Aside from his reputation as a playwright, John Marston has for the most part been recognized from his own time to the present as a satirist, a malcontent, and a generally cantankerous individual. His contemporaries thought of him as a good verse...

John Marston's current reputation as one of the foremost poet-playwrights of the English Renaissance rests primarily on the strength of The Malcontent (1603-1604), the one masterpiece among his comedies that continues to be reprinted in anthologies of...

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...

The Drama of John Marston: Critical Re-Visions. Ed by. T. F. WHARTON. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2001. xiii+233 pp. 40 [pounds sterling]; $59.95. ISBN 0-521-65136-0. While this book was in the press, a production at RADA, the first...

In the following excerpt, Caputi examines Marston's style in the various satires, focusing on his use of speeches, types, and exempla, and discussing how he further developed these techniques in his plays.

Here, Graham discusses Marston's handling of anger in The Scourge of Villanie, Antonio and Mellida, and Antonio's Revenge, arguing that "his work shows a plainness that questions all values, thus transforming anger from a reflection of some prior reality to pure self-expression."

Here, Swinburne attempts to defend the merits of Marston's style from his detractors, asserting that, while the dramatist can be both inconsistent and coarse in his choice of language and subject matter, his writing is "striking and sincere" in its own, very individual way.