Marston's poetics - foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain

The plays that have survived from the early London stage are language-crazed.  When have so many commercial writers been poets, great poets?  When has so much commercial writing been poetry?

John Marston is among the purplest of the poet-playwrights, the most baroque.  I can imagine readers who find he goes too far.  I love it when he gets rolling.

Here, for example, Antonio reads aloud, in Latin, some consoling lines of stoical Seneca, but dismisses them:

Pish, thy mother was not lately widowed,

Thy dear affied love lately defam’d

With blemish of foul lust when thou wrot’st thus.

Thou, wrapp’d in furs, beaking thy limbs ‘fore fires

Forbid’st the frozen zone to shudder.  Ha, ha! ‘tis naught

But foamy bubbling of a fleamy brain,

Naught else but smoke.  (II.2, 33-4)

Passages like this must be great fun for actors, with the f-words overtaking the l-words.  The monologue goes on for a few more lines, more self-pitying or whining, with a few more Fs.  Marston’s genius, I suppose, is that he understands that the play has to function on stage, so it cannot be nothing but foamy bubbling of fleamy brains.

The rawish dank of clumsy winter ramps

The fluent summer’s vein; and drizzling sleet

Chilleth the wan bleak cheek of the numb’d earth,

Whilst snarling gusts nibble the juiceless leaves

From the nak’d shuddering branch, and pills the skin

From off the soft and delicate aspects.

O now, methinks, a sullen tragic scene

Would suit the time with pleasing congruence.  (Prologue, 3)

These Romantic lines, which sound to me like something from centuries later, begin the play, but the Prologue is a place to indulge.  Marston has a terrific Gothic side to his imagination.  Here Duje Piero is at the funeral of the enemy he has murdered.

PIERO  Rot there, thou cerecloth that enfolds the flesh

Of my loath’d foe; molder to crumbling dust;

Oblivion choke the passage of thy fame!

Trophies of honor’d birth drop quickly down;

Let naught of him, but what was vicious, live.

Though thou art dead, think not my hate is dead;

I have but newly twone my arm in the curl’d locks

Of snaky vengeance.  Pale, beetle-brow’d hate

But newly bustles up.

What a weirdo.  Would Robert Browning have written this character’s mad scenery chewing so differently?  Maybe he would have written “twined” rather than “twone.”  What a great, crazy image.

Ben Jonson mocks Marston for his overdone vocabulary, as we will see when I write up Poetaster, the next play on my schedule, but Marston is perhaps more effective with this kind of line (Pandulpho’s son is also a victim of the mad Duke):

PANDULPHO:  Would’st have me cry, run raving up and down

For my son’s loss? Would’st 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.  (I.2, 23)

A little meta-fiction there when Pandulpho switches to rhyme, but what I want is a few lines later:

Listen, young blood, ‘tis not true valor’s pride,

To swagger, quarrel, swear, stamp, rave, and chide,

To stab in fume of blood, to keep loud coil,

To bandy factions in domestic broils,

To dare the act of sins whose filth excels

The blackest customs of blind infidels.

The baroque poet likes the short words, too, often in long chains.  Look at all that alliteration – plenty of f-words in this passage, too.

In my memory The Malcontent, which I plan to discuss in April, is the peak of both Marston’s plotting and poetics.  Don’t miss it.  Jonson’s Poetaster, up next here, is much more missable.