John Marston

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John Marston-Thomas Dekker: Melodrama and Civic Comedy

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SOURCE: "John Marston-Thomas Dekker: Melodrama and Civic Comedy," in An Introduction to Stuart Drama, Oxford University Press, London, 1946, pp. 132-65.

[Here, Boas presents an overview of Marston's career, tracing changes in his style as it developed. He also declares that critical opinions have changed in Marston scholarship.]

… [With] John Marston, recent critical investigation has given a more generous estimate than has been traditional of his contribution to English drama. It has been increasingly realized that Ben Jonson's burlesque of the more vulnerable features of Marston's style in his serious plays has led to an undue depreciation of his distinctive qualities. There has been more appreciative recognition of his aims as a dramatist and of their effect on his technique and his dialogue.

Documentary research has also added to our biographical knowledge. The discovery of the entry of the christening of John Marston on 7 October 1576 in the register of the church of St. Mary Magdalene, Wardington, Oxfordshire, has established the year and place of his birth. At the age of sixteen, in 1591, he entered Brazenose College, Oxford, and took his B.A. in February 1593/4. From 1594 to 1606 he was a member of the Middle Temple, but like many other residents in the Inns of Court he devoted himself to literature instead of law. In May 1598 he published an erotic poem, Pygmalion's Image, and a series of Satires, followed in September by another set of satires, The Scourge of Villany. In the epistle prefixed to this he attacked Jonson under the name of Torquatus and this was followed by 'the war of the theatres' between the playwrights.

It has to be borne in mind therefore that Marston had graduated as a satirist before coming out as a dramatist and that he retained the satirist's temper in his new sphere. He also retained his daring and extravagant vocabulary which might pass within the leaves of a book but which was a provocation to censorious ears when thundered from the stage. And it was unfortunate that Marston's first important venture as a playwright was not in the field of comedy but of tragedy, where his distinctive qualities were put to a severer test. The two-part play, published in 1602 as The History of Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge, was entered in the Stationers Register in October 1601. The mention in Part I, Act V. i. 8-10 of 'Anno Domini' 1599, and 'Aetatis suae 24' points to 1599 as the date of its composition, and Part II must have soon followed. Both were acted by the Children of Paul's.

No source of the play has been traced, but the introduction into the dialogue of Antonio and Mellida of a number of Italian verse lines suggests southern influence. In any case, the main plot and characterization are in conventional romantic vein. Antonio, son of Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, loves Mellida, daughter of Piero, Doge of Venice, who forbids their union, and favours the suit of Galeazto, son of the Duke of Florence. Venice has just overcome Genoa in a sea fight and Piero has set a price upon the heads of Antonio and his fugitive father. Antonio in the disguise of an Amazon comes to the Venetian Court and arranges with Mellida to fly with him. But the plan miscarries and Antonio has to seek out his father in exile. Thereupon Andrugio boldly determines to present himself at the Venetian Court with the words:

Then here, Piero, is Andrugio's head,
Royally casked in a helm of steel.
Give me thy love, and take it.

Piero at once joyfully assents, but immediately afterwards to sad music a coffin is borne in supposedly containing Antonio's 'breathless trunk'. Piero in his transformed mood offers his life and his daughter's love if they 'would but redeem one minute of his death'. Whereupon Antonio leaps from the coffin, crying, 'I rise from death that never liv'd till now.' This finale, crudely motived though it is, exemplifies Marston's instinct for 'good theatre', which is illustrated also in his detailed stage-directions showing close familiarity with the conditions of the Elizabethan playhouse. He availed himself to the full of the musical accomplishments of the Paul's company. And he recognized the value of a comic underplot even if his satire of some of the courtly affectations of speech and deportment has little to do with the action of the play. It is curious that with his sense of the oddities of Euphuism he should not have realized the incongruous effect on an audience of a number of his chosen epithets and phrases. 'Glibbery', mocked by Jonson, is applied in Antonio and Mellida to love, ice, and an urchin; a wave has a 'sliftered paunch'; earth is bidden to 'chawn' her breast; a suitor asks Mellida to 'erect your gracious symmetry', and a friend urges Antonio to

Buckle thy spirits up, put all thy wits
In wimble action.

