^{Note 1 in page 1004} “English Folly and Italian Vice: The Moral Landscape of John Marston,” in Jacobean Theatre, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, i (London: Arnold, 1960), 85–111.

^{Note 2 in page 1004} John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961).

^{Note 3 in page 1004} Freeburg, Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama: A Study in Stage Tradition (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1915), pp. 161–73; Creizenach, The English Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, trans. Cécile Hugon (London: Sidg-wick & Jackson, 1916), p. 221. For similar groupings see Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), p. 127; John V. Curry, Deception in Elizabethan Comedy (Chicago: Loyola Univ. Press, 1955), p. 62; Robert ?. Knoll, Ben Jonson's Plays: An Introduction (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. 158; and Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1968), p. 179.

^{Note 4 in page 1005} Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama, 975–1700, rev. by S. Schoenbaum (London: Methuen, 1964), p. 56. A Knack to Know an Honest Man appeared in 1594 (see Annals, p. 60). Dates cited are from Annals unless otherwise noted.

^{Note 5 in page 1005} See e.g., Arthur Freeman, “Two Notes on ? Knack to Know a Knave,'” Motes and Queries, NS 9 (1962), 326–27, and Paul E. Bennett, “The Word 'Goths' in ? Knack to Know a Knave,'” Notes and Queries, NS 2 (1955), 462–63. David Bevington (Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning, Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1968) devotes several pages to the play and its relationship to other plays that assert the importance or worth of the lower classes. Bennett has provided a critical edition of the play in his Diss. Univ. of Pennsylvania 1952.

^{Note 6 in page 1005} A Knack to Know a Knave, ed. G. R. Proudfoot (Oxford : Printed for the Malone Society at the Oxford Univ. Press, 1963), 1. 55. Future line numbers in my text will refer to this edition.

^{Note 7 in page 1005} Alan C. Dessen, “The ‘Estates’ Morality Play,” Studies in Philology, 62 (1965), 130. Hereafter, “Stage direction” will be cited as s.d.

^{Note 8 in page 1005} It is not verbal echoes or direct internal references to A Knack that make a link of some sort likely, but instead it is the sheer accumulation of parallel treatments of character and event. Such parallelism can result from an indirect relationship, of course, from common sources, e.g., and should not be taken as evidence of Marston's direct imitation of A Knack. External proof of Marston's exposure specifically to this eariier play is also inconclusive. A Knack was played by the amalgamation of Strange's and the Admiral's men which operated until the summer of 1594, at which time the group broke into the new Admiral's men and the Lord Chamberlain's men (?. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1923, ii, 122, 126). Presumably, the play remained in the repertory of one or the other of the companies. If with the Henslowe company, it might have been available to Marston when he wrote briefly for Henslowe perhaps as early as 1599 (Chambers, iii, 428). If with the Chamberlain's/King's men, Marston might have had access to the play as part of the cooperative relationship suggested by his contribution of additions to The Malcontent when the King's men adapted that play for their use. But if Marston indeed has borrowed specifically from A Knack, as likely a possibility is that he simply used a copy of the 1594 edition of the play. Paul A. Jorgensen has found possible references to A Knack in The Trial of True Friendship . . . (1596, author unknown) and in Samuel Rowlands' Diogenes Lanthorne (1607) (Redeeming Shakespeare's Words, Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1962, pp. 9–10). The existence of these references suggests that the play still was remembered even later than The Malcontent. As dramatic satire became more prevalent, Marston and others quite reasonably might have reviewed successful and available examples from the recent past to get ideas for new plays.

^{Note 9 in page 1005} Chambers notes in The Elizabethan Stage (in, 182) that “of over two hundred and eighty plays recorded by Henslowe as produced or commissioned by the companies for whom he acted as banker between 1592 and 1603, we have only some forty and perhaps revised versions of a few others.” On that evidence he suggests that the extant plays from the period as a whole represent “a comparatively small fraction” of the number written.

^{Note 10 in page 1005} It will be useful to deal with The Fawne first even though it postdates The Malcontent. Although the Honesty pattern is adapted and altered in both plays, the changes are more superficial in both substance and effect in the later play.

^{Note 11 in page 1005} Text used is John Marston, The Fawne, ed. Gerald A. Smith, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1965).

^{Note 12 in page 1005} Joel Kaplan, in “John Marston's Fawn: A Saturnalian Satire,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 9 (1969), 335–50, argues that Hercules had genuinely determined to marry Dulcimel himself after Tiberio's preplay refusal and that he recognizes the absurdity of the match only after hearing Herod and Nymphadoro denounce it (pp. 339–41). If so, this is his first recognition not only of the vice that he first resolves to attack, flattery, but also of the crimes against Cupid which eventually become the play's focus.

^{Note 13 in page 1005} Doran applies the term to Renaissance dramatic form in Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), pp. 370–76.

