John Marston's work in verse satire is, perhaps, as exemplary as anything he was ever to do of the purposes that unified the fashionable poets at the end of the sixteenth century. In taking up the "Satyre's knottie rod" in 1598, he assumed a stance, a voice, and a state of mind ideally suited to a vociferous declaration of his individuality. This gesture was to exert a permanent influence on his literary career. Although he was soon prevented from publishing verse satires by the Order of Conflagration of 1599 andalthough his literary efforts after that year were almost wholly dramatic, once he had turned to satire he never abandoned it. It will be increasingly clear, indeed, that his work in verse satire constituted an apprenticeship in the literary methods and techniques that were to be the foundation of his efforts in the drama.

Unfortunately, the task of clarifying and assessing Marston's accomplishment in verse satire is fraught with problems. Renaissance satire is in many respects the most difficult of the Renaissance genres for modern readers. Frequently it is highly topical and allusive. What is often more perplexing, however, is that it is based on a set of assumptions with which modern readers have almost wholly lost touch. Since the days of Hall, Marston, and Donne, English literature has been enriched by the satire of Dryden, Pope, and Byron, whose work is very different and so much more important that modern readers have been educated to judge satire by the standards implicit in it. Too often, accordingly, Hall, Marston, and Donne fare worse in the hands of critics than they ought to fare largely because they fail to manifest the qualities that Dryden, Pope, and Byron display so abundantly. J. P. Collier, who was rather sympathetic to Marston on the whole, says of him [in Poetical Dec.], for example, that "in all there is a great deal of strength and fire; some heavy blows, but nothing exquisitely keen, indicating a real talent for satire of the best kind." And even a critic as sensitive to Marston's value as Ford Elmore Curtis seems to rely on eighteenth-century criteria when he quotes epigrammatic lines as examples of Marston's best work.

Recently, numerous attempts have been made to recover the assumptions necessary to read Renaissance satire as it was intended to be read, to rehabilitate what M. C. Randolph calls "Renaissance satiric theory." Taken as a unit, these studies have enabled us to see over the peaks of Dryden, Pope, and Byron to the smaller range beyond. Yet they have also proved a little disquieting in that they have shown—what is so often true—that Renaissance satire was no single thing, no single, tidy coherent entity, but a shaggy cluster of things, a cluster held together by obvious and important similarities, yet a cluster nonetheless. Disentangling Marston from this cluster will require some care.

The multiplicity of Renaissance satire is met most conspicuoulsy, perhaps, in the diversity of Renaissance attempts to explain its origins—not to mention modern attempts to explain these explanations. A useful paradigm for this confusion is Thomas Drant's prefatory poem to A Medicinable Moral … Two Books of Horace's Satires, English ed (1566), in which Drant derives the word "satyre" from four distinct sources. Moreover, reasonable explanations for this diversity have not been wanting: Lila Freedman has been thorough in clarifying the differences among the Renaissance authorities drawn on, and John Peter persuasive in arguing a varying medieval residue. In emphasizing these differences, of course, we should avoid the implication that the efforts to write satire at the end of the sixteenth century were anything like anarchic; that would be hopelessly wide of the mark. Despite all the theoretical differences, poets and critics found substantial areas of agreement. Whether Marston and his fellows believed satire derived from the rude satyr figure, as the influential Aelius Donatus, Diomedes, and Puttenham had argued, or from the Latin satura, as others opined, or from the classical figure of Saturn, their differences apparently did not prevent them from general unanimity on so crucial a matter as the authentic satiric style since all these derivations were perfectly consistent with the conviction that satire was characteristically harsh and obscure. Furthermore, their universal acceptance of a coarse, conversational, often elliptical, sometimes scurrile speech for satire rested firmly on the precedent of Juvenal and Persius, their avowed models. A John Marston might quarrel mildly about the degree to which harshness and obscurity were proper, but he did not deny their authenticity. It is only within this area of general agreement that the diversity in theory becomes important. There it led to differences in practice from poet to poet, and there it begins to be of help in the task of setting Marston off.

This diversity is most important in questions concerning satire's function and the persona proper to the satirist. It was universally assumed, of course, that satire was corrective. But it was not clear precisely how it was corrective. When Puttenham described the satirist as one who assailed "common abuses and vice … in rough and bitter speeches," he did not go on to say that the satirist also provided positive exhortations to virtue. Yet there was some precedent for such exhortation in the classical satirists and abundant evidence of it in the complaint tradition that so deviously conditioned Renaissance satire. The Renaissance satirists, accordingly, were far from agreed on the point: some of them contented themselves with invective; some quite selfconsciously tried to balance the railing by arguing constructive moral standards.

The confusion was still greater in the related matter of thepersona proper to the satirist. Perhaps nothing has given modern readers more trouble than this element in Renaissance satire. To be sure, their difficulty proceeds frequently from their failure to recognize that Renaissance satirists deliberately assumed a persona; but it proceeds also—after a satiric pose has been acknowledged—from their failure to apprehend the full complexity of the persona and to grasp firmly the fact that this persona differed from satirist to satirist. The speaker in Hall's Virgidemiarum is by no means the speaker in Marston's Scourge of Villainy or Donne's Satires. To understand their differences as well as their similarities, we must consider not only the various precedents followed, but also certain of the aims animating these poets—aims that they shared as young poets writing under the special conditions of their decade, as well as aims that seem to have been peculiar to them as individuals.