And there are passages in the dialogue where Marston flounders in his attempt to realize the aspiration of his prologue:

O! that our Muse
Had those abstruse and sinewy faculties,
That with a strain of fresh invention
She might press out the rarity of art.

Yet at times he succeeds in hitting the mark. There is true nobility in the cry of Antonio's father, conquered, exiled, and bereft (III. i. 59-62):

There's nothing left
Unto Andrugio but Andrugio:
And that nor mischief, force, distress, nor hell-can take,
Fortune my fortunes, not my mind, shall shake.

And there is felicitous imagery in Antonio's utterance in his despair (III. ii. 203-7):

Each man takes hence life, but no man death:
He's a good fellow and keeps open house:
A thousand, thousand ways lead to his gate,
To his wide-mouth'd porch: when niggard life
Hath but one little, little wicket through.

Dramatic surprise was a favourite feature of Marston's technique, but he characteristically gave it undue licence when the gracious Piero at the close of Antonio and Mellida steps on the stage at the beginning of Antonio's Revenge, 'his arms bare, smear'd in blood, a poniard in one arm bloody'. In the interval between the two parts he has poisoned Andrugio and stabbed to death the courtier, Feliche, ostensibly caught in adultery with Mellida. With Marston's flair for piling up the agony the way is thus prepared for a double revenge action. Feliche's father, Pandulpho, is eager like Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy to avenge his son. Antonio, like Hamlet, to avenge his father. But the likeness to Hamlet goes much further and raises the problem of priority. The strong probability is that Marston knew either the pre-Shakespearean Hamlet or an early version (to which Gabriel Harvey seems to refer about 1598) of Shakespeare's play. He keeps the essential features of the Elsinore tragedy but varies the details. Piero reveals that he has poisoned Andrugio that he may marry his widow Maria. But instead of being like Gertrude his sister-in-law, she has been his early love who had preferred his rival to him. Mellida is prevented by her father (in spite of his consent at the end of Part I) from marrying Antonio, not, like Ophelia, because of difference in rank, but because Piero for political ends wishes her to be the bride of the heir to the duchy of Florence. Antonio assumes, like Hamlet, the pose of madness, but in addition he masquerades for a time in a professional fool's garb. His father's ghost appears to urge him to revenge, but it is in the church where he lies entombed not on the castle battlements. The ghost's opening words are in Marston's most incisive style and sum up the whole situation (III. i. 34-42)

Antonio, revenge!
I was impoison'd by Piero's hand:
Revenge my blood; take spirit, gentle boy;
Revenge my blood. Thy Mellida is chaste:
Only to frustrate thy pursuit in love,
Is blaz'd unchaste. Thy mother yields consent
To be his wife, and give his blood a son
That made her husbandless, and doth emplot
To make her sonless.

But with Marston's curious uncertainty of touch he follows this up with lines of overstrained and tasteless imagery:

Thou vigour of my youth, juice of my love,
Seize on revenge, grasp the stern bended front
Of frowning vengeance, with unpraized clutch,
Alarum Nemesis, rouse up thy blood!

It is this incontinence of speech and a corresponding exaggeration in action that hinder much of Marston's intended tragic effect. He alienates the sympathy due to Antonio for his father's murder and Mellida's death, on a false report of his suicide, by making him kill Piero's innocent child, Julio. But there is true pathos in the dialogue between Pandulpho, bearing with him the body of his murdered son, and Antonio in his despair (IV. v. 53-8):

Pan. I am the miserablest soul that breathes.
Ant. S'lid, sir, ye lie; by the heart of grief, thou liest.
I scorn't that any wretched should survive
Outmounting me in that superlative,
Most miserable, most unmatched in woe;
Who dare assume that but Antonio?

The final scene in which the avengers take advantage of the masque in which they are appearing to bring Piero to his doom, while Andrugio's ghost 'placed betwixt the music houses' gloats over the spectacle, is partly reminiscent of the close of The Spanish Tragedy, and doubtless shared a good deal of its popular appeal on the stage. But once again Marston overshoots his mark by a superfluous accumulation of horrific details.

