• 1 This volume, Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus 10, 2021, Scènes dans la langue de l’Autre / Scenes in t (...)
• 2 All references to Shakespeare are to Gary Taylor, John Jowett et al., The New Oxford Shakespeare, O (...)

3In Shakespeare’s time, of course, the play would have been performed in English. Yet, as Henry V enduringly illustrates in its final scene between the English king and the French princess, which elaborates on the game of conquest and submission that is played out on the battlefield and on the diplomatic front,1 Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences were accustomed to hearing other languages – regional, national, scholarly – on the stage, whether in public theatres, private playhouses or at court. Plays in Latin continued to be written and performed. And a quick survey of Richardson and Wiggins’s British Drama 1533–1642: A Catalogue shows that the number of plays using a variety of languages is far from negligible. This ranges from occasional words to phrases, soliloquies and dialogues. In The Merchant of Venice, Portia almost seems proleptically to have the scene between Henry and Katherine in mind when she mocks Falconbridge for having “neither Latin, French, nor Italian” and points out the difficulties of communicating with him insofar as she herself has “a poor pennyworth in the English” (i.ii.51–52):2 French and Italian were languages associated with courtly elegance which, in addition to Latin, a young female aristocrat like Portia could be expected to know. The scene also suggests a humorous mise en abyme, raising the question: in which language is Portia speaking?

• 3 Juan Luis Vives, “Dialogue xiii, Schola”, Linguae Latinae Exercitatio, Lyon, Gryphius, 1542, p. 53. (...)

5In What You Will, Marston stages one of early modern drama’s many schoolroom interludes, a Latin lesson, which reflects a focus on grammar rather than meaning. Written, like the Antonio plays, for the Children of Paul’s, in the first decade of the seventeenth century, the play offers insights into the life of boys recruited to sing in the cathedral choir, who were provided with an education, received musical training, and performed in plays. The schoolmaster (Pedant) tells the lords that he “was solicited to grant [Holofernes Pippo] leave to play the lady in comedies presented by Children” (ii.ii.103–4). He asks the boys to recite their lesson by rote, in a kind of grammatical joust. This is illustrated by a play on the name of one of the boys, Battus, which in the vocative becomes “Batte”, and the word “Batalarius”, meaning, as Juan Luis Vives explains in one of his dialogues, one who has mastered the art of disputation:3

• 6 Sonia Massai, Shakespeare’s Accents: Voicing Identity in Performance, Cambridge, Cambridge Universi (...)
• 7 Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994 [1993], pp. 21–22.

7While proposing a similar scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor (iv.i), where Mistress Quickly “fails to realise that the Latin spoken by Evans and William Page […] is not English”,6 Shakespeare offers a more sophisticated lesson in The Taming of the Shrew, which recalls the long passages from the classics that students were expected to learn by heart and translate into English, then back into Latin. One favourite selection of texts was Ovid’s Heroides.7 While providing an entertaining interlude, the scene is primarily intended to move the plot forward: Bianca’s proficiency in Latin and insistence on organising her lessons as she pleases clearly establish that she is “no breeching scholar in the schools” (Shrew, vi.18).

• 8 Roland Barthes, “Comprendre”, Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris, Seuil, 1977, pp. 71–73, p. 7 (...)
• 9 I discovered after writing this that the notion has been studied by Kevin West, “Translating the Bo (...)

8In Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Roland Barthes writes: “Je veux analyser, savoir, énoncer dans un autre langage que le mien”.8 Where Henry and Katherine approach sensuality through the erotics of translation,9 in a mutual exploration of each other’s bodies through word and gesture, Lucentio and Bianca turn to Ovid’s epistolatory exchanges between mythological lovers to fashion the terms of their own courtship, during a mock Latin lesson. The exchange goes as follows:

• 10 Publii Ouidii Nasonis Heroidum epistolae. Amorum, libri iii De arte amandi, libri iii De remedio am (...)

