John Marston and the late-Elizabethan Satirists

Perhaps with the exception of the balladmaker William Elderton, much of whose work is lost, England appears not to have produced another such provocative, self-publicising satirical temperament again until the late 1590s when there arose what Davenport terms an almost “free-for-all ‘flyting’” between the prominent formal verse satirists of the time. ¹⁴¹ Aside from the strong probability that intermediary examples might no longer be extant, the hiatus is best explained by the absence of any writers since Skelton who immersed themselves in the dialogic spirit and intransigence of classical satire. The fraternal competitiveness of the Inns of Court was no doubt responsible for cultivating the right climate for a revival of neoclassical satire and its dialogic tendencies. Although it was Joseph Hall, a recent M.A. graduate of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, who was the progenitor of neoclassical satire and the initiator of the dispute, it was mostly men associated with the Inns who followed his lead. Hall conceived of himself as the first to have attempted to write in the strain of classical satire and, following his entrance into this mode of writing, a literary quarrel arose between himself and Marston which was later to

¹⁴⁰ The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More, trans. and ed. Leicester Bradner and Charles Arthur Lynch (Chicago, IL: Chicago UP, 1953). Subsequent references for this text are given in parentheses following quotations. Skelton had also been attacked once more by Barclay for his attitude towards James (see Pollet (1971), p.74).

¹⁴¹ Arnold Davenport, ‘The Quarrel of the Satirists’, MLR, 37 (1942), 123-30 (p.123).