In 1633, John Marston, an elderly retired clergyman, may well have felt that twenty-five years' dedication to God's ministry was poorly commemorated by the reissue of six plays of his young manhood, no matter how anxiously their editor proclaimed their moral virtue. Certainly, the plays in Works of John Marston were not the contribution by which Marston wished to be remembered, since he probably wanted little, if anything, to do with the theater. If he did so desire, his wish was frustrated, for his name was removed from the pages of the collection but not from the history of the theater in his era.

Had Marston, in his retirement, visited the theater, he would have glimpsed, even behind the polished surface of Caroline tragedy and tragicomedy, pale ghosts from his plays. The stage history of his plays between 1608 and 1642 belies, however, the extent of his historical dramatic influence. Only one performance of his plays—that of The Malcontent in 1635—is recorded; but our knowledge of the theatrical calendar of those years is fragmentary. Moreover, it is quite unlikely that Marston's distinctive voice was heard only once in over thirty years when its echoes could be heard so frequently in the plays of Webster, Tourneur, Fletcher, Ford, Middleton, Shirley, and others. Instead, the fact that the editor of the collection of 1633 thought it a worthwhile commercial project to reprint six of his plays is a testimony to their vitality; for, at that time, only Jonson and Shakespeare among Marston's old professional colleagues had had such collections of their works published. This factor is not an indication of Marston's place in seventeenth-century drama, but it is a seventeenth-century estimate of Marston's importance.

Force of circumstance made playwrights gregarious, socially and artistically, in Marston's day. They plied their trade in a hard market. Ideas, themes, situations, words, were not private properties: "However jealously individual plays might be guarded by companies, there was no property in the rapidly-developing dramatic art of the writers" [Wood, Plays of Marston]. One aspect of the War of the Theaters is of personal and commercial rivalries, of attack and counterattack; but another aspect is that the same playwrights who fought each other worked in ever-changing collaborations, wrote for different companies and different theaters, and applied what they learned in one place in another. "Both the untalented conventional writers and those with original creative giftsprofited from this situation. They learned from each other, adapting, imitating and absorbing each other's original achievements as they appeared. [Brian Gibbons, Jacobean City Comedy, 1968].

When Marston began writing plays, what he had read and what he had seen acted helped shape what he wrote. He had an educated Elizabethan's knowledge of the Classics: the story of Pigmalion's Image comes from Ovid; his satires prove his acquaintance with Juvenal, Persius, and Horace among the satirists and with Epictetus (who supplies him with mottoes for the first three of the Certaine Satyres), Aristotle, and Seneca among the philosophers. He would have read Plautus and Terence and have had some living knowledge of them because of the translation of their themes, characters, and situations into Elizabethan comedy.

How wide Marston's acquaintance with earlier English drama was, can only be surmised. His plays frequently reflect the form of the morality play, and he could have seen moral civic drama in Coventry, such as the last performance of the Corpus Christi Cycle there in 1579. He was not quite three years old then, but he was the age to be impressed, however, in 1584 and 1591 when the civic authorities at Coventry joined with the guilds and performed the extravagantly and extraordinarily expensively mounted play, The Destruction of Jerusalem. The Marston home faced onto Cross Cheaping, the central market and acting area in the city; and, as an important civic dignitary, John Marston, Sr. might have approved his son's watching an edifying play. Marston, between 1584 and 1592, would also have had opportunity, if not permission, to witness performances by fifty-two companies of touring players paid by the City Council for acting in Coventry.

At Oxford, he could also have seen plays in both Latin and English; but London afforded him the richest variety of plays to see and the most avid playgoers—as he notes in the most cheerful satire, "Humours," in The Scourge of Villanie:

Luscus what's playd to day? faith now I know
I set thy lips abroach, from whence doth flow
Naught but pure Juliat and Romio

…..

H'ath made a common-place booke out of plaies
And speakes in print, at least what ere he sayes
Is warranted by Curtaine plaudeties.

He writes, he railes, he jests, he courts, what not,
And all from out his huge long scraped stock
Of well penn'd playes.
(The Scourge of Villainy, 11.37-51)

Luscus is condemned for the use to which he puts his playgoing, not for frequenting the theaters. Luscus can only parrot what he sees and hears; Marston, however, who was as knowledgeable as Luscus about "what's playd today," had a professional playwright's "common-place booke," but he was no lazy copier. He took notes in order to alter what he witnessed, for what he borrowed he made his own.