All the Renaissance satirists had before them the precedents of Horace, Juvenal, and Persius, and Lila Freedman has done an admirable job of showing their indebtedness to the personae of these Latin writers and their preference for Juvenal's "angry man." All, moreover, fell heir to the rather recent but common tradition that the satirist was a kind of barber-surgeon who administered bitter medicine, let blood, lanced sores, and flayed away infected flesh, a tradition perhaps first set forth only as recently as Minturno's De Poeta … (1559), but certainly commonplace by the end of the century. And all, of course, were aware of the preacher-persona of the complaint tradition, though, fashionable young sophisticates that they were, they took pains to avoid comparison with the complainant's contemporaneous equivalent, the Puritan zealot, as often as they tried to emulate his moral sincerity. The problem of apprehending the personae of Renaissance satire, at any rate, consists in determining the precise proportions in which these precedents mingle in individual satirists. What is more, in a satirist as ambitious as John Marston, it consists in determining how these precedents mingle with at least one other that has not been sufficiently noticed, that of the Stoic teacher-philosopher as met in Epictetus and others.

In general, the fusion of these strains in Marston's verse satires produced a speaker who is by turns haughty and exclusive, furious to the point of hysteria, amused in the manner of Democritus, grimly hardened to the task of whipping and flaying, and then serious with the earnestness of a dedicated healer of souls. It is useful to think of this persona as a cartoonlike extension of Marston the man, culminating at the outer extremity in the satyr's mask. It is in this mask, of course, that we meet the savage indignation and rude accents of outrage—those features of the persona that are most clearly matters of artifice. At the other extreme, in the voice of the Stoic teacher-philosopher, we meet a voice apparently indistinguishable from Marston's own. For the sake of clarity these multiple attitudes might be seen as parts of a process of extension and recession. At moments Marston speaks noisily through the personality of the mask; at others he retreats along the line of extension to speak much as he would in his own person. Once we grant his right as a poet to move back and forth in this way, to complicate his point of view by this device, we shall have no trouble, I think, with the plural attitudes worked with. Each is perfectly consistent with something that Marston the young poet as satirist was trying to do. Despite the presence of artifice, moreover, each is an integral part of Marston's serio-comic view of the world.

Marston runs the gamut of these attitudes with an ease that has often prompted his critics to accuse him of insincerity. But his shifts are perfectly clear once we recognize that they are shifts. In Certain Satires, which, as we shall see, is conceived structurally to deepen progressively in seriousness, he moves gradually from the irritated but rather jaunty sophisticate who twice invokes Democritus, the laughing philosopher, in Satire I to the raging satirist of Satire III:

Now, Grim Reproof, swell in my rough-hued rhyme,
That thou mayst vex the guilty of our time.
[11. 1-2]

For the most part he holds to this exasperation through Satires IV and V to relinquish it toward the end of V for a tone more suitable to the name "Epictetus," with which he signs the work.

In The Scourge of Villainy his shifts are more numerous and complex, but also clear. The prefatory pieces abound in the haughty exclusiveness of the fashionable poets: the speaker is disdainful of detractors, grudging to expose "to their all-tainting breath, / The issue of his brain," yet confident that however little he is understood by his average reader, he will be understood and appreciated by the "diviner wits," those "free-born minds no kennel-thought controlls." There is little beyond a certain exaggeration to distinguish this voice from Marston's own.

But the transition marked at the beginning of "Proemium in Librum Primum" is perfectly clear: when he opens with

I bear the scourge of just Rhamnusia,
Lashing the lewdness of Britannia,

he has patently assumed the satyr's mask. Here we meet all the notorious scorn, contempt, and abhorrence. The poet leaves his ivory tower to scourge the infected multitude because nothing short of scourging—and not very dignified scourging at that—will suffice. Marston's most extreme cultivation of this attitude follows immediately in the tortured obscurity of Satire I. But he retreats slightly from this extreme in Satire II (he had said in the prefatory letter that the harshness and obscurity of Satire I were excessive), where he adopts the tone that dominates the work.

I cannot hold, I cannot, I endure … :
Let custards quake, my rage must freely run.
…
My soul is vex'd; what power will resist,
Or dares to stop a sharp-fang'd satirist?
[11. 1-8]

…..

Who would not shake a satire's knotty rod,
When to defile the sacred seat of God
Is but accounted gentlemen's disport?
[11. 38-40]

…..

Who can abstain? What modest brain can hold,
But he must make his shame-faced muse a scold?
[11. 142-143]

He departs from this outrage frequently in the poems that follow: toward the end of Satire IV, for example, where as teacher-philosopher he argues abstract matters of ethical theory; in the "Proemium in Librum Secundum" and "Ad rhythmum," where as fashionable poet-satirist he pronounces on matters of form; or at the beginning of the last satire, where he explicitly bids Grim Reproof to sleep and invokes "sporting merriment." And his departures are sometimes sudden and brief, as, for example, in Satire VIII, where he punctuates passages of denunciation with abstract reflections on sensuality. But however numerous andabruptly introduced, his shifts are always clear, if you are ready for them; indeed, sometimes ("I am too mild. Reach me my scourge again." IX, 364) they are explicit.

