SOURCE: "John Marston," in Elizabethan Essays, 1934. Reprint by Haskell House, 1964, pp. 177-95.

Below, Eliot argues that Marston has been underrated as a dramatist, partly as a result of comparisons between his work and that of Shakespeare. Eliot suggests that Sophonisba is Marston's best play and "the most nearly adequate expression of his distorted and obstructed genius."

John Marston, the dramatist, has been dead for three hundred years. The date of his death, June 25th, 1634, is one of the few certain facts that we know about him; but the appearance of the first volume of a new edition of his works [The Plays of John Marston, edited by H. Harvey Wood], as well as an edition of his best-known play by itself [The Malcontent, edited by G. B. Harrison], is a more notable event than the arrival of his tercentenary. For Marston has enjoyed less attention, from either scholars...