A Margarite of America (review)

A Margarite of America was Thomas Lodge's last work of imaginative writing, aptly described as a 'horror novella.' It was composed while the author was on a privateering voyage to South America with Sir Thomas Cavendish (1555–92), written, according to his own testimony, while sailing through the Straits of Magellan, where 'many wondrous isles, many strange fishes, many monstrous Patagones with drew my senses.' A reader unfamiliar with the Italianate horror fictions of Matteo Bandello and Cinthio, not to mention recent English works such as Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller or Robert Greene's Planetomachia, might suppose that the circumstances of Cavendish's failed and dreadful colonialist voyage do much to account for the generally dark tone of this curious work. But as Donald Beecher points out in his thorough and helpful introduction, Lodge needed to look no further than the traditional sources of Renaissance romance which he had drawn on already for earlier fictions, the growing body of Elizabethan romance, including of course Arcadia, and Senecan style revenge tragedy such as the recent Titus Andronicus, for imaginative inspiration. He also drew extensively on motifs and characters from his own earlier works, such as the villain-hero in Robert, Second Duke of Normandy, and the suffering lady in The Complaint of Elstred. Despite critical attempts to capitalize on the work's title to connect it with the New World and colonization, Beecher is convincing in his view that the Margarite 'is merely the romance brought back from America because found or written there,' and the heroine, always called Margarita, has no American associations, but belongs entirely to the Europe of romance. Along with invented place-names such as Volgradia, Tamirah and Macarah, there are references to Macedonia, Moravia, various ancient classical locations, Hungaria, Bohemia, and 'the deserts of Russia.'

This comparatively short novella is a composite of all the modes and styles that contemporary readers of romance looked for, but organized in a disruptive rather than a harmonious fusion. The basic story is of faithful love betrayed. Margarita is a heroine of such spotless virtue that a wandering lion recognizes it and rests his head in her lap. Lodge enjoys describing her beauty and sufferings, but otherwise is much more interested in Arsadachus, her lover, a man of corrupt inclinations. He is an Iago-like figure, cunning and devious: 'His cruelty he shadowed with a kind of courtly severity, his lust under the title of love, his treasons under the pretext of true meaning.' Arsadachus is also a figure of the tyrant, given to acts of sadistic cruelty, bloodthirsty revenge, and ungovernable rage; among other things this novella is a study of the psychology of tyranny. He mutilates his father, cutting out his tongue, chopping off his right hand, and jeering at the old man's speechless agony. In a frenzy of madness he batters his infant son to death, not before he has cut open the child's mother's body with a carving knife, and 'seizing on her heart ... tore it to pieces with his tyrannous teeth, crying, "Sic itur ad astra."' This gives some flavour of the bizarre wit with which Lodge characterizes his hero. He also heartlessly manipulates and betrays the guileless Margarita. But in addition to all this, Arsadachus is an accomplished poet, and after the atrocities on his father, he writes a number of love poems, which, the narrator tells us, 'as the most excellent for variety sake, after his so many villainies, I thought good to set down in this place.' This self-conscious transition is typical of Lodge's narrative mode. A Margarite contains numerous poems inserted into this sort of manner, a long episode of questioni d'amore in which the characters debate the role of the senses in sustaining of love, a lavish description of a tilt in the Sidneian manner, and much sententious wisdom...