John Marston

This study aims to analyse the representation of witchcraft in the Jacobean context within the framework of a Jacobean play, namely John Marston's The Wonder of Women or The Tragedy of Sophonisba (1606). Written during a patriarchal period when the misogynistic emperor James I reigns over England and when women are regarded to be biologically and intellectually inferior to men, Sophonisba represents the misogynist mind-set in that the witch in the play is a woman, and she possesses the negative features conventionally associated with the witches at the time. In this respect, this paper argues that Marston's work reinforces the stereotypical witch image and thereby perpetuates the misogynist thought.

In the early seventeenth century, the London stage often portrayed a ruler covertly spying on his subjects. Traditionally deemed 'Jacobean disguised ruler plays', these works include Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Marston's The Malcontent and The Fawn, Middleton's The Phoenix, and Sharpham's The Fleer. Commonly dated to the arrival of James I, these plays are typically viewed as synchronic commentaries on the Jacobean regime.

Kevin A. Quarmby demonstrates that the disguised ruler motif actually evolved in the 1580s. It emerged from medieval folklore and balladry, Tudor Chronicle history and European tragicomedy. Familiar on the Elizabethan stage, these incognito rulers initially offered light-hearted, romantic entertainment, only to suffer a sinister transformation as England awaited its ageing queen's demise. The disguised royal had become a dangerously voyeuristic political entity by the time James assumed the throne.

Traditional critical perspectives also disregard contemporary theatrical competition. Market demands shaped the repertories. Rivalry among playing companies guaranteed the motif's ongoing vitality. The disguised ruler's presence in a play reassured audiences; it also facilitated a subversive exploration of contemporary social and political issues. Gradually, the disguised ruler's dramatic currency faded, but the figure remained vibrant as an object of parody until the playhouses closed in the 1640s.

While studies of the public sphere in early modern England have focused on politics, news, and rational critique, this essay—excerpted from my dissertation and currently under review at English Literary Renaissance after an invitation to revise—proposes that we move beyond Habermas’s public sphere to consider the thoroughly public dimension that characterizes all style. London’s acute expansions, this essay argues, altered the structure of social relations within the city by making anonymity, rather than familiarity, a normative pre-condition of day-to-day encounters. This new condition had the vexing effect of making Londoners public to one another in a way that they had not been before: always present to and scrutinized by other strangers as strangers themselves. This essay proposes that the city comedies of Thomas Dekker, Ben Jonson, and John Marston offered a solution to this novel condition of anonymity by extolling various styles of theatrical dialogue as novel models of social competency within an urban environment newly and uncomfortably defined by publicity and anonymity. That social competency comes from the power of various styles to resolve, exploit, or even intensify the newly public shape of urban, social relations. The essay ends by proposing that in modeling the capacity of styles to negotiate public, urban life, London’s city comedians were contending with the thoroughly public dimension of style itself.

This book analyzes the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Ovid, Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline describes the foundational yet often disruptive force that Ovidian rhetoric exerts on early modern poetry, particularly on representations of the self, the body, and erotic life. Paying close attention to the trope of the female voice in the Metamorphoses, as well as early modern attempts to ventriloquize women's voices that are indebted to Ovid's work, she argues that Ovid's rhetoric of the body profoundly challenges Renaissance representations of authorship as well as conceptions about the difference between male and female experience. This vividly original book makes a vital contribution to the study of Ovid's presence in Renaissance literature.

First, I examine the aspects of the political sovereignty on the Shakespearean stage. In the light of Walter Benjamin’s Origin of the German baroque drama (1928) and of Carl Schmitt’s answer to Benjamin in Hamlet or Hecuba (1956), I show that Shakespeare stages the mortality of the political bodies and the new sovereignty of the plotter. Urged to master the art and the tempo of the plot, the prince is nonetheless unable to prevent the decomposition of the state. Then, drawing on the Elizabethan drama, I question the contemporary effort towards order and synchronization within the city. Hobbes’s theory of political and juridical representation breaks with the mystical conception of political unity and with any inspired legislation, whereas the civil scene is dedicated to the peace between individuals in order to ensure the possibility of a real autonomy in the private sphere. Reciprocally, this autonomy must consolidate the solutions to the problems of melancholy and skepticism conceptualized in Leviathan. While endorsing the tragedy of human condition and of knowledge already put on stage by Shakespeare, Leviathan prevents Schmitt’s exaltation as well as the « pure » violence which, according to Benjamin, lies in the subject’s state of exception. Yet, through the ghosts that Leviathan cannot tolerate within the public sphere, the Shakespearean stage unravels the mechanisms of perpetual order and synchronization without rejecting the law and the project of autonomy.