After this tragic surfeit he turned to comedy, though of a bitterly satiric type. The Malcontent was published in three different editions by William Apsley in 1604. The two earlier spoke of it as by John Marston; the third title-page had 'Augmented by Marston. With the Additions played by the King's Majesty's servants. Written by John Webster'. The chief addition by Webster appears to have been the Induction introducing a number of the chief actors in the King's Company, including Burbage. Their frank talk makes it clear that the play had been written for the Children of the Queen's Revels acting at Blackfriars, but that as a retort to the Children's purloining of Jeronimo (probably the First Part) the King's men had adopted the play as their own. And as they could notlike the boys lengthen out the performance with a great deal of music they had found it necessary to have the dialogue supplemented.

It is plain also from the Induction that The Malcontent had given offence to some of its hearers. Sly, the actor, twice calls it 'a bitter play', and Burbage answers, 'Such vices as stand not accountable to law should be cured as men heal tetters by casting ink upon them'. And in his own epistle to the reader Marston says of his 'supposed tartness' that 'unto every worthy mind it will be approved so general and honest as may modestly pass with the freedom of a satire.' But satire and drama have different aims and limits which Marston here confuses, so that the contemporary criticism of the play seems not without justification to-day. Malevole, the malcontent, is the disguised former Duke of Genoa, Altofronto, who has been dispossessed by his successor, Pietro, supported by the Duke of Florence, whose daughter, Aurelia, he has married after imprisoning Altofronto's wife, Maria. As Malevole reminds his sole confidant, Celso, he had played into his supplanter's hands by abjuring all the usual maxims of policy (I. iv. 9-14):

I wanted those old instruments of state,
Dissemblance and suspect: I could not time it, Celso,


My throne stood like a point in midst of a circle,
To all of equal nearness, bore with none;
Rein'd all alike, so slept in fearless virtue,
Suspectless, too suspectless.

In these lines Marston shows again that he is master at times of clear and cogent expression. But when Malevole in his disguise as an observer of Court affairs begins to rail at all men and all things the unmeasured violence of his invective becomes fatiguing and goes far to defeat its own end. Pietro, not knowing who he is, says of him that

his highest delight is to procure others vexation, and therein he thinks he truly serves heaven; for 'tis his position, whosoever in this earth can be contented is a slave and damn'd; therefore does he afflict all in that to which they are most affected.

There is much indeed to move his indignation. Aurelia proves faithless to Pietro with two lovers, Ferneze and Mendoza. The latter has been chosen as his heir by Pietro, and to gain thethrone quickly he suborns Malevole to kill him while hunting. Malevole reveals the plot to Pietro, bids him assume the disguise of a hermit, and announce his own death. Thereupon Mendoza, saluted as Duke, banishes Aurelia, plans to set free and marry Maria, and proposes to Malevole and the 'Hermit' to make away with each other. They join against this new usurper and seize him during a masque which is to celebrate his enthronement. This recalls the close of Antonio's Revenge, but here the villain's life is spared, and Altofronto is restored to his wife and his crown.

In the working out of this complicated action Marston shows his theatrical skill and his capacity for exploiting the resources of his stage. These cannot make their full effect in print, and Marston was fully conscious of this when he lamented in this epistle to the reader: 'Only one thing afflicts me, to think that scenes invented merely to be spoken should be inforcively published to be read.'

By 1604 Marston had composed his quarrel with Jonson, to whom he dedicated The Malcontent in the most cordial terms. This reconciliation bore good fruit, for early in 1605 the two dramatists, together with Chapman, collaborated in one of the most attractive plays of the period, Eastward Ho, acted at the Blackfriars by the Children of the Queen's Revels and published by William Aspley. The comedy included satirical references in Act III. iii to the Scots, and in Act IV. i to the new king's lavish creation of knights. Marston and Chapman were arrested. Jonson, by his own account, joined them voluntarily in prison, from which the efforts of high-placed friends soon procured their release. The other two playwrights ascribed the offending passages to Marston, who had thus to suffer a sharper penalty than the censure provoked in some quarters by The Malcontent. Otherwise there is only internal evidence to suggest the conjectured distribution of the play between its three authors. Seldom has there been such successful fusion of the work of several hands. But it is the commonly accepted view that credit should be given to Marston

for the general conception of the main plot and for the introduction and development of the chief comic characters … Chapman was engaged mainly in the dramatization of the Italian tale which furnished the underplot, while Jonson, in addition no doubt to valuable advice as to the construction of the whole, did little more than revise and finish the work of his collaborators. [T. M Parrott, The Comedies of George Chapman]

