^{Note 1 in page 208} M. L. Wine, éd., The Malcontent, Regents Renaissance Drama Series (Lincoln, Neb.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1964), p. xix. All subsequent citations from The Malcontent are from this edition. Wine's argument reflects a typical approach to The Malcontent. See, e.g., the following: Anthony Caputi, John Marston, Satirist (Ithaca, ?. Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 197–99; Alvin Kernan, The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1959), pp. 211–19. Aside from emphasis upon the disguise plot, the other most common approach to The Malcontent is one that focuses upon melancholy and malcontentedness as a contemporary satiric convention; see, e.g., Morse S. Allen, The Satire of John Marston (Columbus: Ohio State Univ. Press, 1920), pp. 143–48; Oscar James Campbell, Shakespeare's Satire (London, New York, and Toronto: Oxford Univ. Press, 1943), pp. 143–49; Elmer Edgar Stoll, “Shakspere, Marston, and the Malcontent Type,” MP, 3 (1906), 281–303.

^{Note 2 in page 208} The point-circle image contains, I think, a submerged Wheel of Fortune allusion. The same image is used by Boethius in his Consolation of Philosophy when he explains that Providence (God) is at the center of the Wheel and Fate (Fortune) is on the rim: “Therefore, the changing course of Fate is to the simple stability of Providence as reasoning is to intellect, as that which is generated is to that which is, as time is to eternity, as a circle to its center” (The Consolation of Philosophy, Bk. iv, pr. 6, trans. Richard Green, Library of Liberal Arts, Indianapolis & New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1962, p. 92).

^{Note 3 in page 208} Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1927), p. 164.

^{Note 4 in page 208} See Political, Religious, and Love Poems, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall, EETS (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Triibner & Co., Ltd., 1866; re-edited 1903), p. 251. “Fortune's wheel is ever turning” was, of course, a familiar Renaissance proverb (see Morris Palmer Tilley, A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, Ann Arbor, Mich.: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1950, p. 238).

^{Note 5 in page 208} Raymond Chapman, “The Wheel of Fortune in Shakespeare's Historical Plays,” RES, 1, N.S. (1950), 3.

^{Note 6 in page 208} Anthony Caputi notes that “Once Mendoza engages Malevole as his hatchet man, Altofronto as Malevole quite clearly controls events.” Moreover, as in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and other “duke-in-disguise plot” plays, Marston was thus provided “with a disguised character that easily assumes the multiple functions of protagonist, intriguer, critic, and judge” (John Marston, Satirist, pp. 184–85, 180).

^{Note 7 in page 208} See, e.g., Willard Farnham's The Medieval Heritage of Elizabethan Tragedy (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1936), passim; Madeleine Doran, Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), esp. pp. 116–28.

^{Note 8 in page 208} A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London; 1554–1640 A.D., ed. Edward Arber, m (London: Privately Printed, 1876), 268.

^{Note 9 in page 208} Marvin T. Herrick, Tragicomedy: “Its Origin and Development in Italy, France, and England,” 111. Stud, in Lang, and Lit., 39 (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1955), 243–45. Madeleine Doran calls The Malcontent a “tragicomedy of romantic plot” that is “heavily shaded by satire” (p. 212). And Hazelton Spencer concludes that the play “is tragi-comedy, and stands halfway between Jonson's satiric comedy and the corrosive tragedy of Webster” (Elizabethan Plays, Boston: Heath, 1933, p. 560).

^{Note 10 in page 208} “English Folly and Italian Vice: The moral landscape of John Marston,” in Jacobean Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies 1, ed. John Russell Brown and Bernard Harris (London: Edward Arnold, 1960), pp. 100–01. Hunter picks up the term “aspera Thalia” from Marston's “Dedication” to Ben Jonson in which he calls The Malcontent “ASPERAM HANC SVAM THALIAM.” “Aspera” may, of course, mean “unpolished” in terms of style, but it could also mean “rough” in the sense of “bitter.”

