Enter the Malcontent...a misfit, an outcast, a 'strayer from the
drove', one who laughs at the follies of others from a distance,
like Jacques, or who snarls and rails acerbically like Thersites or
Timon. Sometimes, like Iago, he has murder in his heart. He might
be an alienated intellectual, like Bosola or Flamineo, with an
education he cannot use, or a cynical adventurer like Bussy, or a
revenger, like Vindice, out to right wrongs; a bastard like Edmund;
a Jew like Barabas; an outcast, a social climber, a man with a
deformity, a man passed over for office, a professional clown with
ambitions, a professional soldier with a grudge, a Prince with an
impossible mission, even a usurping king determined to 'prove a
villain'...The Malcontent comes in various garbs and guises,
sometimes glowering and dressed in black, and sometimes not. But
his kind is legion, his intelligence rare, and he figures on the
English stage at a uniquely innovative point in its history. The
Jacobean stage Malcontent had his immediate antecedents in real
life. He also had a dramatic ancestry in the medieval Vice and the
Fool. His anarchic hey-day began in the late 1580s and was
effectively over by the mid 1620s, but this brief period produced
some of the most influential dramatists the Anglophone world has
known, stage-writers of brilliance who were engaged in re-working
Roman and Greek Classicism, and incorporating and adapting English
medieval staples and histories in modern works which revolutionised
stage business and stage language. By the time a play called The
Malcontent by John Marston appeared in 1604, it was satirising a
familiar phenomenon: not only of a stage figure, but of a whole
tranche of plays and theatre-writing distinctly malcontented in
tone and matter. Written and performed in a time of new
intellectual inquiry and a spirit of scepticism regarding the old
fixtures of Man's place in the World and the political and
religious structures that underpinned it - a time of social flux,
of discovery of new worlds, of war, spying, bitter religious
faction, and political and economic uncertainty - these works were
presenting a diverse public audience with the exciting and possibly
terrifying spectacle of this fixture's actual fragility, and the
capacity of Man to challenge his destiny. The author's remarkably
perceptive The Stoic, the Weal and the Malcontent sheds new light
on the the development and relevance of the Malcontent in
Elizabethan and Jacobean drama. Julia Lacey Brooke read English
Literature and Renaissance History at the University of East
Anglia, later taking an MLitt at the University of Birmingham's
Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon. Now based in rural
Tuscany, she is a freelance editor, teacher and lecturer, and
writes satirical fiction.
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