John Marston (c. 1576–1634) was a dramatist of the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, known for his satirical wit and literary feuds with Ben Jonson. His dramatic corpus consists of nine plays of uncontested authorship. This article investigates four additional plays of uncertain authorship which have been associated with Marston: Lust’s Dominion; Histriomastix; The Family of Love; and The Insatiate Countess. The internal evidence for Marston’s hand in these four texts is examined and an analysis made of the potential divisions of authorship. The essay provides a survey of Marston’s individual style by testing vocabulary; prosody; collocations of thought and language; and versification habits within both his acknowledged plays and the contested texts, in comparison to plays written by other authorship candidates.
The title page of the 1594 Quarto text of Dido, Queen of Carthage assigns the play to two authors: Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe. Some scholars, such as J. P. Collier, F. G. Fleay, Alexander Grosart, Tucker Brooke, and Thomas Merriam, have argued that Marlowe and Nashe co-authored the play, or that Nashe added significant material to Marlowe’s text. This article assesses the internal evidence for Nashe’s hand in the play by examining its prosody, vocabulary, phraseology, rhyming habits, and stage directions in comparison to works ascribed to Nashe and Marlowe. The article also explores different modes of collaboration, such as the possibility that Nashe helped to plot, revise, or edit the play.
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