- The Malcontent
"The Malcontent" is an early Jacobean stage play written by the dramatist and satirist
John Marston ca. 1603. The play was one of Marston's most successful works."The Malcontent" is widely regarded as one of the most significant plays of the English Renaissance; an extensive body of scholarly research and critical commentary has accumulated around it. [Logan and Smith, pp. 175-9, 182-91, 198-202, 222-3, 239-40.]
Performance
The play was first performed by the
Children of the Chapel , one of the troupes of boy actors active in the era, in theBlackfriars Theatre . It was later taken over by the King's Men, the adult company for whichWilliam Shakespeare worked, and performed at theGlobe Theatre . The King's Men's production featured a newinduction , written byJohn Webster , and several new scenes, probably written by Marston himself. These additions may have been necessary because the original play was too short for the King's Men's purposes: plays for the boys' companies tended to involve more musical interludes than those of the adult companies, and so be shorter.The Induction
The Iduction to this revised version is a metatheatrical one, in which the play's actors and its onstage spectators comment on the drama that is to follow and discuss the "bitterness" of its satire. King's Men actors
Richard Burbage ,John Lowin , andHenry Condell appear as themselves, whileWilliam Sly appears as a young theater-goer and John Sinklo appears as "Doomsday," his cousin. The gallant asks Condell how King's Men came to mount a Blackfriar's play, and Condell answers, "Why not Malevole in folio with us, as Jeronimo in decimosexto with them?" He suggests that the boys (compared to a decimo sheet) had stolen a King's Men's play, possibly a sequel toThomas Kyd 's "The Spanish Tragedy ," and so they stole Blackfriars's "Malcontent" for their folio-sized actors.Publication
"The Malcontent" was entered into the
Stationers' Register on July 5, 1604, and published later the same year in quarto in three states, the second and third containing the additions by Marston and the induction by Webster. All three texts of the first edition were printed byValentine Simmes for the booksellerWilliam Aspley . [Chambers, Vol. 3, p. 431.]The plot
"The Malcontent" tells the story of the deposed duke Altofront, who has adopted the
alter ego of Malevole, a discontented parasite, in order to try to regain his lost dukedom. Malevole is an angry satirist-figure, who attacks the corruption and decadence of the court in which he lives. The degree to which the play is a comment on the court of James I and the immorality of his courtiers is debatable, as the satire is, by and large, general enough to fit any court. However, "The Malcontent" seemed to some contemporaries to be, like Marston's later plays, a lashing of the new, bumptious, and corrupt Scottish courtiers, and some specific satire is certain.Later productions
During the Restoration and through the eighteenth century, the play was unacted, but it was revived in 1850 at the Olympic Theatre in London. It was not acted again until the 1960's, with a production in 1964 at
Southampton University and then 1968 atOxford University . The A.D.C. Theatre in Cambridge performed it in modern dress in 1983. Finally, in 1998, it was performed by the English Department atBoston University . Aside from these student and repertoire productions, there was a professional staging in 1973 byJonathan Miller . [See the Introduction to David Kay's New Mermaid edition, pp. xxxii-xxxvi.]Notes
References
* Caputi, Anthony. "John Marston, Satirist." Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1961.
* Chambers, E. K. "The Elizabethan Stage." 4 Volumes, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1923.
* Finkelpearl, Philip J. "John Marston of the Middle Temple". Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1969.
* Marston, John. "The Malcontent". New mermain edition; W. David Kay, ed. London, Methuen, 2007.
* Logan, Terence P., and Denzell S. Smith, eds. "The New Intellectuals: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama." Lincoln, NE, University of Nebraska Press, 1977.External links
* [http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/cgi-bin/eprosed/eprosed-idx?coll=eprosed;idno=P1.0170 "The Malcontent" online.]
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