The Malcontent
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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.
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Performance
The play was first performed by the Children of the Chapel, one of the troupes of boy actors active in the era, in the Blackfriars Theatre. It was later taken over by the King's Men, the adult company for which William Shakespeare worked, and performed at the Globe Theatre. The King's Men's production featured a new induction, written by John 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 Induction 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, and Henry Condell appear as themselves, while William 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 sextodecimo sheet) had stolen a King's Men's play, possibly a sequel to Thomas 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 by Valentine Simmes for the bookseller William Aspley.
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 18th century, the play was unacted, but it was revived in 1850 at the Olympic Theatre in London. It was not acted again until the 1960s, with a production in 1964 at Southampton University and then 1968 at Oxford University. The A.D.C. Theatre in Cambridge performed it in modern dress in 1983, in 1998 by the English Department at Boston University, and in 2010 by the Academy for Classical Acting (of the Shakespeare Theatre Company) in Washington, D.C. Aside from these student and repertoire productions, there was a professional staging in 1973 by Jonathan Miller.
Notes
In 2002 the Royal Shakespeare Company produced the play in Stratford, with Anthony Sher in the role of Malevole. In 2010 the American Shakespeare Center produced the play at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virgina, with Ben Curns in the role of Malevole and John Harrell as Mendoza.
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.
