John Marston

The true Duke of Genoa has lost his throne to the usurper Pietro. The Duke returns to court in disguise in order to expose the corruption and regain his rightful office. Resonating with echoes of Measure for Measure and Hamlet, Marston's tragicomedy is a fabulous study of courtly intrigue, betrayal and treachery.

The Malcontent

Ben Jonson

George Chapman

Royal Shakespeare Company

The Royal Shakespeare Company's 2002 season presented five classical works, rarely seen in the theatre but ripe for rediscovery by a new audience. These five plays constitute a body of work written by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, presenting the great diversity of the drama of the period, from city comedy to revenge tragedy, from discovery plays to the latest addition to the Shakespeare canon. Each is published in a separate volume alongside the RSC production. Teeming with energy and larger than life characters, Eastward Ho! sees Touchstone, a London goldsmith, preparing to marry off his two daughters. Touchstone's apprentices, Golding and Quicksilver, lead the wooing until the rakish fop and adventurer Sir Petronel Flash arrives on the scene. A comedy of virtue and true love triumphing over social-climbing, deception and trickery.

Eastward Ho!

Benjamin Jonson (1572-1637) was a Renaissance dramatist, poet and actor, known best for his satirical plays and lyric poems. Jonson's works are particularly recognizable because of his consistencies in style, intricacy of plot, characterization and setting. He focused on creating works that implemented elements of the realistic as well as the absurd. For a few years around the turn of the century, Jonson had participated in the War of the Theatres with his rival playwrights, John Marston and Thomas Dekker; the men satirized each other in scathing comedies. However, a few years later Jonson worked with Marston and George Chapman on a satirical city comedy called "Eastward Ho!" The collaborative effort was a remarkable success, blending three very different writings styles into a single, coherent play. The tale of contemporary London life was written in response to the immense success of Thomas Dekker and John Webster's "Westward Ho!"

Eastward Ho

The Works of John Marston: The Dutch courtezan. The fawn. The wonder of women, or, The tragedy of Sophonisba. What you will

This edition seeks to evaluate Antonio's Revenge not merely as a literary text but as a drama for a particular company, in a specific theatre. The scholarly introduction explores the high degree of originality in Marston's dramatic techniques and establishes him as a leading innovator in both the language and the dramaturgy of his day. Ostensibly the second part of Antonio and Mellida, a satiric romance published in 1599, Antonio's Revenge differs in both theme and linguistic style. Reavley Gair offers an insightful analysis of the play's relationship with Shakespeare's Hamlet --written at about the same time--and a new interpretation of the relations between dramatic companies at the Globe and the Paul's Theatre.

Antonio's Revenge

"This Malevole is one of the most prodigious affections that ever conversed with nature: a man, or rather a monster, more discontent than Lucifer." The Malcontent is a striking example of the new satiric tone and moral seriousness in English comedy of the early 1600s. The play's vision of a fallen humanity driven by lust and ambition is created partly by its depiction of Machiavellian intrigue in the court of Genoa, and partly by the disaffected Malevole, the malcontent of the title, who is actually the deposed Duke Altofronto in disguise. Marston's tragi-comedy is full of reversals, surprises and moral transformations and offers a thin disguise for the Jacobean court and its vices. This new student edition contains a lengthy new Introduction with background on the author, date and sources, theme, critical interpretation and stage history.

A student edition of Marston's classic play The Malcontent is a tragicomedy deriving from the tradition of the revenge play. The verbal ingenuity of Malevole, the "malcontent", and the extravagance of the drama, push the relentlessness of intrigue to its logical conclusion, exposing the basically comic aspect of the genre. The conventional function of the climactic masque is inverted, leading to the essential resolution of the comedy. This edition comes with full commentary and notes, together with photos of Jonathan Miller's acclaimed 1973 production at the Nottingham Playhouse.

The poems of John Marston, 1598-1601, ed. with intr. and notes by A.B. Grosart

Eastward Hoe

Works

The Works of John Marston

This volume showcases some of the most current and exciting research being done on Cambodian religious ideas and practices by a new generation of scholars from a variety of disciplines. The different contributors examine in some manner the relationship between religion and the ideas and institutions that have given shape to Cambodia as a social and political body, or nation. Although they do not share the same approach to the idea of "nation," all are concerned with the processes of religion that give meaning to social interaction, which in some way includes "Cambodian" identity. Chapters touch on such far-reaching theoretical issues as the relation to religion of Southeast Asian polity; the nature of colonial religious transformation; "syncretism" in Southeast Asian Buddhism; the relation of religious icon to national identity, religion, and gender; transnationalism and social movements; and identity among diaspora communities. While much has been published on Cambodia's recent civil war and the Pol Pot period and its aftermath, few English language works are available on Cambodian religion. This book takes a major step in filling that gap, offering a broad overview of the subject that is relevant not only for the field of Cambodian studies, but also for students and scholars of Southeast Asian history, Buddhism, comparative religion, and anthropology. Contributors: Didier Bertrand, Penny Edwards, Elizabeth Guthrie, Hang Chan Sophea, Anne Hansen, John Marston, Kathryn Poethig, Ashley Thompson, Teri Shaffer Yamada.

John Marston

About

Books

Join the club