John Marston's current reputation as one of the foremost poet-playwrights of the English Renaissance rests primarily on the strength of The Malcontent (1603-1604), the one masterpiece among his comedies that continues to be reprinted in anthologies of Renaissance drama. In his own time, however, Marston made his greatest impact on the London literary scene at the beginning of his career, as a writer of verse satire noted for its stylistic and emotional excess. It was in this medium, first with Certain Satires (1598) and soon after with The Scourge of Villainy (1598), that he established a literary voice of violent disaffection that shifted through registers of rage, self-justification, melancholy, sadism, and self-doubt. In an age when satirists were generally expected to cultivate an acerbic tone--to adopt the persona of the malcontent in railing against contemporary abuses--The Scourge of Villainy distinguished itself in rendering the most truculent, hysterical, and, some...