artistry. Again this emphasis on the artistry of the revengers creates an aesthetic distance between actor and audience.

In the fifth act, Marston amplifies his emphasis upon revenge-play conventions, especially the theatrical consciousness of his characters. The final act begins with a dumbshow and a prologue spoken by the spirit of revenge, Andrugio's ghost. The dumbshow here, as at the beginning of Acts II and III, serves to emphasize the Senecan revenge conventions as well as the emblematic, ritualistic nature of the play. Whereas the dumbshow beginning Act III foreshortens the plot by relating Piero's courtship of Maria, the dumbshow of Act V rehearses by playing out in mime the catastrophe which is about to begin. As Pandulpho adopts the role of revenger, he relinquishes his earlier function as “chorus to this tragedy.” The role of on-stage audience that provides choric commentary is assumed here in the fifth act by the ghost of Andrugio, a slightly more anthropomorphic version of Kyd's Revenge. The spirit of revenge that governs Antonio and thus the action of the play, the ghost is also a player who can, with the use of a curtain, stage a scene for maximum emotional effect. The theatrical talent displayed earlier in the ghost's sensational appearance in Maria's bed (III.iv.64) prepares the audience for the ghost's theatrical role as presenter of the play's catastrophe. As prologue and chorus, Andrugio's ghost makes clear the parallel between Marston's fifth act and the fifth act of Antonio's revenge which will be played on the world-stage in the theater of God's judgment:

          Now down looks providence
T'attend the last act of my son's revenge.
Be gracious, Observation, to our scene;
For now the plot unites his scattered limbs
Close in contracted bands.

(V.i.10-14)

As the spirit of revenge and thus of revenge tragedy and as a spectator who conceives of temporal reality as a drama, the ghost is analogous to the theater audience whose taste dictates the creation of revenge tragedy. The ghost's highly developed emotional and aesthetic response—a response devoid of moral judgment—serves as commentary on the moral deficiency of the audience's exclusively aesthetic and emotional response to revenge tragedy. By defining the ghost as the spirit of revenge tragedy and, simultaneously, as audience to it, Marston suggests that the moral deficiency of the dramatic genre derives from the very theater audience whose taste has established the conventions.

As their “last act” begins, Antonio, Alberto, and Pandulpho are conscious only of their role as revengers and of the language, image, and action appropriate to this role. Antonio and Alberto enter simultaneously “at several doors, their rapiers drawn, in their masking attire.” Their entrance is choreographed and costumed; their salutation, antiphonal and invocational (V.iii.1-4). Pandulpho, echoing the stage metaphor of Andrugio's ghost, declares, “Heaven sits clapping of our enterprise” (line 15). He also provides the trio with a motto, or significatio, to complete their emblematic identity: “O, now, Vindicta! that's the word we have” (line 40). The allusion here to Hieronimo's famous “Vindicta mihi” speech (The Spanish Tragedy, III.xiii.1-44) calls attention once more to the revenge conventions within which Marston's revengers will perform their final act.

As the opening dance of the mask begins, the ghost of Andrugio appears above between the music houses. Taking his seat as “spectator of revenge” (V.v.21), he underscores the concept of temporal reality as an unfolding drama. The scene he watches, the climax of Antonio's revenge, involves self-conscious action dictated by decorum, ritual, and convention. It is the aesthetic sensibility of Piero—specifically his respect for form and decorum—that makes him an easy mark for the revengers. Informed of the custom of allowing maskers to banquet first and in private, Piero responds, “I were too rude / If I gainsaid so civil a fashion” (V.v.24-25). Flattered by the request to join the maskers in the private banquet, Piero is quickly overpowered and his tongue plucked out. Pandulpho's explanation of this form of punishment, “We'll spoil your oratory” (V.v.33), gives a good indication of the significance of this brutal act. As the arch-hypocrite and the playwright-actor of dramas of deception, Piero is figuratively defined by his tongue, the instrument of his false art. In addition, the act of cutting out Piero's tongue, like the Thyestian banquet, places the revengers within the familiar conventions of revenge tragedy, established earlier by The Spanish Tragedy and Titus Andronicus. The Thyestian banquet is served to Piero in a ritual of accusation and invective that strips away the villain's mask by defining his true nature and his guilt. The formal, rhetorically balanced accusations and invective prepare for the choreographed murder of Piero. The ghost, from his seat between the music houses, offers the epilogue and critical assessment of his son's drama of revenge: “'Tis done, and now my soul shall sleep in rest. / Sons that revenge their father's blood are blest” (V.v.81-82). The only perspective that can define Antonio as blessed is one that substitutes aesthetics for morality. As the theater audience watches this on-stage audience and critic, its own perspective is once more called into question.

