Antonio and Mellida was the first play by John Marston performed by the newly-revived Paul's Company in 1599. Marston sought to display a variety of talents--comic, tragic, satiric and historical--advertising his own dramatic skills and the prowess of the choristers of Paul's. The play is based on incidents in the reigns of Sforza, Francesco, Galeazzo and Lodovico, who were Dukes of Milan in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Marston displays a detailed knowledge of the dramatic works of Shakespeare, Seneca, Kyd and Nashe as well as the prose of Sidney, Erasmus, Montaigne, Florio and others. This edition includes a comprehensive introduction, an analysis of staging, and full commentary. The text is based on a collation of all known copies of the 1602 Quarto and is presented in a thoroughly modernized format.
The play is a romantic comedy, which charts the "comic crosses of true love" faced by Antonio, son of the good Duke Andrugio, and Mellida, daughter of the wicked Duke Piero.
This edition seeks to evaluate Antonio's Revenge not merely as a literary text but as a drama for a particular company, in a specific theatre. The scholarly introduction explores the high degree of originality in Marston's dramatic techniques and establishes him as a leading innovator in both the language and the dramaturgy of his day. Ostensibly the second part of Antonio and Mellida, a satiric romance published in 1599, Antonio's Revenge differs in both theme and linguistic style. Reavley Gair offers an insightful analysis of the play's relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet --written at about the same time--and a new interpretation of the relations between dramatic companies at the Globe and the Paul's Theatre.
John Marston was born to John and Maria Marston née Guarsi, and baptised on October 7th, 1576 at Wardington, Oxfordshire. Marston entered Brasenose College, Oxford in 1592 and earned his BA in 1594. By 1595, he was in London, living in the Middle Temple. His interests were in poetry and play writing, although his father's will of 1599 hopes that he would not further pursue such vanities. His brief career in literature began with the fashionable genres of erotic epyllion and satire; erotic plays for boy actors to be performed before educated young men and members of the inns of court. In 1598, he published 'The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image and Certaine Satyres', a book of poetry. He also published 'The Scourge of Villanie', in 1598. 'Histriomastix' regarded as his first play was produced 1599. It's performance kicked off an episode in literary history known as the War of the Theatres; a literary feud between Marston, Jonson and Dekker that lasted until 1602. However, the playwrights were later reconciled; Marston wrote a prefatory poem for Jonson's 'Sejanus' in 1605 and dedicated 'The Malcontent' to him. Beyond this episode Marston's career continued to gather both strength, assets and followers. In 1603, he became a shareholder in the Children of Blackfriars company. He wrote and produced two plays with the company. The first was 'The Malcontent' in 1603, his most famous play. His second was 'The Dutch Courtesan', a satire on lust and hypocrisy, in 1604-5. In 1605, he worked with George Chapman and Ben Jonson on 'Eastward Ho', a satire of popular taste and the vain imaginings of wealth to be found in the colony of Virginia. Marston took the theatre world by surprise when he gave up writing plays in 1609 at the age of thirty-three. He sold his shares in the company of Blackfriars. His departure from the literary scene may have been because of further offence he gave to the king. The king suspended performances at Blackfriars and had Marston imprisoned. On 24th September 1609 he was made a deacon and them a priest on 24th December 1609. In October 1616, Marston was assigned the living of Christchurch, Hampshire. He died (accounts vary) on either the 24th or 25th June 1634 in London and was buried in the Middle Temple Church.
A work of historical criticism that offers new interpretations of the nine plays attributed solely to John Marston. Explores his use of literary, historical, and intellectual sources and focuses on recurrent major images and themes in the plays.
This play is a sequel to the romantic comedy Antonio and Mellida. Unlike its predecessor, however, Antonio's Revenge is a revenge tragedy. Antonio and Mellida ended with a scene in which the two lovers were reconciled, with the villain, Mellida's father, Duke Piero, apparently repenting his attempts to keep them apart. Antonio's Revenge begins where the previous play ended. It is revealed that Piero has not really reformed: he still hates Antonio, and is determined to prevent his daughter's marriage to him. Piero murders and imprisons various characters, driving Mellida herself to die of grief, before Antonio teams up with other wronged individuals to carry out a revenge on the wicked Duke, which they do through a masque in the play's last act.
As the Elizabethan era gave way to the reign of James I, England grappled with corruption within the royal court and widespread religious anxiety. Dramatists responded with morally complex plays of dark wit and violent spectacle, exploring the nature of death, the abuse of power and vigilante justice. In Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy a father failed by the Spanish court seeks his own bloody retribution for his son's murder. Shakespeare's 1603 version of Hamlet creates an avenging Prince of unique psychological depth, while Chettle's The Tragedy of Hoffman is a fascinating reworking of Hamlet's themes, probably for a rival theatre company. In Marston's Antonio's Revenge, thwarted love leads inexorably to gory reprisals and in Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, malcontent Vindice unleashes an escalating orgy of mayhem on a debauched Duke for his bride's murder, in a ferocious satire reflecting the mounting disillusionment of the age. Emma Smith's introduction considers the political and religious climate behind the plays and the dramatic conventions within them. This edition includes a chronology, playwrights' biographies and suggestions for further reading.