An allusion in the prologue makes it clear that the authors of Eastward Ho had in mind Dekker and Webster's Westward Ho recently performed, and in their main plot they were in similar fashion presenting a picture of London city life. But they dealt with it in a different spirit and developed their theme on the lines of the prodigal-son story. Touchstone, the Cheapside goldsmith, with his pride in his craft and his rectitude and shrewdness, is a true civic worthy. He has one apprentice, Golding, of similar character to himself, while his fellow, Quicksilver, spends his time in idleness and debauchery, and has frequently on his lips notorious tags from popular plays that he has seen in the theatre. This pair are matched by Touchstone's two daughters. As he puts it (I. i. 79-83):

As I have two prentices, the one of a boundless prodigality, the other of a most hopeful industry, so have I only two daughters; the eldest of a proud ambition and nice wantonness, the other of a modest humility and comely soberness. The one must be ladyfied, forsooth, and be attired just to the courtcut and long tail.

This daughter, Gertrude, is about to marry a needy knight, Sir Petronel Flash, who is to fulfil her dream of rising into a new social level. As she tells her sister, Mildred, 'though my father be a low-capped tradesman, yet I must be a lady, my mother must call me madam'. Nor does her vulgar-minded mother make any demur to her declaration, 'I must be a lady to-morrow, and by your leave, mother (I speak it not without my duty, but only in the right of my husband), I must take place of you, mother.'

But Sir Petronel's only motive in marrying into the city is to get hold of Gertrude's inheritance to finance a voyage that he has planned to Virginia with a sea-captain, Seagull, and two other adventurers. And there blows for a few moments through this London play a breath from the New World when Seagull gives a fanciful account of the treasures waiting for them in the country of their quest. Sir Petronel intends to leave his bride behind, but to take with him the young wife of the old usurer Security. Here there is skilfully interwoven with the main action an underplot apparently based upon a story in the Novellino of the Italian Masuccio. Security is made an accomplice in his own dishonour, in the belief that the disguised woman who is brought by Quicksilver on board Petronel's ship is not his wife, Winifred, but the wife of his lawyer, Bramble. But the voyagers never get farther than the Thames, for in a fierce storm and with a drunken company their ship is wrecked off Cuckold's Haven. This episode, with the successive landing of all who have been aboard, is vividly portrayed with a masterly employment of the resources of the Blackfriars stage.

Sir Petronel and Quicksilver, after their rescue from the 'rude Thames', are arrested and charged by Touchstone, the one 'on suspicion of felony' and the other as 'being accessory in the receipt of my goods'. And the bitterest drop in their cup is that they have to appear before Golding, now married to Mildred, who has been elected to the civic office of alderman's deputy, and who after a stern examination sends them to the 'Counter' prison. The disillusioned Gertrude bewails that she has been made a lady by a knight 'which is now as good as no knight … and instead of land i' the country all my knight's living lies i' the Counter; there's his castle now'. She has to throw herself upon the charity of her despised sister, whose husband meanwhile comes to the relief of those whom he has sent to jail. By a stratagem he gets Touchstone to visit the Counter, where the hitherto inexorable goldsmith is so affected by the demonstrations of repentance by Quicksilver and Petronel that he forgives them their offences, and a general reconciliation takes place. When penning the realistic prison scenes in the last act the authors of Eastward Ho did not anticipate that they would so soon themselves, in Jonson's words, be 'committed to a vile prison' and have to be delivered by higher authorities than an alderman's deputy.

