Playing the scourge: Satire in the drama of Ben Jonson and John Marston (England)

"Playing the Scourge" argues that at the heart of the literary quarrel between Ben Jonson and John Marston is a debate over the form and content of moral observation. Both writers were committed to a poetics that could represent and critique social practice in sharp particulars, and both were invested in generating new authority for their satire. Each acknowledged a problem with traditional literary authority, based as it was on conventional modes that were losing popular interest and were increasingly subject to parody and misappropriation. Both worked to re-establish authority through a strenuous, immediate language and through the practice of close social observation. The differences in their satire reflect divergent views as to the changes required. From the beginning of his career, Marston was pessimistic that full engagement with contemporary social practice was compatible with conventional literary language and its inherent values; by contrast, Jonson believed that the satirical observer could circulate throughout a fallen culture, exposing its extremes and renewing social norms. Though he rejected Marston's more radical poetics, Jonson's repeated failures to realize a self-contained, coherent and influential satirical speaker eventually lead him to accommodation with the language and desires of a mutable world. The result is a satirical poetics in which old moral narratives and forms of speech are constantly tested. Audiences and readers, meanwhile, are challenged to take their own experience into account to make moral sense out of a complex, delightful and unending social play. In the end, neither Marston nor Jonson fully anticipated the fate of moral conviction once subjected to the divisive, exuberant and comic force of colloquial conversation and practical social event. As a result, they ultimately produced a satire that discovers, rather than imposes, knowledge.