age, to a poet of real genius and original powers, it will generally be
presumed, with more or less fairness or unfairness, that this is in
great part his own fault. Some perversity or obliquity will be
suspected, even if no positive infirmity or deformity can be detected,
in his intelligence or in his temperament: some taint or some flaw will
be assumed to affect and to vitiate his creative instinct or his
spiritual reason. And in the case of John Marston, the friend and foe of
Ben Jonson, the fierce and foul-mouthed satirist, the ambitious and
overweening tragedian, the scornful and passionate humorist, it is easy
for the shallowest and least appreciative reader to perceive the nature
and to estimate the weight of such drawbacks or impediments as have so
long and so seriously interfered with the due recognition of an
independent and remarkable poet. The praise and the blame, the
admiration and the distaste excited by his works, are equally just, but
are seemingly incompatible: the epithets most exactly appropriate to
the style of one scene, one page, one speech in a scene or one passage
in a speech, are most ludicrously inapplicable to the next. An anthology
of such noble and beautiful excerpts might be collected from his plays,
that the reader who should make his first acquaintance with this poet
through the deceptive means of so flattering an introduction would be
justified in supposing that he had fallen in with a tragic dramatist of
the very highest order--with a new candidate for a station in the very
foremost rank of English poets. And if the evil star which seems
generally to have presided over the literary fortunes of John Marston
should misguide the student, on first opening a volume of his works,
into some such arid or miry tract of wilderness as too frequently
deforms the face of his uneven and irregular demesne, the inevitable
sense of disappointment and repulsion which must immediately ensue will
too probably discourage a casual explorer from any renewal of his
research.
Two of the epithets which Ben Jonson, in his elaborate attack on
Marston, selected for ridicule as characteristically grotesque instances
of affected and infelicitous innovation--but which nevertheless have
taken root in the language, and practically justified their
adoption--describe as happily as any that could be chosen to describe
the better and the worse quality of his early tragic and satiric style.
These words are "strenuous" and "clumsy." It is perpetually,
indefatigably, and fatiguingly strenuous; it is too often vehemently,
emphatically, and laboriously clumsy. But at its best, when the clumsy
and ponderous incompetence of expression which disfigures it is
supplanted by a strenuous felicity of ardent and triumphant aspiration,
it has notes and touches in the compass of its course not unworthy of
Webster or Tourneur or even Shakespeare himself. Its occasionally
exquisite delicacy is as remarkable as its more frequent excess of
coarseness, awkwardness, or violent and elaborate extravagance. No
sooner has he said anything especially beautiful, pathetic, or sublime,
than the evil genius must needs take his turn, exact as it were the
forfeit of his bond, impel the poet into some sheer perversity, deface
the flow and form of the verse with some preposterous crudity or
flatulence of phrase which would discredit the most incapable or the
most fantastic novice. And the worst of it all is that he limps or
stumbles with either foot alternately. At one moment he exaggerates the
license of artificial rhetoric, the strain and swell of the most
high-flown and hyperbolical poetic diction; at the next, he falls flat
upon the naked level of insignificant or offensive realism.
These are no slight charges; and it is impossible for any just or sober
judgment to acquit John Marston of the impeachment conveyed in them. The
answer to it is practical and simple: it is that his merits are great
enough to outweigh and overshadow them all. Even if his claim to
remembrance were merely dependent on the value of single passages, this
would suffice to secure him his place of honor in the train of
Shakespeare. If his most ambitious efforts at portraiture of character
are often faulty at once in color and in outline, some of his slighter
sketches have a freshness and tenderness of beauty which may well atone
for the gravest of his certainly not infrequent offences. The sweet
constancy and gentle fortitude of a Beatrice and a Mellida remain in the
memory more clearly, leave a more life-like impression of truth on the
reader's mind, than the light-headed profligacy and passionate
instability of such brainless and blood-thirsty wantons as Franceschina
and Isabella. In fact, the better characters in Marston's plays are
better drawn, less conventional, more vivid and more human than those of
the baser sort. Whatever of moral credit may be due to a dramatist who
paints virtue better than vice, and has a happier hand at a hero's
likeness than at a villain's, must unquestionably be assigned to the
author of "Antonio and Mellida." Piero, the tyrant and traitor, is
little more than a mere stage property: like Mendoza in "The Malcontent"
and Syphax in "Sophonisba," he would be a portentous ruffian if he had a
little more life in him; he has to do the deeds and express the emotions
of a most bloody and crafty miscreant; but it is only now and then that
we catch the accent of a real man in his tones of cajolery or menace,
dissimulation or triumph. Andrugio, the venerable and heroic victim of
his craft and cruelty, is a figure not less living and actual than
stately and impressive: the changes of mood from meditation to passion,
from resignation to revolt, from tenderness to resolution, which mark
the development of the character with the process of the action, though
painted rather broadly than subtly and with more of vigor than of care,
show just such power of hand and sincerity of instinct as we fail to
find in the hot and glaring colors of his rival's monotonous ruffianism.
