Writing and Revenge: John Marston's Histriomastix

Abstract

Writing and Revenge: John Marston's Histriomastix James P. Bednarz Lampatho: He be reveng'd. Quadratus: How pree-thee? In a play? —What You Will At the turn ofthe seventeenth century, John Marston and Ben Jonson . satirized each other's poetics and personalities in a series ofrevenge comedies that Thomas Dekker called the "Poetomachia" or Poets' War. "He had many quarrells with Marston beat him & took his Pistol from him, wrote his Poetaster on him," Jonson later informed William Drummond, in whom he confided that "the beginning ofym were that Marston represented him in the stage."1 Since the end ofthe nineteenth century scholars have speculated that what had initially angered Jonson and, to his mind,justified his intellectual and physical attacks on Marston was thatthe latterhad mimicked him as a character called"Chrisoganus" in Histriomastix.Applying Seneca's injunction in Thyestes that"You cannot say you have avenged a crime / Unless you better it," Jonson, it is assumed, retaliated against Marston by assaulting, robbing, and caricaturing him as Crispinus in Poetaster. Recendy, however, this account has been dismissed as a nineteenthcentury critical fantasy, based entirely on Jonson's "paranoia," that undulyprivileges conflict overcooperation in earlymodern theater.2What is at stake in this issue, then, is notjust the historical contextualization of Histriomastix but, more importandy, our sense of the extent to which English dramatists, writing comedies coincident with Hamlet and Antonio's Revenge, secured and defended their literary reputations in the contentious commercial theater through a witty but sometimes cruel form ofcomic revenge in drama. Indeed, Histriomastix was most popular 21 22Comparative Drama at the very moment when having a reputation as a professional dramatist first became something worth defending. Still, its intellectual horseplay —testing the status of poets and players—occasionally got out of hand in the complex interface of art and life. It is difficult not to take public criticism personally. As Jonson struggled to redefine his identity at the beginning of his career, no writer would feel his comic revenge more vehemendythan Marston, with whomhe shared a long and sometimes troubled friendship that blended admiration, cruelty, and affection . The source oftheir earliest estrangement is still most likely to have been, as Jonson first implied, the topical satire oíHistriomastix. I. The Cultural Moment of Histriomastix (1599-1601) HISTRIO-MASTLX./Or,THE PLAYER /whipt/was firstprintedin quarto, withoutreferencetoauthor,company,ortheater,forThomasThorpe in 1610. Although ithashad its detractors—beginningwitii Jonson—ithas also been described by Philip Edwards as being probably "the most powerful and interesting contemporary document on the place oftheatre in England's national life at the end ofElizabeth's reign."3 At about the same time that John Rainoldswas attackingdrama in Th'OverthrowofStagePlayes (1599), what would have been more"trendy"than for the leading writer ofa new private theater to defend itslegitimacyby deridingthe excesses ofthe public theater?4A scholarly consensus has longdetermined thatMarston provoked Jonson's revenge in this playby representinghim on the stage as the poet-playwright-philosopherChrisoganus,therebytriggeringthePoets'War. Yet this consensus splits into two contending theories that posit different dates ofproduction and venue. Marston isthoughttohaveeither(a) revisedanolderplayforproduction bythe Children ofPaul's in 1599; or (b) originated ithimself,possiblywith acollaborator,forperformancebyrevelersattheMiddleTempleayearearlier. The principal issue dividing these contradictory theories is thatthe text of the playas itisprinted inThorpe's quarto requires too manyactors to have beenproducedat Paul's,whereas itisviable,in itscompleteprintedversion, as an amateurproduction.Recently,however,athird,moreskepticalapproach toHistriomastix(c) deniesthatMarstonhadanypartinitscompletion—aseither reviser orcollaborator—and challenges the conception ofprofessional rivalryandrevengeonwhichtheseassumptionsarebased .5 Roslyn Knutson James P. Bednarz23 Fig. 1. Title page o/Histriomastix. Bypermission ofthe HenryHuntington Library. 24Comparative Drama argues thatHistriomastix"was conceived in 1590 (orthereabouts)"and that Marston did not write any of it, since "it lacks not only the marks of Marstonian prosodyand imagerybut also the topicality ofMarstonian allusions ."6 In light ofthis new objection to Marston's association with the play it is necessary to review again the strong pattern of circumstantial evidence implicating him in its revision for the newly revived Children of Paul's in 1599. Although Histriomastixwas printed in 1610, Jonson had alreadycited its tide and derided its peculiar vocabulary in the first quarto of Every Man Out ofHis Humour, published in 1600. Indeed, no reference to Histriomastix can be found before...