However he may not seem to tower above them, Shakespeare worked among and with a considerable cohort of dramatists supplying plays to a variety of venues hungry for new work. Among them, for a while, was the poet, playwright, and satirist John Marston (1576–1634), after 1609 an ordained priest but in the decade following 1598 an outspoken and often controversial figure on London’s literary scene. He is believed to have started the ‘war of the theatres’ in 1599 by offending Jonson, with whom he swapped many insults, and fell foul of authority at least twice, but he also became a sharer and resident writer for the Children of Blackfriars.
After briefly considering Marston at large and in himself, the course concentrates on two major intersections of Marston’s and Shakespeare’s careers. The first concerns Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, a play with a plot remarkably like that of Hamlet which was long taken as an inferior imitation but is far more probably a parodic adaptation for a children’s company of the ur-Hamlet that Shakespeare also in some measure satirised for an adult company. The second concerns Marston’s best known play, The Malcontent, a major hit in 1603–04 that was notoriously stolen from the children by the King’s Men—unless that was all a put-up job that stoked theatre attendance and has deluded scholars. In any case, the play also resonates strongly and variously with Shakespeare’s Measure, for Measure, definitely written by the end of 1604.
The intersections of Shakespeare’s career with Marston’s also raise the whole wonderfully puzzling question of the children’s companies and their relations with the adult players. Though angrily dismissed by Alfred Harbage as a ‘rival tradition’ that was effete, offensive, and artistically perverse, Shakespeare worked closely with the children who played his female roles, and may well have had a far closer working relationship with the Blackfriars company than has commonly been allowed.
