(FULL TITLE "Antonio's Revenge, The Second Part of Antonio...)
FULL TITLE "Antonio's Revenge, The Second Part of Antonio and Mellida". Edited by G. K. Hunter. Written by John Marston. (c) 1965 by University of Nebraska Press. A Bison Book.
Antonio And Mellida And Antonio's Revenge, 1602 (1922)
(This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)
This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.
John Marston was an English poet, playwright and satirist during the late Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, noted for his satirical comedies.
Background
John Marston was christened on October 7, 1576, at Wardington, Oxfordshire. Marston was born to John and Maria Marston née Guarsi. His father, John, was a prominent landowner in the Cropredy district and later a lawyer in Coventry and London; his mother, Mary Guarsi, was the daughter of an eminent Italian physician.
Education
John Marston entered Brasenose College, Oxford in 1592 and received his BA in 1594. He joined his father at the Middle Temple in 1595 to study law.
Career
Shortly after his introduction to the intelligentsia of the Inns, he became perhaps the most controversial member of the group of young poets then dazzling London with epigrams, satires, and what has since come to be known as the metaphysical manner.
From the first, Marston was a clever and vigorous critic of literary and social fashions. His first poem, The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, is by his own admission a burlesque of the popular Ovidian love poem, and his two collections of satires, Certain Satires (published with Pygmalion's Image in 1598) and The Scourge of Villainy (1598), are obstreperous denunciations of decadence.
When in 1599 he was prevented from further work in verse satire by the Order of Conflagration (a ban issued by the archbishop of Canterbury), he quickly turned his talents to the theater by becoming a playwright for the newly formed companies of child actors. With the children and their "private" houses he prospered. In 1599 he brought out a revision (1610) of the old Histrio-Mastix, and in 1600-1601 he completed Jack Drum's Entertainment (1601) and Antonio and Mellida (1602), burlesques of the popular lovers-in-distress plays.
With these plays he launched the experimentation in satirical comedy that was to command his attention for the next six years. Though he detoured in 1601 to write Antonio's Revenge (1602), a tragic medley of satiric and Senecan elements, and later to write Sophonisba (1606), an ambitious attempt to represent in tragic terms his personal version of neo-Stoicism, the rest of his plays are variations on his conception of satiro-comic form. What You Will (1607) is, in his own phrase, a "serious-fantastical" treatment of identities lost and regained; it was his last play for the Children of Paul's. The Malcontent (1604), perhaps his masterpiece, is a powerful exploration of moral deformity and his first play for the Children of Blackfriars. The Dutch Courtezan (1605) is by turns a biting and a broadly comic study of vice and folly. The Parasitaster or The Fawn (1606) is, by contrast, a playful exposure of pretension and hypocrisy.
By 1603 Marston had achieved sufficient success to purchase a one-sixth share of the Blackfriars' Company. By 1604 even his rivals in the public theaters acknowledged his merit when Shakespeare's company performed The Malcontent at the Globe.
Despite his success, Marston's career was checkered with quarrels and scandals. In his verse satires he twice attacked the radical bishop Joseph Hall at length. He offended Ben Jonson in Histrio-Mastix, initiating an exchange of insults that lasted until 1602 or 1603. By 1604 his quarrel with Jonson was ended; in that year he dedicated The Malcontent to him, and early in 1605 he and George Chapman collaborated with Jonson on Eastward Ho. For the offense that play gave to the king, however, he went into temporary exile--probably in Coventry--and Jonson and Chapman landed in prison. Though the Pageant written for King James' reception of the king of Denmark in 1606 indicates that he was soon forgiven, thereafter he began gradually to disengage himself from London and the theater.
In 1607 he wrote The Ashby Entertainment for a production in Coventry. In 1608, after a brief imprisonment for unknown reasons, he sold his share in Blackfriars. About this time he had a hand in a preliminary draft of The Insatiate Countess (1613), a tragedy later finished by William Barksted. But in 1609 he turned his back on the theater for good by returning to Oxford to be ordained.
For the remainder of his public life Marston was a country minister, first at Barford St. Martin in Wiltshire, then, after 1616, at Christ Church in Hampshire.
Only after he resigned his position in 1631 did he return to the scenes of his early triumphs.