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

Abstract

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.