Writing and revenge: John Marston's Histriomastix.(Critical Essay)

Publication: Comparative Drama

Publication Date: 22-MAR-02

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Lampatho: Ile be reveng'd.

Quadratus: How pree-thee? In a play?

--What You Will

At the turn of the seventeenth century, John Marston and Ben Jonson satirized each other's poetics and personalities in a series of revenge 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 of [y.sup.m] were that Marston represented him in the stage." (1) Since the end of the nineteenth century scholars have speculated that what had initially angered Jonson and, to his mind, justified his intellectual and physical attacks on Marston was that the latter had 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.

Recently, however, this account has been dismissed as a nineteenth-century critical fantasy, based entirely on Jonson's "paranoia," that unduly privileges conflict over cooperation in early modern theater. (2) What is at stake in this issue, then, is not just the historical contextualization of Histriomastix but, more importantly, 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 of comic revenge in drama. Indeed, Histriomastix was most popular 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 vehemently than Marston, with whom he shared a long and sometimes troubled friendship that blended admiration, cruelty, and affection. The source of their earliest estrangement is still most likely to have been, as Jonson first implied, the topical satire of Histriomastix.

I. The Cultural Moment of Histriomastix (1599-1601)

HISTRIO-MASTIX./Or,THE PLAYER/whipt./was first printed in quarto, without reference to author, company, or theater, for Thomas Thorpe in 1610. Although it has had its detractors--beginning with Jonson--it has also been described by Philip Edwards as being probably "the most powerful and interesting contemporary document on the place of theatre in England's national life at the end of Elizabeth's reign." (3) At about the same time that John Rainolds was attacking drama in Th' Overthrow of Stage Playes (1599), what would have been more "trendy" than for the leading writer of a new private theater to defend its legitimacy by deriding the excesses of the public theater? (4) A scholarly consensus has long determined that Marston provoked Jonson's revenge in this play by representing him on the stage as the poet-playwright-philosopher Chrisoganus, thereby triggering the Poets'War. Yet this consensus splits into two contending theories that posit different dates of production and venue.

Marston is thought to have either (a) revised an older play for production by the Children of Paul's in 1599; or (b) originated it himself, possibly with a collaborator, for performance by revelers at the Middle Temple a year earlier. The principal issue dividing these contradictory theories is that the text of the play as it is printed in Thorpe's quarto requires too many actors to have been produced at Paul's, whereas it is viable, in its complete printed version, as an amateur production. Recently, however, a third, more skeptical approach to Histriomastix (c) denies that Marston had any part in its completion--as either reviser or collaborator--and challenges the conception of professional rivalry and revenge on which these assumptions are based. (5) Roslyn Knutson argues that Histriomastix "was conceived in 1590 (or thereabouts)" and that Marston did not write any of it, since "it lacks not only the marks of Marstonian prosody and imagery but also the topicality of Marstonian allusions." (6) In light of this 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 Histriomastix was printed in 1610, Jonson had already cited its title and derided its peculiar vocabulary in the first quarto of Every Man Out of His Humour, published in 1600. Indeed, no reference to Histriomastix can be found before Jonson mocked it in Every Man Out, registered by the Stationers on 8 April 1600, after it had been staged by the Lord Chamberlain's Men at the new Globe theater in the second half of 1599. Here--in an episode that Jonson calls his "Scene of Paules" (3.1.19)--Clove asks his baffled friend Orange to converse with him by stringing pretentious words together so that they can impress young gallants who might mistake this nonsense for learning:

Clove: Now Sir, Whereas the Ingenuitie of the time, and the soules Synderisis are but Embrions in Nature, added to the panch of Esquiline, and the Inter-vallum of the Zodiack, besides the Eclipticke line being Opticke, and not Mentall, but by the contemplative and Theoricke part thereof, doth demonstrate to us the vegetable circumference, and the ventositie of the Tropicks, and whereas our intellectuall or mincing capreall, (according to the Metaphisickes) as you may reade in Plato's Histriomastix. You conceive me Sir? Oren: O Lord Sir. (7)

From the late nineteenth century onward, scholars have unanimously ratified Richard Simpson's observation that Jonson satirizes the yet unpublished Histriomastix when he cites its title after quoting, for his audience's derision, four samples of its diction that later appeared in Thorpe's quarto:

