John Marson's Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge - Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st

John Marston does something with the pair of plays Antonio and Mellida (1599?) and Antonio’s Revenge (1600?) that I do not think I have ever seen before.  The first play is a silly, barely coherent romantic comedy, with everything wrapped up in a happy ending.  Antonio’s Revenge is a bloody revenge with the same characters (except for the ones murdered before the first act), demolishing the earlier play.  Which one is the travesty?  Both, I guess.

Companies of school boys had performed plays of high sophistication for decades in London, but 1599 saw the opening of what were effectively commercial theaters featuring companies of boy actors.  These were “private” theaters while the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the Globe, Shakespeare’s company, was “public.”  The public companies were repertory groups that performed almost daily, mixing old plays with a constant stream of new plays.  The private companies performed once a week – the boys were nominally in school.  A play at the Globe cost one penny; at Paul’s Theatre, where Marston’s plays were performed, six (6) pennies.  So the audience was entirely different, with the intimate, roofed boy’s companies playing to richer, more educate, more let’s use the word sophisticated audiences. 

I write this for my own benefit.  It explains a lot of what I see in these plays.  London had a sufficiently large audience that had cultivated a taste for parody and meta-theater.  Not even twenty-five years after the opening of the theaters and the decadent phase has started.  Or maybe things are getting good.  I have a strong taste for parody and meta-theater.

Both plays are full of lines from Seneca’s plays, in English and in Latin.  There are many parodies of bits of The Spanish Tragedy, the old warhorse, and of Tamburlaine and Titus Andronicus, but also of Montaigne.  Antonio and Mellida begins with the boy actors carrying their scripts on stage and discussing how to play their parts.  “I a voice to play a lady!  I shall ne’er do it.”  (Induction, 64)

I am continuing to have trouble imaging what these performances of these complex plays were like.  Some of the “boys” were older teens, and a number would have longer careers on stage, but the youngest, often playing the women’s roles, were seven or eight years old.

Antonio and Mellida:  Venice has defeated Genoa in a sea battle.  The Duke of Genoa and his son Antonio wash ashore.  Antonio and Mellida, daughter of the Duke of Venice, are in love.  This is a comedy and a romance, so love prevails and no one is murdered.  Antonio spends most of the play disguised as an “Amazon.”  It is a comic genre mishmash with lots of room for gags and diversion and songs.

I will mention here before I forget that the clown role, a striving braggart soldier type, at one point demands that a painter make a painting of “Uh.”

BALURDO  God’s nigs, now I remember me, I ha’ the rarest device in my head that ever breathed.  Can you paint me a drivelling, reeling song and let the word be, ‘Uh’?

PAINTER  A belch?

BALURDO  O, no, no – ‘Uh’.  Paint me ‘Uh, or nothing.  (V.1, 144)

He has invented conceptual art, right there on the London stage (although this is also another reference to a line in The Spanish Tragedy).

Antonio’s Revenge:  The Duke of Venice goes back on his word and murders the Duke of Genoa and imprisons his daughter for sexual misbehavior, just before the play starts. 

PIERO          I am great in blood,

Unequal’d in revenge.  (AR, I.1, 7)

The ghost of the murdered duke urges Antonio to wreak revenge on Piero, which he eventually does, just a horrible, horrible revenge. 

ANTONIO [indicates the banquet]

Fall in, good duke.  O these are worthless cates.

You have no stomach to them.  Look, look here:

Herer lies a dish to feast thy father’s gorge.

Here’s flesh and blood which I am sure thou lov’st.

[He uncovers the dish containing oh no too horrible I will stop here]  (V.3, 82)

Seneca’s Thyestes is the main reference here.

Piero is a quite interesting Machiavellian, a ruler himself and more of an actual Machiavellian than the usual burlesque of Machiavelli found in other English plays.  Piero overreachs so much that Antonio does not have to seek revenge on his own but actually assembles a team, which I do not think I had ever seen in a revenge tragedy before.

I would not call Antonio and Mellida a great play; Antonio’s Revenge finds some greatness once it gets moving in lets say Act III.  I’ll bet it works well on stage.  But the important thing is the language, which I will write about tomorrow.  Marston’s language is unusual.

Text and page numbers for Antonio and Mellida are from the Manchester University Press, the 1991 Revels Plays edition; those of Antonio’s Revenge are from the 1965 University of Nebraska Press edition.