Keywords : Melancholy – Skepticism – Law – Discipline – Elizabethan drama – Shakespeare – Walter Benjamin – Carl Schmitt – Hobbes – Leviathan – Behemoth

Renaissance English revenge tragedy enacts a cycle of violence that often culminates in an ambivalent purgation of lawlessness. This circular movement is evident not only in the plots of many revenge tragedies but also in the gestures that characterize this genre. The staging of return in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the circular choreography and masque in John Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, and the language of poison, contagion, and cure in John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi reflect the range of circular movements that bring together the form and performance of Renaissance English revenge tragedy. At the same time, this cyclical narrative structure and recursive embodied effects extend beyond the revenge tragedy form, for example, informing William Shakespeare’s tragicomic The Tempest, and beyond its performance, as when Sir Philip Sidney in An Apology for Poetry theorizes tragedy’s restorative effects on the audience.

The conventional understanding of censorship, arguing that the censorious act is implemented primarily through an act of law as external force, has come under sustained theoretical challenge. It has become possible to assert that censorship is not only regulative but also constitutive in many ways, an internally operating force as well as an externally enforced one. In that sense, Foucault’s idea that censorship has a “paradoxical” effect in terms of leading people to a “deliberate transgression” is well founded. According to this view, repression brings about resistance, so the artistic manipulation of the word through several techniques of rhetoric will enable the artist to give voice to and express her/his opinions and feelings in a more productive and imaginative way.  Thus, as Foucault propounds, “[c]ensorship always works – not as prohibition, but as power”.
My paper addresses the issue of the constitutive nature of censorship and its operations with special attention to John Marston’s revenge tragedy The Malcontent, which was most probably written between late 1602 and early 1604, around the politically delicate and unstable time of Elizabeth's death and James's succession. Specifically, in my study, I will be looking at how Marston, as a satirist whose previous works were burnt under the Act of Bishops’ Ban of 1599, exposes his discontent with the corruption afflicting the court, and its follies, under a thin disguise.
To this end, instead of openly stating his satirical view of his subject matter, the playwright employs a “fool” or “court jester” figure called Malevole so as to voice his critical take on the vices of the court and avoid any offense by putting these critical words into the mouth of a fool. In conclusion, this paper, by closely examining the external and internal censorious forces behind and inside the play The Malcontent, aims to explore the paradoxical but constitutive role of censorship in bringing the writing subject into being. 
Key Words: Censorship, Foucault’s constitutive censorship, satire, Renaissance Play

The publication practices of early modern playwrights like John Marston or Ben Jonson have been widely misunderstood. Through these practices, dramatists did not attempt to distance their works from their theatrical origins, but rather intended to construct an alternative mode of theatricality, thereby reclaiming the visual as a positive force. Through a reconstruction of the relationships between those authors and their printers, and through analyses of their typographic strategies, the essay demonstrates how Jonson in particular made the book his theatre. What emerges is a narrative of Jonson's publishing activities that avoids the conventional, linear account: the playwright did not consistently seek to escape the theatre, but rather, after an initial attempt to associate his plays with classical drama and humanist scholarship, embarked on a decades-long project of inventing a complex visual code of printed theatricality that culminated in the unfinished 1631 folio, and eventually collapsed, the same year, with the publication of The New Inn.

