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 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.

Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday - hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster

I think of Thomas Dekker as one of the great hacks of Shakespeare’s time, writing over a long career a large number of plays, mostly lost, the survivors mostly with better-known co-writers.  The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599) appears to have been an early hit for him, a good example of the hack outdoing himself.  Hacks have their own kind of genius.

Dekker is not a great poet but he has a great ear, or perhaps an inventiveness, for speech.  The Shoemaker's Holiday has kept its interest because of its lively, outlandish speech by London’s shoemakers.

HODGE: How say’st thou, Firk, were we not merry at Old Ford?

FIRK: How, merry? why, our buttocks went jiggy-joggy like a quagmire.  Well, Sir Roger Oatmeal, if I thought all meal of that nature, I would eat nothing but bagpuddings. (IV.2, 103-4)

Firk gets a lot of the highlights.  The shoemakers generally speak in a jumpy prose, the upper-class characters, up to the king himself, in a rather less interesting verse.  Although Ralph gets a nice little verse speech for his wife when he is drafted and sent to France:

RALPH:  Thos know’st our trade makes rings for women’s heels:

Here take this pair of shoes, cut out by Hodge,

Stitched by my fellow Firk, seamed by myself,

Made up and pinked with letters for thy name.  (I.1, 65)

That is one plot, Ralph reuniting with his wife, who is pursued by a so-called gentleman.  Another is the usual romance plot – disapproving father, disguised suitor – except this time the disguise is as a Dutch shoemaker:

FIRK: … he’s some uplandish workman: hire him, good master, that I may learn some gibble-gabble; ‘twill make us work the faster.  (II.3, 71)

And in the C-plot the master shoemaker becomes Mayor of London – based on a true story – resulting in the holiday and a big celebratory breakfast, attended by the king, to end the play.

EYRE: Come out, you powder-beef queans!  What, Nan!  what, Madge Mumble-crust!  Come out, you fat midriff-swag-belly-whores, and sweep me these kennels that the noisome stench offend not the noses of my neighbors.  (II.3, 69)

This is the guy who will be Mayor of London by the end of the play.

This fantasy of the Land of Cockaigne appears a few scenes before the breakfast:

FIRK:  There’s cheer for the heavens: venison-pasties walk up and down piping hot, like sergeants; beef and brewis comes marching in dry-fats [barrels], fritters and pancakes come trowling in in wheel-barrows; hens and oranges hopping in porters’-baskets, collops and eggs in scuttles, and tarts and custards come quavering in in malt-shovels.  (V.2, 124)

I have included Pieter van der Heyden print of Pieter Breugel’s “The Land of Cockaigne,” courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as an example of the kind of thing Dekker was looking at.

Not a great play but a lot of fun in its way and essential for readers looking for the London of the time.  Plenty more plays like that coming up.

Text and page numbers are from Eight Famous Elizabethan Plays (Modern Library).

Next up is John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge (1599 or 1600), a much trickier piece of business than I originally realized. 

What I Read in January 2026 – Robustious rothers in rural rivo rhapsodic.

I will be in London in early March, so my reading has been v v British, more so than usual.  If only I wanted to write anything.

 

NOT SHAKESPEARE AND ALSO SHAKESPEARE

A Midsummer Night's Dream (1595?), William Shakespeare

Every Man in His Humour (Italian version) (1598) &

Every Man in His Humour (London version) (1616), Ben Jonson – discussed here.

The Shoemaker's Holiday (1599), Thomas Dekker – More of London on the London stage.  I will write this one up momentarily.

Poems (???, earlier than 1618 anyway), Sir Walter Ralegh

Nothing Like the Sun (1964), Anthony Burgess – Shakespeare via Joyce via Burgess, with everyone enjoying their puns.  Not quite my Shakespeare, but convincing enough.  My recent reading demystified Burgess’s novel – oh, he read G. B. Harrison’s Elizabethan Plays and Players (1940), just like I did.  The quotation I the title is from Ch. IV, p. 26.  Young Shakespeare has been drinking.

 

FICTION

Men at Arms (1952), Evelyn Waugh – The British at war, but it is the Phoney War, when no one knew what was going on.  Easily worth reading for its humor and details, but post-war Waugh is a more conventional writer than the author of, for example, the outrageous Put Out More Flags (1942).

The Sound of the Mountain (1949-54), Yasunari Kawabata – please see this post.

