Ben Jonson, John Marston and Early Modern Drama: Satire and the Audience by Rebecca Yearling (review)

Yearling's book is a much-welcome contribution to Marstonian scholarship, and a valuable addition to a comparatively thin corpus of monographic studies of his work. The primary purpose of the book is to reassess John Marston's status as one of the major English playwrights of the turn of the seventeenth century and to analyse why he is 'such a problematic dramatist' (3). Yearling addresses this question systematically through an examination of the use of satirical techniques in the plays, with particular attention to Marston's ambivalent relationship with Ben Jonson's work. The title oddly implies that Jonson is the first focus of the study, when Marston is clearly the core of the discussion. The scope of the book purposefully excludes Eastward Ho!, the only collaboration between the two dramatists (plus Chapman), on the grounds that its stylistic unity, and the difficulty of knowing which of the three plotted the play, make it unhelpful to draw a comparison between their contrasting use of satire. The other omission is The Insatiate Countess, which Marston plotted and perhaps partially drafted, but whose final shape is due to William Barksted and Lewis Machin.

The heavy focus on audience response to performance, as declared in the book's prologue, is useful and productive, though one may wonder whether some of Yearling's assumptions go beyond what she can actually justify. For example, she states that she has 'decided to assume that the plays in print at least broadly reflect how they appeared in their original productions' (175, 22n), which is an understandable perspective, but a bold claim nonetheless. Further, in chapter 1, she claims that 'Paratexts indicate the kind of relationship that the playwright wants to establish between himself and his audience' (20), which is again problematic, both in terms of the intentional purpose attributed to them, and in the fact that the term 'paratext' here denotes solely dramatic inductions, prologues, and epilogues meant to be performed, excluding non-dramatic printed materials such as dedications, arguments, and descriptive lists of characters. As such, the confusion between what the printed playbooks showed and what they might reveal of the original performances endures. Her interpretation of these dramatic 'paratexts', taking for granted that they were always performed on the margins of these plays, also overlooks the issue of how detachable prologues and epilogues were in the period, as we do have evidence that they were quite frequently cut, adapted, rewritten, or reassigned to other plays without authorial consent (the many prologues and epilogues in the Fletcher canon being a case in point). Finally, throughout the book Yearling usually assumes an unclearly defined hypothetical audience: for example, statements such as '[Marston] typically leaves his spectators confused and unsettled rather than enlightened' pose the question of who that imagined audience is (120): the original English spectators in early modern playhouses taken as a homogenous entity, potential modern audiences in the theatre, or just a general readership who may try to visualise these performances? The distinction is far from trivial.

The rest of chapter 1 performs an analysis of how Jonson and Marston approached their theatre audiences as declared in the 'paratexts'. In particular, Yearling examines the attitudes of various characters in Marston — the Duke in What You Will and, especially, Doricus in Histriomastix — to trace why his supposed attitude to his audiences in inductions, prologues, and epilogues seems to be less belligerent than Jonson's. This question poses additional problems such as trying to identify the author's views through an examination of dramatic personas — in those paratextual moments and in the dramas themselves — who are tentatively taken to be 'a stand-in for Marston himself' (29). The book's fixation with disentangling Marston's reasons for writing these knotty, difficult plays — creations that, as Yearling suggests, are perhaps deliberately obscure and resistant to critical interpretation — is evocative and even fascinating, but I do not think that her conclusions are entirely...