9Lucentio, as the audience knows, is impersonating the role of tutor in order to woo Bianca, using Ovid as a coded language. Unintelligible to the other character on stage, Hortensio, Latin establishes a form of connivance with the audience, at least with those playgoers who could draw on their own knowledge, learned from schoolmasters or private tutors, to trace the way the young couple “construe” their mutual interest as they read Penelope’s letter to Ulysses (Heroides 1). The lines Lucentio and Bianca quote (33–34) are excerpted from a passage in which Penelope reconstitutes scenes from the Trojan War as narrated by returning Greeks who have preceded Ulysses. A few lines earlier, as she hopes for Ulysses’ safe return, she expresses mingled feelings of impatience and dread in what amounts to a warning for all lovers which Bianca indirectly echoes, “Res est solliciti plena timoris amor” (Love is a thing full of fear and anxiety, line 12). One can almost guess which edition Lucentio and Bianca are using: the “small packet of Greek and Latin books” offered by Tranio (v.95) could have included a volume published a few years earlier, in 1583 in London, by the French Huguenot printer Thomas Vautrollier, which included the Heroides, Amores, Art of Love and Remedy of Love.10 Even those in the audience who had little Latin understood that the Latin quotations serve as a decoy to allow a parallel dialogue, and quite a few would have been sufficiently familiar with Priam, almost a household name on London stages, to enjoy the “translation” of the Trojan king into the servant Tranio. Those who were more familiar with Latin would have noted how the reference to Priam’s age – “senis” – inspires the jump to “the old pantaloon”, Baptista. This unflattering portrayal of Bianca’s father not only recalls the subplot’s possible Plautine and Italian sources, it also suggests how learning languages such as Latin could constitute a space of agency for daughters, beyond the control both of their parents, especially those aspiring to gentrification like Baptista, and of importune suitors such as Hortensio, who resembles Falconbridge in his lack of linguistic proficiency and sophistication. Bianca “construes” her Latin with a better grammatical understanding than Lucentio, confirming that her books indeed are her “company, / On them to look and practise by [her]self” (iii.81–82). Her handling both of Latin and of the situation suggests a poised confidence and holds out hopes for a marriage in which she will have her say.

• 11 References are to Thomas Middleton, A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, ed. Alan Brissenden, The New Mermai (...)

10The transition of a Latin lesson to a courtship scene is parodied two decades later by Thomas Middleton in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. In iv.i, a Latin “disputatio” between Tim and his tutor on whether or not “stultus […] est animal rationale” (a fool is a rational animal, iv.i.2) is followed by what is supposed to be a courting scene between Tim and a young Welsh woman, whom his parents have arranged for him to marry.11 Tim addresses her in Latin precisely because he does not wish to communicate with her, and she responds in Welsh. It takes some persuasion from Tim’s mother to reassure her that he is no stranger speaking some alien language and can be safely married. In using Latin not as a middle-ground for mutual discovery but as a protective barrier, Tim expresses his hostility to this marital transaction, which is motivated by parental interest in the fact that the Welsh gentlewoman “has mountains to her marriage, / She’s full of cattle, some two thousand runts” (iv.i.92–93).

• 13 Jason Lawrence, “Who the devil taught thee so much Italian?” Italian Language Learning and Literary (...)

14It would seem that this “melodious” love duet was written by Marston, seemingly “the only contemporary playwright” to use more than “the odd word or phrase” and to have composed in Italian before Milton.13 No onstage translation is provided. The effect is to jolt the audience into attention and momentarily to isolate Antonio and Mellida from a hostile environment: combining Petrarchan tropes and an operatic musicality, the shared verse serves as a vehicle for their passion and marks a break with the frivolous, English banality of court banter that has preceded. Stepping out of the world of the court sartorially and linguistically, Antonio and Mellida aurally and visually fashion an affective bubble for themselves in much the same way as Romeo and Juliet do by jointly composing a sonnet during the ball at the Capulets’ house.