Stoicism presents itself in John Marston’s Antonio plays in a recognizably parodic, exaggerated form: characters passionately denounce its supposed endorsement of socially isolated existence in order to gird themselves for proper action. Such an understanding, however, ignores both the subtle ways early modern Stoicism demanded embodiment and the complex theatricality with which Marston stages his dramas. By repeatedly calling attention to the material conditions of their performance—conditions that, according to satiric convention, promise a kind of failure of dramatic realization—the Antonio plays invite a more nuanced understanding of the Stoic ideas they appear to denounce. This essay suggests that Marston inextricably ties theatricality to early modern Stoicism, and that this theatricality can be found tacitly woven throughout influential translations of classical and Neo-Stoic texts. Stoicism entails a performative grammar that admits to a life lived in a constructed but unknowable world—a mode of acknowledgment that finds in Marston’s self-aware, continually collapsing, and dramaturgically muddled plays an ideal vehicle.

2017 article on petitioning scenes in early drama.

If I could revise it, I would include something on Julie Crawford's "'Pleaders, Atturneys, Petitioners and the Like': Margaret Cavendish and the Dramatic Petition" in Women Players in England, 1500-1660: Beyond the All-Male Stage. Ed. Pamela Brown and Peter Parolin.

Recent commentators on the “Poetomachia” have stressed its playful and commercial aspect. By the time Volpone appeared in 1605, they claim, Jonson’s animosity towards his former adversaries Dekker and Marston had faded away. After all, in 1604 he had collaborated with Dekker on London’s entertainment for James I, and Marston had written flatteringly of Jonson in The Malcontent. This note presents evidence that in fact the enmity lingered long after Jonson formally declared his retreat from the quarrel in Poetaster. Editors of Volpone have not previously noticed that when, in the Prologue, Jonson boasts of having written the play without the aid of a “journeyman”, this alludes to Marston and Dekker. In Poetaster, Jonson repeatedly describes the Dekker character, Demetrius, as “journeyman” to the gentlemanly Crispinus (a representative of Marston), and Dekker picks up on this when replying in Satiromastix. Jonson insulting Dekker by calling him Marston’s “journeyman” is typical in several respects: he habitually applies the language of craft and commerce to his literary enemies in a contemptuous way (he represents Dekker in Poetaster as a mere hack, without Horace-Jonson’s exalted sense of vocation); and in his “Poets’ War” plays, he portrays Dekker as Marston’s subordinate.

Revenge Tragedy and Classical Philosophy on the Early Modern Stage discovers within Renaissance revenge tragedy the surprising shaping presence of a wide array of classical philosophies not commonly affiliated with the genre. By recovering the pervasive influence of Aristotelian faculty psychology on The Spanish Tragedy, Aristotelian ethics on Titus Andronicus, Lucretian atomism on Hamlet, Galenic pneumatics on Antonio’s Revenge and Epictetian Stoicism on The Duchess of Malfi, Crosbie reveals how the very atmospheres and ontological assumptions of revenge tragedy exert their own kind of conditioning dramaturgical force. The book also revitalizes our understanding of how the Renaissance stage, even at its most lurid, functions as a unique space for the era’s practical, vernacular engagement with received philosophy.

The parable of the prodigal son is the most popular repentance narrative in early modern drama, yet the authenticity of these prodigals’ repentances is frequently disputed. The truly repentant prodigal and posturing sinner are functionally identical on the early modern stage, and the parable was so renowned that the prodigal's repentance and forgiveness could not only be predicted, but expected and engineered. This essay compares prodigals’ repentances across Eastward Ho, The London Prodigal, 2 If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, and the Henry IVs. It argues that these plays exhibit discomfort with the outward display of repentance, the irrelevance of sincerity, and the viability of the parable as a repentance narrative. While some of these repentances have been discussed in isolation, their comparison allows for the examination of ambiguous repentances not as isolated incidents but a discernible trend in early modern culture, born from anxieties regarding the indistinguishability of feigned and ‘true’ performances of inward spiritual change. The authenticity of repentance, it emerges, cannot be determined, but repentance also need not be sincere to be accepted by a plays’ community. The authenticity of repentance proves not only impossible to identify, but ultimately irrelevant to these plays’ social worlds.