Taken together, these attitudes constitute Marston's satiric persona, surely his central device for controlling and directing thought and feeling in the satires. It is a persona quite distinct from Hall's, or Donne's, or even Guilpin's, whose most resembles it. Yet it is only one of several important features of Marston's satires that set them off from his contemporaries'; and it is only a symptom of the wider diversity to be met in the genre.

For the present purpose Marston's distinctness among the Renaissance satirists can be adequately illustrated by comparing him with that contemporary with whom he most frequently crossed swords, Joseph Hall. Both began writing verse satire at roughly the same time (Hall preceded Marston by about a year), and the obvious similarities in their work need hardly be reaffirmed. Despite their similarities and the common assumptions about satire that these similarities reflect, however, they were by no means agreed on all matters. They did not agree, for example, and there was no general agreement, about the precise position of satire in the hierarchy of genres. Sidney had given it a medial position, above "Iambic" and "Comic," but Puttenham had put it at the bottom, below the pastoral. Marston claimed a high place for it, while Hall consistently referred to it as "lowly."

Fortunately, Hall was fairly outspoken about his views. In addition to his random remarks about satire in the Virgidemiarum, he dealt with it at some length in "A Postscript to the Reader," appended to the sixth book. In general, he accepted the stock assumptions about satire's harshness and obscurity. He described the satirist as a porcupine

That shoots sharpe quils out in each angry line,
And wounds the blushing cheeke, and fiery eye,
Of him that heares, and readeth guiltily.

And in the "Postscript" he described satire as "both hard of conceipt, and harsh of stile." But even while recognizing harshness and obscurity as qualities characteristic of satire, he did so with serious reservations. For one thing he suggests at some points that surface roughness was not accidental in authentic satiric utterance. He was nowhere perfectly clear on the point; but in the Prologue of Book III, where he summarized the complaints alreadymade about his satires (apparently circulated in manuscript), he implies that, theoretically, harshness and obscurity should be expressive of "gall," a term that in this context seems to mean angry contempt. He then goes on in the same passage, however, to admit that, whatever their theoretical functions, he was unable to achieve these qualities in his satires:

Some say my Satyrs over-loosely flow,
Nor hide their gall inough from open show:
Not ridle-like, obscuring their intent:
But packe-staffe plaine uttring what thing they ment:
Contrarie to the Roman ancients,
Whose wordes were short, & darkesome was their sence;
Who reads one line of their harsh poesies,
Thrise must he take his winde, & breath him thrise.
My muse would follow them that have forgone,
But cannot with an English pineon.

Both this passage and the "Postscript" show that Hall recognized a true satiric style and admired it but that he felt it irretrievably lost to English writers. Although he tried to imitate it, he openly admitted that his was for the most part a "quiet stile." His fullest discussion of this loss occurs in the "Postscript," where, after introducing his subject with the haughty superiority typical of the fashionable poets, he discursively assembled three reasons for the loss: the ignorance of the age, the age's preference for musical verse, and, most interesting of all, the unsuitability of English for imitating the effects achieved by the Latin satirists.

Marston's refusal to impose any such limitations on satire furnishes us with a valuable index to his behavior as a writer. In this genre, too, he apparently thought of himself as the orphan poet. Of course his feigned contempt for the persons and institutions satirized suggests that he was writing in the genre almost against his will. In the second of the prefatory pieces to The Scourge of Villainy, "In Lectores prorsus indignos," he scorned his public and recoiled from the hand-dirtying that comes from dealing with vice; and at the end of the book he committed it in a manner true to his Stoic convictions about worldly vanity to "Everlasting Oblivion." But these speeches are merely parts of the satiric pose; they tell us little about Marston's serious convictions about satire. The conclusion of "In Lectores" far more accurately represents his considered view of the genre. Here, after deciding to submit to the "dunghill pesants," the Castilios and theGnatos who would abuse his work, he dedicated it to the "diviner wits" who would understand and appreciate what he was about (11. 80-97). Here, as well as elsewhere, his premise is that satire is an important, though a difficult genre. Earlier in Certain Satires he had with assumed humility expressed a fear that he could not attain to the high estate of satirist:

O title, which my judgment doth adore!
But I, dull-sprited fat Boeotian boor,
Do far off honour that censorian seat.
[II, 3-5]

In The Scourge he was not only confident that he had attained to the role but also confident that he was taking the genre to new heights:

O how on tip-toes proudly mounts my muse!
Stalking a loftier gait than satires use.
Methinks some sacred rage warms all my veins,
Making my sprite mount up to higher strains
Than well beseems a rough-tongu'd satire's part.
[IX, 5-9]

As we shall see, this ambition is clearly traceable in the differences between Marston's satires and those of his contemporaries.

But Marston's differences with Hall did not end with the question of the dignity of the genre; he also took a slightly different view of the authentic satiric style. To begin with, Marston held reservations even more serious than Hall's about the popular assumptions concerning satire's harshness and obscurity. Although he frequently described his satires as "sharp-fang'd," "rude," and "rough-hew'd," and although he admitted in the letter prefatory to The Scourge that "there is a seemly decorum to be observed, and peculiar kind of speech for a satire's lips," he argued in the same letter that satire was not as harsh and obscure as his contemporaries claimed. Those who held that it was extremely harsh and obscure, he reasoned, had inferred these qualities from the ancient satirists whom, in fact, they were unable to read properly. For them, he added, he had written the "first satire," "in some places too obscure, in all places misliking me." The authentic satiric style, he apparently thought, was more moderate: "sharp-fang'd," "rude," and "rough-hew'd" to some extent, but not as harsh and obscure as Hall and the others contended. Moreover, atno point did Marston suggest that he felt, as Hall did, that English was unsuitable for the authentic satiric style in either his or Hall's conception of that style.

