Eliot in particular admired "Sophonisba" and saw how Marston's plays, with their apparently stylised characters and bitter portrayal of a world where virtue and honour only arouse "dangerous envy" ("Sophonisba"; Act 1, scene 1, line 45) in those around them, actually bring to life "a pattern behind the pattern into which the characters deliberately involve themselves: the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment".