Temporizing as Pyrrhonizing in Marston's The Malcontent

Abstract

Critics often allude skepticism of John Marston's drama. Robert Ornstein calls Marston first Jacobean exploit dramatically skepticism about Stoic self-sufficiency expressed by Erasmus and Montaigne and implicit in moral philosophy of Elizabethan age.(1) Jonathan Dollimore interprets close of Antonio's Revenge (1600-1) as 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 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-play and its closely-related doubleness of theme, mood, and structure.(4) Yet given fin de siecle intellectual milieu in which play was composed, not mention Marston's evident familiarity with Pyrrhonism, it seems worthwhile ask what relations may obtain between, on one hand, The Malcontent's examination of role-play and duality and, on other, its participation in forms of skepticism--henceforth termed paradigms--available an intellectually curious English poet or playwright at outset of seventeenth century.(5) That Marston had been exposed skeptical lexicon and commonplace skeptical ideas is clear. Both at Oxford, where epistemological quaestiones were commonly posed for disputation,(6) and subsequently at London's Inns of Court, notorious in 1590s for cultivation of radical ideas in philosophy and art,(7) Marston would have had access copies of Latin translations of Sextus Empiricus published in 1560s, as well as other works--French, Italian, Latin, and English--which summarized, applauded, countered, or lampooned skeptical arguments of Sextus with varying degrees of accuracy and persuasiveness.(8) He would, in addition, during his dozen-year tenure at Middle Temple (1595-1606), have been acquainted with Sir John Davies, John Webster, John Ford, and possibly Fulke Greville and Sir Walter Ralegh, each of whom played a part in English dissemination of ancient skeptical thought.(9) And he may well have read English translation of Sextus mentioned by Thomas Nashe in his 1591 preface Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, or else The Sceptick (c. 1590-1618), also a translation of Sextus, and often (though probably spuriously) attributed Ralegh.(10) It thus comes as little surprise that in his satirical Scourge of Villanie (1598), Marston chastises a fictional interlocutor as follows: Fye Gallus, what, a skeptick Pyrrhomist?(11) Besides offering earliest known instance of word Pyrrhonist in English, this speech, in context, demonstrates a relatively accurate understanding of a central Pyrrhonian idea: Marston's satiric persona refuses withhold belief in fashion advocated by skeptics. Rather, he assures Gallus that he is a plain speaker--Ile not faine / Wresting my humor, from his natiue straine--and intends stay that way. In contrast, then, a writer such as Nashe, who also alludes Pironiks and Sextus Empiricus in various works of 1590s,(12) Marston demonstrates a much sharper understanding of Pyrrhonism--an understanding closer that evinced by John Donne (also an Inns-of-Court student), who asserts in his third Paradox that the Sceptique which doubts all is more contentious then eyther Dogmatique which affirmes, or Academique which denyes.(13) Unlike Donne, however, Marston did not read Montaigne until after 1603 publication of John Florio's English translation, and thus his initial understanding of Pyrrhonism depends upon his knowledge of sources other than Essayes.(14) But Marston's acquaintance with elements of skeptical lexicon is only part of story. …