He took note of Marlowe's ringing dramatic verse, which was an exciting break from the old-fashioned formal tragic speech. Marlowe's verse inspired many, but Marston is ready to mock its excesses (albeit kindly) in Antonio and Mellida (1.7)—a play whose two-part structure has its model in Marlowe's Tamburlaine. The brash yoking of tragedy and farce in Marlowe's Dr. Faustus was less distasteful to Elizabethan audiences at the Rose than to modern critics, and it struck a responsive chord in Marston's imagination. Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was extraordinarily popular and phrases from it quickly passed into the common mythology of the stage; a recent study lists fifty-nine plays between 1591 and 1638 that refer to Kyd's play. As for Marston, he refers directly to it in Antonio and Mellida and in The Malcontent (and it is also mentioned in Eastward Hoe and Satiromastix), but its influence as a shaper of revenge tragedy is most strongly felt in Antonio's Revenge … in which Marston's own reshaping of given material can be studied.

Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy provides a model for Marston for the court setting, the ruthless intrigues, the violence; Kyd's Hieronimo, the revenger who stood in general Elizabethan dramatic imagination as the great example of outraged fatherhood put in an impossible position, is the pattern for Andrugio in Antonio's Revenge. Hieronimo is the central figure, and it is essentially his tragedy that is presented. Andrugio is not the dominant figure in Marston's play; indeed, for a tragedy, it rather follows the pattern of a comedy and disperses its attention among several characters. It is less the story of Andrugio, or anyone else, than the story or depiction of court corruption and vice. Marston isless interested than Kyd in his narrative and in the opportunities that certain episodes offer for displaying conflicting attitudes and reactions. Revenge tragedy becomes the forum for debate on the themes and motives of the genre.

Whereas Kyd's framework is moral and presents implacable judges promising certain judgment about the issues in the play, Marston's framework is significantly theatrical and has actors sitting in judgment about the artifices of the theater. This concern causes the Induction to part 1 of Antonio and Mellida to cover some aspects of part 2 of Marston's play, but the discussion of acting and theatricality instituted in that Induction is intermittently carried on in the play (Piero's concern with his own feigning, Balurdo's trouble with his beard). Kyd accepts the genre of revenge tragedy and plays it to the hilt; Marston, characteristically, takes up revenge tragedy to discuss it: his play might almost have been called Antonio's Revenge Discussed. He both accepts and examines the themes and techniques of the genre; he also plays his revenge tragedy to the hilt, but pauses occasionally to remark about that fact.

Marston, who was familiar with Shakespeare's plays, referred to them frequently throughout his career. A Cynicke Satyre (SV, 7) begins with the paraphrase: "A man, a man, a kingdome for a man." Richard III was a favorite play, and Richard's ability to play many roles like a fine actor made him a partner to Piero, Altofronto, Cocledemoy, and Hercules in their various ways. Romeo and Juliet was another play Marston could not get out of his mind. Such is the strength and memorability of Shakespeare's characters that some of Marston's reflect them. Malevole smacks not only of Hamlet in his corrosive vein but also more than a little of the Thersites of Troilus and Cressida. Mamon, in Jacke Drum's Entertainment, occasionally recalls Shylock. The dull constabulary of The Dutch Curtezan comes from the same precinct station as Dogberry and Verges. In the outburst of satirical drama at the turn of the century, which both helped to start and fuel the quarrels which made up the War of the Theaters, the combatant writers—Marston, Jonson, Dekker, Middleton, Shakespeare, and others—were well aware of what each other was doing. What Marston saw and heard in Shakespeare's excursions in this vein (parts of Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, All's Well That Ends Well, and Measure for Measure) he had no occasion to forget or to ignore. Nonetheless, whatever such a character as Malevole may owe to others of his kind, he has, in the pattern of Marston's work, a perfectly adequate ancestry.

In Antonio's Revenge, the balance is tantalizingly suggested between Marston as taker and giver. The play owes much to Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy, but the general theme and a variety of situations and effects are closely connected with Hamlet. The similarities between the two plays seem too close to be merely coincidental: "Poyson the father, butcher the son, & marrie the mother: ha? Strotzo, to bed: snort in securest sleepe" (1.74). There are hardly any close verbal parallels, however, between the two; and Marston was fond of using the language of plays that he took as his models or as his inspiration. Both plays may be based on an earlier version of the same story—a well-known one in any case, probably the mysterious Ur-Hamlet. The similarity in situations between the two plays is, however, obvious; but Marston treats his material very much in his own characteristic manner; and, though at times the reactions of, for example, Antonio and Hamlet, are semblable, the impression given by Marston is not one of a writer who is working directly from Hamlet.