In the final scene of the play, Marston makes special use of the curtained acting areas on the balcony and on the lower stage in order to emphasize the histrionic nature of his characters and also to heighten his audience's awareness of the play as a play. After the ghost's epilogue, the curtain—most likely the same one that in Act I opened to present the dumbshow of Feliche's mutilated body—closes to conceal the ghost. This closing of the curtain signals the completion of the action which the ghost has inspired and supervised. The “first senator” enters with members of court and defines himself as spectator/critic. He emphasizes the theatrical nature of the murder of Piero with the question, “Whose hand presents this gory spectacle?” (V.vi.i). The revengers interpret the question to mean “who has done this deed?” and each claims responsibility. The theater audience, however, knows that the ghost, with his prologue and epilogue, has actually presented the spectacle. After the mutilated corpse of Piero—itself another dumbshow—is viewed and the revengers are congratulated for their performance, the stage direction, “the curtains are drawn; Piero departeth,” makes clear that the scene of revenge has been played within the curtained acting area of the main stage. The use of the curtained area and the closing of the curtain suggest a stage within the stage and thus make explicit the theatrical nature of Antonio's revenge which the ghost has already termed “the last act” (V.i.11). By staging his “last act” in the curtained area of the lower stage, Antonio demonstrates the same sensitivity to theatrical effect as that manifested in Piero's staging of Feliche's body behind the curtain of Mellida's window and in the ghost's staging of his sensational appearance before Maria in the curtained area of her sleeping chamber. Piero's “Tragoedia Cothurnata” (II.v.45) begins in the first act with the opening of the curtain to Mellida's chamber and the display of the “gory ensign” (I.iii.131), Feliche's corpse. Both the “fifth act” of Antonio's revenge and Act V of Marston's Antonio's Revenge end with the closing of a curtain on the “gory spectacle” of Piero's corpse.

The final speech of Marston's play, given to his revenger-artist, underscores the aesthetic concerns of this character and the metadramatic nature of the play as a whole. Dismissing all moral issues with the brief acknowledgment of the need to “purge hearts of hatred,” Antonio's thoughts turn to aesthetic matters, specifically to an appropriate ending for his dramatic performance:

Sound doleful tunes, a solemn hymn advance,
To close the last act of my vengeance;
And when the subject of your passion's spent,
Sing “Mellida is dead,” all hearts will relent
In sad condolement at that heavy sound;
Never more woe in lesser plot was found.

(V.vi.54-59)

His assumption that “all hearts will relent / In sad condolement” sanctions the separation of an emotional-aesthetic response from a moral response. Antonio urges this separation because he conceives of reality through the artistic conventions of revenge tragedy. By creating a revenge tragedy that cultivates sympathy for a morally deficient revenger, Marston forces his audience to experience first hand the response he is calling into question. Antonio conceives of suffering not as a reality of life but as the subject of dramatic art, specifically of a play strangely like Antonio's Revenge. The proper audience response also takes shape in his imagination:

And, O, if ever time create a muse
That to th'immortal fame of virgin faith
Dares once engage his pen to write her death,
Presenting it in some black tragedy,
May it prove gracious, may his style be decked
With freshest blooms of purest elegance;
May it have gentle presence, and the scenes sucked up
By calm attention of choice audience;
And when the closing Epilogue appears,
Instead of claps, may it obtain but tears.

(lines 60-69)

This deliberate association of the revenger-protagonist with the playwright brings into focus Marston's perception of the limitations of a dramatic form in which, despite the obvious moral problems inherent in revenge, “all hearts relent in sad condolement.”

Antonio's Revenge is a young playwright's attempt at a kind of drama that he conceived of as essentially sensational rather than moral. His characters whose aesthetic sensibilities substitute for moral sensibilities reflect the artist's own problem in reconciling the aesthetic with the moral demands of his medium. Like his tragic protagonist, Marston was to some degree trapped by the conventions of revenge tragedy. His treatment of the revenge conventions, culminating in his outrageous exoneration of his revenge protagonist at the end of the play, indicates his dissatisfaction with the dramatic genre and particularly with the sympathetic response to revenge that it fostered.¹⁵ By cultivating an undiminished sympathy for Antonio even to the extent of associating him with the supersensitive audience of the prologue and epilogue and with the playwright himself, Marston makes clear that Antonio is the product of the audience's taste for revenge tragedy and of the playwright who serves that taste. That his chief concern is the theatrical merits and the moral limitations of the genre is apparent in his creation of characters who consciously conceive of life within the context of the genre. In the most fundamental sense, Antonio's Revenge is metadramatic: it is a play about plays, specifically revenge tragedies and the moral and aesthetic problems of the artist who contributes to this convention.

