MARSTON, JOHN

(baptized Oct. 7, 1576, Oxfordshire, Eng.d. 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 began his literary career in 1598 with The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image and Certaine Satyres, a callow, erotic poem that was severely criticized. In the same year, the roughhewn, 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), based on an anonymous earlier work. 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 Jonsonpart of the war of the theatres. In The 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 The History of Antonio and Mellida (1602), its sequel, Antonio's Revenge (1602), and What You Will (1607). The most memorable is Antonio's Revenge, a savage melodrama of a political power struggle. Although What You Will satirized Jonson, that same year Marston and Jonson collaborated on Love's Martyr. In 1604 Marston became a shareholder in the Children of the Chapel, for which he wrote his remaining plays. The Dutch Courtezan (produced 160304) 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. In 1605 Marston again 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, 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.