John Marston, 1575[?]–1634. Born, at Coventry[?], 1575[?]. Matric. Brasenose Coll., Oxford, 4 Feb. 1592; B.A., 6 Feb. 1594. Wrote plays, 1599–1607. Ordained Rector of Christ-church, Hampshire, Oct. 1616 to Sept. 1631. Married Mary Wilkes. Died, in London, 25 June 1634; buried in Temple Church. Works: “The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image” (under initials: W. K.), 1598; “The Scourge of Vilanie” (under pseud: W. Kinsayder), 1598; “The History of Antonio and Mellida” (under initials: J. M.), 1602; “Antonio’s Revenge,” 1602; “The Malcontent,” 1604; “Eastward Hoe” (with Jonson and Chapman), 1605; “The Dutch Courtezan,” 1605; “Parasitaster,” 1606; “The Wonder of Women,” 1606; “What You Will,” 1607; “Histriomastix” (anon.; probably partly by Marston), 1610; “The Insatiate Countess,” 1613; “Jack Drum’s Entertainment” (anon.; probably by Marston), 1616; “Tragedies and Comedies” (anon.), 1633 (another edn., with his name, same year). Collected Works: ed. by J. O. Halliwell (3 vols.), 1856; by A. H. Bullen (3 vols.), 1887.

Personal

  Mr. Henslowe, at the Rose on the Bankside. If you like my playe of Columbus, it is verie well, and you shall give me noe more than twentie poundes for it, but If nott, lett me have it by the Bearer againe, as I know the kinges men will freelie give me as much for it, and the profitts of the third daye moreover.

  He had many quarrells with Marston, beat him, and took his pistol from him, wrote his “Poetaster” on him; the beginning of them were, that Marston represented him in the stage, in his youth given to venerie.

  Of all the dramatists of the time, the most disagreeable in disposition, though by no means the least powerful in mind, was John Marston. The time of his birth is not known; his name is entangled in contemporary records with that of another John Marston; and we may be sure that his mischief-loving spirit would have been delighted could he have anticipated that the antiquaries, a century after his death, would be driven to despair by the difficulty of discriminating one from the other.

The Malcontent, 1604

  THE MALCONTENT. | Augmented by Marston. | With the Additions played by the Kings | Maiesties Servants. | Written | By IOHN WEBSTER. | At London: Printed by U. S. for William Aspley, and are | to be sold at his shop in Paules Church-yard. | 1604.

  We have accordingly no warrant for refusing to Marston the credit of any of the most striking passages in this play, which seems to me almost unapproached by his other productions in its occasional condensed vigour of expression, however greatly we may be tempted to attribute some at least among them to Webster. And there is at all events one example of truly powerful writing not forming part of the additions, and thus undoubtedly the property of Marston, which illustrates the difficulty of trusting too implicitly to instinct in seeking to discriminate between the touch or manner of different poets.

  Though not free from Marston’s two chief vices of coarseness and exaggerated cynicism, it is a play of great merit, and much the best thing he has done, though the reconciliation, at the end, of such a husband and such a wife as Piero and Aurelia, between whom there is a chasm of adultery and murder, again lacks verisimilitude.

  Sad and stern, not unhopeful or unloving, the spirit of this poem is more in harmony with that of Webster’s later tragedies than with that of Marston’s previous plays; its accent is sardonic rather than pessimistic, ironical rather than despondent. The plot is neither well conceived nor well constructed; the catastrophe is little less than absurd, especially from the ethical or moral point of view; the characters are thinly sketched, the situations at once forced and conventional; there are few sorrier or stranger figures in serious fiction than is that of the penitent usurper when he takes to his arms his repentant wife, together with one of her two paramours, in a sudden rapture of forgiving affection; the part which gives the play its name is the only one drawn with any firmness of outline, unless we except that of the malignant and distempered old parasite; but there is a certain interest in the awkward evolution of the story, and there are scenes and passages of singular power and beauty which would suffice to redeem the whole work from condemnation or oblivion, even though it had not the saving salt in it of an earnest and evident sincerity.

General

  Marston wrott his Father-in-lawes preachings, and his Father-in-law his Commedies.

  A Tragic and Comic Writer, not of the meanest rank, among our English Dramatics.