Again, in "The Wonder of Women," the majestic figures of Massinissa,
Gelosso, and Sophonisba stand out in clearer relief than the traitors of
the senate, the lecherous malignity of Syphax, or the monstrous profile
of the sorceress Erichtho. In this labored and ambitious tragedy, as in
the two parts of "Antonio and Mellida," we see the poet at his best--and
also at his worst. A vehement and resolute desire to give weight to
every line and emphasis to every phrase has too often misled him into
such brakes and jungles of crabbed and convulsive bombast, of stiff and
tortuous exuberance, that the reader in struggling through some of the
scenes and speeches feels as though he were compelled to push his way
through a cactus hedge: the hot and heavy blossoms of rhetoric blaze and
glare out of a thickset fence of jagged barbarisms and exotic
monstrosities of metaphor. The straining and sputtering declamation of
narrative and oratory scarcely succeeds in expressing through a dozen
quaint and far-fetched words or phrases what two or three of the
simplest would easily and amply have sufficed to convey. But when the
poet is content to deliver his message like a man of this world, we
discover with mingled satisfaction, astonishment, and irritation that he
can write when he pleases in a style of the purest and noblest
simplicity; that he can make his characters converse in a language
worthy of Sophocles when he does not prefer to make them stutter in a
dialect worthy of Lycophron. And in the tragedy of "Sophonisba" the
display of this happy capacity is happily reserved for the crowning
scene of the poem. It would be difficult to find anywhere a more
preposterous or disjointed piece of jargon than the speech of Asdrubal
at the close of the second act:
Brook open scorn, faint powers!--
Make good the camp!--No, fly!--yes, what?--wild rage!--
To be a prosperous villain! yet some heat, some hold;
But to burn temples, and yet freeze, O cold!
Give me some health; now your blood sinks: thus deeds
Ill nourished rot: without Jove nought succeeds.
And yet this passage occurs in a poem which contains such a passage as
the following:
And now with undismayed resolve behold,
To save you--you--for honor and just faith
Are most true gods, which we should much adore--
With even disdainful vigor I give up
An abhorred life!--You have been good to me,
And I do thank thee, heaven. O my stars,
I bless your goodness, that with breast unstained,
Faith pure, a virgin wife, tried to my glory,
I die, of female faith the long-lived story;
Secure from bondage and all servile harms,
But more, most happy in my husband's arms.
The lofty sweetness, the proud pathos, the sonorous simplicity of these
most noble verses might scarcely suffice to attest the poet's possession
of any strong dramatic faculty. But the scene immediately preceding
bears evidence of a capacity for terse and rigorous brevity of dialogue
in a style as curt and condensed as that of Tacitus or Dante:
_Sophonisba_. What unjust grief afflicts my worthy lord?
_Massinissa_. Thank me, ye gods, with much beholdingness;
For, mark, I do not curse you.
_Sophonisba_. Tell me, sweet,
The cause of thy much anguish.
_Massinissa_. Ha, the cause?
Let's see; wreathe back thine arms, bend down thy neck,
Practise base prayers, make fit thyself for bondage.
_Sophonisba_. Bondage!
_Massinissa_. Bondage: Roman bondage.
