The Precarious Balance of John Marston

Author(s): Samuel Schoenbaum

Source: PMLA, Vol. 67, No. 7 (Dec., 1952), pp. 1069-1078
Published by: Modern Language Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/459959
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 THE PRECARIOUS BALANCE OF JOHN MARSTON
BY SAMUEL SCHOENBAUM

IN the first act of The Malcontent, the best known play of John Marston,
Pietro is informed that his wife is engaged in an adulterous relation-
ship with the usurping duke, Mendoza. Pietro's informant is Malevole,
who is not content with a simple presentation of the facts. Instead, he
taunts the foolish old man with a brutal account of the infamy of cuckol-
dom, tortures him with a lurid description of the wife's lascivious
thoughts, suggests, finally, the possibility of unwitting incest:
Mal. Nay thinke, but thinke what may proceede of this,
Adultery is often the mother of incest.
Piet. Incest.

Mal. Yes incest: marke, Mendozo of his wife begets perchance a daughter:
Mendozo dies. His son marries this daughter. Say you? Nay tis frequent, not
onely probable, but no question often acted, whilst ignorance, fearelesse ig-
norance claspes his owne seede.
Piet. Hydeous imagination. (i.iii, pp. 149-150)1

Malevole's procedure would be appropriate for a Machiavellian villain,

but Malevole is in reality Giovanni Altofronto, the rightful duke of
Genoa, now deposed and forced to assume the role of court railer. He
wanders about the palace, jesting bitterly with the parasites and fools,
commenting outspokenly on the enormities of Genoa and the world's
wickedness.
As we follow his movements, we soon realize that Marston's hero is
not simply a virtuous nobleman earnestly combatting an evil force
which has temporarily triumphed. He is rather a strangely tortured
individual whose activities are often perversely unpleasant. And he is
much more than the central figure in a melodrama of court intrigue. For
the dramatist has lavished all his satirical and rhetorical powers on the
acid speeches of the Malcontent; he is Marston's spokesman. Malevole,
like Marston, is the satirist drawing forth the core of imposthumed sin,
lighting up the hiding places and dark corners where evil lurks, repelled
and fascinated at once by the spectacle of human depravity. His asides,
comments, and soliloquies reflect the unrest of the Jacobean age, are,
indeed, an expression of that skeptical outlook on life which pervades the

1 The H. Harvey Wood edition of Marston's plays (Edinburgh, 1934-39) has been used
throughout for quotations. The text is not satisfactory; but a definitive edition of Marston
is yet to be issued, and meanwhile the Wood volumes are the most generally available. As
there is no line numbering, page references have been supplied instead. The Bullen text
(London, 1887) has been used for the non-dramatic works.

1069

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1070 The Precarious Balance of John Marston

plays of Middleton, the two great tragedies of Webster, and the early
poems and satires of Donne.
But, more important perhaps, the remarks of the Malcontent con-
stitute an intensely personal utterance, the anguished expression of a
troubled spirit. For Malevole's "hydeous imagination" is also Marston's.
This personal note is perhaps the most striking feature of the drama-
tist's work; Marston is an artist noteworthy not so much for what he has
to say about the world around him, as for what he manages to reveal of
the world within him. If his work lacks high intrinsic merit, it is never-
theless a fascinating document of the divided soul of a man.
Perhaps what most immediately impresses the reader is the essential
incongruity of Marston's work. It is bizarre-more eccentric than the
art of any of his contemporaries. Antonio and Mellida, one of his earliest
plays, affords startling illustrations of this quality. At times the drama-
tist is inarticulate, occasionally he is incoherent, and quite frequently
he is hysterical. Marston's hero enters in a state of frenzy and manages
to remain in that unhappy condition for the greater part of the play.
Here is Antonio mourning his separation from Mellida:
Breath me a point that may inforce me weepe,
To wring my hands, to breake my cursed breast,
Rave, and exclaime, lie groveling on the earth,
Straight start up frantick, crying Mellida,
Sing but, Antonio hath lost Mellida,
And thou shalt see mee (like a man possest)
Howle out such passion, that even this brinish marsh
Will squease out teares, from out his spungy cheekes. (Iv.i, p. 47)

But he is not always so articulate:

I have beene-
That Morpheus tender skinp-Cosen germane
Beare with me good-
Mellida: clod upon clod thus fall.
Hell is beneath; yet heaven is over all. (Iv.i, p. 43)

The exasperated annotator is forced to admit, "These ravings are

intelligible."2 The fundamental incongruity lies, however, in the peculia
fusion of romantic melodrama with satirical comedy. The meetin
the estranged lovers on the marshes could, in other hands, have bee
affecting scene. But, at the very climax, Antonio and Mellida sudd
break into an extended dialogue in Italian which is as disconcertin
as it is unexpected. Marston, discerning, with the keen eye of a sati

2 Bullen, i, 63.

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 Samuel Schoenbaum 1071

the preposterousness of the situation, comments on the proceedings

with amused unconcern. It is Lucio, a bystander, who speaks: "I thinke
confusion of Babell is falne upon these lovers, that they change their
language.... But howsoever, if I should sit in judgment, tis an errour
easier to be pardoned by the auditors, then excused by the authours;
and yet some private respect may rebate the edge of the keener censure"
(iv.i, p. 49). The romantic elements in the plot are further obscured by
a whole gallery of eccentrics, a group of courtiers who belong to the
Jonsonian school of fops and gulls. The duality of the author's attitude
can be seen even in the characterization of the villain of the piece. Piero
is the cause of the lovers' sufferings; yet at the most crucial moments
he behaves in a manner that can be regarded only as deliberately comic.
Marston managed later to learn the essentials of his craft, to purge his
style of the grossest absurdities, but moments of hysteria and obscurity
re-appear even in Sophonisba, a later and more disciplined play. The
dramatist was never able to exercise complete control over his material;
for Marston literary activity remained fundamentally an outlet for his
conflicting emotional energies, and, consequently, the classical principles
of order and restraint could have little significance for him.
This lack of consistency and restraint is most striking in the sequel
to Antonio and Mellida. In the induction to his first play Marston had
promised a second part in which the characters "that are but slightly
drawen in this Comedie, should receive more exact accomplishment." As
these minor figures represent primarily satirical types, he apparently
had intended a satirical play, perhaps in the Jonsonian vein. Antonio's
Revenge, however, has even less satirical material than the earlier drama.
Nor does the playwright attempt to continue in the romantic vein;
he turns from "the comick crosses of true love" to create a tangled melo-
drama crammed with intrigue, brutality, and murder. In the prologue
he paints a harsh and barren winter landscape, invites the attention
only of those possessed of a "true sense of misery." Thus he establishes
the mood for the "sullen tragick Sceane" to follow. From the instant the
play opens with the entrance of duke Piero, "unbrac't, his armes bare,
smeer'd in blood, a poniard in one hand bloodie, and a torch in the
other, Strotzo following with a corde," until the final torture scene, the
reader is treated to a succession of gratuitous horrors, excessive even
by Elizabethan standards. On one level it is pure sensationalism, and
panders to the most elementary tastes. But the grisly piece was executed
with obvious gusto; in its frank delight in sheer brutality Antonio's
Revenge takes on the quality of a prolonged sadistic fantasy. At the
climax Piero is bound and his tongue plucked. A dish is opened, revealing
the severed limbs of his son, a "prettie tender childe" sacrificed by An-

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1072 The Precarious Balance of John Marston

tonio for the purpose of tormenting Piero. The revengers taunt the
duke, call him foul names, stab him one by one, and, finally, run all
at once upon him with drawn rapiers. The scene owes much to Seneca,
but exceeds even the Roman in violence. It is noteworthy that the auth-
or's sympathies lie entirely with the revengers; there is no suggestion
that they have proceeded beyond the proper limits of retribution. After
the bloody interlude has ended, the avengers clamor for recognition,
until all finally agree that they are equally worthy of "the glorie of the
deede." They are congratulated and offered generous rewards, but choose
to
live inclos'd
In holy verge of some religious order,
Most constant votaries. (v.vi, p. 131)