The Dutch Courtesan was entered in the Stationers' Register on 26 June 1605, and a quarto was published in the same year 'as it was played in the Blackfriars by the Children of her Majesty's Revels. Written by John Marston'. If it followed closely on Eastward Ho, the more genial tone derived from Marston's collaboration with his fellow playwrights was of short duration. For The Dutch Courtesan suffers from the intemperate and fatiguing violence of expression which is his besetting weakness. He claims that 'the difference betwixt the love of a courtesan and a wife is the full scope of the play', but to achieve this he wades through so much mud that we are inclined to apply to him words used by a character in the play: 'In very good truthness, you are the foulest-mouth'd, profane, railing brother, call a woman the most ungodly names'. The courtesan Franceschina is furious because young Freevill is breaking his connexion with her to marry 'a lawful love, my modest Beatrice'. But his place as the courtesan's lover is taken by his friend Malheureux who, hitherto an austere moralist, is inflamed by the sight of her beauty into delirious passion. Franceschina as theprice of her favours insists that Malheureux shall kill Freevill. All this is on conventional lines, but with his customary ingenuity and command of stage resources Marston so develops the plot that Malheureux, though he only pretends to murder his friend, is arrested, imprisoned, and condemned to execution, from which he is saved at the last moment when Freevill, who has been in hiding and disguised, reveals himself. These complications excite more interest than Freevill's courtship of the somewhat colourless Beatrice, who is eclipsed by her spritely sister, Crispinella, who has something in her akin to the other Beatrice of Much Ado about Nothing, but with a far freer tongue. When her sister cries, 'Fie! you speak too broad', she retorts in words which might serve as a justification for Marston's own extreme frankness: 'I consider nature without apparel, without disguising of custom or compliment; I give thoughts words, and words truth, and truth boldness.' How aptly here and elsewhere maxims of Montaigne are made to flow from Crispinella's lively lips!

But there is still a livelier figure in Cocledemoy, the 'knavishly witty companion' who is the centre of the underplot. Here we meet again with city tradesmen, though they make a poorer showing than in Eastward Ho. Cocledemoy, in a series of disguises, outwits and robs a vintner, Mulligrub, and his wife, and finally gets him arrested on a false charge of stealing his cloak by constables as muddle-headed as Dogberry and Verges. Mulligrub, like Malheureux, is led to execution and saved at the last moment, after he has forgiven Cocledemoy, by that worthy's disclosure of himself and confession that all that he has done has been 'for wit's sake'. The parallel entanglements and solutions of the serious and the comic plots are a striking piece of stage craft.

Parasitaster, or The Fawn entered in the Stationers' Register 12 March 1606, was published in two editions in that year, the second being 'corrected of many faults'. Acted first by the Children of the Queen's Revels and afterwards by those of Paul's, it reverted to the Italian background of The Malcontent and to the situation of a duke in disguise watching over the development of the action. But here the widowed Hercules, Duke of Ferrara, has a specific aim—to see how his son Tiberio progresses in the courtship of the Duke of Urbin's daughter, Dulcimel, on behalf of his father, who really wishes his cold-blooded son himself to become enamoured of her. And this is brought about by Dulcimel herself, who artfully makes her purblind father, in his own despite, the agent of her amorous advances to Tiberio and of a midnight marriage in her chamber.

Hercules, in his role of 'fawn' or parasite, makes less impression than Altofronto as the malcontent, and the group of foolish and dissolute courtiers do not arouse strong interest. But once again Marston shows his remarkable faculty of using the resources of a children's company to secure an effective ending to a play. Hercules devises in honour of the Duke of Urbin the sport of 'Cupid's Parliament', produced with dancing, music, and allegorical figures, in which offenders against the love-god's statutes are summoned to the bar, and each courtier in turn has to confess his guilt, and even the Duke himself is convicted.

On 17 March 1606, five days later than The Fawn, another play by Marston, Sophonisba, or The Wonder of Women, was entered in the Stationers' Register and published in the same year. With Sophonisba the dramatist breaks, in various ways, new ground. For the first time he draws his plot from classical history, probably using Appian's Roman History as his chief source. But, as he tells 'the general reader', he had not laboured

to tie myself to relate anything as an historian but to enlarge everything as a poet. To transcribe authors, quote authorities, and translate Latin prose orations into English blank verse, hath in this subject been the least aim of my studies.

Here, in spite of their recent collaboration, he seems to be hitting at Jonson, whose Sejanus had been published in the previous year. In any case, Marston's treatment of his classical theme is essentially different from Ben's neo-Senecan method. And it is equally remote from Shakespeare's transfiguring art which gives universal significance to the figures in his Roman plays. It has been truly said by the dramatist's latest editor [H. Harvey Wood, Plays of John Marston], that 'it looks forward to the heroic drama of the age of Dryden, and has more in common with All for Love than with any work of its own period'.

