When Don Sago in iv. 3 exclaims—
“A hundred times in life a coward dies,”
we are immediately reminded of Shakespeare’s Julius Cæsar (ii. 2),
“Cowards die many times before their death;”
and Sago’s lament in v. 1,
“Although ... the waves of all the Northern sea
Should flow for ever through these guilty hands,
Yet the sanguinolent stain would extant be,”
decidedly smacks of Macbeth. Occasionally, it is true, Marston does not scruple to borrow from Shakespeare, but in none of his plays are the Shakespearean echoes so clear and frequent as in The Insatiate Countess. The text, as I have said, is extremely corrupt, and the confusion among the dramatis personæ is perplexing to the last degree (see note, vol. iii. p. 154). I suspect that Marston, on entering the church, left this tragedy in a fragmentary state, and that it was completed by the actor Barksteed. The whole interest centres in the beautiful
and sinful Isabella, whose wayward glances, as she moves in splendour, fascinate all beholders; who is indeed a “glorious devil” without shame or pity, boundless and insatiable as the sea in the enormity of her caprices.
In addition to his plays, his poem of Pygmalion, and his satires, Marston wrote a Latin pageant on the occasion of the visit paid by the King of Denmark to James I. in 1606, and an entertainment, which is not without elegance, in honour of a visit paid by the Dowager Countess of Derby to her son-in-law and daughter, Lord and Lady Huntingdon, at Ashby. I strongly doubt whether The Mountebank’s Masque, performed at Court in February 1616-17 (when Marston was attending to his clerical duties in Hampshire), has been correctly assigned to Marston.
There are two anonymous plays[26] in which Marston’s hand is plainly discernible,—Histriomastix, published in 1610, and Jack Drum’s Entertainment, published in 1616. It has been mentioned (see note, p. xxxii.) that Jonson in Every Man out of his Humour puts into Clove’s mouth, with the object of ridiculing Marston, words and expressions found in Histriomastix (coupling them with flowers of speech culled from The Scourge of Villainy), and even mentions the play by name—“as you may read in Plato’s Histriomastix.” Only in a few scenes of Histriomastix can Marston’s hand be detected. It is a