• 14 I am grateful to Sujata Iyengar for suggesting this in the course of our light-hearted exchanges on (...)

15As in Shakespeare’s play, the scene ends on an initially comic note. Having just witnessed this love duet in Italian between his master and Mellida, Antonio’s page echoes perhaps the puzzlement of some spectators, when he wonders at this “confusion of Babel” that leads them to “change their language” and become “double-tongued” (also a lewd pun on all the kissing?),14 a linguistic instability he perceives as a trait of (female) deceptiveness which, in his view, Antonio has (unfortunately) acquired by disguising as an Amazon (iv.i.210–219, 210, 211, 214). This light-hearted moment soon gives way to a sense of oppression, since moments later Piero and his retinue arrive, recognize Mellida and oblige her to return to the castle.

• 15 Unless otherwise indicated, translations are from the Loeb Classical Library: Seneca, Tragedies, vo (...)
• 16 Jasper Heywood, Thyestes, sig. F3v. First published individually in 1566, Heywood’s translation was (...)
• 17 References are to: Christopher Marlowe, “Dido Queen of Carthage” and “The Massacre at Paris”, ed. H (...)

16While the Italian interlude in Antonio and Mellida seems appropriate in a comedy that ends with the reconciliation of the two fathers and a wedding, the sequel, Antonio’s Revenge, plunges its roots in the murky subsoil of Senecan family tragedies such as Thyestes and Agamemnon. Premonitions of the ensuing tragedy may already be traced in the framing of Antonio and Mellida by a few lines in Latin which intimate that any happy resolution may only be temporary. In the opening scene, Piero reveals his god-defying ambition and malevolence by borrowing a line from Atreus, who has just fed Thyestes with his sons (Thyestes, 888): “dimitto superos, summa votorum attigi” (Antonio and Mellida, i.i.60: I discharge the gods: I have reached the pinnacle of my prayers),15 which Jasper Heywood translated as “I nowe lette goe the gods: for all my wil I have obtaynde”.16 What Piero cannot know is that he will endure a fate similar to Thyestes’ at the end of Antonio’s Revenge. When Antonio rises from the coffin, alive, in act v, Mellida, again combining gesture and text, kisses him as she says, “sic, sic, juvat ire sub umbras” (Antonio and Mellida, v.i.340: Thus, thus, I go gladly in the dark). This is an ominous choice, since those are the last words spoken by forsaken Dido before she kills herself (Virgil, Aeneid, iv.660), which playgoers would have heard on her lips in Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage (v.i.313) – and from Thomas Kyd’s Hieronimo (The Spanish Tragedy, ii.v.78).17

• 18 Lucii Annei Senecae ad Gallioneni de remedis fortuitorum. The remedyes against all casuall chaunces (...)
• 19 See Janice Valls-Russell, “‘Even Seneca hymselfe to speke in englysh’: John Studley’s Hippolytus an (...)

17In the tragic sequel, Antonio’s premonitions of his father’s murder at the hands of Piero even as he prepares to marry Mellida – or so he thinks – and the terror they inspire (i.ii.105–143, esp. 112–115) are reminiscent of moments when Aeneas is powerfully affected in Virgil’s Aeneid (iii.175–176 and ii.792–793). Henceforth, Antonio is bent on revenge. In keeping with the tragic mode and the genre of the revenge tragedy, Seneca predominates. The philosopher and dramatist was familiar to English playwrights, in editions printed on the continent; his plays, as well as Neo-Latin imitations, were staged at Oxford and Cambridge; philosophical writings available in English included De remediis, published in a bilingual Latin-English edition with Robert Whyttynton’s translation as early as 1547, and three translations of De beneficiis;18 and English versions of his plays appeared in 1581 in Seneca His Tenne Tragedies, a collective volume compiled by Thomas Newton, which included translations that had already appeared singly in print.19 The debt to Seneca is written into Antonio’s Revenge in a number of ways, in the play’s structural disjunctions between moments of stoical detachment and the relentless drive of revenge, and in a rhetorical style that combines echoes of the translations of his tragedies, borrowings from the translation of De remediis, and Latin quotations from De providentia, Thyestes and Agamemnon as well as Octavia, a play attributed to Seneca in the Renaissance.

