Temporizing as Pyrrhonizing in Marston's The Malcontent

Authors

William M. Hamlin

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, the first paragraph of the essay follows:

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

Recommended Citation

Hamlin, William M. (2000) "Temporizing as Pyrrhonizing in Marston's The Malcontent," Comparative Drama: Vol. 34: Iss. 3, Article 3.
Available at: https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/compdr/vol34/iss3/3