_Sophonisba_. No, no![1]
_Massinissa_. How then have I vowed well to Scipio?
_Sophonisba_. How then to Sophonisba?
_Massinissa_. Right: which way
Run mad? impossible distraction![2]
_Sophonisba_. Dear lord, thy patience; let it maze all power,
And list to her in whose sole heart it rests
To keep thy faith upright.
_Massinissa_. Wilt thou be slaved?
_Sophonisba_. No; free.
_Massinissa_. How then keep I my faith?
_Sophonisba_. My death
Gives help to all. From Rome so rest we free:
So brought to Scipio, faith is kept in thee.
_Massinissa_. Thou darest not die!--Some wine.--Thou
darest not die!
_Sophonisba_. How near was I unto the curse of man, Joy!
How like was I yet once to have been glad!
He that ne'er laughed may with a constant face
Contemn Jove's frown. Happiness makes us base.
[Footnote 1: This verse, unmusical to an English ear, is good Italian
metre; possibly an intentional and deliberate example of the poet's
Italian predilections, and if so certainly a less irrational and
inexplicable one than the intrusion of some villanously bad Italian
lines and phrases into the text of "Antonio and Mellida."]
[Footnote 2: In other words--intolerable or unimaginable division or
divulsion of mind and spirit between two contending calls of honor,
two irreconcilable claims of duty. Modern editors of this great scene
have broken up the line into pieces, marked or divided by superfluous
dashes and points of exclamation. Campbell, who had the good taste to
confute his own depreciatory criticism of Marston by including the
passage among his "Selections," was the first, as far as I know, to
adopt this erroneous and rather spasmodic punctuation.]
The man or the boy does not seem to me enviable who can read or remember
these verses without a thrill. In sheer force of concision they recall
the manner of Alfieri; but that noble tragic writer could hardly have
put such fervor of austere passion into the rigid utterance, or touched
the note of emotion with such a glowing depth of rapture. That "bitter
and severe delight"--if I may borrow the superb phrase of Landor--which
inspires and sustains the imperial pride of self-immolation might have
found in his dramatic dialect an expression as terse and as sincere: it
could hardly have clothed itself with such majestic and radiant
solemnity of living and breathing verse. The rapid elliptic method of
amoebaean dialogue is more in his manner than in any English poet's
known to me except the writer of this scene; but indeed Marston is
in more points than one the most Italian of our dramatists. His
highest tone of serious poetry has in it, like Alfieri's, a note of
self-conscious stoicism and somewhat arrogant self-control; while as a
comic writer he is but too apt, like too many transalpine wits, to
mistake filth for fun, and to measure the neatness of a joke by its
nastiness. Dirt for dirt's sake has never been the apparent aim of any
great English humorist who had not about him some unmistakable touch of
disease--some inheritance of evil or of suffering like the congenital
brain-sickness of Swift or the morbid infirmity of Sterne. A poet of so
high an order as the author of "Sophonisba" could hardly fail to be in
general a healthier writer than such as these; but it cannot be denied
that he seems to have been somewhat inclined to accept the illogical
inference which would argue that because some wit is dirty all dirt
must be witty--because humor may sometimes be indecent, indecency must
always be humorous. "The clartier the cosier" was an old proverb among
the northern peasantry while yet recalcitrant against the inroads of
sanitary reform: "the dirtier the droller" would seem to have been
practically the no less irrational motto of many not otherwise
unadmirable comic writers. It does happen that the drollest character in
all Marston's plays is also the most offensive in his language--"the
foulest-mouthed profane railing brother"; but the drollest passages in
the whole part are those that least want washing. How far the example of
Ben Jonson may have influenced or encouraged Marston in the indulgence
of this unlovely propensity can only be conjectured; it is certain that
no third writer of the time, however given to levity of speech or
audacity in the selection of a subject, was so prone--in Shakespeare's
phrase--to "talk greasily" as the authors of "Bartholomew Fair" and "The
Dutch Courtesan."