• 20 On the precedence of Marston’s or Shakespeare’s play, the possibility of one play deriving from the (...)

18The plot also carries evident reminders of Hamlet, especially in iii.i,20 which takes place at night. In this scene, Marston successively stages: the appearance of Andrugio’s ghost, who calls upon Antonio to “Revenge my blood!” (iii.i.36, repeated at 37); Antonio’s confrontation with his mother, whom Piero intends to marry; and Antonio’s murder of Piero’s young son Julio. Latin is used almost as a series of cues, or to strengthen resolve. The line “Non est mori miserum, sed misere mori” (What is miserable is not to die, but to die miserably) rounds off Antonio’s tribute (in English) to his father (iii.i.31). Andrugio’s ghost enters at that point and he in turn ends his call for revenge by quoting Atreus (Thyestes, 195–196), as Piero had done at the beginning of Antonio and Mellida, “Remember this: / Scelera non ulcisceris, nisi vincis” (51, You do not avenge crimes unless you surpass them).

• 21 Euripides’ play, The Bacchae, which tells the story of Agave and her son Pentheus, was available in (...)

19When Antonio’s mother enters, her unkempt appearance – “Her hair about her ears” (52sd) – earning her stern reprobation from her servant Nutriche, her restless language as she looks for Antonio (“Where’s my boy?” 59) is rich in ambivalence suggestive of conflicting loyalties, since she is about to marry Piero: she likens her anxiety to that of Agave and Medea, an unfortunate comparison since both of them killed their respective children. This inappropriate classical allusion could also suggest Antonio’s mother’s second-hand, rather than first-hand, familiarity with the stories, especially those of Ovid and Seneca.21

• 22 Phoebe S. Spinrad, “The Sacralization of Revenge in Antonio’s Revenge”, Comparative Drama, 39:2 (20 (...)
• 23 Thomas Goffe builds up anticipation by first showing the child with its mother, Clytemnestra, and t (...)

23This adapts Thyestes, “Venit in nostras manus / Tandem Thyestes, venit et totus quidem” (494–495). Like Maria, Julio does not understand the words, which may here again be received as intended for Andrugio’s ghost, but the child senses something is wrong and closes his affective framing of Antonio’s exalted state with: “Truth, since my mother died, I loved you best. / Something has angered you: pray you, look merrily” (150–151). The semantic and linguistic disruption powerfully underscores the affective disjunction in this moment of tension, which Phoebe S. Spinrad sees as resulting from opposing theatrical traditions: “while Antonio’s voice is Senecan, Julio’s is straight out of the medieval play tradition, and the visual impact of the scene is uncannily close to that of the biblical illustrations and the mystery play enactments”.22 Certainly, the discordance between Julio’s homely, affectionate words and Antonio’s exclamatory and sententious phrasing in English and Latin deepens Antonio’s alienation from those around him. Julio’s concern about Antonio parallels Maria’s about her son’s mental health, but the effect is all the more powerful in that it stages a young child about to be murdered; this scene may have inspired a similar, albeit more protracted, moment adapted to a classical context, in Thomas Goffe’s Orestes, written and performed sometime between 1613 and 1618.23

• 24 For a discussion of Stoicism in Marston’s plays see Donovan Sherman, “Stoic Embodiment in Marston’s (...)

24It also connects with an earlier instance of semantic contrast, in the preceding scene, when Antonio rejects the consolation of Senecan stoicism as a form of disembodied, “static patience”.24 Antonio enters dressed, like Hamlet, “in black, with a book” (ii.ii.1sd) which turns out to be Seneca’s De providentia, from which he reads:

• 27 “Notae M. Antonii Mureti”, Controversiae disputatio, p. 501.