On the other hand, Marston seems to have shared Hall's view that the best satire should express its gall or angry contempt to a large extent through style, but he differed with him on the question of the extent to which satire should express contempt. Despite the apparent unfairness to Hall, Marston constantly accused him of devoting his satires exclusively to reailing. The following passage from "Reactio," an attack on Hall included in Certain Satires, offers a typical example of the accusation:

Speak, ye that never heard him ought but rail,
Do not his poems bear a glorious sail? …
Who cannot rail, and with a blasting breath
Scorch even the whitest lilies of the earth?
Who cannot stumble in a stuttering style,
And shallow heads with seeming shades beguile?

As his practice reveals, Marston was not content to restrict satire to railing, to derision, or even to reasoned criticism of a destructive sort. One of the specific means by which he sought to elevate the genre was by combining satire with fairly elaborate moral exhortation, and in this he is unique in the gallery of Renaissance satirists.

In view of the critical differences between Marston and Hall, therefore, it is not surprising that they engaged in a literary quarrel, especially since Marston seems to have been anxious to have a whipping boy. Actually, we have no assurance that either these differences or their critical differences concerning the literature of the past caused the quarrel. Ford Elmore Curtis [in "Life"] and Morse Allen [in The Satire of John Marston, 1920] have argued that they did. But other critics have argued for other causes, equally reasonable and equally conjectural. Arnold Davenport ["An Elizabethan Controversy: Harvey and Nashe," NQ, CLXXXII (1942)], for example, has tried not implausibly to link the quarrel with the earlier Harvey-Nashe controversy. And Arnold Stein has argued still more reasonably ["The Second English Satirist," MLR, XXXVIII (1943)] that the cause of the quarrel was probably a combination of causes. Marston probably resented, he contends, that Hall had published first and had achieved popularity before he had broken into print. Then, making the most of the disparity in their temperaments, he had exploited the possibilities for a quarrel, ifonly to have someone to disintegrate. Indeed, despite the contention of the older critics Grosart and Bullen that Hall fomented the quarrel by attacking the unprinted "Pygmalion's Image" in his Virgidemiarum, the one conclusion favored by the known facts is that the quarrel was extremely one-sided, most of the vituperation having come from Marston. As Curtis has pointed out, "there is in Hall no unmistakable reference to Marston." We have only the epigram that Hall supposedly "caused to be pasted to the latter page of every Pygmalion that came to the Stationers of Cambridge" and that Marston reprinted in "Satira Nova," the satire added to the second edition of The Scourge, to represent Hall's contribution to the quarrel; and even the epigram's authenticity has been questioned. Marston, on the other hand, twice attacked Hall at length in Certain Satires, devoting one whole satire of the five to the purpose, and then continued to attack him in The Scourge. In other words, he behaved like a man prompted by resentment and jealousy and determined to make the most of an opportunity for a literary quarrel. All in all, the quarrel was probably not important enough to justify the attention that scholars have given to it; but it does dramatize Marston's distinctness as a young writer of satire. Certainly it had a place among his thoughts when he sat down to work on Certain Satires in 1598.

On March 30, 1598 the second part of Hall's Virgidemiarum, the three books of "Biting Satires," was entered in the Stationers' Register, the first three books of "Toothless Satires" having been entered in March of 1597. Since Marston referred to the "Biting Satires" in his Certain Satires, we may conclude that he did some of the work on Certain Satires between March of 1598 and May 27, 1598, when The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires was entered in the Stationers' Register. Of course he may have written large parts of Certain Satires before March of 1598 and may have simply added the sections alluding to the "Biting Satires" after their appearance. But if we take March 30, 1598 as the date after which Marston did at least some of the work on Certain Satires and take September 8, 1598, the date on which The Scourge was entered, as a terminal date, we must conclude it likely that Marston did most of his work in verse satire, perhaps all of it (excepting the satire added to the second edition of The Scourge in 1599) during the five months between the end of March and the beginning of September. This work includes the ten satires from the first edition of The Scourge and part, if not all, of the five satires of Certain Satires. In all, this work runs to more than 2,600 lines.

In view of the probable volume of Marston's work during this period, the care and seriousness with which he executed it are significant. At first glance the contents and organization of The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image and Certain Satires suggest that the volume was assembled hastily. Not only is "Pygmalion's Image" different in genre and style from the satires, but the satires themselves do not appear to cohere as a unit beyond the first three. These three satires trace an unmistakable line of development, beginning with the follies described in the epigraph, Quaedam videntur, et non sunt ("Certain things seem to be but are not"), continuing with the more serious offenses of Quaedam sunt, et non videntur ("Certain things are but do not seem to be"), and concluding with the vices of Quaedam et sunt, et videntur ("Certain things both are and seem to be"). Actually, the distinctions declared by these epigraphs are little more than quibbles, though the poems gradually deepen in tone as the speaker works himself into the role of the raging satirist. The fourth poem, however, the "Reactio," is a personal attack on Hall that is only vaguely relevant to the first three; and the final poem, Parva magna, magna nulla ("Petty things are great, great things are nothing"), is hardly a satire at all. It is, instead, a didactic poem in which the thesis set forth in its title is expounded through illustrations from classical story. This heterogeneity has prompted critics to conclude that Marston threw together what he had on hand for the purpose of hurrying into print. The point cannot be settled, of course, with any finality. To the extent that "Pygmalion's Image" and the satires of Certain Satires are dissimilar works, their dissimilarity can be used to support the claim. But the claim accounts for almost nothing; if a more compelling explanation of the structure of Certain Satires can be found, it must take precedence.