The tragic fortunes of Sophonisba, beautiful daughter of the Carthaginian general, Hasdrubal, provided Marston with a subject suitable to his spectacular stage-technique. Wedded to a Libyan king, Massinissa, she surrenders him on their wedding night to the call of Carthage (I. ii):

Soph. Go, best man,
And make me proud to be a soldier's wife
That values his renown above faint pleasures …
Mass. Wondrous creature, even fit for gods not men,
Nature made all the rest of thy fair sex
As weak essays, to make thee a pattern
Of what can be in woman.

There is a rival for her love in Syphax, another Libyan king, who has joined the Roman general, Scipio, in his campaign against Cathage. To detach him from this allegiance the Carthaginian Senate arranges to have Massinissa treacherously poisoned and his bride and kingdom bestowed upon Syphax. An honest patriot, Gelosso, reveals the plot to Massinissa, who now leagues himself with Scipio. Meanwhile Sophonisba has been sent to the palace of Syphax at Cirta, but she is deaf to his pleading and his threats, and in an ingeniously contrived scene escapes from his chamber through a cave to a forest, where she is followed and again seized by Syphax.

At this point (Act IV. i. 91 ff.) Marston had the unfortunate inspiration of introducing an episode suggested by the invocation to the witch Erictho in Lucan's De Bello Civili, Book VI. Syphax summons her to his aid, and she promises to bring Sophonisba to his bed, but herself assumes the loved one's shape to cheat Syphax. But even this unpleasant superfluous scene had its compensation for the Blackfriars audience and the reader of to-day. The stage-directions show how the musical resources of the boys' company were used to build up the scene. 'Infernal music plays softly whilst Erictho enters, and when she speaks, ceaseth'. A song, 'Hark, hark, now rise, infernal tones', is followed by a treble viol, a bass lute, &c., which 'play softly within the canopy', and after this there is another short song, when 'nuptial hymns enforcèd spirits sing'.

Massinissa defeats Syphax in single combat, but spares his life and hastens to Sophonisba. But Scipio orders him to give her up as 'a Roman prisoner to the Senate's doom. The Libyan king is torn between his love and his oath of allegiance to Rome. Again Sophonisba, as on their marriage night, proves herself to be the wonder of women (V. iii. 83 ff):

Soph. List to her in whose sole heart it rests
To keep thy faith upright.
Mass. Wilt thou be slaved?
Soph. No, free,
Mass. How then keep I my faith?
Soph. My death
Gives help to all. From Rome so rest we free;
So brought to Scipio, faith is kept in thee.

She drinks poisoned wine, and the play ends with the mournful solemnity of Massinissa presenting Sophonisba's body to the Roman general:

Look, Scipio, see what hard shift we make

To keep our vows. Here, take, I yield her thee.
And Sophonisba, I keep vow, thou'rt still free.

In the face of such a moving and finely wrought climax it is a perverse criticism that dismisses the whole play as 'second-rate in both design and execution'. A poetic dramatist of to-day is at any rate nearer the mark when he singles out Sophonisba as the best of Marston's plays. In dealing with his classical theme he has achieved a broad simplicity of plan and, except in the Erictho episode, he has restrained his impetuous torrent of speech within the bounds of pregnant and effective dialogue.

Sophonisba was probably Marston's last extant completed play. In June 1608 he was again in trouble with the government and was committed to Newgate. It has been conjectured that he was the author of a piece acted at the Blackfriars satirising the king's interest in Scottish mines, and known only through contemporary allusions. His imprisonment may have prevented his finishing The Insatiate Countess, published with his name in 1613, anonymously in 1616, and in 1631 in two issues, one of which assigned it to him and the other to William Barksteed. It was not included in the collected edition of his plays in 1633. If Marston had the chief hand in the play it was an astonishing recoil from the picture of the 'wonder of women' to that of the deliriously lustful Countess Isabella, whom he found in Painter's Palace of Pleasure. There is nothing in the treatment, except occasional poetic flashes, to make the theme more plausible or less unpleasant. And an equivocal underplot, also derived from Painter, though it has ingenious complications, is almost swamped in a deluge of gutter-snipe vocabulary.

No work could have been a less fitting prelude to Marston's ordination in 1609, and his presentation in 1616 to the living of Christchurch in Hampshire, which he resigned in 1631, three years before his death in London on 25 June 1634 and his burial in the Temple Church on the following day. There are few strangercontrasts in stage-history than between Marston's feverishly active decade of play-making and the obscurity of his quarter of a century as a parish priest.

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