John Marston.
John Marston was of an old Shropshire family: he is supposed to have been born in 1575 and educated at Coventry school. He was a member of Brasenose College, Oxford. His father intended him to be a barrister, but observes in his will that "man proposeth but God disposeth". He wrote satires first, and then plays, later took orders, in 1616 received the living of Christchurch in Hampshire, and died in London in 1634. His plays had been collected and published in 1633. Marston's earliest publications, under the assumed name of Kinsayder, 1598, were "The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion's Image, with Certain Satires," and, in the same year, "The Scourge of Villainy". As to "Pygmalion,"
My wanton Muse lasciviously doth sing,
he says: the verses are in the stanza of "Venus and Adonis". With a cheerful anachronism, Pygmalion, having made his ivory statue of a woman, invokes the shade of Ovid—who lived much after his time. At his prayer the statue lives, and Marston ceases to sing lasciviously.
Of the Satires we may say in the words addressed by Mr. Toots to the Chicken, "the language is coarse and the meaning is obscure". The first attacks one Ruscus, for writing, like Mr. Toots, letters to himself. Parasites and boasting soldadoes are also satirized. A quarrel with Hall who styled himself "the first English satirist," arose; the authors of "The Return from Parnassus" (1601) spoke of Marston with coarse but effective contempt. In 1599 this "new poet" sold a play to Henslowe. His "Antonio and Mellida," "Sophonisba," "What You Will," and "The Malcontent" (a misanthrope, as in Molière and Wycherley), do not receive much praise even from the greatest enthusiasts for the old drama. In the dedication to "The Malcontent" Marston made up his quarrel with Ben Jonson, whom he had assailed in "Satiromastix" in reply to Ben's "Poetaster" (1601), not before Ben, according to his own account, had beaten him. In 1605 Marston joined Chapman and Ben in composing "Eastward Ho". The remarks on the Scots, for which the authors were imprisoned, are merely such as Dr. Johnson used to make for the purpose of teasing Boswell. The play, on the whole, is a very good-humoured study of life in London—rather in Hogarth's manner,—with the honest goldsmith, his industrious and his idle apprentice; his ambitious daughter, who would marry a knight with a castle in the air; his quiet daughter, betrothed to the industrious apprentice; the usual number of jokes connected with "horns," and local colour that was useful to Scott in "The Fortunes of Nigel". Probably Marston did little in this favourite comedy; he wearied of play-writing, and was contemptuous of his own works, and careless of his own fame.
Dekker.
Thomas Dekker, as genial as Marston is crabbed, was a playwright and bookseller's hack, concerning whose life little is known except that he was one of Henslowe's "hands" in 1597; was redeemed by Henslowe from prison in the Poultry in 1598; and was still producing pamphlets in 1637. A Londoner by birth, he knew some Dutch, and as his Bryan in "The Honest Whore" proves, a little Gaelic. His most popular work in prose was "The Gull's Hornbook," which is full of the details of life in the taverns; the thieves; the bona robas, usurers, fops, gamblers, all the world which is best known to the modern reader in "The Fortunes of Nigel".
The social historian finds matter gloomy enough as a rule, in "The Wonderful Year" of the accession of James I; and "The Seven Deadly Sins of London" shows a helpless horror of the crowded poverty of the town. Mr. Swinburne found in one of Dekker's tracts a genius akin to Goldsmith's, Thackeray's, Sterne's, Molière's, Dickens's, and not unlike Shakespeare's; with Goldsmith he is often compared; he has given men medicines to make them love him.
Dekker collaborated with other playwrights, and his contributions are discerned by the bewildering light of internal evidence. Of his own pieces, "The Shoe Maker's Holiday" (1600) is a broadly cheerful comedy; the jolly son of St. Hugh, Simon Eyre, becomes Lord Mayor, and, in the upper plot, the hero, Lacy, is very readily pardoned after deserting his regiment in France to woo another Mayor's daughter in the disguise of a shoemaker.