Janet Spens, in Shakespeare's Relation to Tradition, discusses the resemblances not only between Antonio's Revenge and Hamlet but between that play by Marston and Macbeth. Were Marston's play ever "acted in modern times, the likeness of its opening scenes (Act I., Scenes 1, 4, and 5) to those in Macbeth, Act II, could not have been overlooked. Piero's first entry, 'unbraced' and carrying in one hand a bloody dagger, in the other a torch, is very like the scene where Macbeth is on his way to the murder carrying a torch and a dagger…. Each has an attendant with him whom he dismisses, soliloquizing in something the same strain … we have stage situations which, if represented in dumb show, could not be distinguished. In each play a courtier enters announcing that he has found a Sovereign murdered. In both the only woman present faints, and is assisted out." The comparisons need not be pursued, but the visual impact of some of Marston's scenes may have remained with Shakespeare.

Whether Jonson learned anything from his sometime partner, friend, and disciple is another matter, but he certainly had things to teach his apt though independent pupil. It is to Marston's credit that he was willing to be a pupil. Perhaps he began learning from Jonson by noting the dangers of arrogantly lecturing an audience on their shortcomings (it was lesson that he had begun to study while still a verse satirist). The stage quarrel with Jonson must have forced Marston to study his rival's plays even more closely than he might naturally have done. He inevitably learned much about the art of comical satire from the exercise. From The Malcontent on, hisplays were more tightly plotted, his language was more controlled, and his themes more sharply argued than they had been earlier. Obviously, not all this growing mastery of the stage can be attributed to Jonson, but the purge that master applied was clearly more extensive than appeared in Poetaster and affected more than the wilder excrescences of Marston's vocabulary. Inevitably they fell to arguing again after The Malcontent had been dedicated to "his candid and heartfelt friend." But the last record of their "partnership" ought not to be Jonson's irascible criticisms and anecdotes that Drummond noted down in Scotland; rather it should be that, these sharp comments notwithstanding, a copy of Sheares's collection of Marston's plays was found to be in Jonson's library after his death in 1637. Marston wished to forget his theatrical past, but Jonson found it worthy of notice.

Clear debts to Marston are owed by Webster and Tourneur whose Italianate tragedies of revenge descend directly from Antonio's Revenge and The Malcontent. Much in Webster harks back to Marston, whom he had possibly known in the Middle Temple and with whom he worked in adapting The Malcontent to the needs of the King's Men. Marston's sacrificing of structure to the needs of character exploitation and situation and his illustrating moments of tremendous impact at the expense of breaking the continuity of the narrative foreshadow Webster. The fusing of satire and tragedy especially appealed to Webster's imagination, and Tourneur extended Marston's questioning of the ethical drive of revenge tragedy to its brilliant and cynical conclusion in The Revenger's Tragedy (indeed, in The Atheist's Tragedy he wrote what was essentially an anti-revenge tragedy).

The worlds of Marston and Fletcher are remote from each other, yet each is built upon shared foundations: "The rise of tragicomedy, satiric drama and the private theater are related phenomena … Fletcherian tragicomedy, though by no means the exclusive preserve of the private theater, clearly originated there and catered very successfully to its tastes" [Arthur C. Kirsch, Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives, 1972]. Marston's interests and some characteristics of his drama are influences upon, rather than sources for, Fletcher. Marston's mingling of satirical comedy and tragedy—his reliance upon scenes of contrasting emotional mood fitted into the framework of a contrived plot (no matter how cavalier the contriving)—suggests a crude prototype of polished Fletcherian tragicomedy. Fletcher's scenes, of course, are smoothly ordered, and his emotional conflicts are handled with sophistication; he could mingle tragic and comic, but he was careful, unlike Marston, not to let them struggle confusedly together. In particular, he took great care not to disturb the atmosphere of his play; above all, he did not allow himself to poke fun at his grand-opera world.

Fletcher took his stage world seriously, for the artifice of the theater fascinated him as it did Marston. Fletcher, however, translated the drama into a sophisticated delight by the conjury of the stage. His was a brilliant manipulation of character and event that at one and the same time asked of the audience an acceptance of the trickery and a recognition of the cunning of the playwright and the actors who were entertaining them. This acceptance of a special relationship between author, actor, and audience traces part of its ancestry to Marston's brasher excitement in and exercise of the same relationship.

