John Marston
baptized Oct. 7, 1576, Oxfordshire, Eng.
died June 25, 1634, London
English dramatist, one of the most vigorous
satirists of the Shakespearean era, whose best
known work is The Malcontent (1604), in which he
rails at the iniquities of a lascivious court.
He wrote it, as well as other major works, for a
variety of children’s companies, organized
groups of boy actors popular during Elizabethan
and Jacobean times.
Marston was educated at the University of Oxford
and resided from 1595 at the Middle Temple,
London. He began his literary career in 1598
with The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and
Certaine Satyres, an erotic poem in the newly
fashionable Ovidian style. In the same year, the
rough-hewn, obscure verses of The Scourge of
Villanie, in which Marston referred to himself
as a “barking satirist,” were widely acclaimed.
In 1599 Marston began writing for the
theatre, producing Histrio-mastix (published in
1610), probably for performance at the Middle
Temple. In his character Chrisoganus, a “Master
Pedant” and “translating scholler,” the audience
was able to recognize the learned Ben Jonson. A
brief, bitter literary feud developed between
Marston and Jonson—part of “the war of the
theatres.” In Poetaster (produced 1601) Jonson
depicted Marston as Crispinus, a character with
red hair and small legs who was given a pill
that forced him to disgorge a pretentious
vocabulary.
For the Children of Paul’s, a theatre
company, Marston wrote Antonio and Mellida
(1600); its sequel, Antonio’s Revenge (1601);
and What You Will (1601). The most memorable is
Antonio’s Revenge, a savage melodrama of a
political power struggle with elements of parody
and fantasy.
In 1604 Marston transferred his allegiance to
the boy company at the Blackfriars Theatre
(i.e., the Children of the Queen’s Revels, later
Children of the Blackfriars), for which he wrote
his remaining plays. The Dutch Courtezan
(produced 1603–04) as well as The Malcontent
earned him his place as a dramatist. The former,
with its coarse, farcical counterplot, was
considered one of the cleverest comedies of its
time. Although Marston used all the apparatus of
contemporary revenge tragedy in The Malcontent,
the wronged hero does not kill any of his
tormentors and regains power by sophisticated
Machiavellian stratagems.
In 1605 Marston collaborated with Jonson and
with George Chapman on Eastward Ho, a comedy of
the contrasts within the life of the city. But
the play’s satiric references to opportunistic
Scottish countrymen of the newly crowned James I
gave offense, and all three authors were
imprisoned.
After another imprisonment in 1608,
presumably once again for libel, Marston left
unfinished The Insatiate Countesse, his most
erotic play, and entered the Church of England.
He took orders in 1609, married the daughter of
James I’s chaplain, and in 1616 accepted an
ecclesiastical post in Christchurch, Hampshire.
In 1633 he apparently insisted upon the removal
of his name from the collected edition of six of
his plays, The Workes of John Marston, which was
reissued anonymously the same year as Tragedies
and Comedies.