This odd conclusion, so contrary to the conventional denouement,

wherein the contaminated revenger must also perish, shows the play-
wright identifying himself with the forces of violence, enjoying vicarious-
ly the piling up of horrors.
Indeed the distinguishing characteristic of Marston's work is violence.
In Antonio's Revenge it appears in its most obvious form as the core of the
action. But it manifests itself also when Marston assumes the pose of the
satirist lashing the follies of the age. There is a savage exuberance about
Marston's invective, a pulsating emotional energy that-aside from con-
siderations of quality-puts it in a class apart from the brooding cynicism
of a Webster or the metaphysical wit of a Donne. Violence is apparent
also in Marston's language-in the strained diction and mutilated syn-
tax, in the discordant sound combinations and grotesque imagery. The
violence of expression may be symptomatic of the clash of conflicting
emotional currents in the deeper levels of his consciousness. Perhaps the
nature of these divided emotional attitudes may best be understood by
an examination of Marston's imagery, which is stamped with the peculi-
arities of his temperament.
Images of physical torment are common. In the prologue alone to
Antonio's Revenge he writes of the "snarling gusts" which "pils the
skinne / From off the soft and delicate aspectes," of breasts "nail'd to
the earth with griefe," of panting hearts "Pierc't through with anguish."
Marston's imagery reveals a fascination with man's body and its func-
tions. His verse is rich in references to various parts of the anatomy-
to heart and stomach, to ribs and breasts, to veins and arteries. A few
illustrations will suffice:

(As from his birth, being hugged in the armes;

And nuzzled twixt the breastes of happinesse)
(Prol., Antonio's Revenge, p. 69)

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 Samuel Schoenbaum 1073

I tell you bloods

My spirit's heavie, and the juyce of life
Creepes slowly through my stifned arteries.
(Antonio's Revenge I.iii, p. 77)

Unbendst the feebled vaines of sweatie labour;

(Malcontent III.ii, p. 178)

"Sweet breath from tainted stomacks who can suck."

(Prol., What You Will, p. 235)

He is equally concerned with physiological processes. Thus he describes

the arrival of spring in terms of sexual intercourse:
The wanton spring lyes dallying with the earth,
And powers fresh bloud in her decayed vaines.
(What You Will I.i, p. 238)

But his biological interests extend beyond the sexual; he is preoccupied

with the waste products of the body, with vomit and spit, sweat and
excrement, abscesses and putrefaction:
Now had the mounting Suns al-ripening wings
Swept the cold sweat of night from earths danke breast,
(Malcontent Iv.iii, p. 189)

Why tainst thou then the ayre with stench of flesh,

And humane putrifactions noysome sent?
(Antonio's Revenge I.ii, p. 87)

. . .the sea grewe mad,

His bowels rumbling with winde passion, . . .
Downe fals our ship, and there he breaks his neck:
Which in an instant up was belkt againe.
(Antonio and Mellida I.i, p. 19)

Dog, I will make thee eate thy vomit up.

Which thou hast belk't gainst taintlesse Mellida.
(Antonio's Revenge I.iv, p. 80)

In the comparatively innocuous little comedy, What You Will, there is,
at one point, a whole succession of such images:
Shall he be creast-falne, if some looser braine,
In flux of witte uncively befilth
His slight composures? shall his bosome faint
If drunken Censure belch out sower breath,
Nay say some halfe a dozen rancorous breasts
Should plant them-selves on purpose to discharge
Impostum'd malice on his latest Sceane ...
(Induction, p. 232)

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1074 The Precarious Balance of John Marston

