The Insatiate Countess

The Insatiate Countess is an early Jacobean era stage play, a tragedy first published in 1613. The play is a problematic element in John Marston's dramatic canon.

Act IV

• Day was my night, and night must be my day;
  The sun shined on my pleasure with my love,
  And darkness must lend aid to my revenge.
  The stage of heaven is hung with solemn black,
  A time best fitting to act tragedies.
  The night’s great queen, that maiden governess,
  Musters black clouds to hide her from the world,
  Afraid to look on my bold enterprise.
  Cursed creatures, messengers of death, possess the world;
  Night-ravens, screetch-owls, and voice-killing mandrakes,
  The ghosts of misers, that imprison’d gold
  Within the harmless bowels of the earth,
  Are night’s companions. Bawds to lust and murder,
  Be all propitious to my act of justice
  Upon the scandalisers of her fame,
  That is the lifeblood of deliciousness,
  Deem’d Isabella, Cupid’s treasurer,
  Whose soul contains the richest gifts of love:
  Her beauty from my heart fear doth expel:
  They relish pleasure best that dread not hell!
  • Sago, scene v, lines 1–20
  • Line 10: Vote-killing for voice-killing (ed. 1631 and some copies of ed. 1613). With lines 11–12 compare:
    That villainous salt-petre should be digg’d
    Out of the bowels of the harmless earth.
    —Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 1, i, 2

External links

• A. H. Bullen, ed. The Works of John Marston, Vol. 3 (London: John C. Nimmo, 1887)