Keynote Address: ‘The Dutch Courtesan and the Oxford Marston’
2:00-3:30PM | Chair: Helen Ostovich (McMaster)
Speaker: Martin Butler (Leeds)
Respondent: Jeremy Lopez (Toronto)
We were thrilled to have Martin Butler, one of the two general editors on the new Oxford Complete Works of John Marston, give the keynote for the conference. Butler’s talk outlined some the interesting problems related to editing Marston in general, before uncovering some of the particular challenges related to editing The Dutch Courtesan. He placed the Complete Marston in the context of other recent editing projects, suggesting that Marston has been the one big name missing from the canon of new ‘complete works’ of non-Shakespearean early modern dramatists (Jonson, Middleton, Beaumont and Fletcher, Shirley, and Brome have all gotten updated editions of their complete works in the last decade or so). The last ‘compete’ edition of Marston was Wood’s 1937-38 edition. Butler joked that Marston himself may not have approved of the Complete Marston project, reminding us that Marston removed his own name from the second 1633 printing of his collected works, and citing the possibly apocryphal inscription on his tombstone, ‘Oblivioni Sacrum’: Sacred to the forgetting of...’
The Dutch Courtesan itself is a fairly straightforward play to edit: frequently taught in undergraduate classrooms, it has several single modern editions, only one Quarto witness, secure authorship, and few press corrections. Nevertheless, The Dutch Courtesan is interesting in the context of Marston's work as a whole.
Butler went on to discuss the famous (amongst Marston scholars) relationship between Ben Jonson and Marston. The two dramatists were friends, collaborators, and supposed rivals, and their influence upon each other is remarkable throughout their works. Unusually for the time, Jonson claimed for himself the role of ‘Author’ (as seen on the title page of Every Man Out of His Humour), and published multiple epigrams mocking playwrights. Marston, in contrast, appeared more dismissive about the position of author, arguing in The Fawn (1606) and The Malcontent (1604) that plays are not meant to be published. But in the playful induction of What You Will (1601), his characters do refer to Marston as ‘your friend, the author’: Marston was only the second dramatist, after Jonson, to use that term for his work.
Butler then provided an overview of play-texts where Marston was clearly not engaged with the printing versus texts (like the poems) where he appears to have carefully overseen the printing and formatting. Notes and corrections in The Malcontent, The Fawn, and Sophonisba suggest that Marston was on hand to make corrections to his work. The Antonio plays also appear to be carefully arranged – though this may have just been the work of a good printer. However, The Dutch Courtesan contains many odd and uncorrected stop press errors and mis-corrections: for example, 'gaudia' is printed 'gaud.a', and the text includes several misplaced stage directions. Where was Marston during the printing of Dutch Courtesan?
Butler mused further on some of the peculiarities of Marston and The Dutch Courtesan, including the sententiae – proverbial quotations and phrases set off by two commas: ,, . These sententiae proliferate in not only The Dutch Courtesan, but are so characteristic of Marston the Oxford Marston will likely preserve rather than modernize them. They also provide yet more evidence to support Marston’s embracing of the role of author of printed text, as they seem designed to help the reading eye to easily pick out the quotations. Editors of The Dutch Courtesan must also make sense of the ‘total chaos’ of spelling variations in the play’s character names – especially the oddity of the Goldsmith who in the dramatis personae is listed as Burnish, but later appears in the text as Garnish. (Karen Britland, The Dutch Courtesan’s latest editor, addresses this discrepancy, drawing linguistical connections between the Mulligrubs, the Garnishes, and the Family of Love.) Finally, in one copy of the Quarto, at Malheureux’s insult to Cockledemoy, 'You are a Welyman', a reader has crossed out ‘Welyman (which some modern editors read as ‘wily man’) and replaced it with ‘Welshman’. Did the mysterious annotator hear the play performed and know Cockledemoy put on a Welsh accent? (Julian and Ostovich will be arguing that Cockledemoy’s speech at this point bears linguistic patterns similar to those of the Welshman Evans in Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Toronto Dutch Courtesan adopted ‘Welshman’ in performance, with Cockledemoy donning a Welsh accent for the occasion.)
Butler excitingly wrapped up his keynote by observing that because the Oxford Marston has gathered possibly the largest collection of annotations and responses from Marston's readers, we have the opportunity to trace, for the first time, 'the Marston effect' – his works' imaginative afterlives – offering new interpretative possibilities for early modern drama scholarship.
Jeremy Lopez thoughtfully responded to Butler's keynote by weighing the chaotic vulgarity of plays like The Dutch Courtesan against the order and clarity that editing creates for readers of a university press text. Editing Marston requires finely balancing the need for order and the desire to preserve the ‘wild particularity’ of Marston. Lopez asked: 'What is the particular wild thing that is Marstonian?' Does it change from play to play? And how do we preserve it?