John Marston Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kenneth J. E. Graham

Critical Essay by Kenneth J. E. Graham

SOURCE: "The Mysterious Plainness of Anger: The Search for Justice in Satire and Revenge Tragedy," in The Performance of Conviction: Plainness and Rhetoric in the Early English Renaissance, Cornell, 1994, pp. 125-67.

Here, Graham discusses Marston's handling of anger in The Scourge of Villanie, Antonio and Mellida, and Antonio's Revenge, arguing that "his work shows a plainness that questions all values, thus transforming anger from a reflection of some prior reality to pure self-expression."

The connection of plainness to anger in satire and revenge tragedy is easily demonstrated. For many in the Renaissance, the satirist is a plainspeaker and vice versa, as John Earle illustrates in [Micro-Cosmographie; or, a Piece of the World Discovered in Essayes and Characters] when he says that the blunt or plain man "is as squeazy of his commendations, as his courtesie, and his good word is like an Elogie in a Satyre." Similarly, plainspeaking revengers...
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