The Kindly Ones (1962), Anthony Powell – More of the same.  The war begins in the next novel, thus my turn back to Waugh.  Addendum: more of the same, but the first long chapter moves back to the author's childhood, and could with tiny changes be published as a separate novella.  It is easily my favorite part of the series so far.

An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972), P. D. James – A fine Cambridge-set mystery often taught by Rohan Maitzen.

 

POETRY

The Shield of Achilles (1955), W. H. Auden

For the Unfallen (1959), Geoffrey Hill

 

IN FRENCH & PORTUGUESE

L'Ignorant (1958), Philippe Jaccottet

O Hóspede de Job (The Guest of Job, 1963), José Cardoso Pires – Perhaps about the exhaustion of a dictatorship.  Not available in English.  Possibly slightly too hard for me but I fought through it. The Ballad of Dog’s Beach (1982) is easy to recommend to readers of Leonardo Sciascia and similar anti-mysteries.

Les mots (The Words, 1964), Jean-Paul Sartre – Sartre’s childhood memoir, with long sections on his love of reading and writing.  The classics came from his stern grandfather, rather more trashy stuff from his indulgent mother.  In a different life he would have been a pulp adventure writer.  Sartre, the adult, is often a repulsive character, but the childhood version is a sympathetic, charming little fellow.

I also read, while listening, the lyrics to Caetano Veloso 1968 and 1969 albums, both titled Caetano Veloso.  The former is especially rich in classics.  A valuable exercise I should do more often. 

Kawabata's The Sound of the Mountain - He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery

Dolce Bellezza hosted her 19th Japanese Literature Challenge last month.  Once I have written this post it will be the 54th book in this year’s event.  Amazing.

The book is Yasunari Kawabata’s The Sound of the Mountain (1954, serialized 1949-54).  The sound of the mountain is a foreboding of death.  The novel is about an old man, Shingo, and his midlife crisis.  His friends are dying, his two adult children are running into marital difficulties, and he begins having vivid dreams.  The old man is in his early sixties, employed, healthy, sexually interested, if vaguely and politely so, in his daughter-in-law.  Not so old is what I am saying.

Life and events are the ordinary kind.  Melodrama is minimized.  The novel was serialized over five years, which fits the pace of the story perfectly, although I fear I would have had trouble remembering who was who.  Typical events of daily life are mixed with more symbolically meaningful material.

So Kawabata gives us, for example, a page of tedious chatter:

“No, please.”  He came out on the veranda.  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”

“I was about to change his diaper.”

“Fusako?”

“She’s gone to the post office with Satoko.”  (170)

Etc., including weather small talk.  But then a pair of American military planes fly past. “They did not see the planes, but great shadows passed over the slope” (171) which leads to thoughts and talk of air raids and how children experienced the war, rather more poignant stuff, before returning to the trivia.  This is from a longer section titled “The Kite’s House,” which features the spring return of a kite to the house.  The same kite as previous years?  A descendant?  Is the kite returning to Shingo’s house, or does Shingo live in the kite’s house?  All of this, as is the entire novel, from Shingo’s point of view.

In a sense this is really a novel about how Shingo creates meaning from the world around him.

He began to feel that there was some sort of special little world apart over behind the shrubbery.  The butterfly wings beyond the leaves of the bush clover seemed to him extraordinarily beautiful.  (29)

Then on the next page he has one of his vivid dreams, this time about noodles.

Here are a couple of lines from different dreams.

The American government designated the beard a national monument; and so he could not of his own free will cut or dress it.  (205)

From his body they took a great bucketful of mosquitoes.  (238)

The style of the novel is generally quite plain, plainer than Snow Country (1948), but the frequent dreams add a level of weirdness to the prose.

To my tastes, I would like more of that, and still find Kawabata’s early, fragmented, Modernist The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa (1930) his most interesting book.  But the dreams shake things up.

The Japanese context has its own interest, the occasional post-war intrusions, for example.  If the novel were about Shingo’s son it would be about the way the war and combat affected him, but the subject is kept at a distance.  The forthrightness about suicide always makes my eyes pop.  “’A man can always find another woman to commit suicide with him’” (245) – this is said matter-of-factly by Shingo’s sensible wife, about their son-in-law.

Maybe next year I will try to find a Japanese novel that is more formally or linguistically unusual.  I do not know what that might be.  Any recommendations are welcome. 

Thanks, Meredith!