John Marston (playwright)

John Marston (baptised 7 October 1576 – 25 June 1634) was an English playwright, poet and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods.

In 1598, he published The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image and Certaine Satyres, a book of poetry in imitation of, on the one hand, Ovid, and, on the other, the Satires of Juvenal.

Marston's style is, moreover, in places contorted to the point of unintelligibility: he believed that satire should be rough and obscure, perhaps because he thought (as did many other writers of the time) that the term 'satire' was derived from the Greek 'satyr plays'.

The Archbishop of Canterbury John Whitgift and the Bishop of London Richard Bancroft banned the Scourge and had it publicly burned, along with copies of works by other satirists, on 4 June 1599.

At any rate, Marston proved a good match for the stage—not the public stage of Henslowe, but the "private" playhouses where boy players performed racy dramas for an audience of city gallants and young members of the Inns of Court.

Traditionally, though without strong external attribution, Histriomastix has been regarded as his first play; performed by either the Children of Paul's or the students of the Middle Temple in around 1599, it appears to have sparked the War of the Theatres, the literary feud between Marston, Jonson and Dekker that took place between around 1599 and 1602.

For his part, Marston may have satirized Jonson as the complacent, arrogant critic Brabant Senior in Jack Drum's Entertainment and as the envious, misanthropic playwright and satirist Lampatho Doria in What You Will.

The Return from Parnassus (II), a satirical play performed at St. John's College, Cambridge in 1601 and 1602, characterised Marston as a poet whose writings see him "pissing against the world".

In 1603, he became a shareholder in the Children of Blackfriars company, at that time known for steadily pushing the allowable limits of personal satire, violence, and lewdness on stage.

This work was originally written for the children at Blackfriars, and was later taken over (perhaps stolen) by the Kings' Men at the Globe, with additions by John Webster and (perhaps) Marston himself.

In 1605, he worked with George Chapman and Ben Jonson on Eastward Ho, a satire of popular taste and the vain imaginings of wealth to be found in Virginia.

The subplot of the latter was converted to a droll during the Commonwealth; after the Stuart Restoration, either Aphra Behn or Thomas Betterton updated the main plot for The Revenge, or The Match in Newgate, although this adaptation makes the play both more sentimental and less morally complex.

The general resemblance of Antonio's Revenge to Hamlet and Marston's role in the war of the poets ensured that his plays would receive some scholarly attention, but they were not performed and were not even widely read.

William Gifford, perhaps the eighteenth century's most devoted reader of Jonson, called Marston "the most scurrilous, filthy and obscene writer of his time".

[4] Marston's tragic style is Senecan and although his characters may appear, on Eliot's own admission, "lifeless", they are instead used as types to convey their "theoretical implications".