John Marston (playwright) facts for kids

Title page of John Marston's The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion's Image, 1598

John Marston (baptised 7 October 1576 – 25 June 1634) was an English playwright, poet and satirist during the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods. His career as a writer lasted only a decade. His work is remembered for its energetic and often obscure style, its contributions to the development of a distinctively Jacobean style in poetry, and its idiosyncratic vocabulary.

Life
Selected Works
See also

Life

Marston was born to John and Maria Marston née Guarsi, and baptised 7 October 1576, at Wardington, Oxfordshire. His father was an eminent lawyer of the Middle Temple who first argued in London and then became the counsel to Coventry and ultimately its steward. John Marston entered Brasenose College, Oxford, in 1592 and received his BA in 1594. By 1595, he was in London, living in the Middle Temple, where he had been admitted a member three years previously. He had an interest in poetry and play writing, although his father's will of 1599 expresses the hope that he would give up such vanities. He married Mary Wilkes in 1605, daughter of the Reverend William Wilkes, one of King James's chaplains.

Early career

Marston's brief career in literature began with a foray into the then-fashionable genres of epyllion and satire. 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. He also published another book of satires, The Scourge of Villanie, in 1598. (Marston issued these satires under the pseudonym "W. Kinsayder.") The satire in these books is even more savage and misanthropic than was typical for the decade's satirists. 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'. Marston seems to have been enraged by Joseph Hall's claim to be the first satirist in English; Hall comes in for some indirect flyting in at least one of the satires. Some see William Shakespeare's Thersites and Iago, as well as the mad speeches of King Lear as influenced by The Scourge of Villanie. Marston had, however, arrived on the literary scene as the fad for verse satire was to be checked by censors. 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.

Playwriting with Henslowe

In September 1599, John Marston began to work for Philip Henslowe as a playwright. Following the work of O. J. Campbell, it has commonly been thought that Marston turned to the theatre in response to the Bishops' Ban of 1599; more recent scholars have noted that the ban was not enforced with great rigor and might not have intimidated prospective satirists at all. 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. In c. 1600, Marston wrote Jack Drum's Entertainment and Antonio and Mellida, and in 1601 he wrote Antonio's Revenge, a sequel to the latter play; all three were performed by the company at Paul's. In 1601, he contributed poems to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr.

Feud with Jonson

Ben Jonson: rival, co-author, frenemy

By 1601, he was well known in London literary circles, particularly in his role as enemy to the equally pugnacious Ben Jonson. Jonson criticised Marston for being a false poet, a vain, careless writer who plagiarised the works of others and whose own works were marked by bizarre diction and ugly neologisms. 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.

If Jonson can be trusted, the animosity between himself and Marston went beyond the literary. He claimed to have beaten Marston and taken his pistol. However, the two playwrights were reconciled soon after the so-called War; Marston wrote a prefatory poem for Jonson's Sejanus in 1605 and dedicated The Malcontent to Jonson. Yet in 1607, he criticized Jonson for being too pedantic to make allowances for his audience or the needs of aesthetics.

Blackfriars

Outside of these tensions, Marston's career continued to prosper. 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 on stage. He wrote and produced two plays with the company. The first was The Malcontent in 1603; this satiric tragicomedy is Marston's most famous play. 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.

George Chapman, Marston and Jonson's fellow author

In 1605, Marston worked with George Chapman and Ben Jonson on a play that satirized the popular taste and vain imaginings of wealth to be found in Virginia. Chapman and Jonson were arrested for, according to Jonson, a few clauses that offended the Scots, but Marston escaped any imprisonment. The actual cause of arrest and details of the brief detainment are not certainly known; in the event, charges were dropped.

In 1606, Marston seems to have offended King James. First, in Parasitaster, or, The Fawn, he satirized the king specifically. In 1607, he wrote The Entertainment at Ashby, a masque for the Earl of Huntingdon. At that point, he stopped his dramatic career altogether, selling his shares in the company of Blackfriars. His departure from the literary scene may have been because of another play, now lost, which offended the king. It seems that the French ambassador complained to King James about the disrespectful treatment of the French court in plays by Chapman performed at Blackfriars. Incensed, James suspended performances at Blackfriars and had Marston imprisoned. This suggests that he was the author of the offending play.