Such imagery permeates the Malcontent's most eloquent utterance of

despair and revulsion: "this earth is the only grave and Golgotha wherein
all thinges that live must rotte: tis but the draught wherein the heavenly
bodies discharge their corruption, the very muckhill on which the sub-
lunarie orbes cast their excrement: man is the slime of this dongue-pit,
and Princes are the governours of these men" (Iv.v, p. 197). Man has
a soul, but he has a body as well. He is a creature of superior faculties,
but he is also a biological entity. Marston cannot bring himself to accept
this duality; it is at the core of his disgust with mankind. And yet, if
the body is a source of revulsion, it exerts nevertheless a peculiar fasci-
nation. Marston is unable to countenance what is physical in man, but
he cannot avoid contemplating it. This divided response of attraction
and revulsion reaches its culmination in the desecration motif, in images
of noble or lovely things besmirched and reviled:
Hast thou a love as spotlesse as the browe
Of clearest heaven, blurd with false defames?
(Antonio's Revenge i.v, p. 82)

Sticke candells gainst a virgin walles white back,

If they not burne yet at the least theile blacke,"
(Malcontent II.v, p. 173)

... I ha seen a sumptuous steeple turned to a stinking privie: more beastly, the
sacredst place made a Doggs kenill: nay most inhumane, the ston'd coffins of
long flead Christians burst up, and made Hogstroughs. (Malcontent II.v, p. 173)

Perhaps the most striking example occurs in Sophonisba, when Erictho

describes "a once glorious temple rearde to Jove":
there the daw and crow,
The ill voic'de Raven, and still chattering Pie
Send out ungratefull sound, and loathsome filth,
Where statues and Joves acts were vively lim'd
Boyes with blacke coales draw the vaild parts of nature,
And leacherous actions of imaginde lust,
Where tombes and beauteous urns of well dead men
Stoode in assured rest, the shepheard now
Unloads his belly: Corruption most abhord
Mingling it selfe with their renowned ashes,
Our selfe quakes at it. (iv.i, p. 48)

This ambivalent attitude extends beyond imagery to permeate

ston's view of external reality; it is, in a large measure, responsib
the incongruous nature of his art. Conflicting emotions can be se
operation in his reaction against his own Metamorphosis of Pygma
Image, a conventionally erotic poem in the tradition of Hero and Lean

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 Samuel Schoenbaum 1075

and Venus and Adonis. This youthful work is frankly sensual in its
approach, showing a delight in feminine beauty and amorous impulses.
Although the poem is no more outspoken than others of its type, Mar-
ston apparently felt disturbed and needed to justify himself. In the sixth
satire of his Scourge of Villainy he insists that the Pygmalion is satirical,
that its purpose is to discredit erotic poetry:
Hence, thou misjudging censor! know I wrote
Those idle rhymes to note the odious spot
And blemish that deforms the lineaments
Of modern poesy's habiliments. (23-26)

The apology does not ring true, and Marston has been accused of in-
sincerity. It is more likely, however, that the poet, at first attracted to
the erotic theme, underwent a change of heart. His statement reflects,
perhaps, the need for rationalizing and self-justification as feelings of
guilt and revulsion succeeded the original impulse toward sensual delight.
What originated perhaps as an inability to overcome an infantile
repugnance to elementary biological facts becomes the key to the fantasy
world that is his drama. In his plays Marston creates a nightmare world
of lust and viciousness, intrigue and violence. His setting is usually
"an Italian lascivious Pallace" peopled with villains and fools. The
time is generally night; Marston delights in descriptions of the darkness
which conceals shame and wickedness. The atmosphere is charged with
eroticism, brutality, and cynicism. "I would sooner leave my ladie singled
in a Bordello," remarks Malevole, "then in the Genoa pallace." Women
become symbols of sheer animalism, a tendency culminating in the
ferocious Franceschina of The Dutch Courtezan and Isabella, The In-
satiate Countess-fantastic embodiments of insatiable sexuality. In-
nocence is tainted or destroyed, while evil and malice flourish. The old
harmony has been replaced by universal discord. Pandulpho wants no
song for his dead son:
Pan. No, no song: twill be vile out of tune.
Alb. Indeede he's hoarce: the poor boyes voice is crackt.
Pa. Why cuz? why shold it not be hoarce & crackt,
When all the strings of natures symphony
Are crackt, & jar? why should his voice keepe tune,
When ther's no musick in the breast of man?
(Antonio's Revenge Iv.v, p. 121)