Certain features of the structure of Certain Satires suggest that it is neither simple nor carelessly planned. For one thing, the fact that the component poems are different in kind does not necessarily mean that the work lacks design. On the surface, it consists of three easily recognizable types of poems: Satires I through III are general satires; "Reactio" is a personal satire; and the last poem is a didactic poem. As we shall see, these types correspond precisely to the types constituting The Scourge. If by comparing Certain Satires and The Scourge we can infer good reasons for the specific placement of these poems within them, perhaps we shall discern a structural design where none has been suspected.

The Scourge consists of ten satires (eleven in the edition of 1599) and opens with a panoramic survey of satiric types like those found in Juvenal, Satire I, and in Donne, Satire I. This first poem is designed to illustrate its motto Fronti nulla fides ("There is no trusting to appearances"). Rapidly the poet's wrath mounts until he rejects philosophy, promises to tell the whole truth, and protests that humor is now impossible. In Satire II his theme is again the whole of society, but this time he surveys the subjects available to satire, illustrating the motto Difficile est Satyram non scribere ("It is hard not to write satire"). And in Satire III he completes his justification for writing satire by again surveying the satiric types to support the implication of the motto Redde, age, quae deinceps risisti ("Come tell me what did you laugh at next"), that the state of society is no laughing matter. Satire IV, Cras ("Tomorrow"), which completes the first of the three books, advances the moral intention of the work by documenting through exempla the thesis stated at the end of the straightforward harangue of the latter half of the satire, that tomorrow is too late to reform.

The remaining satires in The Scourge, excluding Satire VI, "Satira Nova," which was added in 1599, and Satire XI, which is another panoramic survey of types calculated to parallel Satire I, represent fuller developments of the major vices treated in the surveys of I, II, III. Satire V, Totum in Toto ("All in All"), illustrates the thesis that villainy dominates everything while virtue counts for nothing. Satire VII, "A Cynic Satire," answers the opening cry, "A man, a man, a kingdom for a man," by showing that there is none, that man has lost his distinguishing feature, reason. Satire VIII, Inamorato Curio, first illustrates through the usual exempla the descent of man to sensuality, then in straight exposition describes the loss of reason to sensuality, closing with an appeal to Synderesis, the spark of divinity and reason that once united man with the godhead. And Satire IX, "A Toy to mock an ape indeed," documents the implied thesis that society is a collection of foolish imitators or apes. Satire XI (Satire X in the original) completes the circle and the scourge by summarizing the wickedness of the age in a survey like that of Satire I and by closing on an appeal to young men to rejuvenate their souls, to recall reason, and to recover Synderesis.

Only Satire VI, Hem Nosti 'n ("Ha! Do you know me?"), and "Satira Nova," both of which are personal satires like the "Reactio" of Certain Satires, seem to depart from this scheme of combining systematic scourging with moral exhortation; but even they, perhaps, were once integral in a way that modern readers finddifficult to appreciate. Although in Satire VI the poet turns momentarily to personal injustices, a subject only loosely related to the central concern of the work, its placement at the mid-point in the discourse suggests that it was probably not just an extra poem that somehow had to be worked in but more likely a functional part.

Of all the possible functional parts defined by Renaissance rhetoricians, Satire VI most clearly resembles the structural digression. Quintilian, the source of so much critical theory at this time, had maintained "that this sort of excursion may be advantageously introduced, not only after the statement of the case, but after the different questions in it, all together or sometimes severally, when the speech is by such means greatly set off and embellished; providing that the dissertation aptly follows and adheres to what precedes, and is not forced in like a wedge, separating what was naturally united." In The Foundation of Rhetoric (1563) Richard Rainolde incorporated this principle into his discussion of the oration called a "Commonplace," an oration that, with its purpose to exasperate the hearers against the accused and its characteristic "exaggeracion of reason," is not unlike a Renaissance satire. Rainolde's analysis of the twelve parts of this oration designated part seven as the digression. In The Garden of Eloquence (1577) Henry Peacham repeated Quintilian: "The digressyon oughte alwayes to pertayne and agree to those matters that wee handle, and not to be straunge or farre distaunte from the purpose, also we muste haue a perfecte waye prouyded aforehande, that we maye goe forth aptelye, and making no longe taryaunce out, retourne in agayne cunninglye." And in 1589 Puttenham confirmed that "it is wisdome for a perswader to tarrie conveniently and make his aboad as long as he may without tediousnes to the hearer." Despite the inherent imprecision of this device, it is not improbable that Marston had it in mind here. Clearly Satire VI deals with a subject on which he could "tarrie without tediousnes" and yet which is a sufficiently relevant "excursion" to cohere to what precedes and what follows. And although no such claims of calculation can be made for the "Satira Nova," since when added in 1599 it seems to have been an afterthought, even this addition was not merely tacked on. Instead, it was placed before Satire XI and, according to the technique usual for digressions, at a convenient distance from Satire VI.