In the two parts of his earlier tragedy the interest is perhaps, on the
whole, rather better sustained than in "The Wonder of Women." The
prologue to "Antonio's Revenge" (the second part of the "Historie of
Antonio and Mellida") has enjoyed the double correlative honor of ardent
appreciation by Lamb and responsive depreciation by Gifford. Its
eccentricities and perversities of phrase[1] may be no less noticeable,
but should assuredly be accounted less memorable, than its profound and
impassioned fervor of grave and eloquent harmony. Strange, wayward and
savage as is the all but impossible story, rude and crude and crabbed as
is the pedantically exuberant language of these plays, there are touches
in them of such terrible beauty and such terrible pathos as to convince
any competent reader that they deserve the tribute of such praise and
such dispraise. The youngest student of Lamb's "Specimens" can hardly
fail to recognize this when he compares the vivid and piercing
description of the death of Mellida with the fearful and supernatural
impression of the scene which brings or thrusts before us the immolation
of the child, her brother.
[Footnote 1: One strange phrase in the very first line is surely a
palpable misprint--_ramps_ for _cramps_.]
The labored eccentricity of style which signalizes and disfigures the
three chief tragedies or tragic poems of Marston is tempered and subdued
to a soberer tone of taste and a more rational choice of expression in
his less ambitious and less unequal works. It is almost impossible to
imagine any insertion or addition from the hand of Webster which would
not be at once obvious to any reader in the text of "Sophonisba" or in
either part of "Antonio and Mellida." Their fierce and irregular
magnificence, their feverish and strenuous intemperance of rhetoric,
would have been too glaringly in contrast with the sublime purity of the
greater poet's thought and style In the tragicomedy of "The Malcontent,"
published two years later than the earlier and two years earlier than
the later of these poems, if the tone of feeling is but little changed
or softened, the language is duly clarified and simplified. "The
Malcontent, (augmented) by Marston, with the additions written by John
Webster," is as coherent, as harmonious, as much of a piece throughout,
as was the text of the play in its earlier state. Not all the
conscientious art and skill of Webster could have given this uniformity
to a work in which the original design and execution had been less in
keeping with the bent of his own genius and the accent of his natural
style. Sad and stern, not unhopeful or unloving, the spirit of this poem
is more in harmony with that of Webster's later tragedies than with that
of Marston's previous plays; its accent is sardonic rather than
pessimistic, ironical rather than despondent. The plot is neither well
conceived nor well constructed; the catastrophe is little less than
absurd, especially from the ethical or moral point of view; the
characters are thinly sketched, the situations at once forced and
conventional; there are few sorrier or stranger figures in serious
fiction than that of the penitent usurper when he takes to his arms his
repentant wife, together with one of her two paramours, in a sudden
rapture of forgiving affection; the part which gives the play its name
is the only one drawn with any firmness of outline, unless we except
that of the malignant and distempered old parasite; but there is a
certain interest in the awkward evolution of the story, and there are
scenes and passages of singular power and beauty which would suffice to
redeem the whole work from condemnation or oblivion, even though it had
not the saving salt in it of an earnest and evident sincerity. The
brooding anger, the resentful resignation, the impatient spirit of
endurance, the bitter passion of disdain, which animate the utterance
and direct the action of the hero, are something more than dramatically
appropriate; it is as obvious that these are the mainsprings of the
poet's own ambitious and dissatisfied intelligence, sullen in its
reluctant submission and ardent in its implacable appeal, as that his
earlier undramatic satires were the tumultuous and turbid ebullitions of
a mood as morbid, as restless, and as honest. Coarse, rough, and fierce
as those satires are, inferior alike to Hall's in finish of verse and
to Donne's in weight of matter, it seems to me that Dr. Grosart, their
first careful and critical editor, is right in claiming for them equal
if not superior credit on the score of earnestness. The crude ferocity
of their invective has about it a savor of honesty which atones for many
defects of literary taste and executive art; and after a more thorough
study than such rude and unattractive work seems at first to require or
to deserve, the moral and intellectual impression of the whole will not
improbably be far more favorable than one resulting from a cursory
survey or derived from a casual selection of excerpts. They bring no
manner of support to a monstrous and preposterous imputation which has
