William M. Hamlin
Temporizing as Pyrrhonizing in Marston’s The Malcontent
Volume 34.4, Fall 2000
Critics often allude to the skepticism of John Marston’s drama. Robert Ornstein calls Marston “the first Jacobean to exploit dramatically the skepticism about Stoic self-sufficiency expressed by Erasmus and Montaigne and implicit in the moral philosophy of the Elizabethan age.”1 Jonathan Dollimore interprets the close of Antonio’s Revenge (1600–1) as “a subversion of providentialist orthodoxy.”2 And Keith Sturgess argues that The Dutch Courtesan (1605) is informed throughout by “Montaigne’s skepticism and moral realism,” thereby encouraging Marston “to explode any simple moral structures of right/wrong, black/white by engaging with the genuine complexity of human experience.”3 The Malcontent (1603), however, despite its status as Marston’s best known play, has received virtually no attention along these lines; rather, critics have generally focused on its brilliant exploration of role-playing and its closely-related doubleness of theme, mood, and structure.4 Yet given the fin de ciècle intellectual milieu in which the play was composed, not to mention Marston’s evident familiarity with Pyrrhonism, it seems worthwhile to ask what relations may obtain between, on the one hand, The Malcontent’s examination of role-play and duality and, on the other, its participation in the forms of skepticism—henceforth termed “skeptical paradigms”—available to an intellectually curious English poet or playwright at the outset of the seventeenth century.5
Notes
1 Ornstein, The Moral Vision on Jacobean Tragedy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1960) 158; cp. assessments of Marston’s anti-Stoic strain by Robert Bennett in “The Royal Ruse: Malcontentedness in John Marston’s The Malcontent,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 1, ed. J. Leeds Barroll, III (New York: AMS Press, 1984), 71–72 and by Geoffrey Aggeler in Nobler in the Mind: The Stoic-Skeptic Dialectic in English Renaissance Tragedy (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1998), 92–96. See also Charles R. Forker, Skull Beneath the Skin: The Achievement of John Webster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986) 52–53, and M. C. Bradbrook, John Webster, Citizen and Dramatist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980) 41.
2 Dollimore, Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries, 2nd ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 38. Similarly, Keith Sturgess claims that in the final scenes of Antonio’s Revenge, through a “poised withdrawal of clear-cut judgment,” Marston “signals a world of moral relativism and philosophic skepticism” (Introduction, The Malcontent and Other Plays, ed. Sturgess [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997] xviii).
3 Sturgess, xxii.
4 See, for instance, T.S. Eliot, “John Marston,” in Elizabethan Essays (London: Faber, 1934) 177–95; Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1961) 193–94, 198–99; R. W. Ingram, John Marston (Boston: Twayne, 1978); Brownell Salomon, “The Doubleness of The Malcontent and Fairy-tale Form,” Connotations 1:2 (1991): 150–63.
5 For a study of skeptical paradigms as manifested in Elizabethan drama, see William M. Hamlin, “Casting Doubt in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus,” SEL 41.2 (2001): 257–75.
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