Marston, thy muse enharbours Horace’ vein,
Then some Augustus give thee Horace’ merit!
And thine, embuskin’d Johnson, doth retain
So rich a style and wondrous gallant spirit,
That if to praise your Muses I desired
My Muse would muse. Such wits must be admired.”
The following address is from Charles Fitzgeoffrey’s Affaniæ, 1601:—
“Ad Joannem Marstonium.
Gloria, Marstoni, satirarum proxima primæ,
Primaque, fas primas si numerare duas!
Sin primam duplicare nefas, tu gloria saltem,
Marstoni, primæ proxima semper eris.
Nec te pœniteat stationis, Jane: secundus,
Cum duo sint tantum, est neuter at ambo pares.”
But the most elaborate notice that any contemporary
has given of Marston’s satires is to be found in The Return from Parnassus.[11] The passage has been often quoted, but it must find a place here:—
“What, Monsieur Kinsayder, lifting up your leg and pissing against the world? put up, man! put up, for shame!
Methinks he is a ruffian in his style,
Withouten bands or garters’ ornament:
He quaffs a cup of Frenchman’s Helicon,
Then roister-doister in his oily terms;
Cuts, thrusts, and foins at whomsoever he meets
And strews about Ram-Alley meditations.
Tut, what cares he for modest close-couch’d terms
Cleanly to gird our looser libertines?
Give him plain naked words stripp’d from their shirts,
That might become plain-dealing Aretine.
Ay, there is one that backs a paper-steed,
And manageth a pen-knife gallantly:
Strikes his poynado at a button’s breadth,
Brings the great battering-ram of terms to towns,[12]
And at first volly of his cannon-shot
Batters the walls of the old fusty world.”
Under date 28th September 1599 Henslowe records in his Diary (p. 156, ed. Collier) that he lent “unto Mr. Maxton, the new poete (Mr. Mastone), the sum of forty shillings” in earnest of an unnamed play. The name “Mastone” is interlined in a different hand as a correction for “Maxton;” but there can be no doubt that the “new poete,” whose name the illiterate manager misspelled, was John Marston. There is no other mention
of him in the Diary. In 1602 were published Marston’s First Part of Antonio and Mellida and Antonio’s Revenge, which had been entered in the Stationers’ Registers on 24th October 1601, and had been ridiculed in that year by Ben Jonson in The Poetaster. Considered as a work of art the two parts of Antonio and Mellida cannot be rated highly. The plot is clumsy and grotesque, and the characters, from the prodigious nature of their sins and sorrows, fail to excite in us any real interest. Marston was possessed of high tragic power, but he has not done himself justice. The magnificent prologue to Antonio’s Revenge prepares us to expect an impressive tale of tragic woe, but the promise is not worthily redeemed. He could conceive a fine situation, and he had at his command abundance of striking imagery. But we are never sure of him: from tragic solemnity he passes to noisy rhodomontade; at one moment he gives us a passage Æschylean in its subtle picturesqueness, at another he feebly reproduces the flaccid verbosity of Seneca’s tragedies. Lamb quoted in his Specimens the finest scene of Antonio and Mellida,—the scene where the old Andrugio on the Venice marsh, overthrown by the chance of war and banished from his kingdom, gives tongue to the conflicting passions that shake his breast. That scene deserves the eloquent praise that it received from the hands of Lamb; and if Marston had been able to keep the rest of the play at that level the First Part of Antonio and Mellida would rank with the masterpieces of Webster. But what is to be said of a writer who, in describing a shipwreck, gives us such lines as the following?—
“Lo! the sea grew mad,
His bowels rumbling with wind-passion;
Straight swarthy darkness popp’d out Phœbus’ eye,
And blurr’d the jocund face of bright-cheek’d day;
Whilst crudled fogs mask’d even darkness’ brow:
Heaven bad ’s good night, and the rocks groan’d
At the intestine uproar of the main.
Now gusty flaws strook up the very heels
Of our mainmast, whilst the keen lightning shot
Through the black bowels of the quaking air;
Straight chops a wave, and in his sliftred paunch
Down falls our ship, and there he breaks his neck;
Which in an instant up was belkt again.”