Quadratus in Marston’s What You Will

Appendix J

Quadratus quotes Richard III and immediately announces what he is doing. In Act 2, scene 1 of John Marston’s What You Will, he cries:

A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse!

The line is Richard’s cry in Richard III, Act 5, scene 4. Quadratus follows it by calling attention to his habit of speaking “play scraps.” His quarrel with Lampatho is conducted partly through the language of the theatre.¹

Marston’s play belongs to about 1600–1601 and appeared in print in 1607. Its title is also the subtitle of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. The 1607 book was printed by George Eld for Thomas Thorpe—the same printer and publisher responsible for Shakespeare’s Sonnets in 1609.²

Quadratus supplies further Shakespearean echoes. At the opening of Act 5, scene 1, he says:

Feed and be fat, my fair Calipolis.

Pistol uses the same formulation in 2 Henry IV, Act 2, scene 4. The joke already has a theatrical history: Pistol combines phrases from George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar. Marston’s use belongs to that chain of quotation and parody.³

“Rivo” is also part of Quadratus’s recognisable manner. Immediately after the Richard III quotation in What You Will, Act 2, scene 1, he cries “Rivo, Saint Mark,” and later in the same scene gives a drinking rhyme:

Music, tobacco, sack and sleep,
The tide of sorrow backward keep.
If thou art sad at others’ fate,
Rivo, drink deep, give care the mate.

At the dinner in Act 5, scene 1, his next line after “Feed and be fat” is “Rivo, here’s good juice, fresh borage, boy?” But the fourth occurrence belongs to another character’s imitation of him. In Act 4, scene 1, Meletza describes:

my chub, my Epicure Quadratus, that rubs his guts, claps his paunch and cries Rivo, entertaining my ears perpetually with a most strong discourse of the praise of bottle ale and red herrings.

The distinction matters: Quadratus says “Rivo” three times, and Meletza makes it his catchphrase in her caricature. Marston shows both the performance and how another person hears and mimics it.⁴

Shakespeare also puts the cry inside an impersonation. In 1 Henry IV, Act 2, scene 4, Prince Hal imagines himself and Falstaff playing Hotspur and Hotspur’s wife:

[…] I prithee, call in Falstaff. I’ll play Percy,
and that damned brawn shall play Dame Mortimer
his wife. “Rivo!” says the drunkard. Call in
Ribs, call in Tallow.

Here too “Rivo” accompanies a bodily caricature and a performed voice. Together with the Calipolis quotation, sack, paunch and appetite, it gives Quadratus a recognisable connection with the comic world of the Henry IV plays.⁴

Later in What You Will, Act 5, scene 1, Quadratus addresses the Duke of Venice:

I am fat and therefore faithful. I will do that which few of thy subjects do: love thee. But I will never do that which all thy subjects do: flatter thee.

More fully, he promises to do what few subjects do—love the duke—and refuses to do what all his subjects do—flatter him. He then proposes an entertainment on Cato of Utica and volunteers to play Cato himself. The duke objects that he lacks a beard; Quadratus answers that a beard never made Cato. Here is a theatrical figure who combines appetite, hostility to flattery and an ambition to perform a classical statesman.¹

Neville’s bodily build gives this characterization a biographical point of comparison. Quadratus calls himself “fat”; John More, writing to Winwood on 29 October 1611 about Neville’s prospects of office, refers to “his unwieldy body and giving himself to a mere country life.” Mayerne’s medical account, headed “Sir Henry Nevill. May 14. 1615,” begins with “Obesus”—corpulent. The letter assigning Neville the name Similis because he was “like Hen 8,” quoted in Appendix B, supplies another contemporary comparison of his appearance. These descriptions belong beside Quadratus’s own “I am fat” and Meletza’s caricature of his guts and paunch.⁵

The vocabulary study places this cluster among 197 plays written in 1590–1610. “Rivo” occurs in five plays (2.5 per cent), including What You Will and 1 Henry IV. Each of the seven words highlighted in Ken Feinstein’s cited blog discussion occurs in nine or fewer plays in this period; all seven also appear, in the corresponding word forms or inflections, in Shakespeare:

These are counts of distinct plays, not repetitions of a word. The four “Rivo” occurrences in Marston therefore contribute one play to the total of five. The small distributions make the cluster more particular than a collection of common verbal resemblances.⁶

The exchange need not run in one direction. Shakespeare could also play off Marston. What You Will and Twelfth Night belong to an overlapping theatrical moment, and the order of their composition is disputed. Some Shakespeare examples in this word group are earlier than Marston’s play; snaffle occurs in the later Antony and Cleopatra, while vassalage occurs in the approximately contemporary or later Troilus and Cressida. The figures describe shared vocabulary within that exchange; the direction has to be considered passage by passage.⁶

Quadratus clearly quotes Shakespeare and uses Shakespearean language, but whether he is intended as a caricature of Shakespeare or Neville remains unresolved.⁷

Marston’s Pigmalion’s Image and Venus and Adonis

Before What You Will, Marston had published The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image. And Certaine Satyres (1598). Its opening poem retells the story of the sculptor who falls in love with his own ivory image, which Venus brings to life. Its relationship to Venus and Adonis has long been recognised in scholarship: A. H. Bullen identifies Shakespeare’s poem as an inspiration and notes their shared stanza form. The verbal echo is particularly clear in the verses headed “The Author in praise of his precedent Poem.”

In Venus and Adonis, lines 199–200, Venus asks:

“Art thou obdurate, flinty, hard as steel?
Nay, more than flint, for stone at rain relenteth.

Marston writes:

So Labeo did complain his love was stone,
Obdurate, flinty, so relentless none.

The echo joins the repeated “obdurate, flinty” to the same image of a beloved whose stony hardness resists entreaty.⁸

The accompanying satires offer a further possible Shakespearean echo. In the second satire accompanying The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598), an apparently devout man is exposed as a “vile, sober, damn’d, Polititian.” Hotspur calls Bolingbroke a “vile politician” in 1 Henry IV, 1.3. Searches of EEBO/EarlyPrint, allowing spelling variants and intervening words, retrieved no other independent example of this particular combination before 1650: the additional Shakespeare hit repeats the passage in the First Folio. Both works appeared in print in 1598. Neville’s parliamentary and diplomatic career gives “politician” an obvious biographical relevance, while “vile” invites a possible play on Neville and the family motto Ne vile velis. A Catholic newsletter of 16 August 1612 also calls him “a greate Puritane,” while discussing his prospects of becoming secretary. That supplies another biographical point of contact with Marston’s Puritan politician, though the satire’s accusation of usury does not by itself identify Neville.⁸

The same satire opens with the speaker calling himself a “dull-sprighted fat Boetian Boore.” Beside Neville’s documented corpulence, Fitzgeoffrey’s description of him as Aonian in Affaniae (1601), III.41, is suggestive: Aonian is a poetic designation associated with Boeotia, and Sutton translates the phrase as “Boeotian Neville’s person.” These correspondences belong beside Quadratus’s appetite and Shakespearean language. They remain possible allusions: the Boeotian speaker and the later politician are distinct figures within the satire, and Fitzgeoffrey’s learned compliment has a different tone from Marston’s self-mocking “boor.”⁹