DONOVAN SHERMAN Stoic Embodiment in Marston’s Antonio Plays I n a brief essay on John Marston, T.S. Eliot attempts to dismiss the An- tonio plays, Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge, as the play- wright’s stylistic throat-clearing that preceded his more mature drama. But, try as he may, Eliot cannot entirely abandon these works,. He finds himself drawn inexplicably to them despite himself because he confesses, they prompt “bewilderment, that anyone could write plays so bad and that plays so bad could be preserved and reprinted” while refusing to be “plays that one wholly forgets.” Their compellingly poor quality, further- more, “cannot be explained simply by incapacity, or even by plain careless- ness. A blockhead could not have written them; a painstaking blockhead would have done better; and a careless master, or a careless dunce, would not have gone out of his way to produce the effects of nonsensicality which we meet.” 1 This blockhead-resistant yet undeniably bad artistry is a func- tion of what Eliot terms Marston’s “irrelevance” and must be a “symptom” of something. Eliot soon lights upon the disease: a quality of poetic drama that he calls a “doubleness” of “dramatic action, as if it took places on two plans at once.” 2 The diagnosis complete, Eliot moves on with a nearly au- dible sigh of relief to The Tragedy of Sophonisba, in his rare opinion the best example of Marston’s genius. 3 I would like to thank members of the “Performing Knowledge on Shakespeare’s Stage” sem- inar at the 2016 meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America for their excellent feedback. I am also grateful for support given by the Center for Faculty Development at Seton Hall University. 1. T.S. Eliot, “John Marston,” Essays on Elizabethan Drama (New York, 1960), pp. 165–66. 2. Eliot, “Marston,” p. 173. 3. Eliot has also penned one of the more famous essays on Seneca’s influence on early modern literature: “Seneca in Elizabethan Translation,” Essays on Elizabethan Drama, pp. 3–55. Eliot’s con- cern here is a formal trace of tradition, a history in which Gorboduc is the clear dividing line. For a genealogy of Seneca’s influence that takes into account more nuanced inheritances and phases, see Jessica Winston, “Seneca in Early Elizabethan England,” Renaissance Quarterly 59 (2006), 29–58. 291 English Literary Renaissance, volume 48, number 3. © 2018 by English Literary Renaissance, Inc. All rights reserved. 0013-8312/2018/4803/0001$10.00