Disorientation and Multiple-identities in John Marston's The Malcontent

남장현 한국중세근세영문학회 2010 고전·르네상스 영문학 Vol.19 No.1

This study attempts to examine John Marston’s The Malcontent with regard to his unique characterization and the concept of identity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. He has been regarded as one of the most idiosyncratic dramatists of his era. His characterizations are allegedly flawed in the sense that each individual, like the playwright himself, lacks coherence and consistent stability throughout his works. However, this lack of coherence in his characters can be said to be quite intentional, since there is evidence to support Marston paid a great deal of attention to human mutability in his verses and dramas. Human mutability, when it is dramatized on stage, opens the possibility that Marston may not have believed one integrated harmonious identity but the coexistence of multiple identities in a human being. In this hypothesis, the first party of this study investigates the social disorientation and disjunction that a group of characters in The Malcontent experience and their mental state in which they cannot sustain their own consistent self. Consequently, each character wishes to annihilate his/her own identity, by eroding their self and yearning for death. Through such an unbearable experience, the characters start to assume multiple identities in one self which are incompatible, or sometimes entirely contradictory. Therefore, the second part highlights the course that the characters adopt various identities through dramatic devices such as disguise, deceit and role-playing. In particular, the character Malevole can be shown to portray a number of identities as a direct result of the turmoil and strife to which he finds himself subjected. Examining Marston’s play The Malcontent in terms of the possibility of multiple identities may not only illustrate Marston’s unique idea of human nature and his own perplexing character but also many critics’ diatribes of his character’s inconsistency. Marston leads us to think that, perhaps, living in his Jacobean world is akin to having the capability of possessing multiple identities, should they need or wish to do so. At the conclusion of the performance, the audience is left believing that any character could metamorphose into new contradictory identities at any time, and that they can achieve anything they put their minds to. Such potential flexibility certainly parallels the reality of human nature of the Jacobean era in which courtiers needed to adapt in order to survive.

시장에서의 성, 정숙함 혹은 매춘: 마스턴의 <네덜란드 창부>를 중심으로

조영미 한국중세근세영문학회 2012 중세르네상스 영문학 Vol.20 No.2

John Marston starts The Dutch Courtesan (1605) with the declaration that his play clarifies the difference between the love of a wife and that of a courtesan. Marston’s effort to make such a distinction was a way of negotiating the age’s anxiety over the blurring of such relatively clear boundaries. The beginning of the 17th century in England witnessed an explosive population growth and the advent of a commercial capitalism which helped London grow as the center of Europe. Such unprecedented change instilled the Londoners with a sense of pride in being at the center of the world, as well as with anxiety and fear as to how to tackle such drastic changes which they had never experienced before. The dramatists of the period, including Marston, put such a tension on stage by resorting to the familiar trope of women's bodies. Among the age’s various ways of controlling women's sexuality was the condemnation of the female propensity for consumption by equating it with sexual promiscuity, the portrayal of women in shops as sexual commodities for luring male customers,and finally the intense denunciation of prostitution for its breaking of the patriarchal hierarchy and its blurring of the boundaries of legitimate trades,which were thought to be exclusively male-oriented. Marston addresses his age’s anxiety by driving his play toward the idealization of Beatrice, a wife, and the demonization of Franceschina, a courtesan. Even though Franceshina distinguishes herself by her mastery of the art required for her career, she becomes the very incarnation of lust itself as the play progresses, and divorces herself from the principles of the market in which she works. Predictably, Beatrice becomes the embodiment of a sense of virtue,modesty, and honesty that is also far removed from reality. Eventually, both heroines of the play turn out to be the projected objects of male fantasies. The main plot of the play is, however, encircled and therefore complemented by the subplot, which shows the domestic life of a London merchant couple. They are the only married couple in the play, and, as a result, serve as a reference for the marriage Freevil imagines with Beatrice. The shop of the Mulligrubs is a place where the practice of a trade is inseparable from homemaking. Furthermore, Mistress Mulligrub implies that she willingly provides more than wine to her customers. Their shop-home is itself the market which Freevil struggles to wall off from his marriage. Despite their snobbish affectations and dullness, they still provide a framework by which we view Freevil's conception of marriage. Moreover, their significance can be better appreciated in light of the fact that they represent the exact point at which Marston and Shakespeare diverge on the same issue of sexual disorders of the age.

The Whore of Babylon: Language and Identity in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan

남장현 한국셰익스피어학회 2014 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.50 No.3

This article examines the issue of national and linguistic identities with regard to the perplexing punishment of the whore in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. At the end of the comedy, Franceschina is sentenced to the gallows while other characters forgive each other and it seems her banishment from the stage world has a parallel with the punishment of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Such a problematic ending defines the play as a Jacobean problem comedy or a tragic-comedy. The play was written just after James I’s accession to the English throne and was performed at the Inns of Court in 1605. It was a time when London, as a center of global commerce in early modern Europe, acted as a locus of multi-nationalism in which national identity was constantly questioned in affiliation with language and its standardization. In particular, the accession raised the establishment of one particular language because both English and Scottish were used in the court, and ultimately betrayed the anxieties of the Jacobeans and their concers about linguistic corruption and the consequent issue of language as a barometer of national identity. In this context, Franceschina is a true embodiment of monstrous hybridity in language, which is clearly materialized on stage by her helter-skelter accent. Even from her first appearance, she is set apart from the other characters that use English without much in the way of strange accent. The corruption of her language is related to the abuse of her body by her male customers, which undermines the binary world view of Freevill who attempts to preserve his own domestic household far from a common public world of prostitution. In the body politic of early modern England, Franceschina is not only a being that is constantly conscious of her otherness due to the monstrous hybridity of her tongue but also the other who is victimized in the anxiety of national, cultural and linguistic identities.