  It is Marston’s misfortune, that he can never keep clear of the impurities of the brothel. His stream of poetry, if sometimes bright and unpolluted, almost always betrays a muddy bottom. The satirist who too freely indulges himself in the display of that licentiousness which he means to proscribe, absolutely defeats his own design. He inflames those passions which he professes to suppress, gratifies the depravations of a prurient curiosity, and seduces innocent minds to an acquaintance with ideas which they might never have known.

  Marston having consulted regularity and correctness in the conduct of his plays, and besides having written them naturally, and both with humour and pathos, must rank before Decker, and essentially, upon a par with Chapman and Heywood, especially when we are told that his poems rendered him still more celebrated than his plays. Being, however, a severe satirist, his contemporaries were not willing to allow him his due portion of praise, and posterity cannot properly judge of his whole merit. What we know of him, however, ranks him very respectfully as a writer.

  The most scurrilous, filthy, and obscene writer of his time.

  Marston, better known in the drama than in satire, was characterized by his contemporaries for his ruffian style. He has more will than skill in invective. “He puts in his blows with love,” as the pugilists say of a hard but artless fighter; a degrading image, but on that account not the less applicable to a coarse satirist.

  Marston is a writer of great merit, who rose to tragedy from the ground of comedy, and whose forte was not sympathy, either with the stronger or softer emotions, but an impatient scorn and bitter indignation against the vices and follies of men, which vented itself either in comic irony or in lofty invective. He was properly a satirist. He was not a favourite with his contemporaries, nor they with him. He was first on terms of great intimacy, and afterwards at open war, with Ben Jonson; and he is most unfairly criticized in “The Return from Parnassus,” under the name of Monsieur Kinsayder, as a mere libeller and buffoon.

  Marston is a tumid and ranting tragedian, a wholesale dealer in murders and ghosts.

  Marston is chiefly remarkable for a fine tone of moral satire.

  Of the dramatic works of Marston and Lilly it is enough to say that they are truly works to the reader, but in no sense dramatic, nor, as literature, worth the paper they blot…. We think that we have sustained our indictment of Mr. Halliwell’s text with ample proof. The title of the book should have been, “The Works of John Marston, containing all the Misprints of the Original Copies, together with a few added for the First Time in this Edition, the whole carefully let alone by James Orchard Halliwell, F.R.S., F.S.A.” It occurs to us that Mr. Halliwell may be also a Fellow of the Geological Society, and may have caught from its members the enthusiasm which leads him to attach so extraordinary a value to every goose-track of the Elizabethan formation. It is bad enough to be, as Marston was, one of those middling poets whom neither gods nor men nor columns (Horace had never seen a newspaper) tolerate; but, really, even they do not deserve the frightful retribution of being reprinted by a Halliwell.

  Marston’s plays, whether comedies or tragedies, all bear the mark of his bitter and misanthropic spirit,—a spirit that seemed cursed by the companionship of its own thoughts, and forced them out through a well-grounded fear that they would fester if left within…. Marston is not without sprightliness, but his sprightliness is never the sprightliness of the kid, though it is sometimes that of a hyena, and sometimes that of the polecat…. His tragedies, indeed, though not without a gloomy power, are extravagant and horrible in conception and conduct. Even when he copies, he makes the thing his own by caricaturing it.

  He is to be classed with Sackville and Chapman, as having more poetical than dramatic genius; although he has given no proof of a creative imagination equal to what is displayed in the early poetry of the former, and the best of Chapman’s is instinct with a diviner fire. But he is, nevertheless, a very imposing declaimer in verse.

  John Marston is the Skelton or Swift of the Elizabethan period. Like them, he wrote in denunciation and derision of what seemed to him vicious or weakly sentimental; and like them, he impatiently carried a passion for directness of speech to the extremes of coarseness. He was for no half-veiled exposure of vices…. Marston’s plays are very remarkable and distinctive productions. They are written with amazing energy—energy audacious, defiant, shameless, yet, when viewed in the totality of its manifestations, not unworthy to be called Titanic. They make no pretence to dramatic impartiality; they are written throughout in the spirit of his satires; his puppets walk the stage as embodiments of various ramifications of deadly sins and contemptible fopperies, side by side with virtuous opposites and indignant commenting censors. His characters, indeed, speak and act with vigorous life: they are much more forcible and distinct personalities than Chapman’s characters. But though Marston brings out his characters sharply and clearly, and puts them in lifelike motion, they are too manifestly objects of their creator’s liking and disliking: some are caricatured, some are unduly black, and some unduly stainless. From one great fault Marston’s personages are exceedingly free: they may be overdrawn, and they may be coarse, but they are seldom dull—their life is a rough coarse life, but life it is. And all his serious creations have here and there put into their mouths passages of tremendous energy.

