Exploring Aesthetic Discomfort in the Experience of the Comic and the Tragic: John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge

Abstract

Antonio’s Revenge, a violent revenge tragedy, is an unlikely follow-up to a romantic comedy, Antonio and Mellida. The two plays share an almost identical set of characters and the same place of action; the time elapsed in between the two plot lines is brief, not even allowing for the wedding of Antonio and Mellida or the reuniting of Antonio’s parents. The impact of the shocking opening scene of Antonio’s Revenge, with Piero as a blood-covered murderer, is intensified by our sense of incredulity that the regress of Piero into his old tyrant self happens so soon after the happy conclusion of Antonio and Mellida. The constant reversal of the comic scenes, however, into serious scenes, some with the clearly suggested possibility of tragic outcome, is actually quite common in Elizabethan drama. Indeed, such a pattern of reversal is a founding principle behind the plot of Antonio and Mellida. However, the critics of Marston have objected to what they consider the playwright’s exaggerated tendency to juxtapose the serious investigation of Senecan stoicism with elements of comedy, the grotesque, and buffoonery. They have complained about this excess as leading to dramatic disunity of structure and tone, crudeness and folly. Some critics have tried to ascribe this excess to and justify it by the experimental spirit of Marston’s writing, by which Marston supposedly succeeds in averting the danger of disunity of structure and tone.