The 'European Women in Early Modern Drama' seminar takes place as part of the European Shakespeare Research Association conference in 2015 (University of Worcester, UK - 29 June - 2 July 2015). The seminar is convened by Dr Edel Semple and Dr Ema Vyroubalová.

Satiromastix (printed in 1602) is Thomas Dekker's contribution to the 'War of the Theatres' that raged between 1599 and 1602, with Ben Jonson on one side and Dekker and John Marston on the other. Caricaturing Jonson as Horace, the play attacks not only his works and personality but also his physical appearance and dress. The quarrel was long thought of as purely an exercise in personal satire, but in Shakespeare & the Poets' War (2001), James P. Bednarz has argued that it concerned differing concepts of authorship, with Shakespeare and Marston critiquing the humanist programme that Jonson sets out in his 'comical satires'. In this article, I discuss a largely ignored textual crux in Satiromastix that relates to Jonson's self-image as an author, as seen in the distorting mirror of Dekker's satire. Recent scholars such as Bednarz and Edward Gieskes disregard Satiromastix, stating that Dekker promotes a humanist credo largely identical to Jonson's, and that consequently the play has little more to offer than some entertaining ad hominem abuse. I argue that in fact the differences between the two are significant. Jonson associates himself with elite culture and classical ideas of satire, while Dekker's satire is more closely related to a festive and popular model, where a community punishes and drives out from amongst them a figure who contravenes their values. Ultimately, Dekker satirizes the gap between Jonson's self-image - as elite defender of literary standards, heroic castigator of vice and folly - and the reality of his status as former actor and mercenary playwright for the public stage.

Vanessa Wilkie argues that the Egerton-Hastings family had a long-established practice of literary patronage that involved commissioning and hosting masque entertainments in their homes to signal major legal victories and familial career advancements. John Marston's Entertainment at Ashby marked the 1607 Act of Parliament that ended a major inheritance lawsuit, John Milton's 1631 Arcades celebrated the family's victory in the Castlehaven trials, and Milton's Comus served as the entertainment at the Earl of Bridgewater's installation as president of the Marches of Wales. This essay introduces Marston's 1607 masque as part of what should be considered a trio of masques, not just a duo of Miltonic masques, and thus more accurately frames all three occasions and texts. The essay also narrows the possible date range of the performance of Milton's Arcades. This reading expands our understanding of the genre and function of elite household entertainments and masques. Keywords: John Milton; John Marston

La novellistica del Cinquecento italiano ha conosciuto una grande fortuna
nell’Inghilterra giacomiana, soprattutto grazie agli adattamenti teatrali. I
drammaturghi secenteschi proseguono la tradizione, iniziata nel secolo precedente, di utilizzare materiale novellistico italiano come base per costruire le proprie opere teatrali. Le Novelle di Matteo Bandello, pubblicate nel 1554, hanno un particolare successo Oltremanica: esse circolano nella versione originale, tradotte in francese sotto il nome di Histories Tragiques e nelle raccolte di tales in lingua inglese; molti drammaturghi hanno dunque la possibilità di attingere alle «enormi e disoneste» storie bandelliane.
Esaminando i processi di diffusione e adattamento delle Novelle – affiancate a un’opera meno nota: le Ducento novelle di Celio Malespini – si mostrerà come la profonda influenza della novellistica italiana sulla produzione drammatica di grandi autori del teatro giacomiano, come John Marston, John Webster e Thomas Middleton, non sia limitata al piano della trama ma abbia importanti risvolti sul piano compositivo, tematico e interpretativo.

Engaging with Elizabethan understandings of masculinity, this book examines representations of manhood during the short-lived vogue for verse satire in the 1590s, by poets like John Donne, John Marston, Everard Guilpin and Joseph Hall. While criticism has often used categorical adjectives like "angry" and "Juvenalian" to describe these satires, this book argues that they engage with early modern ideas of manhood in a conflicted and contradictory way that is frequently at odds with patriarchal norms even when they seem to defend them. The book examines the satires from a series of contexts of masculinity such as husbandry and early modern understandings of age, self-control and violence, and suggests that the images of manhood represented in the satires often exist in tension with early modern standards of manhood. Beyond the specific case studies, while satire has often been assumed to be a "male" genre or mode, this is the first study to engage more in depth with the question of how satire is invested with ideas and practices of masculinity.