26Here, Antonio is not paraphrasing the Latin, but responding to it, as a commentator like Muretus (Marc-Antoine Muret) did, taking to task “intoleranda Stoicorum arrogantia” (the intolerable arrogance of the Stoics) in this passage,27 or as if engaging in a scholar’s or lawyer’s rhetorical debate. The main difference is that Antonio challenges Seneca’s Stoicism in a direct, colloquial style, favouring one- and two-syllable words that contrast with the abstract, multi-syllabic Latin terminology, in which non-Latinate members of the audience could recognise anchor words such as “patientiam”, “dolorem”, “fortunam”. The contrast serves to enrich the semantics of the play in offering multiple, simultaneous levels of language; it also shows that Antonio is unable to respond to what he previously hoped might provide solace: “Alberto, see, / I am taking physic, here’s philosophy” (41–42).

• 28 Reavley Gair (ed.), Antonio’s Revenge, p. 19.
• 29 Reavley Gair (ed.), Antonio’s Revenge, p. 19.
• 30 Reavley Gair (ed.), Antonio’s Revenge, p. 32.

28In a play fashioned by a “density of literary allusion”,28 the Latin quotations, mostly from Seneca, function like tips of icebergs, drawing attention to Marston’s inscription of his play in a dramatic tradition that embraces both recent and classical instances and elicits a twofold movement from the audience, of surprise (not to hear English) and recognition. Where Seneca is not quoted directly in Latin, the play’s characters – Antonio, Pandulpho, Maria – also turn to Robert Whyttynton’s translation of Seneca’s De remediis (especially in iv.v).29 Text and visual images, rhetoric and performance are all the more intimately linked since Marston was writing for young people who displayed multiple talents and performed before what he alludes to as their “choice audience” (Antonio’s Revenge, v.ii.181), many of whose members prided themselves on being au fait with contemporary dramatic and literary trends. Referring to the final scene, where a dumb show precedes the appearance of Andrugio’s ghost and his speech, W. Reavley Gair writes: “Marston has here organically related a mime, and the rhetorical commentary which stems from it, to the unfolding of the plot”.30

• 31 Marston, “To the reader”, The Malcontent, ed. Bullen, vol. 1, p. 198.

29In his address to the reader in the 1604 edition of The Malcontent, Marston expresses concern about the transition to the page of “scenes, invented mainly to be spoken”.31 Marston wrote Antonio and Mellida and its sequel for the Children of Paul’s. Like those he went on to write for the Children of Blackfriars, or Queen’s Children, the plays showcased the talents of those young people’s companies for knowledgeable audiences from the Inns of Court and the entourage of Queen Anne. Marston’s comedies and tragedies are laced with references – quite a few of them tongue-in-cheek – to plays being performed, or having recently been performed, by adult companies on the public and private stages. In this respect, his plays provide insights into the contemporary scene, rather as play reviews do for us today, highlighting what could have struck performers, audiences and playwrights. Marston, of course, was not the only one to do this. Identifying plotlines, situations and character types from the plays performed on London’s public and private stages was very much a part of the early modern spectating experience.

• 32 On other instances of Marston’s self-projection, see Charles Cathcart, “The Insatiate Countess: Dat (...)
• 33 Clare Smout, “Antonio’s Revenge, by John Marston, directed by Perry Mills for Edward’s Boys, Middle (...)

30Similarly, the use – and misuse – of Latin played with and upon the spectators’ knowledge of the classics, while providing the young players with an opportunity to display a linguistic versatility – extended to Italian and mock-Dutch in Marston’s plays – that paralleled their talents as singers and performers. In Antonio and Mellida, the page – and through him, Marston – anticipates a possible critical reception of the Italian love duet, hoping that it may “be pardoned by the auditors” (iv.i.217) and invoking “some private respect” (218), or motivation: Marston may be referring here to his mother, who was at least half-Italian.32 Just as the use of Italian creates an appropriate ambience for the lovers, the use of Latin provides insights into the character’s mental state and reinforces Marston’s take on the genre of the revenge tragedy, with its resulting “idiosyncratic combination of savagery and black humour” that is not devoid of aesthetic concerns.33

• 34 On different strategies used by early modern dramatists for marking linguistic difference, see Andr (...)

