Keele Research Repository

This essay seeks to explore the role played by John Marston in the so-called War of the Poets – the literary quarrel between a small group of playwrights, including Marston, Ben Jonson, Thomas Dekker, and perhaps William Shakespeare, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Marston's role in the War is problematic because although there are figures in his drama who might seem intended to be read as hostile portraits of Jonson, all of these figures are ambiguous, appearing to resemble Marston himself as much as they do his rival. I argue that this is because Jonson and Marston were participating in the War for very different reasons: Jonson in order to distinguish himself from his fellow satiric dramatists and Marston to emphasise the similarities between himself and his colleague. Marston may have done this in order to mock satiric dramatists as a class, but he may also have wanted to irritate Jonson by suggesting that Jonson was not as unique or individual as he liked to believe.