^{Note 11 in page 208} Perhaps Hunter feels that Marston's “borrowing” is evident in that both The Malcontent and // Pastor Fido are sententiously moral and both contain several speeches about God's reigning over Nature, Fate, and Fortune. Amarillis, the chaste heroine of 11 Pastor Fido, may also be profitably compared with Maria, Duke Altofronto's wife, just as Corisca's lasciviousness in // Pastor Fido is themati-cally parallel to Aurelia's in The Malcontent. More specifically, Bernard Harris in a recent edition of The Malcontent compares a passage “taken from the 1602 translation of // pastor fido (ni.v),” in which Corisca denigrates the idea of feminine honor, with Maquerelle's advice to Bianca and Emilia in ii.iv of Marston's play (The Malcontent, The New Mermaids, London: Ernest Benn, 1967, pp. xxvi-xxvii). However, the satiric Malcontent is primarily concerned with ambition, power, decadence, and Fortune, whereas Guarini's pastoral drama concentrates on love.

^{Note 12 in page 208} The date of The Malcontent is still a major problem in Jacobean scholarship, but M. L. Wine, who summarizes the major critics' arguments in his Introduction, concludes that “Caputi's implied designation of 1602–1603 may be the most judicious” (p. xvi).

^{Note 13 in page 209} Giambattista Guarini, The Compendium of Tragicomic Poetry, trans. Allan H. Gilbert, in Literary Criticism: Plato to Dryden (1940; rpt. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press. 1962), p. 511.

^{Note 14 in page 209} Doran, p. 205.

^{Note 15 in page 209} The eagle, Jove's bird, was “traditionally a symbol of Divinity” (see Samuel C. Chew, The Pilgrimage of Life, New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1962, p. 179), whereas the fly was often symbolic of the lustful and ephemeral. See Donne's “The Canonization” for a similar juxtaposition of the two.

^{Note 16 in page 209} It is appropriate that Maquerelle, old panderess that she is, be cast out of court into the “suburbs,” since this is where brothels were usually located; see the discussion between Pompey and Mrs. Overdone in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure i.ii.88–103.

^{Note 17 in page 209} Guarini, p. 524.

^{Note 18 in page 209} “Fortune in the Tragedies of Giraldi Cintio,” PQ, 20 (1941), 234–35. Bernard Harris argues that “Marston reminds one more closely of Giraldi than of any English contemporary dramatist in his treatment of tyranny and infidelity” (p. xxvii).

^{Note 19 in page 209} See v.ii.39–54. Maquerelle's disquisition upon Fortune epitomizes many of the play's major themes. She adopts the rising/falling motif in a humorous and bawdy manner, as is appropriate to her function as bawd (see also v.v.17–18). In John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in His Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1969), which was published after I had written this article, Philip J. Finkelpearl argues that Marston develops a parallel “between Malevole and the most immoral figure in the play, the bawd Maquerelle” (p. 190). He feels that both use Machiavellian tactics and concludes: “A successful politician, Marston shows, must be something of a bawd” (p. 190). I think that the obvious parallel is between Mendoza and Maquerelle and that to read Malevole as a Machiavel is to obscure much of the play's structure.

^{Note 20 in page 209} Machiavelli: The Chief Works and Others, trans. Allan H. Gilbert (Durham, N. C. : Duke Univ. Press, 1958), i, 92.

^{Note 21 in page 209} See Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, trans. Mario Domandi, Harper Torchbooks (New York: Harper, 1965), p. 75 (Ricordo 136, Series C); see also Ricordi 30, 31, 147, Series C, for other comments upon Fortune that echo Machiavelli's sentiments.

^{Note 22 in page 209} The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna in Roman Literature and in the Transitional Period, Smith Coll. Stud, in Modern Lang., 3, No. 3 (Northampton, Mass.: Departments of Modern Languages, Smith Coll., 1922), p. 150. For discussion of Machiavelli and Guicciardini see Patch's The Tradition of the Goddess Fortuna in Medieval Philosophy and Literature, Smith Coll. Stud, in Modern Lang., 3, No. 4 (Northampton, Mass. : Departments of Modern Languages, Smith Coll., 1922), pp. 226–29.