31As we have seen in the discussion of the Italian love duet, the framing in English provides the mood, invites a romantic reception, with suggestions of how it could have been performed. Similarly, Antonio’s comment on the passage from De providentia indicates that what he reads does not suit him, while his glossing of the passage from Thyestes for his mother provides, with “I’ll be revenged”, the clue to the meaning of the emphatic, “ulciscar”, which echoes the ghost’s “ulcisceris”. Where some dramatists opt for onstage translation, Marston chooses to provide indirect clues which enable audiences not overly familiar with the foreign language being spoken to have a gist of the meaning, without alienating those spectators sufficiently acquainted with the text to appreciate its aptness – or lack thereof.34

• 36 Nicolò Bettegazzi, Han Lamers and Bettina Reitz-Joosse, “Viewing Rome in the Latin Literature of th (...)

33This of course has nothing to do with nationalist agendas such as Mussolini’s Ventennio fascista (the two Fascist decades), when a poem might be written in Latin to promote a new Fascist Catholic Rome.36 Rather, as Carole Sauvageot reflected in her review of Still’s production:

• 38 I wish to thank ASC and more especially Lia Wallace, for kindly sharing with me electronically an a (...)

35The 2018 production of Antonio’s Revenge by the adult ensemble of The American Shakespeare Center (ASC, Staunton, VA) opted for a variety of approaches to the Latin text: cuts of single lines that either introduced or closed a character’s speech; translation; and retaining edited passages. Antonio (Benjamin Reed) read the passage from De providentia in English, as if the book he held were an English translation. His Latin address to his mother was shortened to the last two lines, “Antonii vocem excipe / Properantis ad vos – Ulciscar!” (iii.i.71–72), Reed’s voice rising to a shout and detaching the syllables of “Ulciscar”. This single use of Latin, coming moments after the ghost of Andrugio had risen from his coffin, which lay in the central recess of the Elizabethan stage, underscored a turning-point in the play. Piero might have directed events in the first half of the play, but henceforth the director was clearly the ghost: very much the Senecan umbra, wearing a dark robe reminiscent of Roman togas, unlike the modern dress of the other characters, he roamed the stage, overlooked events from the central gallery where Feliche’s body had hung until the scene in Maria’s bedchamber, or shared the audience’s viewpoint from a front-row seat in the pit.38

• 39 Florence March and Janice Valls-Russell record reactions from the French audience in their review, (...)
• 40 McCarthy, Performing Early Modern Drama, p. 10.

36A few years earlier, Edward’s Boys, the all-male student company of King Edward VI School, in Stratford-upon-Avon, performed Antonio’s Revenge. The production was directed by Perry Mills, who rarely modernises the dialogue and encourages his company to play on linguistic otherness: during their performances in English of Francis Beaumont’s The Woman Hater when they toured the South of France in 2016, the Boys peppered their dialogues with improvised phrases such as “tête de poisson”: both the words and the accent in which they were spoken evidently delighted their local audiences, especially the younger spectators who received these attempts at French as “rewards” for their own efforts to follow the English playtext.39 Given that Latin is still taught at their school, Mills chose not to cut or translate the Senecan passages in Antonio’s Revenge, considering that it would take more than that to faze his young actors and their “choice” audiences of fellow students, parents and academics. Already, in the early 2000s, approached by Michael Woods for his BBC2 series, In Search of Shakespeare, he had rallied “some of his pupils to produce a series of short scenes from Elizabethan schoolroom interludes, as well as some of the Latin orations by the wronged women of classical literature that he almost certainly would have studied”.40

• 43 On the importance of music in the language and action of Marston’s plays, see Stephen O’Neill’s thr (...)
• 44 Reavley Gair (ed.), Antonio’s Revenge, p. 39.

