A Critical Acting Edition Of Antonio And Mellida By John Marston 1602

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Antonio and Mellida was the first play by John Marston performed by the newly-revived Paul's Company in 1599. Marston sought to display a variety of talents--comic, tragic, satiric and historical--advertising his own dramatic skills and the prowess of the choristers of Paul's. The play is based on incidents in the reigns of Sforza, Francesco, Galeazzo and Lodovico, who were Dukes of Milan in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Marston displays a detailed knowledge of the dramatic works of Shakespeare, Seneca, Kyd and Nashe as well as the prose of Sidney, Erasmus, Montaigne, Florio and others. This edition includes a comprehensive introduction, an analysis of staging, and full commentary. The text is based on a collation of all known copies of the 1602 Quarto and is presented in a thoroughly modernized format.

Antonio and Mellida is a late Elizabethan play written by the satirist John Marston, usually dated to c. 1599.The play was entered into the Stationers' Register on 24 October 1601, and first published in quarto in 1602 by the booksellers Matthew Lownes and Thomas Fisher. The title page of the first quarto states that the play was acted by the Children of Paul's, one of the companies of boy actors popular at the time. It was followed by a sequel, Antonio's Revenge, which was written by Marston in 1600.The play is a romantic comedy, which charts the "comic crosses of true love" faced by Antonio, son of the good Duke Andrugio, and Mellida, daughter of the wicked Duke Piero. Structurally, the plot is quite conventional, but the tone is unusual: Marston undercuts the emotion of the story of the separated lovers by introducing moments of extreme farce and burlesque, satirising and parodying romantic comedy conventions. The play also employs a metatheatrical induction, in which the boy actors are seen, apparently in propria persona, discussing the roles they are about to play and the way in which their parts should be performed.