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

Abstract

The critical discussion of early modern English tragicomedy has created a model of the genre's progression that runs from the Italianate pastoral tragicomic tradition, epitomized by Giambattista Guarini's work, directly into the English tragicomedies of the latter half of the first decade of the seventeenth century. Plays that complicate this narrative about the genre's development have been described as "mixed" and are either seen as predecessors of the more mature "unified" tragicomedy epitomized by the works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher or are, like John Marston's works, effectively ignored. This essay argues that Marston's most famous foray into tragicomedy, The Malcontent, is best understood not as it relates to the pastoral Italianate tragicomedy, but instead through its relationship with Antonio and Mellida, Antonio's Revenge (the sequel to Antonio and Mellida), and through the ways that these plays use restaged cultural performance to obfuscate genre itself. Antonio and Mellida manipulates dramatic layering and uses genre-specific tropes to create a suspenseful atmosphere driven by the play's incompleteness. These two uniquely non-Aristotelian qualities, incompleteness and generic suspense, undermine the typical expectations defined by tragicomedy's Italianate tradition. In effect, this essay asks readers of English Renaissance tragicomedy to rethink the universal application of Italianate tragicomic logic and to consider alternate approaches to the genre.

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