40Having Andrugio’s ghost oversee the murder, here as in the ASC production, visually reinforces the sense that, indeed, Antonio is addressing him when ventriloquising Seneca and staging the child’s murder for his benefit. The use of a language other than English fully participates in this ongoing interaction of speech and performance and contributes to the “grandiloquent” and “operatic” effect. In Shakespeare’s time as in ours, the actors’ ability to switch languages is part of a wider ability to shift from one register into the next as well as to use mime and music, and create a performance that draws on different genres to transcend them. In plays where language and plot are shaped by the use of music,43 Italian love poetry and Latin verse contribute to what Reavley Gair describes as “a hybrid that has obvious affinities with opera”44 – and songs and music were effectively used in both the ASC and Edward’s Boys productions, heightening moments of tension, enriching the affective moments that pull the play away from parody and enriching its aesthetics.

• 45 For a discussion of Antonio’s aesthetic construction of revenge, and the way he, Mellida and others (...)
• 46 Baines, “Antonio’s Revenge: Marston’s Play…”, p. 290.

41Inviting additional levels of interaction with the audience that challenge expectations while inviting connivance, the interpolation of passages in Italian and, even more so, Latin functions rather like the songs and music: it plays on modes of intertextuality that reinforce the theatricality of the performance and its aesthetics. The action, scene structures and character types suppose a familiarity with contemporary plays that is further explored through rhetorical and visual metatheatrical effects. Similarly, Senecan tropes are present in multiple ways, in addition to self-conscious emblematic poses on Antonio’s part.45 Visual citations simultaneously recall Seneca’s own tragedies as well as plays by Marston’s contemporaries: the ghost, of course; and the dumb show at the end of Antonio’s Revenge, when Piero is served his son in a dish before having his tongue pulled out, a moment that, Barbara J. Baines notes, “serves to emphasize the Senecan revenge conventions as well as the emblematic, ritualistic nature of the play”.46 A rhetoric of revenge underscored by Latin lines lifted from Thyestes, Agamemnon and Octavia is offset by discussions of stoicism and a direct quotation from Seneca’s philosophical writings. Acknowledging a diachronic and synchronic heritage, the Latin excerpts in Marston’s plays position the “scant” (Antonio and Mellida, v.i.73) performance space within a larger dramatic tradition and inscribe the dramatist himself within that tradition, rather in the way that his use of Italian may be a tribute to a family history and another literary heritage.

• 47 Baines, “Antonio’s Revenge: Marston’s Play…”, pp. 293–294.

42Atypically in a revenge tragedy, Antonio not only survives, he is given the privilege of speaking the epilogue and so steering the play yet further away from moral to aesthetic considerations. “Revenger-protagonist” turned “revenger-artist”,47 Antonio invites a rewriting of the tragedy someday, centred on Mellida’s death, in a genre that would “have gentle presence, […] the scenes suck’d up / By calm attention of choice audience” (v.ii.180–181) and reinvent the revenge tragedy by moving towards the more affective mode of the complaint, reconnecting with Dido’s fate, closer perhaps to Euripides’ Trojan Women and Ovid’s Heroides than, henceforth, to Seneca. Ghosting the action on stage, serving as prompters’ or directors’ cues and as spotlights picking out key moments, the Latin in Antonio and Mellida and its tragic sequel suggests a form of collaborative writing down the centuries, with Marston glancing around him at his contemporaries and back to his classical forebears – with whom, possibly, he shared an eye on a posterity which might embrace new productions and adaptations in present-day theatres: “fac quod nulla posteritas probet, sed nulla taceat” (Thyestes, 192–193): do what no future age will endorse, but none fail to talk about.