Stoic Embodiment in Marston’s Antonio Plays

Abstract

Stoicism presents itself in John Marston’s Antonio plays in a recognizably parodic, exaggerated form: characters passionately denounce its supposed endorsement of socially isolated existence to gird themselves for proper action. Such an understanding, however, ignores both the subtle ways early modern Stoicism demanded embodiment and the complex theatricality with which Marston stages his dramas. By repeatedly calling attention to the material conditions of their performance—conditions that, according to satiric convention, promise a kind of failure of dramatic realization—the Antonio plays invite a more nuanced understanding of the stoic ideas they appear to denounce. Marston inextricably ties theatricality to early modern Stoicism, and this theatricality can be found tacitly woven throughout influential translations of classical and Neo-Stoic texts. Stoicism entails a performative grammar that admits to a life lived in a constructed but unknowable world and Marston’s self-aware, continually collapsing, and dramaturgically muddled plays are an ideal vehicle for this mode of acknowledgment. [D.S.]

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