Disavowing Villainy

The most voluminous records of villainy in France during the reigns of Henri III and Henri IV are the journals of a Parisian chancery official, Pierre de L’Estoile (1542–1611). This is the first of four chapters on L’Estoile’s obsession with disavowing the ‘desbordement’ (‘overflowing disorder’) of his age, an obsession that so keenly attests to villainy’s flow between law and literature. Chapter 15 focuses on L’Estoile’s disavowals of the obscene and libellous literature that he documented throughout the reign of Henri III. L’Estoile cultivated a villainous style of manifesting both his disgust at ‘vilain’ poetry and the act of reinscribing it, assuming that legal redress was unlikely to follow. This awkward dual dynamic had parallels not only within French-speaking Europe, but also, indirectly, among English malcontents such as John Marston.

Jonson, Marston, Shakespeare and the Rhetoric of Topicality

The revival of commercial “private” theater by the Children of Paul's in 1599 and the Children of the Chapel in 1600 transformed the culture of playgoing in London at the end of the sixteenth century. It was during this period that John Marston at Paul's and Ben Jonson at Blackfriars attracted attention at these theaters by ridiculing each other personally and denigrating each other's work. In doing so they converted these playhouses into forums for staging ideologically opposed interpretations of drama. Rather than aligning themselves with each other against the “public” theater, as Alfred Harbage had assumed in his influential chapter on “The Rival Repertories” in Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions, Jonson and Marston's satire of each other's work used Paul's and Blackfriars to debate the question of the legitimacy of the drama they staged and the status of the writers who composed it. Their debate on what drama should and should not be constitutes one of the most significant critical controversies in early modern English theater. It constitutes part of the first significant criticism of contemporary drama in English. The point of this essay is to account for how, when Jonson began writing for the Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars in 1600, Marston at Paul's became one of his principal targets through personal invective framed as a series of generalized strictures excoriating the obscenity and plagiarism of contemporary private theater.

Living by Others’ Pleasure: Marston, The Dutch Courtesan, and Theatrical Profit

We have known for over a century that John Marston held a share in Children of the Queen’s Revels, the all-boy playing company that first performed The Dutch Courtesan in 1604, but how this knowledge affects our understanding of his plays requires further exploration. Drawing on neglected documentary sources, this essay reappraises the company’s links with the Chapel Royal choir to argue that Dutch Courtesan capitalizes on the skills that most clearly connected its performers with the royal choir, even while scrutinizing the ways in which the company turned pleasurable recreation into profit.

The Oxford Marston and The Dutch Courtesan

This paper situates the play in the context of the ongoing Complete Works of John Marston, under preparation for Oxford University Press, the first such collected critical edition ever to have been created. It discusses the edition’s aims and working practices as well as the new picture of Marston we expect to emerge from it. Scholars now often encounter The Dutch Courtesan in isolation, as Marston’s single best-known and most-read play. This paper approaches the play in the context of Marston’s career and publication history as a whole, in addition to the textual and theatrical relationships which work on the edition is gradually coming to disclose.

The Insatiate Countess, William Barksted’s Hiren, the Fair Greek, and the Children of the King’s Revels

This essay examines the activity through which the appropriations of William Barksted’s Hiren, the Fair Greek entered the dialogue of The Insatiate Countess. The essay argues that Hiren is a more substantial source for The Insatiate Countess than has been supposed, that The Dumb Knight and The Turk also draw from Hiren, and that Barksted’s narrative verse displays a tendency to use phrases previously deployed by John Marston. The essay considers the implications of these claims and suggests that one explanation for the striking verse register of The Insatiate Countess is that it features Marstonian diction shorn of Marstonian self-consciousness.

Child Singers’ Mediated Bodies

Boy vocalists in children’s company plays by Richard Edwards, John Marston, and Ben Jonson were portrayed as ideal vehicles for poetry, as though their charming, dainty music would provide a means of perfect transmission. Yet children’s singing was also understood to be highly sensuous and erotic—bringing out some of the most licentious dimensions of theatrical experience. This mismatch between ideal communication and embodied performance was often represented in terms of sexual violence, with boy servants graphically punished for altering the messages they were bound to convey. Plays including Edwards’s Damon and Pythias, Marston’s What You Will, and Jonson’s Epicene celebrate child singers’ virtuosity, including their capacity to reimagine their scripts and expose patterns of subjection to critical scrutiny. Song becomes a means of redirecting audiences to the extra-fictional boundaries of theatrical experience, and articulating new registers of poetic meaning grounded in the perspectives of boy performers.

Attributing John Marston’s Marginal Plays

John Marston (c. 1576–1634) was a dramatist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, known for his satirical wit and literary feuds with Ben Jonson. His dramatic corpus consists of nine plays of uncontested authorship. This article investigates four additional plays of uncertain authorship which have been associated with Marston: Lust’s Dominion; Histriomastix; The Family of Love; and The Insatiate Countess. The internal evidence for Marston’s hand in these four texts is examined and an analysis made of the potential divisions of authorship. The essay provides a survey of Marston’s individual style by testing vocabulary; prosody; collocations of thought and language; and versification habits within both his acknowledged plays and the contested texts, in comparison to plays written by other authorship candidates.