poor semi-allegorical play, a clumsy piece of patchwork. Marston’s additions must have been made before Christmas 1599 (when Every Man out of his Humour was produced), on the occasion of some revival. The following lines, which occur early in the second act, seem to refer to Ben Jonson:—
“How, you translating scholar? You can make
A stabbing satire or an epigram,
And think you carry just Rhamnusia’s whip
To lash the patient! go, get you clothes:
Our free-born blood such apprehension loathes.”
Jack Drum’s Entertainment, an indifferent comedy, which appears to have been written about the year 1600,[27] bears the clearest traces of Marston’s early style. All the monstrous phraseology of The Scourge of Villainy and Antonio and Mellida is seen here in perfection. When Jonson in The Poetaster (v. 1) ridiculed Marston’s absurd vocabulary, he selected, inter alia, for castigation, some expressions which occur only in Jack Drum, and are not found (in so closely parallel a form) in the works published under Marston’s name: clear proof that the authorship of this play is to be ascribed, at least in part if not entirely, to Marston. In act iii. of Jack Drum we have—
“Crack not the sinews of my patience,”
which is ridiculed in The Poetaster—
“As if his organons of sense would crack
The sinews of my patience.”
In act ii. are these ridiculous lines—
“Let clumsy chilblain’d gouty wits
Bung up their chief contents within the hoops
Of a stuff’d dry-fat;”
so in The Poetaster—
“Upon that puft-up lump of barmy froth,
Or clumsy chilblain’d judgment.”