Paunch of Esquiline (D[4.sup.r]) Zodiack (B[2.sup.r]) Ecliptick line (B[2.sup.r]) Tropick (B[2.sup.r]) repeated HISTRIO-MASTIX (title page) (8)

These quotations from Histriomastix are so meticulously positioned before its rifle that scholars have reasonably assumed that Jonson is specifically criticizing the play's pretentiousness. There is no record of any other play with this unusual title, and Jonson's mock attribution of the work to Plato picks up one of its most important plot details: the enforced exile of Sir Oliver Owlet's Men at its conclusion. That Jonson was referring to the same work first published in 1610 is further corroborated by the fact that all of these words (except the title) punctuate the speech of the character who most resembles Jonson: Chrisoganus, the proud poet-scholar who disdains the common players.

Dedicated to transforming his patrons into true "Artists" through the acquisition of universal knowledge, Chrisoganus beginning his course of instruction with a lecture on cosmology, explains that the sun "consummates his circled course /In the Eclipticke line, which partes the Zodiack, / Being borne from Tropick to Tropick" (B[2.sup.r]). Jonson's selections from this sequence, which he exhibits as a sign of affectation, reduce Histriomastix to nonsense. The play's title, which explicitly reveals the target of Jonson's parody, provides a punch line for this sequence of Marstonisms. Jonson consequently assumed that either theatergoers at the Globe (who had come to see Every Man Out acted) or readers of his play's elaborate first quarto (printed several months after its premiere) would have recognized his allusion to Histriomastix and shared his amusement. (9) The three early quartos of Every Man Out testify to Jonson's success in gauging his readers' interests. We can be sure that he would not have mentioned a contemporary play unless a core group of these theatergoers and readers knew it. And since he also quotes Histriomastix in Poetaster, registered in December of 1601, his interest in the play--from 1599 to 1601--establishes the only firm chronology available for discussing its reception, in the only other time before its publication in 1610 that it can be identified as a cultural desideratum. And since Marston wrote solely for Paul's from late 1599 through 1601, he would have revised Histriomastix in a hurry for a theater that had just reopened.

What would have drawn Jonson's attention specifically to Chrisoganus is the fact that character's role in the play closely paralleled his own current professional activities. Like Jonson, Chrisoganus is an impoverished poet, scholar, and playwright who seeks advancement through patronage and commercial drama. Jonson's earliest datable poems, some addressed to potential patrons, were written between November 1599 and October of 1601; he began composing plays from at least as early as 1597. (10) Like Jonson, he is a talented poet, known for his dedication to the pursuit of universal knowledge as the foundation of good writing. Like Jonson, he is known as a translator, who specializes in writing satires, epigrams, and plays that employ a characteristically "smooth" style. And like Jonson, Chrisoganus is enraged by the lack of respect he receives from the professional players with whom he negotiates the sale of his scripts. Marston had briefly worked for the Admiral's Men in September of 1599, but when he began to write for the newly revived Children of Paul's at the end of 1599 he alone was in a position to look with wry detachment at Jonson's failed efforts to reform the public stage.

II. Jonson, Marston, Guilpin, and Histriomastix

Since Jonson's reference indicates that Histriomastix was known between 1599 and 1601, he could have consequently suspected that "Chrisoganus" had been created at least in part to represent him on the stage. (11) In 1599 this interpretation would have been confirmed by the fact that a year earlier Marston's cousin and friend Everard Guilpin had apparently used the name "Chrisoganus" in an epigram in Skialetheia, or a Shadow of Truth to satirize Jonson as a ridiculously belligerent man who contorts his naturally ugly face into hostile grimaces before he appears in public. (12) Jonson's unattractive appearance was the subject of frequent remarks. He himself apologized for his pock-marked countenance when he wrote of his "rocky face" and Dekker, who made this a subtheme of Satiromastix, called him "our unhandsome-faced poet" and jested at being doubly amused to see his "face make faces when he reads his Songs and Sonnets" (5.2.153, 258-59). Guilpin's volume of epigrams was banned by the bishops' decree on 1 June 1599 and burned at Stationers' Hall, probably because of its contentious personal satire. Jonson knew this volume and understood its strong topical parody since he borrowed...

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