ABSTRACT
The single most intriguing work in exploring the relationship between English and Italian tragicomedy at the start of the seventeenth century is John Marston’s The Malcontent, entered on the Stationer’s Register in July 1604 as a ‘Tragicomoedia’,1 making it the earliest self-styled English tragicomedy. It is, therefore, clearly significant that Marston chooses to borrow extensively from the one self-styled Italian model, Battista Guarini’s Il pastor fido (first printed in 1590), which was still provoking fierce literary debate in Italy at the turn of the century. Modern criticism, however, has constantly underplayed the link between these two plays, and the two dramatic traditions: ‘Marston’s play and its contemporary tragicomedies exhibit few connections with Italian theory and practice.’2 In The Malcontent Marston presents an early model for English tragicomedy on the professional stage, which is very different from both John Fletcher’s pastoral The Faithful Shepherdess (1608-1609), often cited as the first English play to acknowledge Guarini’s theory and practice, and also the ‘Romantic’ type, written by Beaumont and Fletcher from the end of the decade.3
