Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-ix

   PDF

2. Introduction: Why Does Marston Matter?

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 1-11

3. Prologue: The Problem of the Audience

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 12-17

4. The Playwrights and the Audience

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 18-41

5. Dramatic Satire and the Crisis of Authority

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 42-66

6. John Marston: Provoking the Audience

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 67-128

7. Jonson and Marston: ‘I write just in thy vein, I’

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 129-160

8. Conclusion

   • Rebecca Yearling

   Pages 161-165

9. Back Matter

   Pages 166-223

   PDF

This book examines the influence of John Marston, typically seen as a minor figure among early modern dramatists, on his colleague Ben Jonson. While Marston is usually famed more for his very public rivalry with Jonson than for the quality of his plays, this book argues that such a view of Marston seriously underestimates his importance to the theatre of his time. In it, the author contends that Marston's plays represent an experiment in a new kind of satiric drama, with origins in the humanist tradition of serio ludere. His works—deliberately unpredictable, inconsistent and metatheatrical—subvert theatrical conventions and provide confusingly multiple perspectives on the action, forcing their spectators to engage actively with the drama and the moral dilemmas that it presents. The book argues that Marston's work thus anticipates and perhaps influenced the mid-period work of Ben Jonson, in plays such as Sejanus, Volpone and The Alchemist.

• Jonson
• Marston
• early modern
• drama
• satire
• audience
• Renaissance
• theatre
• spectators
• Britain
• dramatist
• history
• history of literature
• literature
• theatre history
• British and Irish Literature

“Yearling’s book is a much-welcome contribution to Marstonian scholarship, and a valuable addition to a comparatively thin corpus of monographic studies of his work. … Yearling has produced a summa Marstoniana that recalls and responds to the received scholarship on the playwright, offering an interesting reinterpretation of some of his preoccupations as a dramatist.” (José A. Pérez Díez, Early Theatre, Vol. 20 (1), 2017)

• Keele University, UK

  Rebecca Yearling

Rebecca Yearling is Lecturer in English at Keele University, UK. Her research focuses on early modern drama both on the page and in performance. She has previously published in journals including Essays in Criticism and Studies in English Literature.

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