Later life

After the end of his literary career, he moved into his father-in-law's house and began studying philosophy. In 1609, he became a reader at the Bodleian Library at Oxford, was made a deacon on 24 September and a priest on 24 December 1609. Contemporary authors were bemused or surprised by Marston's change of career, with several of them commenting on its seeming abruptness. In October 1616, Marston was assigned the living of Christchurch, Hampshire. He died on 24 June 1634, aged 57, in London and was buried in the Middle Temple Church.

Tombs at that time often started with the formulaic "Memoriae Sacrum" ("Sacred to the memory") followed by the name of the tomb's occupant and an account of their achievements even though such words are hubristic and a contradiction to the Christian virtues of modesty. According to Anthony à Wood John Marston's tomb stone bore the legend "Oblivioni Sacrum" ("Sacred to Oblivion"), which was probably composed by Marston, and, according to Joshua Scodel, the short "epitaph is thus both self-abasing and witty in its novel inversion of tradition".

Selected Works

Plays and production dates

Histriomastix, 1599
Antonio and Mellida, London, Paul's theatre, 1599–1600.
Jack Drum's Entertainment, London, Paul's theatre, 1599/1600.
Antonio's Revenge, London, Paul's theatre, 1600.
What You Will, London, Paul's theatre, 1601.
The Malcontent, London, Blackfriars Theatre, 1603–1604; Globe Theatre, 1604.
Parasitaster, or The Fawn, London, Blackfriars theatre, 1604.
The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedy of Sophonisba, London, Blackfriars theatre, 1606.
The Spectacle Presented to the Sacred Majesties of Great Britain, and Denmark as They Passed through London, London, 31 July 1606.
The Entertainment of the Dowager-Countess of Darby, Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, 1607.
The Insatiate Countess, by Marston and William Barksted, London, Whitefriars Theatre, 1608?.

Books

The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image. And Certaine Satyres (London: Printed by J. Roberts for E. Matts, 1598).
The Scourge of Villanie. Three Bookes of Satyres (London: Printed by J. Roberts & sold by J. Buzbie, 1598; revised and enlarged edition, London: J. Roberts, 1599).
Jacke Drums Entertainment: Or, The Comedie of Pasquill and Katherine (London: Printed by T. Creede for R. Olive, 1601).
Loves Martyr: or, Rosalins Complaint, by Marston, Ben Jonson, William Shakespeare, and George Chapman (London: Printed for E. B., 1601).
The History of Antonio and Mellida (London: Printed by R. Bradock for M. Lownes & T. Fisher, 1602).
Antonios Revenge (London: Printed by R. Bradock for T. Fisher, 1602).
The Malcontent (London: Printed by V. Simmes for W. Aspley, 1604).
Eastward Hoe, by Marston, Chapman, and Jonson (London: Printed by G. Eld for W. Aspley, 1605).
The Dutch Courtezan (London: Printed by T. Purfoote for J. Hodgets, 1605).
Parasitaster, or The Fawne (London: Printed by T. Purfoote for W. Cotton, 1606).
The Wonder of Women, or The Tragedie of Sophonisba (London: Printed by J. Windet, 1606).
What You Will (London: Printed by G. Eld for T. Thorppe, 1607).
Histriomastix: Or, The Player Whipt (London: Printed by G. Eld for T. Thorp, 1610).
The Insatiate Countesse, by Marston and William Barksted (London: Printed by T. Snodham for T. Archer, 1613).
The Workes of Mr. J. Marston (London: Printed by A. Mathewes for W. Sheares, 1633); republished as Tragedies and Comedies (London: Printed by A. Mathewes for W. Sheares, 1633).
Comedies, Tragi-comedies; & Tragedies, Nonce Collection (London, 1652).