The Whore of Babylon : Language and Identity in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan

Jang Hyun Nam 한국셰익스피어학회 2014 셰익스피어 비평 Vol.50 No.3

This article examines the issue of national and linguistic identities with regard to the perplexing punishment of the whore in John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan. At the end of the comedy, Franceschina is sentenced to the gallows while other characters forgive each other and it seems her banishment from the stage world has a parallel with the punishment of Shylock in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. Such a problematic ending defines the play as a Jacobean problem comedy or a tragic-comedy. The play was written just after James I’s accession to the English throne and was performed at the Inns of Court in 1605. It was a time when London, as a center of global commerce in early modern Europe, acted as a locus of multi-nationalism in which national identity was constantly questioned in affiliation with language and its standardization. In particular, the accession raised the establishment of one particular language because both English and Scottish were used in the court, and ultimately betrayed the anxieties of the Jacobeans and their concers about linguistic corruption and the consequent issue of language as a barometer of national identity. In this context, Franceschina is a true embodiment of monstrous hybridity in language, which is clearly materialized on stage by her helter-skelter accent. Even from her first appearance, she is set apart from the other characters that use English without much in the way of strange accent. The corruption of her language is related to the abuse of her body by her male customers, which undermines the binary world view of Freevill who attempts to preserve his own domestic household far from a common public world of prostitution. In the body politic of early modern England, Franceschina is not only a being that is constantly conscious of her otherness due to the monstrous hybridity of her tongue but also the other who is victimized in the anxiety of national, cultural and linguistic identities.

도시희극 속 위기의 청년들: 크레딧 경제의 틈새 찾기

이미영 ( Mi Young Lee ) 영미문학연구회 2021 영미문학연구 Vol.41 No.-

This paper aims to define and analyze young men’s credit crisis and their differentiated strategies in rebuilding their damaged credit by reading closely the two city comedies, Eastward Ho and A Trick to Catch the Old One. Theoretically, the early modern credit economy was based on the harmonious correspondences between moral credit and economic credit, thus orienting toward a “moral economy.” However, as moral credit could be constructed by performance or deceit, the credit economy based on the moral credit could also be manipulated to one’s interest by the clever use of the loopholes inherent in the credit economy. In Eastward Ho, Quicksilver, a “bad” apprentice, ruins his credit and is locked up in the Counter, a debtor’s prison, by his master and creditor, Touchstone. To get released from prison and to regain his credit, Quicksilver must receive a pardon from his former master. For that purpose, Quicksilver performs the role of a penitent prisoner and becomes an icon of penitence in the prison. Golding, a “good” apprentice, silently joins him in the plot as the director of Quicksilver’s performance, thus constructing his own credit as a merciful administrator. Touchstone, a shrewd merchant, also agrees to become a spectator of the show and admits Quicksilver as his apprentice again, thus helping to construct the moral economy of the world in the play. In A Trick, Witgood, a bankrupt prodigal, cannot rebuild his career so easily, because he has multiple creditors and his own uncle, Lucre, is the one who confiscated his land. As his credit cannot be easily rebuilt by mere performances and role-playing, Witgood appropriates the lusty widow stereotype and uses the marriage with a rich widow as leverage to get the assistance of his uncle. He also needs the power of papers and legal contracts, along with cunning manipulation of the hostility and rivalry between Lucre and Hoard, to navigate through the hostile world of London and retrieve his land and reputation. Quicksilver and Witgood, the young men in credit crisis, reveal the loopholes and dilemmas of the credit economy, and show how moral credit and economic credit defined and negotiated each other in the early modern England.

움직이는 석상과 셰익스피어의 문화전쟁

이종숙 ( Jong Sook Lee ) 영미문학연구회 2014 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.36

Real Presence was a question at the heart of the iconoclastic debates and violence that erupted in the English Reformation and the periods following it. The iconoclasts participating in the debates sought to prove the Roman Catholic belief in Real Presence false, and thereby to desacramentalize the relationship between matter and spirit, body and soul, presence and absence, or representation and original. I argue the terms of those debates are incorporated and explored in the poetry of love, secular and sacred, produced in the post-Reformation period. Shakespeare`s “absence-sonnets” for example, reveal a deep-seated anxiety about idolatry, particularly through the figure of the sonneteer-lover who, driven by his scopic desire, creates an absent-present ‘body’ out of the absence of the beloved, and thereby serves to expose how easily latria can slip into dulia into idololatria. Shakespeare further explores, in The Winter`s Tale, the dangers inherent in the sonneteer-lover`s scopic desire, transforming the Ovidian myth of Pygmalion into a story of Pygmalion`s image into a story of Leontes`s petrifying and idol-making desire for absolute possession and absolute presence.

움직이는 석상과 셰익스피어의 문화전쟁

이종숙 영미문학연구회 2014 안과 밖 Vol.0 No.36