Whatever Marston's place among his contemporaries as receiver and giver, the individual quality of his plays must be judged. This quality may be measured in terms of language, of theme and its argument, and of theatrical effect and dramatic propriety. In regard to his style, Marston tells the reader of The Malcontent: "I am an ill Oratour; and in truth, use to indite more honestly than eloquently, for it is my custome to speake as I thinke, and write as I speake" (1.139). He spoke as he thought, even when he thought rather incoherently or confusedly. One gathers that he also wrote as he spoke, for his satires are furious monologues that ask to be read aloud rather than silently, and the voice heard in them is that which easily cut through the cry of the other satirists in the 1590s and that announced Marston very definitely to his fellows. His own ear for the spoken word served him well, and he commanded a range of styles from the impressive nobility of Andrugio to the light rattle of the idle courtiers, from the harsh power of Malevole to the finely balanced mockery of much of The Fawne. His plays are crowded with people who speak naturally, and they are as liable to rise to a flow of passionate exhortation as to fall to a hesitant nervousness. During Marston's age, the art of the "oratour" was formal, mannered, controlled—the delivery of set pieces. Neither Marston nor his characters used such methods, not even Andrugio at his most eloquent. Marston's characters speak as they think; and they break away, therefore, from the speech patterns of earlier tragedy and comedy. This observation does not indicate, however, that the stress of the moment does not affect their language and style as they express their twisting thoughts and half-thoughts in language that is familiar but image-packed. The model is the speaker of the verse satires who is driven by hisquesting and questioning mind; for he leaps from topic to topic, from point to point, before one is fully developed or made: his is a rushing, allusive, poetically charged speech.

Marston's plays often read more stiffly and awkwardly than they sound, for the speeches lose some of their strangeness when they are heard. Marston, more than any of his contemporaries, was aware of how much of his art might elude the printed word: "If any shall wonder why I print a Comedie, whose life rests much in the Actors voice, Let such know, that it cannot avoid publishing: let it therefore stand with good excuse, that I have been my owne setter out" (2.143). He took care over his plays; and, if they had to be printed, he took care over their printing.

Marston's style is intimately bound up with his presentation of an uneasily questioning, insecure, dangerously deceptive world. Marston's vision of society was by its nature difficult to shape artistically, and his problems were worsened because his own understanding of it was not complete. The solutions and solace he was eventually to find in the church and its ministry were only to be reached after ten years of arduous struggle as a writer. When he turned to playwriting he was still in the early stages of his analysis of society, for he was, after all, just thirty-three when he was ordained. Inevitably, he pursued his work in a Christian framework, but that did not preclude him from testing the stoic philosophies of Seneca and Epictetus, the enlightened skepticism of Montaigne, or more orthodox Christian tenets. In this pursuit, he reflects one of the central spiritual and philosophical occupations of his era. He urges his views on society's ills and the cures they demanded in his satires turbulently and bewilderingly; and he conducted the trials on the stage, especially in his first plays, with hardly more decorum. Conflicting opinions were heard, voices were often raised raucously, laughter was heard in court, not all of which was perhaps anticipated, but the trial itself never became a mockery.

Marston's willingness to talk about acting and dramatic genres before and during his plays is a part not only of his concern about theatricality, but of his views of and preoccupation with the problems of life and thought itself. Probing the appearance of things at large meant, in the theater, investigating the accepted genres and modes of representing and imitating life. Marston accepts nothing at face value; he has an overmastering urge to demonstrate that confusion and paradox inhere in life, that simple dichotomies of good and bad are deceptive, that the sight of sindoes not automatically augment the hatred of vice, that innocence is no shield for a moralist. His court of judgment deals with issues that cannot be decided by a neat "guilty" or "not guilty"; for complexity, uncertainty, and lack of stability deny simple solutions. Revenge is not merely an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth; it is not the pursuit of the wicked by implacable men with untarnished noble aspirations. Marston's revengers are not single-minded pursuers of a victim, from the simple view that one is right and the other wrong. Andrugio, Feliche, and Antonio debate not how they should achieve their purpose, but what it is they ought to do—and whether they should do anything. Old-fashioned pursuit of revenge leads only to the bloody and pointless killing of children such as Julio, and, as Duke Pietro discovers, to know that a wife has been unfaithful does not automatically fill one with a holy crusading joy to punish her. Pietro's reaction is Othello's: "But yet the pitty of it, Iago; oh Iago, the pitty of it Iago" (4.1.2580). Marston's anger is not that of a coarse man but of a sensitive one; but he neither parades his sensitivity nor cheapens it into sentimentality. His candid expression of it sustains his best work and results in his most moving scenes.