Eastward Ho is a 1605 city comedy staged by the Children of the Queen’s Revels and written by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, and John Marston. Written in response to Westward Ho, a city comedy by Thomas Dekker and John Webster, each play examines the River Thames as natural boundary within the city of London. Eastward Ho, of some controversy due to anti-Scottish rhetoric, revolves around goldsmith Master Touchstone, his two very different daughters Gertrude and Mildred, and his apprentices Quicksilver and Golding. The play utilizes anxiety over social issues like changing social mobility and the beginning of the privatization of the family unit which will cement itself during the 17th century in the urbanscape of London, presenting a stage of comical relationships that reaffirm those anxieties towards a more stable change.

In Eastward Ho, upward mobility is achieved through the actions and decisions of female characters who are essential in both maintaining stable definitions of hierarchical social rank and in bringing about rank change for themselves and their families. This definition is achieved by three actions: women accept or reject their own social stations through marriage; women also accept or reject their relationships and the social status of other women; and lastly, that women must forgive the men in their lives for grievous wrongs, thereby solidifying the family unit as per societal Elizabethan norms. In the patriarchal society of Eastward Ho, men’s class mobility is made possible by their female relatives in a way that gives the women agency in their outcome. Women’s actions serve to reify the roles outlined by societal norms—being a faithful wife, a good daughter, and to have their male relations accepted in larger political and economic society—as desired by their characters and obtained through a variety of choices and actions.

Emerging from a paper at the Paris 'Shakespeare 450' conference in Easter 2014, this article explores the influence of men from the Inns of Court as a segment of the early modern playhouse audience. The paper focuses mainly on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night and Marston's What You Will, with reference to Jonson's Every Man Out and the setting of the two plays in the context of satirical comedy.

In Early Modern England, emotions were linked to the biological, corporeal aspect of the Galenic four humours, or four temperaments (melancholic, choleric, sanguine and phlegmatic). The excess of a particular fluid, such as yellow bile or blood, could dictate the behaviours of a person. Humoral theory became one of the sources for the representation of characters in drama – the dramatic heroes and heroines often speak of physical changes that the dominant fluid brings about or convey how a particular ‘humour’ influences their emotions. The paper seeks out to explain how the physical concept of the four temperaments is used for the portrayal of the emotions and actions of characters considered ‘mad’ (like the raging old Cassilane in The Laws of Candy, a play attributed to Beaumont and Fletcher, Malevole in Marston’s The Malcontent and William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens) in Early Modern drama. The relationship between the characters’ social position (and place in the hierarchy), the temperament currently influencing them and the perception of their ‘madness’ by the other characters will be of prime importance, as social status and power play an important part in how those ‘temperamental’ characters are treated. Cassilane’s old age is a source of distress and confusion, as the loss of status that the infirm age brings is firmly tied to the perception of old men as choleric. Timon’s rage and retreat into the woods is a synonym of his rebellion against society and the concept of status, the wilderness often being a symbolic place, signifying ties with nature as well as functioning as a secluded place for the ‘madman’ to express his fury. Malevole’s trademark ‘mad’ railing, on the other hand, is an expression of genuine bitterness at being deceived as well as a mask that allows him to express criticism even though it may break certain social rules. Biological metaphors (ranging from allusions to physical afflictions through temperatures to the references to nature) shall be given special attention, as they underline the notion that emotions to the Early Modern mind were first and foremost a bodily experience.

The children's theater companies that performed plays by Marston, Jonson and Beaumont experimented with spectators' metadramatic awareness of the child actor's prodigious imitative powers. By calling attention to those powers, even the most frivolous plays performed child actors joined early modern debates about the nature of mimesis and the powers of fiction.