A Study of the Satirist in Marston's Works

This paper is an attempt to see how the satirist in John Marston's works is characterized. First of all, a brief survey will be made of English satire before Marston. Then I will examine how Marston presents the satirist in his verse satire and on the stage. In verse satire, Pigmalion and The Scourge of Villanie, the satirist, filled with righteous indignation, exposes the depraved world where the fools and villains prosper by pretending to be virtuous. In order to attack vice effectively, the satirist employs the most sharp-edged weapons: irony, sarcasm, caricature, and vituperation. He speaks harsh and unnecessarily obscene language to make human depravity as ugly as possible. As a result of this, he acquires unpleasant characteristics which make suspect his post of a heroic scourger of vice. But our attention is always diverted from the satirist to his satiric objects, because we hear only his voice and stand with him. So his moral flaw remains hidden in verse satire. On the stage, however, we escape the control of his rhetoric, and see the distance between what the satirist claims he is and what he really is. In Antonio and Mellida and What You Will, Marston makes explicit the satirist's ugliness, the features twisting with hate and envy at the sight of the prosperous fools and villains. Thus, the satirist becomes a caricature of the conventional satirist developed in verse satire. In The Malcontent, Marston again elaborates on the moral and sanative purpose of satire. The satirist's sharp-edged weapons serve as effective political instruments to control the depraved world. The satirist contributes to probe to the very source of infection in the state and cut it out of the body politic. The Fawn has quite a different type of the satirist. Disguised as a flatterer, the satirist lures men into foolishness by praising that folly and vice are worldly wisdom. Instead of raillery and diatribe, he employs a technique of exposing absurdity by intensification. As a result, the action of the play moves towards clarification through release.