If we can assume, then, that Satire VI and, later, the "Satira Nova" were calculated digressions, the structure of The Scourge becomes clear. The constituent poems divide themselves into three sustained attacks, culminating in didactic passages at the end of Satires IV, VIII, and XI. The first of the attacks, from I to III, is general, taking a panoramic view of society and its evils; the second, from V (omitting VI, a digression) to VIII, is more specific, dealing with the weightiest evils; and the third, from IX (omitting the "Satira Nova," another digression) to XI, is again general.

Moreover, if we go back to Certain Satires and assume that the "Reactio" was designed as a digression there, we find that a similar pattern asserts itself: the three satires represent the attack, "Reactio" the digression, and the final poem the didactic peroration. It is clear that these patterns do not perfectly correspond, and obviously they leave much to explain about these poems. But their outlines are sufficiently clear to indicate what Marston was about and to identify one of the ways in which he attempted to vest satire with what he felt to be its appropriate dignity. As satiric structures these poems were unique in his day.

In outline Marston's verse satires established the structural pattern that he was to experiment with in all his subsequent work in the satiric mode. In the main these poems are fashioned to arouse anger, a sense of incongruity, disproportion, and deformity, and a fear of moral chaos—or feelings that I shall designate collectively by the term "moral distress." The pattern of attack and exposure followed by reflection and moral exhortation traces a movement from moral distress to righteous contempt and resolution. Here this movement is rough-hewn and relatively simple, and the passages of reflection and moral exhortation do not so much purge or resolve the feelings of moral distress as direct them to righteous indignation. But Marston apparently saw more in this structural pattern than at first glance meets the eye. In his plays he continued to experiment with it, polishing and enriching it as he acquired skill and sophistication, until in his best plays he achieved with a modified version of it a satiric expression that is impressive by any standards.

But Marston's performance in the verse satires and its relevance to his later work can be traced in even greater detail in the techniques that operate within the structural frames of these works. Like everyone else, Marston reveals himself in little as well as in important things. And in matters of artistic method, frequently the little things tell us as much as the important ones can of the artist that is to be.

The verbal style of the verse satires is, of course, as prominent as the satiric persona. In fact, so intricately are the two related that it is difficult not to see the style as a consequence of the persona's shifting moods. Yet when Marston talked about style, he restricted his remarks entirely—as did his fellow-satirists—to the harshness and obscurity of his persona's most violent speeches; he had nothing to say directly about the style of his philosophic passages. Since recent criticism has done the same, it is necessary, accordingly, to recall that the speaker in the satires is not always violent and that the language is not always harsh and obscure. It is important to recall this, not so that we may argue, finally, the presence of several styles in the satires, but so that we may recognize the considerable range of the style that at one extreme is conspicuously harsh and obscure.

In any of its modulations Marston's verbal style is well calculated to remind us that he was one of a group of young poets in revolt against the sweet, musical, but, in their opinion, vapid poetry of an older generation. Morris Croll has written extensively of this revolt in prose writing to show how its basic intellectual impulse to break out of tradition expressed itself in stylistic departures from the Ciceronian elaborateness so emphatically held a deterrent to thought. In poetry as in prose its most common form is characterized by a striking concentration of language, by statements packed with action and meaning, by the "strong lines" and the masculinity of which Thomas Carew was so appreciative in his poem on Donne. It was a style that stressed, as Bacon put it, matter over copie and that demanded intelligence and cultivation in its readers. Of it Chapman had said, "In my opinion, that which being with a little endevour serched, ads a kinde of maiestie to Poesie; is better then that which euery Cobler may sing to his patch." It is this common form of the style that we meet when Marston's persona is, momentarily, a fashionable young poet or a teacher-philosopher, a style not so harsh and obscure as concentrated, tight, and heavily accented. This example from "Cras" is typical:

If not today (quoth that Nasonian),
Much less to-morrow. "Yes," saith Fabian,
"For ingrain'd habits, dyed with often dips,
Are not so soon discolourèd. Young slips,
New set, are easily mov'd and pluck'd away;
But elder roots clip faster in the clay."
[The Scourge of Villainy, IV, 93-98]

In its extreme form (and satire provided the occasion for that extreme) it is a style that would be called harsh and obscure by any standard. Marston cultivated these qualities in a number of ways. To produce harshness he used long compound nouns, abrupt phrases, catalogues of epithets, elisions, combinations of plosive consonants, and extreme dislocations in the metric pattern. These techniques serve chiefly to pile up accented syllables and juxtapose tortuous combinations of sound. To blur the dramatic surface and the lines of exposition in such a way that they tend to obscurity, he frequently suppressed transitions, shifted from one speaker to another without clearly designating the shift, and used obscure mythological allusions, archaisms, and technical expressions borrowed from alchemy, casuistry, and scholasticism. Of course his conversational idiom justified in part his inconclusiveness and abruptness; but his apparent aim was not so much realism as a style expressive of "gall" and appropriate to the satiric persona at his most violent.

