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 years
They did provoke me with their petulant styles
On every stage: and I at last unwilling,
But weary, I confess, of so much trouble,
Thought I would try if shame could win upon ’em.”
The Poetaster was produced in 1601; so these attacks on Jonson, in which Marston must have taken a leading part, began about 1598. In the address “To those that seem judicial Perusers” prefixed to The Scourge of Villainy, Marston undoubtedly ridicules Ben Jonson for his use of “new-minted epithets[15] (as real, intrinsecate, Delphic).” “Real” occurs in Every Man out of his Humour (ii. 1); “intrinsecate"” in Cynthia’s Revels (v. 2); and “Delphic” in an early poem of Jonson’s.
But, as Every Man out of his Humour was first produced at Christmas 1599, and Cynthia’s Revels in 1600, these “new-minted epithets” must have been used by Jonson in some early plays that have perished. Jonson retaliated by attacking Marston in Every Man out of his Humour, and Cynthia’s Revels. In the former play (iii. 1) he introduces two characters, Clove and Orange, who are expressly described as “mere strangers to the whole scope of our play.” They are on the stage only for a few minutes. Clove is represented as a pretender to learning: “he will sit you a whole afternoon sometimes in a bookseller’s shop, reading the Greek, Italian, and Spanish, when he understands not a word of either.” Orange is a mere simpleton who can say nothing but “O Lord, sir,” and “It pleases you to say so, sir.” In the “characters of the persons" (prefixed to the play) we are told that this “inseparable case of coxcombs ... being well flattered” will “lend money and repent when they have done. Their glory is to invite players and make suppers.” Dr. Brinsley Nicholson suggests that Orange was intended as a caricature of Dekker, and that Clove stands for Marston. This view is, doubtless, partly correct, but we must not insist on it too strongly. Dekker—whatever may be said of Marston—had no money to lend, and would rather have expected to sup at the players’ expense than to be made the shot-clog of the feast: again and again in The Poetaster he is ridiculed on the score of poverty. It is undeniable that Jonson, to raise a laugh against Marston, puts into Clove’s mouth grotesque words culled from The Scourge