Notes

1. Antonio's Revenge, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965), p. xviii. Most scholars agree with G. K. Hunter that Antonio's Revenge was written a few months before Shakespeare's Hamlet and that the similarities between the two plays derive from a common source, the so-called Ur-Hamlet (p. xx). Philip J. Finkelpearl in John Marston of the Middle Temple (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), pp. 268-71, argues, to the contrary, that there are four passages in Antonio's Revenge that may allude to Shakespeare's Hamlet.

2. Antonio's Revenge, The Revels Plays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978). In addition to illustrating Marston's use of earlier plays of the public theaters, Gair emphasizes the originality of Marston's use of “mime and music of the choristers, producing a hybrid that has obvious affinities with opera” (p. 31). All quotations are from the Gair edition. Act, scene, and line references are given in the text in parentheses.

3. John Marston's Fantastical Plays: Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge,” PQ 41 (January 1962):229-30.

4. In answer to Foakes's reading of the play as parody, T. F. Wharton (“Old Marston or New Marston: the Antonio Plays,” EIC 25 (July 1975):361) defines Marston's intentions: “The comments of both Marston himself and of his contemporaries confirm that his intentions were pathetic rather than parodic, emotional rather than cerebral.” Wharton insists, accurately I believe, that “Marston's commitment to Antonio's cause (and to Antonio's helper, Pandulpho) is undiminished” (p. 363). It does not follow, however, that the sympathy evoked for the revengers precludes a parodic statement about revenge conventions, as I will try to demonstrate. A recent article by Elizabeth M. Yearling, “‘Mount Tufty Tamburlaine’: Marston and Linguistic Excess,” SEL 20 (Spring 1980): 257-69, approaches the problem of tone and intention in Antonio's Revenge as a conflict between Marston's aversion to linguistic excess and the dramatic exigencies of the stage.

5. Richard Levin, in “The New New Inn and the Proliferation of Good Bad Drama,” EIC 22 (January 1972):41-47, sees in the recent tendency to read a play as parodic, rather than as a “straight” treatment of its subject, an effort to justify the play's shortcomings. See Foakes's response, “Mr. Levin and ‘Good Bad Drama,’” EIC 22 (July 1972):327-29, and Levin's counter response, “The Proof of Parody,” EIC 24 (July 1974):312-16.

6. John Marston of the Middle Temple, p. 151.

7. George Geckle, “Antonio's Revenge: ‘Never more woe in lesser plot was found,’” CompD 6 (Winter 1972-1973):332.

8. S. L. Bethell, “Shakespeare's Actors,” RES n.s. 1 (July 1950):203. In Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1944), pp. 30-31, Bethell states that the “double consciousness of play world and real world has the solid advantage of ‘distancing’ a play, so that the words and deeds of which it consists may be critically weighted in the course of its performance.”

9. Michael Shapiro, “Children's Troupes: Dramatic Illusion and Acting Style,” CompD 3 (Spring 1969): 42. Shapiro also notes that the metaphorical references serve to make the audience aware of “the real world, which includes the audience and the actors as actors; the world of dramatic action, which includes the actors as characters; and the world of play-acting within the world of the dramatic action” (pp. 45-46).

10. Shakespeare's Living Art (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1974), p. 11.

11. Finkelpearl notes the histrionic nature of the serious characters, the “pretty poetry” of Antonio (p. 143) and the burlesque of the serious characters through the absurdities of Balurdo (p. 152).

12. Reavley Gair, “The Presentation of Plays at Second Paul's: the Early Phase (1599-1602)” in The Elizabethan Theatre, ed. G. R. Hibbard, 6 vols. (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1978), 6:32, explains that beards were not used by child actors but were commonly used by the adult troupes.

13. See Claude Paradin, The Heroicall Devices of M. Claudius Paradin, trans. P. S. (London: William Kearney, 1591), pp. 32-34.

14. Finkelpearl notes the resemblance here between Antonio and Piero as part of a thematic statement, present through spectacle, of the “immersion in the destructive element” (pp. 160-61).

15. For a full discussion of the play's controversial ending, see Philip Ayers, “Marston's Antonio's Revenge: The Morality of the Revenging Hero,” SEL 12 (Spring 1972):359-74.