  Shakspere in particular shines through the seams of most of Marston’s plays. His literary ambition was manifestly very great; and opposition vexed him to the quick. But though his ambition was sustained by many acquirements, and by the powers of occasional pathos and fluent humour, while at times he could rise to poetic beauty of expression, yet there is a false ring about most of his efforts, and a want of sustained force in nearly all. He sought to excel in various dramatic species, but can hardly be said to have reached excellence unless in the depiction of the abnormal excesses of contemporary manners; and even here he fails in concentration of effect. Thus I remain in doubt whether on the whole he deserves to be ranked among the great dramatists, with whose names his own is habitually associated, as having like them adorned our dramatic literature with creations of original genius.

  The foulness of Marston’s fancy is often loathsome, even to a critic without squeamishness. It is still a long step in development, if not in time, from him to the ideal tragedy of Hamlet or Othello; to mistake these “preludings” for his music is like the blunder of the Siamese amateur at the opera, who thanked the orchestra on the tuning of their instruments.

  Marston, that biting satirist and tense sententious builder of blank verse.

  That he was an ill-tempered person with considerable talents, who succeeded, at any rate for a time, in mistaking his ill-temper for sæva indignatio, and his talents for genius, is not, I think, too harsh a description of Marston. In the hotbed of the literary influences of the time, these conditions of his produced some remarkable fruit. But when my friend Professor Minto attributes to him “amazing and almost Titanic energy,” mentions “life” several times over as one of the chief characteristics of his personages (I should say that they had as much life as violently-moved marionettes), and discovers “amiable and admirable characters” among them, I am compelled not, of course, to be positive that my own very different estimate is right, but to wonder at the singularly different way in which the same things strike different persons, who are not as a rule likely to look at them from very different points of view.

  Two of the epithets which Ben Jonson, in his elaborate attack on Marston, selected for ridicule as characteristically grotesque instances of affected and infelicitous innovation—but which nevertheless have taken root in the language, and practically justified their adoption—describe as happily as any that could be chosen to describe the better and the worse quality of his early tragic and satiric style. These words are “strenuous” and “clumsy.” It is perpetually, indefatigably, and fatiguingly strenuous; it is too often vehemently, emphatically, and laboriously clumsy. But at its best, when the clumsy and ponderous incompetence of expression which disfigures it is supplanted by a strenuous felicity of ardent and triumphant aspiration, it has notes and touches in the compass of its course not unworthy of Webster or Tourneur or even Shakespeare himself. Its occasionally exquisite delicacy is as remarkable as its more frequent excess of coarseness, awkwardness, or violent and elaborate extravagance. No sooner has he said anything especially beautiful, pathetic, or sublime, than the evil genius must needs take his turn, exact as it were the forfeit of his bond, impel the poet into some sheer perversity, deface the flow and form of the verse with some preposterous crudity or flatulence of phrase which would discredit the most incapable or the most fantastic novice. And the worst of it all is that he limps or stumbles with either foot alternately. At one moment he exaggerates the license of artificial rhetoric, the strain and swell of the most high-flown and hyperbolical poetic diction; at the next, he falls flat upon the naked level of insignificant or offensive realism.

  In 1602 came from the press the “History of Antonio and Mellida. The First Part,” 4to, and “Antonio’s Revenge. The Second Part,” 4to, both acted by the Children of Paul’s. These plays had been entered in the Stationers’ Register on 24 Oct. 1601, and in the same year had been held up to ridicule by Ben Jonson in the “Poetaster.” The writing is uneven; detached scenes are memorable, but there is an intolerable quantity of fustian. Frequently we are reminded of Seneca’s tragedies, which Marston had closely studied. The “Malcontent,” 1604, 4to, reissued in the same year, with additions by Webster, is more skilfully constructed, and shows few traces of the barbarous diction that disfigured “Antonio and Mellida.”

  He preferred to scold at his contemporaries in verse which is as pleasant to read as charcoal would be to eat, and to lecture an imaginary world made up of vices which he took at second hand from Latin books, in a style which raises the image of ancient Pistol unpacking his heart with curses.