Discourse and power: Dangerous dialogues in the works of John Marston

Abstract

The critic Anthony Caputi identifies in John Marston's work an internal consistency that derives from his attention to and satiricomic expression (vii). This thesis argues that Marston's satire is informed by the strategic use of metatheatrical technique in his drama, and that this technique is prevalent regardless of genre. The function of this self-reflexive device is to continually foreground subversive interrogations of prevailing Jacobean socio-cultural practice, in the form of what may be termed dangerous dialogues. In each of the plays examined, Marston's characters attempt to exert control over language and other characters with self-conscious and extravagant role-playing. In defining and enacting a role for themselves, they aim to achieve an autonomous sense of self, and then to subordinate others within a 'plot', or worldview, with this reflexively acted and fashioned self at the centre. However, the intense doubleness of action and language that Marston archly exploits in order to promote social satire in his plays always militates against these attempts to unequivocally assert such power.Three of Marston's plays are analysed in order to demonstrate how he creates dangerous dialogues that critique social and cultural hegemonic ideologies. In the revenge tragedy Antonio's Revenge, it is seen how attempts by court figures such as Piero and Antonio to control and manipulate other characters with language and performance are attempts to assert a centred sense of self, and ultimately, reinforce what they see as social order. Throughout this play, the act of theatricality itself, the very technique employed by these characters to achieve power, in fact subversively reveals the artifice of socio-cultural conventions such as law and order, state power, and the divine right of rulers, questioning their status as self-evident social truths. Marston shows how it is impossible for any character to discipline the centrifugal force of language, containing as it inevitably does the voice of an oppositional other. It is the implicit awareness of this fact that forces the revengers in this play to resort to extreme violence and paradoxically destabilise social order in their attempt to affirm it.The second play examined, The Malcontent, uses the tragicomedy form to interrogate more closely the concept of authority, in particular the ducal authority sought by the figures of Altofronto/Malevole and Mendoza. In endeavouring to reclaim his role as Duke of Genoa, the usurped duke Altofronto adopts the role of the malcontent Malevole in order to attain his political ambition. However, his disguise calls for the voicing of dialogues that intensely condemn the role of Duke and the social hierarchy he presides over as artificial and randomly contrived. It is seen how these dialogues are not completely silenced by the play's attempt at closure. The central figure of the drama is an embodiment of the double-edged nature of language and performance that Marston explores in his plays; the voicing and enacting of one version of social convention necessarily and inevitably brings into being an alternative version. The two co-exist in an unresolvable dialogue that showcases the struggle of contending ideologies.In The Dutch Courtesan, Marston foregrounds the roles of women, and demonstrates how their dialogues continually unsettle the male characters' assertions of social power. Beatrice, Crispinella and Franceschina replicate females such as Maria, Mellida and Macquerelle who feature in the two earlier plays, but the women's voices are arguably given more space in The Dutch Courtesan. In focusing on gender as the battleground upon which the males attempt to assert their sense of autonomous masculine selves, Marston shows how the role-playing of the major male characters in fact potentially reveals how gender itself is an artificial construction. Figures such as the prostitute Franceschina and the maid Beatrice actually have the power to feminise the male characters. As Freevill and Cocledemoy combat these dangerous female dialogues by employing role-playing, their attempts to totally exclude female voices from their sense of selves merely work to reinforce their very presence. Their acts of role-playing are effectively acts of prostitution, implicating them in a performative trap with the anarchic doubleness of language at its base.This thesis aims to show that a sense of subversion results from Marston's strategy of displaying characters' self-reflexive role-playing. Used as means to assert an autonomous self and, finally, the hegemonic constructions of social order, Marston instead highlights the disorder that lurks just beneath the surface of these artificial constructions, and perpetually threatens to disrupt them. This disorder is the essential quality of language itself, this doubleness that continually challenges Jacobean socio-cultural orthodoxy. Instead of order, Marston posits anarchy as the natural condition of existence leading to oblivion; the fact that he dedicates his Scourge of Villaine To euerlasting Obliuion and that his epitaph reads 'OBLIVIONI SACRUM' perhaps reinforces that this was indeed a prominent theme of his life and work.