This is the style most widely met in the verse satires. An extreme example of it can be found in The Scourge in Satire I, the satire that Marston admittedly wrote to satisfy those of his readers who thought that satire should be very harsh and obscure:

Marry, God forefend! Martius swears he'll stab:
Phrygio, fear not, thou art no lying drab.
What though dagger-hack'd mouths of his blade swears
It slew as many as figures of years
Aquafortis eat in't, or as many more
As methodist Musus kill'd with hellebore
In autumn last; yet he bears that male lie
With as smooth calm as Mocho rivalry.
[11, 1-8]

But an example more typical of Marston's style throughout the satires can be chosen at random from the other poems. Satire VII, for example, begins

A man, a man, a kingdom for a man!
Why, how now, currish, and Athenian?
Thou Cynic dog, see'st not the streets do swarm
With troops of men? No, no: for Circe's charm
Hath turn'd them all to swine. I never shall
Think those same Samian saws authentical:
But rather, I dare swear, the souls of swine
Do live in men. For that same radiant shine—
That lustre wherewith Nature's nature decked
Our intellectual part—that gloss is soiled

With staining spots of vile impiety,
And muddy dirt of sensuality.
These are no men, but apparitions
Ignes fatui, glowworms, fictions,
Meteors, rats of Nilus, fantasies,
Colosses, pictures, shades, resemblances.
[11. 1-16]

This passage offers a typical expression of the vexation and contempt at the heart of Marston's style. It illustrates how his indignation, however clearly stated, is also implied in the peculiar contortions and exertions of his language. It is this inner animosity that ultimately gives Marston's style at its best its undeniable authority.

To achieve packed, tightly knotted lines capable of ranging from cacophonous snarling to thundering argument he used even the more conventional elements of his verse in an unconventional way. Like his colleagues, he was suspicious of rhyme, if only because intricate rhyme schemes had been so popular with his predecessors. In "Ad rhythmum," a poem preceding Book II of The Scourge, he invites it to take a part in his poem, then characteristically threatens to expel it if it hampers his expression, for, as he says, "know my liberty / Scorns rhyming laws." His use of the decasyllabic couplet, accordingly, is distinctly free. Most of his lines are rhymed; some of them are not; and some of them achieve slightly discordant effects through consonantal or approximate vowel rhymes. His couplets, moreover, are not the basic units of his discourse. They are usually open couplets, at any point in which he begins and ends statements that often run on for several lines. It is not strange, then, that Marston's use of the couplet does not approach in complexity, polish, and subtlety the use to which Dryden and Pope later put it. His aim, clearly, was to sing a very different song. Nor is it strange, on the other hand, that he chose the decasyllabic couplet for his verse satires: even by his time it was a standard feature of satire. Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Lodge, and Hall had used it before him.

In other respects, too, the originality of Marston's technical performance is sometimes difficult to pin down: frequently it consists in an innovative use of techniques with some kind of precedent in earlier satirists; sometimes it consists in a distinctly new technical strategy. Perhaps no feature of thesatires tells us more about this originality than his aim to exalt the genre and the battery of devices by which he sought to do so. Before him, for example, Donne and Hall had been content to unify their individual satires by organizing them according to a single subject. Marston went after a much tighter unity by organizing each poem in terms of a controlling thesis. Usually, he stated or implied his thesis in the epigraph. Such, for example, is clearly true of The Scourge, Satire I, where the thesis, Fronti nulla fides, is stated, and equally true of Satire III, where the thesis is implied in the epigraph Redde, age, quae deinceps risisti. But often, even after he had introduced the thesis in the epigraph, he restated it at some point in the poem, as he does, for example, in Satire V, Totum in Toto, when he says, "Well plainly thus, Sleight, Force, are mighty things, / From which, much, (if not most) earths glory springs." And when he did not state or imply the thesis in the epigraph, he usually stated it within the poem. Among his satires, only the personal satires and Satire XI depart from the rule of organization by thesis. The material treated in the personal satires was obviously unsuited to such a method of organization, and the function of Satire XI as the concluding poem of the work, serving to draw together its separate strands, favored a unity of another kind.

The techniques by which Marston illustrated these theses, on the other hand, usually had precedents in the work of Gascoigne, Donne, Lodge, and Hall, and his originality consisted in combining them in satires governed by theses and in using them far more extensively than they had been used by his predecessors. Of all the satires written at the end of the sixteenth century, Marston's are easily the most dramatic, and much of their drama and vitality is traceable to his methods of illustrating a thesis through character sketches and exempla.

The more important of these two techniques is that of using character sketches to illustrate the thesis. In its simplest form this did not involve character sketches of any length: frequently he simply referred briefly, as Hall had done, to such known character types as Roscius or Grillus. Sometimes, on the other hand, he followed the example of his predecessors by caricaturing in a few quick strokes types like Sylenus, the old lecher who whispers he'll reform tomorrow (The Scourge of Villainy, IV, 33-38). The satires are peopled with such figures, many of them merely names with historical associations, many of them crudely drawn monstrosities. No doubt much of the difficulty that modern readers have with Marston results from their inability to assimilate them quickly.