The dramatist has conceived a monstrous and distorted world, but one
animated with extraordinary relish and energy. Having created such a
world, he seeks to destroy it. He introduces the satiric commentator
who rails upon it savagely; his plays are punctuated with tirades against
courts and women, fools and parasites. Attraction and repulsion meet

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1076 The Precarious Balance of John Marston

and are held in precarious balance. Sometimes this balance is destroyed,

and we have those baffling excursions into obscurity or hysteria.
Marston is divided against himself even in his attitude toward his
own work. He longed, quite naturally, for a literary reputation. At
times he adopts an air of affected nonchalance. Antonio and Mellida,
"the worthless present of my slighter idleness," is dedicated to "the
most honorably renowned No-body," while What You Will is "a slight
toye, lightly, to swiftly finisht, ill plotted, worse written, I feare me
worst acted, and indeed What You Will." Such self-conscious modesty
is the product of solicitous concern. Marston regarded his craft with high
seriousness; he provided his plays with elaborate inductions and unusual-
ly full stage directions. But, at the same time that he strove after recog-
nition, he yearned for oblivion:
Let others pray
For ever their fair poems flourish may;
But as for me, hungry Oblivion,
Devour me quick, accept my orison,
My earnest prayers, which do importune thee,
With gloomy shade of thy still empery
To veil both me and my rude poesy

These lines, which give the impression of complete earnestness, appeared

in the dedication "To everlasting Oblivion," at the close of his first
publication. The year before his death he was apparently endeavoring
to remove all traces of his authorship from a collection of his plays
about to be issued, and on the stone above his burial place is carved,
"Oblivioni sacrum." Perhaps it was an obscure sense of guilt that led
to the desire to efface any memory of his work; perhaps he regarded his
plays with the same mixed emotions that he felt toward the world he
created within them.
Such conflicts exerted a crippling influence on Marston's art. He has
no objective, or even consistent, view of reality, and consequently his
work lacks relevance. Although he has much to reveal, he has little to
say. T. S. Eliot feels, however, that Marston conveys "the sense of
something behind, more real than any of his personages and their ac-
tion," and thus "establishes himself among the writers of genius."3

3 "John Marston," in Elizabethan Essays (London, 1934), pp. 190, 194. Marston's plays,
once neglected and even derogated, have stimulated more favorable comments in our own
time. "It has been increasingly realized," writes Boas, Introduction to Stuart Drama (Ox-
ford, 1946), p. 132, "that Ben Jonson's burlesque of the more vulnerable features of Mar-
ston's style in his serious plays has led to an undue depreciation of his distinctive qualities.
There has been more appreciative recognition of his aims as a dramatist and of their effect
on his technique and his dialogue." One may, indeed, remark that there has been a tend-

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 Samuel Schoenbaum 1077

Eliot discerns in Sophonisba "a pattern behind the pattern into which
the characters deliberately involve themselves; the kind of pattern which
we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and
detachment, drowsing in sunlight." The critic's language is vague;
he never reveals clearly the elements of which this pattern consists. But
if Eliot wishes to imply that he sees in the play a significance beyond the
merely literal, a philosophical or psychological validity that transcends
the interplay of character, an expression, in other words, of a vision of
humanity that is full and yet individual-then Eliot is reading into the
plays a breadth of understanding which Marston gives no indication of
possessing. For, in order to present a view of life which goes beyond the
purely personal expression of mood or feeling, the artist must possess a
certain degree of insight and stability. These are precisely the qualities
which Marston lacks. There is too much of the turbulent and irrational
in Marston's temperament for writing to have served as anything more
than a means of expressing the disordered fancies and half-acknowledged
impulses that rankled within him.
And so, although his plays contain many dramatically effective situa-
tions and isolated passages of genuine poetry, they are on the whole
unsatisfactory. There is little genuine characterization, because Marston
had little real understanding of or interest in people. He succeeds best
with a figure like Malheureux in The Dutch Courtezan. "A man of Snowe,"
he regards lust as the deadliest of sins, cautions his friend to desist from
the pleasures of a lascivious bed, warns him of the dangers to his health

