A University of Leeds literary historian is embarking on a major project to shed light on an influential but neglected contemporary of Shakespeare.
Playwright John Marston (1576-1634) was one of the most important playwrights of the early modern period, considered an equal in significance to well-known dramatists such as John Webster, Thomas Middleton and John Ford.
A confrontational and often controversial satirist, he wrote a dozen surviving plays, including ‘The Malcontent’ and ‘The Dutch Courtesan’, as well as two volumes of verse.
But this lawyer’s son, who belonged to the sophisticated cultural world of London’s Inns of Court, disappeared from literary life at the height of his success and became a church minister – leaving almost no clues to explain his abrupt change of career.
Now Martin Butler, Professor of Renaissance Drama in Leeds’ School of English, is heading a five-year international project to create the first complete critical edition of Marston’s works, for Oxford University Press. Professor Matthew Steggle, from Sheffield Hallam University, is co-investigator.
The project has been awarded £715,622 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
Professor Butler said: “Marston was an original and idiosyncratic voice. He competed or collaborated with the most important writers of his time, including William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson, and the impact of his highly distinctive style can be seen in the turn towards a more satirical and aesthetically self-conscious mode of writing English drama after 1600.”
Marston’s works have never been properly edited as a body – the last collected edition in the 1930s is incomplete, its textual work unreliable, and its scholarship long out of date.
“The new edition will bring together all Marston's poems and plays for the first time and will scrutinise exhaustively the many early printed editions and the handful of manuscripts in which his works survive,” said Professor Butler, who has also edited a similarly comprehensive Cambridge Edition of the works of Ben Jonson, published in 2012.
“It will establish an authoritative text on critical foundations, provide up-to-date and informative introductions and commentary, and endeavour to resolve the disputes over authorship which bedevil Marston's works.”
Many of the playwright’s works came into print anonymously, or without close oversight from their author; a number are collaborations with one or more authors.
As part of the project, six plays will be forensically scrutinised to establish their provenance.
A conference focusing on Marston’s work will take place next January, while in 2017, in association with Globe Education at Shakespeare’s Globe. There will also be practical workshops at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, part of the Globe, in London, a candlelit archetype of an indoor Jacobean playhouse, similar to the kind for which Marston wrote.
Professor Butler said: “These will road test a range of scenes from different plays in historically sensitised conditions, allowing the editorial work on the texts to be informed by perspectives derived from actual performances.
“We are very much hoping that this might be an opportunity to revive some of Marston’s other work.”
Further information
To arrange interviews, contact Gareth Dant, Press Officer, on 0113 3433996 or g.j.dant@leeds.ac.uk.
For more details of the project, see: http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk/project/C283190F-1981-492C-90EA-BAF2763E718C
Pictured is the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Credit: Pete Le May