Naked ambition and revenge are insufficient for tragedy in Marston, and conventional depictions of love do not make a comedy in his theater. One can no more trust that vice will be repulsive on sight than that love will come at first sight, unproblematically, and lead cheerfully to the easy comfort of "they all lived happily ever after." The strength of affection between Altofronto and Maria, Beatrice and Freevill, Tysefew and Crispinella, and Sophonisba and Massinissa cannot be doubted; but it is not presented in any conventional romantic way. This fact recognized, it must be admitted that the force of convention, the usually accepted demands of the genres, and the thrust of Marston's arguments are not always satisfactorily weighted against one another. To entertain doubts is not always to settle them adequately or dramatically, and the ending of Antonio's Revenge is inconclusive because Marston himself had perhaps reached no conclusions firm enough to be mirrored in a convincing ending. Marston was right, however, to tease at the meaning of the genres, for they do not completely contain his arguments. As Madeleine Doran has observed [in Endeavors of Art, 1954], "The difficulty with these plays is that the problems are realistically viewed, the endings are not. Fortuitous solutions do not usually come to moral problems." But a contrived ending does not necessarily invalidate the endeavor of art that led to it.

Marston takes stock characters, puts them into familiar situations, and then surprises expectation by having them behave "out of character" so that it is hard to know them for what they at first were thought to be. Disguise is the center of Marston's art: actors assume a character for a play, and then the character in that play adopts other disguises. Villains and heroes, earnest men and comedians, men and women, are all of them likely to be different persons at different times, shifting their character as easily as they shift clothes.

This device is, of course, common in the Elizabethan theater; but Marston's particular handling of it claims attention. The fact that all his actors were often boys did not make his plays as parodic as some critics believe, but it was a fact of theatrical life for Marston which he proceeded to turn to his advantage. Boys were, after all, actors as were men; and the pretense of the stage world was his image of the real world's deceptiveness. Because he read life as a mixture of comedy and tragedy further confused by the presence of satire, he made his plays reflect those generic confrontations and mixtures. Marston had used such juxtapositions in his satires—not always successfully—and had discovered that, where they had worked in the satires, they emerged on the stage with greatly enhanced impact as a disturbingly accurate comment on man's behavior.

By trial and error, however, Marston learned that the seemingly random collisions and abrupt changes of gear only worked artistically when deliberation and care justified the word "seemingly." The danger of practicing the "absurd" method is that, with only the slightest miscalculation, the end result is merely stupid or pointless. To argue that there are conflicts which are accidental, as it were, and conflicts which are deliberate is not, of course, to assert that it is a simple matter to distinguish which is which when they occur. To expect to be able to do so with any degree of precision is to expect too much. To recognize the principle and to suggest some applications of it is a sanguine enough hope.

Adaptation of satire to the stage occupied stronger and better minds than Marston's at the turn of the sixteenth century, such as those of Jonson and Shakespeare; but none brought more zest and excitement or more natural theatrical gifts to the task than he did. More than many of his fellow playwrights, Marston was directly and unabashedly fascinated by the art of the theater: its essential artifice, its juggling with illusion and reality, its pretense and actuality; the interplay between the author, the actor and hisrole, and the audience; the contrasting patterns of sound and vision provided by the spectacle of the stage, the counterpoint of different voices, the movement of people, the fusing of words, action, music, and other sounds. He delighted in all of these aspects and explored them brilliantly and, at times, recklessly. He was a theatrical man in the baser sense of the word, for he was undeniably a posturing extravagant.

More importantly, Marston was a theatrical man in the richer sense of the word, one whose natural gifts found exciting and spontaneous expression on the stage. He possessed prodigious gifts no matter how much he sometimes abused them. "It is hard to find another instance of a man thus suffered to pass on to the hands of masters the vision he himself could not express, transmitting to them images, phrases, situations which just fail in his hands of becoming poetry and with them become inevitable and immortal. Truly, as the witch said to Banquo, 'Thou shalt get kings though thou be none,' and that in itself is no slight boon" [Una Ellis-Fermor, The Jacobean Drama]. Possibly Marston might be called the playwright's playwright. This is a lesser thing than being the dramatist's dramatist, but it was an achievement during the richest period of England's stage history.