The Malcontent by John Marston - Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here

What do I want to say about John Marston’s The Malcontent (1603, maybe 1604)?  It is unusual.  Marston is unusual, with a distinct poetic and dramatic sensibility.  No one else could have written it.

The Duke of Genoa has been tossed out by an usurper, so he infiltrates the court disguised as Malevole, the Malcontent of the title, not exactly a courtier, not exactly a jester, but given license by the usurper.   It is as if Diogenes (the dog man) was somehow an attendant of Alexander.

PIETRO [current Duke]:  Come down, thou ragged cur, and snarl here.  I give thy dogged sullenness free liberty; trot about and bespurtle whom thou pleases.

MALEVOLE: I’ll come among you, you goatish-blooded toderers, as gum into taffeta, to fret, to fret.  I’ll fall like a sponge into water, to suck up, to suck up.  Howl again.  I’ll go to church, and come to you.  (I.2, 16)

A nice example of Marston’s original language, including his taste, that Jonson mocked in The Poetaster, for obscure words with a pleasing mouth-feel.  Bespurtle.  Toderers.  The latter is a bit of a mystery, but “tod” is “fox,” if that helps.

The Malcontent sometimes feels like it should be played by Groucho Marx:

BILIOSO:  Out, ye cur! [again, a dog]

MALEVOLE: Only let’s hold together a firm correspondence. [the Groucho line]

BILIOSO:   Out!

MALEVOLE:  A mutual, friendly-reciprocal, perpetual kind of steady-unanimous-heartily-leagued –

BILISOSO:  Hence, ye gross-jawed peasantly – out, go!

MALEVOLE:  Adieu, pigeon-house!  Thou burr that only stickest to nappy fortunes; the serpigo, the strangury, an eternal, uneffectual priapism seize thee!  (II.3, 41-2)

That ends a little too obscene for a Marx Brothers joke.  The Malcontent has a number of outstanding vocabulary-expanding insult passages.

Malevole is the star part, played by Richard Burbage, Hamlet his own self.  Around the same time Burbage was also playing the Duke in Measure for Measure, another duke in disguise.  What fun to be a theater-goer in London in 1603.  Malevole is out for revenge, in some sense, and the restoration of his office, but the play takes a turn at the end of Act III when rather than shoving Duke Pietro off a cliff, he instead converts Pietro to – to what – not his cause, exactly, but to his malcontent vision of life.

PIETRO:  Lord Malevole, if this be true –

MALEVOLE:  If? Come, shade thee with this disguise.  If?  Thou shalt handle it; he shall thank thee for killing thyself.  Come, follow my directions and thou shalt see strange sleights.

PIETRO:  World, whither wilt thou?

MALEVOLE:  Why, to the devil.  (III.v, 66-7)

Soon enough this duke is disguised as a friar (exactly like Measure for Measure) and the two dukes in disguise scheme to disgrace the play’s villain,  The Malcontent is a genuine revenge comedy.  No one is murdered, the adulterous wife is forgiven, and the worst characters are barely even punished.

The Malcontent has a number of strong comic parts with their own great bits, but I think what elevates this play is the psychology of the Malcontent.  He falls into his disguise, into his role, too easily.  It is who he really is.  Similarly this is why Pietro is so easy to convert from enemy to ally, and for that matter why revenge is pointless.  Marston has found language and characters that express his, or a, view of the world, a refreshed Cynicism.

I will try one more Marston play, The Dutch Courtesan,  later this spring; I hope it is at least half as interesting, and a quarter as good.

Next up, soon I hope, is Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed by Kindness (1603), which I remember as a weepy melodrama, quite interesting as a genre example but not a great play.  We’ll see.

Text and page numbers are from the New Mermaids edition. 

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.

John Marston'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.