ency in recent years possibly to overestimate the artistic and historical importance of
Marston's work. The dramatist has been romanticized, perhaps even sentimentalized. To
Theodore Spencer he became the attractive symbol of the thwarted idealist. In Criterion,
xrII (July 1934), 581-599, Spencer wrote: "The secret of Marston's temperament is that
he was an idealist whose idealism was built on insufficient facts. When the facts hit him
in the face the blow was severe, and in order to conceal how much he was hurt, he pre-
tended that he had known about them all along, that he enjoyed them" (p. 597). Even the
obscurity and eccentricities of diction receive sympathetic consideration: Marston is a
founder of the metaphysical school, a writer whose "clumsy attempts to widen the poetic
vocabulary marked a transition from one style of writing to another" (pp. 585, 593).
Parrott and Ball, in A Short View of Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1943), p. 158, feel that
"he pierced the veil of illusion to the harsh realities of life"; while, according to Wells,
Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (New York, 1939), p. 26, Marston-although he
never attains complete certainty of touch-"becomes a really distinguished poet in his
favorite blending of tragedy and satire." Ellis-Fermor, in Jacobean Drama, 2nd ed., rev.
(London, 1947), pp. 77-97, regards Marston as an innovator, one whose experiments with
diction and theatrical situation influenced other Jacobean playwrights. For "it is Marston
with his incoherence and the tumultuous confusion of thought and passion who flashes
illumination, as it were of lightning upon a distant hillside, upon roads we are to travel
later with Shakespeare, with Webster or with Ford" (p. 79).

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1078 The Precarious Balance of John Marston

and good name. But Malheureux's imagination dwells on the loose

sensuality he abhors, and he is at once repelled and fascinated by the
sordidness of sexual license. Assuring himself that "the most odious
spectacle the earth can present is an immodest vulgar woman," he
accompanies his friend to the brothel to view a whore, Franceschina.
"Ile go to make her loath the shame shee's in," he says-but he remains
to become enamoured himself. At first startled that a creature of such
moral degeneracy can be beautiful, he soon falls hopelessly in love. He
is driven almost to distraction by the physical charms of Franceschina;
he is tormented by the guiltiness of his passion. So complete is his fall
that he consents to murder his best friend in order to possess a whore.
Only when faced with the gallows does he fully comprehend the moral
abyss into which he has fallen, and not until then is his frantic yearning
transformed into horrified revulsion. It is easy to see why such a char-
acter would appeal to Marston, and why the dramatist should succeed in
his portrayal. But his range of emotional experience is so limited and
his ambitions so grandiose that he fails far more frequently than he
succeeds. On the whole his fools are repellent, his villains preposterous,
and his heroes uninteresting or inconsistent.
He was fortunate in that his own maladjustment coincided with the
malaise of his age, and that he was temperamentally suited to gratify
the tastes of his spectators. Marston's plays were written for the exclusive
patrons who attended performances at the private theatres. In much the
same manner as the dramatists of the Restoration, he stimulated the
jaded tastes of his frivolous and sophisticated aristocratic audience-an
audience that lacked a feeling for true tragedy, an audience that was
pleased with sensationalism, satire, exaggerated emotions, and senten-
tious declamation. Marston was able to satisfy these needs; he included,
moreover, a gratuitous display of his own morbid tendencies, for he
found his audience receptive to the cynical, the tortured, and the per-
verse. For the modern reader Marston remains interesting primarily for
his self-revelation. Eventually he abandoned the stage and entered the
church, but we do not know whether he resolved in his new surroundings
the conflicts that are evident in his writings. All that remains is the work
of his earlier years-a testimonial of the turbulent emotions of a dis-
tressed spirit.
BROOKLYN COLLEGE
Brooklyn 10, New York

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