Embracing the "Mongrel": John Marston's The Malcontent, Antonio and Mellida, and the Development of English Early Modern Tragicomedy

Abstract

John Marston's tragicomic works have become a troublesome exception to the prevailing critical understanding of the genre. Nonetheless, Marston's position within the history of English tragicomedy makes him difficult to omit from our discussion of late Elizabethan and Jacobean interpretations of the genre, despite the fact that his work largely defies the critically accepted trajectory of tragicomedy's development in the period. While The Malcontent is the first English play identified in print as a tragicomedy, it is by no means the same variety of tragicomedy that John Fletcher would make popular only a few years later.1 Nor is it the type that has interested so many recent scholars. Instead, many current studies of the genre either marginalize or ignore Marston's contribution to tragicomedy, while the critical studies that do address Marston's work tend to apply the same Guarinian model that Fletcher's The Faithfull Shepheardesse and its highly theoretical introduction, To the Reader, so directly engage. These discussions of Marston's influence on the genre point to a teleological bias in the existing critical conversation regarding tragicomedy that leads to Marston's work being forced into a framework that overlooks much of the originality of his tragicomic drama. While there is a direct progression from Italianate pastoral tragicomedy to the unified tragicomedies that become popular in England during the latter half of the first decade of the seventeenth century, that is not the only form of tragicomedy presented on the early modern London stage. Those plays that either experiment with or selfidentify as participating in the genre but that are not part of that direct progression are either seen as marginal or co-opted into the existing trajectory by the current critical discourse. The strong influence of the Italianate tragicomic tradition on the English stage should not lead modern readers to assume that there is only one model for tragicomedy. Marston's tragicomedies put forth a more distinctly English version of the genre, which emphasizes incompleteness within a constantly shifting structure that blends the vicious tone of Senecan tragedy with the unrestrained to which Guarini objects. This type of tragicomedy, in turn, bears more of a resemblance to the late-sixteenthcentury English dramatic romances that Philip Sidney calls mongrel than to the unified Italianate tragicomic tradition.2The standard narrative of tragicomedy's growth into one of the more popular dramatic genres of Jacobean England is rooted in the clear connection between the works of the Italian playwright and theorist Giambattista Guarini and those of John Fletcher. Guarini's best-known work, a pastoral tragicomedy called Il pastor fido (The Faithful Shepherd [1590]), was one of the most successful and most controversial works of printed drama, both domestically and internationally, of the late sixteenth century. Guarini responded to this criticism, which was largely centered on the play's blended genre, in his 1599 treatise, Compendio Della Poesia Tragicomica (The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry), in which he outlines a series of justifications for tragicomedy's inherent unity. As R. A. Foakes describes Guarini's position, [t]ragicomedy, in other words, is controlled by a comic order and is, in effect, a subspecies of comedy (74). In his interpretation of the tragicomic genre, Guarini describes generic blending as something that is rooted in the plot's execution, and not as something that results from a merging of dissimilar plots:Since it deals with great persons and heroes, humble diction is unfitting, and since it is not concerned with the terrible and the horrible, but rather avoids it, it abandons the grave and employs the sweet, which modifies the greatness and sublimity that is proper to pure tragedy. (525)This abandonment of the grave and avoidance of the horrible, as well as Guarini's position that both death and vulgarity are to be avoided at all cost, are mirrored by Fletcher. …