John Marston (poet) - Reception and Criticism

Reception and Criticism

Marston's reputation has varied widely, like that of most of the minor Renaissance dramatists. Both The Malcontent and The Dutch Courtesan remained on stage in altered forms through the Restoration. The subplot of the latter was converted to a droll during the Commonwealth; after the Stuart Restoration, either Aphra Behn or Thomas Betterton updated the main plot for The Revenge, or The Match in Newgate, although this adaptation makes the play both more sentimental and less morally complex. Gerard Langbaine makes a laudatory but superficial comment about Marston in his survey of English dramatic poets.

After the Restoration, Marston's works were largely reduced to the status of a curiosity of literary history. The general resemblance of The Malcontent to Hamlet and Marston's role in the war of the poets ensured that his plays would receive some scholarly attention, but they were not performed and were not even widely read. Thomas Warton preferred Marston's satires to Bishop Hall's; in the next century, however, Henry Hallam reversed this judgment. William Gifford, perhaps the eighteenth century's most devoted reader of Jonson, called Marston "the most scurrilous, filthy and obscene writer of his time."

The Romantic movement in English literature resuscitated Marston's reputation, albeit unevenly. In his lectures, William Hazlitt praised Marston's genius for satire; however, if the romantic critics and their successors were willing to grant Marston's best work a place among the great accomplishments of the period, they remained aware of his inconsistency, what Swinburne in a later generation called his "uneven and irregular demesne."

In the twentieth century, however, a few critics were willing to consider Marston as a writer who was very much in control of the world he creates. T. S. Eliot saw that this "irregular demesne" was a part of Marston's world and declared him "among the writers of genius" (Elizabethan Dramatists). Marston's tragic style is Senecan and although his characters may appear, on Eliot's own admission, "lifeless", they are instead used as types to convey their "theoretical implications" (Michael Scott, John Marston's Plays). Eliot in particular admired Sophonisba and saw how Marston's plays, with their apparently stylised characters and bitter portrayal of a world where virtue and honour only arouse "dangerous envy" (Sophonisba; Act 1, scene 1, line 45) in those around them, actually bring to life "the kind of pattern which we perceive in our own lives only at rare moments of inattention and detachment".