Page:Grierson Herbert - First Half of the Seventeenth Century.djvu/124

104 Marston is the more ambitious of the two, but Dekker is the finer genius, poetic and dramatic. Marston affects both tragic gloom and sardonic satire, but in both he is an impostor. His first tragedy, Antonio and Mellida (1601, published 1602), is perhaps the most outrageous example of the type of melodrama inaugurated by The Spanish Tragedy,—a type which Shakespeare, in the year of Marston's play, transfigured in Hamlet. All the machinery of the kind is to be found in Marston's tragedy,—hideous crime, the ghost clamouring for vengeance, the feigned madman awaiting his opportunity. The style is that of Ancient Pistol, and calls aloud for the purging administered by Jonson in The Poetaster.

The Malcontent (1604), dedicated to Jonson himself, is a play of much the same sort. The banished Duke, in disguise at the usurper's court, rails at everything, and especially at the shams of court life, in the sardonic vein of Hamlet. The dénouement is effected by the favourite device of a play. The style is pruned of some of the worst extravagances of the earlier play, and Marston can write with vigour; but his pretentious satire is as unconvincing as his tragic horrors. Parasitaster, or the Fawn (1606), is in the same sardonic style. The Wonder of Women, or the Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606), on a favourite subject of Renaissance dramatists, is a flaming melodrama.