قراءة كتاب The Works of John Marston Volume 1

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The Works of John Marston
Volume 1

The Works of John Marston Volume 1

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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world.”

Under date 28th September 1599 Henslowe records in his Diary (p. 156, ed. Collier) that he lent “unto Mr. Maxton, the new poete (Mr. Mastone), the sum of forty shillings” in earnest of an unnamed play. The name “Mastone” is interlined in a different hand as a correction for “Maxton;” but there can be no doubt that the “new poete,” whose name the illiterate manager misspelled, was John Marston. There is no other mention

of him in the Diary. In 1602 were published Marston’s First Part of Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge, which had been entered in the Stationers’ Registers on 24th October 1601, and had been ridiculed in that year by Ben Jonson in The Poetaster. Considered as a work of art the two parts of Antonio and Mellida cannot be rated highly. The plot is clumsy and grotesque, and the characters, from the prodigious nature of their sins and sorrows, fail to excite in us any real interest. Marston was possessed of high tragic power, but he has not done himself justice. The magnificent prologue to Antonio’s Revenge prepares us to expect an impressive tale of tragic woe, but the promise is not worthily redeemed. He could conceive a fine situation, and he had at his command abundance of striking imagery. But we are never sure of him: from tragic solemnity he passes to noisy rhodomontade; at one moment he gives us a passage Æschylean in its subtle picturesqueness, at another he feebly reproduces the flaccid verbosity of Seneca’s tragedies. Lamb quoted in his Specimens the finest scene of Antonio and Mellida,—the scene where the old Andrugio on the Venice marsh, overthrown by the chance of war and banished from his kingdom, gives tongue to the conflicting passions that shake his breast. That scene deserves the eloquent praise that it received from the hands of Lamb; and if Marston had been able to keep the rest of the play at that level the First Part of Antonio and Mellida would rank with the masterpieces of Webster. But what is to be said of a writer who, in describing a shipwreck, gives us such lines as the following?

“Lo! the sea grew mad,
His bowels rumbling with wind-passion;
Straight swarthy darkness popp’d out Phœbus’ eye,
And blurr’d the jocund face of bright-cheek’d day;
Whilst crudled fogs mask’d even darkness’ brow:
Heaven bad ’s good night, and the rocks groan’d
At the intestine uproar of the main.
Now gusty flaws strook up the very heels
Of our mainmast, whilst the keen lightning shot
Through the black bowels of the quaking air;
Straight chops a wave, and in his sliftred paunch
Down falls our ship, and there he breaks his neck;
Which in an instant up was belkt again.”

This is hardly a fair specimen of Marston’s powers, but it exhibits to perfection his besetting fault of straining his style a peg too high; of seeking to be impressive by the use of exaggerated and unnatural imagery. When he disencumbers himself of this fatal habit his verse is clear and massive. Neither Webster nor Chapman ever gave utterance to more dignified reflections than Marston puts into the mouth of the discrowned Andrugio in the noble speech beginning, “Why, man, I never was a prince till now” (vol. i., p. 64). There is nothing of bluster in that speech; there is not a word that one would wish to alter. Nor is Marston without something of that power, which Webster wielded so effectively, of touching the reader’s imagination with a vague sense of dread. He felt keenly the mysteries of the natural world; the weird stillness that precedes the breaking of the dawn, and

“the deep affright
That pulseth in the heart of night.”

Antonio and Mellida amply testifies that Marston possessed a strangely subtle and vivid imagination; but few are the traces of that “sanity” which Lamb declared to be an essential condition to true genius.

In 1604 was published The Malcontent;[13] another edition, augmented by Webster, appeared in the same year. From the Induction we learn that it had been originally acted by the Children’s Company at the Blackfriars; and that when the Children appropriated The Spanish Tragedy, in which the King’s Company at the Globe had an interest, the King’s Company retaliated by acting Marston’s play, with Webster’s additions. The Malcontent has more dramatic interest than Antonio and Mellida; it is also more orderly and artistic. Jonson’s

criticism evidently had a salutary effect, for we find no such flowers of speech as “glibbery urchin,” “sliftred paunch,” “the fist of strenuous vengeance is clutch’d,” &c. Marston has been at pains to give a more civil aspect to his “aspera Thalia.” Moreover, the moralising is less tedious, and the satire more pungent than in the earlier plays. There is less of declamation and more of action. The atmosphere is not so stifling, and one can breathe with something of freedom. There are no ghosts to shout “Vindicta!” and no boys to be butchered at midnight in damp cloisters; nobody has his tongue cut out prior to being hacked to pieces. Marston has on this occasion contrived to write an impressive play without deeming it necessary to make the stage steam like a shambles. As before, the scene is laid in Italy; and again we have a vicious usurper, and a virtuous deposed duke; but the characters are more human than in the earlier plays. Mendoza, the upstart tyrant, is indeed a deeply debased villain, but he is not deformed, like Piero, beyond all recognition. Altofronto, the banished duke, who disguises himself in the character of a malcontent and settles at the usurper’s court, is a more possible personage than Andrugio. The description that the malcontent gives of himself in iii. 1, and the other description of the hermit’s cell in iv. 2, exemplify Marston’s potent gift of presenting bold conceptions in strenuously compact language.

The Malcontent was dedicated by Marston in very handsome terms to Ben Jonson, and there is a complimentary

allusion to Jonson in the epilogue. At this distance of time it is impossible to fully understand the relations that existed between Jonson and Marston. There seem to have been many quarrels and more than one reconciliation. During his visit to Hawthornden, Jonson told Drummond that “He had many quarrels with Marston, beat him and took his pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him; the beginning of them were that Marston represented him in the stage in his youth given to venery.”[14] The original quarrel seems to have begun about the year 1598. In the apology at the end of The Poetaster, Jonson writes:

“Three

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