The Critical Fall and Rise of John Marston

John Marston, the most infamous of the late 16th and early 17th-century English satirists and dramatists, achieved both fame and notoriety, and an accepted place in the Elizabethan/Jacobean canon, for his scathing satires such as The Scourge of Villanie, and other plays, most notably Antonio's Revenge; his works are characterised by a highly individual verbal style and a variety of lurid theatrical devices. Fred Wharton's study answers a long-felt need for a full-length analysis of Marston's critical reception, a story almost as wild and extravagant as the rhetoric of Marston's own work. He suggests the reasons underlying Marston's fall and rise, and examines those features of his work most likely to repel or attract successive readerships.