The Oxford Edition of the Complete Works of John Marston

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The project will create the first complete critical edition of the works of John Marston (1576-1634). Marston was one of the most important playwrights of the early modern period: he is equal in significance to such well-known dramatists as John Webster, Thomas Middleton, or John Ford. The author of a dozen surviving plays, including 'The Malcontent' and 'The Dutch Courtesan', two volumes of verse and two courtly entertainments, he was an original and idiosyncratic voice. He competed and collaborated with the most important writers of his time, including Shakespeare, Jonson, and Chapman, and the impact of his highly distinctive style can be seen in the turn towards a more satirical and aesthetically self-conscious mode of writing English drama after 1600. Marston's works have never been properly edited as a body. The last collected edition was published in the 1930s, but its contents are incomplete, its textual work is unreliable, and its scholarship is long out of date. The new edition will bring together all Marston's poems and plays for the first time, and will scrutinize exhaustively the many early printed editions, and the handful of manuscripts, in which his works survive. It will establish an authoritative text on critical foundations; provide up-to-date and informative introductions and commentary; and endeavour to resolve the disputes over authorship which bedevil Marston's works. Many of Marston's works came into print anonymously, or without close oversight from their author; a number are collaborations with one or more authors. As a result there are considerable problems in defining the extent and limits of the canon. Six plays will need close linguistic scrutiny in order to determine whether they belong to the canon in whole or part (or, indeed, at all).The son of a lawyer and a resident of the Middle Temple, Marston belonged to the cultural world of the Inns of Court, where London's lawyers and young gentlemen enjoyed a society notable for its sophisticated and avant garde tastes. He wrote predominantly for the 'private' theatre companies, the troupes of adolescent actors performing for elite audiences at London's indoor playhouses, whose theatrical style was often subversive and challenging. This project will explore the background of Inns of Court society in depth in order to illuminate the context from which Marston's writing emerged and the intellectual and political concerns with which he engages. It will use practical workshops at the recently opened Sam Wanamaker Theatre (at the London Globe) -- which is a modern reconstruction of a playhouse similar to the kind for which Marston wrote -- in order to illuminate little-understood features of his dramaturgy and road-test a range of scenes from different plays in historically sensitized conditions. This will allow the editorial work on play texts to be informed by perspectives derived from practical study of them as performed drama.