^{Note 14 in page 1005} Philip J. Finkelpearl, in “The Use of the Middle Temple's Christmas Revels in Marston's The Fawne,” Studies in Philology, 64 (1967), 199–209, notes an apparent connection between Marston's court of Cupid and the mock trial of faulty lovers in the Middle Temple's Christmas revels over which a Prince d'Amour presided. There was a revels statute against courting “for want of Wit” by “the Fruits of Silence,” and Finkelpearl speculates that “Marston wanted to include this statute regardless of its absolute relevance to the situation in the play” (p. 204).

^{Note 15 in page 1005} E.g., when Philocalia is introduced, Nymphadoro lists her perfections and comments, “There were a lady for Ferrara's duke” (in.i.156). Hercules shows some interest at the time, but nothing is made of it.

^{Note 16 in page 1005} He notes the casual opening, the witty verbal exchanges, and the presentation of vice followed by the enunciation of a moral criterion against which to judge it. Furthermore, “the sequences in which Maquerelle the bawd appears have the loose ‘in-suspension’ form familiar from Jonsonian Comical Satyre, and the dialogue ranges over the conventional preoccupations of Complaint and Satire” (p. 102). For Gibbons, the “gallery of fools, fawning courtiers, bawds and Machiavels” (p. 103) is also derived from Comical Satyre.

^{Note 17 in page 1005} Wells, Elizabethan and Jacobean Playwrights (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), p. 29; Stoll, “Shakespeare, Marston, and the Malcontent Type,” Modern Philology, 3 (1906), 287.

^{Note 18 in page 1005} Text used is John Marston, The Malcontent, ed. M. L. Wine, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964).

^{Note 19 in page 1005} “The Precarious Balance of John Marston,” PMLA, 67(1952), 1069.

^{Note 20 in page 1006} See “The Elizabethan Malcontent,” Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies, ed. James G. McManaway et al. (Washington, D. C. : Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), pp. 523–35.

^{Note 21 in page 1006} The passage is printed in Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, ed. Geoffrey Bullough, n (London and New York: Routledge & Paul, Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), 526.

^{Note 22 in page 1006} William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, gen. ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969).

^{Note 23 in page 1006} Contrast, e.g., “Malevole's” witty exchange with Maquerelle and the court ladies in which he jokes about their adulterous activity (ii.ii) and the dignified and serious comments on lust and shame that Altofront makes to the wounded Femeze (II.V. 144–47). Similarly, as Malevole he conceives of a plot to kill Pietro that earns Mendoza's praise:

? unpeerable invention! Rare! Thou god of policy, it honeys me !

(iii.iii.112–13)

But 10 lines later Altofront speaks his true thoughts:

Celso, didst hear ? ? Heaven, didst hear

Such devilish mischief? Sufferest thou the world

Carouse damnation even with greedy swallow,

And still dost wink, still does thy vengeance slumber ?

(11. 124–27)

^{Note 24 in page 1006} Alvin Kernan, in The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), and Philip J. Finkelpearl, in John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), try to steer a middle course on the disguise issue. Kernan's basic argument is this: “Like Timon, Altofronto once idealized man, and traces of this attitude linger in his malcontent speeches” (p. 215), but the experience of his overthrow disillusioned him. “He now sees the palace and city as a banished Duke who has been treated to a full view of human depravity. So Altofronto becomes Malevole” (p. 216). But upon witnessing several instances of virtue—Maria and the captain, e.g. —he regains “a more balanced view of the world” (p. 218), recognizing “the ultimate necessity of moral conduct, with the qualifying knowledge, however, that most men are base” (p. 219). Finkelpearl describes Altofront as “a true malcontent posing as a malcontent” (p. 185) and speaks of the speech beginning “this earth is the only grave and Golgotha” (iv.v.107–12, quoted above) as expressing Altofront's “faith” to which he wishes to convert Pietro, the “invisible truth” (p. 187) that Malevole's railing makes visible. However, Altofront still wishes to regain his dukedom, suggesting that “Altofronto's left hand has different values from his right” (p. 189). .While Altofront's new knowledge of the potential for evil in men and of the need for opposing it with effective methods is clear enough, neither Kernan nor Finkelpearl provides convincing evidence that Malevole's exaggerated and generalized attitudes are also held by Altofront. For example, in attempting to establish the darkness of Altofront's view of the world, Kernan describes his speech on courtiers (i.iv.74–79, quoted above) as being expressed “in deeply pessimistic but restrained terms” (p. 216), but the very restraint Kernan notes confines the passage to being a frank denunciation of particular vice with no sign of general pessimism. Corrupt courtiers are corrupt.

^{Note 25 in page 1006} Finkelpearl shares this view in John Marston of the Middle Temple, even entitling his chapter on the play “The Malcontent: Virtuous Machiavellianism.”

^{Note 26 in page 1006} The Pattern of Tragicomedy in Beaumont and Fletcher (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1952), p. 69.