Temporizing as Pyrrhonizing in Marston's The Malcontent.

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-SEP-00

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Critics often allude to the skepticism of John Marston's drama. Robert Ornstein calls Marston the first Jacobean to exploit dramatically the skepticism about Stoic self-sufficiency expressed by Erasmus and Montaigne and implicit in the moral philosophy of the Elizabethan age."(1) Jonathan Dollimore interprets the close of Antonio's Revenge (1600-1) as "a 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 the 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 the fin de siecle intellectual milieu in which the play was composed, not to mention Marston's evident familiarity with Pyrrhonism, it seems worthwhile to ask what relations may obtain between, on the one hand, The Malcontent's examination of role-play and duality and, on the other, its participation in the forms of skepticism--henceforth termed "skeptical paradigms"--available to an intellectually curious English poet or playwright at the outset of the seventeenth century.(5)

That Marston had been exposed to the skeptical lexicon and to 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 the 1590s for the cultivation of radical ideas in philosophy and art,(7) Marston would have had access to copies of the Latin translations of Sextus Empiricus published in the 1560s, as well as to other works--French, Italian, Latin, and English--which summarized, applauded, countered, or lampooned the skeptical arguments of Sextus with varying degrees of accuracy and persuasiveness.(8) He would, in addition, during his dozen-year tenure at the 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 the English dissemination of ancient skeptical thought.(9) And he may well have read the English translation of Sextus mentioned by Thomas Nashe in his 1591 preface to Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, or else The Sceptick (c. 1590-1618), also a translation of Sextus, and often (though probably spuriously) attributed to 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 the earliest known instance of the word "Pyrrhonist" in English, this speech, in context, demonstrates a relatively accurate understanding of a central Pyrrhonian idea: Marston's satiric persona refuses to withhold belief in the 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 to stay that way. In contrast, then, to a writer such as Nashe, who also alludes to the "Pironiks" and to Sextus Empiricus in various works of the 1590s,(12) Marston demonstrates a much sharper understanding of Pyrrhonism--an understanding closer to 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 the Dogmatique which affirmes, or Academique which denyes."(13) Unlike Donne, however, Marston did not read Montaigne until after the 1603 publication of John Florio's English translation, and thus his initial understanding of Pyrrhonism depends upon his knowledge of sources other than the Essayes.(14)

But Marston's acquaintance with elements of the skeptical lexicon is only part of the story. He is also familiar, as are many of his contemporaries, with commonplaces of ancient philosophy closely tied to skepticism, among them the Socratic nihil scio and the tactic of arguing in utramque partem. His plays are laced with aphoristic remarks such as "The wisest said: I know I nothing know" (Histriomastix [1599], 1.1.76), "I know I know naught but I naught do know" (What You Will [1601], 2.2.193), and "There's naught that's safe and sweet but ignorance" (The Malcontent, 3.1.32).(15) And his cognizance of the Ciceronian strategy of examining questions from both sides is evident, for instance, in the attitudes of What You Will's Lampatho, a malcontent who, like Vindice, Flamineo, and Bosola of later Jacobean tragedy, laments his fruitless years as a student:

I was a scholar: seven useful springs Did I deflower in quotations Of cross'd opinions 'bout the soul of man. The more I learnt the more I learnt to doubt: Knowledge and wit, faith's foes, turn faith about. (2.2.151-55)(16)

That "cross'd opinions" can lead to terminal doubt is not only the standard conclusion of Pyrrhonian thought with respect to the juxtaposition of opposed beliefs or perceptions, but also a common trajectory of the "vanity of learning" topos so prominent in English philosophical poetry at the turn of the seventeenth century.(17) Finally, it is worth noting one last bit of evidence suggesting Marston's direct acquaintance with the works of Sextus. Late in The Malcontent, when Maquerelle and Malevole debate whether Maria will succumb to Mendoza's marital advances, Maquerelle queries Malevole about the current sign of the zodiac. Malevole mockingly responds by exclaiming "Sign! Why, is there any moment in that?" To which Maquerelle earnestly replies:

O, believe me, a most secret power. Look ye, a Chaldean or an Assyrian (I am sure 'twas a most sweet Jew) told me, court any woman in the right sign, you shall not miss. But you must take her in the right vein then; as, when the sign is in Pisces, a fishmonger's wife is very sociable; in Cancer, a precisian's wife is very flexible; in Capricorn, a merchant's wife hardly holds out; in Libra, a lawyer's wife is...

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