John Marston’s satiric bent is apparent in his first publications: The Metamorphosis of Pigmalion’s Image and Certaine Satyres (1598) and The Scourge of Villanie (1598). Indeed, the Pigmalion poem, ostensibly in the Ovidian amatory mode fashionable in the 1590’s, is most interesting and effective as a satiric commentary on the very tradition that it purports to embrace. Underlying the familiar romantic paradigm of the sculptor’s infatuation with his creation is the portrayal of an artist beset by what Marston calls a “fond dotage,” a form of insanity. Pigmalion’s inability to separate shade from substance is an obvious target for the unremitting satire that informs nearly all of Marston’s work. Moreover, the poem’s lurching oscillations between the genres of erotic epyllion and verse satire point to the stylistic confusion that mars several of Marston’s plays.

Certaine Satyres and The Scourge of Villanie broaden the field of satire to include an entire world of corruption and decay, of dissolving social ties and religious values. Emotionally forceful, if not always structurally coherent, the satires parade a motley cast of characters representative of the assorted vices and foibles of fallen humanity. This dramatization of moral states, as well as an overriding obsession with sexual depravity and hypocrisy, carries over into Marston’s plays.

A ceaseless experimenter, John Marston invested a variety of dramatic forms with the satiric, even mordant, worldview that originated in the late 1590’s and came to define Jacobean drama. To study Marston, therefore, is to study the structural varieties of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama: the morality play in Histriomastix, revenge conventions in the Antonio plays, romantic comedy in Jack Drum’s Entertainment, tragicomedy in The Malcontent, classical tragedy in Sophonisba. Marston’s recurring dramatic strategy pits individual integrity against worldly corruption under hysterically theatrical conditions. His protagonists are often conscious role players, gambling for survival in a world not of their making, which they bitterly condemn. Fascinated by theatrical artifice, by shadings of illusion and reality, and by the interplay between actor and role, Marston speaks to the twentieth century as clearly as he did to his own. Despite the relatively infrequent performance of his plays, even in his own day, Marston’s influence on his contemporaries was profound, his uniquely strident voice echoing through the plays of John Webster, Cyril Tourneur, and John Ford, among others.