Critical Introduction

In his note “To the generali Reader” which precedes the quarto edition of Sophonisba, Marston writes, “know, that I have not labored in this poeme, to tie my selfe to relate any thing as an historian but to inlarge every thing as a Poet.” That one sentence comes close to saying everything about the sources of the play that need be said; Marston has handled the story so freely that tracing a clear line of descent back through numerous other Renaissance tellings to the five extant classical accounts is almost pedantic. Sophonisba’s tale was a popular one which Marston could have read in a dozen places and four languages. ¹ But what appears to be an appallingly complex source problem because of the many languages involved (English, Latin, Italian, and French, in all of which Marston seems to have been at least marginally proficient) turns out to be reasonably simple because there are two distinct Sophonisba traditions, and Marston’s plot comes definitely from one of them rather than from a confusing mixture of the two. And the task is not pedantic, because by comparing plot to sources we get an exact measure of how boldly Marston has constructed his play.