Marston's father was an eminent lawyer of the
Middle Temple. The father first argued in
London and then became the counsel to
Coventry and ultimately its steward. John Marston entered
Brasenose College, Oxford in
1592 and received his BA in
1594. By
1595, he was in London, living in the Middle Temple, where he had been admitted a member three years previously. He had an interest in poetry and play writing, although his father's will of
1599 expresses the hope that he would give up such vanities.
Marston's brief career in literature began with a foray into the then-fashionable genres of erotic
epyllion and
satire. In
1598, he published
The Metamorphosis of Pigmalian's Image and Certaine Satyres, a book of poetry in imitation of, on the one hand,
Ovid, and, on the other, the
Satires of Juvenal. He also published another book of satires,
The Scourge of Villanie, in 1598. The satire in these books is even more savage and misanthropic than is normal for the decade's satirists. Marston's style is, moreover, in places contorted to the point of unintelligibility: he believed that satire should be rough and obscure, perhaps because he believed (as did many other writers of the time) that the term 'satire' was derived from the Greek '
satyr-plays'. Marston seems to have been enraged by
Joseph Hall's claim to be the first satirist in English; Hall comes in for some indirect flyting in at least one of the satires. Some see
William Shakespeare's Thersites and
Iago, as well as the mad speeches of
King Lear as influenced by
The Scourge of Villanie. Marston had, however, arrived on the literary scene as the fad for verse satire was to be checked by censors. The
Bishop of London George Abbott banned the
Scourge and had it publicly burned, along with copies of works by other satirists, on
June 4, 1599.
In September of 1599, John Marston began to work for
Philip Henslowe as a playwright. Following the work of O. J. Campbell, it has commonly been thought that Marston turned to the theatre in response to the bishop's ban; more recent scholars have noted that the ban was not enforced with great rigour, and might not have intimidated prospective satirists at all. At any rate, Marston proved a good match for the stage--not the public stage of Henslowe, but the "private" playhouses where
boy players performed racy dramas for an audience of city gallants and young members of the
Inns of Court. Traditionally, though without strong external attribution,
Histriomastix has been regarded as his first play; performed by either the Children of Paul's or the students of the Middle Temple in around
1597, it appears to have sparked the
War of the Theatres, the literary feud between Marston, Jonson and Dekker that took place between around 1598 and 1601. In c.
1600, Marston wrote
Jack Drum's Entertainment and
Antonio and Mellida, and in
1601 he wrote
Antonio's Revenge, a sequel to the latter play; all three were performed by the company at Paul's. In 1601, he contributed to
Robert Chester's Love's Martyr. For Henslowe, he may have collaborated with Dekker, Day, and Haughton on
Lust's Dominion.
By 1601, he was well known in London literary circles, particularly in his role as enemy to the equally pugnacious
Ben Jonson. Jonson, who reported to
Drummond that Marston had accused him of sexual profligacy, satirized Marston in Clove in
Every Man Out of His Humour, as Crispinus in
Poetaster, and as Hedon in
Cynthia's Revels. Jonson criticised Marston for being a false poet, a vain, careless writer who plagiarised the works of others and whose own works were marked by bizarre diction and ugly neologisms. For his part, Marston may have satirized Jonson as the complacent, arrogant critic Brabant Senior in
Jack Drum's Entertainment and as the envious, misanthropic playwright and satirist Lampatho Doria in
What You Will.
The Return from Parnassus (II), a satirical play performed at
St. John's College, Cambridge in 1601 and 1602, characterised Marston as a poet whose writings see him "pissing against the world" (Knowles 895).
If Jonson can be trusted, the animosity between himself and Marston went beyond the literary. He claimed to have beaten Marston and taken his pistol. However, the two playwrights were reconciled soon after the so-called War; Marston wrote a prefatory poem for Jonson's
Sejanus in
1605 and dedicated
The Malcontent to Jonson. Yet in
1607, he criticized Jonson for being too pedantic to make allowances for his audience or the needs of aesthetics.
Outside of these tensions, Marston's career continued to prosper. In
1603, he became a shareholder in the Children of Blackfriars company, at that time known for steadily pushing the allowable limits of personal satire, violence, and lewdness on stage. He wrote and produced two plays with the company. The first was
The Malcontent in 1603; this satiric tragicomedy is Marston's most famous play. This work was originally written for the children at Blackfriars, and was later taken over (perhaps stolen) by the Kings' Men at the Globe, with additions by John Webster and (perhaps) Marston himself.
Marston's second play for the Blackfriars children was
The Dutch Courtesan, a satire on lust and hypocrisy, in 1604-5. In
1605, he worked with
George Chapman and Ben Jonson on
Eastward Ho, a satire of popular taste and the vain imaginings of wealth to be found in
Virginia. Chapman and Jonson were arrested for, according to Jonson, a few clauses that offended the Scots, but Marston escaped any imprisonment. The actual cause of arrest and details of the brief detainment are not certainly known; in the event, charges were dropped. Also in 1605, he married a woman named Mary, who was probably daughter of William Wilkes, one of
King James's chaplains.
In
1606, Marston seems to have offended and then soothed King James. First, in
Parasitaster, or, The Fawn, he satirized the king specifically. However, in the summer of that year, he put on a production of
The Dutch Courtesan for the King of
Denmark's visit, with a
Latin verse on King James that was presented by hand to the king. Finally, in
1607, he wrote
The Entertainment at Ashby, a
masque for the
Earl of Huntingdon. At that point, he stopped his dramatic career altogether, selling his shares in the company of Blackfriars. His departure from the literary scene may have been because of another play, now lost, which offended the king.
He moved into his father-in-law's house and began studying
philosophy. In
1609, he became a reader at the
Bodleian library at
Oxford, was made a
deacon on
September 24 and a
priest on
December 24, 1609. Contemporary authors were bemused or surprised by Marston's change of career, with several of them commenting on its seeming abruptness. In October of
1616, Marston was assigned the living of
Christchurch, Hampshire. He died on
June 24, 1634, in London and was buried in the
Middle Temple Church.