In its more elaborate form this method of illustrating a thesis involved character sketches like those of the epigrammatists—sketches of considerable complexity. These sketches vary in manner of treatment: sometimes the characters are drawn in one fairly long passage; sometimes they are drawn bit by bit as they dart in and out of the poem. Martia, for example, the fashionable lady who wears a mask, a painted face, and a loose gown, who rides in a coach with a coat of arms, and who affects an angelic look, but who is no more than clothes and simpering affectation, is fully drawn in Satire VII (SV, 160-179). Martius, the man of war, on the other hand, accumulates characteristics with each appearance in the work. In Satire I (SV, 1-3) we learn that he is always threatening people and that he has a hacked sword attesting to many battles. In Satire IV (SV, 2-8) we learn that he steals from his soldiers' pay and keeps a prostitute in Whitefriars. And in Satire XI (SV, 52-73) we learn that he speaks constantly in the idiom of fencing, even when he is seducing his reluctant sweethearts. In addition to Martia and Martius, there are Castilio the courtier, Tubrio the braggart, Curio the dancing page, Luxurio the sensualist, and Mecho the cuckold, not including the various characters playing the roles of the grave official, the lecherous wife, the Puritan, the debauchee, and the amorist. Taken together, they constitute the dramatis personae dominating the foreground of the satirist's created world and offering him the most conspicuous targets for his criticism.

It is this cast of satiric types, more than any other single feature of the satires, that vests the poems with their dramatic vitality. Marston's cast of satiric types is not just larger than those of his contemporaries; he has moved the types through the satires with narrative and semidramatic techniques that do much to animate them. Anticipating in many ways his later practice in the drama, he frequently employed the frame device of observing the types in action from some undefined point of vantage. Thus situated, the satirist shouts to them, "Come, Briscus, by the soul of compliment" (Certaine Satyres, I, 19), or talks to them as he talks to Tubrio in Satire I (Certaine Satyres) when Tubrio lies to him about just having come from the wars in the Netherlands, when actually he has just come from a brothel. Frequently, too, he used the device of observing the types and talking them over with Lynceus, the keensighted Argonaut, or one of his other confidants. Indeed, he even gave speeches to Lynceus and to the satiric types from time to time. The primary effect of all this interplay among characters is to animate poems, otherwise fairly strictly controlled by a thesis, with energy and movement rare in the satires of Marston's time.

Although less important than his use of satiric types, Marston's use of exempla to illustrate his theses is also symptomatic of the vitality of his satires. For the most part he drew the exempla from contemporary life, using such tales as his visit to the rooms of "inamorato Lucian" (Certaine Satyres, III, 51-74), the heartsick sonneteer, or his account of the backsliding of Luscus (SV, III, 34-52), the debauchee who has forsaken whores at his father's request but taken a Ganymede. But in Satire V (Certaine Satyres,) as well as elsewhere, he drew exempla from classical story. In Satire V (Certaine Satyres) he illustrated the chaos of his age in a series of pictures reflecting the chaos on Olympus. Like the satiric types, these vignettes serve to enliven the discourse. Viewed more generally, they exemplify the purpose Marston never abandoned of integrating drama with didacticism, the texture of experience with reflection.

All in all, Marston's efforts in the verse satires are most profitably seen in the context of an almost pretentious aim to elevate and dignify this "new" genre. His multifaceted persona, his chameleon-like language, his battery of devices for exposing and ridiculing deformity, and his careful articulation of a constructive attitude toward it—all this is subsumed by the purpose of setting forth what Marston believed to be a mature response to the contemporary world. This response is extremely complex, as we shall see when Marston has improved on his means of communicating it. But even here, despite a strikingly roughhewn quality, we must conclude that he knew what he was about. The pieces fit, though they may rattle a bit: the parts cohere, though the coherence is undeniably difficult to grasp and difficult to hold.

At the center of this coherence, of course, is the constructive attitude so frequently developed explicitly in passages of straightforward exposition. Here Marston's ambition is most in evidence. Clearly, he wanted to combine the rigors of satire with the inspiration of moral philosophy, to balance the storm and stress of his destructive criticism with a sane view of it all. To do this, he occasionally modulated his voice from the savage accents permitted by the satyr's mask to the calmer tones of the teacher-philosopher. In The Scourge he interrupted the flow of invective in this fashion at three points: in the latter half of Satire IV and at the end of Satires VIII and XI. At such times he is in every respect the moral philosopher, if a rather impatient one: he cites authorities, he refutes them, and he advances his own views. And, at the same time, he maintains the dominant dramatic character of the work by permitting his opponents to speak for themselves and by refuting them as if they were standing before-him.

Curiously enough, he had a recent precedent for this didacticism in Lodge, who in Satire III of A Fig for Momus discoursed at length on the example that fathers should set for their sons. But where Lodge's plea is practical, Marston's is rigorously theoretical; and the difference is significant. Marston's preference for theoretical argument is perfectly consistent with his view of the exalted function of the satirist. His purpose in all his work in satire was not simply to arouse to action but to represent fully what he and his admirers considered a mature, sophisticated attitude toward their world, an attitude typified by its satirical perspective on the world yet based on a solid theoretical foundation.

It is this purpose, finally, that explains the greater impressiveness of his literary task over those set by his fellow satirists. Literary causes alone cannot give an adequate picture of it. However necessary a study of precedents, decorums, and stylistic debts, such study can only illuminate aspects of this work; it cannot illuminate its coherence. In the same way, the combined roles of orphan poet and sharp-fanged satirist cannot explain all the activity of Marston as satirist. To do justice to the total role he was playing, we must now recognize that these poems, as well as the plays written later, were profoundly influenced by his philosophical convictions. The poems and plays as expressions of a complex way of confronting the world of his time cannot be grasped until we understand his personal version of Neo-Stoicism and its place in the total picture.