been cast upon their author; the charge of having been concerned in a
miserably malignant and stupid attempt at satire under the form of a
formless and worthless drama called "Histriomastix";[1] though his
partnership in another anonymous play--a semi-romantic semi-satirical
comedy called "Jack Drum's Entertainment"--is very much more plausibly
supportable by comparison of special phrases as well as of general
style with sundry mannerisms as well as with the habitual turn of speech
in Marston's acknowledged comedies. There is a certain incomposite and
indigestive vigor in the language of this play which makes the
attribution of a principal share in its authorship neither utterly
discreditable to Marston nor absolutely improbable in itself; and the
satire aimed at Ben Jonson, if not especially relevant to the main
action, is at all events less incongruous and preposterous in its
relation to the rest of the work than the satirical or controversial
part of Dekker's "Satiromastix." But on the whole, if this play be
Marston's, it seems to me the rudest and the poorest he has left us,
except perhaps the comedy of "What you Will," in which several excellent
and suggestive situations are made less of than they should have been,
and a good deal of promising comic invention is wasted for want of a
little more care and a little more conscience in cultivation of material
and composition of parts. The satirical references to Jonson are more
pointed and effective in this comedy than in either of the two plays
last mentioned; but its best claim to remembrance is to be sought in the
admirable soliloquy which relates the seven years' experience of the
student and his spaniel. Marston is too often heaviest when he would
and should be lightest--owing apparently to a certain infusion of
contempt for light comedy as something rather beneath him, not wholly
worthy of his austere and ambitious capacity. The parliament of pages in
this play is a diverting interlude of farce, though a mere irrelevance
and impediment to the action; but the boys are less amusing than their
compeers in the anonymous comedy of "Sir Giles Goosecap," first
published in the year preceding: a work of genuine humor and invention,
excellent in style if somewhat infirm in construction, for a reprint of
which we are indebted to the previous care of Marston's present editor.
Far be it from me to intrude on the barren and boggy province of
hypothetical interpretation and controversial commentary; but I may
observe in passing that the original of Simplicius Faber in "What you
Will" must surely have been the same hanger-on or sycophant of Ben
Jonson's who was caricatured by Dekker in his "Satiromastix" under the
name of Asinius Bubo. The gross assurance of self-complacent duncery,
the apish arrogance and imitative dogmatism of reflected self-importance
and authority at second hand, are presented in either case with such
identity of tone and coloring that we can hardly imagine the satire to
have been equally applicable to two contemporary satellites of the same
imperious and masterful egoist.
[Footnote 1: This abortion of letters is such a very moon-calf, begotten
by malice on idiocy, that no human creature above the intellectual
level of its author will ever dream of attempting to decipher the
insignificant significance which may possibly--though improbably--lie
latent under the opaque veil of its inarticulate virulence.]
That the same noble poet and high-souled humorist was not responsible
for the offence given to Caledonian majesty in the comedy of "Eastward
Ho!" the authentic word of Jonson would be sufficient evidence; but I am
inclined to think it a matter of almost certain likelihood--if not of
almost absolute proof--that Chapman was as innocent as Jonson of a jest
for which Marston must be held responsible--though scarcely, I should
imagine, blamable at the present day by the most rabid of Scottish
provincialists. In the last scene of "The Malcontent" a court lady says
to an infamous old hanger-on of the court: "And is not Signor St. Andrew
a gallant fellow now?" to which the old hag replies: "Honor and he agree
as well together as a satin suit and woollen stockings." The famous
passage in the comedy which appeared a year later must have been far
less offensive to the most nervous patriotism than this; and the
impunity of so gross an insult, so obviously and obtrusively offered, to
the new knightships and lordships of King James's venal chivalry and
parasitic nobility, may naturally have encouraged the satirist to repeat
his stroke next year--and must have astounded his retrospection, when he
found himself in prison, and under threat of worse than imprisonment,
together with his unoffending associates in an admirable and inoffensive
comedy. It is impossible to suppose that he would not have come forward
to assume the responsibility of his own words--as it is impossible to
imagine that Jonson or Chapman would have given up his accomplice to
save himself. But the law of the day would probably have held them all
responsible alike.