^{Note 23 in page 209} Linton C. Stevens. “Machiavelli's Virtu and the Voluntarism of Montaigne,” Renaissance Papers (Durham, N. C: Southeastern Renaissance Conference, Duke Univ., 1957), p. 119.

^{Note 24 in page 209} Stevens, p. 119.

^{Note 25 in page 209} Ch. viii (i, 35).

^{Note 26 in page 209} Ch. xvii (i, 62).

^{Note 27 in page 209} Marston loads his play with references to “policy” and “politician”; seei.iii.13–14, m.i.50–51, v.i.33, v.iv.33, v.vi.3. As Mario Praz has demonstrated: “To link politic, in the sinister sense, with Machiavelli, was customary by the end of the sixteenth century. … As soon as the dramatists became haunted by the character of the Machiavellian knave, they began to use with an unprecedented frequency the words policy and politic” (“Machiavelli and the Elizabethans,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 14, London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford Univ. Press, 1928, 61).

^{Note 28 in page 209} See The Pilgrimage of Life, pp. 66–68. Chew reprints two illustrative woodcuts from Andrea Alciati's Emblemata showing Fortune on her unstable sphere and Mercury on a stable cube and then cites supporting evidence from Francis Thynne's Emblems, Spenser's Cantos of Mutabilitie (vi.??17; see also vi.l and 14), and Chapman's drama, among others. That Marston would have had the iconographical tradition in mind is quite likely since, as Mario Praz has shown, Marston was conversant with emblem lore (see Studies in Secenteenth-Century Imagery, 2nd ed., Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1964, pp. 216–18). Of especial interest in terms of the Fortune concept in The Malcontent is Praz's comment upon a passage at li.iii. 18–22: “Malevole (The Malcontent, Act II, sc. iii) quotes the emblem (derived from the apologue) of the eagle and the tortoise: ‘Good God how subtile Hell dooth flatter vice, / Mount him aloft, and makes him seeme to Aie, / As foule the Tortois mockt: who to the skie, / Th'ambitious shell fish rais'd: th'end of all, / Is onely that from height he might dead fall.‘ Marston possibly found this emblem in Sidney's Arcadia” (p. 217).

^{Note 29 in page 209} Machiavelli, Ch. xxv (i, 90).

^{Note 30 in page 209} The “Maxime” being discussed here is “A man is hap-pie, so long as Fortune agreeth unto his nature and humor” ; illustration derives from Ch. xxv of The Prince and Bk. n, Ch. xxix of Discourses.

^{Note 31 in page 209} [Innocent Gentillet], A Discourse Vpon The Meanes Oj VVel Goveriting And Maintaining In Good Peace, A King-dome, Or Other Principalitie. . . . Against Nicholas Machiavel! the Florentine, trans. Simon Patericke (London: Adam Islip, 1602), sigs. N3V-N4. For the disintegration of belief in Providence in the Renaissance with a concomitant emphasis upon Fortune and atheistic and Epicurean philosophical outlooks, see the thoroughly documented chapter entitled “Renaissance Concepts of Providence” by William R. Elton, in his “King Lear” and the Gods (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1966), pp. 9–33.

^{Note 32 in page 209} Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library, i (London: William Heinemann, 1917), 289.

^{Note 33 in page 209} Joseph S. M. J. Chang, “Of Mighty Opposites': Stoicism and Machiavellianism,” Renaissance Drama, 9 (1966), 43. Chang's article is a valuable one and, although primarily concerned with Stoicism and Machiavellianism in relationship to Shakespeare's drama, it corroborates my reading of Marston's attitudes toward Fortune in The Malcontent. Chang offers particularly relevant quotations from Justus Lipsius and Guillaume du Vair, two Renaissance Neo-Stoics whom Caputi thinks it “highly likely” Marston knew (Caputi, p. 59).